Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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> Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient

The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.

Also, it's not inefficient at all, what do you mean by that?

> Geothermal

This is far more promising than nuclear. Enhanced geothermal is opening up massive regions, and the tech is undergoing massive advancement by adopting the huge technology leap form fracking. It is completely dispatchable, and can even have some short term daily storage just by regulating inputs and outputs.

> Wind

Storage solves this today

In the 2000s, I felt like you did. But since about 2015, it's hard for me to understand your views. Especially after seeing what happened at Summer in South Carolina and Vogtle in Georgia, it's clear that nuclear faces larger technological hurdles than solar, geothermal, or wind. Storage changes everything, it's economical, and it's being deployed in massive amounts on grids where economics rule the day (which isn't many of them, since most of our grids are controlled by regulated monopolies).

By “inefficient” I mean you need incredibly large amounts of space, and the power generated is relatively small, and never mind the materials needs!

What kinda batteries are you talking about? There may be tech I’m unaware of, but failing that, there simply isn’t a currently-viable storage solution.

Maybe we’ve made marginal improvements, but our grid certainly cannot handle sending huge amounts of energy to darker regions anyways. The superconductors needed for that don’t exist yet, and the grid overhaul needed to sidestep the superconductors would be tear-jerkingly expensive.

Nuke plants are ready to go. They’re the missing ingredient that steps around all those issues. It provides a large amount of energy, very safely, using a very small land footprint. You can skip huge amounts of the regulation process by using tried-and-tested reactor designs. You can store spent fuel rods in water, then more permanently in concrete and clay.

And again, the holy grail here is fusion. More fusion research will be a completely natural byproduct of a larger nuclear market.

As the other dude said, no one single tech will fix this, and being anti-nuke in an era where we need large amounts of clean energy generation, like, yesterday… we should probably lean on everything we’ve got, and this is tantalizingly low-hanging fruit.

Geothermal does seem to be having its “fusion moment” - I’m very excited to see where that goes! Some Nordic nation (Sweden?) has been living off geothermal for quite some time, so I imagine the tech surrounding its use post-extraction is quite advanced. I’ve got high hopes.

Along a similar line, there was a recent find in hydrogen tech - basically, a way to capture it from the earth, meaning we have an actually-efficient manner of gathering the stuff. Fingers crossed that pans out too!

China is deploying solar at scale and enabling many countries to do it too, like Pakistan.

They are also starting use massive batteries including lithium phosphate and sodium tech for things like grid storage and powered locomotives.

Those incredibly large amounts of space are generally completely unused though. Like on the top of car park sun shades, roofs, and the middle of the desert.

Solar farms, in Australia at least, work both as providers of solar power and as "better than an empty paddock" livestock and feed farms.

Solar panels provide shade, retain soil moisture better, and grow better feed crops for sheep and other animals to graze on while acting as living lawn mowers.

(2022) Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels - https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...

and more recently

(2025) Landline: Episodes 17 & 18, June 8th & 15th

https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11160565 https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11160566

https://iview.abc.net.au/video/RF2404Q017S00 https://iview.abc.net.au/video/RF2404Q018S00

ie. In actual practice they're very much the opposite of "ineffcient".

Storage tech exists right now but it’s not super widespread or reliable (mostly in the “what do I get for my dollar” - you can store power all you want but making your investment back is a little harder). Degradation has proved to be worse than anticipated. Industrial application of Li batteries has been repeatedly hamstrung by supply chain, demand, tariff, etc. problems. New battery chemistry would really be the breakthrough here, anything cheaper and better than lithium

It's extremely reliable, and it's also very economical.

> Degradation has proved to be worse than anticipated.

I follow the space closely and there have been zero complaints about this. And regardless the warranties would cover the early installs.

It's going to be extremely hard for any other battery chemistry to catch up to lithium ion. Sodium has a chance, but the supply chain for lithium is massive, growing, and has lots of substitutions if bottlenecks arise.

The logistics challenges of nuclear are an order of magnitude higher than for nuclear. With far more financial risk, timelines around a decade instead of a year.

The technology for storage is robust, scaling massively, and pretty much unstoppable in the US unless there are explicit bans. Nuclear literally needs a technooogy advancement to catch up, and the closest is SMR production, which is coming close to a decade of being in vogue, with plans stalling out everywhere. Even the planned BWRXs in Canada at Darlington may now be at risk since the US is starting to be viewed as unreliable and too risky to depend upon.

> The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.

The ones I've seen in the news have enough batteries to time-shift the output by like four hours. Which is rather less then would be needed to keep up output through morning if there weren't other kinds of sources doing that part.

So you enhance the already-existing continent-scale grid and import your power from an area a few thousand km/mi away which isn't both cloudy and windless at the same time. Heck, there's probably plenty of opportunity for hydro storage in that range.

If all else fails: power up the backup natural gas power plants for a couple of hours. We're trying to minimize CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, getting to 0% immediately isn't the goal. Run a carbon capture plant during times of energy excess to compensate if you feel like it.

It doesn't shift it four hours, the power to energy ratio is fours. If more is needed, all one needs to do is plug in more batteries.

These are not complicated. They scale small, scale big. This is not very complicated engineering, and not very difficult to understand with even basic electronics knowledge.

> The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.

The existence of the tech isn't the issue, it is the logistics, cost and practicality of building it at grid scale. If you try to calculate how many batteries you'd need to store the equivalent energy of a hydro reservoir, or one hour of a nuclear plant, then try to estimate the land required, you'd quickly discover how intractable the issue is.

I would suggest you go through your own calculations again, because GWH of batteries are being deployed without this supposed "intractable" issue.

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