Hacker News Reader

Comment by looping__lui | Hacker News Reader

Industrialized countries generally need stability when it comes to electricity. People also want to watch TV whenever they like and take a hot shower whenever they feel like it.

View on HN

The hot shower thing is an interesting example, since the tanked ones generally have a lot of flexibility in when they heat the water.

Some things need reliable, dispatchable, energy. But a lot of demand could (and probably should) be shifted to when energy is abundant.

In an industrialized country like Germany - not really. You’d be surprised how little day/night affect our electricity consumption…

Storage helps even out spikes.

In Germany: probably not so much when wind and PV aren’t busy for a month straight and we still need to keep our industry up and running.

We’ll, I’ll take that back - we probably solved all that by running our economy into the ground

Pursuing an industrial strategy predicated on eternal cheap Russian gas (a strategy no doubt encouraged by Russian influence post-GDR) left Germany vulnerable to this situation. It is indeed admirable that they are willing to give it up now for principals, unlike Orban and Hungary.

Yeah, well, it was also very much “get rid of nuclear” that accelerated this path.

Allegedly the Russians also heavily encouraged the German Green movement to go hard against nuclear energy.

> In Germany: probably not so much when wind and PV aren’t busy for a month straight and we still need to keep our industry up and running.

Please do go ahead and show some data on when we had a month long solar eclipse without wind.

https://www.tech-for-future.de/dunkelflaute/

A couple of weeks happen from time to time

Yes that's what nuclear and storage helps with

Reply on news.ycombinator.com