Hacker News Reader

Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

It mystifies me that more people dont get this.

5x cheaper means you can add the cost of storage on top and it's still cheaper than nuclear power.

Because it’s not correct.

You need either nuclear or gas (like 100% capacity, idle most of the time) in addition to massive investments into the grid to make it work (at least in Germany).

I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up as a backup and what the cost of that is. It’s not me making that up but the Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

There is no storage in existence that would allow us to run an industrialized country from battery backup. We are talking ballpark 20 TWh of storage which would require 100 MILLION ton Tesla Megapack gear.

>You need either nuclear or gas

This is straight up misinformation. Nuclear power is not a peaker.

Gas is, batteries are. Nuclear power provides baseload and must be paired with a peaker too - almost always gas (France uses epic amounts of gas when its nuke plants are down for maintenance).

The reason why we have gas as a peaker instead of batteries? Gas is cheaper, and batteries dont get lavished with subsidies like nuclear power does.

>I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up

We look at real models based upon real data, for example:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

FUD and misinformation is a bad way to approach any scientific topic, whether vaccines or energy policy. Id recommend not doing that.

Dude, France has a fraction of our carbon emissions even of we continue to expand our renewable energy strategy - take a look at

https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

I’m not saying “no gas”. I’ saying: no more PV or wind because we already stress our grid with too much electricity on some days and we have periods of days or week where we need to essentially generate 100% without any PV or wind.

You linked the same study for 5 times in this thread - you still misrepresent it's focus. The study concerns itself with the influence of social acceptance and how that reflects on the cost and efficiency of 'going green'.

I accept Fraunhofer’s technical modeling: they explicitly size ~500–750 GW of PV+wind by 2050 (≈6–9× average load) and still keep ~100–150 GW of flexible gas turbines plus sizable batteries for reliability (pp. 5–7). They target ≥95% cuts in energy-related CO₂ vs. 1990, but that still leaves a non-zero footprint—nowhere near France’s nuclear-heavy intensity (p. 11). Where I part ways is economics: today’s ~40 ct/kWh retail reality makes their rosy cost outlook look detached from how this overbuild-plus-backup approach plays out on the ground. I can appreciate Fraunhofer’s technical simulations—they’re excellent at that—but I’m street-smart enough to separate modeling optimism from economic reality, and that’s a distinction worth keeping in mind.

Maybe some street smart and “nuanced” thinking is something to consider? :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com