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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone accurately predicting solar and renewable adoption? Year after year I see terrible predictions that fall way short of the reality in the world. If so, when do those models predict the death of fossil fuel based power plants? There is generally some moment where keeping the infrastructure going becomes so expensive that things just shut down. Are we close? I wonder what the graphs of fossil fuel plan construction and upgrades looks like. Are they near 0 yet?

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I don't understand why it always has to be one or the other? Why can't we have both? More sources of energy means more reliable energy distribution, multiple fail-safes, in summer there is more solar, in fall there is more wind, in winter we probably need power plants to uphold the need for energy so everyone can stay warm. But this polarization of things, just like with politics, is so stupid. They all have pro's and con's. We should be investing in all of them, maintaining as much different sources of energy as possible and reassess the situation over time. Or am I missing something in your comment?

>I don't understand why it always has to be one or the other? Why can't we have both?

I basically agree with you but I think the other point here is valid too. Solar (and some other renewables) are so cheap they basically make it impossible to operate expensive powerplants, and then it kinda becomes a "one thing or the other".

To me it seems that this is a problem with the current business model, which should be adjusted. We should not expect to make money from producing electricity, but instead from consuming electricity.

Basically electricity should eventually be free, since we are in fact being sent orders of magnitude more energy than we need every day.

We have recently discovered how to harness this free energy very cheaply, but are stuck in business models from the time when producing energy was expensive.

I am a huge fan of the diversity argument. I think though that the proven negatives of fossil fuels and the massive difference in cost compared to renewables + batteries will end up making fossil fuels a niche at best in the not so near future. The goal is diversity, not maintaining every possible system. Wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, nuclear and batteries give us a pretty diverse system compared to oil+coal+natural gas that has dominated so far. My point was that fossil fuels are likely heading towards a tipping point where the already massive subsidies keeping them going won't be enough and they will likely collapse suddenly. I, for one, am not willing to continue to subsidize them just to maintain more diversity especially considering how much we subsidize them already.

> they will likely collapse suddenly

In Europe it seems that instead of sudden collapse (1-2 years), they are phasing out (10-20 years). The mix in Spain was nuclear, gas, coal, hidro and fuel a couple of decades ago. Coal was phased out, plants closed by the producers. Fuel almost gone. Gas still important, but nuclear is static and thus has less % of the mix as total output is higher. A lot of new sources are now present in the grid: solar FV, thermal solar, eolic, batteries, reverse pumping and residue burning.

5 years ago (notice the brown band at 5%, coal): https://demanda.ree.es/visiona/peninsula/nacionalau/acumulad...

Today (coal is gone): https://demanda.ree.es/visiona/peninsula/nacionalau/acumulad...

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