[air7]

I don't understand the hype around wind and solar. Or rather I don't see how these technologies can ever be anything more than a minor player in the energy market:

These technologies are extremely sensitive to weather conditions which means that other, more stable sources must exist and have "stand by" production cap to produce all the energy these tech won't under bad conditions. If so, what's the point? (I mean in the grand, climate crisis, scheme of things) what am I missing?

Even in "green" countries, most of the green energy comes from bio fuel which is just burning young "soon to be coal".

[thescriptkiddie]

I know you used danger quotes, but it is worth noting that nothing is "soon to be coal". All coal deposits were formed in the limited (in geopolitical terms) time span after plants evolved the ability to produce lignin but before fungi evolved the ability to break it down. All of the coal that will ever exist on Earth has already been created.

[infogulch]

Steve Mould posted a video just this last week about the small period of time when all the coal was made. Understanding how it happened and why it stopped helps to set your frame of mind when thinking about the viability of natural carbon capture at large scales like how coal was formed.

https://youtu.be/b34al8YmQSA

(You probably mean "geological" not " geopolitical".)

[sunstone]

To a certain extent you're not wrong. There's a critical technology with quickly dropping costs that this future assumes and that's HVDC transmission lines. The larger the geographical span of the area that has all its solar and wind attached the more the variations all average out and the overall reliability and consistency improves a lot.

[godelski]

This is pretty much what most people think. Though if smart grids are built and there are huge advancements in battery technology (like way beyond what the Elon hype stuff is), and if our energy demands don't continue to rise at a high rate, then wind and solar can completely solve the problem.

But what you're pointing out is why the IPCC and most climate scientists want nuclear as a stop gap. Because it's better than coal. But then the conversation becomes about nuclear vs renewables, which no one on the nuclear side wants to get rid or even slow the development of renewables.

[ip26]

Among other things, when it gets really cheap you can start over-provisioning. Cloud cover sometimes cuts the solar irradiance in half? No problem, just build twice as much solar capacity (and maybe add a HVDC transmission line to the next state over for the high production times)

Wide deployment & interconnection will also erase some of the local variability of, e.g. a cloud passing over.

[keanzu]

Land use of solar prevents it ever getting really cheap. According to the UK solar power portal [1]: "If solar covered one percent of the UK it would meet the country’s entire power demand".

> just build twice as much solar capacity

This would increase the land use from 1% to 2%. That's a huge amount of the country to give over to power production.

[1] https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/if_solar_covered_one...

[pjc50]

It's a reasonable fraction of total roof area, I believe.

But the real problem with the UK and solar is not nighttime but seasonality. No, we need to keep going with the wind buildout and not drop the tidal energy programme.

We're getting there: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon...

[esotericn]

The UK has a lot of unused land on a percentage basis.

Granted, half of that will be in Scotland and ideally your solar would be further south, but even then, you're probably talking about switching less than 5% of the arable land to solar.

[ourlordcaffeine]

Overprovisioning in the case of the UK really applies to wind rather than solar.

[kortilla]

Does the UK not experience night time?

[papreclip]

Yea it's pretty obnoxious to be told "try not to use so much power during these hours: [when you get home from work - when you go to bed]. This is when we need electricity.

[icebraining]

There's plenty of use you can move to other times, just ask anyone who has different peak/off-peak rates. A house with good insulation can be pre-heated/cooled in the afternoon. Washing machines can be programmed to run during the day. Even some cooking can be done that way, if you prepare in advance. Those alone cover quite a large chunk of home energy use.

[bryanlarsen]

Perhaps the biggest reason that wind is mostly offshore these days is because it's much more reliable there than on land. It still varies, but not by as much as you'd expect.

There's also a saying "the wind is always blowing somewhere". A good grid reduces variability a lot.

Renewables are projected to get cheap enough that over provisioning can handle most, (but not all) of the stalls, drastically reducing the need for storage or peakers. For example, if you have enough solar to provide 3X as much power as you need on a sunny day, you get about 1X on a cloudy day.

Over-provisioning results in incredibly cheap power on sunny/windy days which can be a huge boon to industry.

[bjourne]

Do you know about the law of large numbers? Basically it says that in the long run "things even out." Suppose you flip a coin 100 times. It can happen that you only get one heads in those 100 flips, but would you worry about it?

In my city the electric scooter companies have carpet bombed the city centre with their vehicles. When I'm downtown can I be certain that one is available to take me from place A to B? I can't and in the worst case I'll have to walk a block to find one to ride on. Big deal.

The electricity grid works the same. It doesn't matter if one wind farm isn't producing because there are so many of them. As long as the total output from them is big enough. Think of it like a RAID system.

[kortilla]

So that rules out solar because... nighttime. So wind has to be the only reliable supply and you need to over build enough of it so a calm weather system in a region has no impact. The numbers stop looking good at that point.

[Areading314]

So if we build enough solar panels, there'll be some running at night?

[mepiethree]

Even if solar can only run a third of the time, that's still a third of our electric carbon emissions taken out, which ain't nothing to shake a stick at.

> what am I missing

Battery storage is a thing and will become much more of a thing

[derision]

Batteries are made from metals which have to be strip mined. It's really not any more environmentally friendly

[mepiethree]

Coal is strip mined too, and then burned. At least you don't burn batteries.

[toomuchtodo]

Lithium is evaporated from brine in ponds, not strip mined.

[ppf]

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=lithium%20mine&tbs=...

Looks delightful.

[toomuchtodo]

Progress is a balance.

[ppf]

Externalizing environmental damage is not progress.

[ryan_j_naughton]

Energy storage will enable us to use only clean renewables. While the costs for energy storage aren't falling nearly as fast, they are still decreasing. I anticipate that rate to accelerate

[tefferon]

Why does everyone turn from Nuclear though? It seems like the most viable option in my opinion. I'd rather have a network of nuke power where energy reliability is weather-independent than forests of wind and farms of solar. I feel like its a much greener approach overall. What's the manufacturing breakeven in carbon costs for a windmill or a solar panel?

[Faark]

In my case geopolitical reasons, mostly. I prefer nuclear plants not be in what the US president lovingly calls shithole countries. Those tend to not yet have nuclear, but a drastically increasing need for energy. Many of them are also a lot closer to the equator than western countries with existing nuclear, making solar much more viable than e.g. in the UK.

> What's the manufacturing breakeven in carbon costs for a windmill or a solar panel?

This questions feels like you mostly try to justify your otherwise preexisting preference. A proper system would have external costs factored into the price, by the way.

[ZeroGravitas]

The genuine answer to your question is that their news sources haven't been demonising renewables and green government initiatives for the last 20 years (in order to prop up their fossil fuel sponsors) so they don't automatically think "communist, hoax, inefficient, boondoggle, political correctness gone mad, end of civilization as we know it, bloody hippies, etc." when renewables gets brought up. Instead they think "cheap, efficient, distributed tech that keeps getting cheaper and that I can use for energy independence on multiple scales" so it's not that they have any great distaste for nuclear, they've just not been trained to hate and fear renewables.

They don't for example, wonder if no one has thought to calculate the carbon impact of renewables, because they assume the scientists and other authority figures they trust who recommend it would have taken that into account. And if they did wonder, it's a short Google away, and their usual info sources would provide facts, not scaremongering propaganda.

That's why you'll rarely see a defence of nuclear that doesn't quickly degenerate into attacking Californian hippies, or government interference, or the collapse of Germany into a solar powered Islamic no-go-zone, or flat out denial that climate change is even a problem anyway" that they've read about in their highly reliable news sources. Generally they're more anti-renewable than pro-nuclear.

[bluGill]

The amount of storage needed is massive. 1000s of hoover dams (including the lakes on both sides) for example. Batteries might work, but so far they haven't scaled that large.

[toomuchtodo]

It's about 6000 Tesla Megapacks [1] for the entire US, roughly 20 square miles of land use.

"Using Megapack, Tesla can deploy an emissions-free 250 MW, 1 GWh power plant in less than three months on a three-acre footprint – four times faster than a traditional fossil fuel power plant of that size. Megapack can also be DC-connected directly to solar, creating seamless renewable energy plants."

We need more Gigafactories (regardless of manufacturer/owner), which needs demand to be proven (contracts with utilities), which allows for more capital to be acquired from capital markets to build more battery factories. Batteries are a known quantity though, versus nuclear where you can spend billions and a decade and still not produce a kWh of power.

Tesla built Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai in 190 days, from breaking ground to manufacturing validation of a Model 3. These are tractable problems.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-megapack-utility-scal...

[danans]

You don't even need that many if you shift demand via distributed dispatchable loads, like electric hot water heaters and EVs.

Also does your figure of 6000 Megapacks derive from total electricity consumption in the US, or just base load?

[bluGill]

You need something to cover the idea that every few years we get a few weeks of minimal generation from wind and solar. Shifting load is a good idea, but it isn't enough. Eventually I have to add more heat to my house.

[toomuchtodo]

Natural gas can always be a generator of absolute last resort, and is likely cheaper than keeping nuclear generators running for those rare occasions.

[Maximus9000]

How much does 1 megapack cost?

[toomuchtodo]

Somewhere between $250 and $400 million.

[toomuchtodo]

> I anticipate that rate to accelerate

Historical cost declines would agree with that thesis. Renewables will approach a price so close to 0 that the battery storage will be the dominate cost in supplying dispatchable energy (but still a lower cost than fossil fuels). Utility lithium battery storage is already cheaper than the most expensive peaking plants, and the cost model improves as costs continue to decline.

https://data.bloomberglp.com/professional/sites/24/Capture2....

https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b... (A Behind the Scenes Take on Lithium-ion Battery Prices)

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/73222.pdf (PDF: NREL Cost Projections for Utility-Scale Battery Storage)

[konschubert]

Bio fuel isn’t soon-to-be coal, if it wouldn’t get burned it would decompose and release the co2 into the atmosphere just the same.

[austhrow743]

>what am I missing?

Unreasonable optimism about battery technology/cost.