[rich_sasha]

So... it’s a massive problem that there is no storage for nuclear waste (mostly agree) but not even worth mentioning there is no energy storage for renewables?

Coming from a cold, dark country with long and cloudy winters and no oceanic coast, it drives me mad when people point at the Med or California and say “look how cheap solar and wind is”.

[fuoqi]

Lack of storage in the US is a purely political issue, not a technical one. Other countries are either successfully building such storage (Finland) or invest into fuel recycling and breeder technologies (France and Russia), which significantly reduce amount of waste which has to be stored and its long-term danger.

[rich_sasha]

Yes, hence the “mostly”. For a variety of blocking reasons though, this is an unresolved (if not unresolvable) problem.

[vimy]

I don’t think we even need to store it. Nuclear waste has been sitting in regular storage for over 50 years now, seems to be perfectly safe. We should just keep doing what we’re doing. Why do we even need to bother putting it underground except for some unlikely what if scenarios 1000 years in the future.

[mlyle]

1. Expecting current political and economic structures etc to remain for thousands of years is silly, so we do need a more permanent solution to a long-term problem.

2. Keeping lots of nuclear waste in spent fuel pools just increases the risk picture unnecessarily.

[vimy]

If society collapses a small uninhabitable region is the least of our problems.

[mlyle]

If there's a regional instability for a year or two and spent fuel pools boil off and then waste melts through, possibly poisoning the groundwater for that region, that's a big problem.

[QuarterReptile]

Mostly corrosion. The half lives involved, combined with the great expense of safely adjusting these things after they're put to rest, means that you would really like something really dry and remote. Fear of contaminating ground water is incredibly sensible to me, at least. It'd be a hell of a thing to get Yucca Mountain un-cancelled...

[EdwardDiego]

...Europe has 38GW of pumped hydro storage. USA has 20ish.

[mlyle]

Which is a great start, but that's like 2-3% of peak load in the US.

[pydry]

Where are you from that has no wind or sun?

[rich_sasha]

Poland has cloudy winters with short days and no reliable offshore winds (nothing comparable to the trade winds on the North Sea for example). It is mostly a lowland country with no potential for pumped hydro, or for the most part, regular hydro.

I’m not, like many Polish people are, pro coal and climate change denier, just saying we can’t solve global warming on the assumption of Californian weather.

[berkes]

Would that not make a great argument for more European integration in energy infrastructure?

Where Spanish solar, Danish and Dutch North Sea Wind, Norwegian Hydro, or Swedish Geothermal, power Poland on the days when its own wind and solar is below whats needed?

I'm from the Netherlands, and many fellow countryman and politicians have similar excuses for not going renewables (there is little Sun, no space for windmills). Both of which are easily debunked. But even if true, easily solved with better integration.

[bigfudge]

When people worry about land-use of solar, I think about exactly this. There are large chunks of central Spain that would be largely improved by covering them in solar panels (joke, but only just in some places).

[berkes]

Or even better: cross the Gibraltar strait and put solar farms in Morocco, Algeria, Mali. Relative cheap maintainance and building, and vast surplus of sun in places where currently only dry sand grows.

And that requires both large and heavy networks towards Europe, but also, moving lots of electricity-heavy industry south. It makes zero sense to build a new coal-power-station in Eemshaven in the Netherlands for some data-center and Aluminium-enrichment-forge (which then ships the aluminium over Europe) when that aluminium-forge could be built in Algers next to a gigantic solar farm in the desert.

[rich_sasha]

I'd be up for that. I am concerned about how that works in practice.

Leaving aside technical issues (can you really push power from Spain to Latvia? Is it really true that total renewable power in Europe can always power the whole continent?), this is an economic project larger than the Euro or the vaccine roll-out. There will be weekly issues of power redistribution - who gets it when there's a shortage? Whose job is it to maintain trans-border infrastructure? Some countries, through resourcefulness or good fortune, will have more spare power, and thus powering, hmm, less powerful countries, leading to the usual "{country-X} power for people from {country-X}". What about electricity costs? Is there a flat rate in Europe? Etc.

I'm not sure how to actually make that work in practice.

[berkes]

> can you really push power from Spain to Latvia? Is it really true that total renewable power in Europe can always power the whole continent?

Both: yes. and no.

If "renewables" is only solar and wind: then certainly not. But the total mix: certainly.

And "distribution" is more than pushing electricity from Malta to Iceland (which is rather inefficient) but also "build the datacenter in malta (edit: next to the sea-cooled solar farm)" or "build that new aluminium-forge in iceland where there's a surplus (edit of free geothermal power), rather than in east-poland where it will be coal-powered".

Edit2: The entire "cost" and trans-border export/import is already in place and handled in EPEX: a free and open market for electricity: https://www.epexspot.com/en/market-data

[pydry]

Even in Poland renewables dominate new sources of electricity generation.

[rich_sasha]

Sort of. Poland has traditionally relied heavily on coal. Now for a variety of economic, ecological and political reasons, there are no new coal plants being installed, and old ones reaching EOL. There is no nuclear, despite half-hearted attempts to bring that about. Gas has mostly been imported from Russia, with constant concerns about continued supplies being used as a political tool, so no significant gas plants either.

So yes, once you factor out all other options, solar and wind is the only thing that you can make progress on. But that's a far cry from saying you could run the country on them.

[pydry]

You likely could eventually. All current projections point that way.

Poland already has a significant advantage with respect to intermittency being connected to an EU wide grid and being able to import/export power easily across a well oiled market. Hawaii may have sun but it can't do that.

The intransigence of the country itself (it loves its coal) is probably the biggest impediment, not Geography. If Germany can do it (and they can and do) so can Poland.

[rich_sasha]

Since pushing to use more renewables, Germany's CO2 emissions have increased.

Being able to import energy from elsewhere doesn't just solve the problem, you just have a bigger area to average over.

[lukifer]

Renewables are cost-competitive, but not by an order of magnitude. If wind and solar net 1/3rd each of CA, it no longer makes economic sense to build them.

[pydry]

Renewables are pretty much the cheapest form of energy everywhere as far as I'm aware.

That's why I was surprised. I wanted to know where the economics didn't work.

[worik]

Yes there is.

Two sorts of grid storage batteries: Elon Must has made Lithium batteries work on grid scale. Flow batteries or fuel cells, are probably more economic. And then there is pumped hydro

[berkes]

We should also not forget the giant decentralised batterypack on wheels that is being rolled out.

EVs have a big capacity. Not industrial sized and with clear limitations (at 08:00 it needs to be charged in order to bring you to work), but all together, having every car in future being a storage, makes for a huge buffer.

[akvadrako]

Elon didn't make any grid-scale energy storage. The largest grid battery installation in the world can only supply power for a couple minutes – that's a buffer at most.

Edit: removed first sentence.

[jillesvangurp]

It's hours, not minutes. Elon Musk ships MWH solutions conveniently packaged as in container form. The largest battery currently being planned is a 1.2GW setup in Australia. That's a big buffer.

Demand for solutions providing power for days simply does not exist currently. Hours is good enough. This business is about providing lots of power quickly.

You are right that they typically are only used for a few minutes to deal with peaks in demand. That's because they are only needed for that long and because you can turn them on and off pretty much instantly. You don't have that choice with traditional solutions like gas plants.

Which is why despite battery cost, this type of battery is very successful at largely removing the need for having peaker plants. It also seems to be very successful at getting rid of blackouts because there were never enough of those peaker plants to begin with in Australia. Another advantage is that you can put these batteries all over the place. Many small installations make up for a lot of aggregate capacity. You can put them in buildings even; and people do.

Musk is also building factories that are producing batteries by the GWH per year per factory and soon TWH per year. He's not alone of course and basically there are quite many other companies now planning their own little GWH production facilities. There are tens of billions being invested in that stuff in the next few years. There will be hundreds or thousands of these factories in a few decades churning out many TWH of storage annually.

That battery capacity is of course mostly intended for the transport sector and not for grid storage. But if you are worried about having enough storage capacity on the grid, there will be multiple TWH of batteries driving around on roads in most countries by the end of the decade. Basically 2M cars with 50KWH batteries == 1TWH. That's a lot of distributed and mobile storage. All we need to do is plug it in.

Of course there will be more optimal solutions as well. But it's capacity we'll have none the less.

[leereeves]

> The largest battery currently being planned is a 1.2GWh setup in Australia. That's a big buffer.

Apparently "Total electricity generation in Australia was estimated to be 265,117 gigawatt hours (GWh) in calendar year 2019"[1], which works out to about 30 gigawatts continually for a year.

So a 1.2GWh battery could power Australia for about two minutes (...at average use. Longer in the middle of the night).

Maybe a hundred installations like that could buffer the fluctuations in renewables in Australia. Plus thousands or tens of thousands more worldwide, while building enough batteries to replace all the cars with electric.

I guess it's doable in a decade or two, if Musk and other manufacturers can really produce TWh's of capacity each year.

1: https://www.energy.gov.au/publications/australian-energy-sta...

[jillesvangurp]

That's a battery capable of supplying 1.2 GW peak demand. Or about 1/30th of the energy capacity in Australia if your numbers are correct. Massive buffer.

Those TWH factories are being built right now. Multiple of them. Production ramp up is going to take a few years before they actually produce that much. But you can sort of do the math based on the number of cars they are selling. About half a million last year so that would be roughly a quarter TWH if you assume 50KWH batteries. Ballpark enough to keep Australia running for about a year if your numbers are correct.

That's last year. It's easy to see how they would grow production to a few million units in the next few years. So, at that point they are using TWH of production capacity that they are building right now in Texas, Berlin, Shanghai, and soon possibly India.

Of course the broader industry is growing quite rapidly to probably a few million unit sales this year and tens of millions by the end of the decade. So, definitely already into TWH/year territory right now. Taking care of Australian energy storage needs is not going to be an issue. About a million EVs would do the trick easily. Sadly, they are a bit behind on jumping on that band wagon but they'll catch up soon enough.

[leereeves]

> That's a battery capable of supplying 1.2 GW peak demand.

Is it, and if so, for how long?

I saw several articles talking about battery capacity in GW's, with no mention of how long the batteries can provide that power, so I think some reporters just don't understand the difference between GW's (a measure of instantaneous power) and GWh's (a measure of energy or battery capacity).

Power plant capacity is reported in GW's because they provide that power continually, but batteries should be measured in GWh's.

And Vistra's Moss Landing 1.2 GWh battery storage in Monterey County, California claims to be the world's largest.[1]

> Those TWH factories are being built right now.

I don't doubt the factories will exist soon, but I wonder if they'll be able to find the raw materials to feed so many factories, and customers to buy it all. Probably some/many will go bankrupt.

1: https://insideevs.com/news/489894/vistra-moss-landing-energy...

[worik]

"So a 1.2GWh battery could power Australia for about two minutes "

It is one battery in, if memory serves, the state of Victoria.

It is not being asked to power all of Australia.

[leereeves]

How does the grid work in Australia? Is Victoria on a separate grid, like Texas is in the US?

[worik]

And of course it is the wrong sort of battery for the application. Flow batteries/fuel cells are better suited.

[dang]

If you can't resist swipes like the first sentence (it happens), please edit them out later. They only evoke worse from others.

Your comment would be fine without the first sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html