[Schroedingersat]

The mines and aluminium smelters and arc furnaces and polysilicon plants are all building their own renewables. They're not going to buy your daytime energy either when they can make their own DC power at $10-30/MWh. The industries which require hydrogen or derivatives will just make it on site and store a few weeks worth. The industries that need heat or steam will store it in a lump of iron ore wrapped in some fire bricks and rockwool.

Then you might want to just stop and think about how you might go about storing energy if you have a pump and a reservoir on a hill or a water tower. Just ponder that one for a few seconds.

[Manuel_D]

> They're not going to buy your daytime energy either when they can make their own DC power at $10-30/MW

Unless it's night time. Or cloudy. Or during the winter when the incidence of the sun reduces solar output. Again, this is why any plan that involves cutting power to mines, smelters, etc. needs to factor in the costs of shutting down these industries when renewables fail to produce energy.

> Then you might want to just stop and think about how you might go about storing energy if you have a pump and a reservoir on a hill or a water tower. Just ponder that one for a few seconds.

Right, except we just have to have a lake on a hill handy. Some places have it. Most do not.

Why don't we just use hydroelectricity for all of our power needs? Ditch nuclear, and ditch solar and wind. Just build dams. Problem solved.

[Schroedingersat]

> Unless it's night time. Or cloudy. Or during the winter when the incidence of the sun reduces solar output. Again, this is why any plan that involves cutting power to mines, smelters, etc. needs to factor in the costs of shutting down these industries when renewables fail to produce energy.

So they'll buy your night time energy for the few hours a day when the wind farm they contracted with for less than your O&M costs isn't producing. Still doesn't help the nuclear operator pay the bills for the other 22 hours. Unless you're suggesting we ban people from supplying their own energy or making contracts with fully privately funded wind generators? Sounds pretty un-free to me.

> Why don't we just use hydroelectricity for all of our power needs? Ditch nuclear, and ditch solar and wind. Just build dams. Problem solved

You cited a need to store energy for moving water from a reservoir to where it is needed. Storing the amount of water you need to store but raise it up a little bit is a fairly well understood problem.

[Manuel_D]

Blocking water with a dam is a well understood problem. Don't bother with wind nor solar nor nuclear nor storage. Just build dams, problem solved.

[DanBC]

> Blocking water with a dam is a well understood problem

I feel like we still have some problems with dam building, because they keep failing. We struggle to get the building material (in particular, sand). Concrete is pretty awful in terms of CO2. Dams of all sizes cause problematic changes to the rivers they're on, and block flows of fish and other animals. Smaller low head weirs and dams kill humans.

Lots of time, money, and effort is going into removing smaller dams and low head weirs.

[Schroedingersat]

No need to have a tantrum just because you couldn't think of a way to claim every joule needed weeks long chemical battery storage.

[Manuel_D]

We won't need any storage. We'll just get all of our electricity from dams. Since it's a well understood problem we can build them anywhere we want in any quantity.

[Schroedingersat]

Nah, wind and solar are cheaper and safer and don't take as long. We can use the existing dams for dispatchable power though. As well as CSP of which the unsubsidized LCOE has recently hit parity with O&M of nuclear and is plummeting. Throw in some thermal storage as well, that's safe.

[HyperSane]

"The mines and aluminium smelters and arc furnaces and polysilicon plants are all building their own renewables."

They most definitely are NOT. Microsoft is building a gas turbine to power a data center in Ireland though, because data centers NEED POWER AT ALL TIMES!

[Schroedingersat]

Well done. Great comparison. An industry that needs five nines of uptime on their power supply in a country with worse solar resource than much of the arctic is totally representative of an industry which only needs to keep interruptions below 4 hours, has costs dominated by electricity and is adding it to reduce the bills.

What an incredible insight.

Meanwhile in things related to what I said:

https://www.riotinto.com/news/stories/First-solar-plant

https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/hywind-tampen-floa...

https://www.microgridknowledge.com/google-news-feed/article/...

https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/microgrids-mining-...

And countless others so frequent they don't make the news. It's an absolute no brainer because solar is about the same price at any scale but fossil fuel micro generation is really expensive.