from Hacker News

Limits to green energy are becoming much clearer

by cribbles on 4/3/22, 6:45 AM with 36 comments

• by abetusk on 4/3/22, 9:12 AM

  This, unfortunately, reads like FUD to me.

  There are limits to solar and wind, both in terms of their carbon footprint, their operating window and their storage, but all these costs are quickly dropping and availability is quickly ramping up. Solar and battery technology are experiencing a similar "Moore's Law" of their own (Swanson's law [0] for solar and Wright's law for the more general scenario [1]).

  Solar is at $.75 at the consumer level and sub $0.30 at the commercial level, with costs only going down (exponentially so). Deep cycle lead acid batteries are available, right now, at the consumer level, for $0.15 / Wh with LiFePo4 sub $0.10 / Wh in some cases. I would expect non lead acid batteries to also undergo exponential decay in price.

  I unfortunately don't have the talk I saw it in, but there's a cute anecdote they give. They show a picture of a busy street in the middle of New York city, with the street filled with horses, carriages and only one or two cars. They show the same spot 10 years later filled with cars and only one or two horses and carriages. Where I live (upstate New York state in the USA), I see solar farms popping up. My expectation is that solar will become widely deployed and adopted in the next 10-15 years.

  The author looks to dismiss ideas of exponential growth and adoption. I also am finding more and more FUD against solar and other "green" technology, falsely claiming the coal and the carbon footprint in it's manufacture is commensurate or outweighs the fossil fuel equivalent (it doesn't).

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

• by salmonlogs on 4/3/22, 9:07 AM

  I can't help but feel the views of the author are carefully crafted to support the agenda of lobbyists and pro fossil fuel groups. The logic is really quite weak and doesn't support the current situation.

  The author also posted articles that are anti-vax.

  A comment left on this blog post:

    Interesting that we think we can substitute millions of years of natures energy (fossil fuels) with a few techno gimmicks; solar wind, nuclear. 
    Similarly we think we can substitute millions of years of immune system natural evolution with a techno gimmick; mRNA injections. 
    Both are woke ideas from the asleep who rule over us.
  

  The author responded

    Good way of putting the problem.

• by Pelam on 4/3/22, 8:55 AM

  As with any established industry there is going to be massive inertia in everything between the contractor supply chains and the executive gray matter. This is understandble as it makes the efficient and comfortable value extraction possible.

  Maybe the current events are the black swan that forces deep changes, innovation and rethinking in the energy sector that may save the humanity from the Mad Max future.

  It will be very painful, but there could be a silver lining. (I admit I’m desperately looking for one.)

• by joe__f on 4/3/22, 9:04 AM

  I was expecting the post to mention how nuclear energy fits into this modelling somewhere, and I was surprised when it didn't. It looked to me that it could be at least a partial solution to most of the points raised.

• by morsch on 4/3/22, 9:15 AM

  Eh, we haven't been trying very hard. Germany has essentially stopped building new wind turbines (1, second graph).

  Even now, when its become blindingly obvious that massive reliance on fossil fuels from foreign dictatorships is an immediate national security concern in addition to a intergenerational moral hazard, there has not been a decisive push for more buildout. It takes half a decade to build a wind park, if you can find a place where insane NIMBY rules let you build one.

  Generation has still gone up (the first graph), because existing turbines are replaced by more powerful ones. We could have been in an entirely different place if the government hadn't stopped pushing for it 15 years ago.

  (1) https://www.wind-energie.de/themen/zahlen-und-fakten/deutsch...

• by atoav on 4/3/22, 9:23 AM

  It is a bit more complex as well (the load on a grid has a real and an imaginary component). Many problems stem from the fact that most solar inverters can source Watts (real) but not VAs (imaginary). That means where traditional generators are able to use their inertia to deal with sudden bursts of capacitive or inductive loads in the net, inverters need to become smarter (or better coordinated) to stabilize the grid in all situations. Four quadrant inverters exist (inverters that can deal with all four quadrants of the real/imaginary coordinate system), but they are not especially wide deployed. Inverters with electronic inertia are in developement.

  This aside of course one issue is storage, but it is not unsolveable at all.

• by sharken on 4/3/22, 9:10 AM

  It took around 22 years for Finland to get their latest nuclear plant operational, that's a long time to wait.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653220

  Yes, the second plant should be built faster but right now nuclear energy is a very long game.

• by newbie2020 on 4/3/22, 8:40 AM

  I remember in one of my engineering classes, we did a depressing calculation. Even if we covered the entire earth with maximally efficient Silicon-based solar panels (that would not be feasible to make in reality), we wouldn’t even generate a tenth of the energy the world needs… and our energy demands only keep getting higher