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131 points mg | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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cbmuser ◴[] No.26597835[source]
It doesn't matter that solar itself is cheap, it still needs backup plants which are the reason Germany has the highest electricity prices - world-wide.

> https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/

It's really strange that users on HN keep rehashing the myth that solar and wind energy will result in lower electricity prices for consumers - they won't, never.

Even if solar and wind energy was free, consumers would still have to pay the costs for running backup and/or storage plants which lets consumers prices soar.

The problem with solar and wind is that they simply can't produce electricity on-demand which means the kWh has an actual market value and can therefore be sold with a profit.

If a solar or wind park produces huge amounts of electricity when demand is low, the result are dumping or even negative prices.

Affordable and clean electricity in populous industrial countries like Germany or the US can be provided through nuclear energy only.

Proof:

> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...

> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...

Germany: 350 million tons p.a. CO2 in the energy sector France: 50 million tons p.a. CO2 in the energy sector

Germany: 38 cents per kWh France: 22 cents per kWh

Germany: 50% renewables in its electricity mix France: 70% nuclear in its electricity mix

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yazaddaruvala ◴[] No.26598017[source]
Here is a commercial installation of solar + storage at $0.04/kWh[1]. And it’s not unique, that article links to the cheapest solar + storage in the US at $0.025/kWh.

Additionally, these are today’s prices, as per this article the price for renewables is dropping exponentially every year. And if Elon Musk is to be believed (which I do) the price for storage is also dropping exponentially.

[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...

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flavius29663 ◴[] No.26598891[source]
storage alone will almost never be enough. The electricity is just too important for the modern societies to leave it to chance. You will have events where there will be no wind or sun for weeks. In order to have that many batteries it would require monumental investments. And those batteries would sit unused for years.

You need a diverse and distributed generation network, backed by gas burning plants.

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1. yazaddaruvala ◴[] No.26599221[source]
I mean, gas definitely doesn't *need to* be involved. At that point you're better off with fission.

For example, the US is connected north to south in 2 electric grids (TX excludes itself, but is huge). Making all three of those grids large enough that the sun definitely isn't obscured for weeks.

Additionally, places like India are talking about building a "world gird" to be the solar power generator for the world.

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2. flavius29663 ◴[] No.26599465[source]
it's one thing to interconnect a few GW here and there, but to power the Texas grid you need 80GW or so. That is a humongous amount of power. You would need at least 10-20 HVDC projects that span thousands of miles each.

BTW, Texas is already connected to the other grids, but not synchronized, e.g. https://www.tdworld.com/overhead-transmission/article/209645... As we all know, these kind of connections were not enough during the big freeze.

But say you make that investment. That is still not a guarantee that you won't have a continent wide lull without sun or wind. You just can't risk it. It's cheaper and more effective to just install some gas turbines for backup. If you fire them up 2 times a year it won't matter for the CO2 budget.

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3. yazaddaruvala ◴[] No.26600038[source]
Yeah I think we are on the same page.

It’s likely just a difference between thinking 10-30 years out, and thinking 100-300 years out.

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4. flavius29663 ◴[] No.26604153{3}[source]
I don't see how more years make it more likely to have more interconnection. The power requirements will balloon, it might be still cheaper to have some local generators instead of investing in long range transmission