Renewables have the problem that the larger the portion of your power that's generated through these renewables, the exponentially more storage you need. It's not a linear relationship, because you can have weather that doesn't cooperate for long periods of time, but the power can't go out.

Another issue is that solar and wind aren't really suitable everywhere. The further north you go the less economical solar becomes. A large chunk of Europe sits further north than the US.

What’s happening right now is that renewables are being paired with an increasing number of gas power plants. Since gas power can ramp up so quickly they’re a good match until storage can take over.

So I think we already have the solution to the problem you’re describing: just pay to maintain a decent amount of the existing gas power plant. If they’re only there for backup, the impact on CO2 emissions will be negligible. You could even make the gas from renewable sources, since in this scenario the cost of the gas itself is negligible compared to cost of keeping the power plant operational.

This is incidentally another reason (current) nuclear is a dead end going forward. They’re a bad match for renewables. What we need isn’t more base load, we need more peaker plants, load following plants, backup plants and energy storage. Nuclear isn’t a good solution in any of these categories.

Any increase in base load would reduce the amount of renewable+gas/storage capacity needed, so at worst it's a neutral match for renewables.

And if people complain about the peakers releasing CO2, they could be converted to use hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced either from renewables + electrolysis, or from 24/7 plants reforming methane to hydrogen with the carbon sequestered and the hydrogen stored underground for later use.

Solar is getting so cheap that it's becoming economical in places that might surprise you.

The UK sits further north than almost all of the USA (excl. Alaska), and has a climate not exactly known for its abundant sunshine. But large-scale solar farms are now commercially viable here without subsidy. (eg: https://www.clevehillsolar.com)

Up here the yearly sunshine is pretty good, close to Germany or so. The problem is that almost all of it comes during the summer. In the winter months when demand peaks, solar produces practically nothing. So without seasonal storage becoming economical, it's not a solution to decarbonizing.

Closer to the equator where seasonal variation is less and demand is driven more by air conditioning than heating solar is an excellent choice.

> "The problem is that almost all of it comes during the summer. In the winter months when demand peaks, solar produces practically nothing."

In the UK, this turns out to be seasonally complementary with our wind turbines. In the winter months, wind speeds are stronger and more consistent (especially off shore). In the summer, there is less wind, but the gap is made up by solar. The net result is pretty consistent renewables production year-round.

> "it's not a solution to decarbonizing."

Every kWh of energy produced by a solar panel in the UK (or wind turbine, for that matter) offsets a kWh that would otherwise be produced from fossil fuels, typically from imported natural gas.

Closer than 51 North? you mean like all of the continental US?

95% of the global population lives at latitude less than 50 degrees.

A large chunk of Europe sits north of that though.

I have a strong suspicion that a good chunk of the opposition to solar is good old fashioned white racism. Can't have an energy source win that benefits the brown skinned parts of the world, this thinking goes.

> Solar/Wind/Storage are beating almost everything.

Does anyone have numbers, how fast (yearly added kWh per capita) has any country built solar+wind lately? Or plans to build in the near future? When Sweden built nuclear in 1976–1986, they added 640 kWh per capita per year. Will some country or state beat that record?

Source: this figure

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/353/6299/547/F2.l...

in this article

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6299/547

The cost of manufacturing energy is not the only cost when you need to distribute energy on a large scale. Electrical grids are prone to oscillations and having less and bigger power sources makes things a lot easier and more reliable (and that means cheaper also). You can store energy but that again increases complexity of the grid and costs (even super-cheap storage will always be more expensive than no storage). To partially solve this you can concentrate solar into large solar farms, but than you have a problem with the space available, you need a lot of land for that - which is perhaps less of a problems in US or Australia or Africa, but in densely populated areas like Europe (which is also located more to the North and gets less sun) or Japan this creates problems. Also there is an issue that our climate is changing and becoming more and more unstable, which could cause lots of engineering and exploitation problems for renewables (hurricanes, hail storms, unexpected drops in temperature and periods of bad weather like this summer in Europe in May). So I don't think it's (yet) all that certain which is the best way to go long-term, and IMHO the clear win of renewables is more a picture painted by media than a solid science.

Grids must be very stable because there is no storage at the end points. If electricity consumers are very OK to be without electricity for few hours per day that alone makes grid much cheaper.

If every endpoint has enough storage to go days without being online, then that’s going to distribute a very large cost to the edge of the grid. Part of the reason that we have a power grid is so that we can pool usage and build capacity based on overall statistics, no absolute peak.

Additionally, the cost to operate the grid is based upon the size of the distribution network and maximum carrying capacity. If we all build local storage that takes us off the grid 90% of the time, we are still going to have to pay the utility roughly the same amount to maintain the network as we do today. Check your power bill, the generation costs are probably less than half of your monthly total, so the rest is going to come back to you one way or the other.

Ideal consumer, from the power network point of view, is as constant as possible. Each time you cut off a consumer node it creates harmonics and surges that need to be compensated upstream. Lots of nodes going on and off simultaneously (and they will as the whole parts of the city have the good sun at the same time) are engineering nightmare, existing grids are just not build to handle it, so they'll need to be upgraded, plus the maintenance costs will go up.

This is exactly the issue. Nuclear simply missed the boat. It couldn't win against coal on a balance sheet and it's surely not going to catch up to renewables now.

There's nothing wrong with it. A cheap fission technology would be a good thing. But at this stage literally no one is interesting in throwing money at a technology that is now into its eighth (!) decade of maturity. The low hanging fruit got picked by our grandparents.

>It couldn't win against coal on a balance sheet

It did win against coal on a balance sheet. It's the environmental concerns that stopped nuclear from proliferation, not the economical.

And the environmental costs for nuclear were internalized by regulation, while the same did not happen for coal. This is still well within the realm of economics.

> the environmental costs for nuclear were internalized by regulation, while the same did not happen for coal

It very much did happen for coal. That's what this whole global warming business is about.

As far as coal's negative externalities go, carbon emissions and their impact on climate change were only some of the most well-known. There's extensive air and water pollution from both mining and electricity production, with negative health effects for everyone from the miners who mine the coal to those living near the power plants themselves. Mining operations can also have pretty significant environmental impacts in addition to the pollution. Fossil-fuel power plants result in thousands of premature deaths each year, millions of lost workdays, and billions in annual healthcare spending.[0][1][2] And estimates are difficult, so it's easy to undervalue their costs; for C02 emissions, for example, more evidence in recent years suggests that we're drastically underestimating the social and economic damages of carbon emissions.[3]

Very, very few of these consequences have ever been priced into coal-fired power production; for decades, it's been a de facto subsidy. And while we're seeing some shifts needed to lower emissions to fight climate change, many of the identified externalities still aren't priced in. Nuclear energy never received that kind of benefit of the doubt, or the sort of friendly regulatory capture that let society ignore many of its own negative externalities and risks.

0. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/graphic-science-h...

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-human-cost-of...

2. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=info%3Adoi%2F10...

3. https://news.stanford.edu/2015/01/12/emissions-social-costs-...

internalized by regulation would imply that the externalities (eg. Climate change) are effectively factored into the cost of producing power by burning coal due to the cost of complying to imposed regulations.

This still isn't the case in most of the world.

I agree. I posted detailed calculations arguing this point of view a week ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20365309.

I was very disappointed, expecting you to show something about storage costs, but you just handwave that part, even though you go into very specific numbers and extrapolation for the actual pv's. May I suggest this is a major blindspot and probably where it completely falls down?

I don't know enough about storage costs to calculate them well, although several recent low-priced PV power-purchase agreements have included storage components, including the one we're talking about here. I look forward to seeing your calculations!

I don't know the calculation either, and have been trying to get hard numbers on various potential large scale storage such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage and Lithium ion, as well as some sort of learning curve for costs. So far I've found a pretty compelling and well backed case for solar, but the storage component is always hand waved.

Perhaps this is hard to calculate because it's unbounded?

Typically:

Known costs for (anything) < ( some storage cost * forever )

Maybe there's something wrong with my math?

Well, sure, storage costs depend in part on how long you have to store the energy, and how often. But surely someone has computed some kind of curve about how much storage is needed for PV to displace increasingly large percentages of peaker and baseload generation, assuming no demand response or other stabilization measures like rolling blackouts?

I hope you aren't making the assumption that storage = batteries, then arguing because weeks and months of batteries would be needed, it's impossibly expensive.

It would be very interesting to see what kind of storage capacity these agreements specify

Also you can also molten salt with the sun, which is done with way fewer moving parts.