Solar doesn't work that well the further you get from the equator.

Nortern Europe? Freezing in the winter (so lots of heating necessitating more electricity), and generally poor weather, plus the daylight hours can be incredibly short.

I'm not sure how solar works in places like this unless you massively overbuild (not exactly appealing, efficient, or environmentally friendly), and/or rely on electricity transported over vast distances (which I understand is not particularly viable).

>Solar doesn't work that well the further you get from the equator.

This simply isn't true outside of artic zones. While it's true the panels become less efficient in a $/kw basis, the cost of panels is already so low that the increase is negligible.

These dark, barren areas also tend to have a surplus of surface area so adding an extra 20-30% in panels to account for the disparity isn't an issue.

Let's take the UK as an example.

Densely populated, so there's not lots of "dark barren" land.

Energy consumption rises considerably in the winter, just as sunlight hours reduce, and the weather gets cloudier.

Even assuming there was lots of free surface area, I would assume that the extra number of panels would far exceed 20-30% when you consider the disparity in energy consumption alongside when it happens (after the sun sets, and before it rises).

The only way it would work is with a very large surplus of panels (quite how large I can only guess, but 20-30% seems incredibly optimistic to me), alongside a very significant storage mechanism. And even then, I'm not sure if that would insure against a severe cold patch coinciding with a few days of cloudly, dark weather.

UK is better off with a combination of offshore wind, onshore wind, solar and pumped storage.

Solar is still good to have coz the spells of low wind tend to coincide with having lots of sun and coz if youre putting up a roof, the costs of adding some panels up there while youre at it are fairly minimal.

What the UK really needs is to fix its near universally shit insulation, though. In terms of "green" ROI nothing else comes close to making buildings hold more heat.

Northern Europe thankfully has alternatives like hydro, geothermal, their own oil reserves..

Some countries yes, but what about others? The UK, Ireland, the Baltics (I was thinking of the Netherlands and Belgium too, although they don't strictly fit in the definition apparently) - not all of these countries have oil reserves or good sources of hyrdo/geothermal electricity.

The UK currently has about 15GW of grid wind power (and maybe 4-5GW privately owned that is not attached to the grid it's just used to avoid buying grid electricity). There is no reason whatsoever that can't be 45GW, and more, except that until now it was not politically desirable apparently.

It's very windy here. On the mainland, especially in summer, it might be calmer for days or even weeks so you would need a lot of storage, but you probably can power the UK on wind if that's what you were determined to do, and when it's really blowing (much of the winter) you can export that cheap wind power too, offsetting the price of buying some of say Spain's solar power or France's nukes when the wind is calm.

Most of today so far for example grid wind was steadily about 13GW. Here on the mainland it seems pretty calm, but I guess out in the ocean it is plenty windy enough to turn those blades and make electricity.

I think we're very fortunate in the UK to have a great mix of wind/solar/tidal to utilise for power generation (although I don't think solar is as appropriate for our situation as wind or tidal). TBH I really wish our politicans would actually do more to advance both wind and tidal generation in this country.

But it still doesn't significantly help countries like Belgium or the Netherlands, or even Germany.

I'm actually very interested to see how Germany tried to decarbonise over the next couple of decades, as I think they've managed to get most of the low hanging fruit (for example, from what I've read, I don't think there's really anymore space for them to install offshore turbines without quite significant difficulties).

When going for serious global scale stuff you put the panels in sunny places and run gigantic cables to the places it isn't sunny. Again, possible to do but massive scale infrastructure projects that take time, money, and political will.

I'm not an expert at all when it comes to this sort of stuff, but don't you lose quite a high percentage of the electricity generated when you move it over the vast distances needed for that to work?

>but don't you lose quite a high percentage of the electricity generated when you move it over the vast distances needed for that to work?

No. 1-2MV DC transmission lines can move power 3000+ miles at >97% efficiency.

This isn't directed at you, but I'm starting to get super frustrated with this myth that transporting electricity is inefficient. I see it almost everywhere these discussions take place and I don't know why.

No offence taken, I'm happy to learn! It seems like I need to go and do more reading about this.

I suppose efficiency aside, the next big problem(s) would be of a political nature? Having no control over your power supply (which is hosted in a foreign nation) is quite a big geopolitical risk?

You lose some but it is manageable, there are already private projects to do things like this, including undersea cables!

Because people correctly point out that if you had literally 100% solar (or near it) the amount of battery you would need is of completely impractical scale in even the medium term future. More reasonable approaches would include many massive lakes with pumped hydro stations. I personally think it is entirely possible but the scale of the operation is a massive undertaking similar to the sum total of fossil fuel extraction infrastructure built up over the last 100 years. We are talking trillion dollar scale. Can the USA summon the political will to do it fast? Probably not. Building more nuclear power plants for base load is probably easier.

You need to overbuild solar with a factor of 5 to get to a practical amount of batteries. See https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1441605024887427073?s=21

One side benefit of that is that energy will be free 90% of the time. Great for carbon extraction and desalination.

That presumably ignores the fact that other industries would adapt to respond to energy that was essentially free for even shorter periods. The economics of heavy industries might change if the energy input was free for 3 hours a day (e.g. offsetting great capital spend to overbuild infrastructure there).

Overbuilding by 5x means you also need to multiply the cost by 5x. Is solar still cheaper than nuclear once you factor that in? (Not to mention the cost of energy storage.)

In Iceland probably not, in Hawaii hell yes.

Has he never heard of power to gas [0]? We already have lots of storage and generators for natural gas. I doubt you'd need more than twice the capacity using power to gas.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

The usual con to get to the conclusion you reached is to assume batteries are used to get to 100% renewables. But batteries are terrible for long term storage and rare event backup, so this is just bad engineering. Batteries + hydrogen does much better in most places, especially at high latitude.

And hydrogen comes with it's own challenges, as a large % of energy is lost in the conversion to and from. This multiplies how much solar you need appreciably. There is no easy solution here, many hard ones. We can do it but need to be willing to do that hard/expensive work.

Yes, hydrogen comes with its own challenges, but batteries and hydrogen are synergistic. Each covers the weak point of the other. Most of the energy stored goes through batteries (efficiency), while most of the energy storage capacity is in hydrogen (capital cost). So the system ends up being cheaper. You do not actually increase the needed generation all that much, because most of the stored energy is still going through batteries, not hydrogen. And in particular, unlike the only-battery solution you don't need to ludicrously use batteries for seasonal energy storage or rare event backup.

Most of the hydrogen produced would, anyway, be used immediately in industry, excepting only when the storage tanks need topping off. The electrolyzers would never, ever be idle.

We need the hydrogen regardless, so its usefulness to store surplus energy besides is a bonus.

Renewables are a technology for a civilization that has decided to accept being in a state of slow decline. Higher stages of civilization will require more power, which can be practically provided only by nuclear. If the west goes all-in on solar, China’s investments into nuclear will give it the opportunity to become the dominant civilization.

You state this with no evidence provided.

Nuclear isn't cheaper now, and won't be any time soon. If we want more cheap energy then renewables _are_ the right solution, especially in places like the US where land is cheap and there is plenty of sunshine. It makes less sense in Europe, but if the Chinese make substantial advances in nuclear tech then great — we can build new reactors in 10/20 years when they do make economic sense.

Utter nonsense. Judging by all evidence, renewables will provide more high quality energy (that is, looking at work rather than thermal energy produced, since renewables produce the former directly) more cheaply than nuclear. Even China is emphasizing renewables over nuclear, you know.

> renewables will provide more high quality energy (that is, looking at work rather than thermal energy produced, since renewables produce the former directly)

I have no idea how this makes electricity from renewables “higher quality”.

In the sense that 1 joule of electrical energy is inherently more valuable than 1 joule of thermal energy. A current commercial nuclear reactor requires 3 units of the latter to produce 1 unit of the former.

This issue comes up all the time in energy analysis where you need to carefully distinguish between "primary" (i.e., before conversion in a heat engine) energy to zero-entropy energy (electrical energy, work).

> In the sense that 1 joule of electrical energy is inherently more valuable than 1 joule of thermal energy. A current commercial nuclear reactor requires 3 units of the latter to produce 1 unit of the former.

When people are talking about 1 GW nuclear reactor, they mean that reactor is generating 1 GW of electricity, so that the reactor is in fact >3 GW thermal. Nobody is comparing electricity from renewables to thermal energy from nuclear.

In fact, this actually makes nuclear superior: you can use the waste 2 GW of heat to run district heating in nearby located cities. Pretty popular in Europe, though with coal/gas plants. There is no similar useful byproduct to solar/wind.

1 GW of electrical power driving a heat pumps gives you the other two GW of heat for free. So, no advantage to nukes there. Anyway nukes are generally too far away from pop centers to provide useful secondary heat. But nukes can drive heat pumps too, so no advantage either way.

Of course the sun does provide direct heat without need to process it through panels. Solar PV and nuke customers both rely on that.

Quality also applies to different temperatures of thermal energy. Low temperature heat, such as the waste heat from a nuclear power plant, has very low quality. It is worth very little, which is why in most cases it is just dissipated to the environment.

> Higher stages of civilization will require more power

If anything, a "higher stage" of civilization would be perfectly sustainable and highly energy efficient.

There's nothing civilized in being a parasitic species.

Renewables + storage will provide a solid, low-carbon baseline until He3-he3 fusion is commercialized and we use that energy to dominate the solar system.