If the lowest demand for electricity in a year is x watts and you have generators that run constantly to supply x watts then you don't need "flexibility". I don't get why this is such a hard concept to understand.

I didn't say you needed flexibility. What I said was that inflexibility is a negative in a power source. It makes the output from the source less valuable per unit of energy than if the source could economically operate at lower capacity factor.

" I said was that inflexibility is a negative in a power source."

Not if they are generating base load. This is why base load is an important concept.

It's a negative because it forces the plant to be operated in base load mode. The grid operator would prefer something that could be economically operated in a more flexible way.

As an example: the combination of wind/solar/storage that could be used to provide the equivalent of a nuclear power plant's output could ALSO be used to provide some flexibility, by altering when the storage is charged and discharged. This flexibility would allow it to generate more value for the same number of kWh provided to the grid.

You basically seem to be arguing that wind/solar/storage solves the problem created by wind/solar/storage.

The variability of wind and solar is actually a HUGE problem. It makes managing the grid much harder and required a large amount of idle generating capacity as backup. This is why proponents love to argue against the very fundamental concept of base load.

Wind/solar/storage does, in fact, solve the power problem. Period.

Variability is in fact a trivial problem solved by storage and transportable backup. Even NG suffices as backup. Even coal suffices as backup. In the future, ammonia will take up that role.

Too bad that this trivial problem literally has no solution, right? We literally have no solution to grid scale power storage. Thank god someone on HN knows it's trivial.

This is completely wrong, wind and solar variability is a HUGE problem that we do not currently have the storage technology to mitigate. The assumption that we do is starting to feel like a religion.

Technology != Infrastructure

We have the tech (you're almost certainly already using it), we have not deployed it at sufficient scale yet.

But we are building the factories to make the batteries, and the mines to feed the factories, as fast as we can raise money to do so.

I'm not sure what's happening with hydrogen (apparently it's much cheaper than batteries?); but regardless, that technology predates all forms of generating electricity more complex than the etymological origin of the word (ἤλεκτρον, amber) — "rubbing things together" was the only option when Deimand and van Troostwijk charged their Leyden jar back in 1789 and demonstrated electrolysis.

Right: storage is mostly 19th-century tech, battery chemistries and catalysts excepted, that only needs building out. But we need not feed the trolls.

Focusing on the mere existence of technology is basically "let them eat cake".

It's fine to say "the factories need to be built", as long as they can be built at a manageable price. But price is a huge factor that cannot be ignored, and it's high enough in this situation to make the word "trivial" incorrect.

I am sympathetic to both of you regarding the word "trivial".

No new problems need to be solved, so in that sense it is trivial.

It costs a lot of money in absolute terms, so in that sense it is not trivial.

The cost (for global battery based storage, the most expensive serious storage option) is in the order of 6 months global supply of crude oil to turn rocks into batteries (i.e. the dumbest possible limit on the cost of recycling), those batteries last at least three years even using the worst cycle-count estimates I've seen and throwing the batteries away at 70% of initial peak capacity, that's trivial.

Opening new mines and factories, even if the new mines provide new work for workers currently in fossil fuels, may be a significant geopolitical and economic shift, so in that sense it isn't trivial.

And so on.

For hydrogen, it's "build a tank that only leaks a little bit". (We'd probably be better off adding some carbon to that hydrogen, but I have no idea if anyone is working on that at sufficient scale even though the tech is over a century old).

The fact is that we exist today in exactly the state that is being promoted as beyond solution. Our present renewable generation and present ready storage are exceeded, and we rely on a 3rd-line backup, fossil fuels. Each increment of renewable generation and storage added reduces the amount of fossil fuels that must be used.

Factories for any form of storage are not different in any material way from a thousand other factories we know work. We have been making factories for going on three centuries, and know we can. Making and operating factories is expensive capex, but exploring, extracting, transporting, and refining fossil fuels is an even more expensive opex. If we could afford fossil opex, renewable capex of similar order is strictly better.

Only if inflexible and flexible are the same cost.

If an inflexible source is cheaper, then it may better a fit as a high capacity factor supplier to meet constant demand.

We first need to agree on the problems and the solution, using levelised costs for lifetime of plant, and safe disposal, preferably using real examples, but theoretical best case examples are also worth discussing.

I'm inclined to believe there is no best pasta sauce, only best pasta sauces. One size does not, in face, fit all.

> Only if inflexible and flexible are the same cost.

You must be misreading the comment or something.

They didn't say it's the only factor, they said it's a negative. It's a negative no matter how the costs align.

Restating the point without additional explanation an argument does not make.

In what world is it reasonable to implement unrequired, unnecessary, and costly, features and call that a net positive in all cases under all circumstances.

You're comparing entire solutions. That's not what they were talking about. They were talking about individual features.

Also, some sources are more flexible by their very nature and get the flexibility for free.

But more generally, lacking flexibility is a negative by itself. It's an acceptable negative if adding flexibility would cost more than the benefit, but it's still a negative.

"But more generally, lacking flexibility is a negative by itself."

Not for baseload generation.

It's still part of the same grid as non-baseload generation, so the lack of flexibility makes the entire grid less flexible. So yes it's a negative.

And most people would call "can't be used for the more difficult parts of power generation" a negative too.