AA5B comments on Solar Panels Are Now Producing So Much Power That They’re Leaving Nuclear Plants in the Dust: "Solar is now the engine of the power transition."

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Searching for Germany, I see many articles on grid storage - basically at its infancy but exploding in popularity. I also see huge expectations on pumped hydro storage

Seems like you’re arguing that we should stop building out these proven, low cost solutions in favor of dumping tons more money into a problematic technology that will take decades and billions of dollarseach

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[–] kronarbob@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

The hydro storage has the same problem than the battery storage. You have to build a reliable eletricity production that cover your needs before being able to store your excess.

How much power can you store with hydro storage ? Do you have enough land/mountain to create the artifical lakes at different elevation ? Can you store enough energy to compensate the reduced production of solar power during winter ? For now, storage is either for short periode ,(days, maybe weeks, with batteries) or limited capacity (hydro pumping). If you are interested on storage technology you should look on the CO2 storage that Italy built lately.

It is complicated to rely on yet to develop technologies to power an entire country. Some can, they should, other can't, and have to rely on non renewable energy.

I've written than Nuclear is probably the best way to produced decarbonated electricity while waiting for good solutions for the renewable energy. I've never said that we should stop developping renewable. While the world spend money on an energy and water consuming technoloy like IA, it would be way more intelligent to focuse all that money on developping renewable... Yet to produce solar panel, wind turbin, concrete, we still need fossile fuel or nuclear. So giving up on it would only make things more complicated.

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[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 point 1 week ago

Time is the missing value here.

that disregards the massive time commitment needed to build out nuclear. When each plant takes over a decade to build and there is no ready supply chain, they can’t be mass produced, scaling out would take many many years
while also ignoring that even the fast solar buildout takes time. Even with ready supply chain, mass production, mature technology, we need to expect scaling out to take 20+ years. We may not have all the answers for storage yet but it’s all known technology and we have 20+ years to figure it out. It’s ok to lag behind solar a bit

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