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> Expensive legacy gas and nuclear plants provide base load power at scale. Something renewables don’t really do.

Running hydro, biogas (e.g. in Denmark) and offshore wind (UK, Spain, France, Italy) can definitely fulfill base load demand on the basis of renewable energy generation. With solar, enough overcapacity can guarantee base load during the day even when it's cloudy, and in the summer the solar overcapacity can be used to run synth-fuel plants for those things that we absolutely cannot run with electricity (ships and large airplanes).

Additionally, we can reduce base load demand during night time... a lot of places are still running incandescent lighting, for example. Replace that with LEDs, better reflectors (for less waste) and movement detectors, and you tackle light pollution at night at the same time. Or heat, add storage to a heat pump system to avoid having to run the heat pump at night. And for fucks sake France please get rid of resistive heating.

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TheCraiggers a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Running hydro, biogas (e.g. in Denmark) and offshore wind (UK, Spain, France, Italy) can definitely fulfill base load demand on the basis of renewable energy generation.

This seems entirely region dependant, but even so, I think a citation is needed here.

I know there are poster children for renewables, like Iceland which struck the energy lottery. But I don't know of many places other than that which can satisfy base load today with renewables unless you're going hyper-local.

Or was your point that we could do it if we threw billions at the problem?

Your entire second paragraph is basically "throw money at it" when, sadly, the politics (which are reflective of the will of the majority) of the world seem to be instead moving in the opposite direction.

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tcfhgj 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the politics (which are reflective of the will of the majority)

where did you read that? e.g. in the US politics = top 10%

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

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bee_rider a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t think it is obvious which is the “throw money at it” solution. Energy utilities are already heavily regulated. Users aren’t really exposed to a market with transparent pricing to enable supply and demand. The folks who want smart grid stuff are the ones trying to let the free market actually work on the energy problem.

Currently, petrochemicals might be:

-Benefiting from consumer-focused subsidies, like heating or energy assistance.

-Subsidized by, like, actual intentional industrial subsidies

-Subsidized by infrastructure investments, like a road out to some hinterlands that is only needed to get to some mine, pipeline, or whatever

-Subsidized by allowing these companies to externalize their costs onto society by dumping them on the environment. All those greenhouse gasses, cleaning them up isn’t going to be free, and we’re going to pay for it.

-Subsidized by international relations. This isn’t a political site, so let’s not dig into the details there. But the long dependency chains for petrochemicals have made some odd international relations bedfellows. These constraints on our diplomatic options have a cost that is hard to capture.

We could start by making sure to price all that in to petrochemicals if we wanted to give ourselves a ton of extra homework (actually we shouldn’t try to run the numbers because it is big country-dependent mess, but we should at least have the size of the picture in our heads).

Renewables have fewer built-in, structural, or snuck-in by negligence subsidies like that. They don’t produce as many toxic byproducts to dump on the planet (though, semiconductors aren’t byproduct-free for sure), and energy falling from the sky is easier to just grab without any drama. So, I think if it were possible to actually run those numbers, renewables would look pretty good.

Then we add in the fact that renewables probably are the future (eventually we will run out of oil). So, subsidies for renewable R&D are an investment that should pay off with future manufacturing jobs.

Overall, sticking with petrochemicals seems very expensive to me.

	▲	TheCraiggers a day ago \| parent [-]
		You're not wrong, but all this amounts to wishing. At the end of the day, the majority only care about their utility bill. Telling them that X will cost more today but lower the bill for the next generation isn't enticing. For that, you need forward-thinking politicians who can dance the subtle dance of planning for the future without making the current situation too onerous for the people. The recent election results in the USA is an example of getting that dance wrong.

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robertlagrant a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Running hydro, biogas (e.g. in Denmark) and offshore wind (UK, Spain, France, Italy) can definitely fulfill renewable base load demand.

What is renewable base load demand?

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mschuster91 a day ago | parent [-]

Sorry, brain fart, shifted the words around and didn't fix the sentence up. Corrected, thanks.

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robertlagrant a day ago | parent [-]

No worries! However I don't understand it :) Base load is the load that can't vary based on weather conditions; i.e. it needs to be supplyable from coal/diesel/gas/nuclear-type generation, or from batteries that have a certain number of hours or days of supply in them at all times. I don't think we have that, although I'm happy to be corrected.

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tcfhgj 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

or from any other type of energy storage

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pfdietz a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The best way to supply "synthetic baseload" with renewables is typically not to use just batteries for storage, but rather a combination of batteries and another storage mode more suited for longer term storage. The latter is optimized to have lower cost per unit of energy storage capacity than batteries, at the expense of lower (perhaps much lower) round trip efficiency.

This latter storage mode isn't needed until fossil fuels are almost entirely eliminated from the grid, since otherwise just use those instead for that long term firming.

The idea that the electricity supply system has to itself shoulder the burden of dealing with intermittency is also mistaken. If it's worthwhile users will be willing to dispatch at least some of their demand. I'm reminded of the argument against deregulation of telecom or airlines: that the new system wouldn't be as reliable or nice. But users were willing to make the tradeoff if the services were cheaper.

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hidroto a day ago | parent | prev [-]

geothermal power would make good base load.

	▲	mschuster91 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah but geothermal isn't without its own risks. For one it's not available everywhere, for it to be viable at scale you need some serious hot rock formation and a way to drill through to it, and finally geothermal energy has been linked with an increased risk of earthquakes.

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wbl a day ago | parent | prev [-]

France has 80% zero carbon all the time. Why not resistive heating?

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fsh a day ago | parent | next [-]

According to the IEA [1], 43% of the energy consumption is oil (transportation, heating), 18% is natural gas (mostly heating), and 25% is electricity. Switching to resistive heating would require doubling the electricity production. Using heat pumps is much more efficient.

[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix

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UltraSane a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Heat pumps reduce electricity usage by at least 3x and also provide cooling.

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pfdietz a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's expensive compared to heat pumps, especially if you also want air conditioning.

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Scoundreller a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They lose out on export revenue

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mschuster91 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Why not resistive heating?

Because France has a massive dependency on nuclear power... of course resistive heaters are cheaper than anything else when you got a ton of NPPs around. But their plants are all aging and are a nightmare to keep operational, so if they'd switch over to heat pumps their total energy demand would go down drastically.

	▲	pfdietz 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> of course resistive heaters are cheaper than anything else when you got a ton of NPPs around. No "of course" about that, especially with current heat pump technology and the fully loaded cost of power from new nuclear power plants.