I've never made a comment on HN commenting on someone else's tone, but I've seen this exact response, word for word, a lot recently on many posts. I don't like this trend. I find it to be adversarial and in bad faith. Suppose they did read the article. Are they likely to reply to you defending themselves? Next time, please address the actual content of their comment instead.
I'm not sure what to make of your hypothetical question about the GP commenter's likelihood of responding, since the first (and only) response to this when I went to bed was from walrus01, whom I was responding to and had a brief conversation with.
I commented in this way because the article directly addressed the problems with the GP comment, and the GP comment made no mention of it. There's also a pattern on HN and elsewhere of comments popping up in top-level threads made in bad faith to derail and redirect conversation, especially on anything related to power generation or renewables. Telling someone to "address the actual content" is precisely what I was doing.
Not the original poster and perhaps it was adversarial, but I think it is also pretty clear that they did not read the article. Of course, they won't admit that (who wants to admit not reading the article?) so they will reply contextualizing their point to the article.
I read the article, I disagree with the concept of using PV to generate artificial hydrocarbon fuels in general, as not a great business plan. It's not the best use of the technology when we should be bypassing that entirely.
Go use excess PV to pump water uphill back into a reservoir or something if you need energy storage, not drive a complicated process to make artificial hydrocarbons to store in a tank and burn in an engine.
Pumped reservoir storage is horrifically inefficient, environmentally terrible for the local ecosystem, and not scalable. You can't just go and build a reservoir anywhere you like.
Chemical energy storage is simple, scalable, and allows for the easy movement of vast amounts of energy over great distances to be used anywhere with minimal changes to existing infrastructure.
When talking about pumped hydro the roundtrip efficiency usually is around 70-80%. Not even close to batteries but way more scalable.
Chemical storage is horrific. Creating diesel and burning it in a turbine or similar you start at 40-50% for the burning phase, without even converting anything in the first place.
If you go the fuel cell route you tend to end up somewhere at 40-60% efficiency.
So no, the only use case for chemical storage is either where you want energy density. Say aviation or maritime shipping. Or nation state like energy security, where you can pay the efficiency price.
For all other use cases any optimization done, or better usage of the energy, will eat into that horrific round trip efficiency.
How is it as scalable when you're at the mercy of the local geology? There are not that many places where pumped storage is viable, its not just pumping water up to some random hill.
The question rather is, how much pumped storage do you even need when you do geographical decoupling through HVDC interconnections?
Similarly, how bound are you to the local topology? The longest already existing HVDC line in China is 3,293 km (2,046 miles). That brings you from the Rockies to any location within continental US.
Utilize renewables to have bidirectional flow compared to traditional hydro.
Except, it really is just pumping water up a hill. Siting for pumped storage is overwhelmingly easier than for hydro generation. The latter needs a watershed. A dike around a hilltop does not.
maybe, but it's also a national embarrassment that most of the major population centers in the US Northeast seemingly cannot be connected by 350 km/h high speed rail such as what China has very rapidly built since 2010. Flights of 1-2 hour duration between many locations in North America should be replaced with rail in most scenarios.
either the political will or budget to do this apparently does not exist.
It's clear that the US cannot build high speed rail. Since 2009, California has spent tens of billions on HSR and has nothing to show for it. There are too many hurdles to overcome. Existing rail lines have turns that are too sharp for HSR, so the government must use eminent domain to take people's property. Construction is delayed by environmental reviews. There are issues with noise. You have to build train stations in urban areas where real estate is ridiculously expensive. Smaller towns along the route can threaten to block or delay the rail line unless they get political favors. And so on.
The easiest way to improve transport in the US would be to abolish the TSA and go back to pre-9/11 screening. That would reduce the time needed to arrive before a flight, making flying more competitive for shorter distances. When electric planes are introduced, they'll most likely be for shorter flights at first (since battery tech won't have the range for cross-country or cross-oceanic flights). Then we'll have similar travel times as high speed rail, similar environmental impact, and more flexibility than HSR (since it's easier to fly more/fewer planes to various airports than to build new tracks).
HSR in America is a victim of American oligarchy's obsession with de-taxing land.
Same reason why a 2 bed in SF is so absurdly priced.
Higher taxes on land will reduce its value - making land purchases cheaper. This will bring American HSR costs more in line with China's.
China also reduces land acquisition costs by building a lot of elevated HSR and reduces overall HSR costs through economies of scale - something that doesnt work when you limit HSR to one area.
Probably going to be the last thing to decarbonize.
Might be able to run off biodiesel or similar. Even if biofuel is double the cost of current dino juice, fuel makes up 20-40% of major airline’s opex, so it’s not like crude-free flying will kill the industry.
Might even be made up with increased aircraft efficiency, more intermediate stop operations (saving 15-30% in fuel by flying 2x medium haul instead of 1x long haul) and better load factors (“revenue management”).
Not necessarily, we could use plain hydrogen. (Could probably even do it with beamed power, but that’s a tech I consider to be insanely unwise to deploy).
Density is almost irrelevant, all that matters here is cost.
And one order of magnitude is more than enough. But yeah, besides planes and rockets, hydrocarbons are important in several industrial processes. Besides, we don't want to replace all of the cars, trucks and ships in a single decade.
Except we have millions of devices now that rely on hydrocarbons that will have to be transition... somehow?
And the infrastructure used to sequester carbon from the air can be turned around and deployed later when we want to sequester carbon without creating hydrocarbons.
