5 ms·

Time to build also matters. How long does it take to build a storage mechanism for a solar/wind farm, vs the time to build a nuclear plant? What are the reasona

by beat 8y ago

Time to build also matters. How long does it take to build a storage mechanism for a solar/wind farm, vs the time to build a nuclear plant? What are the reasonable regulatory requirements? (Lest anyone be complaining about the ignorant treehuggers stopping nuclear plants, I think we can all agree that a nuclear plant is potentially more hazardous than pile of batteries, and should be regulated proportionally.) What are the up-front capital requirements of nuclear vs solar/wind + storage? Another thing people need to keep in mind is we don't need enough storage to run the entire grid indefinitely. We just need enough to smooth the curve out to four nines or whatever number is deemed necessary. And while "the sun isn't always shining and the wind isn't always blowing", the wind is always blowing somewhere.

bilbo0s 8y ago
You wouldn't use batteries generally though. For example, if you had hydro-storage, you'd use the power from the wind or solar to pump water into giant reservoirs. When wind or solar is unavailable, power is drawn from the hydro reservoirs by letting the stored water flow through turbines. (So a dam, basically.) So, yeah, building reservoirs is pretty well defined. And would certainly take much less time than building a nuclear plant. (The cost would be orders of magnitude lower as well.) Still has regulatory issues, just not nearly as many as dead batteries or nuclear power plants do.
- pjc50 8y ago
  There's not many geologically good locations for pumped storage, they tend to be a bit environmentally sensitive, and they're not that quick to build - the one nearest me, Cruachan, took 6 years to build in the 1950s at the reduced safety standards of the time.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    That's only one way that you would do hydro-storage these days though. Think, for example, if you drill a hole deep into the ground, lower a cylinder into it, poke a hole in the bottom of the cylinder, then fill that cylinder with water. If I put a platform with a giant weight on top of it, the platform will press all of the water in the cylinder down through the hole in the bottom. That water will travel through a tube to the top of the cylinder and pour back into the cylinder on top of the weighted platform. In that tube, is where you capture the stored energy with turbines. Then, when the wind picks back up, or the sun comes out, or power is just cheap even from the coal plant, you use that power to lift the platform back up and suck all the water back into the bottom of the cylinder. Benefits of this are, as the HN User "beat" implied below, it's so cheap and simple to build that even a single, say, shopping mall might invest in it to lower their power draw from the grid. They would build one that only serves their mall for instance. You start to build out a truly distributed power storage infrastructure.
- beat 8y ago
  Oh, sure. There are all sorts of interesting ways to cache energy, besides batteries - hydro, gravity, compressed air, thermal, etc. Price, scale, and local constraints should create a rich market for a wide variety of solutions. (As an aside, a sufficiently large hydro storage is its own regulatory problem.)
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    >(As an aside, a sufficiently large hydro storage is its own regulatory problem.) ... Yeah, but as I said in the comment, those regulatory issues are far less onerous than the regulatory issues with building a nuclear power plant. So the investment is less, the maintenance costs less, the kwh is less, and the time to market is less. Which technology do you think the big finance guys are gonna put their money into? If you want money to go into nuclear plants, government has to agree to shoulder a lot of the risk. But there's drawbacks there too so... yeah, just a hard problem.
    - beat 8y ago
      That's why I think we'll see a lot of small-scale distributed storage, rather than giant industrial storage plants that match our current concept of the power grid. If you're running, say, a big box store, buying your own local storage for the store can make economic sense if it can pay for itself by buying dynamically priced energy. And then it doesn't need to be huge, because it's not trying to power a city, it's just trying to power your warehouse/store. A block of batteries, or a thermal system, or a water tower starts looking pretty attractive financially.
      - bilbo0s 8y ago
        I agree. A lot of these storage solutions are starting to be so cheap that it's not hard to see different sorts of players investing in them. The benefit being, as you rightly point out, distributed storage. Such systems are "no-brainers" for entities like, say, hospitals.
        8y ago
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  "Solar With Batteries Cheaper Than Gas in Parts of U.S. Southwest" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-17/solar-with-batteries-cheaper-than-gas-in-parts-of-u-s-southwest https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-17/solar-wit... Tesla built the Hornsdale Power Reserve in under 90 days. Hydro storage is never going to be able to compete with that, and nuclear will never be able to compete with how quickly you can deploy wind and solar. Batteries are rapidly coming down in price, and will continue to do so as EV sales scale up (1 million EVs are sold every six months, and this cadence is increasing). There are no regulatory issues with batteries. You can ship them to a concrete pad and install them, no questions asked.

by beat 8y ago

bilbo0s 8y ago

You wouldn't use batteries generally though. For example, if you had hydro-storage, you'd use the power from the wind or solar to pump water into giant reservoirs. When wind or solar is unavailable, power is drawn from the hydro reservoirs by letting the stored water flow through turbines. (So a dam, basically.) So, yeah, building reservoirs is pretty well defined. And would certainly take much less time than building a nuclear plant. (The cost would be orders of magnitude lower as well.) Still has regulatory issues, just not nearly as many as dead batteries or nuclear power plants do.

pjc50 8y ago
There's not many geologically good locations for pumped storage, they tend to be a bit environmentally sensitive, and they're not that quick to build - the one nearest me, Cruachan, took 6 years to build in the 1950s at the reduced safety standards of the time.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  That's only one way that you would do hydro-storage these days though. Think, for example, if you drill a hole deep into the ground, lower a cylinder into it, poke a hole in the bottom of the cylinder, then fill that cylinder with water. If I put a platform with a giant weight on top of it, the platform will press all of the water in the cylinder down through the hole in the bottom. That water will travel through a tube to the top of the cylinder and pour back into the cylinder on top of the weighted platform. In that tube, is where you capture the stored energy with turbines. Then, when the wind picks back up, or the sun comes out, or power is just cheap even from the coal plant, you use that power to lift the platform back up and suck all the water back into the bottom of the cylinder. Benefits of this are, as the HN User "beat" implied below, it's so cheap and simple to build that even a single, say, shopping mall might invest in it to lower their power draw from the grid. They would build one that only serves their mall for instance. You start to build out a truly distributed power storage infrastructure.
beat 8y ago
Oh, sure. There are all sorts of interesting ways to cache energy, besides batteries - hydro, gravity, compressed air, thermal, etc. Price, scale, and local constraints should create a rich market for a wide variety of solutions. (As an aside, a sufficiently large hydro storage is its own regulatory problem.)
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >(As an aside, a sufficiently large hydro storage is its own regulatory problem.) ... Yeah, but as I said in the comment, those regulatory issues are far less onerous than the regulatory issues with building a nuclear power plant. So the investment is less, the maintenance costs less, the kwh is less, and the time to market is less. Which technology do you think the big finance guys are gonna put their money into? If you want money to go into nuclear plants, government has to agree to shoulder a lot of the risk. But there's drawbacks there too so... yeah, just a hard problem.
  - beat 8y ago
    That's why I think we'll see a lot of small-scale distributed storage, rather than giant industrial storage plants that match our current concept of the power grid. If you're running, say, a big box store, buying your own local storage for the store can make economic sense if it can pay for itself by buying dynamically priced energy. And then it doesn't need to be huge, because it's not trying to power a city, it's just trying to power your warehouse/store. A block of batteries, or a thermal system, or a water tower starts looking pretty attractive financially.
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      I agree. A lot of these storage solutions are starting to be so cheap that it's not hard to see different sorts of players investing in them. The benefit being, as you rightly point out, distributed storage. Such systems are "no-brainers" for entities like, say, hospitals.
      - 8y ago
toomuchtodo 8y ago
"Solar With Batteries Cheaper Than Gas in Parts of U.S. Southwest" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-17/solar-with-batteries-cheaper-than-gas-in-parts-of-u-s-southwest https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-17/solar-wit... Tesla built the Hornsdale Power Reserve in under 90 days. Hydro storage is never going to be able to compete with that, and nuclear will never be able to compete with how quickly you can deploy wind and solar. Batteries are rapidly coming down in price, and will continue to do so as EV sales scale up (1 million EVs are sold every six months, and this cadence is increasing). There are no regulatory issues with batteries. You can ship them to a concrete pad and install them, no questions asked.