3 ms·

Add wind, wave and hydro to the mix, including pumped hydro for storage and demand response. Start installing ground and water source heat pump community heatin

Add wind, wave and hydro to the mix, including pumped hydro for storage and demand response. Start installing ground and water source heat pump community heating that's powered from wind and solar during times of excess. Combined with adequate insulation it becomes remarkably easy to heat and power even in northern climes almost for free. Allow the local electric co to smart-manage the home and EV batteries as part of the grid, subject to personal constraints of when you need 100% EV battery etc. Some places are already there with excess power from renewables every year. We just need the will to scale up.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
Hydro works great where you have an appropriate location for it, but most of the appropriate locations already have it. It doesn't scale. Insulation is great for new construction but cost prohibitive for existing structures -- the new codes require 2x6 construction instead of 2x4 to leave more room for insulation, but you can hardly change that for a hundred million existing structures that aren't going anywhere. Wind and wave aren't diversification because waves are caused by wind, so a still night is still for both. Community heating from wind and solar doesn't provide any efficiency improvement without a cold sink that many areas won't have -- or something that generates waste heat, like nuclear. (Using waste heat from a steam turbine as the cold sink for a heat pump for community heating would be extremely efficient.) Energy storage and time-based pricing is great for handling the high demand low sunlight period in the early evening. You still need something for baseload.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  It's all doable. Quite easily and without bankrupting everyone. Heating from ground and water source heat provides a thoroughly well documented 4 to 6 fold increase in efficiency and still works even when the sea or ground is only at a small differential and the absolute temperature is single digits above freezing. You don't need a handy nuclear plant or gobs of geo-thermal like Iceland. You power the pump and heat exchangers from spare renewable capacity, the heat comes from the ground, sea or river. It works well enough in the Nordic countries and N Scotland (Orkney) to be fairly popular. Of course they benefit from going a bit deeper with ground source which further encourages community over individual installations, but sea works surprisingly well even at those latitudes. Fully becalmed is pretty rare for much of the planet even when onshore is still. There is often wind a little offshore and the waves can result from winds pretty far offshore. Not forgetting tidal and pressure contributions. Sure, some areas will be less suited to wave or tidal than others, just as the UK is far better served by wind than solar. Though solar is still effective enough to be worth installing. Install the right mix for local geography and climate, balance with the national or regional grid. You're right that pumped hydro is particularly constrained by suitable geography, but there's plenty of spots it could be added to the grid still, just not in Florida, Kansas or The Netherlands. :) Insulation isn't so hard either if you promote insulation for existing structures or apply judicious subsidy. New build should, of course, be better and we're a long way from achieving the insulation standards of Nordic countries. UK for instance had a decade of promoting and requiring the energy companies to provide subsidised installation of roof and wall insulation. It was remarkably popular, and pretty damn effective. Not all buildings were suitable of course, but start with the easier ones to get an 80% fix, then worry about the difficult sites and edge cases for the next steps.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Wind and wave aren't diversification because waves are caused by wind, so a still night is still for both. There's also option of tidal energy plants, which pull power straight from the Earth-Moon-Sun system, but AFAIU this only works if you have a large enough body of water available. I agree with your overall point. We need something for baseload Playing nuclear against renewables is ridiculous. We need both.
nickik 8y ago
> We just need the will to scale up. When you ignore all problems of scale and cost then you don't actually solve the problem. Facts are that it has been proven that you can (and quite cheaply) produce energy for a modern industrial nation with nuclear power. And we know that no country, however much investment in all these 'hip' technologies you are talking about, has managed to even come close to powering the whole country with these technologies. And in those that have pushed on these its the opposite of cheap. Centralized production has won out because the waste majority of the time it is a far better idea. And as somebody has lived in a low energy house in northern Europe its neither cheap nor easy to have all these systems and any 'solution' that assumes we can do that for all houses is doomed to fail.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Nuclear hasn't compared at all well on cost. The planned new build in the Lake District has finally failed after a succession of business failures and others pulling out of the consortium starting with Westinghouse's failure. It was announced just this week that Toshiba had decided to liquidate what was left of the project. Hinkley C is going ahead, and currently estimated to cost almost double wind and solar per MWh at current prices Building isn't expected to start until next year and generation some time in the mid 2020s. Wind and solar costs are still falling steadily. Not what I would call "quite cheaply". The French govt (majority owner of EDF) looks to be getting the best of that particular deal. But I don't claim we can instantly switch to fully decentralised renewables. Nuclear is a sensible part of a withdrawal from fossil, if nothing else to buy us an extra few decades and baseload, as I've commented elsewhere. Whilst it performs poorly on cost it does well on CO2 so has a place. By the same token we couldn't go entirely nuclear without dramatically over-specifying grid capacity as nuclear doesn't respond well to transient peak demand. We'd still need a good chunk of diesel, battery or pumped hydro for shorter term reserves, and more intense demand management. Centralised production works when it's a multi GW coal plant next to the colliery, or gas near the pipeline etc. As we adopt an increasing amount of renewables the grid becomes necessarily more localised as weather and climate will differ between regions and the grid is served by thousands of generation sources instead of a few dozen. Simple economics are driving that transition not whether they are 'hip' or not. As for claiming a low energy house isn't cheap, well that makes no sense considering the size of bill reductions.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

Hydro works great where you have an appropriate location for it, but most of the appropriate locations already have it. It doesn't scale. Insulation is great for new construction but cost prohibitive for existing structures -- the new codes require 2x6 construction instead of 2x4 to leave more room for insulation, but you can hardly change that for a hundred million existing structures that aren't going anywhere. Wind and wave aren't diversification because waves are caused by wind, so a still night is still for both. Community heating from wind and solar doesn't provide any efficiency improvement without a cold sink that many areas won't have -- or something that generates waste heat, like nuclear. (Using waste heat from a steam turbine as the cold sink for a heat pump for community heating would be extremely efficient.) Energy storage and time-based pricing is great for handling the high demand low sunlight period in the early evening. You still need something for baseload.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
It's all doable. Quite easily and without bankrupting everyone. Heating from ground and water source heat provides a thoroughly well documented 4 to 6 fold increase in efficiency and still works even when the sea or ground is only at a small differential and the absolute temperature is single digits above freezing. You don't need a handy nuclear plant or gobs of geo-thermal like Iceland. You power the pump and heat exchangers from spare renewable capacity, the heat comes from the ground, sea or river. It works well enough in the Nordic countries and N Scotland (Orkney) to be fairly popular. Of course they benefit from going a bit deeper with ground source which further encourages community over individual installations, but sea works surprisingly well even at those latitudes. Fully becalmed is pretty rare for much of the planet even when onshore is still. There is often wind a little offshore and the waves can result from winds pretty far offshore. Not forgetting tidal and pressure contributions. Sure, some areas will be less suited to wave or tidal than others, just as the UK is far better served by wind than solar. Though solar is still effective enough to be worth installing. Install the right mix for local geography and climate, balance with the national or regional grid. You're right that pumped hydro is particularly constrained by suitable geography, but there's plenty of spots it could be added to the grid still, just not in Florida, Kansas or The Netherlands. :) Insulation isn't so hard either if you promote insulation for existing structures or apply judicious subsidy. New build should, of course, be better and we're a long way from achieving the insulation standards of Nordic countries. UK for instance had a decade of promoting and requiring the energy companies to provide subsidised installation of roof and wall insulation. It was remarkably popular, and pretty damn effective. Not all buildings were suitable of course, but start with the easier ones to get an 80% fix, then worry about the difficult sites and edge cases for the next steps.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Wind and wave aren't diversification because waves are caused by wind, so a still night is still for both. There's also option of tidal energy plants, which pull power straight from the Earth-Moon-Sun system, but AFAIU this only works if you have a large enough body of water available. I agree with your overall point. We need something for baseload Playing nuclear against renewables is ridiculous. We need both.

nickik 8y ago

> We just need the will to scale up. When you ignore all problems of scale and cost then you don't actually solve the problem. Facts are that it has been proven that you can (and quite cheaply) produce energy for a modern industrial nation with nuclear power. And we know that no country, however much investment in all these 'hip' technologies you are talking about, has managed to even come close to powering the whole country with these technologies. And in those that have pushed on these its the opposite of cheap. Centralized production has won out because the waste majority of the time it is a far better idea. And as somebody has lived in a low energy house in northern Europe its neither cheap nor easy to have all these systems and any 'solution' that assumes we can do that for all houses is doomed to fail.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Nuclear hasn't compared at all well on cost. The planned new build in the Lake District has finally failed after a succession of business failures and others pulling out of the consortium starting with Westinghouse's failure. It was announced just this week that Toshiba had decided to liquidate what was left of the project. Hinkley C is going ahead, and currently estimated to cost almost double wind and solar per MWh at current prices Building isn't expected to start until next year and generation some time in the mid 2020s. Wind and solar costs are still falling steadily. Not what I would call "quite cheaply". The French govt (majority owner of EDF) looks to be getting the best of that particular deal. But I don't claim we can instantly switch to fully decentralised renewables. Nuclear is a sensible part of a withdrawal from fossil, if nothing else to buy us an extra few decades and baseload, as I've commented elsewhere. Whilst it performs poorly on cost it does well on CO2 so has a place. By the same token we couldn't go entirely nuclear without dramatically over-specifying grid capacity as nuclear doesn't respond well to transient peak demand. We'd still need a good chunk of diesel, battery or pumped hydro for shorter term reserves, and more intense demand management. Centralised production works when it's a multi GW coal plant next to the colliery, or gas near the pipeline etc. As we adopt an increasing amount of renewables the grid becomes necessarily more localised as weather and climate will differ between regions and the grid is served by thousands of generation sources instead of a few dozen. Simple economics are driving that transition not whether they are 'hip' or not. As for claiming a low energy house isn't cheap, well that makes no sense considering the size of bill reductions.