5 ms·

Re long term, I mean I'm thinking of how I can see the grid ideally looking, not in the transitional phase we are in now. Sure if we plonked down a nuclear reac

Re long term, I mean I'm thinking of how I can see the grid ideally looking, not in the transitional phase we are in now. Sure if we plonked down a nuclear reactor now, that would be good, absenting cost, but it isn't going to be ready now, or in 10 years, so we need to be looking at what the grid will be looking like, and I hope by that point the grid will be well on the way being green so this power station will be competing against wind and solar, not coal and gas. Re renewables not being constant. That's my point, and nuclear isn't flexible enough to take advantage. You can make the case for £100mwh batteries because they can step in instantly, nuclear can't, and also, when the winds blowing that's always going to be cheaper, so the massive fixed costs of nuclear get amortized over less and less MWHs.

mavhc 7y ago
There's no way to make enough batteries for 100% renewable grid, everyone on the planet would need an electric car sized battery, which means you'd need 10000 gigafactories iirc. Which is why I suggested 50% nuclear, 50% renewable. That's still about 100x more renewable than we have today
- benj111 7y ago
  "everyone on the planet would need an electric car sized battery" This is basically what we're aiming for (in the west at least) anyway, with EVs? Are you saying we don't have the materials to do it? Or we don't have the factory capacity for it? Batteries can be made from a variety of materials, and we supply near enough 1 car per person in the west, so batteries should be doable? Id hope some combination of said car batteries, continent spanning grids, smart appliances would get us most of the way there. The biggest flaw with this model is what happens on cloudy, still weeks? I guess some kind of waste to energy, wood, and bio gas, hydrogen power station would be less expensive than a nuclear reactor.
  - godelski 7y ago
    I can't speak for the person you're responding to, but > Are you saying we don't have the materials to do it? Yes. At least without substantially expanding mining operations. > Or we don't have the factory capacity for it? We're NOWHERE near that kind of production level. > The biggest flaw with this model is what happens on cloudy, still weeks? I guess some kind of waste to energy, wood, and bio gas, hydrogen power station would be less expensive than a nuclear reactor. Not if we price in carbon emissions. I also have to mention that there are plenty of places that people live where it is almost always cloudy and almost never windy (at the same time). I will keep saying this: we need diversified energy portfolios. The key though, is we don't want any of those sources producing emissions, or to at least minimize them as much as possible (we're playing a negative sum game here)
    - benj111 7y ago
      "Not if we price in carbon emissions" All those things can be carbon neutral, except waste to energy. Obviously though yes, those places with no wind, sun or other resources. Nuclear will have a place.
      - godelski 7y ago
        > Obviously though yes, those places with no wind, sun or other resources. Nuclear will have a place. And the unfortunate part is that those places hold a fair amount of the world's population. We're not asking for nuclear in places that are sunny and windy. We don't need it there. We're asking for it in places that aren't.
        pfdietz 7y ago
        95% of the world's population lives below 50 N/S latitude.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  It's not just batteries. It's batteries, and transmission, and pumped hydro, and dispatchable demand, and overproduction w. hydrogen to soak up the excess, and burning hydrogen in turbines for very rare long lulls. The cost optimized system will exploit most or all of these, and have no place for expensive baseload sources. Nuclear with its current cost structure and cheap renewables simply don't fit well together.
godelski 7y ago
I think you're not understanding battery tech then. While fossil fuels suck, they just have massive energy densities. Even the most advanced research batteries don't even come close to the energy density of the least efficient fossil fuels (this is why we use fossil fuels in the first place). > Re renewables not being constant. That's my point, and nuclear isn't flexible enough to take advantage. I am utterly confused by this comment.You can vary the output from a nuclear reactor. To over simplify it: rods go in, gets less hot, less power; rods go out, gets more hot, more power. You can load balance. This can be done all day, all season, and in any climate (this latter part is actually extremely important and the whole reason why we need diversified energy portfolios). Solar only powers during the day. Wind only powers when it is windy (most wind is morning and evening when there are shifting temperatures). I am ALL for renewables. But we just have to be real. Batteries aren't there yet and we don't expect them to be there for a few decades. We needed to stop climate change a decade ago. While we should continue investing in new technologies, we have to also start fixing the problem NOW. If it takes 10 years to build something, well then you better start yesterday. But we can't wait 10 years for a new innovation (that might not even come) and then start building (all the while burning fossil fuels in the mean time). That's the trade off. Wait and burn fossil fuels, or do what we can to get off them now and build better stuff as new technology is created. I for one would like to act NOW.
- benj111 7y ago
  To me the trade of is build a wind farm in a couple of years to replace that coal fired power station, or build a nuclear power station in a couple of decades to replace it. From a cost perspective wind is cheaper, it's in place years earlier, both those thing then lead to over sizing it for when the winds weak, but then you've got masses of cheap electricity when the wind blows, lets make hydrogen, or some other inefficient but good enough electric storage medium. By now that nuclear power station is probably built, but it can't compete against wind when the winds blowing, and it still has to compete against the hydrogen power plant when it's not. We've seen countless times how 'good enough' wins in tech. I'm saying wind and some (however crappy) storage medium is good enough. Yes its JavaScript rather than Smalltalk or Lisp, yes essays could be written about how X is better, but it works, and if it doesn't there are a dozen lower cost, lower risk, quicker things to try than building a nuclear power station.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
Suppose we want to get rid of all carbon sources, and minimize the amount of energy storage required due to the high cost. Is it possible to minimize storage with nuclear? Yes, in theory, you spec the fixed generation amount for the peak demand and then have excess supply the rest of the time. Inefficient, but it works. This is clearly not the optimal mix however. Is it possible to minimize storage with solar? No. It doesn't generate at night, that requires an enormous amount of energy storage to overcome, pure solar is a fail. Is it possible to minimize storage with wind? Yes, but you have to match the peak demand with the minimum wind output. That's going to explode costs even worse than pure nuclear. Combining wind with storage to smooth out the load might be better, but by the time that's cost effective, so would using a smaller amount of storage to smooth the day/night load for nuclear and reduce the amount of generating capacity you need there too. Also, wind is not the cheapest generating technology to begin with (solar is cheaper). So what happens if we combine them? Solar plus wind is better, but still problematic. Wind generates at night, except when it doesn't. On a still night you could have to survive the whole night almost entirely on stored energy, but if you need almost as much storage capacity as for pure solar then you might as well make use of it every night and take advantage of the cheaper generation from solar than wind. Wind + nuclear doesn't seem especially interesting either. The problem with wind in general is that its output varies randomly and doesn't track demand whatsoever, so you end up needing a large amount of storage proportional to the amount of wind generation you have. And wind isn't that cheap and storage is really expensive. But solar + nuclear is excellent. The demand for electricity is higher during the day, which is when solar generates. Solar doesn't generate at night, but nuclear does. So you spec enough nuclear generation for the minimum nighttime load and use solar to both handle the higher daytime load and charge up the much smaller amount of energy storage you need to handle just the baseload-to-peak load differential in the few hours between when solar stops generating and people go to sleep, instead of the whole demand for the whole night. You can also then price electricity higher during the night, which makes perfect sense when the solar that generates only during the day is the cheapest generation technology, and then nuclear pays for itself by beating solar+storage on cost for twelve hours a day while allowing you to cut your required solar generating capacity more than in half for the other twelve hours.
- benj111 7y ago

mavhc 7y ago

There's no way to make enough batteries for 100% renewable grid, everyone on the planet would need an electric car sized battery, which means you'd need 10000 gigafactories iirc. Which is why I suggested 50% nuclear, 50% renewable. That's still about 100x more renewable than we have today

benj111 7y ago
"everyone on the planet would need an electric car sized battery" This is basically what we're aiming for (in the west at least) anyway, with EVs? Are you saying we don't have the materials to do it? Or we don't have the factory capacity for it? Batteries can be made from a variety of materials, and we supply near enough 1 car per person in the west, so batteries should be doable? Id hope some combination of said car batteries, continent spanning grids, smart appliances would get us most of the way there. The biggest flaw with this model is what happens on cloudy, still weeks? I guess some kind of waste to energy, wood, and bio gas, hydrogen power station would be less expensive than a nuclear reactor.
- godelski 7y ago
  I can't speak for the person you're responding to, but > Are you saying we don't have the materials to do it? Yes. At least without substantially expanding mining operations. > Or we don't have the factory capacity for it? We're NOWHERE near that kind of production level. > The biggest flaw with this model is what happens on cloudy, still weeks? I guess some kind of waste to energy, wood, and bio gas, hydrogen power station would be less expensive than a nuclear reactor. Not if we price in carbon emissions. I also have to mention that there are plenty of places that people live where it is almost always cloudy and almost never windy (at the same time). I will keep saying this: we need diversified energy portfolios. The key though, is we don't want any of those sources producing emissions, or to at least minimize them as much as possible (we're playing a negative sum game here)
  - benj111 7y ago
    "Not if we price in carbon emissions" All those things can be carbon neutral, except waste to energy. Obviously though yes, those places with no wind, sun or other resources. Nuclear will have a place.
    - godelski 7y ago
      > Obviously though yes, those places with no wind, sun or other resources. Nuclear will have a place. And the unfortunate part is that those places hold a fair amount of the world's population. We're not asking for nuclear in places that are sunny and windy. We don't need it there. We're asking for it in places that aren't.
      - pfdietz 7y ago
        95% of the world's population lives below 50 N/S latitude.
pfdietz 7y ago
It's not just batteries. It's batteries, and transmission, and pumped hydro, and dispatchable demand, and overproduction w. hydrogen to soak up the excess, and burning hydrogen in turbines for very rare long lulls. The cost optimized system will exploit most or all of these, and have no place for expensive baseload sources. Nuclear with its current cost structure and cheap renewables simply don't fit well together.

godelski 7y ago

I think you're not understanding battery tech then. While fossil fuels suck, they just have massive energy densities. Even the most advanced research batteries don't even come close to the energy density of the least efficient fossil fuels (this is why we use fossil fuels in the first place). > Re renewables not being constant. That's my point, and nuclear isn't flexible enough to take advantage. I am utterly confused by this comment.You can vary the output from a nuclear reactor. To over simplify it: rods go in, gets less hot, less power; rods go out, gets more hot, more power. You can load balance. This can be done all day, all season, and in any climate (this latter part is actually extremely important and the whole reason why we need diversified energy portfolios). Solar only powers during the day. Wind only powers when it is windy (most wind is morning and evening when there are shifting temperatures). I am ALL for renewables. But we just have to be real. Batteries aren't there yet and we don't expect them to be there for a few decades. We needed to stop climate change a decade ago. While we should continue investing in new technologies, we have to also start fixing the problem NOW. If it takes 10 years to build something, well then you better start yesterday. But we can't wait 10 years for a new innovation (that might not even come) and then start building (all the while burning fossil fuels in the mean time). That's the trade off. Wait and burn fossil fuels, or do what we can to get off them now and build better stuff as new technology is created. I for one would like to act NOW.

benj111 7y ago
To me the trade of is build a wind farm in a couple of years to replace that coal fired power station, or build a nuclear power station in a couple of decades to replace it. From a cost perspective wind is cheaper, it's in place years earlier, both those thing then lead to over sizing it for when the winds weak, but then you've got masses of cheap electricity when the wind blows, lets make hydrogen, or some other inefficient but good enough electric storage medium. By now that nuclear power station is probably built, but it can't compete against wind when the winds blowing, and it still has to compete against the hydrogen power plant when it's not. We've seen countless times how 'good enough' wins in tech. I'm saying wind and some (however crappy) storage medium is good enough. Yes its JavaScript rather than Smalltalk or Lisp, yes essays could be written about how X is better, but it works, and if it doesn't there are a dozen lower cost, lower risk, quicker things to try than building a nuclear power station.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

Suppose we want to get rid of all carbon sources, and minimize the amount of energy storage required due to the high cost. Is it possible to minimize storage with nuclear? Yes, in theory, you spec the fixed generation amount for the peak demand and then have excess supply the rest of the time. Inefficient, but it works. This is clearly not the optimal mix however. Is it possible to minimize storage with solar? No. It doesn't generate at night, that requires an enormous amount of energy storage to overcome, pure solar is a fail. Is it possible to minimize storage with wind? Yes, but you have to match the peak demand with the minimum wind output. That's going to explode costs even worse than pure nuclear. Combining wind with storage to smooth out the load might be better, but by the time that's cost effective, so would using a smaller amount of storage to smooth the day/night load for nuclear and reduce the amount of generating capacity you need there too. Also, wind is not the cheapest generating technology to begin with (solar is cheaper). So what happens if we combine them? Solar plus wind is better, but still problematic. Wind generates at night, except when it doesn't. On a still night you could have to survive the whole night almost entirely on stored energy, but if you need almost as much storage capacity as for pure solar then you might as well make use of it every night and take advantage of the cheaper generation from solar than wind. Wind + nuclear doesn't seem especially interesting either. The problem with wind in general is that its output varies randomly and doesn't track demand whatsoever, so you end up needing a large amount of storage proportional to the amount of wind generation you have. And wind isn't that cheap and storage is really expensive. But solar + nuclear is excellent. The demand for electricity is higher during the day, which is when solar generates. Solar doesn't generate at night, but nuclear does. So you spec enough nuclear generation for the minimum nighttime load and use solar to both handle the higher daytime load and charge up the much smaller amount of energy storage you need to handle just the baseload-to-peak load differential in the few hours between when solar stops generating and people go to sleep, instead of the whole demand for the whole night. You can also then price electricity higher during the night, which makes perfect sense when the solar that generates only during the day is the cheapest generation technology, and then nuclear pays for itself by beating solar+storage on cost for twelve hours a day while allowing you to cut your required solar generating capacity more than in half for the other twelve hours.

benj111 7y ago