5 ms·

> Solar and wind already are cheaper than anything else out there Yes if you conveniently choose to ignore the availability problems (in the night and in no w

> Solar and wind already are cheaper than anything else out there Yes if you conveniently choose to ignore the availability problems (in the night and in no wind). And that no scalable battery/storage solution exists yet?

adrianN 7y ago
How are batteries, power-to-gas, and solar-thermal with molten salt not scalable?
- sanxiyn 7y ago
  They probably can scale, but haven't scaled yet. The only proven solution today is pumped storage, which is not available everywhere. Pumped storage accounts for >95% of world's installed energy storage capacity.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Not being needed to scale yet and not being able to scale are two completely different things though.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Simple: because at high levels of intermittent penetration, you have to build so much "non-productive" storage technology that the Energy Return on Investment is below the level thought necessary to sustain industrial civilization. For example, this was just published last week: [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X19300926 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1... (Iñigo Capellán-Pérez, Carlos de Castro, Luis Javier Miguel González, Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies, Energy Strategy Reviews, Volume 26, 2019, 100399, ISSN 2211-467X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399.)
  - olau 7y ago
    I accidentally clicked get PDF on the recommended paper from the page, this one: "Will EROI be the Primary Determinant of Our Economic Future? The View of the Natural Scientist versus the Economist" https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S2542435117300831?token=4B5FC4C6C7DB8E3F0CDC1C0B2CF12EC90B862D475B6D87FEA2F85F0D2391C377C45D64D27A2E72123E8CADE0F9E1C35D https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S2542435117300831?... Which actually answers why the point you bring up is not relevant: "In a recent meeting of scientists and economists in London, economists raised eight points as to why it was not necessary to consider EROI in determining future energy availability or policy." Now the above paper tries to refute those points, but using invalid logic, e.g. arguing that because EROI and costs are linked in oil and gas, then the same observation must hold across categories to renewables.
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    That paper has problems. The red flag that stood out to me is that they show huge increases in tellurium, gallium, and indium demand in Figure 10. Those materials are only required for thin film solar technologies. But according to Table 2, their scenario includes one PV technology: fixed-tilt arrays of silicon PV. Where are the increased demand for tellurium, gallium and indium coming from? It reads like they copy-pasted information from prior studies without paying attention to their own scenario parameters.
- manfredo 7y ago
  Because they can provide nowhere near the amount of storage required. For example, one of the flagship solar storage facilities here in California has a capacity of 300 MWh. By comparison, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant generates 2,200 Megawatts. That storage facility can store less than _ten minutes_ worth of energy that the nuclear plant outputs.
  - cygx 7y ago
    The German natural gas infrastructure can in fact store several hundreds of TWh.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      What do you mean natural gas infrastructure? Pneumatic storage?
      - cygx 7y ago
        Lots of German households and industries use natural gas for heating, hence we've got something like 400,000 km of pipeline as well as storage facilities sitting around. Instead of buying natural gas from Russia, we could fill them with synthetically produced methane and/or hydrogen, generated during off-peak hours.
        manfredo 7y ago
        Synthetic methane production has a theoretical maximum efficiency of 30-40%. So we'd need to build 3x as much power and is actually needed, and a bunch of electrolysis and Sabatier reaction plants on top of that. Or we can just follow France's example and build nuclear plants.
        cygx 7y ago
        Those numbers are outdated. Round-trip efficiencies of up to 80% have been claimed: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544218320693 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421... If that's legit and can be made cost-effective, the case for nuclear is largely gone...
- ozim 7y ago
  People are not only powering up their "macbook pros" to watch netflix. Try to run steel mill or any factory on batteries, solar or molten salt, even decent size server farm is not going to run well on solar or wind.

adrianN 7y ago

How are batteries, power-to-gas, and solar-thermal with molten salt not scalable?

sanxiyn 7y ago
They probably can scale, but haven't scaled yet. The only proven solution today is pumped storage, which is not available everywhere. Pumped storage accounts for >95% of world's installed energy storage capacity.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Not being needed to scale yet and not being able to scale are two completely different things though.
acidburnNSA 7y ago
Simple: because at high levels of intermittent penetration, you have to build so much "non-productive" storage technology that the Energy Return on Investment is below the level thought necessary to sustain industrial civilization. For example, this was just published last week: [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X19300926 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1... (Iñigo Capellán-Pérez, Carlos de Castro, Luis Javier Miguel González, Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies, Energy Strategy Reviews, Volume 26, 2019, 100399, ISSN 2211-467X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399.)
- olau 7y ago
  I accidentally clicked get PDF on the recommended paper from the page, this one: "Will EROI be the Primary Determinant of Our Economic Future? The View of the Natural Scientist versus the Economist" https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S2542435117300831?token=4B5FC4C6C7DB8E3F0CDC1C0B2CF12EC90B862D475B6D87FEA2F85F0D2391C377C45D64D27A2E72123E8CADE0F9E1C35D https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S2542435117300831?... Which actually answers why the point you bring up is not relevant: "In a recent meeting of scientists and economists in London, economists raised eight points as to why it was not necessary to consider EROI in determining future energy availability or policy." Now the above paper tries to refute those points, but using invalid logic, e.g. arguing that because EROI and costs are linked in oil and gas, then the same observation must hold across categories to renewables.
- philipkglass 7y ago
  That paper has problems. The red flag that stood out to me is that they show huge increases in tellurium, gallium, and indium demand in Figure 10. Those materials are only required for thin film solar technologies. But according to Table 2, their scenario includes one PV technology: fixed-tilt arrays of silicon PV. Where are the increased demand for tellurium, gallium and indium coming from? It reads like they copy-pasted information from prior studies without paying attention to their own scenario parameters.
manfredo 7y ago
Because they can provide nowhere near the amount of storage required. For example, one of the flagship solar storage facilities here in California has a capacity of 300 MWh. By comparison, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant generates 2,200 Megawatts. That storage facility can store less than _ten minutes_ worth of energy that the nuclear plant outputs.
- cygx 7y ago
  The German natural gas infrastructure can in fact store several hundreds of TWh.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    What do you mean natural gas infrastructure? Pneumatic storage?
    - cygx 7y ago
      Lots of German households and industries use natural gas for heating, hence we've got something like 400,000 km of pipeline as well as storage facilities sitting around. Instead of buying natural gas from Russia, we could fill them with synthetically produced methane and/or hydrogen, generated during off-peak hours.
      - manfredo 7y ago
        Synthetic methane production has a theoretical maximum efficiency of 30-40%. So we'd need to build 3x as much power and is actually needed, and a bunch of electrolysis and Sabatier reaction plants on top of that. Or we can just follow France's example and build nuclear plants.
        cygx 7y ago
        Those numbers are outdated. Round-trip efficiencies of up to 80% have been claimed: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544218320693 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421... If that's legit and can be made cost-effective, the case for nuclear is largely gone...
ozim 7y ago
People are not only powering up their "macbook pros" to watch netflix. Try to run steel mill or any factory on batteries, solar or molten salt, even decent size server farm is not going to run well on solar or wind.