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> Nuclear power is the only solution. How much energy storage do we need to not need nuclear? That seems to be an assumption you're making that I'm not actuall

> Nuclear power is the only solution. How much energy storage do we need to not need nuclear? That seems to be an assumption you're making that I'm not actually familiar with.

buzzkillington 7y ago
That's the wrong question. The right question is how much time do you think the grid should be offline each year? It's a simple question no renewable proponent wants to talk about because it makes their whole case indefensible.
- nl 7y ago
  Renewables plus transmission plus storage plus gas generation is easily as reliable as the generation mix we have now.
  - buzzkillington 7y ago
    Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently. So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 to make a mass extinction inevitable by 2100. Am I the only one that sees a problem with this?
    - nl 7y ago
      mass extinction inevitable by 2100 This is very emotive language, which is fine, but there is no currently projected scenario where mass extinction is inevitable or even likely. Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently. We are well on the way. In many parts of the world this is the majority energy mix already. So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 This is untrue. It's roughly the same cost as replacing coal stations with new coal stations, which is roughly ten times cheaper than replacing them with nuclear. And it cuts energy production C02 production by about 70% which is easily enough to meet most targets to stabilise the climate.
      - nfg 7y ago
        The poster said ‘a mass extinction’ which does not mean what you seem to think it does: “An extinction event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event It seems very fair - even overly cautious! - to push the inevitability of that out to 2100 when many would say it is already in progress.
        nl 7y ago
        You are right of course. However the OP said (in their original post): In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s. I took it in that context. I'd also note the there are multiple causes of mass extinction of which climate change is one.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - imtringued 7y ago
      Well, what else are you going to suggest? Obsolete monolithic nuclear plants? Pro nuclear activists don't actually know the trade offs between nuclear plant designs and the inherent problems that are caused by "super projects". It's just a pet peeve to differentiate themselves from the "green hippies". Where are all the modular reactor factories that the nuclear industry needs? Why is everyone focusing on one shot construction of nuclear infrastructure instead of keeping it alive by periodically replacing existing reactors? Let me describe the way nuclear power plants have been built. Company E wants to build a power plant. It cannot take advantage of an old design because those have been declared unsafe. They only want to build a single one but they are forced to make a custom design. The custom design costs hundreds of millions in R&D before it can be approved by the government. Afterwards the company has to ask for government support because a 10-30 billion dollar project is very difficult to finance and insure by a single company. Now the construction phase begins. Making parts for nuclear power plants requires specialized factories which are often already running at capacity because they are busy with other projects. You can now wait a year or more for the parts to be delivered. Alternatively you can also construct factories dedicated to the construction of nuclear power plants. Once you have all the parts and finished the construction process you can run the nuclear plant for 50 years or more. 30 years later a design defect has been discovered. It can be fixed but it requires a partial redesign. 2 billion have to be spent on upgrades. Now 50 years have passed and the plant is reaching the end of its life. The design is now considered obsolete and should be replaced immediately. The government is now on the hook for the decommissioning process. Costs? Unknown but definitively not less than 10 billion dollars. Because decommissioning is so expensive the government keeps the plant online for another 15 years. Your country has several dozens of these plants and once someone makes a critical mistake or a natural disaster strikes you get a Chernobyl or Fukushima type event again. These power plants are responsible for the bad reputation of the nuclear industry but at the same time the industry willingly took the risk. They have nobody to blame but themselves. Ok, what if we just get rid of those plants and replace them with new ones? The cycle repeats. New design. No economies of scale. New custom factories because the old ones didn't have any customers for 65 whole years. Mistakes can't be fixed. Again, this is not something that green activists forced these companies to do. You know what the answer to these problems is? Making lots of small nuclear power plants. Companies can afford them. They can be cheaply mass produced. They can be cheaply replaced. Custom factories are maintained over time instead of closed down. Yet strangely no nuclear activist proposes these types of reactors because they do not acknowledge the inherent problems nuclear faces. Instead, the focus lies on new designs that don't even exist but promise to do everything better without addressing any of the actually important flaws. Nuclear plant designs are like cryptographic hashing. You will always find a flaw given enough time.
- Valgrim 7y ago
  The right answer is zero time, of course. A renewable smart grid includes long distance transmission lines, short term storage (batteries) and long term storage (pumped hydro). It's never been just about the panels and wind turbines.
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  There's always the opinion that solar is useless on cloudy days. It's my understanding that on a normal cloudy day they're only 25% as efficient as when sunny, and 10% when it's really cloudy. So, not great, but it's something that is being improved upon all the time. > In some cases, clouds can actually result in better panel performance than standard sunny weather. A cloud can reflect or sometimes even magnify sunlight, which results in additional power output from your solar panels. [0] In my country (Oz) we have two states that are into solar: SA has a tesla battery plant (built in <100 days) [1], but more as a 'surge saver', and WA which has recently mentioned it's about to reach serious trouble because solar is now getting in the way of it's existing non-renewable coal (meaning there's an over supply). WA doesn't have battery storage up and running, whereas in SA the tesla plant can ramp up demand almost instantaneously and is saving a bucket load of cash per year (because the coal plants don't need to spin up another turbine to meet demand: something which takes hours to achieve AND is costly) > "We know that the 100 megawatt capacity of the existing Hornsdale battery has saved South Australian electricity consumers $40 million per year since its inception," he said. [1] [0] https://news.energysage.com/solar-panels-work-night-cloudy-day/ https://news.energysage.com/solar-panels-work-night-cloudy-d... [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-19/sa-big-battery-set-to-get-even-bigger/11716784 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-19/sa-big-battery-set-to... In short, the good thing about solar is: - easy to set up, low cost, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade, easy to switch off if over supply ever happens. - good for moving away from coal provided you have storage. As other's have mentioned, the nuclear option costs billions and takes years to set up whereas battery storage of renewables is very very quick indeed to set up, and instantly produces savings.
  - nl 7y ago
    Note that in Australia the Victorian interconnector to South Australia went down recently at the same time as a coal station outage in Victoria. South Australia ran on 55% renewables, 65% gas, while powering the Portland aluminium smelter in Victoria for 55 days[1][2]. Also - outside solar - most Australian states gets significant power from renewables (wind and hydro). Right now as I write this roughly 30% of the power in Queensland is solar, 20% in NSW, about 10% is wind in Victoria with another 15% being solar. In South Australia about 20% is gas, with all the rest being wind and solar. Tasmania is 100% renewable (almost all hydro)[3]. [1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-batteries-saved-the-day-when-storm-cut-south-australia-adrift-22060/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-batteries-saved-the-day... [2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/murdoch-media-headline-shock-renewables-save-the-day-in-energy-crisis-44867/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/murdoch-media-headline-shock-ren... [3] https://reneweconomy.com.au/nem-watch/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/nem-watch/
- breatheoften 7y ago
  Actually economically speaking — what reason is there to think that the total supportable size of an economy which operates with grid instability is smaller than one with perfect or nearly perfect grid predictability? Maximizing value in a world with “power production weather” would be a valuable task from which rewards that aren’t necessarily obvious could be mined if the pursuit becomes incentivized on a larger scale.
  - thereisnospork 7y ago
    > Actually economically speaking — what reason is there to think that the total supportable size of an economy which operates with grid instability is smaller than one with perfect or nearly perfect grid predictability? The short answer is pretty much all of them. It's pretty much canonical that it is economically more productive to have a resource continually available than not. The right economic question to ask is: Where does the marginal cost of increasing uptime meet the marginal benefit of further increased uptime?
nl 7y ago
To actually answer this question is hard. The best answer I've seen is between 3% and 10% of total grid capacity, depending on interconnectivity and geographical diversity[1]. That's for a 100% renewable approach, which is great. Personally I think there is a role for gas fired stations - these produce about 50% of the emissions of coal stations, are cheap and quick to build (very roughly $1M for 1MW) and most importantly can ramp up and down power generation quickly and economically. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/grid-energy-storage https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/grid-energy...
- MertsA 7y ago
  >The best answer I've seen is between 3% and 10% of total grid capacity It looks like that's talking about 3% to 10% of the total monthly power output.

> Nuclear power is the only solution. How much energy storage do we need to not need nuclear? That seems to be an assumption you're making that I'm not actually familiar with.

buzzkillington 7y ago

That's the wrong question. The right question is how much time do you think the grid should be offline each year? It's a simple question no renewable proponent wants to talk about because it makes their whole case indefensible.

nl 7y ago
Renewables plus transmission plus storage plus gas generation is easily as reliable as the generation mix we have now.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently. So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 to make a mass extinction inevitable by 2100. Am I the only one that sees a problem with this?
  - nl 7y ago
    mass extinction inevitable by 2100 This is very emotive language, which is fine, but there is no currently projected scenario where mass extinction is inevitable or even likely. Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently. We are well on the way. In many parts of the world this is the majority energy mix already. So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 This is untrue. It's roughly the same cost as replacing coal stations with new coal stations, which is roughly ten times cheaper than replacing them with nuclear. And it cuts energy production C02 production by about 70% which is easily enough to meet most targets to stabilise the climate.
    - nfg 7y ago
      The poster said ‘a mass extinction’ which does not mean what you seem to think it does: “An extinction event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event It seems very fair - even overly cautious! - to push the inevitability of that out to 2100 when many would say it is already in progress.
      - nl 7y ago
        You are right of course. However the OP said (in their original post): In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s. I took it in that context. I'd also note the there are multiple causes of mass extinction of which climate change is one.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Well, what else are you going to suggest? Obsolete monolithic nuclear plants? Pro nuclear activists don't actually know the trade offs between nuclear plant designs and the inherent problems that are caused by "super projects". It's just a pet peeve to differentiate themselves from the "green hippies". Where are all the modular reactor factories that the nuclear industry needs? Why is everyone focusing on one shot construction of nuclear infrastructure instead of keeping it alive by periodically replacing existing reactors? Let me describe the way nuclear power plants have been built. Company E wants to build a power plant. It cannot take advantage of an old design because those have been declared unsafe. They only want to build a single one but they are forced to make a custom design. The custom design costs hundreds of millions in R&D before it can be approved by the government. Afterwards the company has to ask for government support because a 10-30 billion dollar project is very difficult to finance and insure by a single company. Now the construction phase begins. Making parts for nuclear power plants requires specialized factories which are often already running at capacity because they are busy with other projects. You can now wait a year or more for the parts to be delivered. Alternatively you can also construct factories dedicated to the construction of nuclear power plants. Once you have all the parts and finished the construction process you can run the nuclear plant for 50 years or more. 30 years later a design defect has been discovered. It can be fixed but it requires a partial redesign. 2 billion have to be spent on upgrades. Now 50 years have passed and the plant is reaching the end of its life. The design is now considered obsolete and should be replaced immediately. The government is now on the hook for the decommissioning process. Costs? Unknown but definitively not less than 10 billion dollars. Because decommissioning is so expensive the government keeps the plant online for another 15 years. Your country has several dozens of these plants and once someone makes a critical mistake or a natural disaster strikes you get a Chernobyl or Fukushima type event again. These power plants are responsible for the bad reputation of the nuclear industry but at the same time the industry willingly took the risk. They have nobody to blame but themselves. Ok, what if we just get rid of those plants and replace them with new ones? The cycle repeats. New design. No economies of scale. New custom factories because the old ones didn't have any customers for 65 whole years. Mistakes can't be fixed. Again, this is not something that green activists forced these companies to do. You know what the answer to these problems is? Making lots of small nuclear power plants. Companies can afford them. They can be cheaply mass produced. They can be cheaply replaced. Custom factories are maintained over time instead of closed down. Yet strangely no nuclear activist proposes these types of reactors because they do not acknowledge the inherent problems nuclear faces. Instead, the focus lies on new designs that don't even exist but promise to do everything better without addressing any of the actually important flaws. Nuclear plant designs are like cryptographic hashing. You will always find a flaw given enough time.
Valgrim 7y ago
The right answer is zero time, of course. A renewable smart grid includes long distance transmission lines, short term storage (batteries) and long term storage (pumped hydro). It's never been just about the panels and wind turbines.
cmroanirgo 7y ago
There's always the opinion that solar is useless on cloudy days. It's my understanding that on a normal cloudy day they're only 25% as efficient as when sunny, and 10% when it's really cloudy. So, not great, but it's something that is being improved upon all the time. > In some cases, clouds can actually result in better panel performance than standard sunny weather. A cloud can reflect or sometimes even magnify sunlight, which results in additional power output from your solar panels. [0] In my country (Oz) we have two states that are into solar: SA has a tesla battery plant (built in <100 days) [1], but more as a 'surge saver', and WA which has recently mentioned it's about to reach serious trouble because solar is now getting in the way of it's existing non-renewable coal (meaning there's an over supply). WA doesn't have battery storage up and running, whereas in SA the tesla plant can ramp up demand almost instantaneously and is saving a bucket load of cash per year (because the coal plants don't need to spin up another turbine to meet demand: something which takes hours to achieve AND is costly) > "We know that the 100 megawatt capacity of the existing Hornsdale battery has saved South Australian electricity consumers $40 million per year since its inception," he said. [1] [0] https://news.energysage.com/solar-panels-work-night-cloudy-day/ https://news.energysage.com/solar-panels-work-night-cloudy-d... [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-19/sa-big-battery-set-to-get-even-bigger/11716784 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-19/sa-big-battery-set-to... In short, the good thing about solar is: - easy to set up, low cost, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade, easy to switch off if over supply ever happens. - good for moving away from coal provided you have storage. As other's have mentioned, the nuclear option costs billions and takes years to set up whereas battery storage of renewables is very very quick indeed to set up, and instantly produces savings.
- nl 7y ago
  Note that in Australia the Victorian interconnector to South Australia went down recently at the same time as a coal station outage in Victoria. South Australia ran on 55% renewables, 65% gas, while powering the Portland aluminium smelter in Victoria for 55 days[1][2]. Also - outside solar - most Australian states gets significant power from renewables (wind and hydro). Right now as I write this roughly 30% of the power in Queensland is solar, 20% in NSW, about 10% is wind in Victoria with another 15% being solar. In South Australia about 20% is gas, with all the rest being wind and solar. Tasmania is 100% renewable (almost all hydro)[3]. [1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-batteries-saved-the-day-when-storm-cut-south-australia-adrift-22060/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-batteries-saved-the-day... [2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/murdoch-media-headline-shock-renewables-save-the-day-in-energy-crisis-44867/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/murdoch-media-headline-shock-ren... [3] https://reneweconomy.com.au/nem-watch/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/nem-watch/
breatheoften 7y ago
Actually economically speaking — what reason is there to think that the total supportable size of an economy which operates with grid instability is smaller than one with perfect or nearly perfect grid predictability? Maximizing value in a world with “power production weather” would be a valuable task from which rewards that aren’t necessarily obvious could be mined if the pursuit becomes incentivized on a larger scale.
- thereisnospork 7y ago
  > Actually economically speaking — what reason is there to think that the total supportable size of an economy which operates with grid instability is smaller than one with perfect or nearly perfect grid predictability? The short answer is pretty much all of them. It's pretty much canonical that it is economically more productive to have a resource continually available than not. The right economic question to ask is: Where does the marginal cost of increasing uptime meet the marginal benefit of further increased uptime?

nl 7y ago

To actually answer this question is hard. The best answer I've seen is between 3% and 10% of total grid capacity, depending on interconnectivity and geographical diversity[1]. That's for a 100% renewable approach, which is great. Personally I think there is a role for gas fired stations - these produce about 50% of the emissions of coal stations, are cheap and quick to build (very roughly $1M for 1MW) and most importantly can ramp up and down power generation quickly and economically. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/grid-energy-storage https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/grid-energy...

MertsA 7y ago
>The best answer I've seen is between 3% and 10% of total grid capacity It looks like that's talking about 3% to 10% of the total monthly power output.