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Are Environmentalists the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Useful Idiots?

avmich 6y ago
> Fission is really the only option for always available industrial amounts of power Why not batteries, of all kinds (pneumatic, hydrogen, gravitational), or specifically electrical? Costs, perhaps? The argument between proponents and opponents of fission power rarely focuses on externalities costs. Opponents claim nuclear power is very costly when nuclear waste utilization is considered. What is missing here? To paraphrase, given the current growth rate of solar+wind and other renewable sources of energy, one would think the biggest remaining problem is to neutralize intermittent nature of those sources - or at least of biggest of them, for which batteries would be a solution. Nuclear proponents disagree. Can we have good numbers to compare?
- PeterisP 6y ago
  We don't really have good options for "industrial-size" batteries e.g. something that can offer many GWh of storage, which is something that would be required to sustain modern society through the daily (and nightly) variations of solar and wind power. Pumped hydro can do that in certain places and with major changes to local ecosystem, so this is what we're using, but a full switch to renewables would need much more than what we can get from current pumped hydro locations. Pneumatic, hydrogen or gravitation other than pumped hydro have never been a reasonable option in scale - there are various companies working on that, some of them have posted their PR pieces here, but up until now all that has been pure puffery with no way to scale to large amounts (GWh, not MWh) in anything close to practical costs or infrastructure size. Electrical batteries are not yet sufficiently capable but they may be becoming an option in the near future. E.g. the Tesla superbattery in South Australia is (or at least was) the largest project with 129 MWh of storage - that is a step in the right direction, it is very useful for rapidly covering short-term fluctuations, but the 'superbattery' is comparably tiny, it's less than 1% of the capacity of a single decent pumped hydro plant which get 20000 MWh or more. And if we want enough storage so that the country won't have blackouts every time there's a windless winter evening, then we need much more than that. E.g. UK seems to consume 25GW electricity even during nighttime, so a single windless winter night with 12 hours of darkness needs 300 GWh of storage (so, some 2000 stations like Tesla built in Australia) just for the daily variation - without accounting for seasonal variation in solar and wind. So the answer to "why not batteries" is that this will happen when we will have the capacity to install 1000+ times larger batteries than current megaplants while still having a reasonable price. I'm sure that this is possible and will eventually happen, but we're not there yet.

> Fission is really the only option for always available industrial amounts of power Why not batteries, of all kinds (pneumatic, hydrogen, gravitational), or specifically electrical? Costs, perhaps? The argument between proponents and opponents of fission power rarely focuses on externalities costs. Opponents claim nuclear power is very costly when nuclear waste utilization is considered. What is missing here? To paraphrase, given the current growth rate of solar+wind and other renewable sources of energy, one would think the biggest remaining problem is to neutralize intermittent nature of those sources - or at least of biggest of them, for which batteries would be a solution. Nuclear proponents disagree. Can we have good numbers to compare?

PeterisP 6y ago
We don't really have good options for "industrial-size" batteries e.g. something that can offer many GWh of storage, which is something that would be required to sustain modern society through the daily (and nightly) variations of solar and wind power. Pumped hydro can do that in certain places and with major changes to local ecosystem, so this is what we're using, but a full switch to renewables would need much more than what we can get from current pumped hydro locations. Pneumatic, hydrogen or gravitation other than pumped hydro have never been a reasonable option in scale - there are various companies working on that, some of them have posted their PR pieces here, but up until now all that has been pure puffery with no way to scale to large amounts (GWh, not MWh) in anything close to practical costs or infrastructure size. Electrical batteries are not yet sufficiently capable but they may be becoming an option in the near future. E.g. the Tesla superbattery in South Australia is (or at least was) the largest project with 129 MWh of storage - that is a step in the right direction, it is very useful for rapidly covering short-term fluctuations, but the 'superbattery' is comparably tiny, it's less than 1% of the capacity of a single decent pumped hydro plant which get 20000 MWh or more. And if we want enough storage so that the country won't have blackouts every time there's a windless winter evening, then we need much more than that. E.g. UK seems to consume 25GW electricity even during nighttime, so a single windless winter night with 12 hours of darkness needs 300 GWh of storage (so, some 2000 stations like Tesla built in Australia) just for the daily variation - without accounting for seasonal variation in solar and wind. So the answer to "why not batteries" is that this will happen when we will have the capacity to install 1000+ times larger batteries than current megaplants while still having a reasonable price. I'm sure that this is possible and will eventually happen, but we're not there yet.