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It's sad to see people downvote correct information. For context, the US consumes ~12TWh of electricity daily, so 500 GWh per hour. Global lithium ion battery

It's sad to see people downvote correct information. For context, the US consumes ~12TWh of electricity daily, so 500 GWh per hour. Global lithium ion battery production is around 300 GWh per year. While it's true this is projected to rise exponentially, the amount dedicated to storage is minuscule compared to the scale required to fulfill even one hour of energy storage [1]. This has prompted people to propose more exotic forms of storage like hydrogen, methane produced through the Sabatier process, or thermal storage. But none of those have been deployed at any significant scale, and their feasibility remains unproven. Nobody generates more than 20% of their electricity from solar. Denmark is the only country that generates over 30% of its power from wind, and Germany is the 3rd highest at 24.7% [2]. By comparison plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear power: Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovakia, and France. And the last 3 all produce the majority of their electricity from nuclear. [3] Fossil fuels didn't kick off the industrial revolution, it was the heat engine. The ability to translate thermal energy into mechanical energy. Heating a fluid, turning a turbine, which turns a dynamo is something we cannot easily replace. Replacing the source of heat with a carbon-free source represents a much more modest refactor as compared to trying to migrate modern societies off the the heat engine. Renewables make sense as mitigation: just slap down some solar or wind, don't bother with storage, and shave off daytime carbon emissions when it is producing. But not as the backbone of a carbon-free energy sector. 1. https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

dieortin 6y ago
> It's sad to see people downvote correct information. I'm confused, there's no downvote button in HN.
- manfredo 6y ago
  There is you need a certain amount (200?) of karma to use it. Posts with negative votes have more lightly colored text. The above post no longer has negative votes so it's normal colored now.
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    For completion, am not sure if it was 200 before but it's 1000 now.
integer42 6y ago
Nuclears not some secret unexplored concept at this point. If it were competitive it would be competing. Its costs are too high, not due to regulations due to the sheer amount of resources involved in mining, refining, and operating. Not to mention initial construction.
- manfredo 6y ago
  It's doing much better in terms of actually being used as a large portion of countries electricity generation, as I demonstrated above. But more importantly, the reality is that nuclear isn't competing against renewables it's competing against a fossil fuel grid that's supplemented by renewables. Germany, the poster child for renewables, still emits 10x the carbon dioxide per watt of electricity as France. Let me put it more bluntly. Renewables are indeed cheaper on a per-watt hour basis. But that's more than offset by the need to deal with intermittency. Batteries are great for cars, but they exist at nowhere near the scale required to decarbonize with a wind and solar generation base. More exotic proposals like thermal storage, hydrogen, or the Sabatier process remain in prototyping and academic stage. The cost of storage is a non-answer, because there's no real plan to build this storage. Renewables make in a stopgap mitigation plan but we have no feasible way of building a grid that's powered completely or even mostly by renewables. If our plan is to decarbonize the energy sector, renewables do not offer a solution. Hydroelectricity, and geothermal power do, but those are geographically limited. Nuclear energy is the only source that can feasibly replace fossil fuels as a consistent, geographically independence, and carbon-free energy source. TL;DR: * Industrialization happened because we figured out we could heat water and push a piston (and later, spin a turbine). Modern society is built off the ability to produce mechanical and electrical energy from thermal energy. * It's a lot easier to heat water and spin a turbine with a carbon-free source of heat, than to try and capture energy from sun and wind and store massive amounts of energy to overcome intermittency.
  - wp381640 6y ago
    Battery was and is never supposed to take up the entire storage load of a network - nobody is designing or forecasting future networks in that way. Batteries provide fast response Pumped hydro is what is being used on a lot of networks and in future network planning. Ironically old open cut mines are often perfect locations for them. This paper discusses an algorithm used to find pumped hydro sites - there is _a lot_ of capacity out there waiting to be tapped https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261918305270 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191... There are already numerous draft or under constructions plants that are "triple" projects with a combination of solar/wind + battery + pumped hydro
nl 6y ago
> Nobody generates more than 20% of their electricity from solar. Denmark is the only country that generates over 30% of its power from wind, and Germany is the 3rd highest at 24.7% [2]. By comparison plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear power This is an extremely odd comparison. No one is proposing a completely solar generation strategy - it's renewables vs whatever. Plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from renewables.

dieortin 6y ago

> It's sad to see people downvote correct information. I'm confused, there's no downvote button in HN.

manfredo 6y ago
There is you need a certain amount (200?) of karma to use it. Posts with negative votes have more lightly colored text. The above post no longer has negative votes so it's normal colored now.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  For completion, am not sure if it was 200 before but it's 1000 now.

integer42 6y ago

Nuclears not some secret unexplored concept at this point. If it were competitive it would be competing. Its costs are too high, not due to regulations due to the sheer amount of resources involved in mining, refining, and operating. Not to mention initial construction.

manfredo 6y ago
It's doing much better in terms of actually being used as a large portion of countries electricity generation, as I demonstrated above. But more importantly, the reality is that nuclear isn't competing against renewables it's competing against a fossil fuel grid that's supplemented by renewables. Germany, the poster child for renewables, still emits 10x the carbon dioxide per watt of electricity as France. Let me put it more bluntly. Renewables are indeed cheaper on a per-watt hour basis. But that's more than offset by the need to deal with intermittency. Batteries are great for cars, but they exist at nowhere near the scale required to decarbonize with a wind and solar generation base. More exotic proposals like thermal storage, hydrogen, or the Sabatier process remain in prototyping and academic stage. The cost of storage is a non-answer, because there's no real plan to build this storage. Renewables make in a stopgap mitigation plan but we have no feasible way of building a grid that's powered completely or even mostly by renewables. If our plan is to decarbonize the energy sector, renewables do not offer a solution. Hydroelectricity, and geothermal power do, but those are geographically limited. Nuclear energy is the only source that can feasibly replace fossil fuels as a consistent, geographically independence, and carbon-free energy source. TL;DR: * Industrialization happened because we figured out we could heat water and push a piston (and later, spin a turbine). Modern society is built off the ability to produce mechanical and electrical energy from thermal energy. * It's a lot easier to heat water and spin a turbine with a carbon-free source of heat, than to try and capture energy from sun and wind and store massive amounts of energy to overcome intermittency.
- wp381640 6y ago
  Battery was and is never supposed to take up the entire storage load of a network - nobody is designing or forecasting future networks in that way. Batteries provide fast response Pumped hydro is what is being used on a lot of networks and in future network planning. Ironically old open cut mines are often perfect locations for them. This paper discusses an algorithm used to find pumped hydro sites - there is _a lot_ of capacity out there waiting to be tapped https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261918305270 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191... There are already numerous draft or under constructions plants that are "triple" projects with a combination of solar/wind + battery + pumped hydro

nl 6y ago

> Nobody generates more than 20% of their electricity from solar. Denmark is the only country that generates over 30% of its power from wind, and Germany is the 3rd highest at 24.7% [2]. By comparison plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear power This is an extremely odd comparison. No one is proposing a completely solar generation strategy - it's renewables vs whatever. Plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from renewables.