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California has already saturated the daytime energy demand on sunny days. So does Hawaii. The market forces already exist. But people aren't building storage. B

California has already saturated the daytime energy demand on sunny days. So does Hawaii. The market forces already exist. But people aren't building storage. Because it's not feasible, short of a decisive breakthrough in storage technology. Maybe one of the proposed storage solutions will pan out. But building out trillions of dollars of infrastructure projects on the hope that a future breakthrough will make storage feasible is very risky. Fusion has been 10-20 years away for the past 50 years. General artificial intelligence has been 10-20 years away for the past 50 years. Between: 1. Going with a known solution, that already generates more electricity than solar and wind combined and one we have 70 years of experience working with. 2. Going with a solution contingent on a massive technological breakthrough to actually work. When the stakes are as high as climate change, I cannot even remotely justify going with #2 over #1 even if the costs are potentially lower on paper.

pfdietz 6y ago
> The market forces already exist. And that is a recent thing there. The global market is still developing, and technologies don't materialize instantly. CO2 taxes are still low (or zero) just about everywhere. But hey, I hope you are also not going to claim nuclear will be cheaper in the future, because I could reflect that argument right back at you. And I could observe that, unlike with renewables and storage, nuclear has a horribly bad historical experience curve. > Maybe one of the proposed storage solutions will pan out. But building out trillions of dollars of infrastructure projects on the hope that a future breakthrough will make storage feasible is very risky. It's only a $$$ risk. We absolutely know the storage is possible, we just haven't confirmed how cheap it will be. Worst case is we spend a bit more. This is fine. Investments are not guarantees; one is always gambling.
- sir_bearington 6y ago
  No, it's not "worst case we spent a bit more". Total global lithium ion battery production amounts to less than one hour of storage for the United States alone. Things like pulleys and synthetic methane remain in the prototyping stage. By this logic why not just use fusion? It's possible. We don't know which exact approach we'll use (lasers, magnets, etc.). We don't know how cheap it'll be, but hey it'll happen eventually right? No. It's not "worst case we spend more money". It's "worse case we never solve climate change". And that's a pretty bad worst case. We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables. But this unfounded aversion to nuclear power is hampering actual progress to decarbonization. The cost of waiting around and hoping for storage to become viable is not just the cost of building those storage systems, but also the continued release of fossil fuels as we wait for that to happen - and who knows when that will happen, if ever.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    No, it is "worst case we spend a bit more". We absolutely know that storage is possible. Pumped thermal electricity storage, for example, uses only well understood technologies. We solve climate change by raising CO2 costs high enough. Again, this is not a go-no go thing, it is just haggling over the price. > We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables. This just means CO2 taxes aren't high enough. BTW, they'd have to be $300-400/ton for new nuclear to compete with gas in the US.
    - sir_bearington 6y ago
      No, pumped storage is not feasible. It's both geographically limited, and it's not available at the appropriate scale. Estimates for how much storage would be necessary for renewables to work range from 12 hours to weeks of storage depending on the solar and wind mix. The US has ~25GWh of hydroelectric storage. There are no active hydroelectric storage projects at the moment, only proposals [1]. This is why proposals to decarbonize through intermittent sources always assume a nearly-free mechanism of energy storage. It's easy to make renewables look cheap if you assume some wundertech makes storage free. Will thermal storage, synthetic methane, or who knows what else fulfill this need? Who knows, but they don't yet. Thus renewables only present a solution coupled with an engineering breakthrough. It's like assuming moore's law held true and developed an app that assumed it'd run on a 1THz single-core processor presumably developed a decade in the future. Seems reasonable in 1995, but that's have been a very bad bet. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectric...
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        Pumped THERMAL storage. This is not pumped hydro. Rather, it involves a heat pump, for example compressing argon near-adiabatically, transferring the heat to a hot store (cooling the argon in the process), then expanding the argon back to the starting pressure. The argon is now around at mildly cryogenic temperature, and the cold is transferred to a cold store (liquid hexane, perhaps). To recover energy, this is reversed, with the temperature difference driving the cycle in the other direction. Detailed calculations with inefficiencies show an overall round trip efficiency of 60% or better could be achieved. All the temperatures are below the creep limit of ordinary steel, so this system would require no exotic materials whatsoever. It's also possible to design a thermal storage system without the cold store, using the ambient environment as a heat sink when running the generator. In that case, adding a backup heater (burning hydrogen, say) would make the store double as a backup generator at extremely low extra capital cost.

pfdietz 6y ago

> The market forces already exist. And that is a recent thing there. The global market is still developing, and technologies don't materialize instantly. CO2 taxes are still low (or zero) just about everywhere. But hey, I hope you are also not going to claim nuclear will be cheaper in the future, because I could reflect that argument right back at you. And I could observe that, unlike with renewables and storage, nuclear has a horribly bad historical experience curve. > Maybe one of the proposed storage solutions will pan out. But building out trillions of dollars of infrastructure projects on the hope that a future breakthrough will make storage feasible is very risky. It's only a $$$ risk. We absolutely know the storage is possible, we just haven't confirmed how cheap it will be. Worst case is we spend a bit more. This is fine. Investments are not guarantees; one is always gambling.

sir_bearington 6y ago
No, it's not "worst case we spent a bit more". Total global lithium ion battery production amounts to less than one hour of storage for the United States alone. Things like pulleys and synthetic methane remain in the prototyping stage. By this logic why not just use fusion? It's possible. We don't know which exact approach we'll use (lasers, magnets, etc.). We don't know how cheap it'll be, but hey it'll happen eventually right? No. It's not "worst case we spend more money". It's "worse case we never solve climate change". And that's a pretty bad worst case. We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables. But this unfounded aversion to nuclear power is hampering actual progress to decarbonization. The cost of waiting around and hoping for storage to become viable is not just the cost of building those storage systems, but also the continued release of fossil fuels as we wait for that to happen - and who knows when that will happen, if ever.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  No, it is "worst case we spend a bit more". We absolutely know that storage is possible. Pumped thermal electricity storage, for example, uses only well understood technologies. We solve climate change by raising CO2 costs high enough. Again, this is not a go-no go thing, it is just haggling over the price. > We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables. This just means CO2 taxes aren't high enough. BTW, they'd have to be $300-400/ton for new nuclear to compete with gas in the US.
  - sir_bearington 6y ago
    No, pumped storage is not feasible. It's both geographically limited, and it's not available at the appropriate scale. Estimates for how much storage would be necessary for renewables to work range from 12 hours to weeks of storage depending on the solar and wind mix. The US has ~25GWh of hydroelectric storage. There are no active hydroelectric storage projects at the moment, only proposals [1]. This is why proposals to decarbonize through intermittent sources always assume a nearly-free mechanism of energy storage. It's easy to make renewables look cheap if you assume some wundertech makes storage free. Will thermal storage, synthetic methane, or who knows what else fulfill this need? Who knows, but they don't yet. Thus renewables only present a solution coupled with an engineering breakthrough. It's like assuming moore's law held true and developed an app that assumed it'd run on a 1THz single-core processor presumably developed a decade in the future. Seems reasonable in 1995, but that's have been a very bad bet. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectric...
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Pumped THERMAL storage. This is not pumped hydro. Rather, it involves a heat pump, for example compressing argon near-adiabatically, transferring the heat to a hot store (cooling the argon in the process), then expanding the argon back to the starting pressure. The argon is now around at mildly cryogenic temperature, and the cold is transferred to a cold store (liquid hexane, perhaps). To recover energy, this is reversed, with the temperature difference driving the cycle in the other direction. Detailed calculations with inefficiencies show an overall round trip efficiency of 60% or better could be achieved. All the temperatures are below the creep limit of ordinary steel, so this system would require no exotic materials whatsoever. It's also possible to design a thermal storage system without the cold store, using the ambient environment as a heat sink when running the generator. In that case, adding a backup heater (burning hydrogen, say) would make the store double as a backup generator at extremely low extra capital cost.