3 ms·

Solar panels and wind turbines are ready to go. They can take you to at least 50% renewable electricity without help of any other more experimental technology.

Solar panels and wind turbines are ready to go. They can take you to at least 50% renewable electricity without help of any other more experimental technology. Heat pumps are ready to go in most climates. They can electrify almost all of your heating needs. Electric cars are ready to go for many use cases. They can electrify a large part of your transportation. Of course there is also technology that is a hundred years old and could help: better insulation for houses, better public transport and the like. While you introduce all of those technologies until they reach some point where they're not completely suitable yet, you have time to improve the cost effectiveness of the puzzle pieces that are only kind of available, like grid scale storage, long range transportation, various industrial processes, etc. Maybe it turns out that by the time we've electrified everything and taken renewables as far as they go without killing the grid somebody has come up with a modular molten salt Thorium reactor that can cheaply cover the remaining electricity needs. Maybe power2gas becomes amazingly cheap, or we discover awesome batteries. But it doesn't really make sense not to build as much renewables as you can and electrify as much as you can while you wait for that.

civilized 5y ago
I support scaling up renewables. The question is, should we bet on the solution of fundamental unsolved science and engineering problems that currently keep them from scaling further? Or hedge our bets by scaling up nuclear to cover the gaps left by renewables?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  What is one of those fundamental problems? Fusion has unsolved problems. Batteries do not.
  - civilized 5y ago
    How confident are you that using batteries to reliably serve energy at a civilization scale has no fundamental unsolved problems? Because in my reading about this topic, it comes up quite frequently.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      I'm fairly confident that if you want to throw FUD it's your responsibility, not mine, to give some example.
- adrianN 5y ago
  As far as I know there are no unsolved problems, power2gas could scale to grid scale storage and we have enough room for solar and wind to cover our energy needs. The problems are purely economical right now: power2gas is pretty expensive. So I think it makes sense to ask whether nuclear can realistically beat that. Nuclear is not known to be a particularly cheap source of power either. I defer to people who do more detailed analysis than I can to answer this question. Meanwhile I think we should just build more wind and solar and electrify as much of our energy demand as we can.
  - js8 5y ago
    I completely agree with you, I would just add the big unknown is the shift in demand. If renewables are going to be much cheaper in certain times (they are already cheaper than nuclear, on average, for example https://www.visualcapitalist.com/electricity-from-renewable-energy-sources-is-now-cheaper-than-ever/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/electricity-from-renewable-...), it will be worth shifting energy-intensive industries to utilize that. This might significantly reduce the demand for the base load, and reduce the need for power2gas (and so its cost) significantly.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Yes, I have a friend who works on projects like that for Siemens in Germany. Apparently there is a regime of renewable buildout (roughly at the percentage where Germany is currently at) where it's cheaper to shape demand than to build storage.
    - civilized 5y ago
      This is a very interesting point. I wonder how this restructuring to follow the energy would impact the efficiency of the relevant industries. In space as well as time, I would imagine - you could perhaps move a lot of energy-intensive stuff out into the deserts, right next to the solar arrays.
      - icegreentea2 5y ago
        Most energy intensive work is also mass/volume intensive as well - as in it's producing something. Obvious exception is something like a data-center. Since transporting goods has a cost in itself, it'll probably continue to be cheaper to ship electricity across land, than to relocate plants (in general, there will always be exceptions), especially if we need big, efficient transmission to get energy from the desert into cities (cause those won't move) anyways.
jeffbee 5y ago
Some notes on renewables readiness, that I made yesterday while thinking about California’s heat wave. In California, we now serve up to 95% of grid demand from renewables at certain times of day. This is up from 85% last year. Solar peak capacity grew by 15% last year to over 13GW. Yesterday, batteries discharged 999MW over a five-minute average, a record, just missing the 1GW milestone. Utility-scale batteries have grown 10x in a single year. None of this includes distributed solar and battery storage, which is widespread and has been lowering grid demand for years.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  See also this graph of annual nuclear vs. (non-hydro) renewable generation, in TWh. Now extrapolate that renewable curve forward 10 years, to when any nuclear plant that was started today might be coming online. https://i.imgur.com/HLUmcDk.png https://i.imgur.com/HLUmcDk.png

civilized 5y ago

I support scaling up renewables. The question is, should we bet on the solution of fundamental unsolved science and engineering problems that currently keep them from scaling further? Or hedge our bets by scaling up nuclear to cover the gaps left by renewables?

jeffbee 5y ago
What is one of those fundamental problems? Fusion has unsolved problems. Batteries do not.
- civilized 5y ago
  How confident are you that using batteries to reliably serve energy at a civilization scale has no fundamental unsolved problems? Because in my reading about this topic, it comes up quite frequently.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    I'm fairly confident that if you want to throw FUD it's your responsibility, not mine, to give some example.
adrianN 5y ago
As far as I know there are no unsolved problems, power2gas could scale to grid scale storage and we have enough room for solar and wind to cover our energy needs. The problems are purely economical right now: power2gas is pretty expensive. So I think it makes sense to ask whether nuclear can realistically beat that. Nuclear is not known to be a particularly cheap source of power either. I defer to people who do more detailed analysis than I can to answer this question. Meanwhile I think we should just build more wind and solar and electrify as much of our energy demand as we can.
- js8 5y ago
  I completely agree with you, I would just add the big unknown is the shift in demand. If renewables are going to be much cheaper in certain times (they are already cheaper than nuclear, on average, for example https://www.visualcapitalist.com/electricity-from-renewable-energy-sources-is-now-cheaper-than-ever/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/electricity-from-renewable-...), it will be worth shifting energy-intensive industries to utilize that. This might significantly reduce the demand for the base load, and reduce the need for power2gas (and so its cost) significantly.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Yes, I have a friend who works on projects like that for Siemens in Germany. Apparently there is a regime of renewable buildout (roughly at the percentage where Germany is currently at) where it's cheaper to shape demand than to build storage.
  - civilized 5y ago
    This is a very interesting point. I wonder how this restructuring to follow the energy would impact the efficiency of the relevant industries. In space as well as time, I would imagine - you could perhaps move a lot of energy-intensive stuff out into the deserts, right next to the solar arrays.
    - icegreentea2 5y ago
      Most energy intensive work is also mass/volume intensive as well - as in it's producing something. Obvious exception is something like a data-center. Since transporting goods has a cost in itself, it'll probably continue to be cheaper to ship electricity across land, than to relocate plants (in general, there will always be exceptions), especially if we need big, efficient transmission to get energy from the desert into cities (cause those won't move) anyways.

jeffbee 5y ago

Some notes on renewables readiness, that I made yesterday while thinking about California’s heat wave. In California, we now serve up to 95% of grid demand from renewables at certain times of day. This is up from 85% last year. Solar peak capacity grew by 15% last year to over 13GW. Yesterday, batteries discharged 999MW over a five-minute average, a record, just missing the 1GW milestone. Utility-scale batteries have grown 10x in a single year. None of this includes distributed solar and battery storage, which is widespread and has been lowering grid demand for years.

pfdietz 5y ago
See also this graph of annual nuclear vs. (non-hydro) renewable generation, in TWh. Now extrapolate that renewable curve forward 10 years, to when any nuclear plant that was started today might be coming online. https://i.imgur.com/HLUmcDk.png https://i.imgur.com/HLUmcDk.png