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Renewables can’t replace natural gas until we develop effective ways to store the energy for a baseload. Since we won’t use nuclear power, it’s going to be her

Renewables can’t replace natural gas until we develop effective ways to store the energy for a baseload. Since we won’t use nuclear power, it’s going to be here for quite some time. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/11/bill-gates-bullish-on-using-nuclear-power-to-fight-climate-change.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/11/bill-gates-bullish-on-using-...

grey-area 5y ago
There are lots of proven ways to store energy for fluctuations in load. Hydro storage and battery storage have both been proven at scale and battery storage in particular is dropping in price. Nuclear is very expensive in comparison.
- jcun4128 5y ago
  The moving mass batteries are interesting
  - WJW 5y ago
    Interesting technically but not really economically. Gravity is just not a very strong force compared to chemical bonds so you need humongous amounts of mass and a fairly large height difference to store an equivalent amount of energy as a few containers worth of batteries. There is a reason that even though we've had the technology to make moving mass batteries for decades, the only form of such energy storage in operation today is pumped hydro.
- melling 5y ago
  20% of electricity in the United States is from nuclear. How many more decades before we can replace that with a renewable option? I’ve watched people like yourself be wrong for 2 decades. I suppose in another 5 decades you might be right. In the meantime, being wrong has a price as greenhouse emissions increase
  - grey-area 5y ago
    I'm not sure which point you think you're refuting. Renewable options are here and are being used and grid storage is a solved problem, though with the current balkanised and underfunded state of the US grid it is unsurprising there are significant ongoing problems there caused by lack of long term investment in infrastructure. IMO existing nuclear plants should be kept until they can be replaced easily, and the US may well take decades to do so as they are very slow on the uptake. Other countries are doing a lot better, some have reached 100% power from renewables already for short periods of time and are on track to do it for long periods in the coming decades. Greenhouse emissions are not rising in the US, they are gradually falling as renewable options become cheaper and are built out and EVs spread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States#/media/File:Greenhouse-gas-emissions-by-gas_(2).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th... I'd expect them to keep falling given transport and electricity generation are the main sources.
    - melling 5y ago
      Greenhouse gases have fallen in the United States because we have closed a lot of coal power plants and replaced them with natural gas. Emissions are increasing globally because we are building a lot of coal plants. The fact remains that we are at least 2 or 3 decades from renewables being able to replace fossil fuels for power generation That’s half a century of waiting
      - grey-area 5y ago
        Not even by your calculations is that half a century of waiting (30 years is not half a century!), but your 'fact' of a 2-3 decade wait are demonstrably wrong and unsupported by the evidence. Why do you insist on attempting to set renewables and nuclear in opposition? Scotland for example recently hit generation of 97% of demand from renewables in the year 2020. As part of a larger grid with appropriate balancing and storage, 100% renewables is absolutely doable, and as part of a grid with some base load generated from nuclear (as the US and UK for example already have and is not going away soon), it's definitely doable right now with sufficient will and resources: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-56530424 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-56530424 The only reason the US is trailing so far behind other countries is a lack of will to transition off fossil fuels, a chronic lack of investment in infrastructure and a balkanised electricity grid run for profit, all of which is fixable.
- wavegeek 5y ago
  > lots of proven ways None of which work beyond a few hours. The sheer number of batteries and the amount of pumped hydro needed is phenomenal. As one data point, Elon Musk's much heralded $100m battery in South Australia stores a few seconds of Australia's total energy use. A few tenths of a second for the US. When it is cloudy and there is no wind for a week, renewables are a complete failure. > is dropping in price Batteries have been dropping in price for 140 years. But the best batteries have only been getting better at about 7% per year. Specific technologies have improved faster than this early on in their lives (e.g. LiIon) but during most of this improvement they were far from the best.
- FredPret 5y ago
  Hydro has significant issues as well. You need a massive flooded area, displacing many people and animals, and you totally disrupt the downstream ecology of the river. (See the Aswan dam) It also doesn’t produce a ton of power. The Three Gorges Dam is a colossal project, displaced literally millions, cost a frightful amount of money, and produces 1% of China’s power. Also, if that thing ever breaks, many millions will die. Should have been a couple of small nuclear plants. Regarding hydro storage, it’s the same exact thing, except now you need two dams, one high and one low. This isn’t a practical solution everywhere, certainly not at a national scale.
  - sasfasaf 5y ago
    " and produces 1% of China’s power." It produces 1% of the electricity used by CHINA the premier industrial and most populous country in the world and you dismiss it? Three Gorges was a mistake, but it generates power used by 13 million people. That is a ton of power. Most gas plants are in the 300 MW size, i.e. the 3GD is about 80 of them.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      That China has a lot of consumption is neither here nor there. My point is that they would have to build one hundred of these dams which is clearly totally impractical.
      - sasfasaf 5y ago
        I'm not arguing that 3GD wasn't stupid, just that it generates an insane amount of power. Either way, no more of them will be built - there are not many more gorges like that left.
        FredPret 5y ago
        That’s my whole point. We can’t power the planet with hydro, nor should we try. We need heavy-duty nuclear plants for base load, solar for daytime peaks, and probably some natural gas here and there
ben_w 5y ago
Or long-distance transmission. I have no idea how much a multi-gigawatt HVDC line costs per kilometre, but the losses are within the realm of at least asking if it can be done — 3.5% per 1,000 km is (0.965^20) = 0.49 ~= 51% loss for 20,000 km, and the cells themselves are cheap enough these days that it’s still often economically viable even if you need twice as many cells. (Obviously you don’t want to do antipodal HVDC until you need to, because even if the HVDC lines were free, pointless transmission losses are still pointless even if you can afford them).
- sasfasaf 5y ago
  ". I have no idea how much a multi-gigawatt HVDC line costs per kilometre," Well there's the crux, ain't it? They're bloody expensive. Also, to your 3.5% loss / 1000km line loss add in the transformation losses. Then consider that a 20k line must be a DC line (to avoid reflection losses). Also, why did you use 20k km? Such a curious number, half the world's circumference, that I suspect you mean to propose to wrap the world in power lines to get power at midnight from noon elsewhere Well 20km for your loss calculations is not nearly enough since you cannot connect two sites in a straight line. For starters the earth' topography won't allow it. But then there's the issue that you won't connect every city to every generating site, but have a hub-spoke model (like ethernet). To give you an idea of the added distance compare the straight line distance of Atlanta to Pittsburgh to the interstate distance (520 mi to 680 mi). Finally, the proposal of connecting two sites on opposite ends of the earth is fundamentally hegemonist. What are you going to do with the fiercely independent people that tend to live in deserts when they oppose you wallpapering their desert with panels? When the Bedouins of Algeria are blowing up the electricity needed in Japan, will the EU send storm troopers to punish the locals?
  - ben_w 5y ago
    > Also, to your 3.5% loss / 1000km line loss add in the transformation losses. Which is going to be a fixed amount regardless of distance? While I don’t have the numbers, I would expect HVDC to be a dead end already if it made a difference to my conclusion. > 20k km? Such a curious number, half the world's circumference, that I suspect you mean to propose to wrap the world in power lines to get power at midnight from noon elsewhere Indeed, though this is likely excessive: summer/winter is significantly harder for storage to deal with — and hence the mostly likely to be solved with transmission — than day/night, given most people sleep at night but nobody hibernates though winter. > But then there's the issue that you won't connect every city to every generating site, but have a hub-spoke model (like ethernet) Surely a web is the best topology? Existing grids don’t all run on hub-and-spoke models: https://openinframap.org/#2/19.82/13.02/L,P,S https://openinframap.org/#2/19.82/13.02/L,P,S > When the Bedouins of Algeria are blowing up the electricity needed in Japan, will the EU send storm troopers to punish the locals? While true, I’m not even going to try to play at global geopolitics; all I can say is that while deserts are a good place for PV, and while PV is the best thing I (being neither a biologist nor a geologist) know what to do with a dessert, the land area required for PV is low enough that even the UK — entirely north of the US-Canadian border — would be able to power itself in winter with no transmission and just a day/night storage system using 1% of its land area [0], so tiling the entire Sahara is unlikely: The same equations say that even if we electrify all world energy consumption, Algeria alone could supply everyone 6 times over, but you’d only do a global grid like this precisely if you didn’t want the huge storage system I’m implicitly adding to worsen the performance of my opinion and give your criticism the best possible chance. [0] illumination = (cos(51 north + plus axial tilt) / π) * 1kW/m^2 ~= 87 W/m^2; efficiency = 20% ~> 17.5 W/m^2; 35 GW / (17.5 W/m^2) ~= 2000 km^2; U.K. land area ~= 242,495 km^2. I think this is a bad idea, but economics beats aesthetics and someone would need to run the numbers that I don’t have to say which of storage and transmission is actually better. Perhaps the minima for the UK is PV in Algeria and HVDC, perhaps it is local x*PV + y*wind + z* batteries. It probably varies from any one country to the next.

grey-area 5y ago

There are lots of proven ways to store energy for fluctuations in load. Hydro storage and battery storage have both been proven at scale and battery storage in particular is dropping in price. Nuclear is very expensive in comparison.

jcun4128 5y ago
The moving mass batteries are interesting
- WJW 5y ago
  Interesting technically but not really economically. Gravity is just not a very strong force compared to chemical bonds so you need humongous amounts of mass and a fairly large height difference to store an equivalent amount of energy as a few containers worth of batteries. There is a reason that even though we've had the technology to make moving mass batteries for decades, the only form of such energy storage in operation today is pumped hydro.
melling 5y ago
20% of electricity in the United States is from nuclear. How many more decades before we can replace that with a renewable option? I’ve watched people like yourself be wrong for 2 decades. I suppose in another 5 decades you might be right. In the meantime, being wrong has a price as greenhouse emissions increase
- grey-area 5y ago
  I'm not sure which point you think you're refuting. Renewable options are here and are being used and grid storage is a solved problem, though with the current balkanised and underfunded state of the US grid it is unsurprising there are significant ongoing problems there caused by lack of long term investment in infrastructure. IMO existing nuclear plants should be kept until they can be replaced easily, and the US may well take decades to do so as they are very slow on the uptake. Other countries are doing a lot better, some have reached 100% power from renewables already for short periods of time and are on track to do it for long periods in the coming decades. Greenhouse emissions are not rising in the US, they are gradually falling as renewable options become cheaper and are built out and EVs spread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States#/media/File:Greenhouse-gas-emissions-by-gas_(2).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th... I'd expect them to keep falling given transport and electricity generation are the main sources.
  - melling 5y ago
    Greenhouse gases have fallen in the United States because we have closed a lot of coal power plants and replaced them with natural gas. Emissions are increasing globally because we are building a lot of coal plants. The fact remains that we are at least 2 or 3 decades from renewables being able to replace fossil fuels for power generation That’s half a century of waiting
    - grey-area 5y ago
      Not even by your calculations is that half a century of waiting (30 years is not half a century!), but your 'fact' of a 2-3 decade wait are demonstrably wrong and unsupported by the evidence. Why do you insist on attempting to set renewables and nuclear in opposition? Scotland for example recently hit generation of 97% of demand from renewables in the year 2020. As part of a larger grid with appropriate balancing and storage, 100% renewables is absolutely doable, and as part of a grid with some base load generated from nuclear (as the US and UK for example already have and is not going away soon), it's definitely doable right now with sufficient will and resources: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-56530424 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-56530424 The only reason the US is trailing so far behind other countries is a lack of will to transition off fossil fuels, a chronic lack of investment in infrastructure and a balkanised electricity grid run for profit, all of which is fixable.
wavegeek 5y ago
> lots of proven ways None of which work beyond a few hours. The sheer number of batteries and the amount of pumped hydro needed is phenomenal. As one data point, Elon Musk's much heralded $100m battery in South Australia stores a few seconds of Australia's total energy use. A few tenths of a second for the US. When it is cloudy and there is no wind for a week, renewables are a complete failure. > is dropping in price Batteries have been dropping in price for 140 years. But the best batteries have only been getting better at about 7% per year. Specific technologies have improved faster than this early on in their lives (e.g. LiIon) but during most of this improvement they were far from the best.
FredPret 5y ago
Hydro has significant issues as well. You need a massive flooded area, displacing many people and animals, and you totally disrupt the downstream ecology of the river. (See the Aswan dam) It also doesn’t produce a ton of power. The Three Gorges Dam is a colossal project, displaced literally millions, cost a frightful amount of money, and produces 1% of China’s power. Also, if that thing ever breaks, many millions will die. Should have been a couple of small nuclear plants. Regarding hydro storage, it’s the same exact thing, except now you need two dams, one high and one low. This isn’t a practical solution everywhere, certainly not at a national scale.
- sasfasaf 5y ago
  " and produces 1% of China’s power." It produces 1% of the electricity used by CHINA the premier industrial and most populous country in the world and you dismiss it? Three Gorges was a mistake, but it generates power used by 13 million people. That is a ton of power. Most gas plants are in the 300 MW size, i.e. the 3GD is about 80 of them.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    That China has a lot of consumption is neither here nor there. My point is that they would have to build one hundred of these dams which is clearly totally impractical.
    - sasfasaf 5y ago
      I'm not arguing that 3GD wasn't stupid, just that it generates an insane amount of power. Either way, no more of them will be built - there are not many more gorges like that left.
      - FredPret 5y ago
        That’s my whole point. We can’t power the planet with hydro, nor should we try. We need heavy-duty nuclear plants for base load, solar for daytime peaks, and probably some natural gas here and there

ben_w 5y ago

Or long-distance transmission. I have no idea how much a multi-gigawatt HVDC line costs per kilometre, but the losses are within the realm of at least asking if it can be done — 3.5% per 1,000 km is (0.965^20) = 0.49 ~= 51% loss for 20,000 km, and the cells themselves are cheap enough these days that it’s still often economically viable even if you need twice as many cells. (Obviously you don’t want to do antipodal HVDC until you need to, because even if the HVDC lines were free, pointless transmission losses are still pointless even if you can afford them).

sasfasaf 5y ago
". I have no idea how much a multi-gigawatt HVDC line costs per kilometre," Well there's the crux, ain't it? They're bloody expensive. Also, to your 3.5% loss / 1000km line loss add in the transformation losses. Then consider that a 20k line must be a DC line (to avoid reflection losses). Also, why did you use 20k km? Such a curious number, half the world's circumference, that I suspect you mean to propose to wrap the world in power lines to get power at midnight from noon elsewhere Well 20km for your loss calculations is not nearly enough since you cannot connect two sites in a straight line. For starters the earth' topography won't allow it. But then there's the issue that you won't connect every city to every generating site, but have a hub-spoke model (like ethernet). To give you an idea of the added distance compare the straight line distance of Atlanta to Pittsburgh to the interstate distance (520 mi to 680 mi). Finally, the proposal of connecting two sites on opposite ends of the earth is fundamentally hegemonist. What are you going to do with the fiercely independent people that tend to live in deserts when they oppose you wallpapering their desert with panels? When the Bedouins of Algeria are blowing up the electricity needed in Japan, will the EU send storm troopers to punish the locals?
- ben_w 5y ago
  > Also, to your 3.5% loss / 1000km line loss add in the transformation losses. Which is going to be a fixed amount regardless of distance? While I don’t have the numbers, I would expect HVDC to be a dead end already if it made a difference to my conclusion. > 20k km? Such a curious number, half the world's circumference, that I suspect you mean to propose to wrap the world in power lines to get power at midnight from noon elsewhere Indeed, though this is likely excessive: summer/winter is significantly harder for storage to deal with — and hence the mostly likely to be solved with transmission — than day/night, given most people sleep at night but nobody hibernates though winter. > But then there's the issue that you won't connect every city to every generating site, but have a hub-spoke model (like ethernet) Surely a web is the best topology? Existing grids don’t all run on hub-and-spoke models: https://openinframap.org/#2/19.82/13.02/L,P,S https://openinframap.org/#2/19.82/13.02/L,P,S > When the Bedouins of Algeria are blowing up the electricity needed in Japan, will the EU send storm troopers to punish the locals? While true, I’m not even going to try to play at global geopolitics; all I can say is that while deserts are a good place for PV, and while PV is the best thing I (being neither a biologist nor a geologist) know what to do with a dessert, the land area required for PV is low enough that even the UK — entirely north of the US-Canadian border — would be able to power itself in winter with no transmission and just a day/night storage system using 1% of its land area [0], so tiling the entire Sahara is unlikely: The same equations say that even if we electrify all world energy consumption, Algeria alone could supply everyone 6 times over, but you’d only do a global grid like this precisely if you didn’t want the huge storage system I’m implicitly adding to worsen the performance of my opinion and give your criticism the best possible chance. [0] illumination = (cos(51 north + plus axial tilt) / π) * 1kW/m^2 ~= 87 W/m^2; efficiency = 20% ~> 17.5 W/m^2; 35 GW / (17.5 W/m^2) ~= 2000 km^2; U.K. land area ~= 242,495 km^2. I think this is a bad idea, but economics beats aesthetics and someone would need to run the numbers that I don’t have to say which of storage and transmission is actually better. Perhaps the minima for the UK is PV in Algeria and HVDC, perhaps it is local x*PV + y*wind + z* batteries. It probably varies from any one country to the next.