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“Options include reserve thermal power plants, battery storage or cables for importing electricity from other markets.” Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as
by 28511524 5y ago
“Options include reserve thermal power plants, battery storage or cables for importing electricity from other markets.”
Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.
- randomdata 5y agoThe prevailing nuclear designs are not an option. They are only suitable for base load production, whereas wind is only suitable for peak load production. They serve entirely different purposes on the grid and are not meaningfully interchangeable. When the wind stops blowing you need another technology that is suitable for peak load production (batteries, natural gas, etc.).
- acidburnNSA 5y agoCurrent-design nuclear plants themselves are perfectly capable at ramping up and down on demand on the order of 10s of minutes. They usually just choose not to because fuel is a small fraction of their total cost and so the current (and adjustable) markets pressure them into selling as much electricity as possible by staying near 100%.
- randomdata 5y agoYes, the economics is why they are not suitable.
- acidburnNSA 5y agoYeah but it if you just made a market that valued the ability to ramp up and down on demand then that could be fixed pretty easily. Some form of capacity market exclusively for low-carbon energy could do it. https://learn.pjm.com/three-priorities/buying-and-selling-energy/capacity-markets.aspx https://learn.pjm.com/three-priorities/buying-and-selling-en...
- tjansen 5y agoOnce you have them, is there any reason why you would want to ramp it down, other than trying to justify the existence of wind turbines?
- acidburnNSA 5y agoYes. Demand does ramp up and down every day, so you have to follow that. For example, in California the demand varies from about 22 GW to around 30 GW on a typical day.
- Factorium 5y agoThis is why we need to consider energy demand, as well as supply. Specifically, if we had a whole continent's worth of electric cars charging during the day to soak up excess solar production (8am - 6pm); And allowed them to offload the same energy back into the grid from 6pm - 8am. To deal with the duck curve: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam-Milshtein/publication/335893104/figure/fig2/AS:804597450952705@1568842389392/Californias-Duck-Curve-11.jpg https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam-Milshtein/publicati... The simplest way to solve this is to mandate EV charging points at all workplaces and commuter parking lots, and require all new EVs include the UI and functionality necessary to upload to the grid interactively, and adjust regulations to actually allow and encourage that. We could also build giant solar farms in Morocco and Western Sahara, a comparatively stable and friendly part of Northern Africa, where peak solar times conveniently align with the evening peak of Central Europe.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer Is anti-nuclear sentiment consistent across Europe?
- capableweb 5y agoNothing, especially sentiments, are consistent across the entirety of Europe.
- alexott 5y agomostly in Germany...
- dagw 5y agoIn Sweden there is only one 'major' political party (The Liberals) really advocating for nuclear power, and they're currently at less than 3% in the polls.
- junon 5y agoIt is here in Germany. Nobody here likes nuclear. My ex is a PhD in bioinformatics and argues against nuclear using quite outdated information, even. Nuclear is a non-starter for many. Too many people afraid of another Chernobyl or nuclear waste handling without understanding what caused the former or not being informed about how we deal with the latter, today.
- morsch 5y agoYou must mean tomorrow, because today, we just keep the stuff around in intermediate facilities.
- gambiting 5y agoThe thing is, we know how to store nuclear waste in such a way that it's a solved problem forever. Literally gone and not a worry for any generation from now until forever. It's called deep borehole disposal[0]. Drill a hole all the way down to Earth's crust, put your waste there = it's not coming back on anything shorter than geological timescale. " It is estimated that only 800 boreholes would be sufficient to store the entire existing nuclear waste stockpile of the USA"[0] From what I understand it isn't being done for two reasons: 1) cost 2) once stored this way it's almost impossible to retrieve. Spent nuclear fuel is kept around partially because we know we might be able to recycle it into fresh fuel in the future. If we dump it in a hole deep in the ground it's gone forever. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal
- PeterisP 5y agoIncreasing nuclear capacity is a long-term task, it's not possible to do it quickly in response - all the major nuke plants would be already running at capacity most of the time, there's no option for them to just generate more.
- cure 5y ago> Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer. Maybe this statement is just a reflection of what can be done in a reasonable amount of time (a few years)? Planning and building nuclear plants takes an order of magnitude longer, it seems.
- tehsauce 5y agorealistically building batteries or thermal storage at that scale will probably take as long as nuclear plants
- dagw 5y agoWith batteries and thermal storage you can scale up over time. You can have a new small thermal storage or battery facility up and running in 2-3 years and slowly build it out over the next 20 years, with the option to change technology or capacity as needed during that time. With nuclear you have 20 years of 'nothing' before you have anything to show for your efforts.
- tehsauce 5y agoIt’s true you can start small and scale up, but it still would probably take many years to accumulate enough batteries to make a significant difference. Secondly, it doesn’t make 20 years to build a modern nuclear power plant, 5 years is a better estimate. So nuclear is still easily the cheaper/faster/proven method compared to batteries or thermal.
- dagw 5y ago5 years is a better estimate. How I wish that where true. But looking at all current new Nuclear power plant projects in Europe and the US it's clear that we are incapable of that. Yes we can argue about why that is and how in theory it shouldn't take that long, but the truth is that best case scenario it will take you more than 5 years just to get a building permit to start buildings a new nuclear power plant.
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- guerrilla 5y agoWe do hydro and biomass[1] in Sweden. I'm not sure why Germany, France and Italy, given the topographies, would have a problem with that. Have they not diverisifed as much? 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Sweden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Sweden
- riboflavin123 5y agoHydro is still vulnerable to downturns, though they need to be more prolonged to equal what's happening with the wind in this report. (California's 2021 drought is a good example of how hydro power can fall short.) I mentally think of power generation reliability as: Uncontrollably variable from hour-to-hour: wind, solar, tidal motion Uncontrollably variable on month-to-year spans: hydro Pretty controllable: nuclear (and fossil fuels)
- Kankuro 5y agoIn France, most of the places where dams could be placed are already taken. It also means that pumped hydroelectric energy storage can only be set up marginally.
- phtrivier 5y agoHydro already accounts for 10/15% of electricity production in France (thanks FSM for the Pyrennes chains and the rivers) - and it does not seem like we have much more capacity (there are some small dams from the early XXth century that are being reused.) Nuclear and wind suffer from NIMYBism and are now nothing more than political totems. PV is going this road now that people are realizing installing solar farms means cutting on forest or actual food farms. Coal is already pretty much extinct. Whereas gas is "painless" from a political point of view, private interest in the field (total, engine) have a strong history of political influence, and "gas" wins if RE are installed but the sun does not shine nor the wind blows... So gas is the energy of the future for Europe until there is a breakthrough in fusion or safer modular fission. This will not make the geopol situation any simpler in the east, and is of course a disaster climate-wise - except maybe for coal-heavy countries like Poland and Chez Republic
- ddevault 5y agoMaybe someone can correct me, but I don't see how we're going to get out of climate change (generally, but also specifically) without nuclear power. We need something which can produce a reliable base load and I don't think there are any other widely available options which don't produce heaps of emissions.
- Scoundreller 5y agoOr better reactive demand. Could my fridge/freezer run at deep chill when energy is cheap? Could an a/c build a block of ice for later? Could tank-based water heater recover more slowly when energy is cheap? Could a parked EV schedule its recharge better? Could a washing machine defer or go into “slow-mode” when cost is high? Same with dishwashers? Could lights dim a bit? Could hvac go into slow mode? In a way, my utility can do things that force this (voltage reductions), but it’s only really effective for resistive loads, and could increase resistive losses on the transmission/distribution network. https://www.ieso.ca/en/Sector-Participants/IESO-News/2021/01/IESO-to-Conduct-Routine-Voltage-Reduction-Test-on-January-19 https://www.ieso.ca/en/Sector-Participants/IESO-News/2021/01... One big problem is that transmission/distribution costs aren’t variable based on time-of-day, but they could be too.
- Factorium 5y agoThe major issue is regulation, which is not designed for things like Small Modular Nuclear Reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor We could be building hundreds of these across Europe, placing them close to small cities and using the waste heat for district heating.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoNuclear isn’t on demand, you still need a place to bank energy when you don’t need it since the plant is going to produce a constant load that (given high capital and operating costs of the plant itself) you’ll want to use productively. Natural gas instead would really shine as a backup power source.
- derefr 5y agoAn array of small modular [nuclear] reactors (SMRs) could be set up to switch parts of the array on and off over the course of the day to scale with load. Small plants have shorter ramp-up and ramp-down times, as they move around smaller amounts of working fluid, and power lighter turbines which thus have proportionately higher friction/lower inertia. Of course, this is a lot less efficient than having one big nuclear reactor pumping huge turbines; but it’s possibly more efficient than other forms of peak-load generation, which is the key issue. Plus, any given individual SMR would produce a low-enough wattage to be able to reasonably divert/“dump” power from it into an practical-to-construct-anywhere sink or battery (e.g. building-sized pumped storage, rather than huge dam-sized pumped storage) for handling ramp-down discontinuities.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoAs long as we are going there, backing a traditional nuclear power plant with a reservoir for pumped storage would work as well. But the land needed for such is immense and limited (though great for recreation opportunities). Nuclear could also be coupled with a desalinization plant that would use excess energy to produce clean water for later use (but there are other challenges there). If liquid hydrogen fuel was ever useful, it could produce that with excess capacity also (but again, other issues).
- zbrozek 5y agoThere's lots of things to do with extra electricity, it's just a question of whether or not it's economical. Here in California, for example, I could imagine the excess being used to opportunistically desalinate water and refill reservoirs. If water and emissions were priced appropriately, it might be worthwhile? It's not exactly a battery, but it's a way to make overbuilding more palatable. Alternatively if the grid is unreliable, end-use customers will install their own batteries and generating capacity. Voila, problem solved on someone else's dime!
- meragrin_ 5y agoNuclear falls under thermal power plants. It would be redundant to simply add it to the list.
- HereIGoAgain 5y agoYup.. This HAS to be on the table if we want ANY hope of powering a society anywhere near 100% renewable!