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Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts. This isn’t specific to nuclear; building more of a different kind mitigates the risk.
by gabaix 5y ago
Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts.
This isn’t specific to nuclear; building more of a different kind mitigates the risk.
- pfdietz 5y agoNot really. NPPs as backup to wind would be horribly expensive. Wind droughts don't happen often; even the current price during them would not make a NPP pay off. What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind outages.
- FartyMcFarter 5y ago> What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind outages. Would this work when there's little wind for a week or more?
- pfdietz 5y agoAbsolutely. Hydrogen can be stored underground for maybe $1/kWh of storage capacity. There would also be power related costs, but those don't matter nearly as much for rare event backup. Germany alone has the potential to store an estimated 9.6 PWh of hydrogen, enough to supply their average electric power demand for years, not weeks. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319919347299 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...
- modo_mario 5y agoCreating hydrogen with excess power is really inefficient energy wise and also tips the scales of cost a lot.
- dageshi 5y agoIf the energy is basically free which under certain circumstances (lots of wind) could happen, does it matter how inefficient it is?
- ben_w 5y agoDepends how expensive the electrolyser is. Just because I did make something when I was 9 years old that could fill up a small jamjar with hydrogen, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s economically viable. (I have no idea either way if this is an important limit or not. Just that it can have other sources of downside besides merely using otherwise wasted energy).
- pfdietz 5y agoThere have been reports of cheap mediocre efficiency alkaline electrolyzers in China for under $200/kW. This is indeed a key area for hydrogen from intermittent renewables to be successful, but I think there's great room for cost decline here as volume ramps up.
- rualca 5y ago> If the energy is basically free which under certain circumstances (lots of wind) could happen, does it matter how inefficient it is? There are two sides to this cost: energy production, and storage. The part which is argued to be essentially free is the production, which is not synchronized with energy consumption patterns. Renewable's main challenge is how to store energy cheaply in order to be able to be used reliably to supply the baseline. Until that happens, everyone is required to employ non-renewable energy sources that can and do meet the baseline. It matters nothing is production is free if storing it to supply the baseline is more expensive and thus wasteful than conventional non-renewable sources.
- thrill 5y agoThe creation of the hydrogen is only a portion of the overall system cost, which may total cheaper than alternatives.
- pfdietz 5y agoOnly a fraction of the renewable output would have to be routed through hydrogen, though. It turns out this is still cheaper than new nuclear for providing "synthetic baseload" supply, especially if one looks at projections of how much renewables should cost in the time it would take for any new nuclear plant initiated today to come online.
- p_l 5y agoSaid "fraction", for moderately modest needs and assuming just 24h window where it provides "baseload" can be as "low" as 1/3rd of total renewable capacity - assuming that renewables do 100% of peak whiel saving the excess.. Or so analysis from people I know in the industry, interested in decarbonising (not fossil lobby related), show.
- pfdietz 5y agoSounds about right. See https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ for a toy model that gives about that number, when you solve the optimization problem for Germany. The optimal solutions still have some renewable curtailment, though.
- p_l 5y agoTrying to get usable values for Warsaw area, it gives me the result that we need 8x overbuilding (curiously it suggests solar power mostly), and I'm not sure if we could decarbonize heating on that.
- pfdietz 5y agoPoland is one of the worst places on Earth for renewables. If nuclear still has a shot, it's around there.
- xxpor 5y agoWe should probably prefer pumped hydro before stored h2.
- chess_buster 5y agoMolten Salts powering the old coal plants in a closed system.
- pfdietz 5y agoHot sand looks even better (much higher storage temperature): https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20Day1-Zhiwen%20Ma_NREL.pdf https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D...
- Manuel_D 5y agoAre there any commercial operators of electric grid storage using hydrogen? I can only find prototype or demonstration projects. Most of the time, people saying grid-scale storage is feasible point to technologies that exist in the prototyping phase. The reality is that we don't know whether these solutions will be feasible at scale, or if they'll hit bottlenecks or poor scalability that drives up cost when deployed at scale. Comparing a hypothetical cost of hydrogen, to actual historical cost is comparing apples to oranges.
- pfdietz 5y agoWhy should any exist yet, when natural gas has been so cheap? Tighten the screws enough to eliminate fossil fuel dispatchable sources and you'll start to see it (or something else that can solve the same problem better).
- Manuel_D 5y agoMany places are already seeing energy surpluses. California and Hawaii are consistently reaching excess daytime energy production. If we really can store electricity in hydrogen $1/KWh, then we should be seeing hydrogen storage being built to profit off these intervals of negative energy prices. But we aren't. Is it because people fail to see this market opportunity? Or, maybe, it's because writing a white paper claiming an extremely cheap cost is not remotely the same thing as actually building an energy storage facility at said cost. I agree, we should tighten screws to eliminate fossil fuels. But hydroelectricity is the only scalable form of grid storage we currently have, and that's limited to the right geography. Expecting some unproven technology to be a silver bullet for storage is extremely wishful thinking. We need to be honest about technologies like hydrogen, compressed air, flywheels, etc: These are experimental technologies that might operate cheaply at scale, but we have no real-world experience to back up these claims. I could just say "storage is irrelevant because fusion will deliver energy at $1/MWh" and while nobody can technically disprove it, since they can't see into the future, it's also dishonest to claim this as fact for the same reason.
- p_l 5y ago
- Arnt 5y agoBut if a country mitigates, e.g. by having many operators of different technologies, then consumers can hardly help noticing the price of nuclear. So the operators of nuclear plants end up having to explain ⓐ why they're expensive ⓑ that they are more reliable than the Japanese operators at Fukushima and c) why they still require public subsidy of their liability insurance.
- Chris2048 5y agoWhen you say "why they're expensive" do you mean the plant itself, or the produced electricity? In any case Fukushima is easily explained: They ignored the risk of tsunami despite two studies (and governmental bodies) warning of it. The real reason the Fukushima is so damaging, is that the Japanese are seen as generally "competent", so their mistakes/hubris are seen as reproducible anywhere i.e. "if the Japanese couldn't get it right".
- Arnt 5y agoEither, since the income should justify the investment: One wants nuclear plant operators to have plenty of income, so as not to be tempted to save on maintenance. I agree entirely with the hubris argument. And it's a harsh one, because if an organisation claims to be more competent than the Japanese and and safety-minded too, why can't it persuade an insurer to sell it liability insurance on normal commercial terms, at a justifiable price? It's a difficult argument to make.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago> if an organisation claims to be more competent than the Japanese and and safety-minded too, why can't it persuade an insurer to sell it liability insurance on normal commercial terms, at a justifiable price? It's because nobody else buys that amount of insurance. A hundred billion dollar insurance policy has significant risks and costs to the insurer completely independent of the actual risk of a claim. For one thing, the insurer is required to hold enough capital to pay out possible claims no matter how unlikely they are. So you're basically paying interest on that sum of money in the difference between the ordinary market rate of return and the lower return on the "safe" securities insurers are allowed to hold. That cost is completely independent of the risk of a claim; it's strictly based on the amount of insurance you want. Then what happens if there is e.g. a major earthquake which causes a minor incident at a nuclear plant, so that 99% of the damage is caused by the earthquake but the insurer is a deep pocket and the judge is sympathetic to the earthquake victims? That's a risk an insurer has to account for, but it's not a risk you can address by improving the safety of the nuclear plant because the risk is rooted in politics. When the risk of an incident is low enough, it's costs like that which dominate the premium for the policy. You can make the risk of a legitimate claim arbitrarily small and those costs would still be the same. And it's an isolated demand for rigor. Nobody else is required to carry that amount of insurance. When a coal mine turns an entire town into a superfund site and kills thousands of people, they just file for bankruptcy. What would the alternatives cost if they had to carry the same insurance, or pay for their externalities?
- tjansen 5y agoIt's true, but when does it make sense to include plants that do not deliver reliable power? Wind power makes a lot of sense as long as you are still using fossil fuels. Every watt generated by wind power means that you can reduce fossil fuel, and thus lower your CO2 emissions. But once you got rid of fossil fuels and you have a reliable source of power without CO2 emissions, you can get rid of the unreliable ones.
- adrianN 5y agoWind and solar are pretty cheap and storage keeps getting cheaper, that's why they make sense.
- tjansen 5y agoWe are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes....
- ben_w 5y ago> There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausible over the scale of a decade or so and we would need that timescale to build the renewables themselves anyway)[0], and the batteries are in addition to existing pumped hydro, and even in the current “low wind” scenario the UK is still getting 3.8 GW (~11%) from wind[1][2] rather than getting nothing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201 [1] https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ [2] https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent
- fundatus 5y ago> Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts. No, not at all. Nuclear is used for base loads, not to compensate fluctuating electricity production of other sources.