22 ms·

Comparing the cost of a non-intermittent energy source with an intermittent energy source excluding the cost of storage is comparing apples to oranges. Solar an

Comparing the cost of a non-intermittent energy source with an intermittent energy source excluding the cost of storage is comparing apples to oranges. Solar and wind are cheap, until you saturate the energy market during peak production hours. Then it gets exorbitantly expensive. The only viable storage solution at the moment is hydroelectric, which is geographically limited. Global lithium ion battery output for a whole year doesn't even add up to 1 hour's worth of the USA's electricity consumption. When probed on how to address intermittency, many wind and solar advocates propose things like hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air, or other solutions that are currently in the prototyping stage and have yet to actually be deployed to a grid and demonstrate viability. This is the chief advantage of nuclear power: it works and we have over half a century of production experience with it. Betting on one of those storage solutions panning out is betting on a big unknown.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Renewables and storage are already cheaper than nuclear. Base load is a dead concept. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fossil-fuels-buries-nuclear/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-sola... https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-record-setting-solar-power-price-under-2%c2%a2-kwh/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-rec... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108 https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-boost-for-renewables-grid-scale-battery-storage-is-on-the-rise https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-boost-for-renewables-grid-... https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-three-myths-about-baseload https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  ~~And which storage system is that?~~ (parent post was edited with links after my response) Lithium ion battery production is at only ~400 GWh per year. By comparison, the US uses 12,500 TWh of electricity daily, or just over 500 GWh per hour. And this is only electricity, not total energy usage. Attempting to provision widespread lithium ion storage would lead to demand shock and skyrocketing prices. Not to mention it would involve delaying transition from ICE vehicles to EVs. You're right in some scenarios: if a country has extensive dam networks, then yes renewables + storage could be cheaper. Dams provide immense energy storage capacity. Close the turbines when solar and wind are producing, open them when they're not. If a country is blessed with extensive hydroelectric potential then great. But hydroelectricity is a matter of geography, and plenty of regions do not have the right geography to construct dams. Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage. Other proposals like hydrogen storage, flywheels, etc. have not actually been deployed to the grid so we have no real-world cost history for these systems. Somebody writing a white paper claiming $X/KWh of storage and actually building a system are two very different things.
  - rcpt 5y ago
    > 12,500 TWh of electricity daily You're simplifying out that electric consumption varies during the day.
    - Manuel_D 5y ago
      Excellent point. Peak electricity consumption occurs during the evenings when solar is producing little, if any, electricity. Daily fluctuations of electricity usage put an even greater demand on electricity storage.
      - epistasis 5y ago
        That's not correct, peak demand is usually during mid-day, at least in the US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27212 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27212
        Manuel_D 5y ago
        I'm seeing it peak around the evening in all time zones. This is the link to the actual energy grid visualization tool: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/electric_overview/US48/US48/ElectricityOverview-2/edit https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/el... Browsing the last day's energy usage yields peaks at: Eastern: 8pm Central: 7pm Mountain 6pm Pacific: 5pm
        qqqwerty 5y ago
        Due to AC usage, electricity demand tends to be much higher in the summers than in the winters. And the demand profile in the summers peaks in mid-late afternoon. i.e You are not looking at the highest overall peak of the year, just the hourly peaks from the last few days.
  - Tade0 5y ago
    > Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage. It may not be so now, but in 7 years, or in other words, by the time a nuclear power plant commissioned today starts producing power, it definitely will. Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024: https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-2024-capacities-and-key-players https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-... Without a sudden, disruptive change in the cost and rate of deployment of nuclear there doesn't exist a path for it become a significantly larger part of the energy mix.
- belorn 5y ago
  Germany should pick this up and pledge to be free of fossil fueled power plants by 2025, banning energy generated from fossil fuels from being bought and consumed. If they can beat France on cost then here is a political win to be made. Be it using lithium batteries to store up 3-4 weeks worth of the nations energy consumption, or the more likely green hydrogen which is commonly suggested as being more likely choice for wind energy. The current commercial viable lithium battery solution, that which solar farms has written articles about, is around 4 hours of 80% capacity. Not bad. Every day the batteries get charged when the sun is at its peak and powers prices is at its lowest point, and every day when the sun goes down they can utilize the highest price point as demand exceed supply of cheap energy. For wind it is a bit more complicated. You can have a few weeks of good weather, followed by a long period of low wind conditions and high demand. A few hours won't cut it, and the more capacity you add the slower the discharge cycle will be. Green hydrogen would be a more economical storage medium, but right now the technology is having a hard time to be economical viable. That said it would benefit the world if Germany made a run for it so we can compare the cost to nuclear.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > pledge to be free of fossil fueled power plants by 2025 Unlike pledges, which can be produced instantly, actually bringing reliable power online takes more than 3 years. It's these types of pledges that make the public view these replacement efforts as fundamentally unserious. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of nuclear and think the industrialized west should follow in France's footsteps. But we will not get there by 2025. We may never get there as long as we approach this problem in such an unserious manner.
    - belorn 5y ago
      The parent post is claiming that the storage solutions are right now cheaper than the alternatives. If they are already here in terms of costs then bringing them online should be fairly quick ordeal. I agree with you however that it will take much longer than 3 years. Lithium batteries can be done today for the kind of storage solution which they are suitable, but not for wind. The green hydrogen might work, but we have yet to see large scale production and we are nowhere near to have it operate as an alternative to natural gas on a nation scale. Germany should really make an attempt if they wish to take a different path from France, but it will likely take a few decades if its successful.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Base load is a dead concept. Look at the chart in your last link: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-three-myths-about-baseload https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr... They match up demand with load by using a buttload of hydro and and even larger amount of natural gas. We can't use natural gas if we're trying to get rid of fossil fuels and we can't use hydro in places without appropriate geography, so then what? To say nothing of what happens when solar and wind are "it's cloudy and there's no wind right now" intermittent rather than time-of-day intermittent.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Overbuilding renewables (and accepting seasonal curtailment), utility scale battery and hydro storage, and HVDC transmission and robust interconnections between grids/systems. Whatever is left will be a pragmatic amount of natural gas/green hydrogen/ammonia mix for combustion. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-about-the-need-for-nuclear/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou... > To start, we’ll consider Sanders’ claim that “scientists tell us” that it’s possible to get to a zero-carbon electrical grid without nuclear power. > “The shortest answer is yes, that’s true. Scientists do tell us that we can,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. > Ryan Jones, an expert in electricity systems and a co-founder of Evolved Energy Research, a consulting company that models low-carbon transitions, agreed. “Anyone who says that nuclear is 100% necessary on a technical basis, I would claim, just hasn’t looked at the alternatives in enough detail,” he said in an email. > Most experts FactCheck.org contacted, including those who think nuclear power should remain an option, said that from a technical perspective, nuclear is not needed to decarbonize the grid.
    - rembicilious 5y ago
      Woopty doo, you don’t “technically” need nuclear power to go carbon neutral. If it shaves a decade or two off the process isn’t it worth it? Eventually you can start retiring nuclear plants, but in the mean time isn’t it better to focus on the carbon issue?
UncleOxidant 5y ago
> intermittency What's the uptime for fission plants? I recall that our "local" nuclear power plant (Trojan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant ) being down more often than it was up. Maybe it's because it was an old design or something, but it went online in 1975 which doesn't seem that old. It operated from 1975 to 1992.
- version_five 5y ago
  Normally there are multiple reactors and scheduled shutdowns. This is true for any power source. I'm sure there are differences in maintenance efficiency vs coal or hydro, but it's a different question than short term fluctuation that are a characteristic of wind and solar.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  The uptime (or capacity factor) for fission plants is the highest of any energy source, at over 90% [1] [2]. By comparison, wind and solar at at 35% and 25% respectively. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-capacity-factors-by-selected-energy-source-since-1998/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-capaci... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Worldwide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Worldwide
  - pngai 5y ago
    Also most downtime for nuclear power is scheduled which helps the grid operator avoid blackouts.
    - lovemenot 5y ago
      Somehow I doubt those figures reflect disaster response downtime, such as we have had in Japan for a decade. One may argue that was an overreaction, but the people of Japan beg to differ. Regardless, those shut down reactors ought to drag down capacity factor for the nuclear industry, if the figures are to be credible. Wind doesn't always blow and people react badly to melt-down. These are both facts of life.
manquer 5y ago
Would you also consider the costs of next 10,000 years of safe storage of nuclear waste? If we don't have a viable and economically well understood solution for nuclear waste handling , any cost calculations for nuclear is a waste of time .
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  "What about nuclear waste" is a fossil fuel industry talking point because the government doesn't want to talk about what long-lived nuclear waste actually is. It's plutonium. There are treaties that say you can't use spent fuel from civilian power reactors to make nuclear weapons, so nobody admits to doing this, but they probably are. That's where it goes. But since nobody can admit to it, the representative from coal country gets to say 'what about nuclear waste' whenever somebody wants to replace coal with nuclear and nobody can tell them the answer because they're not allowed to admit it. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. There are also newer reactor designs that can run on plutonium (permanently eliminating it) and also intentionally produce Plutonium-240 in amounts that make it impossible to use for weapons. If that's what we actually wanted to do with it.
  - manquer 5y ago
    Plutonium-239 (and neptunium-237 not used in weapons AFAIK ) are the most long lived isotopes of HLW ( High Level Wastes) yes. There are also other isotopes and other types of waste. We don't have yet data for any civilian waste disposal ( Yuccta mountain project is effectively dead now. We currently do not have a viable economically well understood solution, not hypothetical plans which may work to use plutonium effectively [1] at costs we have no idea about or disposal facility for which costs are not really known yet for all types (HLW/ILW and LLW) waste products we cannot talk costs of ownership.[2] That doesn't mean we shouldn't do nuclear or not build new plants, but without knowing these costs any estimate of cost of ownership is useless numbers in the air as nobody knows what it is going to actually cost yet. [1] Again engineering and economics, engineering maybe well understood, costs are not, we don't know the costs until we build a few, nuclear is notorious for widely over running cost estimates compared to any other power generation method. [2] We don't need to measure thousand years of disposal to know the costs, we just need to run an actual disposal site for few years to really estimate the costs .
twelvechairs 5y ago
A mix of sources (e.g. a few solar and wind plants in different locations) overcomes much of the intermittency and storage issues. It usually requires upgrades to the grid and beyond that just some careful management of the (less regular) intermittency issues (whether storage or alternative sources on demand). One plant should not be judged on its intermittency alone. Its just not how the system works at a connected-grid scale.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  Extreme weather events can result in both extreme energy demand and edge cases for intermittent energy production. We can’t just rely on the low probability of our energy sources dropping out at the same time. That’s just begging for a catastrophic black swan event. Heat and cold can kill during a power outage. At least we need massive peaker capacity (with pipes that don’t freeze), and that’s part of the price tag.
  - gpm 5y ago
    Extreme weather events tend to cause issues for all kinds of power generation, including the so called non-intermittent ones. For example the extreme (for the location) cold in texas last winter took out nuclear, gas, coal, and wind power. There's nothing special about the "intermittent" ones here. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46836 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46836
    - fastball 5y ago
      I'm not seeing that the nuclear plant shut down due to the cold?
      - Retric 5y ago
        Look at the red line it dips at on the second Monday just like coal and natural gas. The drop wasn’t as severe, but it was significant and lasted several days.
      - 5y ago
cinquemb 5y ago
LCOE for CPVCSP + molten salt storage systems are already cheaper than nuclear according to lazards (and increasingly more so with every new plant online), but probably not acceptable for anywhere above the latitude of northern Germany. The EU would need about 10k Cerro Dominador's (which would cover about 1% of the surface area of the EU) to supply its energy needs at worst case (using ~1kwh/m2/day seen during dec/jan).
M2Ys4U 5y ago
>When probed on how to address intermittency, many wind and solar advocates propose things like hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air, or other solutions that are currently in the prototyping stage and have yet to actually be deployed to a grid and demonstrate viability. Cryogenic energy storage ("liquid air") plants have been deployed - a 15 MWh (5 MW peak) grid-scale demonstration plant has been operating in Greater Manchester near where I live since 2018, and there's a permanent 250 MWh (50 MW peak) plant under construction on the opposite side of the city region. Granted that peak energy usage in the UK today was around 42 GW, so it's a small fraction (OTOO a tenth of a percent at peak) of what's needed, but... it's coming. I fully agree with you, though, that nuclear is needed. Renewables + storage can't be the complete answer. I'm a wind, solar and nuclear advocate.
g8oz 5y ago
Comparing the cost of an energy source that has consistently failed to meet budget and construction timeline targets to those that have is what is actually comparing apples to oranges
WalterBright 5y ago
The simplest energy storage solution is your hot water heater. Turning on everyone's hot water heater when there is surplus electricity, and turning them off when there's a deficit, is a very low cost solution. The next level is using residential HVAC systems the same way. Comfortable temperatures are a range, so heating/cooling can push the temps to one end of the range, and when there is less electricity available, they can drift to the other end. The charger for your electric car is another very practical sink for cheap electricity. This is accomplished by having a spot price for electricity, and then people buying thermostats that query the spot price and turn HVAC, hot water heater, car battery chargers, etc., on and off. This can be extended EVEN FURTHER by heating/cooling a pile of rocks to later use to heat/cool the house. A battery consisting of a pile of rocks can't be expensive. The idea is to not only adjust supply to the demand, but to shape the demand to the supply. I am utterly astonished that this is never, ever discussed when talking about solutions to fluctuating supply. Having fixed electricity rates 24/7 is simply madness in today's electricity generation situation.
- rembicilious 5y ago
  Where I live the vast majority of heat is produced by natural gas or propane. This includes water boilers, water heaters, clothes dryers, cooking ranges and ovens.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I bet the air conditioner isn't! Besides, if you could buy an electric water heater that runs when electricity is mostly free, wouldn't you replace your gas heater? I would.
    - Aerroon 5y ago
      This is a good point, but would that ever actually happen? Or would it just be "free" electricity at first and later the electric boiler owners find out that a gas one would've been cheaper after all.
      - 5y ago
petre 5y ago
Flyeheels are not in prototyping stage but they only store modest amounts of energy. https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/uk_to_host_europes_largest_battery_flywheel_system https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/uk_to_host_europes_l...
tempestn 5y ago
One partial solution to the renewables problem is to massively over-build. If they continue to drop in price, that will be feasible. Solar can be built up to the point where it will reliably produce sufficient daytime power even on very cloudy days for instance. Obviously it doesn't produce at night, but usage is also lower at night (in the future variable pricing to keep that the case as more electric cars come online). Likewise wind turbines can reliably produce power day and night if they're a bit geographically distributed and in sufficient numbers. This also means that often there will be more power available than needed. Some turbines can simply be stopped (braked) during those periods, but we may indeed find many loads can be time-shifted, reducing the baseline amount that needs to be reliably produced. Long way of saying I agree with you; to make a reasonable comparison, you need to include an over-building factor to account for the variable nature of renewables. I'm not sure what that factor is (obviously it depends on a lot of variables), but I know it's been studied.
- RobertoG 5y ago
  The problem with over-build is that if you count the energy necessary for building the renewable systems (mining, transport, building..) and the losses in distribution, the return of energy could be not so great. This estimation is a depressing reading: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/12/3036/htm https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/12/3036/htm Estimated energy return on energy invested: onshore wind 2.9:1 offshore wind 2.3:1 photovoltaic 1.8:1 concentrated solar power <1:1
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Same for nuclear, you must take in consideration the nuclear plant destruction, which is pricey, and almost never factored in. In fact, for some weird reasons, I see cost reports in France factoring in wiring for wind energy, but not for nuclear. Also nuclear assume good relationship with nations providing the fuel, which is costly: see Mali war for my country. Getting your hands on objective calculations to compare cost for all energy types it something I seem to never be able to do.
cztomsik 5y ago
I think one interesting solution is to store energy in "gravity", just pull something really heavy up and then when you need energy, let it fall and go through generator. https://gravitricity.com/ https://gravitricity.com/

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Renewables and storage are already cheaper than nuclear. Base load is a dead concept. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fossil-fuels-buries-nuclear/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-sola... https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-record-setting-solar-power-price-under-2%c2%a2-kwh/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-rec... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108 https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-boost-for-renewables-grid-scale-battery-storage-is-on-the-rise https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-boost-for-renewables-grid-... https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-three-myths-about-baseload https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...

Manuel_D 5y ago
~~And which storage system is that?~~ (parent post was edited with links after my response) Lithium ion battery production is at only ~400 GWh per year. By comparison, the US uses 12,500 TWh of electricity daily, or just over 500 GWh per hour. And this is only electricity, not total energy usage. Attempting to provision widespread lithium ion storage would lead to demand shock and skyrocketing prices. Not to mention it would involve delaying transition from ICE vehicles to EVs. You're right in some scenarios: if a country has extensive dam networks, then yes renewables + storage could be cheaper. Dams provide immense energy storage capacity. Close the turbines when solar and wind are producing, open them when they're not. If a country is blessed with extensive hydroelectric potential then great. But hydroelectricity is a matter of geography, and plenty of regions do not have the right geography to construct dams. Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage. Other proposals like hydrogen storage, flywheels, etc. have not actually been deployed to the grid so we have no real-world cost history for these systems. Somebody writing a white paper claiming $X/KWh of storage and actually building a system are two very different things.
- rcpt 5y ago
  > 12,500 TWh of electricity daily You're simplifying out that electric consumption varies during the day.
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    Excellent point. Peak electricity consumption occurs during the evenings when solar is producing little, if any, electricity. Daily fluctuations of electricity usage put an even greater demand on electricity storage.
    - epistasis 5y ago
      That's not correct, peak demand is usually during mid-day, at least in the US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27212 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27212
      - Manuel_D 5y ago
        I'm seeing it peak around the evening in all time zones. This is the link to the actual energy grid visualization tool: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/electric_overview/US48/US48/ElectricityOverview-2/edit https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/el... Browsing the last day's energy usage yields peaks at: Eastern: 8pm Central: 7pm Mountain 6pm Pacific: 5pm
        qqqwerty 5y ago
        Due to AC usage, electricity demand tends to be much higher in the summers than in the winters. And the demand profile in the summers peaks in mid-late afternoon. i.e You are not looking at the highest overall peak of the year, just the hourly peaks from the last few days.
- Tade0 5y ago
  > Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage. It may not be so now, but in 7 years, or in other words, by the time a nuclear power plant commissioned today starts producing power, it definitely will. Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024: https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-2024-capacities-and-key-players https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-... Without a sudden, disruptive change in the cost and rate of deployment of nuclear there doesn't exist a path for it become a significantly larger part of the energy mix.
belorn 5y ago
Germany should pick this up and pledge to be free of fossil fueled power plants by 2025, banning energy generated from fossil fuels from being bought and consumed. If they can beat France on cost then here is a political win to be made. Be it using lithium batteries to store up 3-4 weeks worth of the nations energy consumption, or the more likely green hydrogen which is commonly suggested as being more likely choice for wind energy. The current commercial viable lithium battery solution, that which solar farms has written articles about, is around 4 hours of 80% capacity. Not bad. Every day the batteries get charged when the sun is at its peak and powers prices is at its lowest point, and every day when the sun goes down they can utilize the highest price point as demand exceed supply of cheap energy. For wind it is a bit more complicated. You can have a few weeks of good weather, followed by a long period of low wind conditions and high demand. A few hours won't cut it, and the more capacity you add the slower the discharge cycle will be. Green hydrogen would be a more economical storage medium, but right now the technology is having a hard time to be economical viable. That said it would benefit the world if Germany made a run for it so we can compare the cost to nuclear.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > pledge to be free of fossil fueled power plants by 2025 Unlike pledges, which can be produced instantly, actually bringing reliable power online takes more than 3 years. It's these types of pledges that make the public view these replacement efforts as fundamentally unserious. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of nuclear and think the industrialized west should follow in France's footsteps. But we will not get there by 2025. We may never get there as long as we approach this problem in such an unserious manner.
  - belorn 5y ago
    The parent post is claiming that the storage solutions are right now cheaper than the alternatives. If they are already here in terms of costs then bringing them online should be fairly quick ordeal. I agree with you however that it will take much longer than 3 years. Lithium batteries can be done today for the kind of storage solution which they are suitable, but not for wind. The green hydrogen might work, but we have yet to see large scale production and we are nowhere near to have it operate as an alternative to natural gas on a nation scale. Germany should really make an attempt if they wish to take a different path from France, but it will likely take a few decades if its successful.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Base load is a dead concept. Look at the chart in your last link: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-three-myths-about-baseload https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr... They match up demand with load by using a buttload of hydro and and even larger amount of natural gas. We can't use natural gas if we're trying to get rid of fossil fuels and we can't use hydro in places without appropriate geography, so then what? To say nothing of what happens when solar and wind are "it's cloudy and there's no wind right now" intermittent rather than time-of-day intermittent.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Overbuilding renewables (and accepting seasonal curtailment), utility scale battery and hydro storage, and HVDC transmission and robust interconnections between grids/systems. Whatever is left will be a pragmatic amount of natural gas/green hydrogen/ammonia mix for combustion. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-about-the-need-for-nuclear/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou... > To start, we’ll consider Sanders’ claim that “scientists tell us” that it’s possible to get to a zero-carbon electrical grid without nuclear power. > “The shortest answer is yes, that’s true. Scientists do tell us that we can,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. > Ryan Jones, an expert in electricity systems and a co-founder of Evolved Energy Research, a consulting company that models low-carbon transitions, agreed. “Anyone who says that nuclear is 100% necessary on a technical basis, I would claim, just hasn’t looked at the alternatives in enough detail,” he said in an email. > Most experts FactCheck.org contacted, including those who think nuclear power should remain an option, said that from a technical perspective, nuclear is not needed to decarbonize the grid.
  - rembicilious 5y ago
    Woopty doo, you don’t “technically” need nuclear power to go carbon neutral. If it shaves a decade or two off the process isn’t it worth it? Eventually you can start retiring nuclear plants, but in the mean time isn’t it better to focus on the carbon issue?

UncleOxidant 5y ago

> intermittency What's the uptime for fission plants? I recall that our "local" nuclear power plant (Trojan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant ) being down more often than it was up. Maybe it's because it was an old design or something, but it went online in 1975 which doesn't seem that old. It operated from 1975 to 1992.

version_five 5y ago
Normally there are multiple reactors and scheduled shutdowns. This is true for any power source. I'm sure there are differences in maintenance efficiency vs coal or hydro, but it's a different question than short term fluctuation that are a characteristic of wind and solar.
Manuel_D 5y ago
The uptime (or capacity factor) for fission plants is the highest of any energy source, at over 90% [1] [2]. By comparison, wind and solar at at 35% and 25% respectively. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-capacity-factors-by-selected-energy-source-since-1998/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-capaci... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Worldwide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Worldwide
- pngai 5y ago
  Also most downtime for nuclear power is scheduled which helps the grid operator avoid blackouts.
  - lovemenot 5y ago
    Somehow I doubt those figures reflect disaster response downtime, such as we have had in Japan for a decade. One may argue that was an overreaction, but the people of Japan beg to differ. Regardless, those shut down reactors ought to drag down capacity factor for the nuclear industry, if the figures are to be credible. Wind doesn't always blow and people react badly to melt-down. These are both facts of life.

manquer 5y ago

Would you also consider the costs of next 10,000 years of safe storage of nuclear waste? If we don't have a viable and economically well understood solution for nuclear waste handling , any cost calculations for nuclear is a waste of time .

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
"What about nuclear waste" is a fossil fuel industry talking point because the government doesn't want to talk about what long-lived nuclear waste actually is. It's plutonium. There are treaties that say you can't use spent fuel from civilian power reactors to make nuclear weapons, so nobody admits to doing this, but they probably are. That's where it goes. But since nobody can admit to it, the representative from coal country gets to say 'what about nuclear waste' whenever somebody wants to replace coal with nuclear and nobody can tell them the answer because they're not allowed to admit it. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. There are also newer reactor designs that can run on plutonium (permanently eliminating it) and also intentionally produce Plutonium-240 in amounts that make it impossible to use for weapons. If that's what we actually wanted to do with it.
- manquer 5y ago
  Plutonium-239 (and neptunium-237 not used in weapons AFAIK ) are the most long lived isotopes of HLW ( High Level Wastes) yes. There are also other isotopes and other types of waste. We don't have yet data for any civilian waste disposal ( Yuccta mountain project is effectively dead now. We currently do not have a viable economically well understood solution, not hypothetical plans which may work to use plutonium effectively [1] at costs we have no idea about or disposal facility for which costs are not really known yet for all types (HLW/ILW and LLW) waste products we cannot talk costs of ownership.[2] That doesn't mean we shouldn't do nuclear or not build new plants, but without knowing these costs any estimate of cost of ownership is useless numbers in the air as nobody knows what it is going to actually cost yet. [1] Again engineering and economics, engineering maybe well understood, costs are not, we don't know the costs until we build a few, nuclear is notorious for widely over running cost estimates compared to any other power generation method. [2] We don't need to measure thousand years of disposal to know the costs, we just need to run an actual disposal site for few years to really estimate the costs .

twelvechairs 5y ago

A mix of sources (e.g. a few solar and wind plants in different locations) overcomes much of the intermittency and storage issues. It usually requires upgrades to the grid and beyond that just some careful management of the (less regular) intermittency issues (whether storage or alternative sources on demand). One plant should not be judged on its intermittency alone. Its just not how the system works at a connected-grid scale.

fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
Extreme weather events can result in both extreme energy demand and edge cases for intermittent energy production. We can’t just rely on the low probability of our energy sources dropping out at the same time. That’s just begging for a catastrophic black swan event. Heat and cold can kill during a power outage. At least we need massive peaker capacity (with pipes that don’t freeze), and that’s part of the price tag.
- gpm 5y ago
  Extreme weather events tend to cause issues for all kinds of power generation, including the so called non-intermittent ones. For example the extreme (for the location) cold in texas last winter took out nuclear, gas, coal, and wind power. There's nothing special about the "intermittent" ones here. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46836 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46836
  - fastball 5y ago
    I'm not seeing that the nuclear plant shut down due to the cold?
    - Retric 5y ago
      Look at the red line it dips at on the second Monday just like coal and natural gas. The drop wasn’t as severe, but it was significant and lasted several days.
    - 5y ago

cinquemb 5y ago

LCOE for CPVCSP + molten salt storage systems are already cheaper than nuclear according to lazards (and increasingly more so with every new plant online), but probably not acceptable for anywhere above the latitude of northern Germany. The EU would need about 10k Cerro Dominador's (which would cover about 1% of the surface area of the EU) to supply its energy needs at worst case (using ~1kwh/m2/day seen during dec/jan).

M2Ys4U 5y ago

>When probed on how to address intermittency, many wind and solar advocates propose things like hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air, or other solutions that are currently in the prototyping stage and have yet to actually be deployed to a grid and demonstrate viability. Cryogenic energy storage ("liquid air") plants have been deployed - a 15 MWh (5 MW peak) grid-scale demonstration plant has been operating in Greater Manchester near where I live since 2018, and there's a permanent 250 MWh (50 MW peak) plant under construction on the opposite side of the city region. Granted that peak energy usage in the UK today was around 42 GW, so it's a small fraction (OTOO a tenth of a percent at peak) of what's needed, but... it's coming. I fully agree with you, though, that nuclear is needed. Renewables + storage can't be the complete answer. I'm a wind, solar and nuclear advocate.

g8oz 5y ago

Comparing the cost of an energy source that has consistently failed to meet budget and construction timeline targets to those that have is what is actually comparing apples to oranges

WalterBright 5y ago

The simplest energy storage solution is your hot water heater. Turning on everyone's hot water heater when there is surplus electricity, and turning them off when there's a deficit, is a very low cost solution. The next level is using residential HVAC systems the same way. Comfortable temperatures are a range, so heating/cooling can push the temps to one end of the range, and when there is less electricity available, they can drift to the other end. The charger for your electric car is another very practical sink for cheap electricity. This is accomplished by having a spot price for electricity, and then people buying thermostats that query the spot price and turn HVAC, hot water heater, car battery chargers, etc., on and off. This can be extended EVEN FURTHER by heating/cooling a pile of rocks to later use to heat/cool the house. A battery consisting of a pile of rocks can't be expensive. The idea is to not only adjust supply to the demand, but to shape the demand to the supply. I am utterly astonished that this is never, ever discussed when talking about solutions to fluctuating supply. Having fixed electricity rates 24/7 is simply madness in today's electricity generation situation.

rembicilious 5y ago
Where I live the vast majority of heat is produced by natural gas or propane. This includes water boilers, water heaters, clothes dryers, cooking ranges and ovens.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I bet the air conditioner isn't! Besides, if you could buy an electric water heater that runs when electricity is mostly free, wouldn't you replace your gas heater? I would.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    This is a good point, but would that ever actually happen? Or would it just be "free" electricity at first and later the electric boiler owners find out that a gas one would've been cheaper after all.
    - 5y ago

petre 5y ago

Flyeheels are not in prototyping stage but they only store modest amounts of energy. https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/uk_to_host_europes_largest_battery_flywheel_system https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/uk_to_host_europes_l...

tempestn 5y ago

One partial solution to the renewables problem is to massively over-build. If they continue to drop in price, that will be feasible. Solar can be built up to the point where it will reliably produce sufficient daytime power even on very cloudy days for instance. Obviously it doesn't produce at night, but usage is also lower at night (in the future variable pricing to keep that the case as more electric cars come online). Likewise wind turbines can reliably produce power day and night if they're a bit geographically distributed and in sufficient numbers. This also means that often there will be more power available than needed. Some turbines can simply be stopped (braked) during those periods, but we may indeed find many loads can be time-shifted, reducing the baseline amount that needs to be reliably produced. Long way of saying I agree with you; to make a reasonable comparison, you need to include an over-building factor to account for the variable nature of renewables. I'm not sure what that factor is (obviously it depends on a lot of variables), but I know it's been studied.

RobertoG 5y ago
The problem with over-build is that if you count the energy necessary for building the renewable systems (mining, transport, building..) and the losses in distribution, the return of energy could be not so great. This estimation is a depressing reading: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/12/3036/htm https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/12/3036/htm Estimated energy return on energy invested: onshore wind 2.9:1 offshore wind 2.3:1 photovoltaic 1.8:1 concentrated solar power <1:1

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Same for nuclear, you must take in consideration the nuclear plant destruction, which is pricey, and almost never factored in. In fact, for some weird reasons, I see cost reports in France factoring in wiring for wind energy, but not for nuclear. Also nuclear assume good relationship with nations providing the fuel, which is costly: see Mali war for my country. Getting your hands on objective calculations to compare cost for all energy types it something I seem to never be able to do.

cztomsik 5y ago

I think one interesting solution is to store energy in "gravity", just pull something really heavy up and then when you need energy, let it fall and go through generator. https://gravitricity.com/ https://gravitricity.com/