4 ms·

I’m not against nuclear power but can anyone explain why a similar sized investment in solar+wind+geothermal+battery storage would not work?

winkeltripel 5y ago
Because the land needed for equivalent solar and wind would be massive. There would be no room for NIMBY. Imagine someone you love would lose their home so that a windmill could be constructed. Every city park would need to have a huge windmill, and every roof would need solar panels. That is assuming that we can even locate the material and manpower needed to build so much. This would be at least 2 orders of magnitude more than equivalent power from nuclear.
- onli 5y ago
  > and every roof would need solar panels That's already coming to Germany, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solare_Baupflicht https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solare_Baupflicht. Not legislated in the whole country yet, but that's just a matter of time now.
- danhor 5y ago
  Are you sure about that? The general figures I see are that around 2% of land for wind energy should be very sufficient, which would not need displacing of existing housing and certainly no construction in city parks.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  There is absolutely no need to devote land to exclusively solar or wind use. Farm and pasture land shared with solar panels yield more than without. Wind turbines can also be placed in farm and pasture land, displacing very little production. As I understand it, Germany already has a great deal of wind power installed.
tempestn 5y ago
Interesting question. I had thought batteries were still orders of magnitude more expensive than nuclear, but just looked up some numbers to try and get an idea. Caveat, these are just numbers I've looked up; they look reasonable to me, but I'm no expert, so could well be making a mistake here. Also I'm just looking at capital costs, not operation. From what I can find, the capital cost of a new nuclear plant is somewhere on the order of $6M-9M/MW. On the other hand, a 3MWh grid battery from Tesla runs about $1M. So ignoring cloudy days and just considering providing power overnight (in the winter), you'd need about 14 hours of capacity, so about $14M to provide 3MW, or roughly $5M/MW. So, in terms of initial capital cost, just the battery portion to handle the overnight gap in solar production would be roughly equivalent to the cost of nuclear, but of course that doesn't account for the cost of the solar panels, nor for the fact that there will be other periods when generation is low. (Although these can be partially dealt with by over-building the renewable generation and using wind as well as solar.) However, the other issue is that the lifespan of grid-connected lithium ion batteries appears to be about 5-15 years, whereas nuclear plants should generally last several decades at least. So, batteries + renewables are more expensive in terms of capital than nuclear plants, which are themselves quite expensive, but I must admit I'm surprised that the difference isn't even greater. I expect part of the problem is production capacity. You can build a 1100MW nuclear plant, but I expect it would be nearly impossible to buy a 14GWh of grid batteries because the capacity to build them in that scale just doesn't exist, yet at least. Also, as others have mentioned, you'd need a lot of space. There are other methods of storage that are used, pumped hydro being the most common in large scale, but requiring specific geography. There are other options like gravitational storage with shafts and weights or carts on tracks or what have you, but they're all expensive and/or difficult to scale.
- jpgvm 5y ago
  It's also just not a matter of cost but supply. Even if you had the money for enough batteries to meet storage requirements for a fully green grid there is almost no chance you could manufacture enough cells. For the forseeable future all cell production is going to go into cars because Tesla has fat enough margins to absorb increases in battery costs while utility scale storage can't.
  - SEJeff 5y ago
    Tesla is putting significant new investment into their energy business. Since they now have almost every major battery manufacturer globally doing business with them, they can shift to the less automotive grade chemistry for their stationary energy storage (power packs and mega packs). Elon’s literal words mention this: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/musk-vows-to-accelerate-tesla-solar-and-energy-storage-business-in-2022/617830/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/musk-vows-to-accelerate-tes...
    - jpgvm 5y ago
      Just because they will start using LFP for stationary storage doesn't mean they also won't consume all of the LFP capacity for cars and starve out stationary storage again. They already used LFP for all the China built M3s and started shipping those same M3s to non-Chinese markets. Right now all signs point to this continuing. Margins on cars are much better, right now cell supply is so constrained but demand for Teslas is so high they only manufacture the highest spec SKUs. If there are more cells they will go into producing first lower spec cars and then finally stationary packs will get whatever is left (if any).
      - SEJeff 5y ago
        Hey, I'm just parroting what the literal CEO of Tesla said, but you're fully entitled to your own opinion.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Lithium batteries are the most expensive storage alternative, and would compete with automotive use anyway. There are many others, and the only real question is which will be cheapest to deploy. Hydrogen is attractive despite its currently abysmal round-trip efficiency because hydrogen is so massively useful otherwise; the capital equipment for hydrogen production will never be idle even when the underground cavities hydrogen is stored in are considered full. (They never really get full, as such; the pressure just increases.) Efficiency will only ever improve. Practical alternatives to underground hydrogen include liquified air (also industrially useful after the tanks fill), anhydrous ammonia, underground compressed air (again, compressed hydrogen is even more useful), pumped underground hydro, pumped undersea hydro, iron-air batteries (which are extremely cheap, and safe) and even deep mine-shaft gravitational (again, also compatible with hydrogen, compressed air, and compressed hydrogen). Underground hydro is even more attractive than the mountaintop variety because the head may be thousands of meters.

winkeltripel 5y ago

Because the land needed for equivalent solar and wind would be massive. There would be no room for NIMBY. Imagine someone you love would lose their home so that a windmill could be constructed. Every city park would need to have a huge windmill, and every roof would need solar panels. That is assuming that we can even locate the material and manpower needed to build so much. This would be at least 2 orders of magnitude more than equivalent power from nuclear.

onli 5y ago
> and every roof would need solar panels That's already coming to Germany, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solare_Baupflicht https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solare_Baupflicht. Not legislated in the whole country yet, but that's just a matter of time now.
danhor 5y ago
Are you sure about that? The general figures I see are that around 2% of land for wind energy should be very sufficient, which would not need displacing of existing housing and certainly no construction in city parks.
ncmncm 5y ago
There is absolutely no need to devote land to exclusively solar or wind use. Farm and pasture land shared with solar panels yield more than without. Wind turbines can also be placed in farm and pasture land, displacing very little production. As I understand it, Germany already has a great deal of wind power installed.

tempestn 5y ago

Interesting question. I had thought batteries were still orders of magnitude more expensive than nuclear, but just looked up some numbers to try and get an idea. Caveat, these are just numbers I've looked up; they look reasonable to me, but I'm no expert, so could well be making a mistake here. Also I'm just looking at capital costs, not operation. From what I can find, the capital cost of a new nuclear plant is somewhere on the order of $6M-9M/MW. On the other hand, a 3MWh grid battery from Tesla runs about $1M. So ignoring cloudy days and just considering providing power overnight (in the winter), you'd need about 14 hours of capacity, so about $14M to provide 3MW, or roughly $5M/MW. So, in terms of initial capital cost, just the battery portion to handle the overnight gap in solar production would be roughly equivalent to the cost of nuclear, but of course that doesn't account for the cost of the solar panels, nor for the fact that there will be other periods when generation is low. (Although these can be partially dealt with by over-building the renewable generation and using wind as well as solar.) However, the other issue is that the lifespan of grid-connected lithium ion batteries appears to be about 5-15 years, whereas nuclear plants should generally last several decades at least. So, batteries + renewables are more expensive in terms of capital than nuclear plants, which are themselves quite expensive, but I must admit I'm surprised that the difference isn't even greater. I expect part of the problem is production capacity. You can build a 1100MW nuclear plant, but I expect it would be nearly impossible to buy a 14GWh of grid batteries because the capacity to build them in that scale just doesn't exist, yet at least. Also, as others have mentioned, you'd need a lot of space. There are other methods of storage that are used, pumped hydro being the most common in large scale, but requiring specific geography. There are other options like gravitational storage with shafts and weights or carts on tracks or what have you, but they're all expensive and/or difficult to scale.

jpgvm 5y ago
It's also just not a matter of cost but supply. Even if you had the money for enough batteries to meet storage requirements for a fully green grid there is almost no chance you could manufacture enough cells. For the forseeable future all cell production is going to go into cars because Tesla has fat enough margins to absorb increases in battery costs while utility scale storage can't.
- SEJeff 5y ago
  Tesla is putting significant new investment into their energy business. Since they now have almost every major battery manufacturer globally doing business with them, they can shift to the less automotive grade chemistry for their stationary energy storage (power packs and mega packs). Elon’s literal words mention this: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/musk-vows-to-accelerate-tesla-solar-and-energy-storage-business-in-2022/617830/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/musk-vows-to-accelerate-tes...
  - jpgvm 5y ago
    Just because they will start using LFP for stationary storage doesn't mean they also won't consume all of the LFP capacity for cars and starve out stationary storage again. They already used LFP for all the China built M3s and started shipping those same M3s to non-Chinese markets. Right now all signs point to this continuing. Margins on cars are much better, right now cell supply is so constrained but demand for Teslas is so high they only manufacture the highest spec SKUs. If there are more cells they will go into producing first lower spec cars and then finally stationary packs will get whatever is left (if any).
    - SEJeff 5y ago
      Hey, I'm just parroting what the literal CEO of Tesla said, but you're fully entitled to your own opinion.
ncmncm 5y ago
Lithium batteries are the most expensive storage alternative, and would compete with automotive use anyway. There are many others, and the only real question is which will be cheapest to deploy. Hydrogen is attractive despite its currently abysmal round-trip efficiency because hydrogen is so massively useful otherwise; the capital equipment for hydrogen production will never be idle even when the underground cavities hydrogen is stored in are considered full. (They never really get full, as such; the pressure just increases.) Efficiency will only ever improve. Practical alternatives to underground hydrogen include liquified air (also industrially useful after the tanks fill), anhydrous ammonia, underground compressed air (again, compressed hydrogen is even more useful), pumped underground hydro, pumped undersea hydro, iron-air batteries (which are extremely cheap, and safe) and even deep mine-shaft gravitational (again, also compatible with hydrogen, compressed air, and compressed hydrogen). Underground hydro is even more attractive than the mountaintop variety because the head may be thousands of meters.