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> Actual scientists and competent tech people have driven the costs of solar and wind power, as well as storage, down by several orders of magnitude Yet have b
by IMTDb 5y ago
> Actual scientists and competent tech people have driven the costs of solar and wind power, as well as storage, down by several orders of magnitude
Yet have been incapable of offering a way to power my oven on a cold windless night without burning something.
Virtually all solar and wind installation are accompanied by a thermal power plant (usually gas) that's supposed to takeover when renewable can't be trusted. Yet the eco crowd refuses to factor in the cost of these - otherwise completely useless - backup power plants in the cost of their magical solution. They also conveniently refuse to look at the CO2 produced when using those.
In short, renewables are cheap (if you forget that you also have to create a full backup system) and produce no CO2 (if you forget to measure what's produced by the backup system). Selective memory at it's finest.
Yes, I know, batteries are coming. There is a new breakthrough that will made this practical every 5 year. We have been hearing that same song for the past 4 decades. In reality, energy storage is quite close to optimal. There are some improvements made here and there, but nothing that will be a game changer: if it does not work now (it doesn't), it probably won't in a near future.
- Karunamon 5y ago>...the CO2 produced when using those. Isn't that still a net win? If you're burning N tons of CO2 now, you're burning N-Y during the hours when you don't have to be running the fossil plant. Bonus points if your new backup plant is cleaner (say, NG vs coal)
- IMTDb 5y agoIt's absolutely a net gain when compared to running gas/coal only. But unfair to say that this produces 0 CO2, like it's often claimed. And this backup CO2 production is very far from negligible. Similarly, the cost of running gas only should be computed as: cost of gas power plant + cost of gas. And the cost of the renewable option should be computed as : cost of renewable power plan + cost of backup gas power plant + cost of backup gas. You can't magically exclude the backup from the calculation. And suddenly the renewable option sounds way more expensive.
- ZetaZero 5y agoBatteries were $2,152 per KWh as of 2015, and now go for $137 KWh. That's a 15x improvement in 7 years.
- colinmhayes 5y agoNuclear has the same problem though. It takes on the order of days to change the power output of a nuclear plant. You can't just run it at night or when the wind dies down like you can with a fossil fuel plant.
- cwillu 5y ago“Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute.[7] Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control. Some units follow a variable load program with one or two large power changes per day. Some designs allow for rapid changes of power level around rated power, a capability that is usable for frequency regulation.[8] A more efficient solution is to maintain the primary circuit at full power and to use the excess power for cogeneration.[9]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...
- Gwypaas 5y agoAnd now your nuclear plant which is a net loss running at 100% became an even larger liability.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- markvdb 5y agoThat is why green hydrogen derivatives are so important.
- VintageCool 5y ago1. the natural gas backup system already exists; it is our current infrastructure 2. batteries are already here. The US built 3.1 GW of grid-scale batteries in 2021, and utilities have filed with the EIA that they are building 10 GW of batteries in 2022-2023. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51518 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51518 3. the market for grid-scale batteries scarcely existed before the explosive build-out of solar in the past 3 years. Before recently, the only economic use of grid-scale energy storage was to store excess electricity produced overnight by nuclear power plants at places like the Bath County Pumped Hydro plant, or the "store nuclear-produced energy and release it during commercial breaks of EastEnders" pumped hydro plants in the UK. This means that there is suddenly a huge market incentive to develop new energy storage tech, and the market incentive simply didn't exist 10 years ago. I expect that to produce dividends.