3 ms·
Pumped storage combined with solar and wind isnt orders of magnitude more than nuclear power. It's still cheaper. Fengning is less than half the cost of a nucle
by pydry 4y ago
Pumped storage combined with solar and wind isnt orders of magnitude more than nuclear power. It's still cheaper. Fengning is less than half the cost of a nuclear plant and delivers twice as much power. It's a very effective battery.
Pumped (or indeed, any kind of) storage just isnt very economic when youve got oodles of cheap, dispatchable gas.
Nuclear power almost always exists to help prop up military nuclear requirements. This is as true in Finland (whose plants were built by Russia) as it is anywhere else.
- cinntaile 4y agoOnly 2 out of 5 reactors are Russian built, so only 1 out of 2 plants. There were plans for another Russian reactor but those plans are likely shelved now.
- PaulHoule 4y agoWhere do you get the water for pumped storage and where do you put it? I have a hill that goes up about 300 feet on my farm. I've done the math on the volume of a reservoir for a pumped storage system and it is pretty shocking. The US has domestic production of natural gas, the EU has some domestic production and imports from Russia. Japan imports a lot of LNG. There are many countries that don't use natural gas but they don't use pumped storage, instead they use some combination of: oil, very high prices, rolling blackouts. The military connection is bogus. The size of the domestic nuclear industry is much much larger than plutonium production or uranium enrichment for weapons. Fuel is irradiated for such a long time in commercial reactors that the resulting product contains like amounts of Pu240 which contaminates the desired Pu239 and makes it undesirable for weapons.
- pydry 4y agoThere are many reasons not to do it. A shortage of bodies of water above other bodies of water isnt one of them.
- Dma54rhs 4y agoThe geology needed for pumped storage is incredibly expensive and difficult, the vast majority of the world can't do it and would be even more expensive than nuclear.
- zajio1am 4y ago> Fengning is less than half the cost of a nuclear plant and delivers twice as much power. But the issue is not power but storage capacity. Fengning has 40 GWh of storage capacity, that is less than day of production of basic 2 GW nuclear power plant. For countries in central Europe (or even northern Europe, like Finland), solar production during winter is generally negligible so from renewables you are left with wind energy. There are multiple-day periods of no wind, so just to keep 3 days of wind energy to replace one continuous 2 GW nuclear power, you would need ~3.6 Fengnings.
- pydry 4y agoPeriods of high wind tend to coincide with periods of low solar and vice versa. That negligible solar tends to coincide with the very highest wind production. Offshore also tends to anticorrelate with onshore wind. Diversity of wind and solar production already takes a huge chunk out of variability. Variable/surge/nearly free pricing would take another huge chunk of storage requirements as easily time shifted demand is matched to production (car charging, aluminum smelters, heat pumps, etc). With 2.5 days of pumped storage you're probably covered for about 4 years out of 5. Those 10 day wind lulls happen 1 year out of 10 in summer and 1 in 25 in winter.
- Paradigma11 4y agoWe do have historical weather data, so there should be no reason to guess if a certain amount of storage is sufficient. I would be far more positive on renewables plus storage if people could point to studies that given this grid, storage, energy production and weather data that would have happened during that time period in that area.