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"At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel)" AFAIK, that is a huge leap of faith, nevermind the overbuild r

"At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel)" AFAIK, that is a huge leap of faith, nevermind the overbuild requirements to supply it. Do you have any actual data/estimates to back up that theory? Bonus points for including the energy required to supply transportation needs, and energy growth estimates over say the next couple decades. Because, I've read a crapton of literature on this stuff (and I have a family connection to the TX energy system) and I simply can't see how any of this is going to actually work if 1: The costs don't balloon over carbon sources, 2: The grid maintains a reasonable level of reliability, 3: we can maintain the rare earth mines/production/etc needed to get us even to 100% over the next couple decades without accounting for demand growth. AFAIK: The only workable solution for providing a couple TW's of power realistically in the next decade is Nukes, everything else depends on some "breakthrough" that hasn't happened yet. Edit: If you take hydro out of the picture, the current status of wind/solar is really poor, and its only going to get worse when you have to build 6-8x as many wind turbines or 3-4x as many solar farms just to provide enough average energy to meet todays demands, and with that will come cost multiplication as well. Its easy to build 30% renewable, but every overbuild multiplier is just going to multiply the cost. Then you have to figure out how to store it. edit: edit: Here look at this: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-energy-system-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener... That is a projection of where the US will be in 30 years, and nothing really suggests to me that they are wrong. The only thing I think that will change that is a 1970's French like pivot which clears the red tape, and has an explicit goal of building the ~150 reactors in the US needs to remove most of that carbon. And then start handing it out like candy to other countries because we have standardized the design enough, and built enough of them to return it to 1960's levels of cost (aka cheaper than natural gas). My actual bet at this point is the Chinese do it, and replace the US as a worldwide leader in energy production.

marcosdumay 4y ago
Nice graph that of renewables production on your link. It's always interesting when you get one of those predictions of "yep, it's have grown exponentially since the beginning, but an inflection will start right now and we will only have the low-growth half of the logistic function at the future". I suggest your source has a bad model. Anyway, you are talking about costs of renewables production compared with gas. There's nothing to discuss on that anymore, renewables are cheaper when they can produce, their costs are falling, and fossil fuel costs are predicted to slowly raise forever. The only costs with any space to compare and discuss nowadays are about storage, not production.
- janef0421 4y ago
  Reliable storage requires surplus production, and that leads to a significant cost increase that is likely to be non-linear.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    All of electricity production requires surplus, we run our systems at a fraction of full capacity because that's the only sane way to design a system that has zero storage. As storage gets deployed more and more, we will be able to increase the capacity factor of all the more expensive parts, like transmission and distribution. Already, T&D is a huge cost of our electricity, something like 6-8 cents of the average 13 cents/kWh in the US, with the rest being generation costs. As solar and wind plunge below our current costs, to 1-2 cents/kWh, T&D becomes a much larger cost center, and only storage has the potential to undercut that. T&D is sized to peak draw, which is many many many multiples of average draw. Storage close to the meter solves all that, and drastically reduces the cost of T&D. If we are at 5-15 cents/kWh right now for lithium ion storage, it's going to be 2-6 cents in 10-15 years, faster than we could get the first new nuclear reactor online if we started building today. While I agree that underused storage does have higher cost, we will likely have a plethora of cheaper storage options in the future that only work at lower usage rates than daily discharge, and those can fill in the other parts of the cost/discharge frequency need.
    - StillBored 4y ago
      Any guesses what those storage technologies capable of scaling to TWh levels will be? Also, before wind/solar the grid was built to a small factor over the expected peak. Aka maybe 120% of yearly peak which also compensated for downtime and repairs. These renewable overbuilds are probably 3x-10x in capacity because it is not unusual for say a wind farm to be producing at single digit percentages of its nameplate capacity. In order to be in those lower overbuild ratios though you need ever larger amounts of storage. So it is an ugly curve, and one that will be in competition with carbon sources in many places due to politics, or simply economics.
7952 4y ago
It is obviously technically possible to build a couple terawatts of nuclear. But is there good evidence that the industry and supply chains can scale up quickly? How many new engineers and scientists do you need? And could that work in developing countries?

marcosdumay 4y ago

Nice graph that of renewables production on your link. It's always interesting when you get one of those predictions of "yep, it's have grown exponentially since the beginning, but an inflection will start right now and we will only have the low-growth half of the logistic function at the future". I suggest your source has a bad model. Anyway, you are talking about costs of renewables production compared with gas. There's nothing to discuss on that anymore, renewables are cheaper when they can produce, their costs are falling, and fossil fuel costs are predicted to slowly raise forever. The only costs with any space to compare and discuss nowadays are about storage, not production.

janef0421 4y ago
Reliable storage requires surplus production, and that leads to a significant cost increase that is likely to be non-linear.
- epistasis 4y ago
  All of electricity production requires surplus, we run our systems at a fraction of full capacity because that's the only sane way to design a system that has zero storage. As storage gets deployed more and more, we will be able to increase the capacity factor of all the more expensive parts, like transmission and distribution. Already, T&D is a huge cost of our electricity, something like 6-8 cents of the average 13 cents/kWh in the US, with the rest being generation costs. As solar and wind plunge below our current costs, to 1-2 cents/kWh, T&D becomes a much larger cost center, and only storage has the potential to undercut that. T&D is sized to peak draw, which is many many many multiples of average draw. Storage close to the meter solves all that, and drastically reduces the cost of T&D. If we are at 5-15 cents/kWh right now for lithium ion storage, it's going to be 2-6 cents in 10-15 years, faster than we could get the first new nuclear reactor online if we started building today. While I agree that underused storage does have higher cost, we will likely have a plethora of cheaper storage options in the future that only work at lower usage rates than daily discharge, and those can fill in the other parts of the cost/discharge frequency need.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    Any guesses what those storage technologies capable of scaling to TWh levels will be? Also, before wind/solar the grid was built to a small factor over the expected peak. Aka maybe 120% of yearly peak which also compensated for downtime and repairs. These renewable overbuilds are probably 3x-10x in capacity because it is not unusual for say a wind farm to be producing at single digit percentages of its nameplate capacity. In order to be in those lower overbuild ratios though you need ever larger amounts of storage. So it is an ugly curve, and one that will be in competition with carbon sources in many places due to politics, or simply economics.

7952 4y ago

It is obviously technically possible to build a couple terawatts of nuclear. But is there good evidence that the industry and supply chains can scale up quickly? How many new engineers and scientists do you need? And could that work in developing countries?