6 ms·

Ah come on that wouldn't have been necessary... energy costs could be a lot lower if the path towards renewables hadn't been blocked and undermined for years, i

• acidburnNSA 4y ago
  I'm stating a simple concept, which is that if you put some wind and solar into a heavily-fossil powered grid, the first 30% wind and solar are easy, and the last 30% are harder. But if you do 100% wind and solar, then you have to start spending money on things other than generators. The fraction of cost that is wind/solar generators vs. e.g. energy storage systems, transmission, recycling, etc. shifts from 1 to ~0 at scale.
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    If you look at the minimum cost of providing synthetic baseload in a 100% renewable scenario, the renewable inputs can be > 50% of the cost (the other parts being various kinds of storage). This is geographically variable, though.
    • Manuel_D 4y ago
      > the other parts being various kinds of storage This is handwaving away the most difficult part of of a 100% renewable grid.
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        By which you mean, of course, the least difficult part, and the part that is needed only after all the hard parts, the ones that actually produce energy in useful form, have been built out.
        • Manuel_D 4y ago
          No, energy storage is a far more challenging task than generating it. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60TWh of energy per day. Most energy storage projects are in the hundreds of megawatt hour range, a few in the gigawatts. Estimated for a 100% renewable grid depends on the solar to wind ratio and degrees of overproduction, but they usually fall in the range of 12-24 hours for a 0 carbon grid. And that figure of 60 TWh is only going to grow as underdeveloped countries become more wealthy and want A/C and other amenities. This is a colossal amount of storage, far outside the bounds of existing storage methods. Hence why plans for a renewable grid assume untested mechanisms like power to gas or compressed air will just scale to near-infinity.
          • ncmncm 4y ago
            In fact energy storage is a trivial matter of high-school-level physics. Most existing storage, taking advantage of existing hydro-power dams, uses excess energy to force water up to the reservoir, which energy is later extracted by letting it flow out through a turbine. New pumped-hydro systems built just for storage will be radically cheaper than existing dams, and be practical in hundreds of times as many places: you just need a hilltop no one is using, and water to pump up to it. The reservoir may be much cheaper than a hydro power dam because it does not need to contain high pressure; an earthen dike suffices. There are numerous other, equally simple methods, for places without enough hills or water. Synthetic fuels like hydrogen and ammonia are an attractive choice because tankage is cheap, and they are transportable and have myriad industrial uses, so after your tankage is full you can sell all further production. Of course one only builds storage after there is excess energy to put in it. We will need a lot of it, in time, but it is all just construction and mechanics: ordinary civil engineering. (If you have to lie about the practicality of storage in order to promote nukes, what does that really tell us about your nukes?)
• panick21_ 4y ago
  > if the path towards renewables hadn't been blocked and undermined for years That's a pretty hilarious claim given the absurd amount of global investment in the last 30 years. And lets be real here, nuclear has actually been blocked far more then renewables. In 1982 a green activists literally shot a french nuclear reactor with RPGs. Activists have surrounded nuclear plant and prevented them from being built, only for the state to build a coal plant in the same location. Research projects were canceled as soon as they hit slight issues because politicians did not want to stick their neck out. Compare this with renewables despite 20 decades of green transition and huge cost in Germany the results are not that great. France in 2 decades basically turned its whole gird green, Germany in comparison is not very close and still operates waste coal plants. Even project that were actually very successful and did show path for the future had to be killed of as was the case in France: > A 1998 "Inquiry commission on Superphenix and fast neutrons reactor sector" [3] reported that "decision to close Superphénix was included in Jospin's program ... in the agreement between Socialist Party and Green Party". Also the same report says "despite many difficulties, the technical results are meaningful". In the explanation of vote at the end of the report, commission members says "give up on Superphenix has been a big error" and "Superphenix has to die because is a symbol". France could have build multiple more of these, but of course instead of that they are building the same old PWRs. And generally the transition to nuclear would have happened in the US for example if coal had not been cheaper. Just as the transition to renewables had not happened without the state pushing the technology. The difference is just that now states are willing to accept higher prices and higher spending to push the preferred technology and in the 70/80s that was a total non-starter. > Please better check France for the often touted right way of going nucelar You mean the country that had a essentially green grid for the last 40 years? Are you aware of the fact that CO2 not produced earlier is far better for the environment then CO2 not produced now? Because the reality is France has done the whole world a major favor by running a large industrial economy with nuclear. The real failure in France is that they didn't double down on next generation nuclear and instead simply gave up and essentially stopped adding new capacity and instead relying on gas and German coal. Had Germany gone with nuclear the way France did both Germany and the world we would be in a much better position now. The health effects of coal in Germany alone are staggering. And that doesn't just go for Germany, German coal ash is distributed overall all of Europe, including low countries, France and Switzerland. So to say 'look France has a few issues with nuclear now what a failure of a strategy' is ridiculous when the country next to it burns huge amount of coal and gas. The reality is, had the world moved to nuclear we wouldn't nearly have the problem we have now. The grid would be much greener both in terms of CO2 and other emissions. Based on that you also have a great strategy to push out carbon from home heating and replacing it with electric. The same goes for home cocking with gas. Even for Deep Decarbonization of industry and transport nuclear provides solution. High temperature nuclear heat can be used to make hydrogen or provide heat for all kinds of other chemical process that currently use gas. We could have even done things like moving to nuclear power synthetic fuel production and added increasingly more methanol into gas (this technology was available in the form of Flex-Fuel Vehicles and has been used in the US and Brazil for example). That would have been a way to reduce carbon emission in transportation before electric cars became possible (thanks to Li-Ion). These are all things that nuclear visionaries like Alvin Weinberg advocated and that would have been possible had we pushed forward nuclear technology. Now non of it is to say that renewable now are bad, and since we have done the investment renewable are cheap and often make more sense then nuclear (given nuclear progress has been very limited). However to claim that the nuclear strategy was the wrong one is absurd given both the CO2 output and the general emissions produced by country that didn't have a strong nuclear strategy. The world made a huge mistake by not embracing nuclear.