3 ms·

So you can buffer the wind/solar output for just 78 minutes? Doesn’t sound like a complete solution. Edit: I guess per the paper it really depends on the speci

• Schroedingersat 4y ago
  The demonstration is 5kW year round with insignificant consumption of fossil fuels everywhere with a climate about as good as Toronto or better, not having somewhere to put all the sunlight. Mid-winter in high latitude you get as little as 2hrs of sunlight/day (or 0 in the arctic, but hardly anyone lives there). If you live in the tropics, 10kW is probably fine. Also if you feel the need to use it up, electrolyzers are cheap and hydrogen is worth money. You can also store a great deal of energy in a few tonnes of NaOH and avoid using precious winter electricity for heating. You can also reshuffle the wind, solar and battery for your local climate, or wait a year or three for sodium batteries to halve the price.
• qqqwerty 4y ago
  The parent is pointing out, that if you are trying to find a solution to generate 5kw of constant power using nuclear, for the same cost you can get an absurd amount of renewable generation and storage plus a backup generator. The batteries can store 15 hours worth of energy at peak demand, you get a 10x overbuild of peak capacity in solar, plus wind, biogas and a backup generator to boot. It is highly unlikely that the system would ever fail. I would guess you could probably cut the system size in half and still have uptime in the high 9's. And the added bonus is you would have a fair bit of redundancy should any part of the system need maintenance, whereas the nuclear solution doesn't even come with a backup generator.