7 ms·

I think it does, but someone independently verify my claim. As far as scale, we should consider that it may take ten years to build a nuclear plant, so worst ca

I think it does, but someone independently verify my claim. As far as scale, we should consider that it may take ten years to build a nuclear plant, so worst case we can compare projected storage production in that time frame rather than solely what is produced today. A benefit to my scheme is that roll out can begin immediately, even if reaching full scale takes a little while.

briffle 4y ago
Keep in mind this was the first AP1000 gen III+ reactor built in the US, and one of a handful in the world. The process should get smoother and faster as more are completed, and the process gets optimized.
toomuchtodo 4y ago
Base load is a myth. You're right; you can break ground today with renewables and start pushing fossil fuels out of the mix during daylight and windy periods, with batteries slowly consuming more of fossil generation as their costs decline. https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothing-renewables-cant-better/ https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi... There is ~1TW of renewables in US grid queues, and ~427GW of storage. While many of these projects might not get built, the velocity should be noted. ~95GW of nuclear generation capacity remains. It takes 10 years and billions of dollars to build a single nuclear generator. https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-interconnection-queues-as-wait-times-continue-to-grow/ https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter... https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-storage-in-us-interconnection-queues-alongside-nearly-1tw-of-renewables/ https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-st...
- HyperSane 4y ago
  "Base load is a myth" This is a lie repeated by anti-nuclear types. Base load is simply the year round constant electricity demand. How are we actually going to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of batteries? How are we going to dispose of them?
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    https://insideevs.com/news/523413/catl-unveils-sodium-ion-battery/ https://insideevs.com/news/523413/catl-unveils-sodium-ion-ba... A 4 hour battery for the entirety of world primary energy is about the same cost as one year of auto industry revenue. SIBs require no scarce resources and no toxic elements -- they're basically fancy dirt. For longer scale storage, there are electrolyser industries spooling up in multiple countries. Some of the individual factories are big enough to produce the entire presently installed base in 5 years. Existing OCGT plants have minimal capital and fixed costs, and can burn hydrogen or ammonia basically at cost -- yielding indefinite storage for what is effectively a fixed 4x multiple of the cost of energy.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    > How are we actually going to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of batteries? With battery factories. The very same that will be required to electrify vehicles when jurisdictions are enacting combustion vehicle sales bans at the end of the decade. 74-78 million new vehicles are sold each year. That's a lot of battery demand, which will be a forcing function to scale up battery manufacturing, driving down costs. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/electric-vehicles-to-drive-massive-battery-demand-bnef-chart https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/electri... > How are we going to dispose of them? We recycle them. We already do today. https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ (Redwood has battery recycling agreements with several automakers)
    - HyperSane 4y ago
      And where will we get the raw materials needed to build such vast amounts of batters? Global supply of lithium is already an issue just for electric car production. Global supply of lithium will not be sufficient to store grid scale amounts of energy. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-world-enough-lithium-resources/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor... The world could face lithium shortages by 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says, while Credit Suisse thinks demand could treble between 2020 and 2025, meaning “supply would be stretched”. About 2 billion EVs need to be on the road by 2050 for the world to hit net zero, the IEA says, but sales stood at just 6.6 million last year, and some carmakers are already selling out of EVs. Lithium supply faces challenges not only from surging demand, but because resources are concentrated in a few places and over half of today’s production is in areas with high water stress.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  > ~427GW of storage. Storage isn't measured in GW, but rather in GWh. I'd take any source that doesn't know the difference between W and Wh with a very, very large boulder of salt.
  - bewaretheirs 4y ago
    Well, you need both GWh and GW ratings for storage - how much fits in storage, and how fast can you add and remove stored energy.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      When you're looking at "overnight" levels of storage, you can basically just assume that systems will be able to charge and discharge fast enough, and focus entirely on GWh.
- rayiner 4y ago
  LOL base load is definitely not a myth. What's actually a myth is "supply and demand" in electricity, as if it's a commodities market. In reality it's more like homeostasis--you have to carefully match generation and load and if you don't match it within a few % shit goes extremely sideways.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Load shifting is definitely a thing, and it could become much more of a thing if we rolled out smart appliances and power meters that could automatically react to grid conditions in real time. You do have to carefully match generation and load, but that doesn't always have to be on the generation side, it can be on the load side.
    - catiopatio 4y ago
      I don’t want to live in a world where my appliances turn off at unexpected times to manage load. I also don’t want every appliance in my house connected to the cloud and collecting usage data. I sincerely doubt I’m in the minority on the former, and I hope I’m not in the minority on the latter.
      - bigfudge 4y ago
        That’s fine. You will be allowed to pay for peak time energy. Everyone else will get a better insulated fridge and allow their washing machine to start when the price for the next hour is low.
    - JamesBarney 4y ago
      I don't think load shifting can have much of an effect. I would be surprised if more than 10% of the load could be shifted more than an hour.
      - wumpus 4y ago
        Most home electric vehicle charging can be shifted by more than an hour.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Base load isn't a myth. The reality is that peak and trough loads differ by usually only ~20% outside of summer [1]. Thus, 80% is base load. > and ~427GW of storage Got a source for this claim? That's an order of magnitude off [2] from what I've read before. 1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 2. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/25-gw-of-energy-storage-planned-to-hit-us-grid-through-2023-69156372 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    You don't get to simultaneously claim that averaging loads over 50 degrees of longitude and 20 degrees of latitude is representitive and that averaging production over 20 degrees is impossible. If we pretend electricity can teleport, then you can reach an emissions level under half of the net zero target (and well within the range of emissions from open pit uranium mining and diffusion centrifuging) with today's tech at roughly the post-subsidy marginal cost of energy from a nuclear plant. https://model.energy/?results=e56f13ff1a1728e76048a94a0a37d9eb#solve https://model.energy/?results=e56f13ff1a1728e76048a94a0a37d9...
  - samatman 4y ago
    It's people being lied to by their sources, through a conflation of nameplate capacity and delivered power. You have to knock 90% off every claim you hear about a renewable, that puts the number in the ballpark of what users of electricity will actually get out of it. It's of course the fossil fuel industry which profits from this relentless mendacity. Renewables are great, but they aren't coal's competition and coal knows it. Nuclear is.
    - tchaffee 4y ago
      Sources lying to people is a bold claim that needs to be supported by evidence. Lacking that, folks should ignore claims like this.
      - 4y ago
Turing_Machine 4y ago
> As far as scale, we should consider that it may take ten years to build a nuclear plant Unlike the solar panel factories, battery factories, and replacement distribution network required to replace the entire US electrical grid, which can be online tomorrow morning at the snap of someone's fingers?
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Please read the rest of the paragraph.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    Where it says “a while?” This has the distinctive ring of Kentucky windage to me, are there any actual studies on how long it would take to do this? What’s the shape of the curve? If it’s a while on a logarithmic curve that’s very different than if it’s linear or exponential. The impression that I’ve gotten is that there isn’t a huge amount of slack panel production capacity sitting idle. If we’ve learned anything the last two years, hopefully it’s that supply chain problems can take a while to sort out.
    - tuatoru 4y ago
      Well, on the one hand, Chinese manufacturers (90% of the market) have announced expansions for 2022-2025 of 645 GWe annual production, over and above 2021's total annual manufacturing capacity of 220 GWe. On the other hand, likely all of that will be needed to meet Xi's 2030 target for PV power generation in China. (12,000 GWe capacity, up from 800 now? Something like that.) So near exponential but not much slack for others to use, probably.
      - Turing_Machine 4y ago
        I'm not quite sure I believe anything the Chinese government says. China hasn't stopped building nukes, you'll notice. Edit: See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s?leadSource=uverify%20wall https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
cycomanic 4y ago
It doesn't require back of the napkin calculations, there has been plenty of studies that showed that full renewable is possible even without storage (not counting current hydro). Storage just means less overprovisioning. What this does require is significant investment in grid infrastructure which has been criminally neglected in years.
- nine_k 4y ago
  How much solar can you overprovision to have power at night time? North America is not wide enough to have at least a bit of it illuminated by Sun at all times. And I bet local storage is more economical to build and maintain than an additional network of huge continent-wide transmission lines.
  - kmonsen 4y ago
    In general at least the US hardly users power at night. Most power is to handle the heart during day in the summer which is when solar is most effective.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      This is true for power but it's not true for energy in total. A lot of energy is used at night by burning fossil fuels for heat directly in the home. This is something you have to factor in when reading boldly optimistic claims about how somehow solar and wind can work everywhere without even storage. Maybe if we never stop pumping natural gas into our homes to burn it, but that's not exactly in line with the goals. In reality, for anything north enough to get snow on the regular you can't use today's electricity consumption numbers to judge future needs. When everyone switches to heat pumps base load at night is going to skyrocket.
      - tuatoru 4y ago
        I agree that you can't run on PV alone without storage, without a grid that circles the world. But that's not the situation we face. There are PV, wind, and hydro for generation, and a huge variety of storage options from pumped hydro and compressed air through thermal and batteries to electrolyzed hydrogen and derivatives. Gas (methane) doesn't have to come from the ground. The price of electrolysed hydrogen is dropping. It's early days; there's a lot of learning curve ahead, so we can expect further falls in price. Once you have hydrogen you can use it as-is or combine it with air-captured carbon for synthetic methane and re-use existing infrastructure. Electrolysis is quite complementary to solar. It uses DC voltage (direct from the panels); and PEM (polymer electrolyte membrane) electrolysers start in a second or so, so passing clouds and such are not a problem. Solid oxide and alkaline methods have slightly longer startup times so may require an hour or so of battery storage alongside the panels. Carbon capture is similar to these latter two as I understand it.

briffle 4y ago

Keep in mind this was the first AP1000 gen III+ reactor built in the US, and one of a handful in the world. The process should get smoother and faster as more are completed, and the process gets optimized.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

Base load is a myth. You're right; you can break ground today with renewables and start pushing fossil fuels out of the mix during daylight and windy periods, with batteries slowly consuming more of fossil generation as their costs decline. https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothing-renewables-cant-better/ https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi... There is ~1TW of renewables in US grid queues, and ~427GW of storage. While many of these projects might not get built, the velocity should be noted. ~95GW of nuclear generation capacity remains. It takes 10 years and billions of dollars to build a single nuclear generator. https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-interconnection-queues-as-wait-times-continue-to-grow/ https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter... https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-storage-in-us-interconnection-queues-alongside-nearly-1tw-of-renewables/ https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-st...

HyperSane 4y ago
"Base load is a myth" This is a lie repeated by anti-nuclear types. Base load is simply the year round constant electricity demand. How are we actually going to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of batteries? How are we going to dispose of them?
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  https://insideevs.com/news/523413/catl-unveils-sodium-ion-battery/ https://insideevs.com/news/523413/catl-unveils-sodium-ion-ba... A 4 hour battery for the entirety of world primary energy is about the same cost as one year of auto industry revenue. SIBs require no scarce resources and no toxic elements -- they're basically fancy dirt. For longer scale storage, there are electrolyser industries spooling up in multiple countries. Some of the individual factories are big enough to produce the entire presently installed base in 5 years. Existing OCGT plants have minimal capital and fixed costs, and can burn hydrogen or ammonia basically at cost -- yielding indefinite storage for what is effectively a fixed 4x multiple of the cost of energy.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  > How are we actually going to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of batteries? With battery factories. The very same that will be required to electrify vehicles when jurisdictions are enacting combustion vehicle sales bans at the end of the decade. 74-78 million new vehicles are sold each year. That's a lot of battery demand, which will be a forcing function to scale up battery manufacturing, driving down costs. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/electric-vehicles-to-drive-massive-battery-demand-bnef-chart https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/electri... > How are we going to dispose of them? We recycle them. We already do today. https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ (Redwood has battery recycling agreements with several automakers)
  - HyperSane 4y ago
    And where will we get the raw materials needed to build such vast amounts of batters? Global supply of lithium is already an issue just for electric car production. Global supply of lithium will not be sufficient to store grid scale amounts of energy. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-world-enough-lithium-resources/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor... The world could face lithium shortages by 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says, while Credit Suisse thinks demand could treble between 2020 and 2025, meaning “supply would be stretched”. About 2 billion EVs need to be on the road by 2050 for the world to hit net zero, the IEA says, but sales stood at just 6.6 million last year, and some carmakers are already selling out of EVs. Lithium supply faces challenges not only from surging demand, but because resources are concentrated in a few places and over half of today’s production is in areas with high water stress.
Turing_Machine 4y ago
> ~427GW of storage. Storage isn't measured in GW, but rather in GWh. I'd take any source that doesn't know the difference between W and Wh with a very, very large boulder of salt.
- bewaretheirs 4y ago
  Well, you need both GWh and GW ratings for storage - how much fits in storage, and how fast can you add and remove stored energy.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    When you're looking at "overnight" levels of storage, you can basically just assume that systems will be able to charge and discharge fast enough, and focus entirely on GWh.
rayiner 4y ago
LOL base load is definitely not a myth. What's actually a myth is "supply and demand" in electricity, as if it's a commodities market. In reality it's more like homeostasis--you have to carefully match generation and load and if you don't match it within a few % shit goes extremely sideways.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Load shifting is definitely a thing, and it could become much more of a thing if we rolled out smart appliances and power meters that could automatically react to grid conditions in real time. You do have to carefully match generation and load, but that doesn't always have to be on the generation side, it can be on the load side.
  - catiopatio 4y ago
    I don’t want to live in a world where my appliances turn off at unexpected times to manage load. I also don’t want every appliance in my house connected to the cloud and collecting usage data. I sincerely doubt I’m in the minority on the former, and I hope I’m not in the minority on the latter.
    - bigfudge 4y ago
      That’s fine. You will be allowed to pay for peak time energy. Everyone else will get a better insulated fridge and allow their washing machine to start when the price for the next hour is low.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    I don't think load shifting can have much of an effect. I would be surprised if more than 10% of the load could be shifted more than an hour.
    - wumpus 4y ago
      Most home electric vehicle charging can be shifted by more than an hour.
Manuel_D 4y ago
Base load isn't a myth. The reality is that peak and trough loads differ by usually only ~20% outside of summer [1]. Thus, 80% is base load. > and ~427GW of storage Got a source for this claim? That's an order of magnitude off [2] from what I've read before. 1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 2. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/25-gw-of-energy-storage-planned-to-hit-us-grid-through-2023-69156372 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  You don't get to simultaneously claim that averaging loads over 50 degrees of longitude and 20 degrees of latitude is representitive and that averaging production over 20 degrees is impossible. If we pretend electricity can teleport, then you can reach an emissions level under half of the net zero target (and well within the range of emissions from open pit uranium mining and diffusion centrifuging) with today's tech at roughly the post-subsidy marginal cost of energy from a nuclear plant. https://model.energy/?results=e56f13ff1a1728e76048a94a0a37d9eb#solve https://model.energy/?results=e56f13ff1a1728e76048a94a0a37d9...
- samatman 4y ago
  It's people being lied to by their sources, through a conflation of nameplate capacity and delivered power. You have to knock 90% off every claim you hear about a renewable, that puts the number in the ballpark of what users of electricity will actually get out of it. It's of course the fossil fuel industry which profits from this relentless mendacity. Renewables are great, but they aren't coal's competition and coal knows it. Nuclear is.
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    Sources lying to people is a bold claim that needs to be supported by evidence. Lacking that, folks should ignore claims like this.
    - 4y ago

Turing_Machine 4y ago

> As far as scale, we should consider that it may take ten years to build a nuclear plant Unlike the solar panel factories, battery factories, and replacement distribution network required to replace the entire US electrical grid, which can be online tomorrow morning at the snap of someone's fingers?

Dylan16807 4y ago
Please read the rest of the paragraph.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  Where it says “a while?” This has the distinctive ring of Kentucky windage to me, are there any actual studies on how long it would take to do this? What’s the shape of the curve? If it’s a while on a logarithmic curve that’s very different than if it’s linear or exponential. The impression that I’ve gotten is that there isn’t a huge amount of slack panel production capacity sitting idle. If we’ve learned anything the last two years, hopefully it’s that supply chain problems can take a while to sort out.
  - tuatoru 4y ago
    Well, on the one hand, Chinese manufacturers (90% of the market) have announced expansions for 2022-2025 of 645 GWe annual production, over and above 2021's total annual manufacturing capacity of 220 GWe. On the other hand, likely all of that will be needed to meet Xi's 2030 target for PV power generation in China. (12,000 GWe capacity, up from 800 now? Something like that.) So near exponential but not much slack for others to use, probably.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      I'm not quite sure I believe anything the Chinese government says. China hasn't stopped building nukes, you'll notice. Edit: See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s?leadSource=uverify%20wall https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...

cycomanic 4y ago

It doesn't require back of the napkin calculations, there has been plenty of studies that showed that full renewable is possible even without storage (not counting current hydro). Storage just means less overprovisioning. What this does require is significant investment in grid infrastructure which has been criminally neglected in years.

nine_k 4y ago
How much solar can you overprovision to have power at night time? North America is not wide enough to have at least a bit of it illuminated by Sun at all times. And I bet local storage is more economical to build and maintain than an additional network of huge continent-wide transmission lines.
- kmonsen 4y ago
  In general at least the US hardly users power at night. Most power is to handle the heart during day in the summer which is when solar is most effective.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    This is true for power but it's not true for energy in total. A lot of energy is used at night by burning fossil fuels for heat directly in the home. This is something you have to factor in when reading boldly optimistic claims about how somehow solar and wind can work everywhere without even storage. Maybe if we never stop pumping natural gas into our homes to burn it, but that's not exactly in line with the goals. In reality, for anything north enough to get snow on the regular you can't use today's electricity consumption numbers to judge future needs. When everyone switches to heat pumps base load at night is going to skyrocket.
    - tuatoru 4y ago
      I agree that you can't run on PV alone without storage, without a grid that circles the world. But that's not the situation we face. There are PV, wind, and hydro for generation, and a huge variety of storage options from pumped hydro and compressed air through thermal and batteries to electrolyzed hydrogen and derivatives. Gas (methane) doesn't have to come from the ground. The price of electrolysed hydrogen is dropping. It's early days; there's a lot of learning curve ahead, so we can expect further falls in price. Once you have hydrogen you can use it as-is or combine it with air-captured carbon for synthetic methane and re-use existing infrastructure. Electrolysis is quite complementary to solar. It uses DC voltage (direct from the panels); and PEM (polymer electrolyte membrane) electrolysers start in a second or so, so passing clouds and such are not a problem. Solid oxide and alkaline methods have slightly longer startup times so may require an hour or so of battery storage alongside the panels. Carbon capture is similar to these latter two as I understand it.