9 ms·

There are very few locations where renewables have high enough penetration for dispatchability to be the slightest concern for new additions. In locations with

There are very few locations where renewables have high enough penetration for dispatchability to be the slightest concern for new additions. In locations with lots of renewables already, new projects are including storage, cost-effectively, which turns non-disparchable power into dispatchable. I think it's pretty clear that $58/MWh was never going to be achieved, and as with most nuclear projects, reality is 1.5x-3x of what the boosters promise. But even $58/MWh is not cheap enough to match the bids seen for dispatchable renewables+storage.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
And, consider that the new projects won't be online for 5-10 years, during which time year-on-year improvements to cost of solar and wind will likely continue to decline 5-15% per year. Nuclear projects are turtles chasing rabbits at this point, and the rabbit has head start.
- midasuni 4y ago
  Nuclear was a great solution back in the 90s and early 00s. Not effective now - the cost in both time and money means it’s not worthwhile.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Except where the part where the rabbit start saturating markets during peak production. Then further progress starts to crawl as less and less of the actual generation capacity is usable. At least not until a breakthrough makes energy storage feasible. The only countries that have successfully moved all or nearly-all of their electricity to decarbonized sources have done so primarily with dispatchable sources: hydroelectricity (E.g. Norway, Brazil, Albania, Uruguay) and with a mix of nuclear power filling in where hydro isn't enough (France, Sweden, Switzerland). All of those countries generate a single digit percentage of their electricity from fossil fuels. Nobody has decarbonized primarily through a source of decarboinzed energy source besides hydroelectricity or nuclear power.* Unless there's a storage breakthrough on the horizon, we'll still need to derive a significant chunk of our electricity generation from dispatchable sources. * One minor counterexample is geothermal power, but like hydro it's geographically dependent.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Solar can be installed on roofs. Costs go up, but resiliency goes way up and less grid complexity and transport is needed, and it solves the "holy crap how will we charge all these consumer EVs". The EV(s) can function as some of the battery backup, especially since most EVs will be about 80% overprovisioned for everyday driving. Tesla is already doing it in California. Storage breakthrough: sodium ion goes into mass production at 140-160wh/kg by CATL next year. In addition to being usable for the 200-300 mile EV, that will mean cheap grid batteries. But this obsession with dispatchability at scale shows that there is too much focus on grid-scale solar and storage and centralized control. Yes the upfront costs are cheaper, but grid solar should be hand in hand with a VERY aggressive home/business solar+storage subsidy. It's dumb that a natural disaster knocks out power for the entire area because transmission lines go down. With distributed solar and storage, that wouldn't be nearly as bad. Old guard electric can't wrap their heads around a country where every roof has solar doing most / all / surplus power generation.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      > Solar can be installed on roofs. Costs go up, but resiliency goes way up and less grid complexity and transport is needed, and it solves the "holy crap how will we charge all these consumer EVs". Resiliency how? It makes the grid more fragile since cloudy days make for big energy shortages. It also doesn't solve EV charging. Plenty of people charge their EVs at night because they drive during the day. They also want to charge their EVs regardless of weather. > Storage breakthrough: sodium ion goes into mass production at 140-160wh/kg by CATL next year. Define "mass" production. For context, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day, or about 2,500 GWh of electricity per hour. The concern with dispatchability is entirely reasonable because energy needs to be supplied when it's in demand, and storage isn't anywhere near the required scale. You can't just hand-wave this away by encouraging homes and businesses to buy storage. > It's dumb that a natural disaster knocks out power for the entire area because transmission lines go down. With distributed solar and storage, that wouldn't be nearly as bad. Old guard electric can't wrap their heads around a country where every roof has solar doing most / all / surplus power generation. Quite the contrary. Decentralized power generation actually means more transmission lines to transport energy long distances from the places where it gets generated to the places where energy is in demand. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
Manuel_D 4y ago
> new projects are including storage, cost-effectively, which turns non-disparchable power into dispatchable. Such as? Most storage facilities are targeting a few hundred megawatts of storage, usually enough for a few hours of power but not enough to even out a full night.
- pydry 4y ago
  Snowy 2 stores 350 GWh. Fengning stores 40 GWh. One more snowy 2 (or equivalent) and Australia can get to ~97% solar+wind+pumped storage powered. The only reason existing pumped storage sites used to target a few hundred MWh was because they were historically used for regulating the grid, not providing large scale storage. The geography to do this is plentiful too, as multiple studies have confirmed.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Snowy 2's actual storage capacity is estimated to be ~40 GWh https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-storage/ https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      The paper they're quoting doesn't actually say that and it's double counting some parts of the system that are already accounted for in the 350GWh figure. Try again.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        There's no double counting. The estimate of 350 GWh ignored the fact that the lower reservoir of Snowy 2 is smaller than the upper reservoir. In case you're unfamiliar with how pumped hydro works: There's an upper reservoir and a lower reservoir. To charge the system, water from the lower reservoir is pumped into the upper reservoir, and to withdraw energy the water is passed to the lower reservoir driving a turbine. In Snowy 2, the upper reservoir is large enough to accommodate 350 GWh of energy. But the lower reservoir is not, and actually attempting to actually use that much storage would cause the closed loop system to lose water and permanently reduce the storage capacity unless additional water is added. If I have a 100 liter bucket up top and a 10 liter bucket down below. If I fill up the 100 liter bucket to the brim I could drain 100 liters once, but then I'd lose 90 liters and only have enough water to fill it back up to 10 liters. So does it have a capacity of 100 liters? In a pedantic sense, yes, but in practice you only have 10 liters of usable capacity. Pumped hydro storage requires very specific geography to function, so deceptive messaging is often required to convince people of its efficacy.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

And, consider that the new projects won't be online for 5-10 years, during which time year-on-year improvements to cost of solar and wind will likely continue to decline 5-15% per year. Nuclear projects are turtles chasing rabbits at this point, and the rabbit has head start.

midasuni 4y ago
Nuclear was a great solution back in the 90s and early 00s. Not effective now - the cost in both time and money means it’s not worthwhile.
Manuel_D 4y ago
Except where the part where the rabbit start saturating markets during peak production. Then further progress starts to crawl as less and less of the actual generation capacity is usable. At least not until a breakthrough makes energy storage feasible. The only countries that have successfully moved all or nearly-all of their electricity to decarbonized sources have done so primarily with dispatchable sources: hydroelectricity (E.g. Norway, Brazil, Albania, Uruguay) and with a mix of nuclear power filling in where hydro isn't enough (France, Sweden, Switzerland). All of those countries generate a single digit percentage of their electricity from fossil fuels. Nobody has decarbonized primarily through a source of decarboinzed energy source besides hydroelectricity or nuclear power.* Unless there's a storage breakthrough on the horizon, we'll still need to derive a significant chunk of our electricity generation from dispatchable sources. * One minor counterexample is geothermal power, but like hydro it's geographically dependent.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Solar can be installed on roofs. Costs go up, but resiliency goes way up and less grid complexity and transport is needed, and it solves the "holy crap how will we charge all these consumer EVs". The EV(s) can function as some of the battery backup, especially since most EVs will be about 80% overprovisioned for everyday driving. Tesla is already doing it in California. Storage breakthrough: sodium ion goes into mass production at 140-160wh/kg by CATL next year. In addition to being usable for the 200-300 mile EV, that will mean cheap grid batteries. But this obsession with dispatchability at scale shows that there is too much focus on grid-scale solar and storage and centralized control. Yes the upfront costs are cheaper, but grid solar should be hand in hand with a VERY aggressive home/business solar+storage subsidy. It's dumb that a natural disaster knocks out power for the entire area because transmission lines go down. With distributed solar and storage, that wouldn't be nearly as bad. Old guard electric can't wrap their heads around a country where every roof has solar doing most / all / surplus power generation.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    > Solar can be installed on roofs. Costs go up, but resiliency goes way up and less grid complexity and transport is needed, and it solves the "holy crap how will we charge all these consumer EVs". Resiliency how? It makes the grid more fragile since cloudy days make for big energy shortages. It also doesn't solve EV charging. Plenty of people charge their EVs at night because they drive during the day. They also want to charge their EVs regardless of weather. > Storage breakthrough: sodium ion goes into mass production at 140-160wh/kg by CATL next year. Define "mass" production. For context, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day, or about 2,500 GWh of electricity per hour. The concern with dispatchability is entirely reasonable because energy needs to be supplied when it's in demand, and storage isn't anywhere near the required scale. You can't just hand-wave this away by encouraging homes and businesses to buy storage. > It's dumb that a natural disaster knocks out power for the entire area because transmission lines go down. With distributed solar and storage, that wouldn't be nearly as bad. Old guard electric can't wrap their heads around a country where every roof has solar doing most / all / surplus power generation. Quite the contrary. Decentralized power generation actually means more transmission lines to transport energy long distances from the places where it gets generated to the places where energy is in demand. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...

Manuel_D 4y ago

> new projects are including storage, cost-effectively, which turns non-disparchable power into dispatchable. Such as? Most storage facilities are targeting a few hundred megawatts of storage, usually enough for a few hours of power but not enough to even out a full night.

pydry 4y ago
Snowy 2 stores 350 GWh. Fengning stores 40 GWh. One more snowy 2 (or equivalent) and Australia can get to ~97% solar+wind+pumped storage powered. The only reason existing pumped storage sites used to target a few hundred MWh was because they were historically used for regulating the grid, not providing large scale storage. The geography to do this is plentiful too, as multiple studies have confirmed.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Snowy 2's actual storage capacity is estimated to be ~40 GWh https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-storage/ https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    The paper they're quoting doesn't actually say that and it's double counting some parts of the system that are already accounted for in the 350GWh figure. Try again.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      There's no double counting. The estimate of 350 GWh ignored the fact that the lower reservoir of Snowy 2 is smaller than the upper reservoir. In case you're unfamiliar with how pumped hydro works: There's an upper reservoir and a lower reservoir. To charge the system, water from the lower reservoir is pumped into the upper reservoir, and to withdraw energy the water is passed to the lower reservoir driving a turbine. In Snowy 2, the upper reservoir is large enough to accommodate 350 GWh of energy. But the lower reservoir is not, and actually attempting to actually use that much storage would cause the closed loop system to lose water and permanently reduce the storage capacity unless additional water is added. If I have a 100 liter bucket up top and a 10 liter bucket down below. If I fill up the 100 liter bucket to the brim I could drain 100 liters once, but then I'd lose 90 liters and only have enough water to fill it back up to 10 liters. So does it have a capacity of 100 liters? In a pedantic sense, yes, but in practice you only have 10 liters of usable capacity. Pumped hydro storage requires very specific geography to function, so deceptive messaging is often required to convince people of its efficacy.