12 ms·

The overwhelming majority of electricity demand is base load. Usually on the order of 70-80% [1]. We don't need "some" base load, almost all our demand is base

The overwhelming majority of electricity demand is base load. Usually on the order of 70-80% [1]. We don't need "some" base load, almost all our demand is base load. Electricity storage is nowhere near the scale required to make a dent in the electricity grid. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses about 500 GWh of electricity every hour. Worldwide this figure is about 2,500 GWh per hour. The storage facility you linked to was the biggest facility in the world when it was first constructed, and it stored only 129 MWh of electricity. At our current rate of battery production it'd take us a century of dedicating 100% of our battery output to grid storage to reach 1 day's worth of storage. Battery production is expected to increase, but it's unclear whether raw material inputs can keep up with manufacturing demands [2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load 2. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

coder543 4y ago
> The overwhelming majority of electricity demand is base load. Usually on the order of 70-80% [1]. We don't need "some" base load, almost all our demand is base load. The article you linked doesn't really back this up, at least in the way this discussion means it. It shows that with flexible production, you can drastically scale back on "traditional" base load power sources, and that is representing a real power grid in Germany. Nothing about the graph actually says "this is as much renewables as you can pack into this power grid". If you look at the graph closely, you'll notice that solar is big during the day, and wind is big during the night. With greater installed wind production capacity, the fossil fuel lines would drop drastically in the graph. It's that simple. We would still need to have "peaker plants" available until there is enough grid energy storage capacity, but combined cycle natural plants work fine for that. We can keep pushing down the time they need to on by building more renewables even without batteries. > The storage facility you linked to was the biggest facility in the world when it was first constructed, and it stored only 129 MWh of electricity. I specifically linked that one because it talks about how ridiculously profitable it has been, and how much of an impact it has had on the local grid. If it can save money for a traditional grid, then it is a no-brainer for utilities to install bigger and bigger grid batteries. More demand for batteries means more battery production facilities, increasing global production capacity over time. However, the world is also transitioning to Electric Vehicles, and most EV manufacturers are offering V2G (vehicle to grid) solutions, so millions of EVs can contribute a portion of their battery capacity to the grid in the future, and the grid can compensate them for their contribution. > Battery production is expected to increase, but it's unclear whether raw material inputs can keep up with manufacturing demands [2]. Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious. But, various alternative chemistries are being explored which could help in different ways. > At our current rate of battery production it'd take us a century of dedicating 100% of our battery output to grid storage to reach 1 day's worth of storage. How did you determine that we need a full day's worth of energy storage? We can drastically decarbonize the grid (and lower electric costs for consumers) with a lot less than that, based on what I've seen, but this is a highly speculative part of the discussion so it's interesting to hear how that number came to be.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Look at the the lowest point of energy demand. That's base load. How big is it relative to the peak of energy demand? Depends on the season, but it's usually 70-80% of peak demand. So, the vast majority of energy demand is in fact base load. I'm really confused about why renewable proponents talk about base load all the time - it's really not relevant to decarbonization of the grid. Intermittency of wind and solar aren't just daily: you also have longer-term periods of cloud weather blocking solar and lower wind speed hampering wind power. Actually running a majority renewable grid requires either hydroelectricity, or fossil fuels. The majority of Germany's electricity comes from fossil fuels [1]. It's not a mostly renewable grid, occasionally supplemented by peaker plants. It's a majority fossil fuel grid supplemented by renewables. By comparison, here's France's electricity production [2]. One of these is a mostly decarbonized grid. The other is a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplemented by renewables here and there. > However, the world is also transitioning to Electric Vehicles, and most EV manufacturers are offering V2G (vehicle to grid) solutions, so millions of EVs can contribute a portion of their battery capacity to the grid in the future, and the grid can compensate them for their contribution. This is an idea that no sane grid operator would ever accept. First of all, most of these vehicles actually lose energy in cold weather [3]. And if people leave to go on vacation, then we have blackouts because our energy storage solution drove away for a week? No to mention, plenty of people drive their cars around during the day doing chores or work and charge them at night. Those people are going to be a net drain on the grid. > Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious. But, various chemistries are being explored. The market demonstrates otherwise. At the end of the day, if there's a shortage of lithium and the price goes it up it doesn't really matter what people are writing on tech forums. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:Germany's_electricity_generation_by_major_fuel,_energy_sources_and_share_of_electricity_generation_by_fuel,_energy_source,_from_2000_through_2017_(47958295396).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:France_Electricity_production_1981-2017_(EIA).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:F... 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34120237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34120237
  - 4y ago
LarryMullins 4y ago
> 500 GWh of electricity every hour GWh/h, or simply 500 GW ;)
- Gare 4y ago
  Not quite the same thing. Watts are power. Watt-hours per hour (or jules per hour) are average energy consumption during one hour.
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    Yes, but in practice Watts are almost always an average over some sample period. Generation capacities for power plants are given in Watts, not Wh/h. Wh/h gives you a hint that the sample period was an hour, but that isn't necessarily the case. I don't think Wh/h is the correct way to describe the sample period.
scq 4y ago
Hornsdale Power Reserve was nowhere even close to being the biggest energy storage facility, even when it was constructed. At that time, the biggest facility was the Bath County Pumped Storage Station at 24,000 MWh, which has since been surpassed again.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  Or just take any hydro electric dam. The Swedish hydro power currently stores 17.7 TWh. It is not a battery in how it can fluctuate due to natural flow concerns, but some fluctuations are fine.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Dams are geographically limited. You can't just build more of them. A fully decarbonized grid's ability to build renewables is largely determined by the availability of hydroelectricity for dispatchable power. Sweden gets ~40% of its electricity from hydro, another 40 from nuclear, and 20 from intermittent sources.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      A fully decarbonized grid's ability to build renewables is, in fact, not at all determined by the availability of (watershed) hydroelectricity. In particular, hydro storage can be built in hundreds of times as many places as watershed hydro generation. And, there are numerous other practical storage methods. Ready combined-cycle gas generation capacity is more important, most places. Those will be incrementally converted to consume imported synthetic ammonia.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        > Ready combined-cycle gas generation capacity is more important, most places. Those will be incrementally converted to consume imported synthetic ammonia. Synthetic ammonia that comes from where? Ammonia is currently produced by steam reformation, which emits CO2. You're talking about electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen, and using renewable energy to carry out the Haber process. Nobody is using this strategy of energy storage, so it's priceless in a very literal sense: there is no way to estimate how much such a system would cost. I'd take an expensive solution over a priceless solution any day.
didericis 4y ago
This is highly geographically dependent, but water displacement “batteries” that pump water to an elevated basin when power is on and then let it run through turbines back down to a lowered basin seem like a really simple, effective solution that can work at scale.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  OK if by "highly geographically dependent" you mean "not highly geographically dependent". You need a hill, but there are a very, very large number of hills. Most usually you need to build an earthen dike around the top of the hill, although often a natural feature allows it to be shorter. The reservoir does not need to be deep because the "head" is from it to the bottom of the hill, or even to the water table well below that. The reservoir or reservoirs are good places to float solar farms.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Kansas and the Netherlands would like a word.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      Both have plenty of transmission lines to places with hills.
      - bigfudge 4y ago
        Exactly. And the hills are not actually that far away.
  - didericis 4y ago
    I forget what country was trying to build a bunch of these but an article popped up on here about this a while back and they cited lack of suitable locations as one of the main barriers for building more. The most ideal locations are natural that require minimal land reshaping. Some places in the world have a lot of suitable locations like that. Others don’t. But despite that it still seems much more feasible to build lots of hydro pump stations like that than it does to build other forms of battery farms.
pydry 4y ago
A near 100% renewable grid doesnt require as much storage as you'd think: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... This model projects that a 98% solar/wind/hydro grid is possible for Australia by building an additional 450GWh of storage. 1.3x snowy 2 (which is 350GWh).
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Unfortunately, Snow 2's storage figures are rather misleading. That 350 GWh cannot be used daily, that's its total storage capacity which takes a month and a half to refill. The cyclic capacity of Snowy 2 - as in, the storage capacity that I can pump back into the facility using excess renewable power - is only ~40 GWh. And again, this is geographically limited storage system: pumped hydro requires just the right geography of an upper and lower reservoir spaced not too far apart. Not too bad if you're a sparsely populated country with huge amounts of land per capita. But it isn't a solution for most countries.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    It will be used where it is a good solution. Where it is not, others will be used. Use of other methods elsewhere does not detract from its usefulness in places suited to it.
  - pydry 4y ago
    >Not too bad if you're a sparsely populated country with huge amounts of land per capita. Even a pretty skeptical assessment of Snowy 2 believes it's 240 GWh: https://majorprojects.planningportal.nsw.gov.au/prweb/PRRestService/mp/01/getContent?AttachRef=EXH-2536%2120191108T002841.497%20GMT https://majorprojects.planningportal.nsw.gov.au/prweb/PRRest... "If based on the active storage volume of the ‘lesser reservoir’, Talbingo, the theoretical energy storage capacity is about 240 GWh" Once again this is just JUST ONE project, already under construction and it already will cover somewhere between 30-40% of the energy storage requirements to get the entire country to reach a 98% solar/wind powered grid. Dismissing the possibility of this order of magnitude of storage as simply impossible as the OP did when it is already under construction is asinine. >And again, this is geographically limited storage system: pumped hydro requires just the right geography of an upper and lower reservoir spaced not too far apart. There have been multiple studies on this. Unlike hydro, the geography for pumped storage is not rare throughout most of the world. This is the most perplexing talking point against pumped storage, and frankly, reminds me of when people used to pick up on pro nuclear/carbon lobbies sneering at solar/wind for being infeasible because it was < 1% of the grid back in 2014.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
So it's supposed to be impossible to get the 3 hours or 9TWh (12 years of 2022 production) of battery needed to shift the grid to >99% renewables (including biogas from waste plant matter, planned HVDC, and existing hydro for dispatch) with the much larger than current lithium production that is already pipelined, but scaling Uranium production and the entire reactor and enrichment supply chain 10x with no significant pipelined expansion is trivial? What happens when the known Uranium resources run out 12 years after that?
- lazide 4y ago
  1) not that it would happen, but if it did, they won’t just run out. 2) There are vast Uranium deposits in the Southwest and Canada that were identified and either mined a little, or left untouched after WW2 - because we had so much, we didn’t need them. Early lithium was ‘hard to find’ until it wasn’t, and now there are vast reserves. Lithium is harder to extract per power unit though, as Uranium is incredibly power dense.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    (2) is already included in the "resources" figure.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > Lithium is harder to extract per power unit though, as Uranium is incredibly power dense. Y'all just love making up lies out of whole cloth. This is incredibly wrong and you didn't even consider the idea of checking before deciding it was true. Stanning for nuclear does involve incredible density but it's not power or energy density. Weight for weight, the amount of lithium you need for a 1kW renewable system with diurnal storage (80-160g/kWh for 8-12kWh to provide for 1kW) and the amount of Uranium you need for 1kW of nuclear reactor (45-60MWd/kg @ 32% thermal efficiency with a 7.4:1 tails/fuel ratio with a 3-6 year fuel cycle) are about the same: Roughly 1kg. The lithium battery will last 2-4x as long as the Uranium fuel (12-20 years vs 3-6). At 1-7% the lithium ore is 1-2 orders of magnitude more concentrated than the 0.01-0.7% of most Uranium deposits (Canada's untapped high yield deposits are about the same as good lithium ore but they are deep underground, unique, and only a tiny fraction of what would be needed). The typical ore mined in a mass expansion scenario (0.01-0.03%) would have an energy density between that of coal and crude oil. Mining for the uranium would involve around 100-1000x the quantity of mined or leached ore and tens to hundreds of times as much leaching chemical. The Uranium extraction process doesn't end at the mill. Enrichment is just as involved as brine extraction. The end product of the Uranium fuel costs twice as much as an LFP grid battery and has about the same embodied energy per joule delivered (or double if from an underground or deep open pit mine). Diurnal lithium battery storage is irrelevant where good pumped hydro is available, and is far more than is needed to reach 85-90% VRE (which can be done with 3 hours). Early uranium was also hard to find, then tens of billions were spent trying to find more. There are fairly reliable methods of estimating how much hasn't been found based on the rate of finding it vs. the effort spent and the answer is there's not a lot undiscovered at concentrations that make fuel affordable. It's also largely irrelevant because any you find after you open your 3-8TW of nuclear plants (which are somehow built in 12 years) is not going to be developed before they all run out.
cycomanic 4y ago
To quote the Wikipedia article you cited: > This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market. Renewables are baseload. They mainly compete with other traditional "base load" power plants, i.e. coal and nuclear, all of which rely on dispatch able generation for evening out the peaks and trowths. Your calculation also doesn't make sense, you never need storage to cover the whole electricity generation in all of the US. It's like saying in an all nuclear scenario we need to build plants to cover twice the peak demand because all plants could be under maintenance at the same time. You don't build with 100% redundancy.

coder543 4y ago

> The overwhelming majority of electricity demand is base load. Usually on the order of 70-80% [1]. We don't need "some" base load, almost all our demand is base load. The article you linked doesn't really back this up, at least in the way this discussion means it. It shows that with flexible production, you can drastically scale back on "traditional" base load power sources, and that is representing a real power grid in Germany. Nothing about the graph actually says "this is as much renewables as you can pack into this power grid". If you look at the graph closely, you'll notice that solar is big during the day, and wind is big during the night. With greater installed wind production capacity, the fossil fuel lines would drop drastically in the graph. It's that simple. We would still need to have "peaker plants" available until there is enough grid energy storage capacity, but combined cycle natural plants work fine for that. We can keep pushing down the time they need to on by building more renewables even without batteries. > The storage facility you linked to was the biggest facility in the world when it was first constructed, and it stored only 129 MWh of electricity. I specifically linked that one because it talks about how ridiculously profitable it has been, and how much of an impact it has had on the local grid. If it can save money for a traditional grid, then it is a no-brainer for utilities to install bigger and bigger grid batteries. More demand for batteries means more battery production facilities, increasing global production capacity over time. However, the world is also transitioning to Electric Vehicles, and most EV manufacturers are offering V2G (vehicle to grid) solutions, so millions of EVs can contribute a portion of their battery capacity to the grid in the future, and the grid can compensate them for their contribution. > Battery production is expected to increase, but it's unclear whether raw material inputs can keep up with manufacturing demands [2]. Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious. But, various alternative chemistries are being explored which could help in different ways. > At our current rate of battery production it'd take us a century of dedicating 100% of our battery output to grid storage to reach 1 day's worth of storage. How did you determine that we need a full day's worth of energy storage? We can drastically decarbonize the grid (and lower electric costs for consumers) with a lot less than that, based on what I've seen, but this is a highly speculative part of the discussion so it's interesting to hear how that number came to be.

Manuel_D 4y ago
Look at the the lowest point of energy demand. That's base load. How big is it relative to the peak of energy demand? Depends on the season, but it's usually 70-80% of peak demand. So, the vast majority of energy demand is in fact base load. I'm really confused about why renewable proponents talk about base load all the time - it's really not relevant to decarbonization of the grid. Intermittency of wind and solar aren't just daily: you also have longer-term periods of cloud weather blocking solar and lower wind speed hampering wind power. Actually running a majority renewable grid requires either hydroelectricity, or fossil fuels. The majority of Germany's electricity comes from fossil fuels [1]. It's not a mostly renewable grid, occasionally supplemented by peaker plants. It's a majority fossil fuel grid supplemented by renewables. By comparison, here's France's electricity production [2]. One of these is a mostly decarbonized grid. The other is a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplemented by renewables here and there. > However, the world is also transitioning to Electric Vehicles, and most EV manufacturers are offering V2G (vehicle to grid) solutions, so millions of EVs can contribute a portion of their battery capacity to the grid in the future, and the grid can compensate them for their contribution. This is an idea that no sane grid operator would ever accept. First of all, most of these vehicles actually lose energy in cold weather [3]. And if people leave to go on vacation, then we have blackouts because our energy storage solution drove away for a week? No to mention, plenty of people drive their cars around during the day doing chores or work and charge them at night. Those people are going to be a net drain on the grid. > Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious. But, various chemistries are being explored. The market demonstrates otherwise. At the end of the day, if there's a shortage of lithium and the price goes it up it doesn't really matter what people are writing on tech forums. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:Germany's_electricity_generation_by_major_fuel,_energy_sources_and_share_of_electricity_generation_by_fuel,_energy_source,_from_2000_through_2017_(47958295396).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:France_Electricity_production_1981-2017_(EIA).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:F... 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34120237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34120237
- 4y ago

LarryMullins 4y ago

> 500 GWh of electricity every hour GWh/h, or simply 500 GW ;)

Gare 4y ago
Not quite the same thing. Watts are power. Watt-hours per hour (or jules per hour) are average energy consumption during one hour.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  Yes, but in practice Watts are almost always an average over some sample period. Generation capacities for power plants are given in Watts, not Wh/h. Wh/h gives you a hint that the sample period was an hour, but that isn't necessarily the case. I don't think Wh/h is the correct way to describe the sample period.

scq 4y ago

Hornsdale Power Reserve was nowhere even close to being the biggest energy storage facility, even when it was constructed. At that time, the biggest facility was the Bath County Pumped Storage Station at 24,000 MWh, which has since been surpassed again.

Gwypaas 4y ago
Or just take any hydro electric dam. The Swedish hydro power currently stores 17.7 TWh. It is not a battery in how it can fluctuate due to natural flow concerns, but some fluctuations are fine.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Dams are geographically limited. You can't just build more of them. A fully decarbonized grid's ability to build renewables is largely determined by the availability of hydroelectricity for dispatchable power. Sweden gets ~40% of its electricity from hydro, another 40 from nuclear, and 20 from intermittent sources.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    A fully decarbonized grid's ability to build renewables is, in fact, not at all determined by the availability of (watershed) hydroelectricity. In particular, hydro storage can be built in hundreds of times as many places as watershed hydro generation. And, there are numerous other practical storage methods. Ready combined-cycle gas generation capacity is more important, most places. Those will be incrementally converted to consume imported synthetic ammonia.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      > Ready combined-cycle gas generation capacity is more important, most places. Those will be incrementally converted to consume imported synthetic ammonia. Synthetic ammonia that comes from where? Ammonia is currently produced by steam reformation, which emits CO2. You're talking about electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen, and using renewable energy to carry out the Haber process. Nobody is using this strategy of energy storage, so it's priceless in a very literal sense: there is no way to estimate how much such a system would cost. I'd take an expensive solution over a priceless solution any day.

didericis 4y ago

This is highly geographically dependent, but water displacement “batteries” that pump water to an elevated basin when power is on and then let it run through turbines back down to a lowered basin seem like a really simple, effective solution that can work at scale.

moloch-hai 4y ago
OK if by "highly geographically dependent" you mean "not highly geographically dependent". You need a hill, but there are a very, very large number of hills. Most usually you need to build an earthen dike around the top of the hill, although often a natural feature allows it to be shorter. The reservoir does not need to be deep because the "head" is from it to the bottom of the hill, or even to the water table well below that. The reservoir or reservoirs are good places to float solar farms.
- lazide 4y ago
  Kansas and the Netherlands would like a word.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Both have plenty of transmission lines to places with hills.
    - bigfudge 4y ago
      Exactly. And the hills are not actually that far away.
- didericis 4y ago
  I forget what country was trying to build a bunch of these but an article popped up on here about this a while back and they cited lack of suitable locations as one of the main barriers for building more. The most ideal locations are natural that require minimal land reshaping. Some places in the world have a lot of suitable locations like that. Others don’t. But despite that it still seems much more feasible to build lots of hydro pump stations like that than it does to build other forms of battery farms.

pydry 4y ago

A near 100% renewable grid doesnt require as much storage as you'd think: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... This model projects that a 98% solar/wind/hydro grid is possible for Australia by building an additional 450GWh of storage. 1.3x snowy 2 (which is 350GWh).

Manuel_D 4y ago
Unfortunately, Snow 2's storage figures are rather misleading. That 350 GWh cannot be used daily, that's its total storage capacity which takes a month and a half to refill. The cyclic capacity of Snowy 2 - as in, the storage capacity that I can pump back into the facility using excess renewable power - is only ~40 GWh. And again, this is geographically limited storage system: pumped hydro requires just the right geography of an upper and lower reservoir spaced not too far apart. Not too bad if you're a sparsely populated country with huge amounts of land per capita. But it isn't a solution for most countries.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  It will be used where it is a good solution. Where it is not, others will be used. Use of other methods elsewhere does not detract from its usefulness in places suited to it.
- pydry 4y ago
  >Not too bad if you're a sparsely populated country with huge amounts of land per capita. Even a pretty skeptical assessment of Snowy 2 believes it's 240 GWh: https://majorprojects.planningportal.nsw.gov.au/prweb/PRRestService/mp/01/getContent?AttachRef=EXH-2536%2120191108T002841.497%20GMT https://majorprojects.planningportal.nsw.gov.au/prweb/PRRest... "If based on the active storage volume of the ‘lesser reservoir’, Talbingo, the theoretical energy storage capacity is about 240 GWh" Once again this is just JUST ONE project, already under construction and it already will cover somewhere between 30-40% of the energy storage requirements to get the entire country to reach a 98% solar/wind powered grid. Dismissing the possibility of this order of magnitude of storage as simply impossible as the OP did when it is already under construction is asinine. >And again, this is geographically limited storage system: pumped hydro requires just the right geography of an upper and lower reservoir spaced not too far apart. There have been multiple studies on this. Unlike hydro, the geography for pumped storage is not rare throughout most of the world. This is the most perplexing talking point against pumped storage, and frankly, reminds me of when people used to pick up on pro nuclear/carbon lobbies sneering at solar/wind for being infeasible because it was < 1% of the grid back in 2014.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

So it's supposed to be impossible to get the 3 hours or 9TWh (12 years of 2022 production) of battery needed to shift the grid to >99% renewables (including biogas from waste plant matter, planned HVDC, and existing hydro for dispatch) with the much larger than current lithium production that is already pipelined, but scaling Uranium production and the entire reactor and enrichment supply chain 10x with no significant pipelined expansion is trivial? What happens when the known Uranium resources run out 12 years after that?

lazide 4y ago
1) not that it would happen, but if it did, they won’t just run out. 2) There are vast Uranium deposits in the Southwest and Canada that were identified and either mined a little, or left untouched after WW2 - because we had so much, we didn’t need them. Early lithium was ‘hard to find’ until it wasn’t, and now there are vast reserves. Lithium is harder to extract per power unit though, as Uranium is incredibly power dense.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  (2) is already included in the "resources" figure.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Lithium is harder to extract per power unit though, as Uranium is incredibly power dense. Y'all just love making up lies out of whole cloth. This is incredibly wrong and you didn't even consider the idea of checking before deciding it was true. Stanning for nuclear does involve incredible density but it's not power or energy density. Weight for weight, the amount of lithium you need for a 1kW renewable system with diurnal storage (80-160g/kWh for 8-12kWh to provide for 1kW) and the amount of Uranium you need for 1kW of nuclear reactor (45-60MWd/kg @ 32% thermal efficiency with a 7.4:1 tails/fuel ratio with a 3-6 year fuel cycle) are about the same: Roughly 1kg. The lithium battery will last 2-4x as long as the Uranium fuel (12-20 years vs 3-6). At 1-7% the lithium ore is 1-2 orders of magnitude more concentrated than the 0.01-0.7% of most Uranium deposits (Canada's untapped high yield deposits are about the same as good lithium ore but they are deep underground, unique, and only a tiny fraction of what would be needed). The typical ore mined in a mass expansion scenario (0.01-0.03%) would have an energy density between that of coal and crude oil. Mining for the uranium would involve around 100-1000x the quantity of mined or leached ore and tens to hundreds of times as much leaching chemical. The Uranium extraction process doesn't end at the mill. Enrichment is just as involved as brine extraction. The end product of the Uranium fuel costs twice as much as an LFP grid battery and has about the same embodied energy per joule delivered (or double if from an underground or deep open pit mine). Diurnal lithium battery storage is irrelevant where good pumped hydro is available, and is far more than is needed to reach 85-90% VRE (which can be done with 3 hours). Early uranium was also hard to find, then tens of billions were spent trying to find more. There are fairly reliable methods of estimating how much hasn't been found based on the rate of finding it vs. the effort spent and the answer is there's not a lot undiscovered at concentrations that make fuel affordable. It's also largely irrelevant because any you find after you open your 3-8TW of nuclear plants (which are somehow built in 12 years) is not going to be developed before they all run out.

cycomanic 4y ago

To quote the Wikipedia article you cited: > This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market. Renewables are baseload. They mainly compete with other traditional "base load" power plants, i.e. coal and nuclear, all of which rely on dispatch able generation for evening out the peaks and trowths. Your calculation also doesn't make sense, you never need storage to cover the whole electricity generation in all of the US. It's like saying in an all nuclear scenario we need to build plants to cover twice the peak demand because all plants could be under maintenance at the same time. You don't build with 100% redundancy.