5 ms·

1 gigawatt solar is not the same as 1 gigawatt nuclear though. Also, building solar in Alaska or in Northern Canada would be a waste of money. But yes, a solar

by donny2018 3y ago

1 gigawatt solar is not the same as 1 gigawatt nuclear though. Also, building solar in Alaska or in Northern Canada would be a waste of money. But yes, a solar power plant is cheap and can be implemented almost instantly, it is a huge advantage.

epistasis 3y ago
The right comparison is roughly 4GW of solar plus 6-12GWh of storage for 1GW of nuclear, but even then nuclear is about 2x as expensive.
- donny2018 3y ago
  >4GW of solar plus 6-12GWh It will use a lot of land and I'm not sure if anyone ever did 6GWh storage, not even mentioning 12 GWh. The Li-ion battery technology that is currently being used for storage is very expensive and will last maybe 15 years at best before becoming chemical waste, while the nuke is normally planned to last 60+ years. And that is just to match 1GW of nuke. Now, if you want 100GW, you multiply that by 100. Now solar isn't looking all that advantageous or even technologically feasible (with storage factored in) to me.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    I don't think you have a good idea of scale here 4GW of solar and 12 GWh of storage are a tiny fraction of what we produce every year, barely worth mention. Whereas even a single GW of new nuclear is newsworthy because it was such a monumental effort, over budget and behind schedule by factors of 2-4x Wind, solar, and storage get delivered on time, under budget, and at a scale that nuclear can not even dream of achieving for decades. Claiming that 100GW/year of nuclear is even in the realm of possibility is beyond delusional, whereas 400 GW/year of solar is close to happening, and we will deploying TW/year in the 2030s, before a second site of nuclear could even come online in the US. Land for solar is similarly a red herring. Solar "land use" is easily dual purpose, if need be, but it need not be. Using even a fraction of land that we currently use to grow corn for ethanol would completely power all of our transportation.
    - ftth_finland 3y ago
      According to a recent report, there was only 13.4 GWh of grid storage in the US 2022. Even with projected growth, each addition 12 GWh is not trivial. https://www.smart-energy.com/regional-news/north-america/us-grid-scale-storage-capacity-breaks-market-record-at-4-7gwh/?amp=1 https://www.smart-energy.com/regional-news/north-america/us-...
      - epistasis 3y ago
        12 GWh is a fraction of a single factory's output from a single year. We are producing >50GWh total for storage per year, and the only reason more of it isn't going to the grid is that grid storage is a much less lucrative use of our storage capacity compare to cars, which have higher margins. The entire industry is growing at 10x capacity every five years! Don't forget that this single 1GW of nuclear took more than a decade. We simply can not scale nuclear to meet our needs, it is not a technology that scales well at all. For example, we have roughly 100GW of reactors in the US rapidly reaching their end of life. Even if the industry put all its effort in rebuilding fast enough to replace existing reactors, it would require a scale up that we can't possibly imagine right now. Meanwhile, we are already scaling storage, by building factory after factory.
        ftth_finland 3y ago
        > The entire industry is growing at 10x capacity every five years! Grid storage is projected only to grow 10-17 GWh per year according to the aforementioned article. Is that anywhere enough, if the aim is to decarbonise?
        ben_w 3y ago
        Kinda; cars need to decarbonise as well as the grid, so the batteries are still really important even if none end up on the grid for whatever reason.
        epistasis 3y ago
        And there's zero new expected nuclear after vogtle 4... If we add 10-17GWh in 2023, it would be foolish to think we will add the same amount in 2024. The amount added per year will grow too. We are at the beginning of the logistic curve, where growth is exponential. A few years ago, there wasn't even a single GWh on the grid. For more than a century we have balanced the grid by keeping energy stored in fuel; as we switch to cheap renewables, that's the only time that grid storage becomes necessary, and you have to get to pretty high levels of renewables before it makes economic sense to add storage. So the market is small now, and will grow. Until then, those lithium ion batteries are being shoved into cars, because car makers can not acquire them fast enough to meet demand. There are several other very promising and quickly advancing battery technologies as well, based on iron or sodium instead of lithium. We will see which get cheap, but until there's high amounts of renewables.

epistasis 3y ago

The right comparison is roughly 4GW of solar plus 6-12GWh of storage for 1GW of nuclear, but even then nuclear is about 2x as expensive.

donny2018 3y ago
>4GW of solar plus 6-12GWh It will use a lot of land and I'm not sure if anyone ever did 6GWh storage, not even mentioning 12 GWh. The Li-ion battery technology that is currently being used for storage is very expensive and will last maybe 15 years at best before becoming chemical waste, while the nuke is normally planned to last 60+ years. And that is just to match 1GW of nuke. Now, if you want 100GW, you multiply that by 100. Now solar isn't looking all that advantageous or even technologically feasible (with storage factored in) to me.
- epistasis 3y ago
  I don't think you have a good idea of scale here 4GW of solar and 12 GWh of storage are a tiny fraction of what we produce every year, barely worth mention. Whereas even a single GW of new nuclear is newsworthy because it was such a monumental effort, over budget and behind schedule by factors of 2-4x Wind, solar, and storage get delivered on time, under budget, and at a scale that nuclear can not even dream of achieving for decades. Claiming that 100GW/year of nuclear is even in the realm of possibility is beyond delusional, whereas 400 GW/year of solar is close to happening, and we will deploying TW/year in the 2030s, before a second site of nuclear could even come online in the US. Land for solar is similarly a red herring. Solar "land use" is easily dual purpose, if need be, but it need not be. Using even a fraction of land that we currently use to grow corn for ethanol would completely power all of our transportation.
  - ftth_finland 3y ago
    According to a recent report, there was only 13.4 GWh of grid storage in the US 2022. Even with projected growth, each addition 12 GWh is not trivial. https://www.smart-energy.com/regional-news/north-america/us-grid-scale-storage-capacity-breaks-market-record-at-4-7gwh/?amp=1 https://www.smart-energy.com/regional-news/north-america/us-...
    - epistasis 3y ago
      12 GWh is a fraction of a single factory's output from a single year. We are producing >50GWh total for storage per year, and the only reason more of it isn't going to the grid is that grid storage is a much less lucrative use of our storage capacity compare to cars, which have higher margins. The entire industry is growing at 10x capacity every five years! Don't forget that this single 1GW of nuclear took more than a decade. We simply can not scale nuclear to meet our needs, it is not a technology that scales well at all. For example, we have roughly 100GW of reactors in the US rapidly reaching their end of life. Even if the industry put all its effort in rebuilding fast enough to replace existing reactors, it would require a scale up that we can't possibly imagine right now. Meanwhile, we are already scaling storage, by building factory after factory.
      - ftth_finland 3y ago
        > The entire industry is growing at 10x capacity every five years! Grid storage is projected only to grow 10-17 GWh per year according to the aforementioned article. Is that anywhere enough, if the aim is to decarbonise?
        ben_w 3y ago
        Kinda; cars need to decarbonise as well as the grid, so the batteries are still really important even if none end up on the grid for whatever reason.
        epistasis 3y ago
        And there's zero new expected nuclear after vogtle 4... If we add 10-17GWh in 2023, it would be foolish to think we will add the same amount in 2024. The amount added per year will grow too. We are at the beginning of the logistic curve, where growth is exponential. A few years ago, there wasn't even a single GWh on the grid. For more than a century we have balanced the grid by keeping energy stored in fuel; as we switch to cheap renewables, that's the only time that grid storage becomes necessary, and you have to get to pretty high levels of renewables before it makes economic sense to add storage. So the market is small now, and will grow. Until then, those lithium ion batteries are being shoved into cars, because car makers can not acquire them fast enough to meet demand. There are several other very promising and quickly advancing battery technologies as well, based on iron or sodium instead of lithium. We will see which get cheap, but until there's high amounts of renewables.