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The problem with storage is that the only method with significant production mileage is pumped hydro. This undoes a few of the stated benefits of renewables. Yo

by lrem 3y ago

The problem with storage is that the only method with significant production mileage is pumped hydro. This undoes a few of the stated benefits of renewables. You need to use significant land where you exterminate current nature. Catastrophic failure is a major ecological disaster for a large area… And actually hydro is the second in death toll after coal, isn’t it? Worst of all, you’re limited geographically on where and how much you can put.

asmala 3y ago
Hydro is indeed 1-2 orders of magnitude worse than other renewables on a deaths per TWh basis, but still 2-25× safer than all fossil fuels. (Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...)
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Even that statistic vastly overstates the risk of hydro. From elsewhere on the ourworldindata site: > This rate is almost completely dominated by one event: the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975. It killed approximately 171,000 people. Otherwise, hydropower was very safe, with a death rate of just 0.04 deaths per TWh – comparable to nuclear, solar, and wind. The Banqiao Dam failure had much more to do the 1970s Chinese Communist Party incompetence and the Cultural Revolution than anything specific to water power.
MattGaiser 3y ago
> And actually hydro is the second in death toll after coal, isn’t it? It appears to be second in death toll among renewables, after biomass. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- eastbound 3y ago
  They only didn’t count people falling from the roof as cost of solar energy. For a country of 40m inhabitants, it’s about 1 per year, and that’s huge: > Solar: In an average year nobody would die – only every 50 years would someone die. It’s like saying Chernobyl only caused 32 deaths because the other ones were outside the plant.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Fortunately, a rational PV rollout will use PV on the ground in large arrays, where it's much cheaper than awkwardly fitting it onto fiddly little roofs.
andrewinardeer 3y ago
I think the 'catastrohpic failure' argument is overblown. How many events have occurred when there was large scale contamination? Obviously Chernobyl. Yet pointing to this I think is a cop out. A corrupt, secrecy driven regime 40 years is not equivalent to a modern society in the 2020s. What people don't understand is there has been literally decades of nuclear power generation over hundreds of reactors worldwide with zero issues.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  > Yet pointing to this I think is a cop out. A corrupt, secrecy driven regime 40 years is not equivalent to a modern society in the 2020s. I’d say the current state of American infrastructure, with our collapsing highways and constantly derailing trains that poison entire towns, would suggest otherwise.
  - thatswrong0 3y ago
    This is a bit reductionist, as we're talking about vastly different scales of infrastructure here governed by very different institutions with very different expectations imposed upon them by the population. From some admittedly quick research, there are apparently 600,000 road bridges in the US, and the continued maintenance of these bridges is dispersed between 50 different state governments. The US 140,000 miles of railroad track that transports 61 tons of goods per American per year. The scale of the size and use of road and rail systems in the United States are off the charts massive. This is not to excuse the issues you're referring to (they are real and they should definitely be fixed), but the context in which these issues are occurring is important when comparing to something like nuclear. And it's not like it's all bad when it comes to massive infrastructure in the US: 1.7 million people fly in the US every day, and the last fatal crash on a commercial airlines occurred in 2009. It's actually kind of mindblowing that flying in the US right now is probably the safest mode of transport.. ever? Clearly the US is capable of regulating _some_ things well from a safety perspective. So.. there are only 92 active nuclear reactors in the United States, all of which are regulated under a single independent agency of the US federal government (the NRC). It's a much smaller, more tractable problem than general transportation infrastructure. The worst accident occurred in 1979 and the total amount of deaths in the US caused by the industry are vanishingly small compared to so many other industries (even if you use the worst estimates from the TMI accident). The regulations and associated costs surrounding nuclear are such that we have fewer reactors now than we had in 1990. And the designs and technology of nuclear reactors continues to be improvements upon (what happened at Chernobyl specifically is basically not possible anywhere in the world besides the Russia). I just don't think it really makes sense to cast into doubt the entirety of the US government's ability to keep people safe at all (including from scary things like nuclear) just because we are seeing _some_ things go wrong at times (and I say this as someone who does in fact have very little faith in the efficacy for the US government generally speaking). Context and historical performance matter.
bobthepanda 3y ago
Pumped hydro is actually possible to be a lot smaller and less ecologically devastating than traditional hydro. The requirements are rarely for more than a few hours or a day or two of storage, which significantly reduces the required reservoir volume. And the only requirement is that it be at a higher elevation than the source body of water, so rather than disrupt an entire river and its migration patterns you can have it off to the side. Because the sites are now a lot smaller and not limited to drops in elevation along rivers, you now have many possible sites; many pumped storage sites are either existing reservoirs or disused mines.
- lovemenot 3y ago
  Furthermore, the reservoirs can make good sites for solar PV: having power distribution already present, reducing evaporation and enhancing PV output by cooling.
- Zanfa 3y ago
  > The requirements are rarely for more than a few hours or a day or two of storage, which significantly reduces the required reservoir volume. That’s one of the main issues right there. You can’t just plan for the typical case. You need to account for the slightly less frequent cases as well, like 11 days straight of <20% solar/wind generation [1]. And that’s not even an extreme outlier event. [1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind-goes-gas-fills-in-the-gap/ https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind...
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Rare events like that can be covered by combustion turbines. First with natural gas (not used often, so little CO2 emission), ultimately with hydrogen. Because a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is maybe 5% of the cost per watt of capacity of a nuclear power plant, we could cover the entire grid with CT backup and not come anywhere close to the cost of powering the grid with nuclear. And because these would be used so infrequently the fuel cost would be negligible.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
RGamma 3y ago
I wish someone would give these guys lotsa money https://heindl-energy.com/ https://heindl-energy.com/

by lrem 3y ago

asmala 3y ago

Hydro is indeed 1-2 orders of magnitude worse than other renewables on a deaths per TWh basis, but still 2-25× safer than all fossil fuels. (Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...)

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Even that statistic vastly overstates the risk of hydro. From elsewhere on the ourworldindata site: > This rate is almost completely dominated by one event: the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975. It killed approximately 171,000 people. Otherwise, hydropower was very safe, with a death rate of just 0.04 deaths per TWh – comparable to nuclear, solar, and wind. The Banqiao Dam failure had much more to do the 1970s Chinese Communist Party incompetence and the Cultural Revolution than anything specific to water power.

MattGaiser 3y ago

> And actually hydro is the second in death toll after coal, isn’t it? It appears to be second in death toll among renewables, after biomass. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

eastbound 3y ago
They only didn’t count people falling from the roof as cost of solar energy. For a country of 40m inhabitants, it’s about 1 per year, and that’s huge: > Solar: In an average year nobody would die – only every 50 years would someone die. It’s like saying Chernobyl only caused 32 deaths because the other ones were outside the plant.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Fortunately, a rational PV rollout will use PV on the ground in large arrays, where it's much cheaper than awkwardly fitting it onto fiddly little roofs.

andrewinardeer 3y ago

I think the 'catastrohpic failure' argument is overblown. How many events have occurred when there was large scale contamination? Obviously Chernobyl. Yet pointing to this I think is a cop out. A corrupt, secrecy driven regime 40 years is not equivalent to a modern society in the 2020s. What people don't understand is there has been literally decades of nuclear power generation over hundreds of reactors worldwide with zero issues.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
> Yet pointing to this I think is a cop out. A corrupt, secrecy driven regime 40 years is not equivalent to a modern society in the 2020s. I’d say the current state of American infrastructure, with our collapsing highways and constantly derailing trains that poison entire towns, would suggest otherwise.
- thatswrong0 3y ago
  This is a bit reductionist, as we're talking about vastly different scales of infrastructure here governed by very different institutions with very different expectations imposed upon them by the population. From some admittedly quick research, there are apparently 600,000 road bridges in the US, and the continued maintenance of these bridges is dispersed between 50 different state governments. The US 140,000 miles of railroad track that transports 61 tons of goods per American per year. The scale of the size and use of road and rail systems in the United States are off the charts massive. This is not to excuse the issues you're referring to (they are real and they should definitely be fixed), but the context in which these issues are occurring is important when comparing to something like nuclear. And it's not like it's all bad when it comes to massive infrastructure in the US: 1.7 million people fly in the US every day, and the last fatal crash on a commercial airlines occurred in 2009. It's actually kind of mindblowing that flying in the US right now is probably the safest mode of transport.. ever? Clearly the US is capable of regulating _some_ things well from a safety perspective. So.. there are only 92 active nuclear reactors in the United States, all of which are regulated under a single independent agency of the US federal government (the NRC). It's a much smaller, more tractable problem than general transportation infrastructure. The worst accident occurred in 1979 and the total amount of deaths in the US caused by the industry are vanishingly small compared to so many other industries (even if you use the worst estimates from the TMI accident). The regulations and associated costs surrounding nuclear are such that we have fewer reactors now than we had in 1990. And the designs and technology of nuclear reactors continues to be improvements upon (what happened at Chernobyl specifically is basically not possible anywhere in the world besides the Russia). I just don't think it really makes sense to cast into doubt the entirety of the US government's ability to keep people safe at all (including from scary things like nuclear) just because we are seeing _some_ things go wrong at times (and I say this as someone who does in fact have very little faith in the efficacy for the US government generally speaking). Context and historical performance matter.

bobthepanda 3y ago

Pumped hydro is actually possible to be a lot smaller and less ecologically devastating than traditional hydro. The requirements are rarely for more than a few hours or a day or two of storage, which significantly reduces the required reservoir volume. And the only requirement is that it be at a higher elevation than the source body of water, so rather than disrupt an entire river and its migration patterns you can have it off to the side. Because the sites are now a lot smaller and not limited to drops in elevation along rivers, you now have many possible sites; many pumped storage sites are either existing reservoirs or disused mines.

lovemenot 3y ago
Furthermore, the reservoirs can make good sites for solar PV: having power distribution already present, reducing evaporation and enhancing PV output by cooling.
Zanfa 3y ago
> The requirements are rarely for more than a few hours or a day or two of storage, which significantly reduces the required reservoir volume. That’s one of the main issues right there. You can’t just plan for the typical case. You need to account for the slightly less frequent cases as well, like 11 days straight of <20% solar/wind generation [1]. And that’s not even an extreme outlier event. [1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind-goes-gas-fills-in-the-gap/ https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind...
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Rare events like that can be covered by combustion turbines. First with natural gas (not used often, so little CO2 emission), ultimately with hydrogen. Because a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is maybe 5% of the cost per watt of capacity of a nuclear power plant, we could cover the entire grid with CT backup and not come anywhere close to the cost of powering the grid with nuclear. And because these would be used so infrequently the fuel cost would be negligible.
TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago

RGamma 3y ago

I wish someone would give these guys lotsa money https://heindl-energy.com/ https://heindl-energy.com/