5 ms·

Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain’t our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the same time. Eg hydro, overprovisioning

Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain’t our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the same time. Eg hydro, overprovisioning solar or wind, transmission to remove local weather variations, coupling wind and solar, demand flexibility. Fervo just started its first full-scale new-gen geothermal plant, for instance; 24/7 firm power. You might like David Roberts interview with Tim Latimer about it: https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally...

forrestthewoods 3y ago
Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.
- switchbak 3y ago
  Canada's energy mix is roughly 60% hydro, and some provinces are well past 90%. You ought to check your numbers.
  - forrestthewoods 3y ago
    No offense, but Canada isn’t relevant on the global scale. Hydro use is growing, especially in developing countries. However it’s a shrinking percentage of total energy generation. There is an absolute cap on theoretical hydro energy production, and it isn’t enough. Hydro is low carbon and renewable. But it isn’t green, and it’s not enough.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    Canada is second-largest country by area, occupying around 6.5% of Earth's land surface. It's only 37th by population, with 0.5% of world's population. It's very non-representative example.
- jakewins 3y ago
  True but PV+wind make our existing dams go much further - recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season. Adding PV means hydro can save much more of its water, just dispensing to “fill in the gaps”. This is already how the hydro in Norway and Sweden operates, you can see it daily if you look at the hourly power breakdowns by generation type. But I agree, I hope we will get to a point where we can decommission the big dams..
  - xyzzyz 3y ago
    > recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season That’s not quite how it works. Consider the biggest hydro project in US, the Columbia river, with its 14 dams. The system does fill up in the rainy season, but the crucial thing is that it’s not the dams that do fill up, but rather the whole watershed, meaning things like snowfall and ground water. This means that we have very limited amount of control over when we let the water through. We can’t just dam the river for an extended period: if we don’t use it for generating power, we must spill (waste) it. This means in practice that the dams are not batteries: to a large degree, it‘s use-it-or-lose-it. To make these into batteries, we’d need to somehow refurbish the dams to tremendously increase the power generating capacity on each dam, so that instead of assumption of continuous flow (either through turbines or spillways), we make the flow more intermittent, so that we can make up for closed times by pushing more water through during open times. This is tremendously difficult in practice: dams are simply not designed to allow for refurbishing with many more turbines or much more flow through them than they were originally designed for, the upstream reservoirs are not designed for quickly varying water levels, etc. Point is, we can’t just “save the water”.
    - Arrath 3y ago
      > That’s not quite how it works. Yeah in reality there are two forms of hydropower: the classic reservoir dam, and 'run of the river' powerplants. You're absolutely right, even reservoir dams don't really fulfill the 'annual battery' idea, since they must maintain some minimum outflow for downstream consumers and can't shut it off entirely if it better suits the power generation goal.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  > But hydro sucks more than most people realize. There's a reason Russia blew up the Kakhovka hydro dam. The down-stream impacts of the flooding were more devastating than what they could reasonably accomplish with conventional weapons.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    No. It killed <75 people. They blew up the dam because it was also a bridge and removing it allowed them to redeploy troops to the east.
    - KptMarchewa 3y ago
      I'm as far from russia apologist as can be - but they blew the bridge part few months earlier, in November. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw
      - ethbr0 3y ago
        They dented and rendered the road inoperable months earlier. But the thing about dams is that they're over-engineered and massive. Even with high explosives it's difficult to demolish one. Hence why dam busting bombs were large (>4000 kg) and still required underwater detonation to boost their power [0]. It wasn't unreasonable for the Russians to expect Ukraine might be able to seize a bridgehead on the far side, rebuild an operable road over the dam, and then rush armor (and logistics) across it. Much harder and more time consuming when there are no longer any load bearing remnants available. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise#The_attacks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise#The_attac...
        KptMarchewa 3y ago
        >It wasn't unreasonable for the Russians to expect Ukraine might be able to seize a bridgehead on the far side, rebuild an operable road over the dam, and then rush armor (and logistics) across it. It was, as much as it was unreasonable for russians - that's why they ran over to that side of river.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  Looking this up. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html > Hoover Dam generates, on average, about 4 billion kilowatt-hours. And the lake covers an area of 1,495,806 acres Rough estimate, 2GW worth of solar produces that much in a year. And requires I think 12000 acres of land. (Open to have phat fingered the calcs) My take away is it's not even economic anymore and requires flooding 100 times more land then a solar plant.
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Dams still get built for non-power reasons, to manage water supplies, so adding turbines (and floating solar PV) to them might make sense, but yes I think we're now at the point where new hydro purely for energy production is going to struggle to make a case for itself against just deploying renewables and batteries and interconnects. edit: to add some context re the Hoover dam: > Upon becoming Secretary of Commerce in 1921, Hoover proposed the construction of a dam on the Colorado River. In addition to flood control and irrigation, it would provide a dependable supply of water for Los Angeles and Southern California.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    It's not exactly relevant how much solar produces per year - it's very important _when_ the energy can be produced and how much you can control that.
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  Absolute nonsense. Your attitude is actively harmful to decarbonization. Ecosystem change =/= ecosystem destruction. The lake produced by a dam is a far more beneficial ecosystem to a much broader range of life than the river that preceded it
  - nicpottier 3y ago
    Source? I like hydro but this is not at all what people I know working in this field believe to be true.
- thatswrong0 3y ago
  My assumption is that rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere pose a much greater existential threat to humanity than localized ecosystem damage resulting from river blockages. But maybe I'm wrong. Speaking of hydro, I do think pumped hydro-storage ought to be looked at a lot more for energy storage (esp. versus giant lithium-ion battery banks), especially as we transition to inconsistent renewable sources like solar and wind. I'd assume that creating new, isolated bodies of water wouldn't incur as much ecological damage as blocking off existing rivers or greatly increasing our mining of rare earth minerals)
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    But it isn't "localized ecosystem damage". Building dams absolutely fucking destroys the ecosystems upstream and downstream. It's the civil engineering of burning the crops when you retreat. The "new" ecosystem has nothing in common with the prior ecosystems.
    - DiscourseFan 3y ago
      I'd rather some species of fish die out than the ocean boils, personally
      - thatswrong0 3y ago
        Yeah. And dams can be removed (and as far as I can tell, nature is relatively adaptable and can recover).
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  Hydro is only source of renewable power that generates >50% of any country's electricity grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable... Wind caps out at 42% with Denmark, solar at 15% in Australia. Many countries have nearly 100% of their electricity coming from hydroelectricity. Besides nuclear power, hydroelectricity is one of the few non-intermittent sources of renewable energy - sure, rainfall does technically make hydro intermittent in a sense, but it's not going to change output on a dime when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. Well, you also have geothermal power, but that's even more geographically constrained than hydro.
  - forrestthewoods 3y ago
    That’s a non sequitur. I never said hydro wasn’t renewable. I said it wasn’t clean. Most people think of hydro as renewable and low carbon and clean. Two are true, one is false. Hydro is dirty and, imho, we should phase it out the same way we should phase coal out. Nuclear isn’t renewable by most definitions. But it is low carbon and clean. Nuclear was good 40 years ago. Solar is getting good. Wind I don’t know much about. Hydro is an ok bootstrap but is much dirtier and more problematic than most people realize.
    - Manuel_D 3y ago
      Hydro is indeed clean in that it does not emit greenhouse gases. Sure, it disrupts life around the dammed waterway. But that's way less of an impact than climate change.
      - therealdrag0 3y ago
        Hydro emits huge amounts of GHG when flooded organic matter decomposes btw.
        Manuel_D 3y ago
        This is a one-time overhead emission, and I doubt it's "huge" compared to even a small amount of fossil fuel use.
azinman2 3y ago
Every serious analysis in green energy has never been able to make it work without nuclear.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  This is a baldfaced lie (unless you are engaging a No True Scotsman dismissal of the large number of studies that say otherwise.)
  - azinman2 3y ago
    https://youtu.be/bkIK4Xo1GRM https://youtu.be/bkIK4Xo1GRM
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Not wasting 100 minutes of my life on that. I'd read a paper defending such a claim. In the meantime, here are a large number of abstracts of peer reviewed papers showing 100% RE is feasible: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/100PercentPaperAbstracts.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Comb... Here's a review article on 100% RE studies: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 "The main conclusion of most of these studies is that 100% renewables is feasible worldwide at low cost."

forrestthewoods 3y ago

Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.

switchbak 3y ago
Canada's energy mix is roughly 60% hydro, and some provinces are well past 90%. You ought to check your numbers.
- forrestthewoods 3y ago
  No offense, but Canada isn’t relevant on the global scale. Hydro use is growing, especially in developing countries. However it’s a shrinking percentage of total energy generation. There is an absolute cap on theoretical hydro energy production, and it isn’t enough. Hydro is low carbon and renewable. But it isn’t green, and it’s not enough.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  Canada is second-largest country by area, occupying around 6.5% of Earth's land surface. It's only 37th by population, with 0.5% of world's population. It's very non-representative example.
jakewins 3y ago
True but PV+wind make our existing dams go much further - recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season. Adding PV means hydro can save much more of its water, just dispensing to “fill in the gaps”. This is already how the hydro in Norway and Sweden operates, you can see it daily if you look at the hourly power breakdowns by generation type. But I agree, I hope we will get to a point where we can decommission the big dams..
- xyzzyz 3y ago
  > recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season That’s not quite how it works. Consider the biggest hydro project in US, the Columbia river, with its 14 dams. The system does fill up in the rainy season, but the crucial thing is that it’s not the dams that do fill up, but rather the whole watershed, meaning things like snowfall and ground water. This means that we have very limited amount of control over when we let the water through. We can’t just dam the river for an extended period: if we don’t use it for generating power, we must spill (waste) it. This means in practice that the dams are not batteries: to a large degree, it‘s use-it-or-lose-it. To make these into batteries, we’d need to somehow refurbish the dams to tremendously increase the power generating capacity on each dam, so that instead of assumption of continuous flow (either through turbines or spillways), we make the flow more intermittent, so that we can make up for closed times by pushing more water through during open times. This is tremendously difficult in practice: dams are simply not designed to allow for refurbishing with many more turbines or much more flow through them than they were originally designed for, the upstream reservoirs are not designed for quickly varying water levels, etc. Point is, we can’t just “save the water”.
  - Arrath 3y ago
    > That’s not quite how it works. Yeah in reality there are two forms of hydropower: the classic reservoir dam, and 'run of the river' powerplants. You're absolutely right, even reservoir dams don't really fulfill the 'annual battery' idea, since they must maintain some minimum outflow for downstream consumers and can't shut it off entirely if it better suits the power generation goal.
mywittyname 3y ago
> But hydro sucks more than most people realize. There's a reason Russia blew up the Kakhovka hydro dam. The down-stream impacts of the flooding were more devastating than what they could reasonably accomplish with conventional weapons.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  No. It killed <75 people. They blew up the dam because it was also a bridge and removing it allowed them to redeploy troops to the east.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    I'm as far from russia apologist as can be - but they blew the bridge part few months earlier, in November. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      They dented and rendered the road inoperable months earlier. But the thing about dams is that they're over-engineered and massive. Even with high explosives it's difficult to demolish one. Hence why dam busting bombs were large (>4000 kg) and still required underwater detonation to boost their power [0]. It wasn't unreasonable for the Russians to expect Ukraine might be able to seize a bridgehead on the far side, rebuild an operable road over the dam, and then rush armor (and logistics) across it. Much harder and more time consuming when there are no longer any load bearing remnants available. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise#The_attacks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise#The_attac...
      - KptMarchewa 3y ago
        >It wasn't unreasonable for the Russians to expect Ukraine might be able to seize a bridgehead on the far side, rebuild an operable road over the dam, and then rush armor (and logistics) across it. It was, as much as it was unreasonable for russians - that's why they ran over to that side of river.
Gibbon1 3y ago
Looking this up. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html > Hoover Dam generates, on average, about 4 billion kilowatt-hours. And the lake covers an area of 1,495,806 acres Rough estimate, 2GW worth of solar produces that much in a year. And requires I think 12000 acres of land. (Open to have phat fingered the calcs) My take away is it's not even economic anymore and requires flooding 100 times more land then a solar plant.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  Dams still get built for non-power reasons, to manage water supplies, so adding turbines (and floating solar PV) to them might make sense, but yes I think we're now at the point where new hydro purely for energy production is going to struggle to make a case for itself against just deploying renewables and batteries and interconnects. edit: to add some context re the Hoover dam: > Upon becoming Secretary of Commerce in 1921, Hoover proposed the construction of a dam on the Colorado River. In addition to flood control and irrigation, it would provide a dependable supply of water for Los Angeles and Southern California.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  It's not exactly relevant how much solar produces per year - it's very important _when_ the energy can be produced and how much you can control that.
newZWhoDis 3y ago
Absolute nonsense. Your attitude is actively harmful to decarbonization. Ecosystem change =/= ecosystem destruction. The lake produced by a dam is a far more beneficial ecosystem to a much broader range of life than the river that preceded it
- nicpottier 3y ago
  Source? I like hydro but this is not at all what people I know working in this field believe to be true.
thatswrong0 3y ago
My assumption is that rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere pose a much greater existential threat to humanity than localized ecosystem damage resulting from river blockages. But maybe I'm wrong. Speaking of hydro, I do think pumped hydro-storage ought to be looked at a lot more for energy storage (esp. versus giant lithium-ion battery banks), especially as we transition to inconsistent renewable sources like solar and wind. I'd assume that creating new, isolated bodies of water wouldn't incur as much ecological damage as blocking off existing rivers or greatly increasing our mining of rare earth minerals)
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  But it isn't "localized ecosystem damage". Building dams absolutely fucking destroys the ecosystems upstream and downstream. It's the civil engineering of burning the crops when you retreat. The "new" ecosystem has nothing in common with the prior ecosystems.
  - DiscourseFan 3y ago
    I'd rather some species of fish die out than the ocean boils, personally
    - thatswrong0 3y ago
      Yeah. And dams can be removed (and as far as I can tell, nature is relatively adaptable and can recover).
Manuel_D 3y ago
Hydro is only source of renewable power that generates >50% of any country's electricity grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable... Wind caps out at 42% with Denmark, solar at 15% in Australia. Many countries have nearly 100% of their electricity coming from hydroelectricity. Besides nuclear power, hydroelectricity is one of the few non-intermittent sources of renewable energy - sure, rainfall does technically make hydro intermittent in a sense, but it's not going to change output on a dime when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. Well, you also have geothermal power, but that's even more geographically constrained than hydro.
- forrestthewoods 3y ago
  That’s a non sequitur. I never said hydro wasn’t renewable. I said it wasn’t clean. Most people think of hydro as renewable and low carbon and clean. Two are true, one is false. Hydro is dirty and, imho, we should phase it out the same way we should phase coal out. Nuclear isn’t renewable by most definitions. But it is low carbon and clean. Nuclear was good 40 years ago. Solar is getting good. Wind I don’t know much about. Hydro is an ok bootstrap but is much dirtier and more problematic than most people realize.
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    Hydro is indeed clean in that it does not emit greenhouse gases. Sure, it disrupts life around the dammed waterway. But that's way less of an impact than climate change.
    - therealdrag0 3y ago
      Hydro emits huge amounts of GHG when flooded organic matter decomposes btw.
      - Manuel_D 3y ago
        This is a one-time overhead emission, and I doubt it's "huge" compared to even a small amount of fossil fuel use.

azinman2 3y ago

Every serious analysis in green energy has never been able to make it work without nuclear.

pfdietz 3y ago
This is a baldfaced lie (unless you are engaging a No True Scotsman dismissal of the large number of studies that say otherwise.)
- azinman2 3y ago
  https://youtu.be/bkIK4Xo1GRM https://youtu.be/bkIK4Xo1GRM
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Not wasting 100 minutes of my life on that. I'd read a paper defending such a claim. In the meantime, here are a large number of abstracts of peer reviewed papers showing 100% RE is feasible: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/100PercentPaperAbstracts.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Comb... Here's a review article on 100% RE studies: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 "The main conclusion of most of these studies is that 100% renewables is feasible worldwide at low cost."