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>With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project's economics have worsened, and backers started pulling out of the project. I would e

• monero-xmr 3y ago
  I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind. I am hopeful that hydrogen can be generated in the desert and moved by hydrogen-truck. Or grid-scale batteries actually exist someday. But if we write off nuclear, a lot of coal and natural gas will be burned.
  • bradbot 3y ago
    Is it possible to transport wind / solar energy across the country via high powered transmission lines?
    • monero-xmr 3y ago
      No, because of physics you lose more power the longer distance it travels. It is also very expensive and difficult to build a network that can move power great distances to where it's needed given how dense the areas that need it are (major cities).
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • baybal2 3y ago
        [dead]
      • bobthepanda 3y ago
        You can certainly get it to places closer, then shift those areas' power to farther away places, etc. China has a large network of HVDC lines. Unfortunately, due to how the Chinese power market works, they're mostly underutilized, even in times of high power stress.
    • threeseed 3y ago
      Sun Cable, formerly known as PowerLink, is an ambitious idea that involves sending solar power via an undersea cable 4,200 kilometers (2,610 miles) from Darwin, Australia, to Singapore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
    • cesarb 3y ago
      Yes, and it's already done today; for instance, in Brazil these high power transmission lines transport wind power from the northeast region (which has lots of wind due to favorable geography) to the southeast region (where most of the electricity consumption is). The total distance is on the order of 2000 km. (A fun fact: many of these high power transmission lines were originally to send power from the hydroelectric power plants in the southeast region to the water-starved northeast region. With the rapid expansion of wind power in the northeast region, the usual direction of the flow has reversed, and it's not uncommon for that wind power to provide over a quarter of the power for the whole country.)
      • monero-xmr 3y ago
        Genuinely curious - why is wind power being cancelled in the North East because it isn't cost competitive, if it's so easy to do? https://apnews.com/article/offshore-wind-orsted-cancellation-biden-new-jersey-3f2ff7c9832210ce862f6e7179fae439 https://apnews.com/article/offshore-wind-orsted-cancellation...
        • kragen 3y ago
          you're confusing the northeast of brazil, which is what cesar was talking about, with the northeast of the usa these are not just in different countries but in vastly different climates in different hemispheres the exact page you linked in your comment literally answers your question: 'due to problems with supply chains, higher interest rates and a failure to obtain the amount of tax credits the company wanted. ... High inflation, supply chain disruptions and the rising cost of capital and building materials are making projects more expensive while developers are trying to get the first large U.S. offshore wind farms opened.' maybe you should have read it please don't post random bullshit without respect to whether it's true or not
          • monero-xmr 3y ago
            It’s strange because wind is supposedly overwhelmingly cheaper and better, yet even with tons of government subsidies and political will behind it, it still can’t be built. Wouldn’t something truly more cost effective be easy to build because it’s cheaper? Clearly something doesn’t add up.
    • iamthemonster 3y ago
      Ignore the sibling comment, it is definitely possible, typically via HVDC transmission. With 3% losses per 1000km, HVDC transmission of variable renewable energy is absolutely part of our future energy systems. Wind is especially well suited to this - to a certain extent it's always windy SOMEWHERE whereas with solar you ain't generating any at night, no matter what.
      • cesarb 3y ago
        > whereas with solar you ain't generating any at night, no matter what. Nitpicking: that's only the case for photovoltaics. Solar thermal can store the heat for a while, and keep generating even after the sun goes down.
        • kragen 3y ago
          solar thermal is dead tho just like other thermal power plants, it's too expensive to compete with pv and wind
  • NikkiA 3y ago
    It's never 'not windy' everywhere, plus gravity batteries can store power for days/weeks. Geothermal is also an 'always on' renewable.
    • monero-xmr 3y ago
      If it was this easy, gravity batteries and geothermal would be everywhere and widely used, but they remain niche.
      • voisin 3y ago
        Because there are currently cheaper options. Those are last mile, high hanging fruit solutions.
      • kragen 3y ago
        gravity batteries and geothermal are too expensive to be competitive, except in the niches of pumped hydro, district heating, very polar regions, and stranded assets from before pv and wind got so cheap
    • angiosperm 3y ago
      Incidentally, the only viable gravity batteries known today are pumped hydro reservoirs. On the up side, they only need a hill. On the down side, they need a hill. (Gravity Vault, BTW, is 100% scam.) Suspending weights from ocean platforms (e.g. scrapped supertankers), for flat places with deep sea nearby, should be a viable alternative, but it has not been done yet. Deep cave systems are another, either draining water into them or (for those below the water table) pumping air in. There are a lot of deep caves.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    Deserts don't tend to have much water, so where do you expect to get the hydrogen from? Getting water to the desert takes a pile of energy as it is, and typically once it gets there people want to turn it into plants.
    • kragen 3y ago
      you can use the hydrogen an arbitrarily large number of times once you get it there, and the amount of water needed is so small that this is not a major part of the cost of a grid-scale storage system system even if you have to truck it in, which you don't because even deserts have groundwater please do the math instead of posting random bullshit without respect to whether it's true or not specifically hydrogen is 142 MJ/kg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density and is 1/9 of water by mass, so each kg of water you drill, truck in, or collect from cisterns can store 15.8 MJ as hydrogen. a square meter of 21% efficient pv panel produces 210 watts nameplate, or 52 watts derating for the 25% capacity factor typical for deserts. that is 4.5 MJ per day. the water needed to store the panel's daily production weighs much less than the panel itself and is therefore much cheaper to truck in obviously it would be stupid to truck it back out again unless you decided to do your grid-scale storage somewhere else
    • angiosperm 3y ago
      Deserts all have way more humidity than you could ever need for your hydrogen production. Extracting hydrogen from atmospheric water vapor is a win because it is cleaner than ground water, and has already been vaporized.
  • cesarb 3y ago
    > I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind. You are making it harder by adding that "cleanly" requirement, because the simple answer is going to be "natural gas". Unlike coal or nuclear, natural gas power plants are fast to start and stop (hydroelectric is even faster, but depends on favorable geography), so they can be left powered down (using no fuel) until they're necessary; and both overbuilding wind and solar, and spreading them over a wider area, can reduce the amount of time where that natural gas (or hydroelectric) backup is necessary. By requiring a perfect solution (100% clean), you are excluding the 90% solution which is already possible, and which can be incrementally enhanced to get closer and closer to that 100% goal (by adding more wind and solar, by strengthening the interconnections so the generation is spread over a wider area, by sprinkling a bit of storage like batteries or reversible hydroelectric, and even by dynamically reducing consumption when there's a generation shortage).
    • bobthepanda 3y ago
      Reversible hydro is actually pretty possible in much of the world, particularly the US, because all you need is something bowl-shaped at a high elevation. Pumped hydro for the most part needs storage measured in hours or days, and something like the size of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam is overkill. It's also more advantageous than regular hydro, because it does not need to be in the path of flowing water, so you avoid issues with silting up, lack of suitable locations, it's much less environmentally destructive, etc.
    • StillBored 3y ago
      funded by backdoor taxes if texas is any indication. Prop 7 passed, which is basically just shifting the cost of grid reliability from the energy companies to the tax payers. So now you get to pay top dollar for the energy which is 50%+ carbon sources, while also paying to keep the plants operating from the general budget. Its like a wet dream for those energy traders. https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_Proposition_7,_Creation_of_State_Energy_Fund_Amendment_(2023) https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_Proposition_7,_Creation_of_Sta...
    • camel_gopher 3y ago
      The problem with this 90% solution is that the more renewables are added, the more natural gas capacity is required to cover the capacity. Good problem for the natural gas industry. Going clean with nuclear isn’t cheap right now, and it shouldn’t be. It wasn’t at the start of renewables when solar was expensive. Cheap, reliable, clean; pick two.
  • atoav 3y ago
    The thing about cloudy no wind days is: 1. These are conditions that don't coincidence as often as one would think 2. If they do happen at the same time they are limited to certain places Now the only thing you need to have your solar and wind installations not in one place and make sure it is unlikely enough to have all of them inoperational at once. If you have the proper energy storage and a big enough grid that can balance itself this is totally doable.
  • vegetablepotpie 3y ago
    It’s possible to build mostly renewable grids today with existing technology without nuclear. For example Marin Clean Energy generates over 90% of its energy from carbon free sources [1]. Storage and batteries are the key. Although lithium ion has limitations in the use case of long term discharge and storage, new chemistries are becoming commercially available that are appropriate for grid scale power. Iron Air batteries are made out of cheap, common materials, can discharge for up to 100 hours and can store power for long periods of time. Form Energy is building a plant in West Virginia that will produce these batteries and will open in 2024 [2]. Renewables are getting increasingly cheaper. Storage is increasingly more available. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are going to win out and it’s going to happen much sooner than conventional wisdom says. [1] https://www.mcecleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2021_MCE_Impact-Report_FINAL.pdf https://www.mcecleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/20... [2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/form-energy-build-long-duration-battery-plant-west-virginia-2022-12-22/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/form-energy-build-lo...
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    Why would you move the hydrogen? It would be generated near a storage cavern, stored there, then brought up and burned in turbines there. Also, moving hydrogen by truck is a nonstarter. Pipelines are much better.
• gravitronic 3y ago
  A harder stumbling block compared to nuclear is land mass requirements per Mwh: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
  • threeseed 3y ago
    There are many parts of the world that are uninhabitable because it is too hot. The perfect location for solar installations.
    • fao_ 3y ago
      And the world production of food far exceeds the world's population, yes. The difficulty, as always, is logistics and economics.
    • downvotetruth 3y ago
      You used the word inhabitable. I do not think it means what you think it means.
      • readthenotes1 3y ago
        I think they confused "hot" with "wet"
        • CRConrad 3y ago
          That happens all too often in other contexts too.
      • threeseed 3y ago
        I have edited to mean uninhabitable. e.g. places like outback Australia where it reaches 50C and is a long distance from water.
        • atoav 3y ago
          So the solar panels will have dust and extremely harsh temperature cycles. I don't have any source on that, but I don't think the gained efficiency from the hot sun is going to outweigh the pain (and efficiency loss) from maintaining that efficiency in such an environment.
• Ericson2314 3y ago
  The problem is those prices are wrong; they are pricing the hard thing. Renewable sells when it wants to, for dirt cheap. And they don't sell when they don't want to. At that point, today, typically natural gas picks up the ball. Other storage is as much in its infancy as SMRs, as is "demand response". The pricing people compare so favorably isn't pure renewables, it's that renewables + fall back fossil mix.
  • matthewdgreen 3y ago
    This is true. And it also highlights what the part I don't understand about these nuclear investments. Absent massive government subsidies, any nuclear-based solution has to compete against the renewable + fossil mix, which is dramatically cheaper than any nuclear solution. That means any nuclear investments will have to operate in a pretty unfavorable market until renewables reach a saturation point (maybe 50% of energy generation or more.) That point is still somewhere in the future. It's not clear when that saturation point will arrives (or if it will), but when that happens today's nuclear investors will also have to "bet" that storage costs won't have dropped to the point where storage eats a big chunk of the market for nuclear generation. And finally: in the course of taking this risky long term bet, nuclear manufacturers will have to build out huge amounts of manufacturing capacity so they can actually meet market demand. Anyway, the whole thing seems like a pretty risky bet. Maybe not such a risky bet if the technology was mature, but very risky given the fact that storage is relatively mature and basically needs a lot of manufacturing and process tweaks to wipe out the benefits of nuclear.
  • ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Renewables have a lumpy profile of energy provided. Nuclear has a flat profile. But demand is also lumpy, so the issues of matching supply to load are basically identical. What do you think France uses all the gas on its grid for? Why do they have excess electricity in the middle of the night that they need to tempt people to use domestically or export to other countries?
    • Ericson2314 3y ago
      My understanding is that newer nuclear is better and ramping up and down? Perhaps SMRs can also help with this too? (e.g. turning on and off individual SMRs as a sort of "dithering".)