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> New research shows that hybrid energy grids that rely on a mix of renewable and fossil fuel energy are up to the task, so long as the timing of freshwater pro

> New research shows that hybrid energy grids that rely on a mix of renewable and fossil fuel energy are up to the task, so long as the timing of freshwater production is right. In some situations, it may even be more financially and energy efficient to put that generated energy toward desalination rather than store it in batteries for use later. And this is why I remain skeptical of renewables as base load energy. The only carbon free base load energy tech remains nuclear which is also perfectly capable of performing desal during off-peak times.

tmoertel 3y ago
Geothermal also works for carbon-free base load, and newer drilling techniques made it viable in areas without high surface heat.
barbazoo 3y ago
> And this is why I remain skeptical of renewables as base load energy. Someone should tell countries like Germany then \s https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/germany-aims-get-100-energy-renewable-sources-by-2035-2022-02-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/german...
- himinlomax 3y ago
  Germany is currently producing nearly half of their electricyt from coal and gas right now. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Yes, someone really should. Germany is currently one of, if not the, worse polluters in the EU, by far. Compare it to France, which produces most of its electricity from nuclear power, and thus produces almost half the CO2.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    First sentence from the linked article: > Germany aims to fulfill all its electricity needs with supplies from renewable sources by 2035
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      Aiming is easy. Achieving your aims is an entirely different problem. Given their track record, it seems more plausible that they'll close down wind turbines and replace them with more coal, like their "green" government has been doing with nuclear.
ProjectArcturis 3y ago
Somebody always wants to tout nuclear, even when that's not the topic at hand. Nuclear is equally unsuitable to solar as a stand-alone energy source. Nuclear energy is produced constantly throughout the day, and would not match the daytime peaks in electricity consumption. Anyway, this article is discussing one of many new ways that power usage can be shifted around during the day, which makes solar able to provide a LARGER share of our overall energy.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  No, this article is saying that if you have a hybrid grid of fossil fuels & solar, desal is a cheaper application than storing in batteries & using solar power banked in batteries at night. If you have a full renewable grid, that advantage disappears. That’s because the price differential comes from arbitrage & that price differential makes desal cheaper than building capacity. I bring up nuclear whenever there’s a discussion of grid energy to provide a reality check that solar is not able to get us to net 0 by 2050 in any way regardless of clever new ideas. By contrast nuclear actually does have that capability and it’s not purely theoretical nor “hey what if we productionized some new hypothetical theoretical idea at massive scale and ignore all unintended side effects” - we have plenty of existence proof that nuclear is a drop-in replacement for fossil fuels & thus actually very quickly reduces the need for them in the grid energy mix whereas no such existence proof really exists for renewables (yes - someone brought up Denmark but that’s not a repeatable situation because they are one of the windiest places on earth and wind doesn’t have the same critical downsides that solar does for grid power).
  - ProjectArcturis 3y ago
    >very quickly Vogtle 3 just came online in July, 17 years after the initial application was filed. Unit 4 hasn't come online yet. They're going to cost more than double the initial estimate. I just don't get the fascination with a power source that is so much more expensive and slower to bring online.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
laurencerowe 3y ago
Unfortunately nuclear is now horribly expensive to build so we’re just not going to build that much of it. By contrast renewables (and batteries) are getting cheaper and cheaper so we are building lots of them. In 2022 Denmark generated 62% (+12% from 2021) of its electricity from renewables (excluding biomass which seems suspect to me) while France generated 63% (-5% from 2021) from Nuclear. I think you can make a case that nuclear is competitive for 100% carbon free grids (though by the time it’s built batteries will have gotten far cheaper.) But it seems clear that renewables are by far the cheapest and quickest way to get to ~80% carbon free grids.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Yes yes. Renewable proponents really love trotting out costs while ignoring the only reason costs have gone up is because we significantly ramped down our nuclear production efforts. Same would happen if we did that for solar. But that’s a choice we get to make. Also nuclear construction costs are particularly outsized in the US where regulations are intentionally constructed to strangle it. Japan, China, and Europe build it much more cheaply. Existing heavy water reactors could be built more cheaply than they are now. And MSR/thorium designs are a step function cheaper beyond that because they generate even less waste, don’t need expensive fail-safe mechanisms because it’s inheritently physically impossible to melt down, and don’t need water to cool down which is both a cost savings & avoids the issue of warming waters due to global warming impacting the ability for reactors to run at times. China has already started building MSR designs and it sucks that the DOE is dragging their feet in approving these designs & focusing instead on SMR designs. The regulatory capture of the US beuracracy by fossil fuel companies is a huge problem. > it seems clear that renewables are by far the cheapest and quickest way to get to 80% carbon free grids Got any existence proof for this claim? We’re building renewables as fast as we can and countries seem to generally tap out at ~20% ammortized across the year and are growing extremely slowly (~1% each year). By comparison France runs 90% carbon free and that’s because of their nuclear grid. Batteries will decrease over time but we still don’t yet know what grid-scale renewable base load looks like & I don’t think that 80% number is correct considering that baseload is 30-40% of maximum load (i.e. best case peak without batteries is 60-70%). But all the solar proponents also seem to ignore a major headwind for solar which is that while we build out more & more capacity, our energy demands grow faster than that. We’ve electrified 2% of consumer cars, 0% of trucks, 0% of ships, 0% of airplanes. Electrifying cars is going to add an insane amount of demands on the grid & solar can’t keep up (batteries either). And yes, there’s the argument of using batteries in EVs to do the grid balancing but we don’t actually have that tech & 0 regulations requiring it meaning that in 2035 which is the target when ostensibly we stop creating new ICE cars, we still won’t have that ability. Building out nuclear capacity is still by far the quickest & cheapest option to not only convert our existing energy to carbon free but also to keep up with ever growing demands. Remember - the more capacity you build, the cheaper it gets per MW. Also, nuclear is way more land efficient than solar which is a separate unrelated discussion but also relevant. Again, my argument is not to stop solar investments but to remove all the regulatory and bueracratic roadblocks that inhibit nuclear fission so that those companies can compete fairly. Denmark is an absolute best case because they are geographically advantaged for wind. Wind is much more resilient and cheaper than solar but is also more geography dependent. Fission can be installed anywhere.

tmoertel 3y ago

Geothermal also works for carbon-free base load, and newer drilling techniques made it viable in areas without high surface heat.

barbazoo 3y ago

> And this is why I remain skeptical of renewables as base load energy. Someone should tell countries like Germany then \s https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/germany-aims-get-100-energy-renewable-sources-by-2035-2022-02-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/german...

himinlomax 3y ago
Germany is currently producing nearly half of their electricyt from coal and gas right now. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
tsimionescu 3y ago
Yes, someone really should. Germany is currently one of, if not the, worse polluters in the EU, by far. Compare it to France, which produces most of its electricity from nuclear power, and thus produces almost half the CO2.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  First sentence from the linked article: > Germany aims to fulfill all its electricity needs with supplies from renewable sources by 2035
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Aiming is easy. Achieving your aims is an entirely different problem. Given their track record, it seems more plausible that they'll close down wind turbines and replace them with more coal, like their "green" government has been doing with nuclear.

ProjectArcturis 3y ago

Somebody always wants to tout nuclear, even when that's not the topic at hand. Nuclear is equally unsuitable to solar as a stand-alone energy source. Nuclear energy is produced constantly throughout the day, and would not match the daytime peaks in electricity consumption. Anyway, this article is discussing one of many new ways that power usage can be shifted around during the day, which makes solar able to provide a LARGER share of our overall energy.

vlovich123 3y ago
No, this article is saying that if you have a hybrid grid of fossil fuels & solar, desal is a cheaper application than storing in batteries & using solar power banked in batteries at night. If you have a full renewable grid, that advantage disappears. That’s because the price differential comes from arbitrage & that price differential makes desal cheaper than building capacity. I bring up nuclear whenever there’s a discussion of grid energy to provide a reality check that solar is not able to get us to net 0 by 2050 in any way regardless of clever new ideas. By contrast nuclear actually does have that capability and it’s not purely theoretical nor “hey what if we productionized some new hypothetical theoretical idea at massive scale and ignore all unintended side effects” - we have plenty of existence proof that nuclear is a drop-in replacement for fossil fuels & thus actually very quickly reduces the need for them in the grid energy mix whereas no such existence proof really exists for renewables (yes - someone brought up Denmark but that’s not a repeatable situation because they are one of the windiest places on earth and wind doesn’t have the same critical downsides that solar does for grid power).
- ProjectArcturis 3y ago
  >very quickly Vogtle 3 just came online in July, 17 years after the initial application was filed. Unit 4 hasn't come online yet. They're going to cost more than double the initial estimate. I just don't get the fascination with a power source that is so much more expensive and slower to bring online.
  - vlovich123 3y ago

laurencerowe 3y ago

Unfortunately nuclear is now horribly expensive to build so we’re just not going to build that much of it. By contrast renewables (and batteries) are getting cheaper and cheaper so we are building lots of them. In 2022 Denmark generated 62% (+12% from 2021) of its electricity from renewables (excluding biomass which seems suspect to me) while France generated 63% (-5% from 2021) from Nuclear. I think you can make a case that nuclear is competitive for 100% carbon free grids (though by the time it’s built batteries will have gotten far cheaper.) But it seems clear that renewables are by far the cheapest and quickest way to get to ~80% carbon free grids.

vlovich123 3y ago
Yes yes. Renewable proponents really love trotting out costs while ignoring the only reason costs have gone up is because we significantly ramped down our nuclear production efforts. Same would happen if we did that for solar. But that’s a choice we get to make. Also nuclear construction costs are particularly outsized in the US where regulations are intentionally constructed to strangle it. Japan, China, and Europe build it much more cheaply. Existing heavy water reactors could be built more cheaply than they are now. And MSR/thorium designs are a step function cheaper beyond that because they generate even less waste, don’t need expensive fail-safe mechanisms because it’s inheritently physically impossible to melt down, and don’t need water to cool down which is both a cost savings & avoids the issue of warming waters due to global warming impacting the ability for reactors to run at times. China has already started building MSR designs and it sucks that the DOE is dragging their feet in approving these designs & focusing instead on SMR designs. The regulatory capture of the US beuracracy by fossil fuel companies is a huge problem. > it seems clear that renewables are by far the cheapest and quickest way to get to 80% carbon free grids Got any existence proof for this claim? We’re building renewables as fast as we can and countries seem to generally tap out at ~20% ammortized across the year and are growing extremely slowly (~1% each year). By comparison France runs 90% carbon free and that’s because of their nuclear grid. Batteries will decrease over time but we still don’t yet know what grid-scale renewable base load looks like & I don’t think that 80% number is correct considering that baseload is 30-40% of maximum load (i.e. best case peak without batteries is 60-70%). But all the solar proponents also seem to ignore a major headwind for solar which is that while we build out more & more capacity, our energy demands grow faster than that. We’ve electrified 2% of consumer cars, 0% of trucks, 0% of ships, 0% of airplanes. Electrifying cars is going to add an insane amount of demands on the grid & solar can’t keep up (batteries either). And yes, there’s the argument of using batteries in EVs to do the grid balancing but we don’t actually have that tech & 0 regulations requiring it meaning that in 2035 which is the target when ostensibly we stop creating new ICE cars, we still won’t have that ability. Building out nuclear capacity is still by far the quickest & cheapest option to not only convert our existing energy to carbon free but also to keep up with ever growing demands. Remember - the more capacity you build, the cheaper it gets per MW. Also, nuclear is way more land efficient than solar which is a separate unrelated discussion but also relevant. Again, my argument is not to stop solar investments but to remove all the regulatory and bueracratic roadblocks that inhibit nuclear fission so that those companies can compete fairly. Denmark is an absolute best case because they are geographically advantaged for wind. Wind is much more resilient and cheaper than solar but is also more geography dependent. Fission can be installed anywhere.