3 ms·

Storage is absolutely exploding. With China adding 74 GW in 2024 [1] alone and for the US it was expected to make up 30% of grid additions [2] before Trump came

• PaulHoule 1y ago
  That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of storage. There is also this problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?" If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1] So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably. [1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME
  • ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    Throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm. Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total energy supply. When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting food waste. If they are still needed. Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on before attempting to solve a future issue today. Yes we already have a solution for all those industries which require stable power: buy an electricity future. But somehow we need to treat the grid differently and handout untold trillions to the nuclear industry. We have research on when we achieve learning effects. > If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements: > - It has to be the same site > - It has to be the same constructor > - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next > - It has to be constant labor laws > - It has to be a constant regulatory regime > When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world. From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k China is not succeeding? They have been averaging 4-5 construction starts per year since 2020 which tracks to a 2-3% nuclear power in their electricity mix. From their 2011 target of building 300 GW nuclear power in the next 10-20 years they have so far managed to complete 46 GW. But surely those final 254 GW will show up before 2031.