4 ms·

> Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar. I love how the talking

> Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar. I love how the talking point has switched from "storage can't even cover an hour" a couple of years ago to now apparently having trouble with "multiple weeks". How quickly reality shifts. When we're talking about emergency reserves, because that is what you are trying to paint as the end of the world, then who the fuck cares where it comes from? Having that problem means that close to 99% of our entire energy system is renewable. The final piece is trivial to solve with synfuels, biofuels, hydrogen or whatever when it is deemed necessary. In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc. is enough to run the entire grid without any other energy source for 16 days. That is trivially repurposed as our car fleet is switched to BEVs. Or just use whatever aviation and the shipping industry settles on as they decarbonize. > or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload. This tells me you don't have the slightest clue how the grid works and are reasoning backwards from attempting to justify a trillion dollar handout to the nuclear industry. Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production. What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed. Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.

arcticbull 1y ago
> In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc. Just so we're clear ethanol produced from corn is almost the same carbon intensity as the gasoline, and it's worse for the climate when you factor in the land use changes. [1] The whole program was just a giveaway to corn farmers from the Dubyah administration. Even the rosiest image painted by the renewables industry association says it's 26% less carbon intensive (but they neglect land use). Ethanol is basically fossil fuel with extra steps. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-ethanol-worse-climate-than-gasoline-study-finds-2022-02-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...
- lovich 1y ago
  Was the carbon emitted from burning this ethanol sequestered in the ground or was it already in the air and is just cycling the same amount of carbon involved the atmosphere?
  - arcticbull 1y ago
    You can look at the linked study, it's a complicated topic but this is net carbon add. It's a combination of the fossil fuel based fertilizers, tractor fuel, moving the corn around, processing the corn into starch, fermenting the starch and moving the end product to blending sites. It also includes carbon released due to changes in land use.
    - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
      Which means: Nearly all emissions can be replaced with carbon neutral transport and energy sources as we decarbonize society.
zozbot234 1y ago
> Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity With nuclear power, there's no such thing as 'too much'. It's economically optimal to produce flat out ("baseload") because continued production really is "too cheap to meter", as the saying goes. The cost is pretty much all in the plant itself, which is why a lot of research into next-gen nuclear is about building smaller and cheaper plants. > But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed Yes? That's how a "baseload" source works. And we should not pretend that intermittent renewable sources aren't going to have the exact same issue, only to a far greater extent (especially as they scale out to "99%" of the system). You can address this by not putting all your eggs in the intermittent basket.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  So what happens when you stick two French grids next to each other and you can't rely on your neighbors fossil fuel plants to absorb your over production by throttling down? The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now. You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver. Here's a history refresher: The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuclear-reactors https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc... How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum? That does not sound very logical.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    > ...The cost for nuclear skyrockets. The cost for the nuclear plants themselves is exactly the same, it's just no longer offsetting expensive non-renewable sources. Intermittent renewables run into this issue to a far greater extent as they scale out, because their variable cost is higher.
phil21 1y ago
The final few percentage points of reserves are almost all that matters to reliable grid operation. This can mean many things including load shedding even. If you decided fuel costs were exactly zero for emergency reserves you would still have those being by far the largest cost contributor to the grid as a whole. Building plants that can basically cover your entire peak load and letting them sit idle is insanely expensive and would be the most subsidized form of generation on earth. Not building them would be horrifically irresponsible. I’ve always been talking about seasonal storage as the actual problem that matters with intermittent generation. A week long power outage for a region is a society killer if it happens with any regular frequency. The only time I’ve ever brought up nightly storage is in the context of upper middle class folks using the grid as a free nightly battery and outsourcing their costs onto poor people - then commonly bragging about it. I would love to see net metering killed once a local grid gets above a certain inflection point of solar generation, and then only hourly market based pricing offered to anyone who wants to remain grid-tied. The market dynamics would then sort themselves out. The rooftop solar subsidies only make sense to bootstrap an industry. We should have been building all forms of power generation and storage over the past few decades instead of relying on inertia from the responsible generations of people that came before us. That inertia is rapidly running out, and cheap tricks like efficiency gains are no longer low hanging fruit. As previously stated though - residential usage is not that interesting as a whole. Industrial usage is and commonly glossed over in these discussions. Grid-tied BEVs are a laughable solution. It ignores any sort of human agency. When the grid goes down, people are not going to keep their only form of transportation plugged in for the common good. If anything they will top it off and keep it so until grid stability returns further straining a creaky grid. Again, it only solves the relatively easy problem of residential reliability and only for relatively wealthy folks.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  You do know that essentially all grids even today has emergency reserves? You call it "extremely wasteful" but that already exists. Generally they are older plants, often staying online through capacity markets or other mechanisms. The question you need to answer is: How will you force me with a home battery and rooftop solar to buy your 20 cent per kWh excluding transmission costs nuclear power?

arcticbull 1y ago

> In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc. Just so we're clear ethanol produced from corn is almost the same carbon intensity as the gasoline, and it's worse for the climate when you factor in the land use changes. [1] The whole program was just a giveaway to corn farmers from the Dubyah administration. Even the rosiest image painted by the renewables industry association says it's 26% less carbon intensive (but they neglect land use). Ethanol is basically fossil fuel with extra steps. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-ethanol-worse-climate-than-gasoline-study-finds-2022-02-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...

lovich 1y ago
Was the carbon emitted from burning this ethanol sequestered in the ground or was it already in the air and is just cycling the same amount of carbon involved the atmosphere?
- arcticbull 1y ago
  You can look at the linked study, it's a complicated topic but this is net carbon add. It's a combination of the fossil fuel based fertilizers, tractor fuel, moving the corn around, processing the corn into starch, fermenting the starch and moving the end product to blending sites. It also includes carbon released due to changes in land use.
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    Which means: Nearly all emissions can be replaced with carbon neutral transport and energy sources as we decarbonize society.

zozbot234 1y ago

> Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity With nuclear power, there's no such thing as 'too much'. It's economically optimal to produce flat out ("baseload") because continued production really is "too cheap to meter", as the saying goes. The cost is pretty much all in the plant itself, which is why a lot of research into next-gen nuclear is about building smaller and cheaper plants. > But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed Yes? That's how a "baseload" source works. And we should not pretend that intermittent renewable sources aren't going to have the exact same issue, only to a far greater extent (especially as they scale out to "99%" of the system). You can address this by not putting all your eggs in the intermittent basket.

ViewTrick1002 1y ago
So what happens when you stick two French grids next to each other and you can't rely on your neighbors fossil fuel plants to absorb your over production by throttling down? The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now. You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver. Here's a history refresher: The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuclear-reactors https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc... How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum? That does not sound very logical.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  > ...The cost for nuclear skyrockets. The cost for the nuclear plants themselves is exactly the same, it's just no longer offsetting expensive non-renewable sources. Intermittent renewables run into this issue to a far greater extent as they scale out, because their variable cost is higher.

phil21 1y ago

The final few percentage points of reserves are almost all that matters to reliable grid operation. This can mean many things including load shedding even. If you decided fuel costs were exactly zero for emergency reserves you would still have those being by far the largest cost contributor to the grid as a whole. Building plants that can basically cover your entire peak load and letting them sit idle is insanely expensive and would be the most subsidized form of generation on earth. Not building them would be horrifically irresponsible. I’ve always been talking about seasonal storage as the actual problem that matters with intermittent generation. A week long power outage for a region is a society killer if it happens with any regular frequency. The only time I’ve ever brought up nightly storage is in the context of upper middle class folks using the grid as a free nightly battery and outsourcing their costs onto poor people - then commonly bragging about it. I would love to see net metering killed once a local grid gets above a certain inflection point of solar generation, and then only hourly market based pricing offered to anyone who wants to remain grid-tied. The market dynamics would then sort themselves out. The rooftop solar subsidies only make sense to bootstrap an industry. We should have been building all forms of power generation and storage over the past few decades instead of relying on inertia from the responsible generations of people that came before us. That inertia is rapidly running out, and cheap tricks like efficiency gains are no longer low hanging fruit. As previously stated though - residential usage is not that interesting as a whole. Industrial usage is and commonly glossed over in these discussions. Grid-tied BEVs are a laughable solution. It ignores any sort of human agency. When the grid goes down, people are not going to keep their only form of transportation plugged in for the common good. If anything they will top it off and keep it so until grid stability returns further straining a creaky grid. Again, it only solves the relatively easy problem of residential reliability and only for relatively wealthy folks.

ViewTrick1002 1y ago
You do know that essentially all grids even today has emergency reserves? You call it "extremely wasteful" but that already exists. Generally they are older plants, often staying online through capacity markets or other mechanisms. The question you need to answer is: How will you force me with a home battery and rooftop solar to buy your 20 cent per kWh excluding transmission costs nuclear power?