10 ms·

If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free en

• Shivetya 12y ago
  Well one stumbling block is that we need to get thousands more people trained to service these energy storage facilities, let alone the windmills and solar panels. There is already a shortage there as the skill set is not one side, part electrician, part mechanical engineer, and so on.
  • nine_k 12y ago
    With automation cutting more jobs in other industries, this could actually be beneficial. I don't think that training someone to be a serviceman on a solar plant takes as much pain as e.g. training a good programmer or a mechanical engineer.
  • digikata 12y ago
    There's no reason you couldn't bring up a infrastructure for technician level training to get those spots filled. I think you could just tap into the bureaucracy for existing job re-training efforts and it would work out fairly well.
  • marze 12y ago
    Fortunately, solar photovoltaic doesn't need servicing. Energy is big business, revenue will be there for servicing once market share is there.
    • intrasight 12y ago
      Solar photovoltaic probably needs more servicing per kWh than any other method. If those panels aren't clean, you don't get the expected return.
      • digikata 12y ago
        I predict at some point that something like an roomba for solar panels might spring into existence...
        • patrickk 12y ago
          They actually already exist. Google "solar panel cleaner robot" or similar.
  • toomuchtodo 12y ago
    If Tesla is building cells on a massive scale at the gigafactory, nothing stops them or a partner from building these into cargo-container utility scale storage systems and shipping them by rail to strategic utility interconnect points.
• DennisP 12y ago
  Storage helps nuclear too, with less demanding requirements. You can keep running your nuclear plants at full blast and use storage to average the load. If the storage is cheap enough that'll cost less than partially idling the nuclear plant. Wind and solar, like nuclear, have costs dominated by capital cost, but with less predictable output. To run civilization on those alone, we'd need quite a bit more storage, to cover times when it's cloudy and still for a couple weeks. Long-distance transmission helps but that's not free either. Particularly now that Gen III+ plants are on the market, fast reactors are maturing (in Russia at least), and half a dozen startups are working on molten salt reactors, I wouldn't take nuclear off the table. We need every non-carbon energy source we can get.
  • toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Wind and solar have a fairly beneficial failure scenario (ie nothing happens, save for the few turbines that have destroyed themselves during adverse conditions). You'll never be able to compete with that, fission, fusion, whatever. We still don't know where to put the waste, we still refuse to acknowledge the ability to reprocess said waste, and so forth. You don't even need more storage to run wind and solar as base load; you simply need to overbuild capacity and maintain a sufficiently intelligent transmission network. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere. Solar and wind will win the day.
    • manigandham 12y ago
      We know where to put the waste, lots of the issues are political rather than technical. Lots of NIMBY with this stuff. Fusion also produces far less actual nuclear waste than fission if we can ever get that working. There are also working designs like the molten-salts that have failsafes that work without power and have no disastrous consequences (like radioactive fallout).
    • DennisP 12y ago
      The advanced reactors I mentioned produce about a hundred times less waste, and it's back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. Encase in a block of glass and bury it. They can also use our existing waste stockpiles as fuel, so we'd end up with less waste than we have now. No renewable can accomplish that. I did see a paper a couple years ago on running a section of the U.S. electric grid on wind/solar alone. They had a computer try about ten thousand scenarios, and found that the cheapest was to overproduce energy by a factor of three, and add a bit of storage. So at least for that region, wind/solar would have to be less than a third the cost of fossil per kWh to be competitive. I certainly hope it gets there. In the meantime, we can't really afford to be picky about our non-carbon energy sources. Modern nuclear plants have excellent safety records, and more advanced reactors look even better. Let's just not build any more of the 1970's-era plants that have run into trouble. We've learned a lot since then.
• tertius 12y ago
  I still need to be convinced that those two methods can produce enough to even reach a point of surplus to be stored given our energy needs and projected future needs.
• fennecfoxen 12y ago
  > If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. You still need to get better return on capital before wind and solar are competitive on cost alone. Wind turbines don't last forever (and are hard to recycle well, since they need to be made of tough materials, which leads to some interesting but probably scalability-limited schemes to reuse old blades for things like bus shelters and playground equipment -- look up Wikado Playground in Copenhagen, for instance) and neither do solar panels. Maybe that's also something they'll fix "in the long run" but it's really not a fundamentally different class of future-problem than improved storage.
• breischl 12y ago
  I don't think that's quite true. You don't need a lot of storage to make the peak-shaving, time-arbitrage setup he mostly talked about economic. But you need a whole lot of storage to make a reliable grid out of unpredictable generators. The author briefly touched on this in the context of home battery usage: "Solar + a small battery may get someone in Germany to 70%, and someone in Southern California to 85%, but the amount of storage you need to deploy to increase that reliability goes up steeply as you approach 99.99%." I believe the same logic applies to grid-scale storage. Getting rid of those reliable, dispatchable base-load nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants is going to be very expensive.
  • jn1234 12y ago
    It makes sense to have the base load be something that is easily dispatchable and reliable. Renewables are an option in the short term, however the holy frail is nuclear fusion, which is clean, reliable and relatively cheap (building the infrastructure). In the short term, it actually only makes sense to replace generation that becomes retired with renewables because of the carbon costs associated with building new infrastructure. It makes sense that an inefficient natural gas plant that runs a couple of times a year at extreme peaks, will have a smaller carbon footprint than building new infrastructure.
  • eigenvector 12y ago
    Base-load nuclear is the opposite of dispatchable. Dispatchable means you can turn it on and off at will. It takes a long time to shut down a nuclear plant and start it back up again (on the order of days not minutes). By contrast, natural gas plants can be highly dispatchable hence their use as operating reserve in many ISOs.
    • breischl 12y ago
      Hm. I was about to tell you that you're wrong, but then noticed you're an electrical engineer... so I guess you probably know more about this than I do. But, my understanding is that dispatchable is the opposite of intermittent generation (solar, wind), because you can choose when it's running or not. Also, baseload is the opposite of peaking, because baseload generators take a relatively long time to turn on/off. Thus nuclear would be dispatchable, baseload power since you can decide when it runs, but it takes a long time to get there. Or am I totally off base here?
• sooper 12y ago
  What about something unexpected like superconducting transmission lines between temporal energy producing / consuming zones?
  • api 12y ago
    Sure. Cheap superconductors would also be a "black swan" for energy markets. They could enable trans-oceanic power lines for example, which would allow solar in Africa to power Manhattan at night. You could create a planetary power grid, which seems to me like something that would almost define a Kardashev type I civilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
    • r00fus 12y ago
      Fascinating. Never heard of this categorization of civilization technology before. Apparently, according the wiki, in 2012 we were at type rating 0.724, presumably a large portion of that is non-renewable sources like coal/petroleum/natural gas. Interesting that TypeII is almost a quantum leap over the TypeI - construction of a dyson sphere sounds like an almost unimaginably massive undertaking compared to blanketing the globe with solar cells.
• cstross 12y ago
  There are places where solar is less than helpful -- up here in Scotland, we're north of Moscow: in midwinter we get as little as 4.5 hours of daylight every 24 hours (6 hours here in Edinburgh, in the south). Also, we tend to live in apartment buildings: many dwellings, only one roof, shared gardens. (On the flip side, we're in one of the world's best areas for wind and tidal power.) The point is, the far north (think Scandinavia, Russia, the UK) really needs non-solar. And the far-far north is a lousy environment to go out and fix a broken wind turbine. So there's probably a role for nuclear there. There may also be a role for nuclear in shipping, although civil nuclear shipping peaked early (in the 1950s/60s) and the only folks currently doing much of it are the military and the Russian arctic icebreaker fleet. If oil becomes too expensive for propulsion, nuclear may be necessary as backup for wind power (sails and weather satellites work great together -- until you're becalmed).
  • bjelkeman-again 12y ago
    Sweden in 2014 produced about 64 TWh (42%) from large hydro and 62 TWh (41%) from nuclear. The rest came from wind 12 TWh (7.9%) and from other 13 TWh (8.5%)! other being mostly biofuel and waste. The interesting thing here is probably the change over time. In 2005 the distribution was 72 TWh (hydro), 70 TWh (nuclear), 0.9 TWh (wind), 12 TWh (other). With wind growing by 13x and the others staying relatively static, and energy use going down slightly. [1] There is quite a lot of variance per year, as the winter weather changes energy consumption quite significantly. Electricity export has gone from about zero (2005-2007) to 15 TWh (2012-2014). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sweden
• exelius 12y ago
  Actually; cheap storage makes the argument for nuclear energy even better. Nuclear is very bad at responding to demand because it can take weeks or months to restart a nuclear reactor. Under any scenario, you're going to need some kind of power grid. That grid is going to have a non-zero "base" load as batteries charge, etc. Nuclear is perfect for generating this base load - it's reliable, clean and not subject to the variability that solar and wind are. Don't get me wrong, solar and wind are going to be a big part of the grid, but you want diversification of technology so that if you have a cloudy, but not very windy day, the grid can still keep up. Also, fission reactors are being miniaturized, and at the timescale we're talking about, fusion may be an option as well. I don't think nuclear will be 50% of energy generation or anything, but it's a good, reliable technology that can supply a consistent amount of energy in any weather conditions.
  • beat 12y ago
    Right. That's the correct use for nuclear in a solar/wind + storage future - a stable and reliable base load.
  • afarrell 12y ago
    The problem for nuclear is that with the way the bulk electricity market works, shaving off the peaks could hurt the ROI of building a new nuclear plant significantly. In New York and New England, suppliers bid in how much power they are willing to supply at a given price, the market operator runs a giant LP solver over the bids and transmission constraints between locations in order to satisfy demand in each location, every supplier that is scheduled in a given location gets paid the price of the marginal watt in that location. So nuclear plants bid negative to make sure they get scheduled and rely on other positive-price sources getting scheduled in order to turn a profit.
    • exelius 12y ago
      Those economics change drastically when cheap, mass storage of electricity is available. Spend all day charging your batteries with solar and wind, then discharge them in the evening. You could afford to underbid conventional fuels with renewables at similar margins and still negative-price nuclear. But that's the great thing about capitalism: it adapts to small efficiency gains in commodities production very quickly.
• ThomPete 12y ago
  I don't think thats is entirely correct. The issue isn't just storage but also production/output of the actual energy and as someone else once said here. Green energy is a linear solution to an exponential problem. I think there is something to that. Also it doesn't solve anything for space travel which I don't believe are going to be put on hold. But it will definitely be great.
• markbnj 12y ago
  >> We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. I think that's a simplistic view. Yes there is tremendous energy in the movements of air in the atmosphere, and water in the seas, even more in the daily exposure to sunlight, and quite a bit in the geologic forces operating in the earth's interior. That's all well and good, but what matters in terms of powering a modern civilization is energy density, portability, and durability. Electric power isn't going to get a lot more portable than it is now. Storage improvements will make it more durable. But in terms of density the only sources we have are heat cycle sources dependent on fossil and nuclear fuels. Storage advances don't magically make renewable sources dense enough to replace the power we now get from non-renewable sources. Edit: I should also have mentioned the obvious non-heat cycle source, hydro, which is dense enough in some places to be a very significant contributor.
  • brc 12y ago
    This is entirely correct and always forgotten by the 'energy is everywhere, we just have to grab it' thinking. The point is that wind energy is too diffuse and the capital costs of tying up that much land in wind generators is astronomical - and there is a very real degradation in site quality as you use up all the good sites first. It's pointless to say it's always windy somewhere, because transmission losses and costs make that unfeasible. Solar is even worse because at even the best site on the best day you only get 50% of energy generation time, so event with perfect storage you have to have 2x the generation capability. All this is the reason why - even right now with massive subsidies and compensation and special protection from environmental standards other developments have to adhere to - wind and solar account for about 1% of worldwide energy generation. There is a limited role of grid top-up for solar and wind, but the future of energy generation is not either of them. The near term is in more efficient and less polluting modern gas and coal plants, with conventional nuclear filling increasing in use to provide clean energy without airborne pollution. If the public can ever get over three decades of nuclear hysteria, that is.
  • rhino369 12y ago
    The goal doesn't really have to be zero emissions either. Transportation usage is only 30% of carbon use. Just cutting electricity usage to zero emission would mitigate the worst of global warming.
• Terr_ 12y ago
  Partly, but it isn't just storage, it's also the losses in transmitting the energy from A to B, especially if we're discussing areas which are relatively dim or windless.