If we did that for fossil (and other) fuels, you’d bet they would cost more too.
If we did that for fossil (and other) fuels, you’d bet they would cost more too.
The economic lifetime of the first commercial installations is only now starting to end (partly because they have been extended so often). So we do not have that much data to work with, but so far it does not look good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
"In Europe there is considerable concern over the funds necessary to finance final decommissioning"Moreover, like the decomissioned reactors, the fuel will have to be stored for a very very long time. Most of the fuel generated since the 40's and 50s is in "temporary storage", in their original installation. We have never built installations that have to last as long as the nuclear storage sites we envision, and we have no idea how the ones we have started to build will hold up over the hundreds if not thousands of years that they have to last.
I can apreciate people taking an optimistic view on this, and saying that these problems should not preclude nuclear. But saying that nuclear is compared in an unfair light due to decomissioning is taking the issue the wrong way around.
Reminder that Coal and oil energy gets to dump their spent fuel in the atmosphere, and thereby our lungs!
The uneven treatment of different energy sources really is fantastic!
Still a lot, and nasty stuff, but less than half, to pick a nit.
Can you state in which country nuclear has to pay all the externalities up front? And if that country has any nuclear to begin with? (I know from Germany that the opposite was always a major point of criticism - the insurance nuclear plant operators need is limited, lots of the responsibility and costs of nuclear waste handling has been transferred to the state.)
Even only the decommissioning fund requires a payment of 5 cents/kWh, which just itself is a cost that solar can compete with.
[1] https://epub.wupperinst.org/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/26...
Solar and wind's dispatchability remains its key weakness. Storage at anywhere near the required amounts remains a fantasy. That's why Germany and California are still burning fossil fuels for ~40% of their energy, while France's share of fossil fuel generation is under 10%.
1. https://blog.aee.net/the-numbers-are-in-and-renewables-are-w....
You're making the same error as reitzensteinm. The fact that you can charge and discharge a 1 KWh battery a thousand times doesn't make it a 1 MWh battery.
If the United States wants to use 80% renewables we need 12 hours of energy storage, which works out to 6 TWh. Even at a very generous cost estimate of $100/KWh, this works out to 600 billion dollars. The fact that batteries can be cycled for a few thousand cycles doesn't make this any cheaper. It just means we "only" need to spend 600 billion dollars every 5 to 10 years. And we'd still be burning fossil fuels at about 1/3rd the rate we currently do.
And would struggle with providing 500Gw that the battery above could.
At that scale everything is expensive, but the market still seems to say that Nuclear is more expensive than the other options.
My hand-wavy maths aside, the people who sign the checks seem to agree that today (2020, it is cheaper to get power from solar/wind + battery than nuclear). Cost of wind and solar today is what nuclear needs to beat, comparison to gas and coal are not relevant for new build systems (as in neither are getting the same kind of new build capacity as solar/wind in the coming years).
4 APR-1400 will cost the UAE ~ $24.4 bn to complete. So $600 bn will give you 98 APR-1400 reactors, for a total of 131GW of electrical power – not to mention twice that in thermal power, which can be used for central heating, hydrogen production, etc.
This thermal energy is currently ignored in almost all calculations; it makes little sense to include it in a debate that only focuses on electricity, but at the same time it makes little sense to have such a debate (unless one is a lobbyist), when the use-case is much broader.
The most expensive part of nuclear energy are the capital costs – the discount rate in particular – since it is a "everything up front"-project, where political scrutiny is extremely high (much of it for good reason, but too much is mainly the 'vetocracy' and NIMBYism in action) and the low amount of new plants being built is limiting the build-up of knowledge.
In my native country of Denmark, there is basically zero research in nuclear compared to other energy sources; even in the institutions that were led or founded by the Nobel-prize winning Danish physicist, Niels Bohr. That is all due to politics and it shifts the debate to be less and less about science, which is one of the saddest things to happen.
After 60 years of being build and in action, the nuclear industry should be able to support it's own research needs. Considering the amounts still going to EurAtom (1.6 billion euro per five years) it is not yet as poor as one might expect.
I think the Nuclear proponents should really look at the numbers as they are today and in the near future * Why are they are these not good enough in a modern market place. * Why are the safe modern reactors not build ? * Why are the smaller modular reactors not yet in the market ? * Where are the complications? is it the NIMBYs or has the nuclear power industry taken the wrong direction ? * On a manufacturing level, how come I can order pv or wind turbines from a vast number of players at short notice (years) ? * What is required to compete with the expected pricing cost of battery, wind and solar of 2035 ? * Why are so many projects delayed in the construction phase ? How often from lawsuits How often from defects * Could nuclear be build at a rate that makes a difference if money and site licenses were not an issue ?
Nuclear should be wining, but why isn't it? My guess is that the physics is simple, but the chemistry is complicated.
New nuclear power plants come in at 90-95%+, while lower for both solar (10-25%) and wind (22% for onshore and 36% for offshore in 2018). This means that 1GW of nuclear power will, on average, result in 0,9-0,95GW of grid capacity, while 1GW of offshore wind will result in 1/3rd of that.
So if we use your example with Hornsea 2 (I haven't checked your data, but choose to believe you), Hornsea 2 is 50% more expensive than nuclear power, with out factoring in the cost of large scale energy storage. Ask any honest person in the battery industry – I have done that, because I wanted to know whether or not it was an option – and she will clearly tell you, that they will not even be able to meet the anywhere close to 10% of EU or US storage needs in 2050, while also supplying batteries to EVs and other needs.
Those windmills have an operating life of 15-20 years. Once again, we need to triple or quadruple the cost, to keep that capacity on the grid for an equal amount of time. The same goes for whichever storage solution you choose – batteries for example.
Newer battery technology might change that, but that is a very schizophrenic approach that I see in far too many people, who put their politics first: The environmental challenges are enormous, present and must be solved fast... just not with that specific type of technology, but rather one that we haven't invented yet. I find this close to disqualifying.
Safe modern reactors are built; look at the South Korean project in UAE. SMR's are a relative new field, they have already come very far, which is surprising for many, since government support of this research is close to none, compared to money spent on other green energy projects (even the foolish ones, such as wave energy).
Nuclear is stable and delivers energy 24/7. When the requirement is for stable energy with a high total EROEI, nuclear is a great technology. If one thinks of the environmental situation as a crisis, one should want to act now. Nuclear can be rolled out now and a wide rollout would make the industry do all those things, you think it is lacking. Because not enough is being done now and if it was a purely economic discussion (including proper safety, storage of spent fuel until it can be used, etc. – not cutting corners!), nuclear would already be the major power source in he world. But feelings go above facts, which is hurting science, humanity and the planet.
For wind, if there is storage capacity factor goes up. Basically, if it can produce and there is a consumer (the battery) then the wind mill will turn. If there is no consumer it shut's off even if there is wind.
Windmills have a guarantee for 20 years (in common contracts, sometimes 25). Included in the above prices. Nuclear island lasts 60 years, but will be refurbished and it's power island is not guaranteed for 60 years (turbines). Solar panels guarantees are heading towards the 40 year mark (inverters not yet).
The law of large numbers favor's wind and solar for reliability at scale.
It's not about feelings, it's about hard economic reality. That even with massive economic subsidies very few modern nuclear plants are viable.
With the problem, that the scale up period of Nuclear is too slow. Even successes take decades to build. And are limited by sites/foundery's that themselves takes years to build.
Solar and wind are only viable with storage. Hydroelectric storage is currently the most popular, but it's geographically limited. Batteries don't provide anywhere near the scale of storage requires. The US would need 12 hours of storage to reach 80% renewable generation and 3 weeks of storage to reach 100% renewable generation [1]. The US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity daily. But global lithium ion battery production is only 300 GWh per year [2]. Even if we contributed 100% of global battery production to grid storage in the US, it would take 800 years to fulfill 3 weeks of storage. Sure, battery production is set to increase to 2,000 GWh per year some time in 2030, but that only brings this time down to 120 years. And remember, this is just the storage demands for the United States.
If we're worried about the time it takes to decarbonize, then solar and wind are very poor choices.
1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
2. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...
But using your numbers, right now it would take about 15 years of battery production to provide the storage for that 80% target. That is, empirically, the same order of time it takes to commission a new nuclear power plant. Add to that the fact that this battery production capacity itself is comparatively young (less then a decade, mostly) and very much scalable and you come to the conclusion that, right now, it is more efficient to achieve that 80% target by batteries vs. nuclear power. If the US signals to the world market that there is a demand of about 1TWh of storage per year, the production capacity will explode.
As in, if we stopped manufacturing smart phones and electric vehicles and dedicated all batteries produced in the entire world, then it'd take 20 years to fulfill the storage required to reach 80% renewables for just the United States. We would still need to build storage for the rest of the world! And that still leaves us with 20% of our power coming from fossil fuels. To get to 0% we need 3 weeks of storage not 12 hours. Even if battery production increased tenfold, it'd take 80 years of global battery production to fulfill the storage demand to get only the United States to 100% renewables.
And the US only makes up ~1/5th of the world's energy consumption. To get the entire world to 100% renewables it would take 4,000 years at current levels of battery production. Even if battery production increases tenfold, or one-hundredfold it would still take much longer than the 15 years it takes to set up a nuclear power plant. Like I said, if you're worried about how long it would take to decarbonize, stay well away from intermittent sources of power.
Nuclear power plant construction has high latency, but you can build multiple plants at once: France took about 15 years to bring it's nuclear power generation from 10% to over 80%. Each individual plant took year to builds but in aggregate France built a nuclear plant every 100 days.
When you include the cost of storage, solar and wind is still enormously more expensive than nuclear. The reality is that we don't event know what storage at this scale would even look like. It would take 800 years of global battery production at the current production rates to reach the 3 weeks of energy storage required to decarbonize the US with renewables. And that's with the infeasible idea we're dedicating 100% of batteries to grid storage: no EVs, no smartphones, all grid storage. And again, this is just for the US's storage needs.
Forget cost, energy storage at this scale isn't event possible with one current levels of technology.
To get to 100% renewables you most likely need chemical storage as hydrogen or methane.
Using car batteries for storage doesn't solve the fundamental mismatch between the staggering amount of batteries that get produced and the amount of storage that is required. Not to mention, I'm dubious if this scheme would even work. Why would I hook my car storage up to the grid? It's going to eat away at the battery life of my car. This essentially just offloads the cost of battery storage to consumers by decreasing the battery life of their EVs due to the constant charge and discharging.
You'd integrate your car battery with the grid because you'd get cheaper charging in return, or some other form of monetary reward.
And again, car batteries being used or not, we wouldn't have enough battery storage fulfill the storage requirements for decades or even centuries, and by then the first batteries we built will have long since worn out.
[1] https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S03062619150018...
That's how literally every thermostat has worked that I've encountered in my entire life, and I'm close to 30. Yes, this technology already exists. That's why there's no benefit to it: almost everyone already has a thermostat that works like this.
The problem is that most people turn the heat on from 7pm to 8am, which is when solar is producing little to no energy.
This does not solve the problem of windstill, dark winter weeks, where you will want proper energy storage solutions, for example hydrogen or methane that you made during summer. But it does help substantially with reducing peak demand by smearing it out over a longer time frame and thus reduces storage needs. It is in fact such a good idea that it makes sense even with conventional power generation, because even with fossil fuels demand spikes are expensive.
* With my normal thermostat I set my home to be heated to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. When it falls below 68 degrees it gets heated.
* With a smart thermostat I set my home to be heated to 68 degrees. When it falls below that, it gets heated.
There is zero difference between the behavior of a "smart" thermostat and a normal thermostat. Unless the power company gets to turn off your thermostat, or reduce the temperature range below what the user set then there's no way to reduce power consumption by hooking it up to a smart grid.
A smart grid works by rearranging the schedule of energy demand. This only works for types of energy demand that can be rearranged, like running your dryer. You can't rearrange the time when your home is heated, unless you want to be cold.
This is largely and unavoidable problem. It's a big part of why Germany mostly heats it's houses with natural gas while France mostly heats with electricity.
For car battery storage to help with this, the car has to be plugged in while its owner is at work to soak up the noonday power, and then plugged in again at home to be discharged. By the time most people go to work in the morning, there isn't enough sun to charge the car yet, so they have to go to work without whatever power has been taken out of the battery at night, so the battery has to be bigger than is necessary for driving.
This extra battery capacity in the car is much more expensive. It's not 100% available, because sometimes people won't plug in their car, and it has to be made more rugged to deal with driving on the road. You're also paying an energy cost to haul an energy storage system to and from the office every day.
Overall, you'd do better by just using large scale fixed battery banks that can be optimized for energy storage. The only real reason to like vehicle based energy storage is that it takes the cost of energy storage off the books of renewable generation and hides it in transportation costs.
An efficient way to heat a house is to have a heatpump plus low temperature floor heating (and cooling). This system works best by keeping the floor at a constant temperature, day and night.
Of course, a house also needs to be properly insulated and have ventilation with heat recovery
Not cheap, but in no way a "fantasy". Certainly not in a world with sane carbon pricing.
It absolutely is a fantasy to use this for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the US uses 11.5 TWh of electricity each day. The entire world produces 300 GWh of batteries every year. In order to achieve the 12 hours of storage for 80% renewables we'd consume global battery production for several years. To reach the 3 weeks storage for 100% renewable we'd need 805 years of the entire world's battery production at current levels. Sure, battery production is set to double over the next decade. But we're still talking centuries worth of global battery production to fulfill the storage demands of just the United States. And we're ignoring the fact that batteries wear out after a few thousand cycles.
Again, the idea that batteries are going to make wind and solar feasible is a fantasy.
This point is largely moot because we don't even have the manufacturing capacity to deliver the amount of batteries required. We only build 300 GWh of batteries globally each year. To reach 12 hours of storage, the US would need 6 TWh - 20 years of global production at current production rates.
NMC chemistry (as used in Hornsdale) is good for 3000-4000 cycles, although it's about 50% more expensive than LFP, at least if you buy them from CATL.
This isn't going to be cheap. But it is feasible, and if you care about carbon I'm not sure how else you do it.
How about we use the carbon free method of generating electricity that France has used to generate most of it's electricity for close to half a century?
We don't have to wait for a miracle that makes batteries cheaper, we don't have to scale up battery production by several orders of magnitude. If we built ten nuclear plants for every one that exists in the US today, that's enough for 100% carbon free electricity generation. It'd also provide enormous amounts of water if we use the waste heat for desalination. It also wouldn't involves consuming massive areas of land for solar panels. It would only involve technologies that currently exist and that we have decades of experience working with.
If you need to store half your generation on a diurnal cycle, add it on to the LCOE of ~$50/MWh for utility scale solar, and you are cost competitive with the LCOE of nuclear today.
Lithium battery production is going to skyrocket regardless of whether it's used for grid storage; we're going to need enough for a billion cars over the next decades, even if the world converted to nuclear. Prices will continue to fall just as they have.
I am a strong believer that we should have embraced nuclear, given what we know now about climate change. But starting in 2020 with next to nothing, we're just now passing parity where renewables are starting to win, and the gap is going to get larger.
Now imagine what is going to happen if the demand for batteries increases one thousand fold (which is what is necessary to make grid storage possible) over the course of a decade or two.
So why will scaling up battery demand a thousand fold over the course of a decade or two make it explode in price, but scaling up nuclear plant construction five hundred fold (from two to a thousand) not do the same?
You are putting your thumb on the scales. I think we're done here.
Understand that even just 1 hour of energy storage for the US exceeds global battery production. If we try to use batteries for gird storage we're going to experience a battery shock in the same vein as the oil shock. That'll be terrible, because it will stunt electric vehicle adoption. There are much better uses for batteries than grid storage.
We're both putting our thumb on the scale: You're claiming that we're going to see a 10x decrease in battery cost, despite surging demand for batteries. I'm explaining that nuclear built at scale will likely cost 4-5x less than current nuclear projects.
The difference is I have historical precedence to justify this statement. We did build nuclear at a much larger scale during the 1970s, and it did cost 4-5x less on average.
Will battery production scale up like oil production did over the course of 1900 to 1970? Maybe, but that's an entirely speculative claim. The reality is that if countries start attempting to purchase grid scale batteries, we're going to experience a battery shock in the same vein as the oil shock following the Arab oil embargo. If the US tries the purchase 1 hour worth of battery storage the price for that amount of batteries is infinite. Or undefined. Because 1 hour of battery storage for the US is greater the the total amount of battery production in the entire world. The mismatch between supply and demand is that large.
Increase in demand, leads to an increase in cost, which in turn incentivizes increased production. The production of batteries is forecasted to increase substantially, but it's still well below what's required for grid storage.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/World-crude-oil-producti...
I'm still leaning towards renewables for various reasons, but could be swayed - could you share any more details about where the 12 hour capacity requirement and costs mentioned come from?
note how this assumes that every joule you consume must have come from the storage system as if there were zero overlap between consumption and demand such that all energy had to pass indirectly through the battery system
also note how he typically treats reminders by others as claims of silver bullet panaceas: even if governments had devoted to fully switching to renewables and had solid plans distributed over multiple sources (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, ...) and over multiple storage systems (synthetic fuel, batteries, flywheels, ...) in a way it sufficed our needs, it's not surprising that pointing at just one energy source or just one storage type, you'd arrive to the conclusion batteries, or solar won't suffice... even though in combination they might.
Excellent point: The power that's going to be displaced is during the evening and night, which is when peak energy consumption occurs. The power that's going to be displaced is even greater!
> note how this assumes that every joule you consume must have come from the storage system as if there were zero overlap between consumption and demand such that all energy had to pass indirectly through the battery system
I do no such thing, not all energy needs to pass through the battery system. Of course daytime energy use can draw on solar panels directly.
> also note how he typically treats reminders by others as claims of silver bullet panaceas: even if governments had devoted to fully switching to renewables and had solid plans distributed over multiple sources (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, ...) and over multiple storage systems (synthetic fuel, batteries, flywheels, ...) in a way it sufficed our needs, it's not surprising that pointing at just one energy source or just one storage type, you'd arrive to the conclusion batteries, or solar won't suffice... even though in combination they might.
In combination they might suffice. Do we want to bet averting climate catastrophe on a solution that might work? Or on a solution that does work? We know that nuclear power can power all of a nation's energy demands. We have firsthand examples of this happening. It's not contingent on unproven technologies like synthetic fuels, grid-scale batteries, or massive farms of flywheels.
I haven't seen much in the way of true apples to apples comparisons. Most solar plants with storage don't have much storage. For instance I saw a link this week on HN for $30 + $15/MWh for solar + storage, but the storage was only one hour of the nameplate capacity.
Based on the falling prices of batteries, I don't think it will be long before solar + storage providing power evenly over 24h (an unrealistic worst case) becomes economical.
At a 30% capacity factor, assuming the batteries are charging for 8 hours and draining for 16, that plant would need 5x as much storage for a cost of $30 + $75/MWh.
More realistically you'd only need 3-4x as much storage as you get small amounts of sunlight later and earlier in the day, and demand curves are not flat. Halve the price of batteries, which already happened in the 2010s, and that's looking economical even with a zero price on carbon.
But most countries are pretty far from saturating solar potential, so you can still build solar without storage for a while. Once you need the battery backing, it's probably going to be cheap enough.
So if we (naively) multiply by 1000 we get 23,74€/MWh. And that is for the home market. I know battery storage doesn't scale linearly, but also if you were to build this as a highly-scaled farm, I'm sure prices would also drop as well.
That's not the the worst case. Solar output varies by season. So you have to have enough storage for multiple weeks. This also means you have to greatly over-provison solar panels so that they not only provide power, but also enough to charge batteries.
For seasonal variation, simply overbuilding is also a possibility. No storage would be needed at all in Minnesota, for example, until renewables get to 70% of consumed electrical energy.
And where's hydrogen going to come from? You need to overprovision renewables so that they not only provide power for now, but also store enough power (via batteries or hydrogen or whatever) to get around daily, seasonal and inter-seasonal variability.
And by the way, hydrogen from renewables is massively inefficient.
Overprovisioning renewables for immediate consumption works in tandem with hydrogen, since it means there will be times excess power is available to make the hydrogen.
The round trip efficiency of power->hydrogen->power through turbines will be maybe 33%. But this is FINE, if the capital cost of storing hydrogen in underground caverns is low enough and renewables are otherwise cheap enough (low LCoE).
Hydrogen gas would be useful for things like shipping. Such gas would likely be produced close to the port through thermochemical means, powered by a nuclear plant. This would minimize the amount of pipeline that needs to be built to transfer the gas to ships.
Not really. It has lower energy/mole. There is the possibility that if CO2 is present that microorganisms could react the two to make methane. But aside from that, where is this much greater complexity coming from? The equipment required for storing either is similar.
Hydrogen is already dealt with on a very large scale. If expanded to STP, the amount of hydrogen produced every year globally would occupy 700 cubic kilometers. This is not Power Point technology of the kind you find in pro-nuclear arguments.
Did you read my post? Because I explain how it's permeability and corrosion make it challenging to build long lasting containers to store hydrogen.
It's not the same technology to store methane. Methane can be liquified and kept as a liquid at room temperature. Hydrogen cannot, it must either be kept as a gas (drastically reducing it's energy density per liter) or cryogenically cooled. The scale at which it is produced, stored, and transported is not even remotely close to natural gas.
Show me where you get this figure that 700 cubic kilometers of hydrogen is produced yearly? And even if it is, using it for energy storage is much more challenging than using it for things like chemical production because the latter doesn't involve storing hydrogen for long periods of time.
The amount of hydrogen produced yearly doesn't hold a torch to Methane. 3.9 trillion cubic meters of natural gas are consumed yearly [1]. This works out to 2.7 trillion KG or 297 billion tons. By comparison, 70 million tons of hydrogen are produced annually [2]. We produce over 4000 times as much natural gas as hydrogen annually. I have no idea where you getting this idea that the hydrogen economy and natural gas economies are remotely close to the same scale.
> This is not Power Point technology of the kind you find in pro-nuclear arguments.
You're right, pro-nuclear arguments don't need to hand-wave away severe technological limitations. Because it actually works, and there are real-world examples of it working.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/282717/global-natural-ga...
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production#:~:text=....
And did you read my post? There is already a great deal of equipment for manipulating hydrogen on an industrial scale. What, did you think they rip that stuff out every month? The issue you are raising is already well solved.
> It's not the same technology to store methane. Methane can be liquified and kept as a liquid at room temperature
The great majority of methane storage is underground as compressed gas, not cryogenic. Underground storage is cheap; the capacity in the US is a good fraction of the annual consumption of natural gas here. It is this long-proven technology I am referring to, which should have been clear from what I wrote earlier.
> Show me where you get this figure that 700 cubic kilometers of hydrogen is produced yearly?
World annual production of hydrogen is 70 million metric tons, or 7.0e10 kg.
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-hydrogen
The density of hydrogen gas at STP is less than 0.1 kg/m^3. Divide to get 7.0e11 m^3.
> We produce over 4000 times as much natural gas as hydrogen annually.
Globally, 6% of natural gas production is used to make hydrogen. I wasn't talking about hydrogen production by electrolysis; I was talking about total hydrogen production, to show that hydrogen is a material that global industry already has vast experience with.
If by "a great deal" you mean "a fraction of one percent of what is required". No, the issue I'm raising is not well solved. Currently hydrogen is used shortly after it's produced, typically for chemical manufacturing or oil refining. It's not being stored for long periods of time, nor is it being transported in anything close to the amount of natural gas.
> The great majority of methane storage is underground as compressed gas, not cryogenic. Underground storage is cheap; the capacity in the US is a good fraction of the annual consumption of natural gas here. It is this long-proven technology I am referring to, which should have been clear from what I wrote earlier.
That's assuming these underground storage will work with a substance that has greater permeability. And storage is only half the problem, it's also a matter of the infrastructure used to transport gas to the end user. Simply pumping hydrogen through the same pipelines as natural gas isn't as easy as it sounds. Hydrogen has greater permeability and turns metals into hydrides at pressure. Hydrogen pipelines need to be much more corrosion resistant.
To put this in comparison, the US has 2 million miles of natural gas pipelines [1]. It only has 900 miles of hydrogen gas pipelines [2]. Most hydrogen is produced near areas of demand, and is not transported for long distances or stored for long periods of time. There's research into carbon-fiber pipelines that could better resist corrosion, but this is not a mature level of technology. It's more feasible to pipe methane, and then use steam reforming on-site.
> The density of hydrogen gas at STP is less than 0.1 kg/m^3. Divide to get 7.0e11 m^3.
Volume doesn't matter, I converted the volume of methane produced to mass.
> Globally, 6% of natural gas production is used to make hydrogen. I wasn't talking about hydrogen production by electrolysis; I was talking about total hydrogen production, to show that hydrogen is a material that global industry already has vast experience with.
Excellent point, total hydrogen production is 70 million tons with most of it produced through steam reforming (which produces carbon dioxide). Electrolysis only accounts for 4% of hydrogen production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production#Methods_of....
The fact that 6% of natural gas production is used to make hydrogen doesn't mean that our hydrogen production equals 6% of our natural gas production. Most of the natural gas used in steam reforming is used to produce heat. And methane is 75% carbon by mass.
To recap, we have 3 orders of magnitude less hydrogen production and hydrogen transport infrastructure. Even less if you only count hydrogen produced through electrolysis. This is in no way "a great deal of equipment for manipulating hydrogen at scale".
1. https://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/state-gas-pipelines.asp...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_pipeline_transport
Solar is so cheap now that already panel generation capacity is frequently getting oversized compared to the potential inverter output, to maximize costs.
Future solar farm design will optimize seasonal generation capacity similarly; size your panels for the seasonal minimum, attach batteries, and you can have year round output of a firm amount with only hours worth of batteries.
You have seasonal, and inter-seasonal variability in a solar and wind output. You need to account for that, in an economy that requires orders of magnitude more energy then being provided by renewables and is still electrifing. What do you mean it's silly?
I've seen a few articles now where a baseline required battery storage is on the order of weeks. What do you mean a few hours is all that's required? What if you have a multi-day cloudy, wind-still weather? What do you do then?????
>size your panels for the seasonal minimum, attach batteries
No. You need to over-provison even for minimum seasonal output, because even in seasonal minimum you still need to charge your batteries. Winter is very long.
> only hours worth of batteries
If you don't mind constant blanks during periods of prolonged reduced wind/solar output...then sure. I don't what 'few hours' means - there's a day-night cycle every single day. Multi-day and highly variable multi-weeks where solar and wind output is minimal or none are relatively common.
Here's what should give you pause and maybe make you reexamine your confidence - nobody is actually building out a solar/wind/battery infrastructure - nobody. We're essentially expanding natural gas use and complementing it with solar/wind (there's a reason why Germany is singing multi-decade contracts to ship Russian natural gas, and why every natural gas company is pushing renewables). Natural gas is not a transitional technology to renewables. It's the end-state for renewables.
What is the plan to isolate the poisonous meals in a solar panel for multiple generations? There isn't one. It just goes in landfill, I expect with relatively little concern for if it is setting up the next Flint, Michigan scenario.
I doubt any form of energy would be economic if it was held to the same standards as Nuclear. It is perfectly safe, has proved itself to be perfectly safe now that we have 50 years of evidence and then the operators have to spend however much it takes to make it safer than that. This impossible task turns out to be hellishly expensive.
There are literally 2 or 3 stories where there was a bad meltdown, and even then the damage seems to be comparable to having used coal over the same period of time. Worst-case scenario with 40 year old reactor designs is comparable to business as usual, and people start arguing over if that is safe enough.
After decommissioning a solar farm, at worst the soil might not be suitable for farming but nobody would complain about building a house there. For the same to be true of a nuclear plant a very expensive decommissioning process must be completed.
This used to be a great way of sourcing solar panels for off grid applications where a small drop in efficiency was totally offset by the low cost.
I think we can also safely assume used lithium batteries will similarly remain in high demand.
I don't think that is true, the article cites that the majority of the bad cancer cases from Chernobyl were caused by ingestion of tainted milk.
Besides, the core of that argument there is you have no evidence ergo there is no problem. That isn't a good argument. There are some horrific substances used in industrial processes (like, eg, the production of solar panels). Just because you want to think about them in nuclear but not elsewhere doesn't mean the problems go away. Industrial waste is industrial waste; humanity has been ignoring this stuff for millennia. It is no reason to block something as measurably environmentally positive as nuclear. The numbers suggest nuclear does less harm.
We should be holding all the options to the same safety standards.
> After decommissioning a solar farm, at worst the soil might not be suitable for farming but nobody would complain about building a house there. For the same to be true of a nuclear plant a very expensive decommissioning process must be completed.
Don't build a house there then. Incidentally it'd be a prime spot for a new nuclear plant.
These things are perfectly safe for people to work in, the issue is highly localised. The area of a plant is small. And, again, by the numbers a solar panel farm is going to sterilise a larger area of land. The fact that in theory it could be used doesn't change the fact it is going to be unusable by virtue of being covered in solar panels.
If I was an investor and I would choose something that has lower cost and higher profits, especially if it also favored political. Lower costs and higher profits are pretty nice. Choosing something that cost more and has less profits sounds terrible.
The investment in fossil fuel plants is mostly because of natural gas - a great deal many of coal plants have been converted or shutdown.
Assuming some conservative numbers of 1kwh of batteries costs 100usd and can do 2k cycles, that results in extra 5cents per kwh.
With the day/night cycle the utilization could be around 50%. Offset by only roughly half of your electricity needs to be stored. Sunless days would be pain though.
Imo if combined with cheap solar can be competitive.
FWIW my current electricity provider already applies a 1 cent/kwh surcharge for "peak capacity assurance".
This amount factored in will always be political in nature.
There are estimates, however, saying that those costs will exceed the overall benefits in the next few years, i.e. in the end it‘ll have been a negative-sum game.
What I meant is, that there is a concept to factor in such costs at all. Is it "complete" - surely not. Is it at least a concept that could be applied when talking about incurring costs for future generations? IMHO absolutely.