You are mixing up the price of capacity vs. the price of generating the electric energy. A battery for 100/kwh can be used several 100 to 1000s of cycles.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.