He says renewable can't provide the level of energy we have without decreasing drastically our consumption. And nuclear fission is the only path we have to reduce our CO2 emissions.
I would love renewable or fusion to cover all our needs, and keep my comfortable life as it is today. But I didn't find any inspiring talks or readings so far to balance his arguments.
I've been reading Jason Hickel's book "Less is More" [1], which talks a bit about energy use, in general, and how it must be reduced, regardless of what technologies we wind up with. And one of his points is examining how much energy is just flat-out wasted. ~50% of food is just wasted, for example—whether because it's ugly, or left in a refrigerator too long, and rots. Think about how most American cities are designed, and how it's just normal for most Americans to own and drive personal vehicles for hours each day. Those resources and the energy needed to extract those resources is largely just unnecessarily wasted.
Consider countries like Costa Rica, Finland, Taiwan, etc., where quality of life is better than in the US. Life expectancy is higher. Infant mortality is lower. Education is better. And they need a tiny fraction of the energy the U.S. does. Clearly there's room for a lot of improvement with how we use energy.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-in...
Also for whatever reason people love to talk about how mining trucks will become EVs, and they always link me to the same Komatsu truck which they claim is an EV, but actually has a diesel engine and uses an electric power transmission.
I just don't see a similar pathway for nuclear? Particularly in less stable parts of the world without an existing industry.
Also, the current generation of EVs will provide a substantial amount of flexibility resulting in £billions of savings for the UK grid and consumers (see https://www.kaluza.com/blog-busting-the-myth-ev-smart-chargi...). The addition of Vehicle-to-Grid chargers will further allow increased renewables.
With the cost of these technologies decreasing, the importance of nuclear power will reduce over time.
I also recommend looking through his list of books on the sidebar.
https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
Here's the summary page where the author asked if the UK could supply its energy needs from renewables alone:
http://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml
The answer was "not quite."
However, he assumed that utility scale solar farms would be using 10% efficient panels. 20% are now widely available. So let's make these two quick edits:
- Assume that solar farms provide double the energy from doubled panel efficiency.
- Drop biomass, because it's unneeded with better solar farms.
With these changes the renewable energy supply of 206 kWh/person/day exceeds modeled demand of 195 kWh/person/day. Making some other simple updates like assuming that car transportation is mostly electrified would further increase the margin of safety.
This is an outrageous falsehood. Play with the numbers at this model site to see:
Also, why is energy density relevant for stationary storage? The cost of land to site batteries is trivial.
If you want to store power overnight you want kinetic storage, or possibly power to gas. There are lots of technologies available. Some of them are cheaper than nuclear, but none of them are economical yet because there is no market for day-to-week-scale storage until solar/wind start to approach 50% of the power mix.
...neither of which are cheaper than batteries or we'd be doing that
Yes, we are doing pumped hydro, but only in a few convenient locations. I recently watched a video about Ireland's new pumped storage facility[1], it mentions some pretty tight constraints for what we currently consider economical (e.g. hill slope). Bill Gates' new book[2] doesn't go into as much detail but also doesn't sound like we got this figured out any better than batteries, basically saying we need breakthroughs or this is going to simply be a prohibitively expensive undertaking for non-rich countries. Specifically about hydrogen (the "to gas" option that has the most buzz at least) [2] says that there are high losses in conversion (without saying how much) as well as hydrogen leaking from metal tanks and electrolyzers being very expensive. There's hope for breakthroughs but.. they do have to happen in order for it to be better (cheaper) than today's batteries.
At a bare minimum, it's not obvious that what GP wrote is "just wrong". This isn't something we have a definite answer to.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI
[2] "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need" ISBN 978-0-593-21577-7
I agree that we don't have definite answers, but that's why what the GP wrote is just wrong. They're reducing a very complicated set of technologies to the economics of lithium ion batteries. While yes, pumped hydro is something of a cop-out, it's clear there are a variety of techs that are cheaper than lithium ion.
The economics of this are also a little unclear to me. In the presence of sustained negative electricity prices, it seems obvious in principle that lots of storage technologies would suddenly become economical. But it's hard to imagine how that would work given the way we currently finance these things. (And by extension, it's not clear to me that this is actually a technical problem so much as a political one.)