Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy in a world that will require more electricity if it uses electric vehicles and move away from fossil fuels. The coal and gaz industry love renewables because you NEED gaz and coal if there's no wind or sun.
Please look at the number.
> Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy
NEVER is a long, long time. We definitely need nuclear to step in for quite a while, but it's plausible that we can be completely renewable and non-nuclear some time in the future.
Why wait? I'm quite aware of the various downsides of nuclear. Yes, it's currently expensive. But one way or another, every functional nuclear power plant displaces several natural gas and coal plants.
It's really that simple.
If we assume that CH4 and CO2 emissions have a strong chance of being an existential threat to our civilization, then we can make no other option but to embrace nuclear ASAP, even with all of its problems.
At the same time, pour funding into research: there's all kinds of fission technologies that show promise in safety, cost and in minimizing byproducts.
Even more important, pour funding into batteries and other energy storage technologies.
As far as renewables have come, we they have hardly scratched the surface for base load requirements. Except for hydro in some locations.
Not really. I'm just saying that all renewable, non-nuclear is possible...some time in the future.
Realistically, I think even in some kind of idealized future, there will be a lot of nuclear power in the mix. Hopefully it's safe, low cost and produces minimal harmful byproducts.
In truth, if nuclear can get excellent enough, which is a real possibility, then it becomes effectively more clean than solar and wind, right? The energy density is so high, there is a LOT less to build.
Given the choice between our land covered in solar panels, wind mills and battery farms, and a few very large but very safe and cost effective nuclear power plants....that choice gets pretty easy in my opinion. But I'll take the former as well, if needed.
> Given the choice between our land covered in solar panels, wind mills and battery farms, and a few very large but very safe and cost effective nuclear power plants....that choice gets pretty easy in my opinion. But I'll take the former as well, if needed.
From my perspective, there are a lot of things that become significantly easier to do if we can produce as much energy as possible, ranging from synthesizing liquid fuels from air and water (chemically possible but energy-intensive) to extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it in some sterile chemical sludge that we can pump into empty oil wells to large-scale water desalination (combined with removing the salt). And that’s just in the realm of climate change and sustainability—we are also going to need energy to do new things, not just to do the same things we’re doing now with less ecological impact, or even reversing the ecological impacts we’ve already caused.
We’re going to find productive uses of energy faster than we’re going to be able to develop the energy production needed to sustain them. So I’m not sure we’ll be given the choice—we’ll need to do both. The main difference being that a high amount of nuclear baseload would obviate the need for batteries.
Seriously large amounts of sustainably created energy opens all kinds of doors, and might actually be one of the only ways out of our current and upcoming climate crisis.
One of the many issues with solar that doesn’t get addressed.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m a huge proponent of solar when it make sense. I grew up in the Desert Southwest so it can make a lot of sense there in particular.
But solar is NOT a replacement for technology like nuclear energy.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Coun...
WWS would be sufficient for the majority of countries around the world including the US and all it takes is the political will to implement this. Not technology.
Which they conveniently hand wave off since that was a subject for another paper.
If they had confidence in their ideas, they would at least summarize the findings of that paper that justify their implying the grid as not being an issue in the practicality of their plan. For example: even if the grid is 100% reliable (which - spoiler - it’s not), what are the sizing implications due to transmission loss? How do you get power across continents to have true geographic diversity? This paper presents all upside with no downside? Ha!
Again, nice theory in a perfect world. We do not live in a perfect world.
Well since they are countering the unreliable generation arguments with “unreliable generation isn’t a problem if you have enough diverse sources” - if you can’t interconnect those diverse sources then you don’t have much of a solution, do you?
Nice theory, zero discussion of how you make the theory practical reality.
Edited after cooler head prevailed.
How many miles of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery backup are needed to produce the same amount of energy as a single nuclear plant? I imagine if you do the math at scale, it turns out to be negligible, if not more expensive for renewables.
> “Repowering is happening and will increase. It’s a great opportunity to get more energy from today’s wind farms. Repowering reduces the number of turbines by a third while tripling the electricity output. And it preserves the existing wind farm sites which often have the best wind conditions. Governments need repowering strategies that set the right framework and ensure efficient permitting procedures for repowering”, says WindEurope CEO Giles Dickson.
Most of the material used in wind turbines can be recycled:
> Wind turbines are a valuable source of resources which can be reused in the circular economy. 85-90% of a dismantled wind turbine are recycled today, including the towers, foundations, generators and gearboxes. Most of these materials are made up of concrete, steel and cast iron which are easy to recycle and for which there is an active circular economy market in Europe.
https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/what-happens-...
As for size, sure, nuclear plants are more compact. But you can't build nuclear plants on top of people's houses, or in the North Sea. Investors and actuaries have done the math, and renewables are just plain cheaper per Kwh, at least in today's landscape.
You can't compare wind turbines from 70 years ago to today. (I noticed the convenient deemphasizing of solar farms. Look up issues with abandoned solar farms.)
The last point is moot. Land is abundant in America. I also question the hand-wavy "investors have done the math"
Same with solar cells. I see them putting up thousands of acres of solar cells in the Nevada desert - will be fun to see what happens 20 years from now. Local cities who leased the land out to those farms are making money now - but are they going to get stuck with an expensive clean up if those companies go bust in 20 years because the market changes, subsidies have ended, etc? It’s nuts.
People bristle at terms like “virtue signal” - here’s an opportunity for our “elites” to show some real leadership.
I won’t hold my breath.
Ironically, wind turbines are more efficient than nuclear power plants. Solar panels are not, but at least they do direct energy conversion from sunlight (whereas the nameplate efficiency of nuclear power plants additionally ignores the requirements of the fuel processing chain that starts with removing mountains of ~500ppm ore these days).
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/exclusive-india-may-buil...
Renewables are better on a raw $/KW measure. But that's a naive way of assessing intermittent sources. Once you start saturating the market during peak production, only part of the newly installed capacity actually displaces fossil fuels. Non-intermittent sources of energy like hydroelectricity and nuclear power aren't subject to this constraint
> We're already starting to hit during peak renewable production
What do you mean by that?
This is why most renewable plans assume that there will be some silver bullet that makes energy storage effectively free. Without some way to turn an intermittent source into a consistent source, it'll be very difficult to decarbonize with wind and solar.
Nuclear can replace fossil fuels today. If we finally get other renewables to a place where they can address issues like predictability and reliability, then we look at de-commissioning nuclear.
But preemptively removing a very viable tool from your toolset is just bananas.
And solar/wind are also "cheap" because they are mostly produced in mainland China, with coal and cheap labor (including "very cheap labor": https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...). Not a very sustainable solution...
Since they use so much of it, that would build up capacity for other uses, and the subsidy doesn't even have to necessarily go straight to nuclear power, which might improve the optics.
Here's a discount for specialty concrete that only nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams would be interested in...
Let's see - the per capita total energy consumption - which includes transportation, industry, agriculture (everything) in the US is 80 MWh yearly[0]. The global population is expected to peak at 10 billion. Assuming the whole world consumes energy like a drunk sailor like the US does (and by the way, BEVs, for example, are twice as energy-efficient per mile than gasoline vehicles [1]) - that comes to 800 PWh.
The average solar cell produces 150 watts per square meter[2]. Running at 6 hours per day for a year, thus a square meter produces 0.3285 MWh. Therefore you need 2.4 million sq. km of land to supply the total global energy consumption (where the average consumption is 15 times higher than current consumption) only through solar. How much land is it? Quite a lot - twice that of India, and a quarter of the Sahara desert[3]. But remember this is spread all over the world. As a percentage of the total land area, it's not even a single percent. Agriculture itself consumes 60 times more area than this.
However, this is only from solar. The current state-of-the-art offshore turbines produce 15MW peak power already. Such a turbine has a rotor diameter of 236m. The optimal distance between turbines is 10D, where D is the rotor diameter [5]. Thus assuming a 50% capacity factor, an offshore wind farm produces 11.8 kWh per square meter per year. You would also need 12 million such turbines to supply the entire world's energy consumption per year. Assuming we get half of our annual energy consumption from offshore wind, you would need 33 million square kilometers covered in wind turbines. When it comes to areal efficiency wind, it is an order of magnitude worse than solar - however, the advantage is that the area is mostly free. Offshore turbines spaced kilometers apart can coexist easily with shipping lanes, while onshore turbines can and do exist without issues with ranches and farmland. By the way, the US coastline itself is 150,000km [6]. Thus, if you cover the coastline with turbines (only five deep), you can only generate the entire combined US energy demand from offshore wind.
And we have not touched on rooftop solar and onshore wind at all. So I fail to see how renewables will NEVER supply enough energy to the world.
References:
[0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=85&t=1
[1] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml#:~:text=EVs%20h....
[2] https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/solar-insolat....
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara
[4] https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1706915/vestas-laun...
[5] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/29/14495
[6] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/shorelength.html#:~:text....