Solar is dirt-cheap and about to get even more powerful

I have an off-grid family member running their lighting+IT loads straight off DC just so the inverter can sleep at night. Its efficiency is garbage with small loads.

There are some promising techs out there, like Liquid Metal Battery:

https://ambri.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiRrvxjrJ1U

My car has enough capacity that it could easily do it . . .

"Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope." from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant

There are some differences between BWRs and PWRs, but the figures are not hugely different.

2) there are always going to be Capex-dominated industries running full-bore 24/7 that need base power with the same power gen profile. Nuclear is perfect for this.

You exactly want to complement renewables with inflexible. You want 100% of your "DC component" of your load profile handled by base load power plants, and maximizing the utilization of power storage by variables.

That means the winter renewable production troughs on dark, windless days become more shallow. Since the requirement on installed wind and solar capacity is driven by how many Watt-hours you need to overproduce so that they can be stored for sunless, windless days, that ends up drastically reducing how many solar panels and wind turbines you need.

You can test this in the model.energy simulator that you linked by simply subtracting a value from "constant electricity demand". I just did that using realistic values for Germany - reducing the constant electricity demand by 20GW from 66 to 46 GW (roughly the peak capacity of nuclear plants in their heyday) leads to a reduction of peak renewable capacity from 537 to 358 GW, basically exactly a factor of 1.5.

You'll still need a flexible source of course to get rid of the oscillations over the minimum demand.

Long term storage of hydrogen is quite easy so. It can be stored in thermal oil, rendering it inert. In thay form it isn't even considered dangerous goods for transportation anymore.

Source: I consulted a green hydrogen project on logistics a while ago.

It's only explosive when mixed with air in confined places, as is gasoline, LPG, CNG, steel, wood and flour. Unlike most others, confinement is a requirement, otherwise it escapes too quickly. See [1] for comparison.

> hard to store safely, damages its own holding vessels

For these reasons I suggest we should produce and store methane, though hydrogen issues aren't a showstopper and hydrogen fuel cells are more efficient.

[1] https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2017/03/17/so-just-how-dangerous-is...

It's far easier to store it (underground, as compressed gas; this is a demonstrated technology) than it is to store energy in batteries. The cost/energy capacity can be extremely low, ~ $1/kWh equivalent.

For many industrial processes, ammonia is a well-established common feedstock, having none of the issues of hydrogen you mention.

Here in Japan, some Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants are already running with 10% ammonia blend.

I think you are right about pure hydrogen, but I can see green-hydrogen-into-ammonia as viable for many applications including heavy transportation (train, ship, truck).

We just need much more economic electrolysis, because hydrogen is almost always produced from fossil fuels today.

Hydrogen, with all it's downsides, is awesome for long term storage because it scales sublinearly with capacity.

- safety: lithium-ion batteries explode if you look at them funny, and are full of poisons, while kerosene can put out a lit match and can be safely imbibed;

- materials availability: carbon is about ten times as abundant in earth's crust as lithium, and there are readily available ways to concentrate carbon from the air such as planting forests, while concentrating lithium from seawater is somewhat trickier;

- specific energy: Li-ion batteries can store 0.5 MJ/kg, and kerosene is 43 MJ/kg, which is a huge advantage for things like trucking and aviation;

- energy density: Li-ion batteries store 1 MJ/liter, kerosene is 35 MJ/liter, which is also important for things like aviation; and

- capital cost of storage facilities: you can store 200 liters of kerosene in a US$10 barrel, while 200 liters of lithium-ion batteries would be about 12,000 18650s, which costs on the order of US$50,000.

Gasoline does indeed share most of these advantages and can also be used in cheaper engines that can rev faster. Other fuels that might be reasonable to synthesize in the same way include hydrogen itself, methane, LP gas (propane/butane), and ammonia (!!).

Can you show a single example - anywhere in the world - where this is done at grid scale?

> So it's useful to have a very low capital cost "black swan" backup system. The name of the game here is extremely low capital cost, even at the price of terrible efficiency

I've seen grid scale generators leased as a month-scale solution, so I suppose that counts. That seems more useful than any unproven scheme.

It's fairly easy and cost effective to recycle once you have the infrastructure in place. It seems most of the pollution reports are from before the mandate and also when precursors were way cheaper relative to the final product.

You don't need to etch solar cells for any reason.

I vividly remember freezing on the bus though. Being outside was better.

What I also vividly remember was the beach. Totally different beach experience than anything else I've had before or after. It was really weird when I walked into the ocean and the water wasn't actually feeling colder than air around me. It was just suddenly wet around you but not cold ;)

Something that is a heat wave in one place might just be called 'weather' in another place. If New Delhi got our "regular winter weather", it would be called way more than a "cold spell", while 2 weeks of New Delhi weather here is called a heat wave.

In terms of maintenance this is a really simple setup since there are no batteries to maintain. The inverters do not require periodic maintenance and the panels only need to be washed off periodically to keep them operating at their peak. In the time we've been operating like this we lost one inverter and one panel which was damaged from a falling rock. So easy to maintain, and trouble free.

The question then was "how much does the power company pay for power that you produce?" The terms and conditions of what you pay, and what the power company pays, is nominally the "rate plan."

When we started, this was new to PG&E and we were on a plan where we stopped getting monthly bills, instead the mechanical meter would run forward when we were drawing power and backward when we were generating power. Each month we'd have a 'net power' which could be positive (used more than produced) or negative (produced more than used)and every 12 months that was summed up. If the number was negative they would just zero it out and roll over to the next year (free power for them), if it was positive they would charge a stepped rate based on total power used for the year. Once they got "smart" meters installed they got creative with the plans, we ended up on a plan where they pay us a wholesale rate, bill us at a retail rate, and total $ up instead of actual power used. This works out better for them and extended the time it took for the system to pay for itself.

Powerwalls can (and in our case will) completely disconnect you from the electric grid. They don't buy any of your power and you don't buy any of their power, hence no rate plan. If you size the system you can be pretty sure you won't ever be without power (even with a series of cloudy days) and you can add a natural gas fueled electric generator[1] (we would still have gas service) which could charge the powerwalls in a pinch.

I've got all the feeds instrumented so I can tell exactly how much power the house is using and the panels have generated (fed into an influxDB time series database) and using that data have been planning for the retrofit based on our usage over the last 15 years.

The Powerwalls double the initial installation cost but since I'm not paying margin (selling wholesale and buying retail)to PG&E the actual value delivered is higher and so it has a better rate of return. Of course I can only speculate on the lifetime ownership costs of Powerwalls (much like I had to do with the inverters which I had in my spreadsheet being replaced every 10 years since that was the warranty on them).

[1] What I really wanted was some Bloom Energy fuel cells for that but they don't really have a 15 - 20kW rated one, it is too small.

Can confirm, did some work in a power station. The frequency is displayed in very large font front and centre of the control room. It's really a leading indicator of the health of the network, so any fluctuations are monitored very closely and the operators would sometimes jump on the phone with nearby generators if it starts doing something unexpected.

Another interesting fact, in the control room there was also an indicator showing the frequency adjusted clock time. Older clocks (like many of those bedside alarms) used the 50/60Hz as a clock rather than using a built-in crystal, so it was important to make sure that over time the frequency did average out to 50/60Hz to keep clocks in sync.

Lets talk about the Flamanville Unit 3: the new plant was approved long ago, and its construction began on 2007 (planned to end in 2012). No bureaucracy, no extra regulations, no restrictions. Built by EDF which is to say by the France gobernment, as they own 90% of EDF), budgeted 3.3 billions.

- 2012, costs escalated to 8.5 billion. Delayed to 2016.

- 2014, delayed to 2017 due to Areva failure on delivery. Areva is owned by the french gobernment, who lost a lot of taxpayer money on it.

- 2015, the french gobernment detected structural problems in the vessel. Detected multiple failures in cooling systems. Cost increased to 10.5 billion, finishing delayed to 2018.

- Due to delays, loans required more guarantees in 2017. The french gobernment agreed, and deemed the plant "safe to start" even before tests, to appease investors.

- 2018, leaks detected in tests. Costs rose to 11 billion, opening delayed until 2019.

- 2019, more leaks detected, costs of repairment rose to 12.4 billion.

- 2020, a gobernment audit estimated that the costs would rise to 19 billion, and it will be charged via taxes to the french citizens. Plant still not working.

This is the history of a nuclear power plant heavily favoured by the gobernment, with costs multiplying by 7 in fifteen years (and rising). All of it while having to compete with solar and eolic technologies that are naturally falling in costs year after year.

Same happened in USA Vogtle, and taxpayers end up eating the overcosts.

Nuclear plants are, economically, a suicide for any society. They are cheap to run, but they are extremely complex monsters that costs a lot to build, even in the most favourable scenario.

Our pool of cheap, abundant, reliable and safe electricity seems more real with eolic and PV than with nuclear. I have more faith in "each-house-with-a-PV-roof-and-batteries" than in "100%-nuclear".

Notice that I didn't even menction waste, accidents, costs of fuel, fearmongering, etc. in my posts. Just plain economics.