Such large wind turbines break the 50% capacity threshold:
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...
Mostly because at such heights wind is generally higher and more consistent.
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...
Mostly because at such heights wind is generally higher and more consistent.
France produces 75% of their electricity with 56 nuclear power plants, which - if the above is broadly correct - you would be able to replace with 7000 of these wind mills. That's a lot, but on the other hand, Germany has already installed 20k wind turbines so far, so it seems within reach. Obviously you still need to think about matching supply and demand, but I'm surprised by how feasible this appears.
Sadly, not everything is so green here, like it may sound.
They're supposed to prove the supremacy of french engineering companies with the new EPR design, however all it's shown so far is the many inadequacies of any institution we've known so far to respect basic security/operating principles.
There are many, many EPR-related scandals to explore if you speak french, and even more scandals relative to french engineering companies if you're curious like Lafarge, Areva, Bouygues..
In addition to electricity, nuclear power plants also produce a lot of heat, which can be used for district heating purposes (called co-generation), as is done frequently in northern and eastern Europe. Heating is the dominant component of the final energy consumption, accounting for close to half of all energy use. This is apparent when driving around in an electric car - keeping the cabin warm easily accounts for ~30% of the consumption. Wind turbines obviously produce no surplus heat to extract
https://www.climateforesight.eu/energy/nuclear-power-feeling...
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/632988813/hot-weather-spells-...
Thermal power stations face a panoply of potential malfunctions, regardless of their heat source. They are very, very complex.
Is that the case though? To my knowledge nuclear reactor heat is only used to produce electricity and kill biodiversity in rivers so far.
Also, nuclear reactors are built far away from populous area for obvious security concerns. Are there adequate mechanisms for transporting heat over long distances? That's already a problem for electricity, which incurs huge losses (heat dissipation).
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Haiyang-begins-c...
For net heating climates, my understanding is that this form of heating can be much more efficient than alternatives like electric heating.
> my understanding is that this form of heating can be much more efficient than alternatives like electric heating.
It makes sense that mutualizing efforts to produce heat is gonna have a better yield/efficiency. I'm just sure nuclear energy is a disaster (at least all known and planned implementations so far) and i'm not sure whether using that excess heat in this manner is efficient. I'm very sure, though, that it's considerably better than rejecting very hot water into natural streams where it destroys ecosystems.
Really? Look at Pickering nuclear power station for example. Highly populated area all around it.
In any case, in that model, heating housing using nuclear sites heat makes perfect sense.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto...
I have no major problem with more renewables per se, but unless you're in the Orkneys or a dessert/Mediterranean climate, it appears to me that there are always times when they're not available and so you have build out something as a back-up.
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, we have nuclear plants providing >10,0000 MW continuously (click "Supply"):
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
Hydro and gas area scaled up as needed (especially over the last few days with >30C weather), and wind is very "random". (We have only a token amount of solar.)
Right now it's not possible, and there is no solution in sight.
Edit: Why I'm being downvoted, we can't store energy at scale for now, end of the story.
Goes to show that many here do not fully understand the challenges of running an electric grid and also that far too many have bought into the propaganda of wind, solar and battery storage being the sole path forward.
Not large enough. There isn't enough space on earth for all the lakes needed to make pumped hydro work. Sure where there is unused potential we should use it, but there isn't a whole lot of places left where we can do it - even before we get into how hydro tends to destroy ecosystems.
The problem with battery energy storage is not cost but scale. There isn't a battery in the world that can power a gigawatt scale electric grid for more than a few minutes. The original point is a good one - no renewable generation technology is a replacement for coal/gas/nuclear simply due to the unpredictable and variable nature of renewable generation.
Edit - it is very telling that information and views that go against the grain of "renewable energy is the sole future" are instantly downvoted. Shame on you.
The actual issues are the cost efficiency of batteries, the amount of batteries that can be produced in total, and the flexibility of the power grid. Flexibility of the power grid is a known solvable problem, although how much it will cost to improve our infrastructure there is an important question. The point you were responding to was presumably arguing that $100kw/h batteries exist, and that that’s cost efficient enough. The questions are A) Is it true batteries at that cost exist, B) Is that actually cost efficient enough, and C) Can we produce enough of them to deal with the scale of batteries needed. Your post didn’t really argue against any of those points, just stated vacuously that current setups aren’t sufficient. Obviously current setups aren’t sufficient, the question is if we are approaching the cost point where they could be.
Finally, these are just Li-ion prices. Na-ion and Fe-ion are also very close to deployment now. Both of them cannot match the energy density of Li-ion, but that's fine. Grid storage depends on cost, not energy density anyway
A lot of smaller batteries is effectively equivalent to a single larger battery and that does not get around the problem from above - they simply cannot store enough energy for more than short periods. A handful of large hydro reservoirs store more potential energy than all chemical batteries in the world combined.
Meanwhile, extreme weather events are getting more common. Texas - for example - had a nearly 10,000 MW shortfall between their forecast and the actual, served demand. Is a battery every going to supply capacities like that for hours on end? No. During that cold snap, some wind turbines froze, some didn't see enough wind and much of the solar wasn't generating at full tilt. What then? Do we shrug our shoulders and say "no heat, too bad"?
Chemical storage batteries cannot power large grids for extended periods and that is the fundamental problem being ignored, not their cost.
The problem with HN is that people do not think outside their silicon valley and techbro bubble. Another comment here suggested that domestic loads can be served with a battery. Sure, if you live in California and don't need much heat. This is the problem - when someone points out that what is proposed is not viable everywhere and that a mix of solutions is needed, it gets downvoted because it doesn't follow the "renewable energy is the be all and end all" argument.
> Chemical storage batteries cannot power large grids for extended periods and that is the fundamental problem being ignored, not their cost.
You are being downvoted because this is just an opinion, not backed by any facts on the ground. Most solar installs today itself come with 4 hours of battery backup. Also, several posters and I have given cost figures on how much multi-day battery backups would cost even at current prices. So your insistence that batteries only last for a few minutes is getting downvoted, and calling people techbros isn't helping either.
Solar + Storage 100% can replace residential power usage. Ask anyone with a home battery and solar. Density is obviously a factor, but seems straight forward to solve.
Industrial energy usage, I think it’s seperate, but also is very moveable. Ie we can change how industry works to surge production at peak solar and wind, and then reduce when that power is not available. Plus battery storage still works here (Not just lithium either, hydro, thermal, compressed a air, gravity store).
Where exactly do you see “unpredictable” energy problems that storage or shifting doesn’t solve?
I'd posit that it's mostly cost, otherwise it would be a solved problem now.
Certainly we can scale - even if it means putting low-cost batteries behind the meter (that solves, for a very modest sum, 90% of power consumers' problems). That's a horizontal scaling, obviously.
For the consumer types that need a lot of energy, then we need to come up with more imaginative solutions for their requirements. These types of turbines are almost definitely part of that.
Aside - complaining about downvotes is bad form. My feeling is your myriad comments on this article exhibit vehemence, and imply everyone else is ill-informed. It's possible we all have something to learn.
As i said originally, the technical problem is scale. Even if cost does fall, no battery can power a gigawatt scale grid for more than a few minutes. Yes - minutes. During an extreme weather event, what will happen? There is a lot to learn but the solution - and this the part that people don't like hearing - is a mix of technologies. Batteries are a thin slice of the solution. We need more hydro generation, more nuclear, more wind and more solar PV. It is not a binary choice as many here seem to believe.
Certainly.
> Even if cost does fall, no battery can power a gigawatt scale grid for more than a few minutes. Yes - minutes. During an extreme weather event, what will happen?
In an emergency the primary focus isn't, for example, on powering offices, powering every single thing you can. The focus should be on powering homes for a relatively short duration at reduced consumption. The goal is survival, not keeping everything on the grid powered up 24/7. Two Powerwalls can power a home for two to three days at reduced energy consumption (rationing). There's no reason we can't get to that type of outcome as routine in the next 10-20 years, given the cost of homes today (nearing $400,000 median sale price) and the continual decline in battery costs (and that's assuming no great battery breakthroughs). There's no reason all new homes built in the US shouldn't come with the equivalent of at least three Powerwalls of energy storage 20 years out.
This gives the power consumer an energy cache, effectively, with 2-3 days of self-reliance.
That's why I suggested that your insistence that we need one stonking large battery sitting somewhere is misguided - we can distribute, today, relatively cheaply (compared to the cost of a house build / maintenance) short-term independence from the grid supply.
Compressed air storage is another option, that is quite cheap and scales extremely well. The one being built by Hydrostor now in California is 4GWh, for example [0].
Refs:
[0] https://newatlas.com/energy/hydrostor-compressed-air-energy-...
This energy consumption thus translates to an averaged power requirement of 4TW. Notably, while peaks are local, however nationally, extremes are not that higher than average. The average capacity factor is a third for renewables, so 12TW of nameplate renewable capacity is enough for the vast majority of the time - to power the entire nation's complete energy requirements through renewables.
Let's go with a 50-25-25 mix of solar-onshore-offshore wind. Thus solar nameplate needs to be 6TW, and both onshore and offshore wind needs to have 3TW nameplate capacity installed each. Solar PV generates 10W per square foot. That's 22,000 square miles. A lot of that can come from rooftop solar. Onshore wind turbines are 2.5MW each, which translates to 1.2 million turbines, while with the offshore turbine designs that this article shows - this is 200k turbines. The cost of such turbines (onshore+offshore) with installation would come to 9 trillion USD. Solar would cost a similar amount. Battery costs for storing 96TWh (a day's worth of energy consumption - averaged) would be 10 trillion dollars more.
Thus, building the nameplate capacity for the entire US to be powered by renewables is approximately 30 trillion dollars, where the GND price tag originated. However, all of these are at current solar/wind/storage prices. Each of those three is falling, and if the market becomes this big, economies of scale will drive costs down further.
That's actually not that outrageous. In reality you would probably want more battery capacity than that, but at the same time you'd probably have other forms of power generation too. Those other forms of power generation probably aren't going to be off when wind power isn't being produced, which means that they don't need to be covered by the battery capacity.
France's budget in 2021 was $755 billion.
Edit: I forgot about batteries wearing out. If they have to replace the batteries once a year then this would still be prohibitively expensive.
I heard a solar project is over-provisioning the battery and planning to replace it every 5 years as they must be able to deliver some amount of MWh 4 years down the road.
> You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge. For instance, you might use 75% of your battery’s capacity one day, then recharge it fully overnight. If you use 25% the next day, you will have discharged a total of 100%, and the two days will add up to one charge cycle.
References:
Most cars have more than that as battery so when all car are electrified, put together and filled up they can power France for a day without any other generation source.
France peak demand is about 100 GW so that's 3.2 kW per car.
It's a tiny amount relative to the power of the motor.
It can flow through a nearly normal plug (16A 230V).
And this is for the worst day of the year.
A 50% capacity factor does not mean there's no wind 50% of the time. It only means that, averaged over a whole year, the power produced is 50% of the maximum the generator is rated to produce. This includes periods of time when there's wind, but wind that's not strong enough to reach the maximum output of the generator.
And the wind not being strong enough to reach the maximum output of the generator is probably the most common situation, since it makes sense to design the generator to reach its maximum output at the strongest normal wind on the region; when the wind is stronger than that maximum, the generator has to shut down (feather the blades and brake the rotor), otherwise it will get damaged.
Looking through may 2021 I see instances in which actual wind power delivered is zero.
https://www.aeso.ca/grid/forecasting/wind-and-solar-power-fo...
It may not be windy in some places, but chances are it will be windy in others.
Fossil fuel backups such as gas are not a bad interim solution, considering gas is less polluting than coal.
There are some problems with economics, as backup solutions cost money even when they are not being used.
Extreme prices in Alberta were recently caused by a lack of wind across the province. Turns out sometimes it isn’t windy anywhere! Similar can happen for sun. A big storm can move in and it is dark and cloudy and you get 10% of nameplate for 5 days.
I think ammonia production by solar power near deserts is going to be the missing link that provides the flexibility we need to keep the grid reliable on a cloudy windless day.
On a domestic level, countries like Germany have legislation that targets accelerating internal grid connections.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netzausbaubeschleunigungsges...
On a supranational level in Europe, the EU has targets to increase grid interconnections between countries.
https://ec.europa.eu/energy/topics/infrastructure/electricit...
On an intergovernmental level, outside of the EU the UK is building an underwater cable to Denmark, to share hydro and wind energy.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/13/work-beg...
On https://www.electricitymap.org/map you can see the transfers between national (ish) grids, and that the transmission lines aren't idle. You can slide the map to North America, but the data is very incomplete.