But this is simply wrong. One can easily imagine a 100% renewable system of that kind. At current costs in the US it would likely be cheaper than a nuclear solution.
Yeah, we have been doing too much imagining and too little execution.
Sorry my friend, in order to make assertions like that one has to take the time to do some of the math. I have. The gap between what people are imagining and reality is quite large.
Assuming a 1000 GW requirement, in other words, we need that much power and we do not currently have it...so we have to build it:
Using 325 W panels, considering their cost, cost of installation, wiring, structure costs, permits and battery (without them the whole thing is kind of pointless), the total cost of the system is in the order of $40 trillion dollars.
A 1.1 GW nuclear power plant costs about $9 billion. We would need 910 of them. That total cost comes out to $8.2 trillion.
In other words, nuclear is about 1/5 the cost of the equivalent solar system.
However, the story does not end there. This is still very much hand-wavy until we look at other numbers.
For example, how long would it take to build these systems?
Assuming it takes 10 days to install a solar a 10 kW system, and we manage to install 10,000 solar systems at a time (simultaneously) across the entire nation. In other words, every ten days 10,000 new systems come online. Well, we need one billion systems, which means this will take 2740 years. Imagine that: We bring online 365000 systems PER YEAR and it still takes nearly 3000 years. Check my math please.
Nuclear? If we had a mandate to start building nuclear plants tomorrow and we took the time to setup a the process and controls to achieve a run rate of 1 year per plant...and we build one plant per state per year...that means 50 per year. Which translates into 1000 plants in 20 years. If I am off by 100%, this means we do it in 40 years.
To me nuclear --with commitment and a no-bullshit united effort to execute-- seems like the only viable solution.
There's more...
How many cells would be needed for the aforementioned solar solution. Assuming approximately 1200 cells per battery pack (Tesla 2170's), this means we need nearly 3.5 trillion cells. I am not even going to get into what this might translate into in terms of minerals, mining, transportation, CO2 generation, environmental damage, etc. I don't even know how long it might take to make 3.5 trillion cells and how much energy it might take to make them. These are numbers I need to research and put into the model at some future point. Right now, given what I've looked at, the whole thing seems entirely ludicrous on first inspection.
Even better, the above calculation for solar assume 100% efficiency. In other words, a 10 kW solar array that actually produces 10 kW 24/7, which is ridiculous. It also assumes inverters and energy conversion equipment that is 100% efficient...which is equally ridiculous.
What I am trying to convey, going back to your comment, is that we can imagine anything at all and it can sound fantastic. Until we take the time to do the math there is no way to know if reality and these imaginary solutions actually align in any way.
I don't think I am wrong at all. I could be off by some amount, sure, yet I think the difference still dwarfs solar by far. If we want electric ground transportation, I think the only path forward is a massive commitment to nuclear.
Speaking of utopia: It would be fantastic to see the worlds nuclear arsenals being converted to nuclear energy generation. From destroying humanity to improving life all over the planet. Not sure that kind of leadership exists anywhere.
[0] Real 13 kW system daily output
I could be wrong. You could be 100% correct. I just have not found evidence to support these ideas. It all sounds good until math and physics do their jobs.
The $40/W figure you get is utter nonsense.
So ~$4.76B for 1GW or ~$4.76T for 1000GW.
This also ignores future upgrades with would use sCO2 turbines vs typical steam and higher delta_C molten salts (typical delta_C now is only 300 for KNO3 + NaNO2 + NaNO3, but systems using CaCl2 + MgCl2 would have a delta_C of ~1500, and meta-material salts could be engineered with even higher delta_C) so the same solar fields can have even higher outputs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Dominador_Solar_Thermal_...
You will note that the levelized cost of power from these fields is maybe 1/3 that of your nuclear figures.
> Assuming it takes 10 days to install a solar a 10 kW system, and we manage to install 10,000 solar systems at a time (simultaneously) across the entire nation.
Absurd, since utility-scale systems are orders of magnitude larger than that. There are individual PV fields that have capacity larger than your 10,000 tiny systems.
Your argument from incredulity about manufacturing these systems is not worth anything.
South Korea would argue with you on the experience part, as well.
That wasn't their argument. It was that comparing imagined costs to real ones is not valid.
That's just not realistic. Not at scale. And, of course, you have to have batteries or the entire thing is pointless. The issue with electric car charging is stressed by power demand. In other words, calculating energy alone does not solve the equation. If you want to charge your electric car in 2 hours vs. a slow 12 hour charge you will need at least six times more power at the socket.
Remember that at higher power (generally meaning, higher current) the power losses increase with the square of the current. Fast charging requires more power than the simple ratio of (time_for_slow_charge/time_for_fast_charge) due to these losses. Super simple hypothetical numbers: If you slow charge at 1 A for ten hours and want to fast charge at 10 A in one hour, your copper losses (energy lost to heating the wires that get the electricity to the plug) are proportional to the square of the current times the resistance of the wiring.
Example:
0 AWG wire can carry 150 A.
It has a resistance of 0.093 ohms per 1000 feet
At 100 A, the loss over a 1000 foot run is: 100 x 100 x 0.093 = 930 W. Almost 1 kW.
This is not meant to be a calculation of actual charging of a vehicle. It's just an illustration of what happens as we face the reality of millions of vehicles fast charging and slow charging on an infrastructure that simply isn't designed to support what we would need to do. I don't even want to think about how much power would be converted into heat on the grid in this all-electric future. Things people just don't talk about when electric cars are put up on a pedestal as examples of a clean "green" future.
The business about cars is weird, as car charging will be needed in a nuclear powered grid too. How is this an argument against renewables? If it's that renewables require more distribution capacity (due to a desire to charge vehicles during the day), then it's also the case that solar can be dispersed to reduce the need for distribution. And if solar + grid level storage provides synthetic baseload more cheaply than nuclear then the distribution argument collapses entirely.
You have to consider all the variables that would be affected when you start talking about solar at such massive scales. For example, if I understood you correctly, you are suggesting pumping water to altitude using solar power and then using that potential energy to spin turbines on the way down.
OK, great, sure, Physics 101 problem. Theoretically, yeah, that would work. In practice, you would cause such devastation to the ecosystem doing something like that --again, at scale, not a small lab experiment-- that the entire concept is turned on its head.
The mining and all other things required to make batteries at such massive scales isn't something anyone would want to be around, much else highlight as "green".
BTW, I want electric vehicles. I really do. However, we need to figure out how to do it without hiding a stinking rotten ecological mess somewhere in China so we can feel great about our little "green" electric car on the driveway in Los Angeles.
It's almost like the issue of child labor in China and other places. It's OK so long as our t-shirts are nice quality and cheap? Of course not. Well, the same should apply to the realities of solar and electric vehicles.
Right now my perspective is that we'd be swapping one rotten mess for another. Solar panels and batteries would have to be replaced in massive quantities every 10, 15, 20 years, depending on who you want to believe. At scale, that's billions of, well, everything to trash. Even if we recycle, again, at scale, not a pretty sight.
I don't have all the answers. I probably don't have any answer. I just know that there's a lot of hand-wavy, feel-good, save-the-planet stuff floating around and nobody seems interested in doing the math. It's far easier to convinced the unthinking masses that "green is better" and we need to "save the planet" than to put-up a few slides in a presentation and discuss the reality of having to adopt nuclear power with gusto if we want any of those things to become realities.
In other words, the politicians who have been anti-nuclear can't bring themselves to now be pro-nuclear because that would mean losing votes. Which means we don't do the right thing because politicians want to keep their jobs, not because there are viable alternatives.
Remember that this thread started with an article about China building 150 reactors. Why are they doing that? Because nuclear power, done correctly, is the best option for constant, reliable, consistent and long term energy. If you do that math, including total cost of ownership, this is pretty much indisputable.
Ahem...
May I introduce you to the
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor ?
( singing voice: "It started with a hiss...never thought it would come to this..." )
"US president Barack Obama canceled construction of the agreement-supporting US MOX fuel fabrication facility in 2016, citing cost overruns and for financial reasons proposing instead that for the US share of plutonium, it be diluted with non-radioactive material and disposed in the underground WIPP facility.[9][10] However, the dilution could be reversed, and the material reconverted into weapons-grade plutonium.[9]
On October 3, 2016, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the agreement to be suspended because the US did not meet its obligations.[11]"
Great! <sarcastic>
OK, well, maybe we do what Elon Musk proposed and send all of our nukes to Mars, blow them up and start an atmosphere?
The fact that the world "leaders" can't come-up with a way to de-nuke the planet is further evidence that politicians --world-wide-- are not the best and the brightest among us.
Don't get me started on that tangent.