This was a weird take from the author since NPP aren't interchangeable with Wind/solar-parks.
Seems more like a nuclear hit piece than an actual attack on lobbyism.
Not saying the following is the case, but the sample space is broad. For example, overregulation.
"Since the first ZECs eligibility period began, power markets have deteriorated significantly, thus the financial needs of New Jersey's nuclear plants have continued to grow. Nationwide, nuclear plants continue to struggle economically to survive. Since 2018, three nuclear plants have closed in the eastern U.S., all for economic reasons, and the impact has had a ripple effect."
So, they aren't blaming regulations, they're blaming the fact that the power markets have "deteriorated" ie. there is less money to be made.
Nuclear clearly hasn't become cheaper, and neither have fossil fuels, so what exactly has led to this cheaper electricity if it isn't the plummeting price of renewables?
Yet no evidence for this is raised.
I don’t believe an abandonment of nuclear R&D is solely to blame. But I haven’t seen sufficient evidence to discard the hypothesis.
Most of the rest of the electricity energy sector campaign for LESS regulation - the coal power industry is notable example but you see this even in the renewables space where, for example, wind producers would like to have more freedom to site turbines.
The fact that the nuclear industry puts nearly all its lobbying effort into securing financial support instead of attacking regulations, suggests that regulation is not the reason why nuclear is failing to survive but that it's simply because of price/cost.
The other notable example I can think of in the energy sector is with directly growing biofuels. A similarly uneconomic way of providing energy that couldn't exist without massive subsidy.
The thing about nuclear is that regulation is clearly highly necessary in the industry -- there's still plenty existing power plants like Fukushima that are not safe to walk away from, and that can only exist safely when they're competently monitored, and their weaknesses are shored up.
And in fact, accidents result in more, expensive but reasonable regulation. One of the conclusions from Fukushima was that you needed the ability to hook up emergency power and water to a power plant in the event of a disaster, even one that destroys roads. Had people gotten to Fukushima in time with the right tools, it'd have been far less dramatic and less expensive. So that's a quite reasonable thing to want.
However, this means that now there need to be tools and spare parts that can be carried by a helicopter in reasonable time. The existence of those tools, parts and helicopters however all costs money, and so is their continued testing and maintenance.
And yet again nuclear gets more expensive as we patch another hole, while renewables are not affected.
for instance: In CA Diablo Canyon is catching flak over the effect its cooling water has on the local sealife (gmafb) which is at least part of the official reason it is intending to shutdown.
Now you might argue that power production is going to unavoidably kill something, and we have to make a choice about what's the lesser evil -- do we poison everything with coal, overheat fish with nuclear power plant cooling, smash birds with wind turbines, or set them on fire with a solar heliostat?
We might well decide that it comes out in favor of nuclear there, but if we're minimizing harm then harm has to be measured, accounted for, and limited, and therefore regulating this particular thing makes perfect sense.
I agree. But should we hold wind power to the same standards?
Hundreds of thousands of birds are killed by wind power per year, in the US alone:
https://www.birdwatchingdaily.com/news/conservation/new-stud...
Did anyone compare the environmental damage done by Nuclear per GWh to winder per GWh?
The problem is that this argument holds for every 'this particular thing'. How does it affect the patterns of migratory birds? Cicada cycles? Invasive species? Are historical buildings going to be destroyed? Trees cut down? Was there a native american settlement on the site that we just have to study? That any one of these petty concerns can be brought to litigation by an activist party to stand in the way of 9% of California's total energy demand is absurd and self-defeatist.
People wonder why we can't build anything anymore[0] and then demand we bike-shed every petty item to death in the courts.
[0]At reasonable costs/timelines. I'm still waiting for my high speed rail. Or housing that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
[1]: https://www.powermag.com/more-than-32-gw-of-new-gas-fired-po...
[2]: https://www.sei.org/publications/subsidies-shale-oil-and-gas...
[3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2020/03/20/we-must-not-...
Usually, the numbers you get are installed capacity. They aren't really helpful, because renewables load factor is significantly lower than other energies.
That being said, even factoring that out and relying on demand fulfilled instead, a renewables+gas system still usually sources most of its energy from renewables. If you see a system where most of the power comes from fossil fuel, that means renewables aren't dimensioned to service all the power needs.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
In 2022, the last nuclear plants were shut down. I expect that capacity was replaced by either import or fossil fuels + any new renewable capacity since last year.
By inspecting the graph, it seems that their current consumption includes about 2000 PJ of renewables, which is maybe slightly more than the production from nuclear was 20 years ago.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
If you compare this to a graph of installed capacity you see how misleading it is to look at installed capacity, where you get the impression that more than half of Germany's power comes from renewables:
https://www.google.com/search?q=german+energy+consumption+by...
In reality, it looks like Germany gets about 15-20% of their energy from renewables.
Over the last 20 years, energy prices in Germany have roughly doubled, while the amount of energy produced by carbon-neutral sources is about the same (nuclear was replaced by renewables). Total greenhouse gas emissions have gone down a bit, due to reduced overall consumption and the replacement of coal with gas.
I think that would be if you're only counting electricity production. And that's only because heating and automobile still uses primarily fossil fuels. If they are included, Germany is still at only about 15-20% renewable.
> I consider this to be a huge success
Compared to the most obvious reference, France, German greenhouse gas emissions are still almost twice as high.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/carbon-fo...
Like most nations, it looks to me that the population in Germany is being targeted with propaganda from their government.
That's also true in France, despite our different power production means. Home heating and transportation are mostly fossil-based.
This means that France's performance in terms of greenhouse gas emissions is significantly better than Germany, Spain and Italy. Also, and maybe even more importantly, France has enjoyed significantly cleaner air, and thousands fewer deaths from air pollution every year, compared to what they would have with polution at the same levels as their neighbours.
Over the last 30 years, Nuclear power may have saved 100000-300000 French lives.
The fraction of electricity produced with those heavy-emitting plants is the major question, and ways to use mostly renewables and therefore to reduce it are known: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557422
France never relied on gas as a complement for its nuclear fleet. First off, because we have always had enough reversible hydro if ever there was a need.
Second, because nuclear in France can do load-following just fine.
France's gas has three main sources:
1) industrial gas users that use the heat in a plant to generate some power,
2) gas companies building gas plants near their LNG terminals to have more options with their gas,
3) gas plants built in the 2000's by Poweo when the energy market opened, which are operated independently from EDF's nuclear plants.
In the very first graph, titled "PRODUCTION NETTE D'ÉLECTRICITÉ", the reddish-orangish surface reflects coal, oil (petrol), gas (methane) (also biomass and waste but it was and stays a small fraction)
Second: no, nuclear load-follow has severe limitations. Please read https://www.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi... Pertinent information: « un réacteur peut varier de 100 % à 20 % de puissance en une demi-heure, et remonter aussi vite après un palier d’au moins deux heures, et ce deux fois par jour » it means: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
Then I can't understand your "gas has three main sources". It lists (including cogeneration) indeed "sources" of load-following, however they all are fueled by fossil fuels, and therefore are consistent with my observations: France needs fossil fuel for power generation, its nuclear fleet isn't sufficient.
I'm not saying France doesn't have power from gas. I'm saying that the reason we have gas plants is completely unrelated to nuclear. If you look at intraday graphs, the resource historically used to improve performance is STEP hydro, not gas.
> Second: no, nuclear load-follow has severe limitations.
The article you quote does say the opposite of what you have it say. Let me quote from it:
> Méconnue, la souplesse du parc nucléaire français permet d’ajuster à tout moment l’offre de production des différentes énergies variables à la demande des consommateurs.
translation: "Little known, french nuclear plants' flexibility lets them continually adjust the production capacity, including variable energy sources, to consumers' needs"
> however it is insufficient in the real world
<citation needed>
> It lists indeed "sources" of load-following
No, it lists the reason why these historic plants were built. The reason was never load following, as you claimed earlier.
> France needs fossil fuel for power generation, its nuclear fleet isn't sufficient.
That is completely unrelated.
According to this line of thought we prefer gas over nuclear. This is not true: on an economic perspective and also emission-wise nuclear + hydro is a better tandem. However it cannot fully cope and needs 'backup', which is nowadays mainly gas turbines in powerplants.
Why, in your opinion, do we need to use those gas turbines?
Right now https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix shows 9% gas, and everyone can check that it is a quite common figure: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
> The article you quote does say the opposite
No, your quote means "nuclear can be used", it is true and I don't deny it: I showed limits (stated in the very same document), meaning that nuclear follow-up cannot be done "at will", and also that other non-desirable (but more flexible) sources (gas) are in use. Why are they in use, if not in order to compensate nuclear's limits? Why do we need fossil fuel for power generation?
Because we need the power, simply. That's unrelated to the other plants we have, though.
> I showed limits (stated in the very same document)
These limits are not preventing NPPs to participate in both primary and secondary reserve mechanisms which are used to balance the power grid. See [1] for more details.
[1]: https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document
True (in order to generate electricity demanded during peak consumption), and it doesn't preclude other uses (load-following). Everyone can check (for example at https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix ) that many gas turbines are up and running, and really producing (they aren't in "maintaining warm mode, with minimal production, in order to be ready quickly to ramp up") even outside of peak load.
> NPPs to participate in both primary and secondary reserve mechanisms
Yes, they do participate. The point is for them to be sufficient, to do it all by themselves, to let us get rid of fossil fuel: they don't.
The very document you reference (it is very interesting, thank you) abstract state aforementioned limits: "EDF’s nuclear reactors have the capability to vary their output between 20% and 100% within 30 minutes, twice a day, when operating in load-following mode" then "thermal fleet (mostly gas turbines or combined cycles) are used for mid-merit and peak generation."
That is and will remain true regardless of NPP's status. If anything, because only one of the power providers uses nuclear.
> state aforementioned limits
The needs for power modulation we have are within these limits for scheduled daily variations. Daily variations are not the same as load following.
Besides, the document also states that NPPs have other mechanism to tune power produced (+/- 2% over 30 seconds, and +/- 5% over 15 minutes). These other mechanisms are the ones used for load following, and are fully automated. See pp. 4 and 5.
All mechanisms used to tune power are pauses-inducing (depending upon the fuel state...), they cannot be used at will. If I'm wrong please explicitly write here that a "the (thermal) power generated by an existing and active industrial French nuclear reactor can always be freely modulated, without any limit nor any need to sometimes abstain from doing so for a while".
Load following isn't about a plant being started or stopped, it's an automatic mechanism that is either handled without any intervention (primary reserve : the plant's turbine monitors the frequency and adapts over 30s) or with interventions from the grid operator only (secondary reserve: RTE's systems have the hand on the providers' facilities). Every plant that participates in load following does it through the same mechanism, nuclear or gas doesn't matter.
What you describe is merit order, and it's not happening at the same operating level.
> Therefore if a gas turbine takes the load, nuclear could not do so
We do have examples of nuclear being used this way. It is likely that gas plants are also used this way, since every power provider is required to participate, and some french providers don't have NPPs.
> All mechanisms used to tune power are pauses-inducing (depending upon the fuel state...), they cannot be used at will.
Not sure what you mean by that. Like gas plants, nuclear plants work by heating water. This means that this water buffers some energy, and that buffer can be used for fast but small power variations, with minimal impact on the pipe system.
As for large variations in power, such as the 100% -> 20% change you quoted, they are scheduled ahead of time, and you can find technical explanations on how operators do that.
As you noted, there are obviously bounds to variations. As you said, they can't be used at will. One thing you seem to neglect, though, is that flexibility requirements are within these bounds. That means that power variations required can be serviced while staying within the limits of the system.
This means that what you're asking for: "active industrial French nuclear reactor can always be freely modulated" would be unnecessary gold-plating.
This is, indeed, central here.
It seems to me that, if nuclear can do all necessary follow-up (the fine, low-latency, the part of it which is at best not-well-planned and often absolutely not planned for), it should do so, as it is cheaper and emits less than any fossil-fuel-burning equipment.
I can only see two reasons for this: - the price-calculation method (marginal cost...) used in Europe offers way more benefits by always producing the last kWh thanks to fossil fuel - letting a fleet of nuclear reactors take on all necessary load-follow has some unwanted long-term effect (costs, maintenance, fuel state...)
Are those reasons sound, is there any other one?
Frequency controlling a grid (e.g. increasing or decreasing plant output by a few %s) is important for grid stability first and foremost. Grid costs are less important, and the process is not overseen by the producer, who bears the costs, but by the grid manager. Because of that, every power provider connected to the grid, is required to be able to provide some % of flexibility on its non-renewable fleet, including the providers who only operate fossil plants. For redundancy reasons and ease of implementation, this flexibility is split between as many plants as possible for each operator.
The step at which you can prioritize less costly means of production is scheduled ahead of time. This is when you typically need larger variations, such as moving a plant's output from 100% to 20%. In this step, merit order is used, and, to my knowledge, nuclear has priority over gas in France.
> redundancy reasons and ease of implementation, this flexibility is split between as many plants as possible for each operator.
This is the core of the argument. My point is that if the nuclear fleet was flexible enough to provide 100% of the follow-up it would do so (because it emits less and costs less), and therefore production snapshots would rarely show significant production from flamme plants (burning fossil fuel), which would only be significant during peak consumption. In other words thanks to such a sufficient flexibility the merit-order could be sound at any moment. The reality is that those 'fossil' plants very often (nearly constantly) generate a fair fraction of the gridpower (they aren't in minimal production "ready to warm-start" mode, they generate in a useful way).
> The step at which you can prioritize less costly means of production is scheduled ahead of time. This is when you typically need larger variations, such as moving a plant's output from 100% to 20%. In this step, merit order is used, and, to my knowledge, nuclear has priority over gas in France.
Yes, and it shows that the nuclear fleet can always (bar any incident) tackle a rather large scheduled (in hours) modulation, which is a totally different challenge than "realtime" follow-up.
And my point is that the grid does not work that way, and it's not up to NPP operators to decide it.
Is electricity in the US socialized? I thought they were all private companies, but you seem to be talking as though this is a political choice, rather than an economic one. I freely admit I don't know much about how the US operates its grids.
The total price tends to end up around $0.15/kwh, plus taxes, or around the same as new nuclear, with all associated regulations. (but more than already established nuclear, or the cost nuclear should have if built economically).
For those who really care about global warming, nuclear is still much better than such a mix.
If you're really not worried about global warming, gas + renewables make a lot more sense. Especially if you don't want coal or nuclear "in your back yard".
You need load following to keep up with shifting demand, that’s absolutely required and the only thing actually required. Intermittent and base load on the other hand is simply cheaper than load following which lowers production costs vs a 100% load following grid.
Intermittent sources can actually provide a much higher percentage of annual power than base load sources at a lower cost per kWh.
Load following is the 1st category historically, currently filled by hydro, gas turbines, and batteries.
Base load was the 2nd category which was less flexible but historically cheaper coal and nuclear. The only advantage it has over load following is price.
We now how a new 3rd category intermittent generation which is also cheaper than load following but just like base load it can’t follow the demand curve.
Therefore replacing all base load generation with cheaper intermittent generation is absolutely fine as lone as load following can pick up the slack there is zero downsides.
PS: Nuclear doesn’t actually lower peoples electricity costs. The difference is people in France are paying a percentage of their electric bill in taxes rather than as a separate bill. That’s great for poor people, but less so for the economy.
That’s critical because nuclear really doesn’t fit very will in a renewable heavy grid. Given the choice of nuclear + hydro + batteries or solar + wind + hydro + batteries the solar + wind grid is vastly cheaper.
Having said that, some nuclear is likely to be cost competitive without subsides in 2060+ somewhere.
I'm very much not anti-nuclear but I do wonder if we've possibly missed its window. To me, a plausible two-step solution to decarbonization would be (or could have been): 1a. Replace all the fossil fuel base load generation with nuclear/hydro, 1b. Replace all the variable load natural gas plants with storage, 2. Now that storage is mature and scalable, replace all the nuclear with solar/wind.
The reason this makes more sense in my head is that renewables are actually more dependent on natural gas than nuclear would be, in the current world of limited storage. I agree with you that once storage is built out, the role of nuclear is a lot less clear. But I think you'd have to say that it's still an open question whether we can really make storage scale as much as it needs to if it's going to support a fully renewable grid. It has only recently started to seem like the answer to that may be promising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
"Base load" on the power generation side has only ever been an side effect of economics, not an intrinsic property of the electrical grid.
I think I just don't get what point you're making.
Basically, there's no such thing as a profitable nuclear plant. Every nuclear plant in existence exists only because of vast amounts of public funding. People make lots of money with them but that's always courtesy of local tax payers and clever businesses making sure they are not on the spot when things get expensive.
When the price per mwh for renewables is an order of magnitude lower (or multiple orders long term), it becomes feasible to do really inefficient things with renewables and still be more cost effective. Things like simply installing 10x more than you need. Or using that excess capacity to generate e.g. hydrogen. Or just spending a lot of money on energy storage. Or building cables so power can be imported/exported between areas with surpluses and shortages. That's why Europe doesn't have rolling blackouts. It has a lot of wind and solar. Some countries have months where they use nothing else. And then winter comes and the lights stay on and no blackouts happen. There are challenges, sure. But they are addressable.
What's going on in the market is that legacy power generation is being dismantled more or less prioritized by cost. That's why many formerly coal dependent countries at this point are pretty far done getting rid of coal. Even some parts of the US with traditionally very strong coal lobbies. It just stopped being economical years ago. And that stopped being in doubts soon after. Gas is going to follow the same path now that gas is no longer cheap. Even just the wild price fluctuations of gas are problematic. You can't plan a business to stay financially healthy if the prices of your main resource fluctuate all over the place.
Nuclear has been in decline for decades. Old nuclear plants are exploited until the investments for keeping them going fall out of favor with local legislators. New nuclear plants are deeply unpopular and a relatively rare event at this point. Closing existing plants is likewise unpopular because of a sunk cost fallacy that makes it tempting to spend some more. But even that runs out at some point.
New plants occasionally get build of course; but rarely on budget or time and usually with vast amounts of public funding. Decommissioning nuclear actually requires investments as well. It's expensive and typically not actually factored into electricity pricing. Just like storing the waste for millennia isn't accounted for either. Or providing perpetual security to prevent terrorists doing things like building dirty bombs with stolen radioactive waste or simply sabotaging a plant. All that depends on public funding. Nuclear plants are stupendously expensive if you consider all of that.
The corruption pointed at in the article is basically about how public money has been used for decades to keep expensive nuclear plants going. Big spending infrastructure attracts all sorts of behavior. And where there is big government spending and not a whole lot of scrutiny, corruption is going to happen.
Patently false. Europe has a lot of nuclear and gas and coal - way more than wind and solar - that's why it doesn't have blackouts. Europe is up on the 50th latitude, solar is 3x worse than in California or Hawaii - and hence 3x more expensive. The cost per kWh of French nuclear plants at 7c/kWh is not much higher than French wind or solar at 5-6c/kWh, and it is half the cost of solar/wind plus the battery capacity to make it through windless winter weeks.
The real cost of nuclear (taking taxpayer's money into account) is heavily discussed, and will in any case only be known after decommission of all reactors then last dangerous waste inert: in the meantime any major blunder may change the total cost.
Germany's gridpower offers one of the best quality of service (availability...) in Europe.
French electricity pricing does not include the money that French tax payers pay to keep on building new nuclear plants. Or the money they are going to pay for getting rid of them. Or the money they will be paying for security, waste disposal, etc. Nuclear is pretty cheap when you just resell what tax payers give you and defer any cost back at the tax payer. That's the problem with nuclear: it can't really be done without tax payer money.
Also, France has significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions per capita than Germany, despite having a lot less renewable power.
And for the costs of decommisioning, this report estimates that when that is included, the nuclear power generated by current plants have a levelized cost of between 0.059 euro and 0.083 euro per kWh. For future plants, the report claims costs between 0.076 and 0.117 euroes per kWh. The report states that this is high compared to alternatives, but if cheap Russian gas is taken away, it is probably cheaper than the alternatives (without gas, renewables must have a significant amount of storage added to their price to be viable as a 24/7 source, or one must return to super-dirty coal).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Wikipedia has some nice factoids on the French nuclear industry; including this one:
"The actual cost of generating electricity by nuclear power is not published by EDF or the French government but is estimated to be between €59/MWh and €83/MWh". That would be much higher than what they charge. Here's another gem:
"EDF remains heavily in debt. Its profitability suffered during the recession which began in 2008. It made €3.9 billion in 2009, which fell to €1.02 billion in 2010, with provisions set aside amounting to €2.9 billion.[citation needed] The Nuclear industry has been accused of significant cost overruns and failing to cover the total costs of operation, including waste management and decommissioning."
They are having significant cost related to their ancient plants needing lots of downtime for maintenance and upgrades to keep them going beyond their retirement age. And then the new plants are not projected to be any better.
I wonder who is paying for this.
This is precisely the cost I quoted in the comment you replied to. Also, it is compatible with the price French consumers are paying on average for electricity (even when excluding taxes, and taking transport costs into account):
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
> I wonder who is paying for this.
I suppose time will tell.
Much cleaner air than surrounding countries: https://airquality.one/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/europe-air...
Resulting in thousands of lives saved every year from lower air polutions (that's one Chernobyl or more worth of lives SAVED every year, in France alone):
https://assets.weforum.org/editor/e1rgwaEG5hxgxOvB6LAXfj23t1...
This isn’t true, especially relative to the USA. The real reason Europe doesn’t have rolling blackouts is that consumer electricity prices are just much much higher than they generally are in the states. Even Norway with all that cheap hydro is more expensive than Washington state with a similar energy mix.
Consumer prices for energy are less subsidized and taxed more in the EU. So, people tend to care about not wasting it a bit more than in the US.
The US is really good at making cost somebody else's problem. That's why it has blackouts. Because ultimately it is a problem that needs solving. And that takes money.
We can cherry pick a couple of incidents (California wildfire with rural town blackouts and Texas’s winter weather failure), but you could do the same for Europe as well.
The higher costs do cause more judicious use of electricity than the states. Electricity rates aren’t subsidized in the states, rather electricity rates subsidized some of the dumber projects and mismanagement.
We can also cherry pick European blackouts from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages if fairness is desired. If we want to go by frequency, Australia seems to be the worst developed country for blackouts, but their infrastructure is more spread out.
There is no need for a continuous, constant output source of electricity if you have diverse sources, including storage and fast response.
There are economic and timeline rationalisations why a baseload supply model will happen. It's about a different use of the word "need" -it benefits some actors in the problem space.
On the battery front, a major patent on lithium iron phosphate expired just a couple weeks ago. I don't know what the long term consequences of that will be, but if it means being able to buy LFP batteries at $100/kwh or less outside of China, that could change the economics of utility-scale battery storage quite a bit.
In the long run I hope to see high capacity transcontinental HVDC lines linking continents so we can buy solar power from the other side of the Earth when it's night where we are, and sell our surplus when the sun is shining -- no batteries needed. That's hard and expensive. (Supposedly China is working on a deal with Chile where China can buy solar power that gets sent across a proposed trans-Pacific power line. I think that's the kind of megaproject that every industrialized country should be thinking about.)
Due to the gas issue with Russia Germany is planning to re-commission 15 coal plants, that's 10GW of capacity. 20 years ago, Germany had roughly... 10GW of nuclear, now decommissioned.
Source: https://www.montelnews.com/news/1323149/germany-may-allow-re...
But again, let's repeat all together "lets overbuild renewable capacity, non-proved large scaled battery storage, a lot of smart-grid and some hydrogen storage".
The biggest world hydrogen tank, the one used by the NASA, can power-up an average natural-gas station for roughly half a day. But hydrogen is the future for sure!
Technosolusionism is actually one of the biggest problem we have. You want to solve this CO2 issue, first reduce your consumption by at least 80% to reach Paris Agreement.
But don't worry, if we're not doing it by will, the laws of physics and thermodynamic will do it by force ;)
What? Humans are known to kill each other to avoid being the one on the losing side.
I don't see a realistic path forward for hydrogen, except maybe as fuel for aircraft. Batteries are good enough for most things, and a lot more efficient.
There are a bunch of projects in this space. I love going down this rabbit hole.
The EU supergrid is already being built out, and doesn't require linking far flung continents since it links Norwegian hydro and North Sea wind power, among other sources. A mix of geographically distributed hydro, wind, solar, batteries and perhaps geothermal will negate the need for relying on solar + HVDC stretched around the globe along with the geopolitical risks.
Some examples from past HN comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30935073
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29230939
Morocco-UK solar/wind/battery project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJunxkln578
Germany is aiming to get 100% of it's electricity from green sources by 2035, so expect a lot more projects in this space in future:
As a previous comment pointed out, one solution is to just over-construct renewables. You can look through a graph of output of wind+solar for a large area and find the minimum output compared to its rated capacity. The output from wind+solar is never zero, and the minimums are usually short. Last time I looked at the numbers for UK, if I remember correctly, it looked like they had to have 2-3 times the rated capacity to produce enough for the vast majority of days with minimum production.
It's more accurate to say that nobody has demonstrated that storage + intermittent can power a large scale modern grid (there are plenty of examples for micro grids and islands). Whether it actually can or not is unknown.
And part of the reason is that nobody has really needed to demonstrate it yet. There have so far been other workarounds that have been acceptable. UK and Germany doesn't have their own hydro-power, but has built grid connections to tap into Norway's for instance.
> Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems.
The other side of this, that is increasingly being taken more seriously, is to have more adaptive loads. There are for instance large parking garages built for EV car ride sharing or rental services that are V2G capable. The cars have quite a lot of flexibility in when they do their charging, and they can even feed energy back into the grid. There have been studies of anything from varying the temperature of freezers and hot water tanks across the country, to varying production rate or temperatures is metal production.
To me, if we're serious about solving climate change, this is essentially a problem that solves itself: we absolutely need to make a MASSIVE amount of green hydrogen.. for trucks, ships, planes, e-fuels, fertilizers, steel, etc. That's a HUGE amount of load that can easily be load-balanced to follow the production from renewables. You can even feed some of the stored hydrogen back into the grid in rare cases with extremely low production, probably using existing gas peaker plants.
I'm not against nuclear btw, but feels like the most enthusiastic nuclear proponents often have a very myopic view of the problem. That is, they assume in 20-30 years, everything will look exactly the same as before, except all electricity is nuclear+some renewable. Assuming we don't solve the energy storage and load balancing problem is equivalent to assuming we don't solve the climate crisis, because CO2 emissions are about so much more than just electricity production.
How is that a solution? No amount of solar/wind farms will make sun shine in Europe at night, or shine sufficiently in winter (when energy needs are the greatest).
Maybe if we have enough solar-panels we can catch the moon-light enough to have a proper baseload, who knows!
Wind farms don't need to make the sun shine at night, they just need to make the wind blow at night. So far they have managed to achieve that quite well.
More seriously, the amount of solar/wind farms you need is just enough to charge (home/car/grid) batteries during the day with the amount of energy that you will lack during the night. Fortunately energy requirements at night are lower than during the day, and the wind keeps blowing, so you might not even need batteries at all most nights, and could get away with just a 2x factor of wind farm over-construction.
> shine sufficiently in winter (when energy needs are the greatest)
Yes, this is the real problem. In the winter there are is greater demand and less supply; windless days become much more significant; and batteries can't store summer energy to be used in winter. For this, you do need more like 5x over-construction, perhaps combined with things like biofuels or atmospheric carbon capture using the excess energy during the summer.
> Sometimes the sun does shine and the wind does blow. That’s most of the time in South Australia, apparently. The average share of wind and solar during October was 72%. For 29 out of 31 days, 100% of the power used in South Australia (SA) was renewable. The sky didn’t fall, the grid didn’t collapse, and the apocalypse is not nigh.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/04/solar-wind-72-of-south-...
With a 65.7% average of renewables over 2021.
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/record-year-rene...
I'm assuming you mean price per kWh, compared with wind/solar and the necessary storage? What is the current price of renewables plus storage?
They are put into temporary storage (viable for 10-50 years), that's not long term storage.
> I'm assuming you mean price per kWh, compared with wind/solar and the necessary storage? What is the current price of renewables plus storage?
You cannot operate a grid on nuclear only so why include storage for renewables?
Edit: supplied time frame for temporary storage
Ohio electricity is about 50% gas.
To clarify, lets look at what baseload means. Lets take wikipedia's definition: > The baseload (also base load) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time for example, one week...
Electricity demand varies over time (on various time scales). Electricity providers need to make sure that they can supply both the continuous demand (i.e. the lowest point of the noisy curve that is supply) and the fluctuations (using some sort of adjustable supplies). Traditionally it was cheaper to have some power plants run 24/7 at constant output power (e.g. your nuclear power plants), to supply the baseload and use more expensive adjustable sources, e.g. gas peakers to supply varying demand.
That is an economic decision, if gas peakers are cheaper than those plants running 24/7 you would never use them, because the variable sources give you much more flexibility.
With renewables we are in exactly this situations. Renewables give you varying supply, so essentially a noisy supply curve with some average and a minimum supply, given a sufficiently large grid that supply will not be zero and with enough build out, you will always have enough supply to cover baseload. Because renewables are so much cheaper than nuclear, economically you would always build more renewables to lift up your ability to supply baseload, moreover because (most) renewables are varying, you actually also create capability to supply the varying demand (something you can't do with a nuclear power plant).
So in short, intermittent renewables can supply baseload (in fact they are better at that then working as "peakers"). If they are much cheaper than nuclear (which has been the case for many countries) it makes more economic sense to build more renewables than large nuclear plants.
incidentally the wikipedia article talks about the fact that you can use intermittent sources for baseload just in the next sentence > This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of low cost, availability and high reliability in any particular market.
So in short it is a myth that you require nuclear (or any large 24/7 power plant) for baseload. If renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear, then it makes sense to invest in renewables to supply that baseload.
The failure of the Germany energiewende is a great example, Californias struggle is another.
>The promise was sweet: Germany's transition towards a low-carbon society would cost the average household no more than €1 ($1.1) per month, "the price of a scoop of ice cream," as Jürgen Trittin, then minister for the environment, put it in 2004.
So please don't try to rewrite the history. It was supposed to be cheap.
Except it's not as big of a failure as many try to claim. It's meeting huge challenges, for sure. But part of the problem has little to do with inherent flaws of renewables.. like the politics around building more grid transmission lines from north to south (if you hold this against renewables you have to hold political resistance against nuclear too).
24 May 2022 16:36
> (Montel) The German government plans to allow a market return 10.4 GW of hard coal, lignite and oil-fired reserve capacity if a gas supply crunch threatens power supply security, Montel learned on Tuesday.
> The new rules are designed to use as little gas as possible in an emergency situation by replacing the generation from gas-fired power plants, a government document seen by Montel showed.
But maybe there's a catch about re-commissioning coal massively and still planing to reduce it on the long term.
They also plan to change some laws to speed up transition to renewable energies: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/Energie/0406_uebe...
You can argue that renewable are not deployed fast enough in germany, and there are good arguments for that, but the article isn't about that.
California has AFAIK a major grid-related problem: bad maintenance, not enogh interconnections with neighboring states... In which way renewable energy creates a problem there?
We're going to need a massive amount of green hydrogen for trucks, planes, ships, e-fuel, fertilizers, steel, etc. That's going to be fairly easy to balance with the variable output from renewables. The cost of electrolysis is also coming down, so over-capacity on the load side is also viable. It may even be possible to store some of the hydrogen, and feed it back into existing gas peaker plants (expensive, but should only rarely be needed)
People who say we require nuclear (I'm not against it, just skeptical of the claim that we require it, or that it makes economic sense), rarely seems to keep the big picture in mind. CO2-emissions is about far more than electricity production, and most of the required solutions will inherently add energy storage or load balancing capability (since that's part of the reason we use fossil fuels: they help us store energy for when we need it)
However, electrolysis is a great source of variable load, and changing pricing structure to prioritise dispatchable sources (including renewable+storage mixes operating as virtual power plants) would also change the economics of nuclear power plants without wrecking economics of renewables.
Prioritise dispatchable power (buying from NPPs, hydro and renewable+storage VPP) then match the rest of the load with green hydrogen production using electrolysis and push hydrogen into other sections of the economy (metallurgy, vehicles that can't go for batteries, etc.) so that your target is always to overproduce electrical power using hydrogen as sink - is in my opinion a much better setup than backfilling renewables 1:1 with gas turbines, and fixes renewables being "destabilising factor" in energy market.
> moreover because (most) renewables are varying, you actually also create capability to supply the varying demand (something you can't do with a nuclear power plant).
which is just pure fantasy / fake news. Two random noises (varying renewable supply + variable demand) will very rarely cancel out.
Other ways are complementary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557422
> With a more cooperatively designed system, this could be reduced to just 20 GW across the continent.
So, no, you cannot sustain baseload power with wind, even with cooperation, you still need powerplants (carbon? coal. green? nuclear)
I don't think anyone thinks that literally, but rather that in most places that's true in practice given the alternatives.
Solar won't contribute to baseload at all for large parts of the day, meaning that no amount of overprovisioning helps. Wind has more noise on a day-cycle, so can be "averaged out" for large geographical areas, in theory. In practice though, I don't think wind provides baseload supply anywhere, currently, but happy to be proven wrong.
[citation required]
looking at last EIA report renewables + storage is still multiples of nuclear