It's now actually cheaper to build wind/solar + some sort of storage than designing/building/operating/decommissioning a nuclear plant.
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