How are you going to deal with base load?
We can save money on nuclear but reducing the amount of bureaucracy and increasing the volume for economies of scale.
We can save money on nuclear but reducing the amount of bureaucracy and increasing the volume for economies of scale.
See Table 1 in this review paper from June for a summary of grid simulations from 10 separate models running 100% renewables at various time step resolutions: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=983...
Now its a rallying cry for some reason.
Additionally, I would recommend you read the remarks of Table 1, where half of them either make a gigantic portion of electricity needs disappear (not counting livestock needs lol), or assume that 10000TWh (or much more) will be covered by fossil fuels or nuclear. Hm, that sounds like a lot like a base load. It does not either cover how much you need to build (current best case scenarios are that you need to build 2.5x worth your needed consumption for it to be available at all times. Hope you're ready to cover Texas in solar panels you need to replace every ten years), or assume that you can just... transfer electricity through ? Yeah, sure, if we had a worldwide grid that just delivers energy where it needs to be without loss, but we don't.
You can also provide a base load with just solar. You just need to spread your panels all over the country to make up for the fact that sun is not always shining everywhere, but the idea stays the same: can we produce 100TWh over a year with our installation, no matter what ?
Energy isn't produced for the fun of it. Base load is related to total demand, at all times. Some of that demand is so you can run your USB powered coffee cup, some of it is to run foundries. You pick what you fit in that, but whatever you pick must be covered by that base load.
Needless to say, with sources as intermittent as wind and solar, making any kind of plans except "we're going to produce X over this month" is pretty much impossible, and you need to compensate by building tons of storage to smooth things out, otherwise you get brownouts.
- improve interconnects
- overdimension production
- CHP [0] with biomass fuel
- hydro storage
- increase demand flexibility
- generate carbohydrates for seasonal storage
- lower consumption
Technological improvements and breakthroughs are nice extras.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
Not that hydro is enough for baseload in itself.
They've also been importing cheap electricity to avoid burning expensive fossil fuels for about a decade, so they probably want to continue with that.
They have a lot of power generation in the north, but not enough transmission capacity to transfer it to the population centers in the south, so they have to sell it cheaply to their neighbors, and buy expensive electricity from their neighbors in the south.
This all worked fine when they could buy cheap electricity from their southern neighbors. But now they have a problem.
A few weeks ago there was 10X or more electricity price difference between north and south Sweden.
Take a look at:
https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/
Pick, for example, August 26, 2022, at 11:04. Prices up north are 14 euro per MWh, and 750 euro per MWh in the south.
With the recent chaos at the French nuclear plants Sweden became the largest exporter of electricity in the EU. [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
Nuclear and hydro are the baseload generation in Finland at the moment and will be far into the future. Hydro is also used to handle peaks. Imports are mostly hydro too.
If we're talking peace time, then there's loads of strategies. For Finland, Sweden and Norway there's immense possibility of hydro power to simply switch it to be used in a more dispatchable manner than baselod. For less hydro equipped countries see this research.
> *B. Dealing With Variability and Stability*
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].
> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
Needless to say, the sheer need for resources to build all this will make the current state of global warming and climate change look like child's play compared to earth after.
Holy shit, how hard is it for zealots to understand and accept that our best, realistic solution to electrifying as much as possible is through a combination of nuclear and renewables, something that literally every competent actor has said time and time again ?
But you seem to be implying that those are renewable problems that nuclear doesn't have, and that adding nuclear to the energy mix will improve them.
Can you explain how?
Like, "pink hydrogen" is hydrogen made by electrolysis with nuclear power. You had a little rant about Green Hydrogen, so how does nuclear change that?
What's wrong with EVs charged from nuclear?
Does nuclear mean you don't need grid interconnects? Why do France and Germany trade energy back and forth then?
I like nuclear as a tech. It's you that I have doubt about actually supporting it as it seems to just be a hippy-punching shibboleth for you. Are you really just arguing for fossil fuels?
Solution: Build renewables on a scale never seen before, then do it again two more times, as well as once every ten years to replace the ones that failed.
Do you see the slight problem? We do not have the resources for that. We cannot afford that. Is nuclear perfect? No. We have spent fuel (that hopefully we can figure out how to reuse, but for now, it's just waste buried deep), it's big, it's unwieldy. But it's reliable. Resources are both plentiful and we don't need that much. A whole lot of concrete (still much less that we would need to put wind turbines), fissile material that can be found pretty much anywhere, and a good bunch of pipes and various metals (infinitely less than what we'd need for solar or wind).
I said green hydrogen was shit for storing energy, and so is pink hydrogen. But if that can make you happy, I'm more than willing to use whatever surplus we get from renewables to make hydrogen. I'd just rather we waste 70% of a small production, rather than 70% of all.
What's wrong with EVs charged from nuclear? Everything. The only green car is a car that isn't manufactured. For most people (especially in europe), an EV will pretty much take 10 years before it offsets its CO2 emissions. Should we stop selling ICEs? Yes. Should we replace millions of existing cars with EVs? Absofuckinglutely not.
Nuclear means you're less dependent on those interconnects. Which, you know, is a useful thing to be as a sovereign country. See: Europe and its dependency on gas.
> Are you really just arguing for fossil fuels?
Considering how happy fossil fuel companies are about renewables because it allows them to sell gas when it inevitably doesn't work for a day and you need something else to make up for it, you would do well to rethink your mindless support. Every 100% renewables plan is the equivalent of a spherical cow in a vacuum. We cannot mine that much. We cannot find that much space in ideal locations, nor maintain it. There is not a single mine in the world able to get the resources we need. Ignoring reality is all fun and games, and if we had infinite time in front of us, I'd be all okay with going full intermittent power. But we both know it's not the case. Pretending anything else is ignorance and optimism at best, and malice at worst. You need to learn compromise, and as it stands, we cannot afford not to.
Finnish winter crushes solar and wind generation. No sun and wind still days.
The Baltic sea is also definitely workable for off-shore wind. Not to the level of the north sea but not that far off.