What this does require is significant investment in grid infrastructure which has been criminally neglected in years.
And I bet local storage is more economical to build and maintain than an additional network of huge continent-wide transmission lines.
This is something you have to factor in when reading boldly optimistic claims about how somehow solar and wind can work everywhere without even storage.
Maybe if we never stop pumping natural gas into our homes to burn it, but that's not exactly in line with the goals.
In reality, for anything north enough to get snow on the regular you can't use today's electricity consumption numbers to judge future needs. When everyone switches to heat pumps base load at night is going to skyrocket.
Gas (methane) doesn't have to come from the ground. The price of electrolysed hydrogen is dropping. It's early days; there's a lot of learning curve ahead, so we can expect further falls in price. Once you have hydrogen you can use it as-is or combine it with air-captured carbon for synthetic methane and re-use existing infrastructure.
Electrolysis is quite complementary to solar. It uses DC voltage (direct from the panels); and PEM (polymer electrolyte membrane) electrolysers start in a second or so, so passing clouds and such are not a problem. Solid oxide and alkaline methods have slightly longer startup times so may require an hour or so of battery storage alongside the panels. Carbon capture is similar to these latter two as I understand it.
That shouldn't be how an argument works.
Unlike the solar panel factories, battery factories, and replacement distribution network required to replace the entire US electrical grid, which can be online tomorrow morning at the snap of someone's fingers?
The impression that I’ve gotten is that there isn’t a huge amount of slack panel production capacity sitting idle. If we’ve learned anything the last two years, hopefully it’s that supply chain problems can take a while to sort out.
On the other hand, likely all of that will be needed to meet Xi's 2030 target for PV power generation in China. (12,000 GWe capacity, up from 800 now? Something like that.)
So near exponential but not much slack for others to use, probably.
China hasn't stopped building nukes, you'll notice.
Edit:
See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
There is ~1TW of renewables in US grid queues, and ~427GW of storage. While many of these projects might not get built, the velocity should be noted. ~95GW of nuclear generation capacity remains. It takes 10 years and billions of dollars to build a single nuclear generator.
https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter...
https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-st...
> and ~427GW of storage
Got a source for this claim? That's an order of magnitude off [2] from what I've read before.
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
2. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
If we pretend electricity can teleport, then you can reach an emissions level under half of the net zero target (and well within the range of emissions from open pit uranium mining and diffusion centrifuging) with today's tech at roughly the post-subsidy marginal cost of energy from a nuclear plant.
https://model.energy/?results=e56f13ff1a1728e76048a94a0a37d9...
It's of course the fossil fuel industry which profits from this relentless mendacity. Renewables are great, but they aren't coal's competition and coal knows it. Nuclear is.
Show me the $13/MWh nuclear reactor (or even fuel for that matter).
Granted that's variable wholesale, and a full 100% renewable system costs $50-100/MWh in countries with high labour cost and without optimal climate, but this is still vastly cheaper than nuclear.
Solar is indeed better than nuclear if your goal is to reduce the amount of fossil fuel use by shutting coal and gas plants down during sunny days. But if the goal is a total elimination of fossil fuel use, then the cost of storage has to be included and nuclear wins out.
Yes. Bringing the total price to almost that of nuclear.
But unlike nuclear -- the price of which increased continuously from the 60s through early 90s while production was the highest it has ever been -- they are both dropping precipitously. So much so that the whole system cost could plausibly be lower than just the steam turbine and heat exchanger component before a new reactor would open (which is already mass produced more than any other production technology).
By all means build nuclear, but do it on a level playing field. Either give 60 year guaranteed prices at 2-4x current market rate, zero risk loans, and free insurance to all zero carbon sources with >90% availability or none.
This is the complete opposite of reality. Nuclear saw it's largest period of growth during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following the mid 1970s growth tapered off, and higher prices ensued as economies of scale were lost.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Here's a chart from that paper plotting plant construction vs cost over time. The big cluster of cheap plants in the late 60s and early 70s is what nuclear looks like when economies of scale are leveraged: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
It's like talking out of one side of your mouth about how advanced and safe your new electric SUV is (for the driver), whilst claiming it would be cheaper than a bicycle because you could in principle manufacture something with the same performance and safety as a model T for $5k so taxpayers should give you free loans and infinite insurance. The people of Niger are the pedestrians in this analogy.
If you're going to accuse me of dishonesty, it'd be good to at least try to explain what I lied about. Did plant construction not slow down? You have the history of nuclear plant construction available to you in the previous comment. If you want to make the claim that it was plant designs changing that led to raised costs, then it'd be good to explain how nuclear plants changed.
> If you're going to accuse me of dishonesty, it'd be good to at least try to explain what I lied about.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=2030
You showed a graph of prices which decreased a little with the first few large scale PWRs (before the industry had much experience with grid scale facilities), then continuously increasing from late '67 through '72 when construction was at its peak. Then resuming higher than it had been when when there was no experience and continuing to increase for the second peak of construction start (which was when those first set were just finished).
If what you said was remotely true, then the graph -- which you showed me -- would have its lowest price at the reactors which were permitted around '75 and finished around 85 because this is when the number of recently finished reactors was at its highest (and on par with the late 80s) and when the number of just started reactors was roughly as high as it has ever been.
This is the opposite of what it shows.
You are showing a direct contradiction of your thesis and claiming it somehow proves it. Ergo you are directly lying whilst showing proof you are lying. This is what gaslighting is.
The graph shows a negative learning rate, a positive correlation between under construction plants and price, a positive correlation between recently finished plants and price, and for the non-demonstration section, a negative economy of scale.
There are reasons outside that graph many of those aren't true or aren't the only reason for expense due to confounding factors, but that's not what you said.
This is a lie repeated by anti-nuclear types. Base load is simply the year round constant electricity demand.
How are we actually going to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of batteries? How are we going to dispose of them?
With battery factories. The very same that will be required to electrify vehicles when jurisdictions are enacting combustion vehicle sales bans at the end of the decade. 74-78 million new vehicles are sold each year. That's a lot of battery demand, which will be a forcing function to scale up battery manufacturing, driving down costs.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/electri...
> How are we going to dispose of them?
We recycle them. We already do today. https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ (Redwood has battery recycling agreements with several automakers)
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...
The world could face lithium shortages by 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says, while Credit Suisse thinks demand could treble between 2020 and 2025, meaning “supply would be stretched”.
About 2 billion EVs need to be on the road by 2050 for the world to hit net zero, the IEA says, but sales stood at just 6.6 million last year, and some carmakers are already selling out of EVs.
Lithium supply faces challenges not only from surging demand, but because resources are concentrated in a few places and over half of today’s production is in areas with high water stress.
A number of alternative chemistries exist, which are much less expensive and less flammable. They of course have lower energy density, but it does not play a major role: batteries sitting on the ground can afford to be be bulky and heavy.
Abundance alone is irrelevant; you need certain concentrations for the mining process to be viable. AFAIK that is the challenge with Li: the necessary concentrations are only found in several places of the world.
In the future, we might be able to mine lithium from some sources that are now useless, but the environmental cost might be enormous.
In an ideal world we would innovate with better chemistries which would render the need for lithium obsolete before we cause more damage. I know the technology exists (particularly for grid scale storage), but knowing humans, we will probably ruin more environments (and foreign economies) before such technologies will be meaningfully explored.
Sure, and rare earth metals aren't really all that rare. The problem is that the processing cost is well beyond economical for most of it.
Anyway, consider: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054
This paper explains how one can storage power at an efficiency of 65-75% using machinery made with ordinary materials operated at modest temperatures.
The truth is that a "base load plant" is one that can only supply the base load, as it has to be kept running most of the time to have a possible chance of making economic sense. Being a base load plant is a negative thing, indicating inflexibility.
If an inflexible source is cheaper, then it may better a fit as a high capacity factor supplier to meet constant demand.
We first need to agree on the problems and the solution, using levelised costs for lifetime of plant, and safe disposal, preferably using real examples, but theoretical best case examples are also worth discussing.
I'm inclined to believe there is no best pasta sauce, only best pasta sauces. One size does not, in face, fit all.
You must be misreading the comment or something.
They didn't say it's the only factor, they said it's a negative. It's a negative no matter how the costs align.
In what world is it reasonable to implement unrequired, unnecessary, and costly, features and call that a net positive in all cases under all circumstances.
Also, some sources are more flexible by their very nature and get the flexibility for free.
But more generally, lacking flexibility is a negative by itself. It's an acceptable negative if adding flexibility would cost more than the benefit, but it's still a negative.
Not for baseload generation.
And most people would call "can't be used for the more difficult parts of power generation" a negative too.
Not if they are generating base load. This is why base load is an important concept.
As an example: the combination of wind/solar/storage that could be used to provide the equivalent of a nuclear power plant's output could ALSO be used to provide some flexibility, by altering when the storage is charged and discharged. This flexibility would allow it to generate more value for the same number of kWh provided to the grid.
The variability of wind and solar is actually a HUGE problem. It makes managing the grid much harder and required a large amount of idle generating capacity as backup. This is why proponents love to argue against the very fundamental concept of base load.
Variability is in fact a trivial problem solved by storage and transportable backup. Even NG suffices as backup. Even coal suffices as backup. In the future, ammonia will take up that role.
We have the tech (you're almost certainly already using it), we have not deployed it at sufficient scale yet.
But we are building the factories to make the batteries, and the mines to feed the factories, as fast as we can raise money to do so.
I'm not sure what's happening with hydrogen (apparently it's much cheaper than batteries?); but regardless, that technology predates all forms of generating electricity more complex than the etymological origin of the word (ἤλεκτρον, amber) — "rubbing things together" was the only option when Deimand and van Troostwijk charged their Leyden jar back in 1789 and demonstrated electrolysis.
It's fine to say "the factories need to be built", as long as they can be built at a manageable price. But price is a huge factor that cannot be ignored, and it's high enough in this situation to make the word "trivial" incorrect.
No new problems need to be solved, so in that sense it is trivial.
It costs a lot of money in absolute terms, so in that sense it is not trivial.
The cost (for global battery based storage, the most expensive serious storage option) is in the order of 6 months global supply of crude oil to turn rocks into batteries (i.e. the dumbest possible limit on the cost of recycling), those batteries last at least three years even using the worst cycle-count estimates I've seen and throwing the batteries away at 70% of initial peak capacity, that's trivial.
Opening new mines and factories, even if the new mines provide new work for workers currently in fossil fuels, may be a significant geopolitical and economic shift, so in that sense it isn't trivial.
And so on.
For hydrogen, it's "build a tank that only leaks a little bit". (We'd probably be better off adding some carbon to that hydrogen, but I have no idea if anyone is working on that at sufficient scale even though the tech is over a century old).
Factories for any form of storage are not different in any material way from a thousand other factories we know work. We have been making factories for going on three centuries, and know we can. Making and operating factories is expensive capex, but exploring, extracting, transporting, and refining fossil fuels is an even more expensive opex. If we could afford fossil opex, renewable capex of similar order is strictly better.
A 4 hour battery for the entirety of world primary energy is about the same cost as one year of auto industry revenue. SIBs require no scarce resources and no toxic elements -- they're basically fancy dirt.
For longer scale storage, there are electrolyser industries spooling up in multiple countries. Some of the individual factories are big enough to produce the entire presently installed base in 5 years. Existing OCGT plants have minimal capital and fixed costs, and can burn hydrogen or ammonia basically at cost -- yielding indefinite storage for what is effectively a fixed 4x multiple of the cost of energy.
Lol, is that supposed to impress? Tens of trillions, and you're talking money.
Global spend on oil and gas is in the neighborhood of $4T per year. Coal is another $1T. Per year.
$0.1T or $0.8T spent on making batteries, that last ten or twenty years apiece, is small change in comparison.
The argument is about who gets the money.
A good summary is at https://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/uploads/pub...
and https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
I also don’t want every appliance in my house connected to the cloud and collecting usage data.
I sincerely doubt I’m in the minority on the former, and I hope I’m not in the minority on the latter.
So, I guess my point is, why are you reducing a panacea of mutually beneficial options down to a binary decision?
Storage isn't measured in GW, but rather in GWh.
I'd take any source that doesn't know the difference between W and Wh with a very, very large boulder of salt.