Welcome to The new dark ages in Germany. Leading politicians even do not have any higher education: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricarda_Lang It’s scary how these people decide about topics they have no idea about.
renewables will provide for 80% of Germanies energy needs by 2030, and close enough to 100% in 2050.
There does not seem to be nearly enough construction of pumped storage or battery to cover the unevenness of German wind power. In fact, their prices have gone negative repeatedly in the past, which is not in fact a good thing. (OMG help, we'll pay anyone to take this power before the grid blows up!)
By the time there is enough, storage will be massively cheaper. In the meantime, charging storage from gas or coal and then drawing it down is the same as burning gas or coal for immediate use, just with losses.
I could see Norway or Switzerland being major players in pumped hydro storage, given their geography.
Awhile back I did a bunch of math to try to figure out how much stored gravitational energy is in Lake Mead, and if I didn't make any major mistakes it came out to be about as much energy as the U.S. uses (as electrical energy) in 24 hours. The idea of moving that amount of water around on short time scales is hard to fathom.
Lake Mead stores (well, stored) radically less energy than mountaintop reservoirs with thousands of feet of "head" can hold behind cheap earthen dikes. Look up "penstock".
Stored energy (in a fixed gravitational field) is the product of height and mass. Hoover dam has a "hydraulic height" of 576 feet according to a government website, though the average height of any given drop of water is less than that because the lake is deep (or it was, anyways).
The thing about lake Mead is that the volume of water is absolutely huge. I don't think there are any mountaintop reservoirs anywhere close to it because though the altitude difference could be a lot more, it's hard to store large amounts of water on a mountaintop.
If we estimate that the average height of water in Lake Mead is 400 feet and it holds 26 million acre feet, then a pumped hydro storage system with 4,000 feet of altitude difference would need to hold 2.6 million acre feet to be equivalent. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like that in the U.S. The Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia has an upper reservoir of about 35.6 thousand acre feet and a vertical distance of 380 meters (1,246 feet).
Sweden has lots of high mountains that may have shallow reservoirs built cheaply on top of. Reservoirs with earthen dikes are radically cheaper than the sort of dams needed for traditional hydro power, and may be placed almost anywhere, because they do not need or destroy a watershed. Lots of small ones, placed close to users, are better than one big one like Lake Mead.
1. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...
2. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik...
As you already knew.
> Batteries will probably be cheaper,
The above commenter clearly thinks that batteries are going to provide cheap storage.
If you have some alternative plan for storage at the scale of tens of terawatt hours, please do tell.
It's great for countries that have it, but you're not going to be storing much hydroelectricity outside of mountainous regions.
that's not how that works.
also:
Dunkelflaute is 0.5% - 1.5% per year and only very rarely for longer than 24h. peaker power plants are turned off most of the time today and a combination of those and decentralized battery storage will easily buffer Dunkelflaute in Germany.
The idea is that the hydrogen can then be used in existing gas power plants.
It's reasonable to keep ICE power plants around as an emergency backup; if you have to use them for a week in January or when infrastructure breaks for whatever reason it's not the end of the world. Ideally things would run smoothly enough that they'd never be used.
You also assume that power plants can just be flipped on and off like a light switch. They can't.
There is a political risk that the governments of those countries change and they seize the energy-producing assets and sell surplus power to someone other than Europe. Perhaps a mutually-beneficial arrangement would be the best way to reduce the risk of it falling apart; for instance, if Morocco has the solar panels and Switzerland has the pumped-hydro storage facility to buffer out day/night cycles, both sides can trade power to their mutual benefit. Without both parts of the whole system, the other half is less useful.
So is nuclear fusion. You have provided no evidence or even argument that it is practical.
Proposing that you can compensate day night cycle with transmission is surely a joke, no infrastructure of such scale has ever been built.
Anything not built yet has not been built. After it is built, it will then have been built.
On the other hand, we know how to make high-voltage DC transmission lines -- the only real questions are: how much will it cost, and is there some way we can do it better and cheaper?
There have already been DC lines over 2,000 miles long built that run at 800 kV or more. That's already long enough to reach several time zones away, and it's not a conceptual stretch to imagine linking several of these together to reach further. According to wikipedia:
> In 2010, ABB Group built the world's first 800 kV UHVDC in China. The Zhundong–Wannan UHVDC line with 1100 kV, 3400 km (2100 miles) length and 12 GW capacity was completed in 2018. As of 2020, at least thirteen UHVDC transmission lines in China have been completed.
> While the majority of recent UHVDC technology deployment is in China, it has also been deployed in South America as well as other parts of Asia. In India, a 1830 km (1140 mile), 800 kV, 6 GW line between Raigarh and Pugalur is expected to be completed in 2019.[58] In Brazil, the Xingu-Estreito line over 2076 km (1290 miles) with 800 kV and 4 GW was completed in 2017, and the Xingu-Rio line over 2543 km (1580 miles) with 800 kV and 4 GW was completed in 2019, both to transmit the energy from Belo Monte Dam. As of 2020, no UHVDC line (≥ 800 kV) exists in Europe or North America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
Numerous politically stable European countries have plenty of room for solar installations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
in my book 98.5% easily fits the bill of "close to 100%"
so the answer is exactly what we do today: have a reserve capacity. part of that may even be traditional peaker power plants that remain turned off most of the year just like today.
I'd be curious about climate data on the distribution of Dunkelflaute duration, by region.
So, we'd have to build a large number of peaker plants, which are really expensive in that they have to amortize their costs over a small amount of uptime.
It's a political problem, not a technical one, and we do not, absolutely not have to build up new parallel peaker capacity. we can simply keep select plants alive.
Simply stating that no new peaker plants are needed "because storage capacity will be there" is a bit too simplistic.
I'd be glad if that's the case, but I'm not convinced it's actually true.
it took 1 year to build and start operation of giga Shanghai, and not much longer for giga Berlin.
it's a political challenge, not a technical one.
however back then Germany was between a rock and a hard place for our energy supply and we simply added a new supply channel, in addition to US LNG and Saudi and Qatari LNG.
The nuclear exit was supported by the population and not decided against them by politicians.
And to your criticism: A lot of politicians in germany are lawyers. Are they allowed do decide for the country? Do they have an idea about nuclear topics?
How about with their very friendly neighbors across the Baltic Sea who are about to finish a facility for exactly this purpose? https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s...
Even ignoring this, pearl clutching about the nuclear waste storage problem without directly contrasting it with the CO2 waste problem is highly problematic. Nuclear waste is a contained, tractable problem even if challenging. We barely even know where to begin with tackling the problem of removing gigatons of CO2 from the high atmosphere.
Can’t see that getting any better climate wise
And France is still building their nuclear waste dump site not that far from the border. Many also have a problem with this.
Most of the time people who wrote this argument have no concept what nuclear waste actually looks like.
Have you actually seen what nuclear waste looks like?
It is a solid substance, it doesnt go anywhere. Waste is compact, It fits in a small warehouse. Its in a radiation proof container and doesnt kill anyone who isn't trying to eat it. Of you leave and come back in 100 years thos nuclear waste will be exactly where you left it.
Instead of generating this nuclear waste that we can store, transport, or handle in any way we please.
We have replaced nuclear capacity with coal and gas.
Generating billions of tons of CO2. That cannot be stored. There is more CO2 produced ina year that we could fit in every gas canister himanity has ever produced. Also a gas canister doesnt stay sealed for very long by itself. Every attempt at economic carbon capture has not produced very much so far.
> A lot of politicians in germany are lawyers
Same here, and I think thats precisely the problem - there are few scientists and technical proffeshions in government. Like a huge chunk of human society is not present in decision making.
Yes, it has numerous forms. Most high-level radioactive waste is stored in dry cask storage. Until you destroy the cask and the things in it, it's pretty safe. But if you keep too much at one place it becomes a great target for terrorists. If you put them below the surface you must find conditions which doesn't degrade the cask.
Medium and low-level radioactive (dry) waste is often stored in plastic bags in normal steel barrels. When they rust through, you have a big problem. And steel barrels tend to rust faster than radioactive waste decays. Germany put a lot if these barrels into the former mine Asse and had to get it back at really high cost after saline water entered the storage location. After that there was even more waste to store because you need new barrels and have to store parts of salt from the mine as well. So Germany practically had a nuclear waste storage. It didn't work out so well, so people there are skeptical when someone else says it's not a problem.
And then there are radioactive liquids in storage tanks. The only solution I have heard so far is to dilute them so that they can be dumped into the sea. That may work for small quantities of waste, but if it's done globally, we have a problem.
> Same here, and I think thats precisely the problem - there are few scientists and technical proffeshions in government. Like a huge chunk of human society is not present in decision making.
I just wanted to say that a formal degree doesn't necessarily qualify you more on the subject and I don't like someone saying "you haven't studied this shut up". I judge people by their arguments, not by their title.
But I think more expertise among politicians can never hurt.
More people die every year from radiation from coal, excluding accidents, than have died from nuclear (including accidents) since the beginning of time.
Relying on hyperbole like this undermines your own argument.