Dispatchable energy sir.
In locations with lots of renewables already, new projects are including storage, cost-effectively, which turns non-disparchable power into dispatchable.
I think it's pretty clear that $58/MWh was never going to be achieved, and as with most nuclear projects, reality is 1.5x-3x of what the boosters promise. But even $58/MWh is not cheap enough to match the bids seen for dispatchable renewables+storage.
Nuclear projects are turtles chasing rabbits at this point, and the rabbit has head start.
The only countries that have successfully moved all or nearly-all of their electricity to decarbonized sources have done so primarily with dispatchable sources: hydroelectricity (E.g. Norway, Brazil, Albania, Uruguay) and with a mix of nuclear power filling in where hydro isn't enough (France, Sweden, Switzerland). All of those countries generate a single digit percentage of their electricity from fossil fuels. Nobody has decarbonized primarily through a source of decarboinzed energy source besides hydroelectricity or nuclear power.* Unless there's a storage breakthrough on the horizon, we'll still need to derive a significant chunk of our electricity generation from dispatchable sources.
* One minor counterexample is geothermal power, but like hydro it's geographically dependent.
That happened. It's called off river or blue field pumped hydro and sodium batteries.
This isn't built in sufficient quantities, and hasn't seen significant growth in decades.
> and sodium batteries.
This hasn't even been commercialized at all yet, let alone at grid scale.
1. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
3. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/race-lithium#:....
The 2007 Uranium bubble called. They would like to sell you some lithium futures for delivery on 2028 at costs based on an exponential fit.
> And unlike lithium, nuclear power already makes up 10% of the world's electricity generation. We only need an 8x increase (another 10% of electricity already comes from hydro) instead of a 1000x increase like we do with grid storage.
So after adding the first load for these reactors using hope, then operating them for 15 years, what do we do about the other 12TW of energy? What about the heavy casting facilities needed for thousands of reactor vessels? All the other critical minerals such as around half of the world's chromium production, vast quantities of precious metals and 100s of billions of litres a year of sulfuric acid production to process all the incredibly low grade uranium ore?
> The thing about nuclear energy is that there's so much energy contained in uranium that more exotic forms of extraction like seawater absorption [2] is feasible
I thought things that hadn't been done were completely impossible? Or do we get to acknowledge the TWh scale sodium ion supply chains and 100GW per year electrolyser supply chains that are being built right now as being vastly more realistic?
In any event, either this is a complete fantasy or the Vanadium that you necessarily get in much larger quantities even when using a sorbent that is as selective as possible for Uranium will provide half an hour to two hours of storage for capacity exceeding that of the nuclear reactor every time you refuel it. So at least filling the ocean with broken polymer ribbons will have a minor long term benefit.
Was this due to a sudden increase in reactor construction? There was no spike in nuclear power plant operation in 2007. Speculative bubbles are different from actual commodity shortages.
> So after adding the first load for these reactors using hope, then operating them for 15 years, what do we do about the other 12TW of energy?
By "the other 12 TW of energy" you mean other sources of primary energy? The good thing about nuclear power is that it produces thermal energy. This enables things like thermochemical hydrogen splitting which is more suitable to production of hydrogen for transportation fuel and green smelting. The waste heat from nuclear plants can be scavenged for heating and desalination. This is a distinct advantage over wind and solar that do not directly produce thermal energy and have to be converted from electricity to thermal energy.
> What about the heavy casting facilities needed for thousands of reactor vessels?
What about them? The amount of steel needed for reactor vessels is a drop in the bucket of the overall steel market.
> All the other critical minerals such as around half of the world's chromium production, vast quantities of precious metals and 100s of billions of litres a year of sulfuric acid production to process all the incredibly low grade uranium ore?
Again, what about them? Chromium is widely used for stainless steel. Sulfuric acid is widely used for plenty of things like fertilizer production, hydrocarbon refining, and car batteries. An 8x increase in nuclear power wouldn't substantially affect the markets for these resources. Do you have a reason to think that nuclear power production will cause shortages in chromium or sulfuric acid? If so, let's see that analysis instead of just postulating it as fact.
> I thought things that hadn't been done were completely impossible? Or do we get to acknowledge the TWh scale sodium ion supply chains and 100GW per year electrolyser supply chains that are being built right now as being vastly more realistic?
Please read sources before commenting on them: uranium seawater extraction has been successfully performed - not at costs competitive with traditional mining, but as explained in the source the cost of raw uranium is negligible for nuclear power
> In any event, either this is a complete fantasy or the Vanadium that you necessarily get in much larger quantities even when using a sorbent that is as selective as possible for Uranium will provide half an hour to two hours of storage for capacity exceeding that of the nuclear reactor every time you refuel it. So at least filling the ocean will have a minor long term benefit.
This is not how seawater extraction works. The same mass of adsorbent won't collect larger quantities of other elements. The 6 grams of uranium collected per kilogram of adsorbent doesn't turn into a 6 kilograms of material per Kg of adsorbent for a material that's 1000x as concentrated in the ocean. It will fill up faster for a more concentrated element, but you're still retrieving similar amounts of material for the same amount of adsorbent. You have to make 1000x as many trips to collect 1000x as much material, regardless of concentration.
The cost of this extraction is entirely comprised of deploying and retrieving the adsorbent material - letting a buoy sit in the ocean for 2 months instead of 1 week costs nothing. This is why seawater extraction is prohibitively expensive for most applications, uranium's incredible energy density is what makes it a viable application.
Mild delay in a mine opening. A sudden increase in reactor construction would be much worse.
> This is a distinct advantage over wind and solar that do not directly produce thermal energy and have to be converted from electricity to thermal energy.
CSP exists and is going down in price rapidly.
> Sulfuric acid is widely used for plenty of things like fertilizer production, hydrocarbon refining, and car batteries. An 8x increase in nuclear power wouldn't substantially affect the markets for these resources
1kg of Uranium from inkai or husab uses 50-100kg of sulfuric acid. And this is high grade compared to the 600,000 tonnes per year you are proposing using. Doubling world sulfuric acid production is about the right magnitude.
> uranium seawater extraction has been successfully performed
Make up your mind about what is possible and what is impossible. If doing it once to publish a paper and then pencilling out the costs of raw materials counts then we can all just use AlS batteries and go home.
> This is not how seawater extraction works. The same mass of adsorbent won't collect larger quantities of other elements. The 6 grams of uranium collected per kilogram of adsorbent doesn't turn into a 6 kilograms of material per Kg of adsorbent for a material that's 1000x as concentrated in the ocean. It will fill up faster for a more concentrated element, but you're still retrieving similar amounts of material for the same amount of adsorbent. You have to make 1000x as many trips to collect 1000x as much material, regardless of concentration.
> The cost of this extraction is entirely comprised of deploying and retrieving the adsorbent material - letting a buoy sit in the ocean for 2 months instead of 1 week costs nothing. This is why seawater extraction is prohibitively expensive for most applications, uranium's incredible energy density is what makes it a viable application.
Natural Uranium in a burner reactor is not very energy dense in the scheme of things. Much higher than coal, but about the same power output as a similar mass of silicon in a photovoltaic cell (but at 75% CF for 6 years rather than ~15-25% for 30-50).
At ~3g/kg the uranium only has about 10x as much energy as you'd get by burning the polymer or 5x in the current nuclear fleet (wonder how much it takes to make?). There goes the much vaunted EROI unless you get quite a few reuses (hint: you only get a few).
Also what I said is exactly how sea mining works. Please at least try to understand these technologies before pushing them. You get more vanadium than Uranium in any realistic use case https://www.osti.gov/pages/biblio/1234341
The longer you leave it, the more Uranium gets displaced by Vanadium. At 2 months you get 5x as much.
1kg of natural uranium has a power output of about 1-2kW for 6 years and then it's gone. 1kg of vanadium can store 350-650Wh.
Such a simple plan with so few completely deal breaking oversights compared to building sodium ion factories which is already happening and building more pumped hydro which we know how to do.
Except the polymer is re-usable.
> The longer you leave it, the more Uranium gets displaced by Vanadium. At 2 months you get 5x as much.
Until it's saturated, then you can leave it out all you want and it won't collect any more. And I had thought you were referring to lithium seawater extraction - you just tossed out vanadium without actually explaining how you'd use it and I assumed you mistyped lithium.
Unfortunately vanadium redox batteries are not nearly built at the scale of lithium batteries - which are themselves not built at a scale large enough for grid storage - as well as poorer round trip efficiency.
A few times: https://www.ornl.gov/publication/investigations-reusability-...
As I said, there goes your eroi. At 10mg/kg you're producing 10,000 tonnes of polymer per year per reactor and harvesting it 3-6 times. This is supposed to be economical? That's 10 million tonnes of plastic waste per year just for one terawatt or 10% of world plastic waste to replace FF electrical generation.
> Until it's saturated, then you can leave it out all you want and it won't collect any more.
If you leave it in too long the Uranium starts going out because Vanadium has higher concentration and similar affinity. But long before that, your polymer breaks down and becomes microplastic pollution.
> Unfortunately vanadium redox batteries are not nearly built at the scale of lithium batteries - which are themselves not built at a scale large enough for grid storage - as well as poorer round trip efficiency.
So now we're back to this incoherent dissonance where doing something once on a tiny test platform makes it a definite solution to world energy, but something being produced at GWh scale in the real world is not big enough? That's a truly stellar amount of double think you've got going on there. I'm sure there'll be even more interest when your magic $20/kg unlimited supply vanadium machine running at 20x current total production is up and running.
The adsorbent loses efficiency after a couple elution cycles, but it is regenerated by an alki wash. Read this [1] if you want a better explanation. No, you do not need to keep producing tons and tons of polymer. You have to treat it with chemicals after a couple cycles, but you don't need to throw the whole polymer away and start anew.
Regardless, this whole seawater extraction tangent is only a contingency if no new terrestrial reserves of uranium are found. Unlike intermittent sources which require massive amounts of grid storage, uranium seawater extraction isn't going to be necessary any time soon which is why I'm not super concerned about how seawater extraction isn't being commercialized.
On the other hand, renewables are already starting to saturate the market during peak production today. In order to make intermittent sources viable we need storage systems now. It's not dissonance, it's the fact that there are presently functioning alternatives to seawater extraction that will continue to work for the near to mid term future. Whereas there are no storage systems capable of delivering energy at grid scale.
..The longest lasting method in that paper is a scale model in idealized conditions of the same method I linked to but the first was in more realistic conditions... they ran one in the ocean but not more than once.
> Regardless, this whole seawater extraction tangent is only a contingency if no new terrestrial reserves of uranium are found. Unlike intermittent sources which require massive amounts of grid storage, uranium seawater extraction isn't going to be necessary any time soon which is why I'm not super concerned about how seawater extraction isn't being commercialized.
So we're back here. To match the scale of renewable when they start to run into the constraints that require scaling up storage, you need about 3TW by 2030 (before then a mix is viable along with using surplus for replacing non-electrical fossil fuels such as H2). That's 10,000 tonnes of fissile material up front, and another 10,000 every reload. You need to open every mine on the planet today and empty them by 2040. Then your sea mining rig needs to be ready to go (and hilariously has to be installed on a greater net capacity of offshore wind turbines than the capacity of nuclear reactors it supplies). After that you still need just as much storage for variable loads because ramping isn't an option as idle capacity would reduce your fuel runway by 6 years.
All this because you think lithium production can't double when the extraction started a year ago? It's actually a comically bad plan. Well done. The bit where it needs the wind turbines was comedy gold.
Sure, they may need to regenerate the adsorbent after just one use. But the polymer survives. Even if the adsorbent retains most of its efficacy after one elution cycle, it could be more efficient to refresh it to maximize the material collected per trip. You seemed to have been under the impression that the entire polymer needed to be replaced when you talked about how it'd be more effective to burn the polymer: "at ~3g/kg the uranium only has about 10x as much energy as you'd get by burning the polymer or 5x in the current nuclear fleet"
For what it's worth I am confident that lithium ion battery production will continue to increase and double, triple, or even quadruple over the next century. But that will be barely enough just to satisfy EV demand for batteries. Even just provisioning 12 hours of grid storage worldwide would need 30,000 GWh at present electricity demand. That's close to a century of production at present rates. Doubling, tripling or even quadrupling production still means we'd need to dedicate several decades worth of battery production just to satisfy 12 hours of present electricity demand. Not to mention the fact that electricity demand is going to increase as more transport moves to EVs and as poorer countries develop. Not to mention the fact that these batteries need to be replaced after a few thousand cycles.
I'm confident about battery production doubling or tripling, it's the factor of 10 to 20 that I'm more skeptical of - and that's the kind of increase we'd need to make battery grid storage feasible.
> For what it's worth I am confident that lithium ion battery production will continue to increase and double, triple, or even quadruple over the next century. But that will be barely enough just to satisfy EV demand for batteries. Even just provisioning 12 hours of grid storage worldwide would need 30,000 GWh at present electricity demand. That's close to a century of production at present rates.
You're off by over a factor of 3. There's around 1TWh/yr now, and 5TWh/yr under construction due before 2030. And only a few hours needs to be high power. The rest can be thermal, PHES, CSP dispatch, virtual batteries via load shifting, hydrogen for emergencies, and so on.
> I'm confident about battery production doubling or tripling, it's the factor of 10 to 20 that I'm more skeptical of - and that's the kind of increase we'd need to make battery grid storage feasible.
It's happened, if it were a nuclear project then it'd be at the stage where they've already declared it finished, but shut it down straight after loading and said it will reopen in a month. Other industries do things a little differently, but either way it'll mostly be running around 2028
We also don't make a terawatt of batteries per year. 2021's total lithium ion battery production was less than half a terawatt [1]. Most estimates place it between 300 and 500 GWh. Don't confuse predicted capacity with actual production figures. Production is often half of projected capacity or even less [2]. You're overstating battery production by at least a factor of two.
And as far as predictions about battery growth goes, we can't build an electricity grid on predictions. People said we'd be harnessing fusion by the end of the millennium. People said we'd all be using VR headsets as the primary means of interacting with computers back in the mid 2010s. People make all sorts of predictions about what could happen. Actually making it happen is a whole different story. The way to make the case that battery production can reach 5,000 TWh per year is to deliver 5,000 TWh of batteries. We haven't even accomplished a tenth of that.
By comparison several countries have transitioned most of their electricity generation to nuclear, and plenty more have built 30-40% of their generation capacity with it and don't need any more because they have hydroelectricity. The viability of nuclear power isn't a prediction, it's historical precedence. Nobody has built any significant amount of grid storage. Nobody developed countries has generated more than 50% of their electricity from wind and solar. This has, on the other hand, been done with nuclear. Demonstrated precedence vs. eager predictions. I'm much more keen on betting the future of planet on the former.
1. https://www.interactanalysis.com/lithium-ion-battery-market-....
2. https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/growt....
The sorbent is the polymer. The polymer is the sorbent. They're the same thing. There is no separate regeneration cycle if you use alkaline for the elution because the alkaline cycle is the regeneration. Read the document you linked.
> But after several elution cycles the polymer is refreshed. Even the more pessimistic study you linked to found that it'd cost $830/Kg on the upper bound. This is only 8x the cost of existing mining methods, and wouldn't substantially increase the cost of nuclear power because enrichment is a bigger component of fuel cost than extraction.
It's small at $120/kg. $830/kg brings raw uranium cost for existing fleet to around $20/MWh or $12/MWh for a modern reactor. It'd be a little less because the tails would become less concentrated, but this is still significant. But what do you keep saying about promises? Why do we believe without question a wild-ass guess for something that has never happened in an industry that consistently overruns costs by a factor of 2 or 3?
> 2021's total lithium ion battery production was less than half a terawatt [1]
What year is it? In what year will factories built this year have been running for a year? How much more does an industry growing at 25-50% produce after two years? How many times has the claimed capacity been lower than the subsequent net production in the last five years?
The largest growth in the nuclear industry ever was around 30GW net. At this rate it would take decades to provide enough power, and 2021's battery production could easily cover diurnal storage. There's no precedent for anything close to the current renewable install rate, there is no precedent for mass expansion of mining, and you still haven't said where the fuel is supposed to come from after 2040.
Quite the contrary, CSP fell out of favor because PVs outcompeted it. What is making CSP better? Did mirrors suddenly improve?
> 1kg of Uranium from inkai or husab uses 50-100kg of sulfuric acid. And this is high grade compared to the 600,000 tonnes per year you are proposing using. Doubling world sulfuric acid production is about the right magnitude.
Did you just pick these figures out of thin air? Reduction of uranium in sulfuric acid is nowhere near 100 : 1 ratio. Unless you're talking about 600,000 tons after enrichment, in which case your figure for uranium consumption is off by an order of magnitude. A 1 GW reactor requires 27 tons of uranium per year [1]. The world uses an average of 2,500 GW of electricity meaning we'd need 68,000 tons of uranium fuel per year. The world produces 231 million tons of sulfuric acid annually [2], so even if we run with your un-sourced numbers this only requires an increase of 2-3%.
> At ~3g/kg the uranium only has about 10x as much energy as you'd get by burning the polymer or 5x in the current nuclear fleet (wonder how much it takes to make?). There goes the much vaunted EROI unless you get quite a few reuses (hint: you only get a few).
Except unlike solar power, the nuclear fleet doesn't require vast amounts of energy storage. It produces the amount amount of electricity regardless of sunlight or wind speed.
Here's the future of renewables: We keep building it opportunistically to displace natural gas. But once they saturate markets during peak production, they become far less effective at displacing carbon emissions because most of their energy is wasted.. After some time scratching our heads struggling to build energy storage at anywhere near relevant scales, we realize that dispatchable energy is necessary and we build it the only ways we know how: hydroelectricity where geography permits, and nuclear power. Or we can jump straight to the the last part and skip building a bunch of intermittent generation that will be made redundant in the end anyway.
1. https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/how-is-uranium-...
2. https://www.essentialchemicalindustry.org/chemicals/sulfuric...
Yes. Thanks for noticing: https://www.reutersevents.com/renewables/csp-today/self-alig... I think the first projects using them are just about done. Heliostats now require much less foundation and are much cheaper to install. The remaining portion is almost identical to the cheap part of many of the SMR concepts, but on a stick instead of in a gigantic steel and concrete room.
But the main driver is actually that it is dispatchable. If you make the hot bit bigger and combine it 5:1 with PV with a little battery on the side you get a millisecond response, grid forming, 24/7 dispatchable power station that is presently about the same price as a NPP but is actually going down rather than up. They're only good in low clous regions, but there is enough good resource for it to make a contribution on the same order as nuclear.
> Did you just pick these figures out of thin air? Reduction of uranium in sulfuric acid is nowhere near 100 : 1 ratio. Unless you're talking about 600,000 tons after enrichment, in which case your figure for uranium consumption is off by an order of magnitude. A 1 GW reactor requires 27 tons of uranium per year [1]. The world uses an average of 2,500 GW of electricity meaning we'd need 68,000 tons of uranium fuel per year. The world produces 231 million tons of sulfuric acid annually [2], so even if we run with your un-sourced numbers this only requires an increase of 2-3%.
It's for getting it out of the ore at 1-3ppt. Do you not even understand that not all uranium resource is like cigar lake where you just find some yellow and green rocks, pour a bit of heavy water on them and call it good? Go look at the sulfuric acid consumption of rossing or inkai, realise those are high concentration compared to the other 7 million tonnes and lower concentration needs more, then come back and apologise.
Most of the ore you are proposing mining is no more energy dense than oil.
> Except unlike solar power, the nuclear fleet doesn't require vast amounts of energy storage.
One kg of natural uranium cannot produce enough energy to wear out an LFP battery made with 1kg of lithium -- and the lithium can be recycled. I think we're good.
The EV(s) can function as some of the battery backup, especially since most EVs will be about 80% overprovisioned for everyday driving. Tesla is already doing it in California.
Storage breakthrough: sodium ion goes into mass production at 140-160wh/kg by CATL next year. In addition to being usable for the 200-300 mile EV, that will mean cheap grid batteries.
But this obsession with dispatchability at scale shows that there is too much focus on grid-scale solar and storage and centralized control. Yes the upfront costs are cheaper, but grid solar should be hand in hand with a VERY aggressive home/business solar+storage subsidy.
It's dumb that a natural disaster knocks out power for the entire area because transmission lines go down. With distributed solar and storage, that wouldn't be nearly as bad. Old guard electric can't wrap their heads around a country where every roof has solar doing most / all / surplus power generation.
Resiliency how? It makes the grid more fragile since cloudy days make for big energy shortages. It also doesn't solve EV charging. Plenty of people charge their EVs at night because they drive during the day. They also want to charge their EVs regardless of weather.
> Storage breakthrough: sodium ion goes into mass production at 140-160wh/kg by CATL next year.
Define "mass" production. For context, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day, or about 2,500 GWh of electricity per hour.
The concern with dispatchability is entirely reasonable because energy needs to be supplied when it's in demand, and storage isn't anywhere near the required scale. You can't just hand-wave this away by encouraging homes and businesses to buy storage.
> It's dumb that a natural disaster knocks out power for the entire area because transmission lines go down. With distributed solar and storage, that wouldn't be nearly as bad. Old guard electric can't wrap their heads around a country where every roof has solar doing most / all / surplus power generation.
Quite the contrary. Decentralized power generation actually means more transmission lines to transport energy long distances from the places where it gets generated to the places where energy is in demand. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
Such as? Most storage facilities are targeting a few hundred megawatts of storage, usually enough for a few hours of power but not enough to even out a full night.
One more snowy 2 (or equivalent) and Australia can get to ~97% solar+wind+pumped storage powered.
The only reason existing pumped storage sites used to target a few hundred MWh was because they were historically used for regulating the grid, not providing large scale storage.
The geography to do this is plentiful too, as multiple studies have confirmed.
In case you're unfamiliar with how pumped hydro works: There's an upper reservoir and a lower reservoir. To charge the system, water from the lower reservoir is pumped into the upper reservoir, and to withdraw energy the water is passed to the lower reservoir driving a turbine.
In Snowy 2, the upper reservoir is large enough to accommodate 350 GWh of energy. But the lower reservoir is not, and actually attempting to actually use that much storage would cause the closed loop system to lose water and permanently reduce the storage capacity unless additional water is added. If I have a 100 liter bucket up top and a 10 liter bucket down below. If I fill up the 100 liter bucket to the brim I could drain 100 liters once, but then I'd lose 90 liters and only have enough water to fill it back up to 10 liters. So does it have a capacity of 100 liters? In a pedantic sense, yes, but in practice you only have 10 liters of usable capacity.
Pumped hydro storage requires very specific geography to function, so deceptive messaging is often required to convince people of its efficacy.
The 240 and 40 are also a lowball because parts of the losses were already accounted for at the beginning. That part is the double count.
Also, you insist that there's an error in this analysis - "double counting" - yet you neglect to actually explain what was wrong with it. This [1] is the report that arrived at the 40 GWh figure.
> Whilst Talbingo’s level could be reduced to provide ‘space’ for Snowy 2.0 Tantangara water, this would reduce the energy storage and efficiency of Tumut 3. As Tumut 3 has 60 GWh of storage when Talbingo is full, any reduction in Talbingo water levels would reduce that capacity, which can be delivered at 1,800 MW for up to 33 hours. A reduction would also (marginally) reduce the efficiency of Tumut 3. Another reason to keep Talbingo close to full is that a call on Snowy 2.0 to generate for 7 days would normally be most unlikely. Also, Tumut 3 can very quickly generate and create space in Talbingo for Snowy 2.0 water, though this still means discharging water to Blowering, beyond whatever spare capacity there was in Jounama at the time. So, if the current operational arrangement remains largely intact, the available capacity for Snowy 2.0 before water is lost to Blowering would be approximately 28 GL. This volume equates to a recyclable energy storage capacity for Snowy 2.0 of about 40 GWh (28/239x350) – i.e. 20 hours at 2,000 MW.
If more than 40 GWh of storage were used, Snowy 2 would reduce the capacity of other hydro electric plants. It's the estimate of 350 GWh that relied on double counting, not the 40 GWh figure. If this analysis is wrong, then actually explain what's wrong with it instead of just insisting that it's double counting.
1. https://majorprojects.planningportal.nsw.gov.au/prweb/PRRest...
Trying to paint this as 40GWh is the very definition of bad faith.
But doing so would reduce the usable storage of other facilities using the same body of water. This is explained here:
> At the extreme, the water stored in Talbingo/Jounama could be reduced to 28 GL. This would allow 160 GL of Tantangara water to be accommodated in Talbingo. This equates to a recyclable energy storage capacity for Snowy 2.0 of about 235 GWh (160/239x350). In this case the energy capacity of Tumut 3 is reduced from 60 GWh to 10 GWh, so the net energy storage is 185 GWh (235-50).
How much can Snowy 2 store without adversely impacting other storage facilities? 40 GWh.
Cycling 240 GWh of energy would almost entirely eliminate Tumut 3's storage capacity, and yield a net increase in storage capacity increase of only 185 GWh. 240 GWh is only correct if we ignore the capacity reduction of Tumut 3. And of course, I doubt Tumut 3's operators would agree to this scenario without being bought out because it'd destroy their ability to turn a profit and have a chilling effect on future hydro projects.
So yeah, bad faith. And now you've had it pointed out twice it's just lying.
The issue is that the maximum cyclical storage capacity is determined by the minimum of both the upper and lower reservoirs. Snowy 2's lower reservoir is Tumut 3's upper reservoir. And Tumut 3's lower reservoir is barely 1/10th the size of Snowy 3's upper reservoir. That's the bottleneck.
If your point is that we should just accept the fact that Tumut 3 can't be run at full capacity if Snow 2 is deployed, then yes that's correct.
> The downstream dams dispatch their dispatchable energy and you leave enough water in the middle two that the maximum can be pumped back upstream
Right: in order for Snowy 2 to avoid losing any water, then Tumut 3's upper reservoir (which, remember is Snowy 2's lower reservoir) has to start empty in order to accommodate the water from Snowy 2. And then Tumut 3 can't drain this water when prices are high because Snowy 2 needs it re-charge its upper reservoir when electricity prices are low. In order to run Snow 2 at maximum cyclic capacity, Tumut 3 has to essentially become totally subservient to it.
Imagine I have 3 cups: 30 Liter cup flows to/from a 15 liter cup, to a 5 liter cup. I only have 20 liters of actual cyclic storage capacity, not 50. The 15 and 5 liter cups have to start empty in order to catch the water flowing down from the 30 liter cup. If the 15 and 5 liter cup started full, they'd overflow and lose water.
So if Snowy 2 is running at max cyclic capacity, Tumut 3 can only store and release the water that can fit in its lower reservoir (the 5 liter cup). That's why running snowy 2 at max cyclic capacity would completely shaft Tumut 3.
> The extra dispatchable energy is an upside. It's like having a battery that can't be charged past 70% but fills itself the rest of the way.
But that metaphorical battery fills itself very slowly. It's not cyclic capacity and thus isn't nearly as useful.
Imagine you have company A that sells a battery that stores 1 GWh and you can charge and discharge it at a rate of 200 MW and charge it at a rate of 200 MW. Company B sells a battery that stores 10 GWh for the same price that can also discharge at a rate of 200 MW, but it's super sensitive to charging and can only be charged at a rate of 1 MW - it'll take a month and a half to get back to 10 GWh.
Which of these batteries is more useful? The first one, by a massive margin.
> But that metaphorical battery fills itself very slowly. It's not cyclic capacity and thus isn't nearly as useful.
It's seasonal storage. The fastest it can empty or fill is a week. A renewable grid doesn't ever require it to run at max power until it is empty and then fill at max power until it is full. That's a failure mode of a grid with large centralised production that has major unplanned outages like nuclear plants.
Is a load balancing or grid forming battery more useful? Yes. Can snowy 2 form a buffer for 350GWh of energy consumption in any realistic scenario? Also yes.
What about them? Those aren't pumped hydro storage plants, they're just normal dams. There's no pump: you can't supply them with electricity to pump water back into the reservoir.
Cyclable capacity is the only type of capacity anyone cares about. Again imagine I sell someone a battery claiming it has 10 GWh of capacity. they drain 10 KWh, and then they try to charge it back up but it stops at only 3 KWh. They call tech support and I say "well, sir, the battery only has 3 KWh of cyclable capacity." I guarantee you >99% of people would think they were cheated. Saying that the battery has a capacity of 10 KWh is highly misleading; it's only true in a pedantic sense.
The whole point of Australia's storage plans is to even out solar energy's daily output. The plan is to pump the water into the upper reservoir during the day, and release it at night. The requires cyclical storage. The trickle of water that precipitation puts into the upper reservoir is negligible.
...which it can do by curtailing or releasing the dispatchable energy in tumut 2 if tumut 3 needs to adjust
also the 'trickle' is an entire watershed, not surface precipitation
In all practical senses, over the time scales for which seasonal storage is required, snowy 2 adds 240-350GWh of load shifting. Your sleight of hand doesn't work I already know where the ball is.
Looping back to my battery analogy. The extra 7 Kwh of non-cyclical storage could come in hand if you needed to use it for an extended period of time if the power goes out. But it's not useful if you need to use it every day. Australia, California, and plenty of other energy markets need cyclical storage that is used every day/night cycle to smooth out the duck curve[1].
If you had clarified that most of Snowy 2's storage capacity is not suitable for cyclical storage from the outset, this whole tangent could have been averted. Cyclical storage is the kind of storage that it's in demand, so it's important not to present non-cyclical storage that has a very limited recharge rate as equivalent to a lithium battery.
It can diurnally cycle around 7% of australia's electricity production, it can provide several days power (about 5) at times when the dams are slightly lower (ie. The only time it is needed) and has the capability to provide a week of power (at the same 7%) if circumstances are not par for the course. It can regenerate any water it needs to expel in such a situation in a few weeks using Tumut 2's regular output. Only in conditions of severe drought does its capacity stay down at the 240GWh range.
Anyone with the ability to use arithmetic and basic logic can infer this from the diagram you linked.
Also there is plenty of precedent for something called a battery where using the full nameplate capacity has a high cost and is not easily reversible. It's called a lead acid battery and was one of the most common chemistries for the better part of a century
But it regenerates this very slowly. It'd take over a month to recharge. Again, you can't compare a pumped storage reservoir with a precipitation-based reservoir (aka a dam). With the former you put energy in and energy is stored. With the latter you just have to wait for the rains to fall. This is not useful for cyclical, or as you insist we word it, diurnal storage. Anyone with a solid grasp of logic can see that, too.
> Also there is plenty of precedent for something called a battery where using the full nameplate capacity has a high cost and is not easily reversible. It's called a lead acid battery and was one of the most common chemistries for the better part of a century
Lead acid batteries only last ~300 cycles so you'd have to replace them every year if used for cyclical storage. This is why lithium based battery chemistries are used.
The refill comes from tumut 2. And again, it's a 2GW storage that provides diurnal, five day, and seasonal. Do try to comprehend basic concepts like 'water that goes through a dam goes to the lower reservoir'.
> Lead acid batteries only last ~300 cycles so you'd have to replace them every year if used for cyclical storage. This is why lithium based battery chemistries are used.
This doesn't matter. It's called a battery and you can't typically use nameplate capacity. It's exactly the thing you keep acting outraged about. It's also probably the thing most associated with the word battery other than single use cells.
And for the fourth time, this water is from precipitation. You can't supply electricity to it and pump more water. It's not storage in the sense that you can supply it with a GWh of electricity and later tap the energy you put into it. You're literally saying every single dam is a "pumped storage" facility even if there's no way to pump water into the upper reservoir. Do try to comprehend the difference between pumped storage and a dam.
> This doesn't matter. It's called a battery and you can't typically use nameplate capacity. It's exactly the thing you keep acting outraged about. It's also probably the thing most associated with the word battery other than single use cells.
If you're not running them at full depth of discharge then you're cutting down your usable storage capacity. If you're running 1 GWh of batteries but you're only going to 50% depth of discharge to extend longevity then you've really only provisioned 500 MWh of storage.
But they're sold and advertised based on the emount of energy they can dispense when full. Once you use that much energy you can never store that much again. And everyone is fine with this. Snowy 2 is less limited than this.
> And for the fourth time, this water is from precipitation. You can't supply electricity to it and pump more water. It's not storage in the sense that you can supply it with a GWh of electricity and later tap the energy you put into it. You're literally saying every single dam is a "pumped storage" facility even if there's no way to pump water into the upper reservoir. Do try to comprehend the difference between pumped storage and a dam.
Every single dam is storage. It's why so many were built in the nuclear boom. The 40GWh can be cycled any time, the 240GW can be cycled at any point it is needed in any real scenario (ie. When water levels are not at max and tumut 3 is also using its storage in the same direction). The rest is recharged by curtailing normal hydroelectric flow later (by putting renewable energy into the grid) on seasonal timescales. The system needs to dispense a certain amount of water anyway so the full 350 is available cosistently on a seasonal basis. You may have a point if you were asserting calling it 350 rather than 240 was a bit misleading without further context and caveats (ie. Only once or twice a year and only for that 'week long renewable drought' so beloved of stans of generation technologies that go offline for weeks unexpectedly like coal), but you weren't. Instead you were yelling that it was 40.
Ergo bad faith.
Right, but renewables need storage that we can charge and discharge daily, not seasonal storage. We're back to the 10 KWh battery that can only be charged to 3 kwh on demand.
> Every single dam is storage. It's why so many were built in the nuclear boom.
Renewable growth predated the nuclear boom by a long margin: concrete and effective turbines made possible bid advances in hydropower around the 1930s and 1940s. This is when the Hoover dam, the Coulee dam, and most of the other big hydro power plants were built. The nuclear boom was in the 1960s and 70s.
> The 40GWh can be cycled any time
And again, this is the main form of storage we need to flatten out the duck curve.
> the 240GW can be cycled at any point it is needed
Yes, but then it takes a long time to refill. This is useful for seasonal storage, as you point out, but again flattening the daily fluctuation is what's really necessary. The bigger value is for the use case that's not in as much demand.
The point of storage is that you can capture the surplus energy of renewables. The idea is that if my grid consumes 100 GW of electricity and I produce 150 GW during the day I can capture that extra 50 GW. Dams can't do this. Yes, you can reduce a dam's production when renewables are at peak generation and let water levels rise. But that's not really storage. What happens when the renewables produce so much energy that it's saturating demand? You can't capture that surplus energy with just a dam, you need a bidirectional connection.
Pointing out that you're sidestepping the fact that only a much smaller portion of storage capacity can by cycled daily like a lithium battery is not at all bad faith.
...which it can do for the full 2GW rated power without discharging water.
Every time load shifting or diurnal storage is mentioned, there are cries of 'but what abuurt the 3 day energy drought you need four days'
Now when presented with a system that is designed precisely for this use case you start whining.
Make up your mind.
> What happens when the renewables produce so much energy that it's saturating demand? You can't capture that surplus energy with just a dam, you need a bidirectional connection.
In addition to this you can use Tumut 2 as your output, then when there is surplus energy store it via snowy 2. This will take a few weeks, but it is a way to fill the entire 350GWh with curtailed renewable energy if that is what you really want. Some water is lost in a full emptying or when changing from diurnal capability to 5 day capability, but some water must go downstream anyway or blowering cannot work. The full 7 days can be cycled a few times a year, which is what it was built for.
Even without that, you've absorbed 2GW with your hydro curtailment and your 2GW storage facility is storing 2GW for a week exactly as advertised. Focusing on a technicality that doesn't come up is bad faith. You can't cycle 350GWh with 2GW in a day. Can you not divide?
You were the first one to bring up seasonal storage here [1]. Nobody was ever talking about seasonal storage until you brought it up. "but what abuurt the 3 day energy drought you need four days" this is all you talking, bud.
> In addition to this you can use Tumut 2 as your output, then when there is surplus energy store it via snowy 2. This will take a few weeks, but it is a way to fill the entire 350GWh with curtailed renewable energy if that is what you really want.
But it's not what we really want. What we really want is to capture the excess production of intermittent sources. Saying a dam is energy storage is like saying natural gas plants are energy storage. You can curtail their output when renewables are in production, sure: If you have 100 GW of demand and 50 GW of solar production during the day you can run your natural gas plants at 50 GW during the day and 100 GW at night. But what happens when solar grows to 200 GW? The objective is to use 100 GW and store 100 GW during the day and tap into the stored energy at night. Dams and natural gas don't let you do that.
It says 2000MW on the document you linked. It's not anyone else's fault if you can't be bothered comparing the numbers 2, 24 and 350.
> But it's not what we really want. What we really want is to capture the excess production of intermittent sources.
Think it through for even half a second. If Tumut 2 is operating at average, then the water it ejects over the course of days or weeks can be stored at any rate up to and including 2GW. In all practical scenarios (which do not include a week straight with nothing but draw followed by a week straight of nothing but charging) what you describe is exactly what snowy 2 does. In situations where the entire system doesn't need to produce net energy, diurnal draw cycles can feed water into Talbingo, and diurnal charge cycles can feed that water into Tantangara (and tantangara s higher so it can be a small jet energy draw). The water needs to be released anyway (but not in any particular week) for irrigation and to keep the river healthy so where is the problem?
If you lack the imagination or ability to apply logic necessary to see how three parts can fit together that's not on anyone else for not spoon feeding you the obvious conclusions available from the sources you cited.
As the market changes and it becomes profitable to supply power at night, more batteries are trivially added. But while we still have so many fossil sources for the lull in demand at night, energy prices are at their lowest during the night.
As more fossil generation is replaced with renewables, more storage will be added.
Batteries have a clear scaling path, plenty of materials, and are growing 10x at a predictable rate.
Scaling batteries is utterly trivial compared to the challenges facing SMRs.
The historical record is right there for everyone to see. Batteries are a serious industry, at a serious scale, with serious engineering and real timelines and improvements. The entire nuclear industry are charlatans and lightweights compared to what's happened in batteries and renewables. Which is a shame, because nuclear could have had a chance, perhaps.
Scaling batteries is the opposite of trivial. I don' think you comprehend the mismatch between our battery supply and what grid storage demands. The US consumes about 500 GWh of of electricity every hour. This is more than the cumulative global battery production in all of 2021 [1]. And the cost of batteries has stopped shrinking and started rising [2]. The reality is that we'll be hard-pressed just to keep battery production growing fast enough to satisfy EVs. Lithium battery production will probably double or triple, but that's still not enough to make grid storage feasible.
How many countries have provisioned a day's worth of electricity storage? Half a day? An hour? For all the talk about nuclear power being charlatans and lightweights, no country at al has produced the majority of its electricity from intermittent sources. But nuclear has [3]. Pretty good for a bunch of charlatans!
1. https://www.interactanalysis.com/lithium-ion-battery-market-....
2. https://www.ft.com/content/31870961-dee4-4b79-8dca-47e78d29b...
ramp times are measured not in hours but in days
Modern LWR reactors ramp at around 5% per minute.
France & Germany use them for Load following https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...
Conventional nuclear is vastly more dispatchable than other fuel types
For comparison solar/wind are about $30-40. Levelizing with pumped storage pushes that up to $60-$70.
IIRC France and Germany almost exclusively use gas for load following. Even at current prices it's vastly cheaper than using a NPP to do it.
From: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrati...
The NuScale plant incorporates unique features that enhance its ability to load follow, either due to changes in electricity demand or variable generation by renewable sources on the grid. This is accomplished through a combination of the small unit capacity of a NuScale module (50 MWe gross) and a multi-module approach to the plant design. This design strategy provides a uniquely scalable plant and gives the plant owner considerable flexibility in both the build-out of the plant and also its operation, including for load-following. The key power management options of the NuScale plant for load-following operations, designated NuFollow™, include the following:
• Taking one or more modules offline for extended periods of low grid demand or sustained wind output,
• Maneuvering reactor power for one or more modules during intermediate periods to compensate for hourly changes in demand or wind generation, or
• Bypassing the module’s steam turbine directly to the condenser for rapid responses to load or wind generation variations.
At that point it's effectively just curtailment.
That said, in New Zealand the story is different, because we have some very large battery banks called hydropower lakes. However when our batteries run dry, the country has a bad time.
Currently storage is over 3TWh[1] and in 2020 NZ hydro generated 24TWh[2].
[1] https://www.energylink.co.nz/publications/hydro-watch
[2] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_New_Zealand
Their point is interesting. If you already have hydro and add solar or wind, can you pump back into the lakes during periods of excess, and use the hydro at night?
If not, it's called pumped hydro storage (or most precisely it's blie field on river pumped hydro if it's already dammed and on a river). You need to trap the water somewhere so you don't have to pump it too far. This involves building a lower reservoir and adding pumps or modifying the turbines to be two way.
This helps build industry experience with molten salts and would allow it to be actually dispatchable (rather than paying for energy in the form of capex and fixed O&M and then just not producing it)