Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and there are lots of ways of making them.
Nuclear is still possibly a great fit for niche locales where renewables aren’t feasible at all. Not a nuclear hater by any means (we need every innovation we can get), just show your math.
Most of those people living in Russia, Norway, and Sweden with easy access to an abundance of hydro, to the level that energy flows north to south in the Scandinavian countries.
> just show your math.
I admit I can't. It's mostly gut-feeling from various science news sources I keep up with (e.g. Ars Technica; Skeptic's Guide to the Universe).
Solar, Wind, HVDC transmission lines, short-term battery storage get us most of the way there, and is all on the process of being built out now. Medium term storage is still up in the air (flow batteries? compressed air?). Long term storage looks like hydrogen or natural gas with carbon capture. All these things seem more achievable than fusion in the next few decades.
I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of-state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a tough sell.
Last I checked, we mine our own coal, pump our own oil and put up our own wind farms [1]. Minnesota, for what it’s worth, runs on renewables, coal and nukes [2]. The fifth of natural gas it does use comes from Canada, the Dakotas and Iowa.
These cold-state energy security concerns are a big part of the political puzzle that gets missed in the national discourse.
[1] https://www.wsgs.wyo.gov/products/wsgs-2012-electricalgenera...
If most states stopped importing energy they would have to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves. That would be a huge quality of life reduction in terms of convenience and home air quality.
Resistive heating.
> most states stopped importing energy they would have to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves
Most states don’t have high-baseload, low-latency life-or-death energy requirements. Those that do have the options I outlined above.
High level, the energy transition isn't simply a fossil->renewables story, but also a centralization->highly decentralized story.
EDIT: It seems not too badly [1].
[1] https://empoweringmichigan.com/how-do-wind-turbines-work-in-...
From the context, I think your link is relevant to the GP's question.
However, if you search for "geothermal Minnesota", you'll get hits primarily related to ground-loop heat pumps.
Note that in the Minneapolis area, the ground will freeze down about 3 feet in winter, so you need to bury your ground loop deeper than that. The frost line is even deeper up in the Duluth area. (Also, you need to use an air compressor to purge the vast majority of water out of any in-ground sprinkler systems before the ground freezes.)
However, I also remember a news story about some used wind turbines relocated from California that had trouble due to inadequate heaters to keep the lubricant from getting too viscous.
https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identify_p...
I don't really see a hot/cold stratification in this chart-
https://www.statista.com/chart/12098/the-us-states-with-the-...
And even then, the difference in costs seems quite small. Alaska is $332 and Georgia is $310.
I think it's highly likely we'll be burning a lot of algae fuel in the coming decades in situations where the energy density of carbon fuels is necessary.
The goal is to reduce emissions so it would be great even if we can just stop burning coal in the summer.
It's one of those issues the overwhelming majority of people are on the same page about what we should do but at the ends you have "my livelihood depends on coal" on one end and "my life is insulated against the downsides of full-renewables so I'm privileged enough to have out of touch opinions" on the other and that's who shows up in comment sections.
Its the same as what we see with EVs, tbh. Oh noes, what if you get caught in a snowstorm!? Imagine if 80% of the cars were EVs and they got stuck and there were... no chargers! Picture yourself freezing to death because of "those people".
Real world performance and goals are not correlated well with media hyperbole.
https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid...
I don’t think storage will be feasible in places like Minnesota. The following makes far more economic sense:
- Double solar / wind production by buying 2x more panels vs. “normal” states.
- Go all electric (heat pump / induction) for appliances and vehicles.
- Buy 8-24h worth of house batteries.
- Use a fossil fuel generator to top off batteries during outages (this more than doubles the generator’s end to end efficiency)
- Sell excess electricity to the grid, where it is used for subsidized carbon capture.
This should be completely resilient against storms and power outages, and extremely carbon negative. It would cost about 2x as much as best case renewables.
500,000 kilowatt of panels would produce ~33 gwh in the worst month (January). So, we'd need 151 times that many to have a good chance of doing this with purely solar. That'd mean 75,500,000 kw of solar panels. Assuming that we could install these for $1.50/w, that'd cost 113,250,000,000 and there's still a chance that we'd freeze people to death.
To mitigate that risk, we'd want to add ~500 gwh of batteries (just guessing as to needed capacity here). At a price of ~150/kwh, we'd be looking at ~75,000,000,000 in energy storage prices.
Feel free to check my math, as I did that pretty quickly. The figures are absurdly high due to scaling for the worst case type scenarios. Summer months would correlate with lower demand and more than double the supply.
Sensibly speaking, noone would try to do this. Its like building an offgrid home. You can get 90% of the way there and add a generator, or you can spend 10x more be truly offgrid. Almost everyone chooses the former. Maybe even 80%. Solar is great and very cost effective, but the returns diminish the deeper one goes.
E: Ah, it occurs to me that you're using electric heat pumps, which are probably much more efficient than my NG boiler.
Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I was estimating, that looks easy, lol.
Also, I estimated solar at $1.5/watt. That's probably at least 50% too high.
Selecting the state of Minnesota, 2011 weather data, and 2030 cost assumptions, this would be about 70 Euro/MWh. The cost optimized solution would involve 222 hours of hydrogen storage, 5 hours of battery storage, 4.2x peak power of solar and 2.4x peak power of wind.
Removing 20% of emissions will make a huge difference.
ETA on this should be around 2030?
What I don’t get is since solar is cheaper, why are we building so many coal power plants?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2317274-china-is-buildi...
Coal handles baseline load. We should be using nuclear for baseline instead.
I'll believe it when the batteries are actually installed and the bill is paid.
Also, the solar farm is planned for 800-MWh of storage. In 2021, LA used over 65 TWh of electricity[1]. That's over 7 GWh, per hour. So this storage would run the city for a few minutes. Not exactly a replacement for base load generation.
We need a major breakthrough in storage tech to make grid-scale storage a reality. Li-ion batteries are never going to cut it. Who knows whether grid scale storage will come along faster than fusion.
This is false. This has only ever been shown to be true in extremely narrow edge cases where the batteries only needed to last overnight in extremely sunny locations.
For solar+batteries to be cheaper they need to be large enough to power through weeks/months of cloudy/snowy/leafy/rainy weather in places that are at least near higher latitude locations.
Mechanical, lithium based, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped hydro are all types of batteries that are able to store quite large amounts of power today or in the near future. Certainly cheaper than fusion has any hope to be within 20 years.
Form Energy is working on iron air batteries as a new class of multi-day energy storage, launching its first test installation in 2023
The US passed a tax credit for energy storage, to encourage building more pumped storage capacity
Congress is working on transmission line permitting reform
There are some good reasons to be optimistic in the near term
The viability of fusion has been centered for a long time around getting more power out than you put in and once that marker is met it's viewed as the last giant hurdle in the way. There's still plenty more R&D that needs to be done before it can easily / readily scale though.
It's where nuclear was in the 60s basically. Even if it only ever gets to be comparable to nuclear in terms of costing but with none of the hazardous byproduct, it will come out ahead. When you consider the environmental factors involved in battery production it is pretty clear that fusion at least has the potential to be the cleanest sources of energy. Whether it ultimately gets there is another question.
Plants built in the 70s are still operating. It is nowhere near a decade away.
I do think it'll be a decade or so to go from net gain -> commercial fusion reactors coming online.
Most skepticism is ratified by subsequent events.
DT fusion doesn't appear to have much to recommend it, since it still requires a thermal cycle like fission or coal, and that keeps its cost high. From an engineering point of view it involves large monolithic plants with very complex and stressed equipment. This seems the opposite of good engineering.
We're constantly being told to take the long term view. Are we only to do that when it's favorable to the technological optimist's case or budget?
If you have to build a steam turbine to convert the energy from your fusion reactor into electricity, it's never going to compete with solar and wind power in most of the world.
Doesn't mean that there won't be applications (if you can make all those lasers compact enough, submarines, ships, and ultimately spacecraft come to mind), but grid electricity is doubtful.
The other thing is that if LLNL is still using their own definition of Q, it's not necessarily the case that they've demonstrated net-energy breakeven; they like to compare direct energy delivery to energy release, so when calculating Q they basically pretend there aren't any energy losses from actually running the huge laser facility itself. As a result, LLNL assumes that laser technology will improve to the point that real-life Q can catch up with their "scientific Q" metric. (IIRC I think "Project LIFE" was supposed to develop some of those technologies, but it never worked out, possibly since NIF is so far behind their promised schedule.)
1 fusion plant has less NIMBYs to deal with than wind-on-land, for example.
But yes, could be that still it's too expensive by the time it becomes available. By then I hope we can make a fusion plant so small it fits on a space ship and power an Epstein drive :-)
Right now they are, but they often rely on materials from politically unstable regions (particularly Africa), or potential political rivals (China). Also, many solar panels require polysilicon from China, which is almost certainly produced with forced labor.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industr...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinj...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/evidence...
And it's not just a China problem.
"On batteries, there were major issues with the mining of between 15% and 30% of the world’s cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Amnesty International found that children, some as young as seven, were working in artisanal cobalt mines, often for less than $2 a day. Mining conditions were reportedly hazardous, and workers often did not have adequate protective equipment and were exposed to toxic dust that contributed to hard metal lung disease."
The US is trying to crack down but Europe is lagging behind on it. However, if the report's claim (which I see no reason to doubt) that China has 82% of the global polysilicon market is true, with most of their polysilicon production being in the Xinjiang region, calling solar panels (or batteries) "cheap" is fairly distasteful considering their sources.
And if you want to store multiple days for a northerly nation with very cold winters, frequent high pressure anticyclones (so, no wind) that can last about a week, and you want to switch everyone to zero carbon heating, then the technology doubly doesn't exist.
And the only retort to the above will be mumbling "yeah, but exponential improvement in batteries plus didn't someone say something about hydrogen?" which is essentially, wishful thinking. When you can build a zero carbon grid out of nuclear fission plants - and we've known how to do so since the 60s.
Close to me is the oldest one, built in 1972 and still operational today: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Huntorf
But it is almost certainly closer to existence than fusion.
We're not close, and it's basically completely unfeasible. Fusion will be closer in 100 years than such a project.
Consider pumped thermal energy storage. Use a thermal cycle to generate hot and cold (say, by compressing a gas, probably argon, extracting the heat, then reexpanding, and then storing the resulting "cold"), then reversing that cycle to generate power.
This scales embarrassingly well. It can be made entirely from cheap materials available in essentially infinite supply. No component operates at a temperature above the creep limit of ordinary steel. Round trip efficiency could reasonably be 75%. This requires no technological breakthroughs -- it's 19th century technology.
For all the crocodile tears about children mining cobalt, it's easy to forget how other industries can be just as bad or much worse. Of course, critics of batteries are laser focused on only and exclusively criticizing how bad things are when it comes to batteries and literally nothing else whatsoever.
I mean, do you want to talk about oil? Or coal? Or copper? Or uranium? Nasty industries, each of them. Especially oil. Lots of environmental destruction, poor working conditions, the occasional bit of genocide or sponsored corruption, wars, etc. Mining and oil/gas industry just are a nasty. Especially when everybody just accepts it as normal and looks the other way.
Maybe fusion will stay a small part of the energy mix for decades even after the first commercial plants are built but be part of what eventually enables us to use orders of magnitude more energy than we do now…
It could still be a useful technology, especially in space. I could see a moon or mars base powered by fusion.
Also of course we might want to consider the carbon emissions of gas plants.
Cost effectiveness is also a myth perpetrated by the death of nuclear executed through bureaucracy.
The nuclear, however, is currently the true energy source to use, technologically much simpler (than fusion) to execute with decades of experience making it the safest out there. It is the zero-carbon environmentally friendly energy source.