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.
> 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-...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.