Yet somehow in 2022, peak coal is now in front of us again, and even at these unprecedented production levels, people are buying it for over $400 per tonne. Despite the fact that solar and wind were alleged to have killed coal 10 years ago when it cost $50/tonne. Coal was completely uneconomical, they said. Coal is a stranded asset, they said. How did so many of the "experts" get it so wrong?
At this point it's clear that we can't keep waiting for renewables. You think nuclear takes way longer to get online, non-hydro renewables haven't even matched existing nuclear electricity production yet. They haven't even been able to halt the rise in demand for coal, let alone kill it, 10 years after it was supposed to be dead.
The best time to stop listening to anti nuclear / pro fossil fuel propaganda and save the climate was in the 70s. The second best time is now.
Betting on renewables + batteries in 2022 is like betting on the fast breeder reactor in 1955. There certainly is going to be development in batteries and other forms of storage in the next decade but we don't know where the minerals will come from, we'll have more grid scale batteries catch on fire, face more challenges siting solar farms because, as a major land use, they could affect endangered species, etc.
There will be progress there but remember that decarbonization is not just replacing the current electricity grid but it also involves replacing gas appliances with electric appliances, using electricity for heat in buildings (probably with heat pumps), electric cars (that people will want to charge at night and thus require more grid storage as well as competing for battery materials), replacing industrial uses of energy, synthesizing e-fuels for aviation and other special applications, etc.
Nuclear as we know it faces two problems: (1) the steam turbine and heat exchangers of the LWR are enormous such that an LWR would have a hard time competing even if the heat was free, (2) every country other than Russia has built LWRs sporadically and faced terrible project management problems; China is catching up with Russia with their Hualong One (4 completed in the past 2 years, 12 under construction now.) Long term the industry has to get rid of the water to get the temperature up so the powerset can be made more economical and you can use the heat for industrial applications such as thermochemical hydrogen, with the big plus that a reactor without a moderator can get roughly 50x the energy out of a pound of natural uranium than LWR.
Grid stability cost money and power companies do not want to carry that cost. It is a much better investment for them to let society carry those costs and simply produce as much energy when its most cost effective to do so.
There's also a related problem: once everyone is already paying the cost to purchase and operate backup power on a regular basis, they're not going to bother paying their power bills. They're just going to disconnect from the grid, because people aren't paying them for "power when its most profitable". They're paying for "power when they need it". Grid stability is the literal job of your power company, arguably moreso than power generation.
Which returns back to investments. If consumers will reward companies based on the cost of kw/h, and they will assume that governments take care of balancing the grid, then companies that invest in technology that produce the cheapest kw/h and ignore grid stability. The only way out would be for governments to subsidize less economical ventures but which consider grid stability.
You're using a black swan event (russian invasion of ukraine) like it's a baseline of what to expect in the future, ignoring that the world has invested more money into renewables this year than ever before
The world is definitely moving on from coal and gas and I reckon this coal crisis will be the last, I expect to see a lot more articles like this coming up around the world:
South Australia’s remarkable 100 per cent renewables run extends to over 10 days
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-...
No I'm not. Coal went to record highs almost a year before Ukraine was invaded and before any disruption to fossil fuel exports from the region, and many many years after renewables were said to have killed it. Do you really not remember? Stranded assets? Coal is not price competitive at $50/tonne?
> The world is definitely moving on from coal and gas and I reckon this coal crisis will be the last, I expect to see a lot more articles like this coming up around the world:
Not moving on, as record production and demand shows. Will one day in the future move on and won't move back, hopefully according to experts and random internet commentators who said it was definitely dead 10 years ago -- is not going to cut it for climate change though. We obviously need more baskets to put the eggs into.
> South Australia’s remarkable 100 per cent renewables run extends to over 10 days
One tiny state with almost unlimited solar and wind resources in one small country? That's great. Doesn't change the fact that we've run out of time waiting for wind and solar and they've still barely cracked 10% globally yet.
That's it's also hilariously weasel worded -- obviously that state is still burning a lot of gas to generate electricity. Strange why they don't feel they can be honest and up front with the public, why are they still trying to fool people about those things? Doesn't really lend a lot of credibility or confidence to what they're selling.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/coal
Looks like a black swan to me, prices steady and trending downwards over the previous 20 years until Covid/Russian invasion which resulted in insane Euro demand
> Not moving on, as record production and demand shows.
https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all&interval=1M
We can see that renewables are soaking up a lot of the increase in demand, for example you can see South Australia go from coal and gas making up 100% of supply 10 years ago to just gas making up 16% and with the installation of new batteries and hydrolisers in the next few years to drop even further.
It just so happens that SA went hard on renewables because they had some of the most expensive power in the world. I'm sorry that it's not impressive to you. :(
You can also see my home state of Queensland: https://opennem.org.au/energy/qld1/?range=all&interval=1M
Increases in power demand are being met by renewables and it's now taking a bite out of fossil fuels with the largest ever investments by a long shot this year. I've never seen so much money thrown at an issue.
They are also all connected to an Australian grid which connects SA, VIC, NSW, QLD and TAS together, so when for example SA has excess cheap renewable power it can export it to another state reducing their power costs and thus their fossil fuel usage.
> obviously that state is still burning a lot of gas to generate electricity.
Yes but the point is that it has gone down significantly over the last 10 years and this is happening all over the world.
We'll also soon be helping power Singapore:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...
> is not going to cut it for climate change though.
At the end of the day if China/India/Vietnam and Indonesia seek to continue to build coal power plants then that's on them and I will continue to push against buying things made in those countries.
Is coal dead? no definitely not, will renewables have replaced significant amounts of coal in the next 20 years, I'd bet the house.
It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.
And we could find more U-235 if demand really went up.
What would be needed are breeder reactors operating with a breeding ratio > 1. Otherwise, the vast majority of the 238U cannot be used.
The energy demand is not flat, it has peaks. If you don't flatten these peaks with storage, you need to build a production system that should be able to generate enough energy during the peak, but then, some of the generators will have to be turned off the rest of the time.
To illustrate the idea, let me invent some numbers: with storage, you have, let's say, 10 power plants to build that are running relatively all the time, producing an integrated total of electricity of, let's say, 100. So, if you paid X$ for building the 10 power plants, you will have X/100 per unit of electricity. Without storage, you may end up with, let's say, 15 power plants, but some are turned off 90% of the time. At the end, you also produce an integrated total of electricity of 100 (the integral is the same, the time of consumption is just shifted to create peaks). The cost of build is now 1.5X, and you will have to 1.5X/100 per unit of electricity.
On top of that, turning on and off a nuclear plant is less efficient than producing continuously, so the price of electricity increase even more.
So, even with nuclear, storage needs to be built. Once the storage is built, it means that the problem of intermittence of renewable is way less problematic.
What do you mean by "bottling it"? Do you mean storage? Because that's exactly what I'm saying.
Aluminum production, for one example.
Bauxite is so cheap and abundant that the cost of aluminum is almost entirely in the electricity required for smelting. And because aluminum is such a critical material for industry, it is effectively equivalent to energy exportation. This is why tiny Iceland is a top 10 global exporter of it: abundant free geothermal energy with nowhere else to go.
On my mind, the main problem of scaling down production for nuclear plant is that a nuclear plant is very expensive, and if it produces only at submaximal capacity, it means that the construction cost is spread on less electricity production.
Nuclear takes hours to days to respond to load change, so there has to be much more reactive power available. And nuclear plants need to be able to draw megawatts of power from the grid any time they're not generating power. You can't "cold boot" a nuclear power plant without a massive external power supply and it takes days to weeks to do so.
It's so bizarre hearing people advocating for nuclear talking about storage like it's some barely-understood, dangerous, hideously expensive sci-fi pipe dream. Grid-scale energy storage is almost 100 years old and battery based systems have been actively deployed for many years at all levels of the grid, right down to residential.
Days? Seriously? You know that is not true, don't you? The French nuclear power plants are an existence proof of that.
Nuclear does need to be supplemented with something else with low construction/fixed costs for handling the rare, extreme peaks. That will most often be some sort of gas-powered plants. This has nothing to do with nuclear powers "inability" to "respond to load change" and everything to do with the cost of building enough nuclear power capacity that will almost never be used.
On the other hand, we are still very, very far from being able to do really large-scale battery storage. We don't have the manufacturing capacity for the enormous number of battery cells needed and even if we did, the cost would be prohibitive. This will of course change for the better in the future but that is how things are for now.
I believe the French facilities have the capacity of doing load following, but are not doing it because it is less efficient (and therefore more expensive). So I would also not say "days", but it is also true that one cannot directly take a situation where nuclear has, so far, being used only for base load and pretend that load following will work exactly the same way.
I'm not sure why you say "rare, extreme peaks": the current demand is non-flat every day, with a difference between the trough and peak that is typically ~50% of the peak.
I agree that large scale battery storage is challenging. Maybe the solution would be to have some storage and some "wasted efficiency" by using nuclear plants in load following and turning them in stand-by every day during off-peak hours.
[0] https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ...
Just getting that to an hour means a three order of magnitude change in the amount of connected grid storage. Good luck finding that much pumped hydro! The easy spots are taken already!
An hour is not enough, of course. That might handle some small variations in wind only. Of course, one diurnal solar cycle means you need to store power for 8-12 hours. That is another order of magnitude. So in order to do this, we need to increase our battery capacity by four orders of magnitude. Multiple days? Weeks?
Now consider that the demand curve will become even more extreme, as climate change increases demand for electric heating and cooling. And consider that you will also need to account for electrifying the cars on the road (because building out storage like this is a multiple decades project), which will place additional capacity demands on the grid.
The thing with storage is not that it's difficult, it's that it's big. Like the scale is you need to nationalize your extraction industries and turn your economy into a wartime economy whose singular purpose is producing batteries big. It's not a Tesla or Google or even a DOE scale problem.
I also don't understand your argument about solar cycle: solar is producing close to peak hours, while nights are non-peak hours. So, in practice, it's not like you need to store the electricity locally for more than a couple of hours. I guess you are talking of a situation where the grid is 100% solar, but that's obviously a ridiculous scenario that no one has never pushed for.
I agree with the fact that the demand curve will become more extreme, and it is exactly the reason of my intervention here: this is a complicated situation, and it does not matter if the grid is mainly nuclear or mainly renewable, it is still problematic.
I agree that the storage problem is tricky and that the scale is a challenge. But this challenge still exist in full nuclear grid, unless we end up with a lot of idle nuclear plant running only few hours per day.
If you can turn a nuclear plant off (summer) and on (winter) once a year, the storage requirement for solar drops by a lot.
1) week storage and 3-6 months storage are extreme events, similar in probability as overlapping technical shutdowns in nuclear facilities. In practice, with interconnection, it is even arguable that such long term storage are even needed.
2) the technology built for short term storage is usually not that bad for medium term storage either. In any case, if you want a nuclear grid, you will need to invest in storage technology, and there is no reason the progress in those technology will only improve short term storage solutions.
But I 100% agree: a nuclear plant turned on during winter will help. I'm not against nuclear, I just want to react to the incorrect view that storage is just a renewable problem.
NG backup works fine, and will continue working fine indefinitely. Storage cuts the fraction of time the furnace needs to run.
Eventually, synthetic fuel will displace NG. It will be imported at need, same as NG today, but with no possibility of cartels.
Unless Germany is willing to admit that they wouldn't be able to reproduce what France did in the 70/80s.