Europe needs energy. Moroccan solar may be a clean solution
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
It's a significant chunk, but obviously needs to be supplemented with more solar/hydro/wind/nuclear in Europe to cause a significant reduction in CO2/kWh. https://twitter.com/european_grid is always an interesting read, seeing how much the generation method varies between neighbouring countries.
I'm all in for renewable when it makes sense, but I think it's time we stop pretending all renewables work everywhere. Solar is not going to work in Northen Europe, and transporting energy from the south is also not the solution.
Nuclear is an essential piece of the climate puzzle, especially for northen climates, and these kinds of proposals feel like the German anti-nuclear agenda bending their backs to try and find _some way_ to make it work.
https://twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/1645710705784664066
It seems to be stuck in the past, talking about "baseload" and solar in deserts.
Being part of an Europe wide supergrid that connects distributed storage and generation seems to be a much more modern take from the UK side.
Meanwhile Morocco probably wants to be looking at ways it can turn its renewables into something it can sell to more than one country, probably via some kind of value-add industry.
edit: one specific oddity, in order to make full use of the cable, they need to combine the solar with wind and batteries. But wind and batteries can be installed in the UK/North Sea, and wind is stronger in the winter.
I'm puzzled why we'd have to enter into a relationship with Morocco when nuclear power is proven clean tech, at least a hundred years old.
Am I missing something?
So there's that.
The bigger problem is we only want things without downsides, which don't exist.
Moebius things?
(I suppose they will be both "all upside" and "all downside". Does not work.)
I am not so sure about that. At least not if you ONLY rely on nuclear.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/electricit...
France massively profits from being part of the European grid. While the above is about a year time frame, France is frequently an importer. That's why there's big grids with different producers, consumers, and forms of storage, like pumped-storage.
Having just nuclear power would be really dumb. Just like just solar, just wind, etc.
I'm not saying there's no benefit to Nuclear, there definitely is, and it should be part of the mix, but it's not a replacement for a decent investment in Solar.
Finland that you quote was marinating it's Olkiluoto reactor for many years. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and Olkiluoto got from "let's think about approvals for a few more years" to pumping out electricity in a flash.
Yes. Yes, you can.
--- start quote ---
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany [ report from 2011 ] operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr [rated power] per minute.
--- end quote ---
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
> the more modern reactors have been prone to massive delays with an
This is mostly a political issue. China and South Korea are bringing reactors online faster.
> Fourthly, as we found last year, during heat waves rivers can run dry causing a shortage of water to cool the plants forcing them to go offline.
Again, that was a combination of things, including politically-motivated underinvestment in maintenance of nuclear power plants
The vast majority of the cost of nuclear power (which is very, very, very expensive) is capex for building out the capacity. Building it and then leaving it idle is crazy.
Cost of NPP with load following > NPP paired with storage > solar+wind paired with storage.
(where storage could be batteries, pumped storage or windgas).
The quote literally is: "Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode".
Edit: the requirements are literally "For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute."
> but the cost is even more insane than using it as baseload.
And you have sources for that "insane cost"?
"While most nuclear power plants in operation as of early 2000's were already designed with strong load following capabilities, they might have not been used as such for purely economic reasons: nuclear power generation is composed almost entirely of fixed and sunk costs so lowering the power output doesn't significantly reduce generating costs, so it is more effective to run them at full power most of the time.[10][11]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant
France using Nuclear Power for load following is more a signal that they'd misjudged and significantly overbuilt nuclear capacity, not that it's a good idea. EDF has overwhemling financial problems and went spectacularly bankrupt in large part because unlike with, say, solar and wind - that spare capacity is very, very, very expensive.
tl;dr - as I said before, you technically can do it but it's absurdly expensive and just not worth it.
Again. Very, very VERY slowly:
--- start quote ---
Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode
--- end quote ---
And these countries have more power plants than the rest of Europe.
If you bothered to read the report, and not just wikipedia, you'd see graphs for plants built as early as 1978 happily operating in load-following mode. E.g. Unterweser, commissioned in 1978, operated between 700 MW and 1400 MW per day in load-following mode. Same for Grohnde (commissioned in 1984). Etc.
And, of course, have sources for this?
https://energiforskmedia.blob.core.windows.net/media/18663/h...
--- start quote ---
Additional Costs for Load-following Nuclear Power Plants. Experiences from Swedish, Finnish, German, and French nuclear power plants
The conclusion from this report is that with a well-prepared load-following, there are very few additional costs...
It is concluded that if the load-following is planned and the regulation is done within determined levels specific for the plant there is no hindrance or addi- tional costs for load-following.
<Summarising: the actual cost is minimal, but may affect the resulting MWh price because nuclear power plants have high fixed costs and low variable costs.>
--- end quote ---
Unlike, say, renewables, that have overbuilding as a requirement I guess: https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
What this means is that they built enough capacity to counter most requirements for power, and hand handle elastic demand without the need to overbuild or extensive expensive storage (something also absolutely required for renewables).
Right, except at 5x the cost.
Nuclear power, and indeed, load following would make a lot more sense if grid scale storage were prohibitively expensive or impossible.
Source?
> if grid scale storage were prohibitively expensive or impossible.
It's currently both [1].
BTW. Case in point: https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
---
[1] Edit: This is a nice quick overview from a year ago https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/energy-storage-ana...
"Cheapest" option is pumped hydro storage. To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion (in reality much higher) while greatly damaging ecology in large areas.
The most expensive option is Li-ion batteries, clocking in at a measely 1.1 trillion dollars.
Cheap and feasible.
Odd that somebody who is trying to school me on the realities of renewable energy is unaware of this, but here you go:
https://energycentral.com/sites/default/files/styles/og_meta...
>>if grid scale storage were prohibitively expensive or impossible. >It's currently both
For something that is prohibitively expensive and impossible we sure are seeing a lot of it rolled out.
>"Cheapest" option is pumped hydro storage. To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion
Meanwhile, Hinkley point C is projected to cost $28 billion and for that we will get just 3.2GW.
Europe used 2785 TWh last year. Even if you assumed that storage is free, that still requires a minimum of 317GW, which would require about 100 Hinkley Point Cs, which would cost $2.7 trillion to build.
$100 billion would be a bargain.
Odd that someone who keeps reeating falsifiable untruths about nuclear couldn't be bothered to provide their sources even when repeatedly asked
> https://energycentral.com/sites/default/files/styles/og_meta...
This is a graph with no context and no explanation. And of course it doesn't include things like the need to overbuild and projected costs of storage.
> Meanwhile, Hinkley point C
Meanwhile if you selectively look at a single nuclear plant built in conditions which the FUD you spread around has been the norm for the past three decades, sure.
> $100 billion would be a bargain.
Of course you continue to ignore everything from what I write but what makes your FUD look plausible and good. Of course it won't be 100 billion because there's literally no way you could build that many PHS (and not at that cost). You'd know that if you actually read the links I provided, and not cherry-picked whatever you want from my words.
I have no interest to continue talking to someone who argues in bad faith.
Adieu.
But with solar you must include the cost of large scale energy storage, which makes it more expensive
>Secondly, it's not a responsive source of electricity - so you can't modulate the output easily. 1) that's what pumped hydro is for, 2) modern reactors can alter their output by as much as 5%/minute
It doesnt really matter what kind of storage you have to pair with solar (batteries, pumped storage, windgas) it still delivers cheaper power.
Only if you omit cost of energy storage infrastructure and grid upgrades necessary for VRE.
> Secondly, it's not a responsive source of electricity - so you can't modulate the output easily.
Repeated often by nuclear critics even though there's evidence out there of German nuclear modulating load within 24 hours.
> Fourthly, as we found last year, during heat waves rivers can run dry causing a shortage of water to cool the plants forcing them to go offline.
French powerplants did not go offline last summer, a few of them that lack sufficient cooling tower infrastructure had to eject hotter than usual water into rivers.
It's risky to put all your eggs in one basket.
The other day Finland finally connected its latest nuclear power plant - Olkiluoto 3 to the grid. It will play a crucial role in securing the country's access to energy.
Took 18 years instead of the 5 originally planned and €11bln instead of €3bln.
Mind you, it was still worth it, but given the upfront cost it's hard to work on several such projects in parallel.
And this here is a success story - Hinkley Point C is still in development despite consuming over £30bln.
China is doing great regarding nuclear, but after 20 years of intensive development they still don't have the capacity of France - a country with a single digit percentage fraction of the population.
It's still horribly expensive and slow to build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... : approval in 2012, 50% cost overrun, projected completion in 2027.
People will counter that with various other reactor designs, but if it's a new design, it no longer counts as "proven", does it? Not until the first one is running.
Then there are two other risks:
- the "black swan" disaster, where a Chernobyl cloud takes out European agricultural production for months and in a few places years. Very low probability, but things can go wrong; the shelling near the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, for example.
- nuclear proliferation. Everyone's forgotten about this since we're fine with the existing nuclear powers, but does that apply to every country?
Many of those delays are political rather than technical.
On top of that, imagine if instead of deriding, denigrating and spreading FUD about nuclear energy for the past 20-30 years we would instead invest in it and improve it.
> the "black swan" disaster,
Literally yesterday there was a black swan for renewables in Germany. They shut down the last reactors and... https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
--- start quote ---
Germany's 66.5 GW of installed wind is only producing as much as the 3 reactors that turned off last night used to produce.
400% expansion of wind would only provide half present need
--- end quote ---
But of course no renewables proponent will ever mention this as a black swan event. Because "sometime 40 years from now, maybe, we will have overbuilt all the renewables and energy storage we need"
You're not wrong, but that also applies to, for example, an international collaboration to build a global HVDC power grid that can shift enough power from antipodes that we could do a pure PV electricity supply without any storage.
Would only take, like, a decade of global metal production, making it faster than that specific reactor.
But hey, politics.
> But of course no renewables proponent will ever mention this as a black swan event.
That's a misuse of the term, black swans are the unknown-unknowns, not predictable bad things.
Also, at current rates, more like 10 years. Electric cars use so many batteries that having the capability to make all-electric road transport necessarily also makes grid storage trivial.
Good start building ASAP anyways, but not at the expense of things that are faster to deploy.
There is a chance I cannot compute (not a specialist) that the long drought wave in Europe - meaning, the lack of certainty of the reliable flow of rivers - may impose extra burden on the selection of eligible fitting places.
But still, they are much faster to deploy than a nuclear plant, plenty of examples for that around.
You mean Germany right now after it stupidly shut down its last nuclear reactors, and is dependent on coal, and imports from France (75% of whose electricity comes from nuclear).
But yes, shutting them down at this moment is at least bad timing, but the preparations for that have been going on for years apparently. I'm not a nuclear power plant operator so I don't know what is involved with extending operation once certain decisions have been made.
Right now importing renewables from thousands of kilometers away is hugely cheaper than nuclear, and the economics are only getting more stark. Not every problem is solved with renewables (yet), and nuclear has its place. But anyone who looks at the plummeting price of renewables and thinks “just build more nuclear” isn’t paying attention to the economics.
https://archy.deberker.com/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-p...
Somehow this estimation is taken at face value, and yet:
> Hinkley Point C is a 3.2 GWe nuclear plant and is currently estimated at 32.7 GBP
This is taken at actual value. Even though original cost was estimated at 12.4 bn GBP. A lot of cost and budget overruns for nuclear plants are purely political, amidst a rising ocean of FUD.
Meanwhile, https://www.offshorewind.biz/2016/12/02/offshore-wind-projec...
--- start quote ---
Ernst & Young (EY) has found that an average power and utility megaproject is delivered 35% over budget and two years behind schedule
Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57% were over budge. Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49% on average,
--- end quote ---
So that estimated 16bn GBP is very likely to be significantly over 25bn GBP by the time it's completed.
Edit.
More:
https://percepto.co/solar-construction-delays-budget-overrun...
"Data shows the avg. 50MW PV construction project delays cost $2M. The average solar construction project is delayed by about 20% with the consequences hovering around $2M in costs."
https://www.qualenergia.it/sites/default/files/articolo-doc/...
"we assessed the construction costs affiliated with 401 electricity infrastructure projects worldwide. We found that these projects collectively involved $820 billion worth of investment, and represented more than 325,000 MW of installed capacity and 8500 km of transmission lines. Taken together, these projects incurred $388 billion in cost overruns, equivalent to a mean cost escalation of $968 million per project, or a 66.3 percent overrun per project."
And so on.
--- start quote ---
Most nuclear power plants incurred time overruns, due to both engineering issues and public opposition. Considering the long development times of such plants and the large amount of capital required, these time overruns likely caused large increases in interest charges and contributed significantly to the large levels of overruns seen [29]. Moreover, as Table 3 indicates, the most severe cost overruns for nuclear power were confined to the United States and the 1980s, it is likely that they were significantly influenced by the nuclear power accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. These accidents resulted in “regulatory ratcheting” where safety requirements were significantly altered in the middle of construction periods, with meaningful impacts on equipment needs, construction designs, labor, and materials.
--- end quote ---
After nearly 30 years of FUD and underinvestment I'm not surprised these projects now take longer. There's regulatory capture, political issues etc. It's possible that they now require safety levels way beyond any reason (Fukushima, commissioned in 1971, and hit by an earthquake and a tsunami at or exceding its safety baseline resulted in 1 death directly attributable to the accident).
Unfortunately, there are very few good-faith discussions around nuclear power, it's always emotionaly charged and manipulative. That's why you end up in situations like Germany: https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
But we have to live in the real world, and here in the real world we need to build an enormous amount of low-carbon power generation in a ridiculously short amount of time. And right now nuclear prices are not comparable to wind/solar prices as we actually build nuclear today. This holds even when you apply the most generous assumptions when comparing them. And non-nuclear renewables are getting cheaper every day, something that just isn't happening to nuclear.
So fine, build some nuclear around the edges. Baseload is great! But people need to recognize that short of a political and technological revolution of which there is currently no sign whatsoever, solar/wind/storage are going to form the bulk of a decarbonized grid. So let's please get on with making that happen quickly, because every month we burn fossil fuels brings more future devastation.
We do. Moreover, we need to overbuild those sources by yet nknown amounts because they are intermittent.
> This holds even when you apply the most generous assumptions when comparing them. And non-nuclear renewables are getting cheaper every day, something that just isn't happening to nuclear.
Are they getting cheaper enough? Including all the required overbuilding and all the (yet non-existent) grid-scale storage that is required for renewable energy?
> So fine, build some nuclear around the edges. Baseload is great!
Indeed. Baseload is great. And when talking about renewables their proponents almost never talk about it. Or about daily power fluctuations. About requirement spikes etc. Because we just have to believe that there's some magical solution just around the corner.
And yeah, that revolution you're talking about is definitely not going to happen precisely of the emotionally-charged discourse. And we don't really need a tech. revolution for nuclear. We're already pretty capable of building them quickly, given the political will.
The great renewable project project we're talking about? It started in 2018. On top of that "As of November 2021, [cable production] production is planned to start in 2024, and it will take four years to produce the cables required by the project." [1] Expected to be completed by 2030. [2]
So, about 10 years or more. On par with some nuclear stations. Expect costs overruns to be just as on par.
Meanwhile in China. Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant. Construction of each reactor is about 6 years. Total nameplate capacity is now 6GW. Estimated cost of construction: 16 bln USD.
> So let's please get on with making that happen quickly, because every month we burn fossil fuels brings more future devastation.
Meanwhile Germany shut down its nuclear plants and replaced them with fossil fuels. Additionally 13% of the country is given over to corn to create biofuel which is also burned.
It's hard to be passionate about these moronic things. Especially since the renewable revolution needs to bring in probably as much of a technological revolution to become truly scalable (e.g. grid storage required at these scales is literally nowhere to be found).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco-UK_Power_Projec...
The intermittency is sufficiently predictable that we know the overbuild requirement well enough for a variety of possible solutions, including cheapest overall, or least storage requirements. I tend to go for x10 in armchair discussions like these because that's the level needed given the current global average power factor of PV.
> Are they getting cheaper enough? Including all the required overbuilding and all the (yet non-existent) grid-scale storage that is required for renewable energy?
Yes.
> grid storage required at these scales is literally nowhere to be found
The fact I can say the same for the uranium mines needed for sufficient nuclear power, isn't an argument against nuclear power.
Why?
Because we don't have a current need for those mines.
Why is this a useful comparison?
Because until we decide we want to electrify transport (it's mainly about that not about PV vs. Wind vs. Hydro), there hasn't been demand for that many battery factories.
But in both cases, we know what to do, and how to do it.
Is it?
> that we know the overbuild requirement well enough for a variety of possible solutions
Here's a quiet night from a few days ago. 0 solar production. https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
--- start quote ---
Germany's 66.5 GW of installed wind is only producing as much as the 3 reactors that turned off last night used to produce.
400% expansion of wind would only provide half present need!
--- end quote ---
> Yes.
And the source for that claim is?
> The fact I can say the same for the uranium mines needed for sufficient nuclear power, isn't an argument against nuclear power.
You're trying to confuse fuel requirements with grid storage requirements. One we have. Other we don't, and almost no one talks about the cost and the requirements. See the quote and link above.
> Because until we decide we want to electrify transport (it's mainly about that not about PV vs. Wind vs. Hydro), there hasn't been demand for that many battery factories.
What does electric transport have to do with an absolute requirement for renewable energy sources to be backed up with grid-scale energy sources?
> But in both cases, we know what to do, and how to do it.
Ah yes. It's that emotionally charged magical thinking again. If we pretend that problems don't exist, they don't exist.
Meanwhile, renewable energy is:
- intermittent
- is extremely slow to ramp up
For both cases you need to have grid-scale energy storage to handle demand. And overbuild renewable storage in for cases when (not if) generation drops.
And yet, no one talks about the cumulative costs for that (and the fact that we literally don't have storage on that scale).
And yet, everyone is clapping each other on the back that hey, there's this Morocco-UK project that is 100% cheaper than nuclear be cause estimations have said so, and so much faster to build than nuclear even though even estimations say it'll take 10 years.
Yes
> And the source for that claim is?
Prices on Amazon for even non-bulk purchases of batteries and PV. Even cheaper elsewhere.
> You're trying to confuse fuel requirements with grid storage requirements.
False.
I'm giving an analogy.
Uranium mines have a production rate.
Battery factories have a production rate.
Both are presently insufficient to be be 100% of global power.
This doesn't matter in either case.
> It's that emotionally charged magical thinking again. If we pretend that problems don't exist, they don't exist.
???
My emotion in this case is "boredom".
Boring is good. Nobody wants civil infrastructure to be exciting. Exciting is bad.
And AFAICT nobody is denying that e.g. PV needs sunlight. What we're doing is giving you the very solutions you're saying don't exist, even though you're almost certainly holding an example of it in your hand right now while reacting emotionally to the suggestion that there are other solutions besides nuclear.
> What does electric transport have to do with an absolute requirement for renewable energy sources to be backed up with grid-scale energy sources?
55kWh per car * number of cars >> multiple day energy use per person * number of people
> is extremely slow to ramp up
???
Newly installed nameplate capacity for PV last year is 286 GW. Even accounting for 10% capacity factor, that's quite nice. Then there's wind.
Is it cheaper than putting the solar closer? Don’t know. It would be more consistent, which is a big deal with solar. That alone can compensate for a lot of inefficiency.
Drawing a 750 km line from the coast of Morocco I can almost reach Barcelona, Spain. With perhaps some advances, and including the distance of the branching network, I think reaching "enough" of European power consumption is doable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link
edit: actually, looking at terrestrial interconnectors the record is much farther already, 2210 km between Hami and Zhengzhou in China.[2]
Coincidentally, Wikipedia mentions that the longest proposed cable is in fact the Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project[3], which the Washington Post article failed to mention. At 3,800 km, the power losses would apparently amount to 13%.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interconnector [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco-UK_Power_Projec...
There's a proposal to link the UK to Morocco directly with a 3800km cable: https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
A private scheme in Australia (Sun Cable/PowerLink) was looking at connecting Australia to Singapore via a 4500km cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link (It fell apart due to commercial issues rather than technical/engineering ones from what I'm aware.)
- Sand/Dirt
- Excess Heat
- Transmission losses
- Political instability
- Geopolitics (Algeria, other issues..)
Arguments for:
- Gets around NIMBY
- ???
Panels need to be clean and cool (25c) to work optimally. Preferably close to where the energy is consumed.
Incidentally the interiors of many sunny EU countries like Spain are depopulated..
And it's not so much "NIMBY" as a genuine land cost issue. We could do well to expand rooftop solar on large buildings, though.
In extreme heat they are 25% less efficient.
Transmission over long distances is not lossless.
The hitch is the people that can make such cables have a long back order list.
Keeping them clean is maintenance. All forms of generation have maintenance requirements.
What is the cost of extra panels to overcome transimission losses? How does that compare to buying fuel at a more local plant?
How much does keeping solar panels clean cost? How does that compare to keeping a gas turbine running?
And yet home energy demand peaks in the winter, for heating (mostly natural gas, but we probably need to move off that) - just when rooftop solar is at its worst.
Putting the same solar panels nearer the equator would produce power with less seasonality - and more total power too.
Is your solar capacity and storage maxed out? How much would it cost to max it out?
Is there a difference in practice between dependence on foreign gas vs foreign solar? Hint: you can store a lot of gas in case of supply disruption and immediately buy more from alternative suppliers. Whereas one UHV cable cut and you are left with no recourse for quite some time.
Is Morocco a stable country? Per chance does it have any disputes with aggressive neighbors?
Moon, however, needs wireless, and I still need to write up that blog post about what I don't like about space based energy…
If Morocco were too unstable for partnerships of this kind, the world would have been fucked already.
Ultimately the biggest argument for is as usual: price. You can make this nearly as available and definitely less expensive than the ongoing European nuclear power projects, except maybe for that power plant in Belarus.
Afghanistan is sitting on a couple trillion in minerals but you aren't getting that out reliably any time soon.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1278057/export-value-fer...
Or maybe it's the same effect as with the Schengen expansion: all the troublemakers moved west.
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-phosphorus-disruptedwe-sleepwa...
https://www.eetimes.com/innovative-approaches-tackle-self-cl...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BritNed
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Cross-Channel
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFA-2
Is it talking about the famously dreary countries of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc?