There is also the ongoing switch to vehicle electrification.
There is massive need for multiplying our current baseline energy generation.
We can worry about bailing the boat after we patch the massive holes.
Until then, and likely even then, carbon capture (especially direct air capture) remains “Chevron’s fig leaf” [0]. I.e., a blatant predatory delay strategy by the fossil fuel industry.
[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/12/chevrons-fig-leaf-part-...
A large number of people will die if you force this to happen without providing an adequate substitute.
Those alternatives do exist. The levelized cost of energy for renewables (especially solar) has seen a dramatic drop over the past 2 decades, and is continuing to drop. As it stands, they are already equal to or cheaper than fossil fuels. And this is before we start pytting a price on carbon that’s commensurate with the externalities it produces.
The same is true for energy return on investment [0].
As for carbon capture. It is an incredibly expensive process, both energy and money wise. Implementing it on a fossil fuel plant would dramatically raise the price of the electricity it generates.
Direct air capture is even more expensive.
And like I said, carbon capture is extremely energy intensive. If you want that carbon capture to really do much (other than predatory delay) it needs to be powered by new renewables. We’ll you’re better off just hooking those renewables to the grid and displacing the fossil fuel plants.
If they were actually cheaper, there wouldn't be any need to ban fossil fuels. Everyone would switch on their own accord.
What I’m arguing for is that we stop treating the atmosphere as a public sewer and put a durable price on carbon (one that’s reflective of the externalities it creates).
For the issue of intermittency see page 11. Even after firming for intermittency (and without subsidizes or a price on carbon) solar and wind are cheaper than gas peaking plants, very competitive with coal, and competitive/more expensive than combined cycle gas. If you put a price on carbon (I.e. stop treating the atmosphere as a free sewer) the renewables become even cheaper.
This analysis considers a carbon price of 20-40USD/tonne CO2. (It’s unclear if they only consider that price on literally CO2 or on CO2e.) but that hypothetical 20-40$ is lower compared to what currently Canada is doing (48$ USD) and a lot lower than were the Canadian number is going (~112 USD). It’s somewhere in the middle for the Europe since there is a huge spread in price [1].
[0]: https://www.lazard.com/media/nltb551p/lazards-lcoeplus-april... [1]: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/carbon-taxes-in-europe...
The entire raison d'etre of a peaking plant is that you can bring it online immediately when a sudden peak in demand occurs.
Solar and wind simply can't do that. You can't simply pick up the phone and order the sun to shine or the wind to blow.
Taking California as an example, their solar causes negative electricity prices during the day meaning that fossil fuel/nuclear need to dump electricity on the market and pay people to take it since ramping down would be even more expensive. This in turn requires peaking plants on either side of that solar peak.
Introducing short term storage allows for that access electricity to be shifted a few hours to address that demand.
A complementary, and orthogonal, change is demand side management. People already voluntarily change their behaviour to take advantage of time of use pricing. With strong solar penetration mid day can become the cheap electricity price rather than night time.
Either way, overprovisioning, storage, etc. add significant costs and it isn't clear what those costs would actually need to be to avoid serious problems with high frequency if we actually take fossil fuels out of the equation.
We have experience with fossil fuels enough to say 'store x amount of diesel (or natural gas) onsite so you can handle a 100 year storm' or similar. We have no such experience with solar, battery storage, wind, etc.
Also keep in mind, California has pretty much the ideal climate for 'green' energy - almost all it's population is in temperate, sunny climates, and it has huge sunny deserts and wind generating mountains all nearby. Most electrical usage will be air conditioners, and in that climate those are near ideal solar loads.
And they're the ones that just pushed to keep their major nuke plant online they were shutting down.
It's going to be a lot harder for almost everyone else.
Demand side only goes so far - sometimes people do actually need that energy now, and it tends to be when there are real issues that need that energy to address. Like emergencies, storms, cold snaps in the winter, etc.
Yes, voting to keep operating your existing fleet in operation for an extra 5 years is one thing, paying up for a major refurbishment or a brand new plant is another thing.
But this is beside the point. If we still need use gas peaking plants for emergencies and outlier events and only that, then 99% of the energy decarbonization battle is won.
As for night time, see my comment about storage; build out pumped hydro or dam-based hydro and use it as your battery. When you inevitably have excess solar/wind during the day pump water uphill, and/or decrease you hydro production rate, and then at night time use that pumped storage and/or increase the rate at which you run water through your turbines.
If a particular region doesn't believe that it's realistic for them to do this, or show that nuclear will be cheaper, then build that.
We have adequate substitutes. Replace base load with nuclear. Electrify transportation and charge the batteries with renewable generation.
The true barriers are political. The fossil fuel industry doesn't want to be replaced with nuclear and renewables. The auto industry (which makes a large proportion of profits from maintenance) doesn't like simpler vehicles that need less maintenance. So they dig in their heels and put regulatory barriers in front of the alternatives.
But it's past time for them to lose.
We can talk about everybody just riding their bike, which I agree would be better for all involved, but so far the data coming back from that experiment has been absolutely dismal.
At this point I think ignoring peoples reluctance to bear any inconvenience, and the consequences that has on policy in a democratic society, is dangerously negligent if you take the climate crisis seriously.
The data is emphatic and unambiguous. We could do more, but we refuse to, and the steps we could take to force the issue would be catastrophic and extremely risky. War is not carbon neutral, and victory is far from assured.
Building some nuclear power plants is arguably the least bad option. I don’t expect that medicine to taste good going down but I, as well as a great many around here, am in the solutions business. And this will take a bunch of coal plants offline in a fashion that we could get people to choke down.
I inferred you didn’t like nuclear power because most folks who are focused on climate do not. EVs and nuclear power plants aren’t a panacea but they can make a dent, a big one, they’re politically possible, and we can start today.
I would start by saying that a) I don’t have an ideological problem with nuclear, I have an economic one. While wind, solar, and hydro (and the rest) have been getting cheaper (sometimes drastically so, as in the case of solar) year over year, nuclear has only been getting more expensive. The longer we run the plants, the more problems we learn about and the higher the cost becomes.
And no, I don’t think the SMNR will solve that, if anything I think they will be even more expensive ($/MWh) because they lose the economies of scale within the plant. It’s argued that you’ll get that price down since they can be mass produced and modular, but the 400MW scale currently being made are neither small nor mass produced. Building enough of them to actually take advantage of learning rate effects is a dubious proposition, especially with the market fragmented behind dozens of designs.
Whether nuclear retains a spot for itself remains to be seen and will be dictated (I believe) primary by the cost being brought down faster than the alternatives.
And that alternative (point b) is the modernization of the electrical grid (something that we need to do regardless of the path forward) to create larger electrical grids. The intermittency problem is lessened when large geographical areas share their generation capacity. Similarly with storage (hydro one solution that already exists).
Are we having a serious discussion here? We’re pretty darn good at transmitting power and there are physics problems at work here that are really frustrating to have to explain over and over to people who desperately want to believe there is some silver bullet around the base load problem.
There isn’t. There is no grid scale solution. There is no mix of renewables that is going to get around the base load. It doesn’t exist.
We. Can’t. Afford. To. Wait.
But to your point about not being able to wait, I agree. So if we were to greenlight a new nuclear power plant today how long until it produces electricity? (Let’s even assume we have all of the trained personal available to build and operate it.)
The Vogtle plant took 14 years, and that was at an existing site. I’m putting my bet on a solid 2 decades if a new site is needed. To say nothing of the cost overruns.
But, let’s be generous and say 14 years. We can’t wait for 14 years to remove fossil fuels off the grid, to say nothing of growing demand. We need to build something that will produce green electricity next year.
Again, nuclear can certainly have its place. But it has a bunch of economic challenges to overcome to earn that place.
'We' == just the US that struggles to build a nuclear plant, or 'We' including, say, South Korea with 25 reactors operating and another four under construction and due to be finished by 2030 (along with boofing up and extending some of the older plants in the same time period)?
The US could ask South Korea for assistance, of course, but they might be tied up building nuclear reactors in Uganda and potentially other one or two other countries in Africa.
They have their work cut out for them with countries in Africa, I didn’t believe they currently have the local expertise or supply chains.
Billions.
That seems like a pretty "massive hole" to me.
What we do need to suddenly do however is act like we care, not just pay lip service to solving the problem.
"Next year" looks a lot like "suddenly" to me.
I am discussing the building of new electricity production, not the forceful removal of fossil fuel production.
You don’t need to ban coal burning, you simply have to make them pay for the externalities they create. Gas power plants replace coal ones for the simplyfact that they’re cheaper. Unless we actively subsidize coal, they aren’t cost competitive and will fail on their own.
The answer is less, not more: compact housing, compact communities, compact cities, efficient transit, etc.
The way we have built the world relies on assumptions about limitless resources, and in order to get through this problem we need to fundamentally reconsider how we approach using resources.
What can be done today:
- zoning reform (in the USA especially)
- investment in small dense housing
- investment in transit
What isn't going to help:
- Business As Usual (BAU) But "Green"
- Dumping more energy into the system
Nuclear reactors can be great, but they do not resolve the civilization-level energy waste problem.