Desalination can beat batteries for excess energy
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
[1]: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38422172#38424191
EDIT it seems like it may be back on?
https://www.sbck.org/our-work/advocacy/water-supply/desalina...
¹: A divide that is seen more as a centrist — far-right divide from my european perspective.
Most US representatives from Texas are elected with far fewer; many Democratic gerrymanders mean that as little as 1% of the population is choosing the representative.
As always, I advocate for some form of random election (sortition) — it'd be way more representative — and it'd be harder for people to mess with the election: we'd literally have more representative representatives and more robust elections. (I'd also require risk limiting audits, paper trails, and non-identifying ballot checking.)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=map+of+texas+state+congressional+d...
Compare that to other states: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=map+of+new+york+state+congressiona...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=map+of+newcalifornia+state+congres...
I am from somewhere where all important democratic elections are won by absolute numbers, so we don't even have the whole problem.
The term gerrymandering comes from a district that was drawn so convoluted that it looked like a Salamander.
If you want fair elections, without districts being gerrymandered, just draw rectangles with about equal populations and be done with it.
It's easy to demonstrate the same thing on a small scale - at my house with hot water heating for example, I run my electric (heat pump) storage hot water heater in the middle of the day, and it almost always runs 100% from solar power (sometimes with extremely cloudy or rainy weather it uses some grid power). I don't have a battery system yet, but I'm doing the sums - and if I relied on instantaneous electric hot water heating so was heating water on demand mostly outside solar hours, even before thinking about the lower round-trip efficiency I'd need a far bigger (and therefore much more expensive) battery system than I will now for the same hot water load.
If you're in an area that has less sunshine but more wind energy, the principle is basically the same, you just have to time it for when there's excess wind energy, but it just seems very obvious that if you can shift high energy use tasks to those times that's always going to be more effective than using batteries, and doing so makes the battery storage cheaper for the electricity use that you really need it for...
If it were easy to change, I’d probably put in a recirculating system that keeps the water hot in the pipes (not sure how much electricity that wastes though).
For example, aluminum production is famously energy-intensive, but I've read it's not good for the equipment to start and stop it frequently because the reaction happens in molten aluminum salts and it hurts the equipment when you stop and it solidifies.
And while Bitcoin is energy-intensive, it's also capital intensive for the chips so it's not cost-effective to run it only part-time.
Reverse osmosis may have a good combination of high energy:capital ratio (so it doesn't waste a lot of capital on idle equipment) and not requiring complex startup/shutdown sequences.
There's probably a lot more low hanging electricity demand shifting fruit like this.
It seems like the general idea is to build out excess capacity on the desalinization side and run the desalinization plant at less than full throughput during peak consumer demand (i.e. peak of the duck curve?).
The various policies we have are for Aluminum Smelting plants, Desal, and other heavy-electricity industries to use excess solar (or nuclear) power during peak-energy times, and to turn off during peak-usage times to help balance the grid.
On an individual level, we might be able to even do this for air-conditioning, washing machines, or car-charging (if you have a PHEV or EV).
Cryptocoins then perverted the models we created to earn money from this through mining (using energy during peak-energy and turning off during peak-usage). But the "intent" for those laws has always been for industry and/or individual grid-level issues.
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For low-utilization machines (ex: washing machines and dryers), this makes perfect sense. The main issue is that for high-utilization machines (ie: all industry wishes to run at 100%, rather than 80% or 50%), you end up doubling or more the cost of CapEx.
Ex: You'll need twice as many Desal plants if they only operate during the most efficient 50% of times during the week. Which might be worthwhile, but you have to run the math. Every hour these plants are shutdown for power-saving purposes is an hour that they are sitting away / depreciating.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/3g78nj/are_al...
Nonetheless, some industry are willing to give it a test to see how feasible it is.
https://www.lightmetalage.com/news/industry-news/smelting/tr...
> “We have reinvented the electrolysis process for the production of aluminium. For the first time, we will be able to vary the energy supply during operation significantly. This will allow us to react to changes in the electricity supply, which will benefit the power supply to households in Essen,” says Philipp Schlüter, CEO of TRIMET. “As an aluminium producer, we are naturally an energy-intensive company. As such, however, we are also a valuable partner for the energy revolution.”
> The €36 million trial installation converted a total of 120 furnaces in hall one of its Essen plant, which will be able to consume either 25% more or 25% less energy for up to 48 hours. The energy requirement can also be reduced to zero for up to an hour, if necessary. This means up to 2,000 megawatt hours of electricity can be stored for use in the energy revolution.
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It requires new smelters, new software, new engineers. Its all very expensive. But it might be worthwhile. Just don't go like... crazy... with the idea right? There's downsides, but the upsides are immense. Keep an eye on the costs and practicality, and give it a test. It might be worthwhile.
That's my outlook anyway. Maybe Aluminum specifically is run too close to 100% utilization to be useful (we do have a very predictable amount of Aluminum...), but maybe other industries have a more start/stop and feast/famine kind of setup that would benefit from off-hours automation for energy price optimizations and/or even grid-tie stabilization.
But there are _real_ Aluminum plants giving this idea a test. So this isn't "vaporware" or even "theoretical". This is a real test occurring today.
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We have to ask ourselves: is a 2GW-hr battery the best thing to build? What if Aluminum-smelters could instead vary their load by +/- 25% with this new software/manufacturing mechanism? What costs more, the 2GW-hr battery or this software + manufacturing change to Aluminum plants?
In both cases, we get 2GW-hrs of "energy storage". EDIT: IE, varying your load each day is a form of energy storage that should be considered by members of society. It may very well be cheaper to achieve 2GW-hrs of virtual energy storage by upgrading industry, rather than trying to build impossibly huge amounts of Li-ion batteries.
All these other ideas are worth exploring and I’m 100% in favor of them, but the only path to decarbonizing the grid is nuclear & I’m so frustrated by all the solar absolutists that think renewables can power 100% of the grid by 2050 just because solar panel costs are dropping. We’d get much closer to net 0 if we were building fission plants aggressively (cue all the solar proponents claiming it’s too expensive or unsafe even when it really isn’t and solar costs are intentionally calculated in a misleading fashion to ignore the buildout needed for energy storage or altering unrelated industries to make solar more attractive).
As a related datapoint on “party tricks”, China built more solar and wind in the first nine months of 2023 than all 26 nuclear reactors it has under construction. They’re likely to build even more next year. The need for baseload is a valid point, but the trajectories of renewables vs. non-modular nuclear are so different that it’s hard to see nuclear catching up enough to make a difference.
Yes, China is building a huge amount of solar capacity, but AFAICT it’s all about absorbing peak growth as they add more consumers of electricity. Baseline growth remains a huge problem and China is solving that with a mix of nuclear and fossil fuels. I fully expect China will continue to ramp up nuclear as they get better at it.
And EVs are a huge iceberg problem for the electric grid as they currently don’t run off the grid and represents a massive amount of energy consumption that will be added to the grid. On top of that they consume a huge amount of battery production which means there’s not that much left over for grid scale batteries. We also have no existence proof of economical grid scale batteries at any meaningful scale. You also have to overbuild your solar by quite a bit so that you can charge the battery up when the sun is shining to time-shift that excess capacity into the night.
Solar is fine and it’s not a knock against it, but there’s simply no trajectory to reach net 0 CO2 emissions and you will end up with a hybrid grid. 18% nuclear would represent a huge CO2 reduction because all that capacity would otherwise be fossil fuels (because the alternative is not building batteries because that tech doesn’t exist yet). MSRs are a neat party trick but honestly I think China’s approach of SMRs is a far safer bet in terms of being a massive cost reduction, safer, and use waaay less water & are far less of a research project. My hunch is that they’re also standardizing their nuclear plant designs to keep costs in check. Keep in mind that France is 90% fossil fuel free in their grid even though nuclear only represents ~60% of energy produced.
I haven’t read anywhere that fission failed due to economics - it has always been price competitive with fossil fuels. It’s the regulatory burdens & concerns about safety (some valid, most not) that strangled its growth. Do you have any links suggesting nuclear construction is uneconomical?
Right now the (global) goal isn’t 100% renewable energy, and it won’t be even by 2030 or 2040: a grid that’s 70-80% renewable with 20-30% average fossil emissions will be a massive improvement and will keep us on track for decarbonization. The interesting question is whether battery storage will decrease in price fast enough to deliver that remaining fraction, or whether we’ll have to build the remaining 20% with fission by 2050/60. Batteries are already economical enough that we have 5GW deployed in CA for infra-day time shifting. It seems like an incredibly long bet to imagjne that after three more decades of technological and manufacturing improvements their cost won’t have dropped enough to make them a viable competitor for nuclear. For my own part I wish I could take the other side of that bet, since I think it would be a good one. But we’ll have to wait and see.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to...
Do you have a source for this? It seems wild, and I'd be happy to read more about it.
*48 hours* is the part of that statement that solves the "need energy at night" problem. By allowing this industry to shift power-consumption forward, or backward, by 48-hours, you effectively build a battery. A very strange battery yes, but it means the plant can collect during peak solar (+25% power usage), and then cut power at night by -25%.
No _might_ about it, this currently happens for A/C, and is just getting going for car charging (see EV Managed Charging as a category).
Also some functions of commercial/industrial facilities that can be ramped more easily, eg shut off half of the hallway lighting in an office building. I think I recall things like rock crushers being turned off, but I might be misremembering that.
Ideally you could offset this by having people who aren't well positioned for panels do energy storage: Buy in the morning, sell back in the afternoon. Practically I don't think the utility companies are going to cut them in on a big enough part of the profits to incentivize them to do so.
Demand response for A/C tends to look more like pre-cooling before the hottest hours, then reduce demand during the hottest hours. So it's not about shifting demand towards maximum production, but rather shifting demand away from the demand peak (aka, peak shaving). So it's similar but a little different.
>Practically I don't think the utility companies are going to cut them in on a big enough part of the profits to incentivize them to do so.
The commercial version of what I stated in the previous paragraph (ie, demand response/peak shaving) empirically already happens, and has non-trivial dollars attached to it. Again, maybe not exactly what you're talking about, but it rhymes.
Less efficient by what factor?
That will depend heavily on local conditions, type of panel, etc.
Significant, but not devastating.
Would you say the same holds across months? Say, would cooler May have better production than hotter July? Or is July still ahead because of more sunshine hours, offsetting the hot inefficiencies?
Sometimes May beats July, sometimes it doesn't.
If you're interested, I have released all my panels' data at https://gitlab.com/edent/solar-data/
I see the pvoutput page didn't pick up some days in May and June 2020. I'm curious why, since I can see them on your .csv dumps.
It's usually given in the datasheet of the panel.
If you are brewing beer you have times where you have to heat it and times where it needs to sit at a given temperature. Try to optimize the process to heat during cheaper quarter hours.
Europe has an day-ahead auction with 1h products and continuous trading with quarter hours as the smallest product (still varying from country to country).
At Tendril, we did this in 2017. We called it Orchestrated Energy.
The "fully charged show" sometimes have videos on this and similar topics. This [0] video goes through the pros and cons of using hydrogen in different ways
My takeaway is that as much of the energy as possible should be used without converting it. This avoids the substantial losses converting to and from hydrogen. But storage is one of the viable uses.
Your idea to use it to iron out the economics, though, might have some merit if the price fluctuations are high enough (which is what motivated us to begin with)
The cells dont like running in the reverse direction so you either research bidirectional cells or double the capital costs making cells optimized for each direction. Also, over potentials are pretty high and the catalysts foul easily but for the cleanest of inputs.
Also, is RO the cheapest for DS? I thought modern distillation is back on top, especially if you have waste heat
The problem is that the amount of energy you get back would be fairly small in comparison to the input energy. It might not be economically practical. The amount of energy you can reasonably store per unit of input energy might not ever surpass the cost of the equipment to extract the energy and put it back into the grid.
There's a minimum energy cost in separating water from salt. Salt dissociated into water has a lower energy state than separate salt and water molecules. You have to put that much energy back into the salt ions to pull them out of solution, and they will keep that energy until dissociated again.
So you have to pay the cost of entropy, then pay for all the energy loss in the combustion, capture, and conversion stages. I'm not sure if you'd get enough energy out to ever be worth the trouble.
RO can be more efficient than electrolysis. The major factor is that electrolysis wastes a good fraction of the input energy on heating the water. On the other hand, RO requires high pressures, which is energy intensive.
RO is generally more efficient overall, but either way you have to pay the cost of reversing entropy.
So it's interesting, although at some point it seems unnecessary to enumerate that this same concept applies to every possible source of electricity demand.
I don't understand this statement. Shouldn't the cost of consuming electricity vary as the supply of renewables changes throughout the day?
Pumping water, Bitcoin mining, what else?
There might be pumps, in addition to just gravity assisted transportation of water. When energy is cheap, we can do both desalinate + transport.
There's a tradeoff -- spending more building the desalination plant makes it possible to run at a lower duty cycle so you can spend less on the electricity.
The problem with only running them part of the time is that the fixed capital and other operational costs of the plant are now split over a smaller amount of water produced so that water is more expensive than if you ran the plant all the time paying more for electricity at other times of the day.
If it takes 1GW-hr to make I dunno, a billion gallons of water or whatever, then it might be cheaper to store a billion-gallons of water + build a 2nd desal plant rather than trying to build a 1GW-hr Li-ion battery.
That's the real question that's being discussed here. What's cheaper? Additional Desal plants + water storage? Or Giant-batteries?
Presumably, pumped-hydro is off the table (which is true in some geographies). Pumped-hydro is an effective form of GW-hr sized energy storage but is somewhat frustrating at how limited the geography can be for it in practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
The Carlsbad desalination plant [1] cost $1 billion to build, and it produces 190000 tons of desalinated water per day, or 5.7 million tons per month. Assuming a 6% financing cost, and 30 years amortization, you pay $6 million per month, or about $1 per ton of fresh water. That's a cost you incur whether you desalinate the water or not. If you decide to run the plant at 50%, then that's $2 per ton.
It takes 3.6 kWh to desalinate a ton of water. The cost of electricity in California is about $0.12/kWh for industrial users, so that's about $0.44 per ton of desalinated water.
Let's say you switch from the current electricity providers to solar generation that is absolutely free. Then you save $0.44 for each ton, but incur an additional capital cost of $1.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...
That said, you'd probably still want batteries to supply power to things like a desal plant when water levels are low.
The cost of overbuilding desalination capacity is non-zero though, and energy is only about ~1/3rd of the typical cost for a cubic meter of water overall depending on the plant, so the marginal savings may not be as big as we would like here.
Power price goes negative +200M times/year, just in the US and it is increase. It would be wonderful to get paid for charging EV. Tesla Electric customers report making as much as $150 a day[1]. Car batteries are bigger than powerwall, EV owners can make quite a bit of money by participating in VPP (Virtual Power Plant).
(1) https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo...
I think it's more about how deep the cycles go -- just don't let the grid drain below like 30-40% battery and it likely would have no meaningful impact long term.
But at such a compensation level, one could probably just purchase deep cycle lead acid marine batteries. They could sit in one's basement charging/discharging at a much lower cost than the lithiums in a car.
Current estimate for a battery replacement is 4K - 20K. With energy storage's learning curve, this will be soon under $3K.
1)https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/12/catl-will-mix-cheaper-...
https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...
My understanding is that the impact on battery longevity relates to the rate at which it is being charged/discharged. Accelerating and regenerative braking are small potatoes compared to charging over a typical level 2 system, I would think.
A typical L2 charger will provide in the range of 6-10kW (AC, marginally less ends up going to the battery after conversion losses). 10kW is only 13hp; forget acceleration - the car draws more than that at highway speeds.
(You can come at this result another way too - an L2 charge may take 6-10hr to refill the battery from empty. But the car would not be able to drive 6-10hr at highway speed starting at 100% charge! So the L2 must be delivering less power than the car consumes at cruising speed.)
1: They expect them to start charging.
2: They expect them be charged when they return.
Please don't let your imagination run away with schemes like this. The incentives might be nice, but they'll only attract people who understand them and are in a situation to take advantage of them.
I just tell my car to make sure it's charged & warmed by 7AM and it takes care of the rest.
If I had the opportunity to join VPP I'd just tell it to make sure that it was at 80% at 7AM and never below 50% any other time.
Please don't let your lack of experience run away concocting scenarios which don't exist.
I've had electric cars for almost a decade, and I currently have two Teslas.
> concocting scenarios which don't exist
I've had plenty of situations where my car didn't charge. (Don't buy an electric Chrysler, btw.)
The most recent situations have to do with Tesla's new feature where the car will primarily charge on solar.
> "Be charged to 100% by this time"
What I hit was with my dual car charger. (Grizzle) It gets screwed up by things like timers when two cars are plugged in.
It divides the amperage up evenly until a car finishes charging, and then gives the car that is still charging most of the amperage. If the 2nd car is on a timer, the charger will never give it full amperage until you unplug and replug it.
This is a problem with Tesla's solar charging feature, because only one car will charge at a time. When car 1 finishes and car 2 starts charging, the charger doesn't adjust, and the car 2 never gets full amperage.
You'll hit the same thing if you have two cars plugged in and they are both on timers.
Granted I could probably push on Grizzle to give me a firmware update, but my experience is that they ignore support questions.
But, we have electricity anywhere we have a building. In fact, thats the first utility thats hooked up before anything is even built. Now, we can think of charging an EV anytime it is parked. Residential garages have a 240V dryer outlet (or in the laundry room next to garage). That outlet can be used or an additional outlet can be added.
Cars are parked 22 - 23 hours a day. They can charge anytime they are parked.
I've driven electric cars for a decade and have two.
That is not my assumption at all. My assumption is that most people will consider the car defective if they plug it in, and then it doesn't have a full charge when they come back to it. (Either overnight or at work.)
> Residential garages have a 240V dryer outlet
Where I live that was a recent code change. I had to install an outlet for my first electric car. When I built my house in 2017, I had to really push on the builder to include an outlet.
But for a destination charger (e.g. shopping center), or a charger at home or work, it doesn't have to be like that. I would have a system where there's three options (can be three big light up buttons) - 1. I need the battery charged right now, 2. I'd like the battery charged over the next 6 hours, and 3. I have enough charge for now, but do charge me up if it's free or prices are negative.
Option 2 would probably be the default, because it would be able to modulate the demand and charge very cheaply, because it'd mostly only have to avoid the two-hour or so peak periods (like the solar duck curve). Option 1 is there when you need it, but you might pay a few dollars more for a charge. During the day in summer, in areas with lots of solar (like my state in Australia) you might be able to always select Option 3, and usually get a full charge (well, I'd set the 80% limit but fully up to there) every time without ever paying anything.
It doesn't have to be hard - you just tell it you want charge right now, over the next little while, or you don't care, and you pay (or don't pay) a differently depending on what you select. It can be a very small number of super simple and extremely intuitive options, not complex settings you need to think about. People scare-monger about "Governments taking away our ability to use power when we want", but it's actually going to be "Utilities will offer incentives like free electricity if you choose to shift your usage" - just offering more options, not taking away freedoms.
And this is why I remain skeptical of renewables as base load energy. The only carbon free base load energy tech remains nuclear which is also perfectly capable of performing desal during off-peak times.
Someone should tell countries like Germany then \s
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/german...
> Germany aims to fulfill all its electricity needs with supplies from renewable sources by 2035
Given their track record, it seems more plausible that they'll close down wind turbines and replace them with more coal, like their "green" government has been doing with nuclear.
Anyway, this article is discussing one of many new ways that power usage can be shifted around during the day, which makes solar able to provide a LARGER share of our overall energy.
I bring up nuclear whenever there’s a discussion of grid energy to provide a reality check that solar is not able to get us to net 0 by 2050 in any way regardless of clever new ideas. By contrast nuclear actually does have that capability and it’s not purely theoretical nor “hey what if we productionized some new hypothetical theoretical idea at massive scale and ignore all unintended side effects” - we have plenty of existence proof that nuclear is a drop-in replacement for fossil fuels & thus actually very quickly reduces the need for them in the grid energy mix whereas no such existence proof really exists for renewables (yes - someone brought up Denmark but that’s not a repeatable situation because they are one of the windiest places on earth and wind doesn’t have the same critical downsides that solar does for grid power).
I just don't get the fascination with a power source that is so much more expensive and slower to bring online.
Basically it and hydro are the only green tech that have shown the ability to completely displace the need for fossil fuels. With solar/wind we’re left with a hybrid grid and hoping that battery tech improves to the point where we overbuild enough solar that we can recharge batteries with excess capacity for nighttime use (the price of which is frequently ignored when discussing solar as a grid energy). In other words - it’s an open question as to solar and wind can replace base load requirements (which are substantial). If they can’t then we’re left with fossil fuels, nuclear, and wind. As we see in China, they’re building a crapton of fossil fuel (specifically coal) power plants that they will run overnight / emergency situations during the day. That’s progress but it’s a long way away from net 0. That’s why they’re also investing in their capability to build fission. that’s why you’ll see their fission projects finish on time and get cheaper over time. Fission is “more expensive” not because of the tech but because we don’t make enough of it to recoup economies of scale. You’d see the same effect with solar but because solar doesn’t pose as much threat to fossil fuels in the near term people don’t really care (it’s a very long transition period - I fully expect us to not achieve net 0 by 2100 unless we switch to nuclear). Keep in mind that solar and wind also can’t solve major transportation use cases with ships and planes which can’t be electrified (even an open question for semis but at least plausible there over time). Planes likely are the hardest but putting reactors that can’t meltdown onto ships sounds like a no brainer and would cut a huge green house gas emitter and an insane amount of pollution going into the oceans.
Nuclear is perfectly good at load following until the U is nearly burnt: the French do it.
The reason nuclear is most suited to base load is because the capital costs are so high it makes sense to use a reactor as close to 100% utilisation as you can.
In 2022 Denmark generated 62% (+12% from 2021) of its electricity from renewables (excluding biomass which seems suspect to me) while France generated 63% (-5% from 2021) from Nuclear.
I think you can make a case that nuclear is competitive for 100% carbon free grids (though by the time it’s built batteries will have gotten far cheaper.) But it seems clear that renewables are by far the cheapest and quickest way to get to ~80% carbon free grids.
Existing heavy water reactors could be built more cheaply than they are now. And MSR/thorium designs are a step function cheaper beyond that because they generate even less waste, don’t need expensive fail-safe mechanisms because it’s inheritently physically impossible to melt down, and don’t need water to cool down which is both a cost savings & avoids the issue of warming waters due to global warming impacting the ability for reactors to run at times.
China has already started building MSR designs and it sucks that the DOE is dragging their feet in approving these designs & focusing instead on SMR designs. The regulatory capture of the US beuracracy by fossil fuel companies is a huge problem.
> it seems clear that renewables are by far the cheapest and quickest way to get to 80% carbon free grids
Got any existence proof for this claim? We’re building renewables as fast as we can and countries seem to generally tap out at ~20% ammortized across the year and are growing extremely slowly (~1% each year). By comparison France runs 90% carbon free and that’s because of their nuclear grid. Batteries will decrease over time but we still don’t yet know what grid-scale renewable base load looks like & I don’t think that 80% number is correct considering that baseload is 30-40% of maximum load (i.e. best case peak without batteries is 60-70%). But all the solar proponents also seem to ignore a major headwind for solar which is that while we build out more & more capacity, our energy demands grow faster than that. We’ve electrified 2% of consumer cars, 0% of trucks, 0% of ships, 0% of airplanes. Electrifying cars is going to add an insane amount of demands on the grid & solar can’t keep up (batteries either). And yes, there’s the argument of using batteries in EVs to do the grid balancing but we don’t actually have that tech & 0 regulations requiring it meaning that in 2035 which is the target when ostensibly we stop creating new ICE cars, we still won’t have that ability.
Building out nuclear capacity is still by far the quickest & cheapest option to not only convert our existing energy to carbon free but also to keep up with ever growing demands. Remember - the more capacity you build, the cheaper it gets per MW. Also, nuclear is way more land efficient than solar which is a separate unrelated discussion but also relevant. Again, my argument is not to stop solar investments but to remove all the regulatory and bueracratic roadblocks that inhibit nuclear fission so that those companies can compete fairly.
Denmark is an absolute best case because they are geographically advantaged for wind. Wind is much more resilient and cheaper than solar but is also more geography dependent. Fission can be installed anywhere.
The huge difference here is that each individual nuclear power station is a megaproject while solar panels are mass manufactured items produced in the hundreds of millions per year.
> Also nuclear construction costs are particularly outsized in the US where regulations are intentionally constructed to strangle it. Japan, China, and Europe build it much more cheaply.
Europe is not building new nuclear cheaply or quickly either. All three EPR projects in Europe are hugely over budget (at least $10B per reactor) and more than a decade behind schedule.
China has been able to build new nuclear more quickly but the factors that make building new nuclear faster in China also make building new renewables faster:
"Every year, the combination of wind and solar, and usually both individually, outstripped new nuclear generation, both in raw nameplate capacity and in additional TWh of annual generation."
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...
> Denmark is an absolute best case because they are geographically advantaged for wind. Wind is much more resilient and cheaper than solar but is also more geography dependent. Fission can be installed anywhere.
Onshore wind and utility scale solar seem to be pretty similar cost-wise now, which is cheaper will depend on the site. Northern Europe is really bad for solar given the northerly latitude, but southern Europe and the US are far more suited to it.
Offshore wind is expensive for renewables though getting cheaper. It's now about the same cost as gas (before prices went up when Russia invaded Ukraine) in Europe and under half the cost of new nuclear.
> Got any existence proof for this claim? We’re building renewables as fast as we can and countries seem to generally tap out at ~20% ammortized across the year and are growing extremely slowly (~1% each year).
Between 2000 and 2020 renewables went from 2.8% to 43.1% of UK generation. It's being built at 2% a year. That's about 25% in the time it takes to build a new nuclear reactor.
China is increasing the percentage of both solar and wind in its energy mix by about 1% each per year (much faster than nuclear.) In 10 years wind and nuclear have gone from neck and neck to wind being almost double, while solar has gone from nothing to neck and neck with nuclear.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?time...
> By comparison France runs 90% carbon free and that’s because of their nuclear grid.
I pretty much lost hope in nuclear when it turned out even the French can't build it cost effectively anymore. 20 years ago nuclear looked like the only realistic option. Since then nuclear build costs have spiralled while renewables have gotten cheaper and cheaper.
What about the cost of additional desalination equipment needed to take advantage of energy peaks? In a situation like this, is extra desalination equipment needed when renewable energy peaks? Or, do current desalination systems have periods where the equipment is idle?
The headline reeks of oil/gas companies pushing an agenda to keep gas turbine a critical part of the baseload infrastructure and keep grid storage from developing.
When electricity on the grid is cheaper, all intensive applications can run at that time. Just make the difference of price worth the pause of the industry when electricity is scarce.
Well, yeah...
It’s a stupid comparison though because the point of batteries is to get to net 0 and desal plants don’t help with that. But it’s not a great sign for renewables achieving net 0 at the grid level that a process that is so energy intensive for getting so little water out is a better use of electricity than batteries.
You already need infrastructure to store fresh water for later use, and storing water for later use is relatively low loss (depending on the scale --- outdoor reservoirs can have a lot of loss). There's always a question of capital costs, of course: does it make more sense to have a higher capacity plant with a lower duty cycle where the duty cycle that uses mostly off-peak priced energy, or a lower capacity plant with a higher duty cycle which uses on-peak priced energy much of the time.
Most energy consumers don't care about getting to net 0, they want to pay less for energy, if energy is a large part of their input costs.
Intermittent operations do help get to net 0 though --- if all energy intensive uses could handle intermittent operations, it allows for more intermittent generation. It certainly doesn't get you all the way though; there's lots of uses that won't work well without continuous energy.