With a turnover of over 15.7 billion euros, and a 46 percent growth increase in comparison to 2022, the energy storage sector’s expansion in Germany continues at a fast pace ...
The toal capacity of household storage devices now has reached about 6 gigawatts, roughly equal to the capacity of Germany’s pumped hydro storage installations, the association said.
I agree that nuclear should have it's place in a modern energy grid for the time being, but the skepticism towards renewables from nuclear proponents is also not right. It may have been justified twenty years ago, but the world is different now.
The thing is that there's isn't one answer to how to smooth out renewable production, making it harder to mentally model than a simple "just build nuclear".
I'm going to just give a few ones that you need to take together:
* You don't need pumped hydro. There's a massive yearly 650 TWh of hydro in Europe, which can serve as a "virtual battery" by using it only when other renewable sources are low. The same, to a lesser extent, is true for bio-methane.
* Electricity is just about 10% of primary energy. The other 90% contain many sources of demand that are extremely amenable to load shifting. Cars, heating, to name two massive ones.
* Short term variations in renewable output (i.e, anything shorter than seasonal) can be smoothed by batteries, eventually. Not today, but, like PV, battery cost is on a staggering exponential decline.
* The EU has an integrated grid, nuclear will continue to be used in all European countries at least indirectly through imports.
From a high level economic perspective: The low and declining cost of a kWh PV provides a massive economic incentive to solve this.
You build batteries like what California is doing.
> possibility of length, geographically vast "cold snaps"
The correlation between renewables drops off literally exponentially as a function of distance, creating a diversification effect that makes this situation sufficiently rare. The bigger the land mass, the better. You also overbuild by a bit to handle droughts, and curtail in normal periods. In the circumstances that it still happens, you use natural gas as a backstop, or you use long-duration clean storage like hydrogen (which remains more hypothetical/expensive currently, but that will change).
Hydrocarbons have had centuries of process improvements and optimizations - I think it's only fair to give renewables a chance to catch up, no?
In general, renewable electricity is solved. Energy transition problems is now about marine and air transport for which no applicable solution exists yet (ammonia is too problematic from too many angles and hydrogen stubbornly refuses to really take off).
* Battery storage is minutes of electric output
Cold snaps and inversions (clouds are low, no wind, cold) are counted in days to weeks.
You're mixing up the use of batteries for grid stabilization with their use for storage.
But it might come as a shock to you, cities are taking in order of MW to GW
A typical grid-storage battery will have enough storage to dispatch power at 100% of its rated capacity for 4 hours.
Of course if you draw out the energy at less than full capacity, it will take longer to fully discharge.
The largest battery currently in the US - Moss Landing - for example is rated 750 MW/3,000 MWh - which means it can sustain 750MW of output for 4 hours and it does this daily.
This is not "20 minutes".
New solar parks often come with a couple of hours of battery storage. You numbers seem to be out of date.