If you need baseload, and need it carbon-free, your only option currently is nuclear. It's terribly encumbered, but apparently it's still less of an impasse that large-scale electricity storage currently is.
What about geothermal, tidal, hydro, etc?
- Hydrothermal: great if you're in Iceland, or near Yellowstone, or other such place blessed by heated rock being close to the surface. Not as great if you need to drill 7 km to reach it.
- Hydro: great if you have a lot of mountains and rivers, like Switzerland or Norway. Harder if you don't, like in much of Texas, to say nothing of Florida.
- Tidal: great if you have a sea shore, preferably with narrow bays / fjords. But if you're in a place like Turkmenistan (one of the two doubly-landlocked countries), you resort to drilling for and burning methane %)
* most of the "good sites" have already been taken
* hydro will regularly silt up, requiring constant dredging
* hydro does not work as well or at all in drought conditions, which are increasingly common
* hydro dams require reservoirs, which in addition to the obvious disruption of the displacement of thousands or even a million plus people in the case of Three Gorges, can end up emitting large amounts of carbon as flooded vegetation decomposes.
* hydro is extremely disruptive to migratory fish. the success rate of interventions like fish ladders is in the low single digit percents. so you can get a bunch of carbon free power but also destroy an ecosystem in the process, not to mention any downstream fishing. and you see similar effects with other things that downstream users might want from the river like fresh silt.
That they don't work when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow is such a tired and trite remake.
Yes, they don't provide consistent output on their own, but storage exists. If you need electricity store it in batteries or pumped hydro. If you need it for heating store it in thermal batteries.
In my region wind generation dipped down to only 1pc of capacity for a day or two last winter which seems to be the floor as far as I can tell.
That tells me that we only need to increase capacity by 100x to get the coverage we want, and as a bonus we get all that surplus capacity most of the time to use on non-essential industry.
Especially on continent-sized electrical grid scales. We put the farms in windy spots, and we pick a variety of spots.
Try doing the figures, we can't scale batteries to cover these drops.
I think this varies depending on where you live. In California, Cal-iso has a really cool dashboard that seems to show that they have enough battery storage to hold about 90 minutes of daytime solar generation.
Definitely not something that can handle a fully cloudy day yet (presumably it's cheaper to keep some natty gas plants ready to spin up or import than to store more excess solar?)
We need 30x, or maybe 100x more storage. After that, we could live on renewables only, and keep gas-fired plants only as a disaster-recovery tool, like diesels in datacenters.
Until then, we need stable generation which does not spew CO2, which is, well, nuclear. It's hard to tell if ubiquitous cheap utility-scale batteries emerge in 5 years or 50 years.
It’s just insufficient. Solar + storage is cost competitive with nuclear. The problem is we have a bajillion needs for batteries, a Balkanised global market and wholly insufficient production forecasts over the next decade without gas or nuclear support. Voters seem to like gas. Private participants are choosing nuclear where they can.
Good to be a gas exporter for the next half century or so.
China is building a lot more, too. It will probably have 80% of the world’s energy storage capacity in a decade.
We just don’t talk about them in the West for some reason. I guess battery tech is more appealing somehow but it’s not cheaper nor more environmentally friendly, all in all.
I hope that now once there are some serious users of power, they might build some of these plants, and then governments in the West will wake up to how good the plants are.
This is a consideration but I don’t think it’s the real reason we don’t consider these plants.
You’re flooding gorgeous landscape near high property values.
Cool. Yes. Now scale that by two orders of magnitude.
Here’s the kicker: getting approval to put an SMR in Wyoming is easier than flooding another valley or buying massive contiguous plots. Nuclear, if these guys can execute, which is a big if, promises to be as agile as gas generators. Our current default when we have energy shortfalls.
You might be thinking in an all-or-nothing way. Some solutions don’t need to scale well on cubic scales, etc. Moreover, there is hardly a reason pumped storage power plants can’t be done along side nuclear investment. There isn’t a dichotomy of choice, expanding use of both — or either — would benefit us all.
In fact, there are synergies between pumped storage and nuclear power — pumped storage allows nuclear to more closely meet the peaks and valleys of electricity demand throughout the day.
I think the biggest problem is that the energy sector isn’t making big plant investments due to capitalistic incentives. Why invest into plants if less supply of electricity means a higher unit price, and any state investment into private power companies can go straight into retained earnings/dividend? It would be improving things for technological advancement sake, against investor interests. Things work differently when the power companies are state-owned, of course. But that doesn’t completely flip the script either — technological advancement for advancement sake is still not often pursued. And it’s often even seen as wasteful by the electorate.
If we wanted technological advancement, we have several clear ways to achieve it, even without scaling the current technology exponentially. The problem is that we didn’t want it enough. But now some companies do.
The current baseline power demand forecasts from the DoE and IEA.
> Even storing 50% more energy this way
Is in the broad scheme meaningless. It would still require massively increasing our investment in gas generators.
I think it's good to think about investing into energy at these scales, it would open a lot of exciting doors for humanity, as Kardashev described. But we are at the very start of this investment and I think we need vastly different novel technologies to think about 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x, etc.
We will probably have to do with what we've got for now.
To replace fossil fuels we need to scale renewables by an order of magnitude. To do that without nuclear we need to scale storage by orders of magnitude.
My ancestors (along with natives) were run off from their valley home in PA when a dam was built. Out here in the Sonoran Desert, we've got a lake where the river should be, and the indigeneous (among others) are still pissed about the dam that was pretty much politically forced on all of us.
Conversely, there are groups who absolutely rejoice when a dam is decommissioned and demolished. It's party time when that land is reclaimed, and the water flows again naturally.
As with any land development, they require land, of course. But all power grid elements do.
Damn or not, pumped hydro requires flooding and then unflooding, turning the Alpinesque ecologies into tidal pools. That's disruptive.
The truth is that we are developing a lot of land every year for different purposes, from industrial to residential. The question is whether we will develop it for everyone's benefit, or for some yet another tax exempt monopoly's warehouse.
We could even build these plants in place of abandoned industrially exploited land, such as quarries, which conveniently already form quite large water reservoirs. We could reclaim a completely dead parcel of land and once we stop using the reservoir, it could blossom into a set of new natural ecologies.
Don't take the worst case scenario and present it as the only one when there is a world of possibilities.
Where do you think large, regular flows of water in natural valleys that can be economically dammed with large gravitational potential energy sit?
We need batteries that cost, say, $10 / kWh, are not (as) flammable, not toxic (not Pb, not NiCd), and don't degrade too fast.
With that, they can be large, heavy, have low specific charge, require high or low temperatures (within reason), etc. For a large utility-grade installation all these qualities are not hugely important. There is plenty of space under solar panels and around wind turbines anyway.
Before that, selling methane remains a very good business indeed.
A nuclear plant in the USA takes oh about 18 years to build. That's 18 years of solar, wind, and storage growth and cheapening.
First of no one is saying its just wind and solar. You say wind, solar and energy storage (batteries).
And second, if more people would buy EVs, we would already have A LOT MORE storage available. My EV has 100kWh and could heat a whole modern build house for 2 full days in winter.
But we need, as you said, a baseload. Nobody is really discussing how to create this, they're just saying we should magically invent an incredibly dense battery (more energy-dense than hydrocarbons, ideally, or let's say within 50% as useful) using technologies nobody can even fathom. Meanwhile, we're seeing breakthroughs in fusion tech, miles ahead of the usefulness of fission, which is miles ahead of anything else we have right now.
I just don't understand the aversion to a clean, renewable power source.