I'd welcome someone to try to run the numbers on this. I tried myself, but I just don't have the expertise. Don't forget to account for almost all of our current heating coming from natural gas burned on-premise. Then, expand your analysis to include all buildings in all northern climes. Is there even enough materials on the planet to build all those batteries? Do batteries even work at -40 degrees? And that's just one set of challenges, every area has similar but different problems for renewables to tackle.
The answer is both: put huge money into renewables and into nuclear. Nuclear is a proven tech. It works. We understand it. We stupidly threw away all of our skill to build it, and put up huge regulatory roadblocks. But those are solvable human problems, if we care to do it.
Storage for renewables is still a huge question mark, which we should also dump a ton of money into, but we need a solution today. Nuclear is here.
Splitting up the world in areas and then claiming you need to solve a different problem in each is throwing away probably the most cost effective way to get cheaper energy, more grid interconnection and more price mechanisms to shape supply and demand.
They generate 57 Twh right now. That's about 10% of the current production of the entire nation of Canada just for one US state.
I think you are greatly underestimating the scale of the United States compared to Canada.
What's commonly done in these arguments, and you did some of that, is declare that from first principles nuclear is the solution and we aren't only doing it for other reasons. Yet while there are plenty of simulations of doing full grids with only solar, wind and batteries there's never one where a full nuclear roll-out actually makes sense economically.
Ah okay! That's our disconnect. Do go run the numbers on how much natural gas we're burning up here. It's a lot, like seriously a lot. How many batteries will we need to ensure that amount of energy is available for (say) 2 weeks of continuous cloud cover at -10 ~ -40 degrees F? Keep in mind that if it fails, people will die. I don't feel confident enough in my own analysis to share it, but do try it out yourself for an exercise. It's pretty eye-opening.
> Yet while there are plenty of simulations of doing full grids with only solar, wind and batteries
I would love to see this! Can you share some? Do they account for converting Minnesota's heating needs from natural gas?
I don't know what a "nuclear roll-out simulation" is, exactly. As stated earlier, my position is that we should be building both nuclear and renewables. We should build whatever makes sense for the area in question. If renewable+storage can solve all of an area's needs, then that's fantastic and we should absolutely do that.
If I understand right, you are arguing we should not be building any nuclear, even in Minnesota. I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem. I'm asking if you can provide a link to an analysis showing that we can feasibly and cost-effectively solve the Minnesota winter problem without any nuclear power. Can you please link to one?
Any simulation where building nuclear power plants makes economic sense would do.
> I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem.
You're again asking for simulations about Minnesota specifically which doesn't make sense. Unless you're thinking of seceding from the union and closing the borders to energy trade, as long as the US as a whole can do it Minnesota in particular can be a net energy importer in winter if that's what's needed. Here's the RethinkX simulation of that:
https://www.tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Rethinki...
"Our analysis makes severely constraining assumptions, and by extrapolating our results from California, Texas, and New England to the entire country we find that the continental United States as a whole could achieve 100% clean electricity from solar PV, onshore wind power, and lithium-ion batteries by 2030 for a capital investment of less than $2 trillion, with an average system electricity cost nationwide of under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour if 50% or more of the system’s super power is utilized."
This is almost 5 years old at this point. Others have linked other such analysis. At this point asking people to show them simulations for renewables while trying to argue for nuclear is disingenuous. Renewables are the ones being built out at scale all over the world while nuclear struggles to deliver new projects and doesn't seem to have a viable path to being cheap.
No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.
> Here's the RethinkX simulation of that
Thanks for the link. I focused on the New England scenario, as it's the most similar to Minnesota of the 3 scenarios. It doesn't seem to account for heating. This is the problem I keep coming to in these analyses. See page 25:
> Our model takes as inputs each region’s historical hourly electricity demand ... For the New England region, our analysis applies to the ISO New England (ISO-NE) service area which provides 100% of grid-scale electricity generation for the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Our heating is not supplied by electricity. I definitely believe that our current electricity demand may be met by renewables in a feasible timescale, but that leaves out the massive hole of heating our buildings.
The only reference I could find to New England's heating is this little note at the bottom of page 46:
> If New England chose to invest in an additional 20% in its 100% SWB system, for example, then the super power output could be used to replace most fossil fuel use in the residential and road transportation sectors combined (assuming electrification of vehicles and heating).
But I don't see any actual numerical analysis backing this up. Given their analysis earlier only spoke about electricity usage, I'm not super convinced by this one sentence.
Additionally, the New England scenario suggests they need 1,232 GWh of storage to supply only 89 hours of electricity for the area. Even if we agree that's a sufficient amount of time, the currently largest energy storage facility on the planet is only 3 GWh[1]. We would need 410 such facilities for New England alone. Can we really scale battery tech up that much, especially given resource constraints like Lithium and copper? Maybe! Hopefully! But it's a big question. Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
[1] https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/worlds-largest-battery-storag...
If that's your assumption then this is a non issue. Minnesota is currently less than 2% of total winter electricity demand in the US. Lets be pessimistic and assume that because it needs more heating in winter than average those 2% become 5% with electrification of heating nationwide. Even if 100% of that electricity needed to be imported from other states that's still a very small amount of the total. You could import all that solar and wind energy from other states if you can't produce any at all locally. The scenario is obviously much better than that, you'd only need to cover the shortfall which is what already naturally happens in joint grids all over the world.
> Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
I'm still waiting for a link that shows that nuclear can be built at anything approaching reasonable cost. In all these discussions that's always presented as a given and then all the discussion is on the shortfalls of renewables. Meanwhile the actual reality on the ground is that the renewable roll-out is rising exponentially and nuclear projects are practically non existant.
Some combination of nuclear and solar/wind feels much more realistic to me to meet this demand, than building out that many batteries.
This is all napkin-math-y, so feel free to fudge it up and down a bit. But I just can't get the numbers to feel reasonable to me.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3060mn2m.htm
[2] 1 cf ng = 1039 btu https://www.nrg.com/resources/energy-tools/energy-conversion...
[3] https://www.convertunits.com/from/British+thermal+unit/to/gi...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Minn...
(1) Diurnal. You need to store maybe 12 hours of production to get through the night. It's believable that this could be affordable with batteries.
(2) Seasonal. In a place like Minnesota you either need to overbuild solar panels by a factor of 3 or so, or you need a lot of storage, probably not batteries, but maybe some kind of chemical or thermal storage. Casey Handmer would point out that you could use excess energy in the summer for industrial activities but that could be easier said than done because the capital cost of a factory that runs 1/3 of the time is 3x that of one that runs all the time.
(3) Dunkelflaut. Sometimes you have a rough patch of cloudy weather and little wind, so the requirements are worse than (1).
It's rare to see credible analysis of the grid-scale cost of a solar + storage system because of (3) -- you can quote a reasonable price for batteries that will supply power "almost" all the time, but costs rise explosively as you increase "almost". With different requirements for reliability the cost of a storage-based system could be "a bit less" than "nuclear power plants built without bungling" or it could be much more. It also has to vary with your location though people talking about the subject don't seem to talk about that which contributes to people talking past each other. (In upstate NY I could care less about Arizona)
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
The cheapest grid is 90-97% renewable (depending on location) in 2025. As battery prices go down, that number gets higher.
The answer is actually "nothing". We keep gas generators around for the winter months in extreme northern climates.
We don't have to drive fossil fuels down to zero. If we need to run fossil fuel plants 10% of the time, then we've cut 90% of our power-generation CO2. Cutting the remaining 10% is far less important than other greenhouse gas sources (transportation, concrete & steel manufacture, agriculture, etc.)
We already have all of the gas plants we need to do that job. Replacing the with nuclear is unnecessary.
If it turns out that we can build nuclear fast and cheap enough to supplement the existing zero-emission transition, so much the better. But there's no need to prioritize the last dregs of fossil fuels. Just the opposite: whatever gets rid of most of the problem, fastest, is optimal for reducing the harm from climate change.
40deg lat includes a _lot_ of the world.
And Russia? And the northern EU? And many parts of China, Japan, northern US (NYC!? Buffalo?). Northern Italy, Germany, Switzerland? Does everyone who dips below 0 deg F get to burn gas? -10F? If the infra remains in place with that kind of demand, don't you see the costs being low enough that people elsewhere will want to do that rather than transition to carbon-free for the fun of it?
It's hand waved away like this, but did anyone do the analysis as suggested? My guess is the results will not be as easy to wave away as you suggest. But OTOH, maybe heat pumps + overcapacity solar arrays will do it. Who knows?
We could ignore them completely and focus on the most viable areas and have years and years of work to be done. We are not building nearly as fast as we should.
Minnesota, Russia, Buffalo, et al are not a reason to delay significantly ramping up renewables in other places.
This is not a worthwhile subject to discuss in this context. It's rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
> if we replaced all viable capacity outside of cold dark areas of the world it would be fine to continue burning gas there
with
> we would have decades of more time to solve these issues in cold areas
As in: Ignore vs Delay. It's clear in hindsight, but wasn't on first reading.
the point is that it's not a problem that should slow down adoption of renewables everywhere else, we don't need to debate nuclear vs renewables because of cold while non-cold areas are still burning tons of fossil fuels constantly
saying "but what about cold!" only serves to add further fuel to the constant drag created by the fossil fuel industry, they love these arguments because it sows consumer doubt — they go as far as to fund anti-renewable activism under the guise of environmentalism to a similar effect
Yes, if we are forced to make that choice, your logic is sound. But we are not, and nobody ever implied we were.
The sun doesn't rise above 30deg over the horizon, for weeks. (MN > 45deg latitude, and earth tilts away by up to 23.5 deg). It gets below freezing for months, sometimes below zero for weeks. Sometimes below -10F for days (although that's becoming less common).
These are legitimate questions.
We're not going to find common ground, that's OK. Let's just stop circling around each other and/or worrying about it. Cheers.
Wait, what? Who in this discussion suggested it was?
Edit: it's less important to worry about that at the moment.
And yeah, we need to decarbonize ASAP.
By many, many orders of magnitude.
There's enough stuff you could use batteries as a replacement for bricks (and timber) in your (everyone's, worldwide) house construction, and still only be a rounding error in the global resources.
Also more than one chemistry, so while Wikipedia says li-ion batteries use 11.6 kWh per kilogram of lithium, just remember there's also sodium-based batteries and literally oceans full of both sodium and lithium.
And they can be recycled when they wear out, unlike methane, oil, and coal which are burned in the process of making heat; and all of those are extracted at a much higher rate than are battery minerals would need to be even if we didn't recycle at end-of-life when they've been through too many charge-discharge cycles.
> Nuclear is here.
So are renewables, and they're already cheaper.
But also, getting power from a nuclear reactor to your house requires a power grid. And you can also use that power grid to simply… put the e.g. solar panels somewhere else in your country that isn't -40 and covered in snow — or a different country, as demonstrated by e.g. the USA's western connection tying bits of Canada to bits of Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
I think nuclear is a thing we should have done fifty years ago in spades.
I'm not sure it's a thing we should do today when the economics behind solar are just so, so much stronger.
I'd really love to see this investment go to storage projects instead.
Battery tech finally seems to be moving, and I'd like to see the US be able to make plays on the LFP/Sodium battery fronts far more than I want overpriced power from nuclear.
There's arguments to be made about having more transmission so you can move electricity from one place to another, but that's also expensive and difficult to build and comes with downsides like vulnerability to natural disasters and attack along a much longer path. Or, as in California, the transmission is its own latent source of disaster that can immolate the state.
Most likely outcome of the recent issues, lots more batteries.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/
> In the figure above, what was previously a defined peak in natural gas generation each evening has eroded into a plateau in 2024. That is because batteries are assisting with the predictable, but large, swings in solar output each day. These rapid ramps have been largely managed by natural gas units to date, but now batteries are taking on much of that responsibility.
That's not even looking at solutions like pumped water, thermal storage, and others which have barely started ramping up to scale.
These are all being built and used in Northern Europe. There's no magic here - just solid engineering and financing.
Which is the topic of this recent study (though they limit themselves to solar and battery):
I'm sure that capacity is only growing going forward.
Under market forces, the electric company have no quarrel in sending people a bill that is 12 times the average month for a single month. There is also very luke warm interest in reducing the cost for the consumer by building out storage. The economics has so far not been that great outside of using government subsidizes, and as northvolt demonstrated, not that interested in using loans when the subsidizes run out.
That said, the Finish project of storing hot water for district heating looks like one of the more interesting storage solution. They are also investing into nuclear, so it seems like time will show how the economics will pan out. Heat exchangers are very effective at generating heat for district heating, so the heat storage has some steep competition.
If one were not being cynical it makes sense to some degree in order to simply diversify our non fossil fuel energy sources.
An all of the above approach to decarbonizing makes sense, and nuclear will be a useful part of that.
There are also loads that want very large, high-availability power and/or process heat. Reactors would pair well with things like metal refining or electrolysis to get the hydrogen for ammonia production.
At the end of the day, there's never one source of energy which is a silver bullet for everything and the best approach is probably a diverse mix of supply.
The wind chill would drop below -40 most nights, sometimes significantly lower. Wind power won't help much because they need to shut down at the worst times- either too windy or icy.
As much as I love heat pumps, having thousands upon thousands of homes switching to resistive heating because the pumps can't keep up in the evening is going to get ugly.
District heating won't save you; the metro doesn't actually burn enough stuff to heat the cities and a significant part of the population is in semi or very rural areas that wouldn't benefit anyway.
Edit: that same metro just put together a fund to renovate a few blocks of an underserved area. It's in the millions of dollars. I can't imagine the cost of converting the entire area to district heating; it would surely eclipse the entire government budget. This is the sort of thing that will only happen if you have the kind of fiat power of an imaginary wand.
I found this article very interesting, although it didn't tell me how many kilometres of district heating pipe were laid each decade: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/24/9281
You are incorrect anyway; using the EU's definitions only Madrid and Barcelona are more populous than Copenhagen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_in_...
I mean, for example, in Madrid a neighbourhood has no electricity because is has been taken over by drug gangs. But at the same time it has electricity to grow marihuana. I guess that is a problem Copenhagen does now have.
It wouldn't be impossible to do, but they would need someone else to help fund it.
Giant heat pumps can source heat from seas, rivers, underground reservoirs etc and the latter can even store energy seasonally that might otherwise be curtailed or wasted by e.g. data centers.