> but there will be times when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing so you need to be able to meet energy demands in those cases. The only clean solution is nuclear (and hydro where available).
That claim is highly debatable. Lots of people claim that the storage necessary to overcome these generation troughs make it infeasible but they seem to completely ignore holistic cost minimization approaches using overgeneration and then conclude that the amount of storage required makes it impossible. Meanwhile it's been calculated that modest overgeneration squashes storage amounts (and costs) in massive ways. People have actually studied these things, you know...
See for example the 2018 article On the economics of electrical storage for variable renewable energy sources by Zerrahn et al.
> You really don't, you just need to burn fuel to fill in for gaps caused by weather
That suggests that we'd need to keep most of the existing infrastructure for power generation and also replicate its capacity with wind and solar plants.
That sounds both expensive and inefficient.
> Storage is not a problem now - economic solutions exist already to build it where it is valuable. Its just not needed much yet.
Nuclear has actually proven that it can work at the scale we need it (~20% of actual power generation from memory). Renewables and storage have not. So this is an argument of hypotheticals vs actuals. The burden of evidence on the hypothetical solution is a bit higher than an assertion that it'll work.
The only grid-level storage solutions that actually store energy (not just modulate grid supply short-term) is big hydroelectric dams which are not one size fits all solutions.
> That relies on only taking the base load and offloading the actual hard part to other generators. Exactly what nuclear proponents like to say will be impossible for renewables.
It's certainly not impossible, since that's what we do currently. The reason we would like to stop doing it in the future is co2 emissions, not a feasibility barrier.
Now my point was that we don't have experience of massive storage. And in the absence of storage, nuclear costs go up, while renewables output goes down. One is painful but manageable, we don't have a plan to handle the other.
Personally, I wish we spent a bit less subsidies on renewable production, and a bit more on grid-sized storage, so we can have an answer on costs. Without this, discussions on storage-enabled grids are conjectures at best.
>>And maybe most importantly, acknowledge that nuclear energy is far more expensive than other green energy options
It is not really though when you factor in ALL of the costs of the main renewables (wind and solar), one of the big problems with both is the fact their output curves normally do not match demand curves every well, meaning when wind and solar are producing power, the demand for that power is at its lowest.
Thus wind and solar can only be a viable replacement for Fossil fuel and nuclear if you add in methods of energy storage, so electricity can be stored when it being produced and then consumed when it is needed.
Once you factor in this storage / demand problem the costs of wind and solar go through the roof
> if you want to go from eg 50% to 100%, then you need MASSIVE storage to guarantee that you have power when you need it.
You really dont, you just need to burn fuel to fill in for gaps caused by weather, that become increasingly less frequent the more wind and solar is oversupplied. And oversupply is not a big problem - it can be easily curtailed. The optimal amount of renewables supply to build is over the level where they regularly exceed demand - and that is the stage where big batteries become very economical to build.
Carbon neutral fuel-wise, biofuels and electrically generated fuels are very viable future options.
Storage doesn't become more of a problem with more wind and solar - it becomes more of an opportunity to further reduce fuel consumption.
Storage is not a problem now - economic solutions exist already to build it where it is valuable. Its just not needed much yet.
> So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables.
If you build enough nuclear power to fill the gap in the duck curve without storage, and remove fossil fuels, you're basically running entirely nuclear and hydro, and mostly nuclear. You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use, because you need e.g. 100GW for the peak load in the evening but only 50GW for twelve hours overnight.
That doesn't seem likely to be cheaper than using storage for only the differential load in the evening. But once you have storage there isn't any good reason not to use cheap solar for the daytime load differential, and to provide the energy to charge the storage for later in the day.
> For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear.
Not if you price carbon.
> For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping.
That's cost per MWh generated not accounting for when you need it. Renewables need both short-term storage and long-term storage.
If you generate with solar, what do you do at night? You'd need 12 hours of storage. Maybe that's economical in some contexts but it definitely raises the cost.
Now what do you do if it's cloudy or still for a week, or a month? 720 hours of storage would be crazy expensive. You could use natural gas plants or similar, but then you have to pay the cost of maintaining natural gas plants and the associated infrastructure that you only use 2% of the time.
1GW nuclear plant vs 1GW (average) of solar + 12GWh of storage + 1GW natural gas plant + rarely used gas pipelines or 720GWh of on-site reserves, which costs more?
> so you'd need to have something like 10x solar if you wanted the overcapacity strategy to work, which also make things prohibitively expensive.
In the short-term, gas backup for such scenarios (which are relatively rare, and during which renewables will still operate at some non-100% fraction of the required energy) seems like it might be a reasonable option: we could probably get to (pulling numbers out of thin air) 95% renewable generation or something that way.
Longer term, we'll definitely need some kind of long-term storage though. Perhaps synthetic fuel driven by overcapacity renewables during peak generation times might be an option here?
>as natural gas turbines are the only currently existing scalable solution which could potentially handle variable production of Solar and Wind.
Nuclear, pump back hydro and other storage solutions.
People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc.
> The reality, though, is that none of the proposed energy storage solutions are easier than just building nuclear power plants.
This doesn't appear to be the case, or at least doesn't appear to be the case for much longer, when renewables are multiple times cheaper than nuclear.
> First, it shouldn't be solar+storage but solar+wind+storage. Solar and wind work well together because wind is strongest at night.
The trouble is they're both intermittent, even independent of time of day. For solar that's much less trouble because the demand is higher during the day, and aligns extremely well with air conditioning load in the summer.
But if you're relying on wind at night and then there isn't any, and you also have no solar because it's night, what's left?
> Generated fuels, like hydrogen, may work well for long-term storage and we'll them for other things.
At which point you have to add the cost of production, storage and generation facilities for some other generating technology.
> Third, we can overbuild solar and wind. It might be cheaper to make 3x or 5x than needed.
But how does that fix it? Sometimes it's calm for weeks, so your wind turbines are generating at 5% capacity for that long. Are you going to overbuild by 20x? Or build enough storage to power the entire grid for that long, even if you only use it for two weeks every three or four years?
> Finally, we are going to need extra energy for carbon capture and generating fuels.
This is a generic argument for building more of any kind of non-carbon generating capacity.
> but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it.
Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point.
We just put a new nuclear power plant into service in Finland.
> Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage).
Do you have any sources to back up these figures? I’m genuinely interested.
How is hydrogen a viable storage form when you cannot burn 100% hydrogen and fuel cell aren’t available or cost effective at utility scale?
How are batteries a viable storage form when there isn’t enough global manufacturing capacity to store energy at scale?
How is pumped hydro a viable storage form when you are limited by geography and can’t really build any more?
> First, solar and wind are not more environmentally destructive, at least in any appreciable way.
There's many reasons that these forms of energy are arguably worse than nuclear environmentally: such as the substantial amount of prime land they must occupy to generate the same amount of electricity to the second order effects of their limited nature in necessitating batteries to store power when the sun/wind isn't working.
> Second, solar and wind can sustain modern human civilization.
> Sixth, all of wind, solar, and nuclear are just electric sources and we face a storage density problem not a generation problem.
I've written about this many times, but this energy storage problem is precisely why wind and solar cannot work to drive human activity. When the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow, you just can't realistically store enough energy to drive refrigeration, industry, and all of the other features of modern life on a mass scale with our current technology level. Nuclear energy doesn't have this constraint.
> Third, clean energy has de facto not been solved because only a small percentage of generation is currently nuclear.
> Fourth, even what you describe were possible, construction lead time on known scalable reactor designs is many years.
I'm not concerned. If it's a problem and necessary for humanity, it will eventually happen, and very quickly. I think economics dictates this.
> Fifth, even what you describe were possible, the fuel supply chain is underdeveloped and would take many years to develop.
Not worried. Uranium prices are currently spiking and will continue to spike. And this is a good thing as it incentivizes increased production. Experts more informed than me have said when the spot price of uranium hits around 60-65, many more mines and sources become economically viable and will start scaling up.
> Seventh, the nature of the climate problem is one that has already happened and will continue for decades even if every human ceased to exist immediately.
I have no doubt that climate change fear mongering will exist eternally. Whenever a politician messes up forest management or flood mitigation, it's easier to blame "climate change" than their own competence.
I'm less convinced that it's a real threat to life on Earth. We'll adapt to any challenges, as we always have.
> Eighth, nuclear is still not renewable.
It doesn't matter as we have enough uranium to last many, many, many lifetimes, and far more if sea-water extraction can be done safely. By that point, we'll have other options.
> I could go on but I hope you appreciate that I disagree with you and think you are underinformed about nuclear power.
I'd agree with you that despite trying to stay informed, I don't know nearly enough about nuclear energy. And for that I blame the media who is fixated on trying to clickbait fear rather than informing us about the solutions.
>If newer advances can’t make it cost competitive with renewables plus some storage (I’ll get to that in a minute) then why would you ever deploy it.
Because it can work rain or shine. Wind or no wind.
What happens if we have no wind and have a lot of clouds for a few weeks in an area? The storage is limited and nuclear can still produce. Yes, I understand other areas can likely pick up the slack, but nuclear doesn't have that issue. At a minimum nuclear is a good thing to have as a back up even if we have sufficient renewables.
Also, don't forget climate change is supposed to cause more extreme weather events. We don't know what impact that will have on wind and solar.
> And yet unlike renewables nuclear (and coal and gas etc.) are very close to that. And nuclear routinely runs close to its capacity, predictably.
Sure. Apples to oranges; they're not the same thing. Theoretical perfect-day max generation isn't how you provision solar/wind, that'd be stupid; the folks building out Germany's renewable efforts aren't stupid.
If you need a certain baseline of a certain renewable, you overprovision (and trade capacity with other areas and generation methods). Given the cost of new solar/wind capacity these days, that still makes perfect economic sense. Any long-term renewables plan is going to include energy storage and peaker plants of some kind to ensure a reliable grid on a national/continental scale.
>Solar and wind are great but they don’t provide a continuous source of energy.
This is a solved problem through various forms of storage (synthetic gas, pumped hydro, batteries etc).
Nuclear is a solid baseline for sure but I don't think there is a way around the security requirements, which means it will become too expensive to keep around when free energy from the sun can be stored cheaply.
> A very pervasive argument against renewables is "but storage!!!".
This goes with my issue, emergencies. I expected to see that in the article.
When you absolutely MUST have power absolutely right now, renewables don’t cut it with current storage options. Think disaster or pop-up energy needs.
I’m just really skeptical that the hard pushes for renewables are taking into account we should have excess production options in coal and NG going forward.
Something that might happen Aka Reasonably competitive with alternatives.
It’s physically possible to build infrastructure allowing 100’s of GW of solar electricity to move from Africa to South America across a single grid. But, there’s noway that is actually going to happen as it would be a horrific waste of resources vs local storage even ignoring political problems etc.
The same thing is true of Nuclear. There’s no way you’re going to see anything close to a 100% nuclear grid when adding hydro, batteries, wind, and or solar would drastically lower costs.
However, once you accept people aren’t going to do something that stupid you need to consider what mix of generation and storage is cheapest and how far from that we’re willing to go. That same logic is why nobody is every going to build days worth of battery storage, it’s simply cheaper to have extra capacity that mostly sits unused than extra storage.
No, we do. Well, perhaps saying storage isn't quite accurate. What we need is reliable power, because solar is not.
Perhaps you have not seen the charts I posted from my 13 kW array showing what we produced in the last three months compared to the same period last year?
This was caused by rain and weather. The very direct implication of this is that solar power requires an external reliable power source. Without it you could have entire cities go dark.
And so, the question is: If solar cannot work without an additional power source capable of delivering 100% of the required power for prolonged periods of time, why are we insisting on building two power systems, one solar and one using a different technology?
> There is no point in even talking about building nukes. Nukes are dead, dead, dead. Not because of regulation, or hippies, but because no one with the money would waste it building one.
Forget I said nuclear then. Solar at scale cannot happen without having a reliable power source available to support it. If we want to stick with clean sources, the only real options are wind and hydro. Nuclear, I would highlight, is cleaner than burning stuff to make energy. Yet, again, let's not discuss nuclear for the moment.
Because of the characteristics of solar you have to two at least two things:
- You have to grossly over-build by ten times or more
- You have to have a backup power source that can
deliver 100% of the required peak power for minutes,
hours, days and even weeks.
The grossly overbuild part is very easy math to understand. Let's take the simplest of them all: No sun at night. This means --in very rough strokes-- that if you want to store the equivalent amount of energy for night-time use, you have to double the system. One half of the array supports daytime use while the other half charges 100% efficient storage (not a reality) for use at night.
That's not the end though. In a practical reality (feeding a neighborhood, town, city) you need constant power. In a perfect day (no clouds, rain, etc.) the output of a solar array looks like an inverted parabola. Here's a chart from my system.
In order to deliver the same amount of energy as a constant-power system of the same peak power output, you need to build a solar array 1.5 larger than this. That's because the integral of the area under the inverted parabola is 2/3 the area of the enclosing rectangle. Simple math.
Now we are to having to build a system of 2 x 1.5 = 3 times larger.
This happens more often than most people might imagine. The cause, in this case, clouds. Not ugly dark clouds, beautiful white clouds during an beautiful blue-sky day. When it comes to solar, clouds are evil.
I won't continue with the math. I'll just say that, when you consider all the issues with solar (including seasonal output, negative power coefficient and dirt) you can easily see that if you want 1 GW of output you better consider building a 10 GW array, or more. And this requires massive amounts of storage, otherwise you have no power at night or during some of the issues I presented above. As the other charts show, the last few months taught me a lot about what can happen.
Going back to having to build a 100% reliable power system that can supply 100% of the power needs to support unreliable solar. At some point you have to ask yourself. If you are going to build a full duplicate power system, just to have solar, does it really make sense?
This is where reality smacks you in the face again. Sure, there are places in the world where one could use hydro and wind. That isn't going to solve the problem though. You can't use these technologies everywhere. Wind also has its problems.
This is why I tend to reach for nuclear. I can't think of any other technology that can provide 100% power availability at nearly 100% of the time. The other requirement is that we have to be able to start building it now, not in ten years (see above). In the US, it could take well over 25 years to build any type of reliable-power generation plant. We just don't have the ability to move quickly any more. Which means that there's a practical limit function to how far we could take solar, because it isn't reliable and it requires 100% backup.
Not a simple topic. I obviously believer in solar enough to have spent my own money and built a nice 13 kW system. I will be expanding it to 20 kW this year. I might consider going to 30 kW next year. Why? I can't charge enough batteries for the system to deliver power reliable enough to support electric vehicles. This is another reality. Most of my neighbors have small 3 to 5 kW systems. They are all screwed. I talk to them all the time. Some regret having solar because it is costing them more per month (due to leasing and the rising cost of power) than when they put these inadequate systems in. Some were told they could charge electric cars with solar, which was 100% false.
I love solar. I believe in it. I simply prefer to talk about it in real terms and not in a fantasy world where the technology is perfect, reliable and has no issues.
> Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal
This completely ignores scenarios of extended cloud cover, cold temperatures and low wind (somewhat like we just saw in Texas) where properly winterized baseline power would be the only way to keep everything up the whole way through.
Barring future unknown tech, we will always need either nuclear or natural gas if we want five nines of uptime in our electrical power. There is just no practical way currently to build enough storage across the grid to maintain 100% uptime during a week or more of reduced renewable generation.
That claim is highly debatable. Lots of people claim that the storage necessary to overcome these generation troughs make it infeasible but they seem to completely ignore holistic cost minimization approaches using overgeneration and then conclude that the amount of storage required makes it impossible. Meanwhile it's been calculated that modest overgeneration squashes storage amounts (and costs) in massive ways. People have actually studied these things, you know...
See for example the 2018 article On the economics of electrical storage for variable renewable energy sources by Zerrahn et al.
reply