Fuel cells are a high capital cost solution to the problem of turning hydrogen into electricity, at higher efficiency. That's not what solar or wind need -- they need low capital cost, mediocre efficiency backup sources.
On the contrary, current efficiency of even cheap-and-dumb electrolysis is 70% {1}, which means that cheap solar like the 2.155¢/kWh plant from 6 montgs ago {2} can easily provide baseline load.
This is pretty much entirely because PV keep getting cheaper faster than everyone expected — even as recently as five years ago, pessimism like yours wouldn’t have been unreasonable, and yet the problem is now essentially solved and all we need to do is build the stuff at the prices we can already afford.
Of course they can't and of course it doesn't get cheaper unless you decide to frame it in a way that not at all realistic.
Solar is less then 1% and that's with 300% increase it's not even close to being able to deliver baseline anything regardless of how cheap it gets. It's a dream that's not even close to be realistic and frankly highly naive.
Again 47w per m2 vs. 1000w per m2 and with solar panels needing continous repeairs and no grid or fuel cells in sight plus reliance on coal, nuclear and oil for when the sun doesn't shine.
Your first sentence is missing a word. Can’t what? I gave you links to show my working.
I have no idea what you’re referring to with “47w per m2”, can you elaborate?
Ditto “needing continuous replairs“. There’s a rover on Mars that’s been running for about 15 years continuously on solar with no human maintenance.
From an engineering point of view (though not political), you don’t even need to worry about night time, because the earth is round and even planet sized grids don’t lose enough power to raise my example of 2.155¢/kWh to even as high as coal. And that’s if you refuse to use the fuel cell tech that already exists.
They can, when teamed with dispatchable sources, destroy the economic case for expensive baseload sources.
This is why you're not seeing new nuclear plants much in the west. The decision makers know they face huge risk from future cost declines of renewables which, combined with gas, would leave those reactors unable to amortize their construction, financing, and fixed operating costs.
There are other solutions for long term storage of renewable energy to make it dispatchable. For example, making hydrogen, then burn it in turbines. The efficiency of this is lousy, but the capital cost can be quite low.
I see plenty of self-inflicted damage. Inability to meet cost estimates for new nuclear plants, for example. If nuclear had been as great as the salesmen had told us, the opposition would have been much less, and would likely have been steamrolled. As it stands, utilities largely don't want to build new nuclear plants. They even shit talk it in public. They aren't doing this because they are secret radical ecoterrorists; they are doing it because they are hard nosed business people with no time for failures.
This is nothing new. As the Forbes cover story on Feb. 11, 1985 said: “The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale… only the blind or the biased can now think that the money has been well spent.”
In recent years, they gave nuclear another chance. And it failed again. You are unlikely to get a third chance anytime soon.
So by that argument if wind and solar where so great it wouldn't only be supplying around 1.5% of our energy and growing much more rapidly than it does.
You can't both have your cake and eat it.
The difference is that we KNOW that nuclear can deliver way more energy per m2 than wind and solar can. We know how to get it to work and we know that the primary cost of nuclear is political NOT technical completely opposite wind and solar which have technical issues to provide as much as nuclear or coal or oil can.
What? No, that argument is nothing like the claim you are trying to make in that first paragraph. Please stick to actual working logic.
Yes, nuclear can deliver more energy per m2. But this is irrelevant, since we have no shortage of m2. What we have limits on is $$$. On the metric of energy/$, nuclear fails. And no, we do not know that the problem with nuclear is political. You can keep repeating that, but it doesn't make you any less wrong.
Of course it is. You are claiming that the lack of success of nuclear shows that it doesn't work financially. The same can be said about the effectiveness of solar. If it was so effective and could support most of our energy needs why haven't it?
The reason nuclear is expensive is because of the regulations around it NOT because of the technical issues of building a nuclear power plant.
What condemns nuclear is the stubborn lack of improvement it has shown.
Solar and wind have shown impressive and sustained improvement along so-called "experience curves". The cost of each has declined as a power law in cumulative installed capacity. This decline has been sustained while they've declined in cost by orders of magnitude (PV has improved in cost by more than a factor of 200 since the 1970s.)
Nuclear, in contrast, has been largely free of such sustained improvement. If anything, costs have increased with experience -- negative learning. The complexity and scale of nuclear appears to be such that learning effects are cancelled out.
And no, regulations are NOT the reason. That's the increasingly lame excuse nuclear fans confabulate to deal with the cognitive dissonance of their precious technology not actually living up to their fantasies about it. And as I've said elsewhere, if your complaint is that government doesn't let reactors meltdown enough, you might as well hang it up and go home. You are not going to win that one.
Because even though only 5 of the last 20 years had less than 30% annual growth, even though the annual average compounded equivalent rate since records began has been 73% per yer (which I think places it second in growth between improvements to cost reductions in genetics (#1) and Moores law (#3)) it takes time to do that.
This year PV alone is forecast to reach half a terrawatt. I’m not sure if that’s peak or average but at 30% per year growth, it doesn’t really matter. World electric use is only 2.7 TW, after that point we want to start electrolysing hydrogen out of water even if only to replace jet fuel.
