Renewables don't provide base load capacity, though. What do you do when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing? You either burn some carbon or split some atoms. Those are currently the options available.
Hydropower storage is geographically limited. Chemical storage is not available at the scale required. Plus most batteries produced are going to EVs. Remember, the world uses ~60 TWh of energy per day. And it's not not the day and night cycle that needs to be smoothed out, it's also seasonal fluctuations that can last for weeks.
All the other options haven't been built at scale. Hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air have all been suggested, but aren't deployed widely enough to prove viability.
It is. But the issue is that storage systems are quite expensive and not nearly as green as what feeds them.
Interestingly when you include these nuclear is much more competitive. But this depends on the studies and you should pay very close to the assumptions those studies make. Regardless, these are always in aggregate. So even with biases the case always is made that when considering the heterogenous nature of environment that some places will favor nuclear and others will favor renewables (which is again nonhomogeneous as wind and solar aren't always strongly coupled and certainly hydro isn't available everywhere). This is true for the studies that show the best results for nuclear and the studies that show the worst. A major problem with these discussions is people are operating on aggregate assumptions and acting as if it's one or the other.
One interesting part that people might not be aware of is hydrogen production. Nuclear is often argued as a base load so the question is what to do when the sun is shining and wind is strong? You can throttle nuclear but this is not cost effective. But you can in turn produce hydrogen, which can even be used to cheapen and make renewable storage more green. One of the biggest concerns here though is that hydrogen production might be so valuable that nuclear producers might favor that over providing base load.
So as everything, the reality is much more complicated than our general conversations reveal. It's even far more complicated than what can be included in a HN reply. But I hope I gave a sufficient response than can also point to more information.
Obtaining electricity thanks to industrial renewable (see Lazard's LCOE) is way (and more and more) cheaper than with nuclear.
There are many ways to alleviate unwanted impacts of 'intermittency' (PEM membranes, central plant enabling many sites exposed to different wind regimes to feed it, batteries...)
Hydrogen overproduction (from the grid perspective) isn't a challenge because various industries need huge amounts (~94 millions metric tons/an) of it.
Therefore the 'hydrogen' approach favors renewable sources.
Most of what you are talking about is theoretical and the real costs will become apparent only once someone tries actually doing it. Meanwhile, nuclear power is proven technology for decades, worldwide.
Established by make sure you know the assumptions it makes too. Don't just take data at face value, make sure you know what the data actually is telling you and importantly what it doesn't tell you.
I'm talking about nuclear power plants in general, which have been in use since the '50s. Not a specific type of reactor. If 'it was proven' then I guess France's electricity shouldn't be cheaper than Germany's? Oh wait...
The point is about total cost, and considering all public money invested the French nuclearization isn't a cheaper way. Just compare tax pressure in France and Germany, and their public fundings for the grid.
Moreover in case of any mishap (major accident, hot waste wandering around...) all bets are off.
What tax pressure are you talking about? Germany has higher income tax than France. Also, even if nuclear power is a bit more expensive–why should we race to the bottom price tag when we're trying to fight a climate crisis? Isn't preserving vast natural areas and ecologies (instead of covering them up with solar and wind farms) worth a bit more money? Isn't it worth it to reduce pressure on strip-mining huge amounts of earth to eke out some meagre amounts of minerals for batteries?
> Moreover in case of any mishap
Reactors are designed to shut down (full containment) and have been for many years now, so no 'all bets' are not off. That's just FUD.
All taxes considered (not only income tax)
"the highest shares of taxes and social contributions as a percentage of GDP being recorded in France (48.0 %), Belgium (45.6 %) and Austria (43.6 %)."
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
> Isn't preserving vast natural areas and ecologies (instead of covering them up with solar and wind farms) worth a bit more money?
Indeed, however the burden related to renewable sources is often way less than presented as off-shore wind turbines (globally the biggest reserve) don't use any land and offer sanctuaries to exhausted seas, while solar panels on roofs and agrivoltaics... aren't really a burden, either.
> Isn't it worth it to reduce pressure on strip-mining huge amounts of earth to eke out some meagre amounts of minerals for batteries?
These raw materials have substitutes and they are recycled.
Uranium is a fuel (disappearing gradually), has no substitute, is hardly recycled in practice and as ore grades are diminishing greenhouse-gas emission associated to its obtention will augment.
>> Moreover in case of any mishap
> Reactors are designed to shut down (full containment)
Clearly write: "a major nuclear accident in France is simply absolutely not possible" and everyone knowing about all this will immediately grasp that you don't know what you are writing about. An hydrogen / vapor explosion is possible, and it may let dangerous stuff escape in the wild, and this is true in France. The subject of debate is not this danger but the associated risk (probability and effects of such an events).
Talking about overall tax levels is a red herring. We have to look specifically at the costs of power generation (both internalized and externalized).
> the burden related to renewable sources is often way less than presented
Surely you're joking. Wind turbines are the size of football fields and they basically can't be recycled after their useful lifespan of 20 years. They have to be buried, using up huge amounts of space.
> Uranium is a fuel (disappearing gradually)
Again, I hope you're joking, because leaving aside all the existing uranium mines operating today, even leaving aide the fact that spent fuel can be recycled (and a lot of if is even today!), we know how to extract it from seawater. If you think seawater is a scarce resource, I don't know what to tell you.
> write: "a major nuclear accident in France is simply absolutely not possible" and everyone knowing about all this will immediately grasp that you don't know what you are writing about.
As opposed to writing 'as ore grades are diminishing greenhouse-gas emission associated to its obtention will augment' which is perfectly legible to everyone? Sure dude.
Also, you realize that the burden of proof lies with the person claiming something is possible, because you can't prove a negative, right? You know that's not how the scientific process works, right?
Source? The real TCO isn't. Fact: EDF gobbled during decades public money and various advantages, and is now crushing under a >50 billions € debt
> the carbon intensity of generation is 10 times lower than Germany's
In the 1960's France coal reserves were vanishing (France switched to nuclear) while Germany's were massive (in RDA it was huge). This is the root cause.
Nope. This is now illegal in most nations. Even recyclable blades now exist, and old ones are more and more burnt in cement killns.
> uranium
> spent fuel can be recycled (and a lot of if is even today!)
Nope. Source? Even France doesn't recycle (MOX) more than a few percent, and it only is recyclable once. Industrial real 'eternal' recycling (possible with renewables, as most components such as copper or aluminium are 'infinitely' recyclable at human timescale) of uranium isn't achieved anywhere. If it is, please state where and how.
> we know how to extract it from seawater
This is nothing more than an old dream. Please state (source) where it is, at industrial stage. It simply isn't, anywhere, and all attempts (since the 1970's) failed, and this is a well-know fact. Quote: "pumping the seawater to extract this uranium would need more energy than what could be produced with the recuperated uranium". Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-j2/docs/e...
The remainder being almost entirely fossil fuels including 25.6% from burning coal, largely necessary because Germany chose to phase out nuclear energy.
Electricity is not the whole story either. Renewables accounted for less than 20% of Germany's primary energy consumption in 2023.
The point is, removing the remaining 1/3rd of fossil fuel production becomes a lot harder. The issue is that renewables other than hydro and geothermal are all intermittent. Build as many solar panels as you want, you're not going to satisfy nighttime demand without massive storage facilities.
10 GWh of storage is peanuts. That's what one nuclear plant produces in about 5 hours. The USA uses 500 GWh of electricity per hour.
The first step is just to build enough renewables and enough battery to last one average day. That gets you to 95% of reducing CO2. Then you can think about if it even makes sense to replace those cloudy yet/windless days.
We just need to spend on the most economic places to save CO2.
World electricity consumption is 60,000 GWh per day. "Last one average day" is much greater than existing battery production can satisfy - it's around 40x annual battery production to achieve just 12 hours of storage. And that's ignoring the fact that electric vehicles are consuming the vast majority of battery production. Making any serious efforts towards grid-storage would set back EV adoption.
Using EV as grid storage is not feasible. One, many vehicles are used for business, utilities, and public transit. So they'll be driven during the day, and charged at night. This is going to increase load during hours of non-production, the opposite of storage. Two, no san grid operator is going to accept a situation where much of their storage capacity will just drive away for vacation, or in anticipation of a disaster. The predicted exponential rise is still an order of magnitude less than the scale required, and the vast majority of it is not going to grid storage.
Wind is subject to intermittency, too. It's not a magic bullet that eliminates storage. Unless you're overprovisioning wind by a factor of 10 (in which case it's not cheap anymore), you'll still have weeks-long stretches where there is insufficient energy.
Hydro is really the only non-intermittent carbon-free energy source besides geothermal and nuclear power. The reality is that wind and solar are only cheap in the context of a non-intermittent source that can fill in for the intermittency of renewable production. Running a minority of your grid on solar and wind, supplementing gas plants is one thing. Running a grid mostly wind and solar is totally different beast.
But you can't deny the reality that the electricity supply is rapidly changing and that the issues of non-intermittency are turn out as not so relevant than anticipated. We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to. Batteries are helping us rely less on them and since cost of batteries and PV/wind is trending so strongly down, it is already happening that many markets prefer batteries over using gas/coal plants.
This will push down CO2 emittance. That all that matters really (at reasonable cost).
> We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to.
Not if you want to solve climate change. Reducing emissions to 50% of present levels and then just keeping them there isn't going to prevent climate change. Overproduction during peak hours doesn't help unless you have a way to release that energy in non-peak hours.
Again, growing battery production isn't actually resulting in grid storage. Even dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage isn't going to make significant changes in grid storage, but it will stop EV adoption.
> Sorry this just false. Battery deployment for electricity grid storage is progressing with unprecedented and accelerating speed.
And what, exactly, is that speed? The US plans to deploy "15GW" (presumably the authors mean GWh of storage, GW is not a unit of storage) of grid storage in 2024. That's less than 2 minutes of storage!
Again, global battery production is only about 6-700 GWh (be careful with figures that cite capacity, which is distinct from actual production). And very little of that is dedicated to grid storage.
Those figures are about maximum dispatchable power usually for a time of more than 1 hour (2 to 4 seems typical).
So 16 GW battery allow you to power the US similarly to 3x times the power of the largest US nuclear reactor for probably 3 hours.
If such projects are economically feasible now, the economics are just getting better and better and this means we will see exponential growth. California is seeing improved grid stability and reduction in CO2 emissions due to batteries today.
Somewhere between 4 and 8 minutes worth of storage deployed over the span of a whole year is not even remotely close to feasible. Even diurnal storage to even out solar production will require 8-12 hours worth of storage. Seasonal intermittency will require days or even weeks.
Since 2020, battery prices have gone flat. Moore's law works because computers get faster as transistors get smaller. That's not the case for batteries, or most other goods. A new car cost a million dollars in 1900, $100k in 1910, and $10K in 1920. Would it have been reasonable to assume that a new car would cost $10 by 1950? Of course not, the steel and rubber in the car is worth much more than $10. A car cannot cost less than the input materials used to build it.
I guess, fair amount of NIMBY there (if you don't like wind power next to you, you also don't like storage next to you in a lot of cases), some subsidies might also have had some effects on storage vs production built. Not everything is capital efficient in all places, too, of course.
1) Pump water uphill and let it run downhill. There is a massive amount of viable geography for this all over the world.
2) Batteries
3) Charge more money for electricity so people shift their demand.
4) Make hydrogen, store it and burn it to make the electricity.
Surprisingly, if you only did 4 (which is the most expensive) all of the time for every watt of power generated from solar and wind it would be very expensive, but would still be a bit cheaper than nuclear power. Nuclear power is just that expensive.
And the price only gets more horrendous if you try to use it as a peaker.
It can be solved at continental-level. Germany already sells part of its overproduction (wind, solar...) to Austria and Switzerland, to have it stored by their dams.
Whatever happened to the notion of local/decentralised energy?
Plus it relies on countries at both ends wanting the interconnection. Sweden and Norway are not so happy about other countries taking their hydro energy when it suits the market.
> relies on countries at both ends wanting the interconnection
Exactly as, right now, each and every country in the continental grid sometimes starts a production unit in order to help a neighbor in need. Everyone gains by playing according to this rule.
> taking their hydro energy
Because, right now, the system is far from being complete: not enough production units deployed on the continent, interconnections, lines, storage... This transition, a huge ordeal, is in progress.
> help a neighbor in need. Everyone gains by playing according to this rule.
Not so for Norway, where electrical prices have gone up as a result of all of these inter-connectors and a drought. Norwegian people and businesses have lost out. Politicians have taken note.
> The larger the interconnection the bigger the failure domain
True, however we have to consider the chances of a given proportion of the grid to fail: a more spread-out and heterogeneous (wind, solar...) fleet of production units is way more robust.
> power is political
True, however such incidents are rare (this one dates back from 2018) and their extent more and more reduced as grid-control devices and backup plants are continually enhanced.
As already shown there is no way for nearly all nations to ever hope to obtain an autonomous grid, and even those able to plan on this will obtain a less-robust and more expensive grid. Team play is becomes more and more mandatory and efficient, on all accounts, and bad players may lose the support of the biggest group.
> electrical prices have gone up
Yes, because there now are not enough ways to store, causing some over-pressure on existing ones. Storing in order to sustain the grid when production isn't sufficient only makes sense if we store overproduction, and overproduction remains rare (esp. at continental-level) because way too few renewable are producing. We reached the very first step: more and more overproduced renewable electricity, which triggers investments towards the next step: massive storage. V2G is a major contender.
You need more than that. My memory is that solar needs something like 16 hours of storage assuming perfect weather. And it gets much worse if you don't have perfect weather.
No you don't need more than that because electricity grids do not consist entirely of a single form of generation. Have you considered learning something about this topic before commenting?
Judging from their other comment I think they seem to be some kind of nuclear/anti-environmentalist zealot. In this comment they assumed wind power didn't exist. In the other comment they said that my current electricity tariff (3) would get people lynched and crater the economy rather than getting me to put my laundry, dishwasher and car charger on at a different time of day.
This kind of abject extremism is sadly par for the course on topics like this due to the kind of propaganda that the nuclear industry spews out. It generates zealots.
Yes, obviously I did because you responded to it below.
I find it amusing that when I cited a study that modeled exactly this scenario you poured scorn on it because it was modeled around a specific country. You didn't respond with actual figures demonstrating that this altered the results significantly, you just said "AUSTRALIA EASY MODE".
Seriously?
Yet the guy that presumed that the wind doesnt blow... ever? You didnt respond to that.
It's an interesting insight into the mind of a nuclear activist.
I'm certainly not anti-environment. It's just I recognize that the only path forward that is both possible and not horribly destructive is nuclear. The technology to make renewables practical simply does not exist even on the horizon. The storage problem is always handwaved away with "batteries" or "hydrogen"--the greens never do the numbers because that will expose the fact it doesn't work.
Renewables reduce oil and gas use. Period. You still need just as much generating capacity and you still release a lot of CO2.
And in that other comment what I said is that going pure renewable would get people lynched for how badly they wrecked the economy. The "green" approach is basically "pay no attention to the fact that the storage tech does not exist." In the real world we see it *increasing* emissions. (Shut down nuke, the load falls onto gas because it actually exists.) What would happen to our economy if power was dollars per kWh?? Because that's what it would take to ensure the lights always stay on in a pure renewable environment.
>With that in mind, exactly one year ago I started running a simple simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with approximately five hours of storage
Worst case scenarios can be provisioned for by storing and burning hydrogen.
The roundtrip cost of electricity generated this way is expensive (it's ~50% efficient) but even then it is still cheaper than the cost of baseload nuclear power electricity.
1) Pump what water up what hill? You need vast quantities of water and terrain capable of being dammed at reasonable cost. Few sources of water can be pumped at that rate without causing considerable trouble. And places with lots of water tend to be rather sparse in suitable hills. (If the terrain isn't pretty flat the water runs fast and doesn't stick around to be vast quantities of water.)
2) Not even in the ballpark of economic.
3) You'll really crater our economy, you'll get lynched and people will go back to the old way.
4) You realize the low efficiency of the loop you are proposing and big storage headaches it causes?
And nuclear power isn't "just that expensive". Rather, US nuclear power is by regulation defined as too expensive. There is a horrible provision in the nuclear world: "as low as reasonably achievable." Sounds good, and probably is good in the medical side. But on the power side it inherently defines nuclear as too expensive because if it wasn't too expensive then additional "safety" (which I find questionable, there comes a point where additional "safety" means more to break and thus doesn't really work) would be reasonably achievable.
The Republicans keep crusading about "too much regulation" but because they're not actually interested in the best possible outcome they miss the biggie: We should define that which is say 2x as safe as the status quo is deemed safe enough. And the flip side of this, that which is 2x as dangerous as the status quo is deemed unsafe. (I'd be open to different ratios, I just need to put something down.)
Let's look at the reality.
Nuclear safety? It's about 10x as good as natural gas. (5x if you count Fukushima--but all of those deaths are from the evacuation. Staying put had an expected death toll of zero.)
Natural gas is about 10x as safe as oil.
Oil is about 10x as safe as coal.
Yes--coal is 1000x as dangerous as nuclear.
(And note that these numbers do not include any harms from climate effects and thus are actually an understatement.)
Waste? There are two basic types:
Low-level: stuff that might have been contaminated. Compare it to ambient (things which aren't hotter than ambient shouldn't be treated as nuclear waste) to see if you need to care, usually you don't.
High-level: Yeah, it's hot. Very hot. But we are handling it wrong. The problem is that in the name of preventing proliferation we made reprocessing a dirty word. Plutonium is plutonium, isn't it? No. Bombs need Pu-239 with low amounts of Pu-240. It's extremely hard to make a bomb from reactor plutonium because it's got gobs of Pu-240. Yes, they can be separated--but anybody who can separate them can also separate U-235 from U-238. Pretty much the same thing, it's just the plutonium is 3x harder to separate.
Reprocess the spent fuel. 90% of it goes back into the reactor, even more if you're using a breeder design. Of what's left there are some commercially useful isotopes. Cobalt-60 would be pretty nasty spread over the environment but it's pretty darn good at killing things you really want dead. Say, to make shelf stable meat and dairy products. Once you get done with that you have some actual waste. Which will decay to ambient in 10,000 years and note that most of that decay is in the early part. You simply don't need elaborate precautions.
