I think you're overstating the provenness of renewables. There's a lot of support infrastructure that hasn't been invented that is required to produce the roughly 3 terawatt average per day as well as the storage for the daily cycle.
I also think your overstating the risk involved in nuclear power. Even fukushima was pretty tame, and unlike Japan the USA has lots of relatively uninhabited real estate we can put the plants on.
Cost is one factor. Location is another. Reliability another. Risk another. Nuclear is a system of tradeoffs that is very hopeful for fighting emissions.
Of course this is all moot since even if the USA and Europe went to zero emissions, we won't make a dent in climate change. The developing world must be addressed with at least as much urgency as the West must be addressed.
> There's a lot of support infrastructure that hasn't been invented that is required to produce the roughly 3 terawatt average per day as well as the storage for the daily cycle.
On the contrary, two solutions already exist.
Batteries are expensive, but (IIRC) still cheaper than nuclear, though more expensive than fossil fuels.
And the losses of planet-scale grids are small compared to the cost-advantage that solar has. You could literally power your home at night from the sun hitting the other side of the planet. (That said, I have no idea what the Installation or maintenance or political costs are, only the efficiency).
> the losses of planet-scale grids are small compared to the cost-advantage that solar has. You could literally power your home at night from the sun hitting the other side of the planet.
You're comparing apples and widgets. The losses of planet-scale grids are way too large to make it even feasible to power your home at night from the other side of the planet: not enough power would be left by the time it got to you. The cost is irrelevant.
“””the authors measured the corona loss of a 765kV, 3 phase, and bundled transmission line to be about 1.87kW/km in fair weather. This amounts to only about a 0.083% loss over a 1000km line. In bad weather, however, the authors measured the loss to be 84.3kW/km, or about a 3.7% loss.””” - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/
3.7% loss = (100-3.7)/100 multiplier per 1000km = 0.963
Half world circumstance = 20,000km -> 0.963^20 = ~0.47 multiplier
-> 2.155 cents per 0.47 kWh = 4.5 cents per kWh from the opposite point of the planet, assuming the worst case studied in the first link on the entire route.
It could be 80% losses (0.2 kWh receives for every 1 kWh produced) and still be effective both from ‘cost’ and ‘maximum possible power output’ perspectives.
Ignoring that major oversight, transmission lines aren’t free and they require upkeep so building/maintaining them across the ocean needs to be factored into your costs.
It’s like claiming it’s cheaper to have sushi flown in from Japan everyday if you just ignore the air freight cost.
Yes that was a silly omission. However, adding resistive losses doesn’t change the conclusion because the margin is so large (it does make it much closer though). And this is ignoring that the line losses we see now are based on the most cost-effective designs for nation-scale grids, when one can straightforwardly (for example) use a higher voltage for lower resistive losses (no point reducing those losses further on nation-scale grids), or even use existing medium-temperature superconductors, which is thing but not widely used for power yet.
And I literally acknowledged that I was excluding the cost, financial and political, of building and maintaining the lines in my first post on this thread.
I ignored those costs because my argument is, and always was, that solutions already exist. That the line losses — large as they are for a worldwide grid — are not a fundamental problem. It’s not like we can’t build pylons or have yet to invent a way to join wires together after they come out of a factory.
And we already have a lot of national scale grids, how hard is to join the existing ones together? Sure, it’s a bit close when comparing 2.155 cents per kWh * 20% line efficiency (which is worse than even my updated estimate!) to fossil, but that’s also your midnight cost, when you use least.
If you have the power to just throw out costs as a concern, then we’ve had a solution for much longer. Geothermal.
>And we already have a lot of national scale grids, how hard is to join the existing ones together?
Very. We haven’t even managed to get the US on a national grid. To connect continents is just fantasy at this point. Do you realize the undertaking it would be to get 700kv line to Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, etc?
I also think your overstating the risk involved in nuclear power. Even fukushima was pretty tame, and unlike Japan the USA has lots of relatively uninhabited real estate we can put the plants on.
Cost is one factor. Location is another. Reliability another. Risk another. Nuclear is a system of tradeoffs that is very hopeful for fighting emissions.
Of course this is all moot since even if the USA and Europe went to zero emissions, we won't make a dent in climate change. The developing world must be addressed with at least as much urgency as the West must be addressed.