> Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar.
I love how the talking point has switched from "storage can't even cover an hour" a couple of years ago to now apparently having trouble with "multiple weeks". How quickly reality shifts.
When we're talking about emergency reserves, because that is what you are trying to paint as the end of the world, then who the fuck cares where it comes from?
Having that problem means that close to 99% of our entire energy system is renewable. The final piece is trivial to solve with synfuels, biofuels, hydrogen or whatever when it is deemed necessary.
In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc. is enough to run the entire grid without any other energy source for 16 days.
That is trivially repurposed as our car fleet is switched to BEVs.
Or just use whatever aviation and the shipping industry settles on as they decarbonize.
> or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
This tells me you don't have the slightest clue how the grid works and are reasoning backwards from attempting to justify a trillion dollar handout to the nuclear industry.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
> In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc.
Just so we're clear ethanol produced from corn is almost the same carbon intensity as the gasoline, and it's worse for the climate when you factor in the land use changes. [1] The whole program was just a giveaway to corn farmers from the Dubyah administration. Even the rosiest image painted by the renewables industry association says it's 26% less carbon intensive (but they neglect land use). Ethanol is basically fossil fuel with extra steps.
Was the carbon emitted from burning this ethanol sequestered in the ground or was it already in the air and is just cycling the same amount of carbon involved the atmosphere?
You can look at the linked study, it's a complicated topic but this is net carbon add. It's a combination of the fossil fuel based fertilizers, tractor fuel, moving the corn around, processing the corn into starch, fermenting the starch and moving the end product to blending sites. It also includes carbon released due to changes in land use.
> Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity
With nuclear power, there's no such thing as 'too much'. It's economically optimal to produce flat out ("baseload") because continued production really is "too cheap to meter", as the saying goes. The cost is pretty much all in the plant itself, which is why a lot of research into next-gen nuclear is about building smaller and cheaper plants.
> But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed
Yes? That's how a "baseload" source works. And we should not pretend that intermittent renewable sources aren't going to have the exact same issue, only to a far greater extent (especially as they scale out to "99%" of the system). You can address this by not putting all your eggs in the intermittent basket.
So what happens when you stick two French grids next to each other and you can't rely on your neighbors fossil fuel plants to absorb your over production by throttling down?
The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now.
You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver.
Here's a history refresher:
The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors
Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so
How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum?
The cost for the nuclear plants themselves is exactly the same, it's just no longer offsetting expensive non-renewable sources. Intermittent renewables run into this issue to a far greater extent as they scale out, because their variable cost is higher.
If you've decided to build a nuclear plant already (and there are plenty of reasons for such a choice - for one thing, it adds diversity to the mix when combined with intermittent renewables) that energy is no longer "horrifically expensive", it's already paid for. If you're worried about "producing too much" (which could happen with either nuclear or renewables), putting it in storage makes sense.
Again, you don't seem to comprehend how the grid works.
Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid. Both renewable power and nuclear power competes for the most inflexible portion of the grid. A fight renewables win hands down and nuclear power is forced to throttle down.
What happens when nuclear power is forced to throttle down? It becomes more expensive due to being nearly 100% CAPEX.
Like I said, Vogtle costs 20 cents/kWh running at full tilt. Somewhere at 40 cents/kWh running half the time.
Do you notice how many instances last week renewables supplied 100% of the grid load? Mind that this is late winter in Australia.
What do you do with your nuclear plant all those hours? Shut it down? Bid negative to make renewables shut down?
In Australia old traditional base load coal plants are forced to become peakers or be decommissioned. That is the reality today. In South Australia coal plants were phased out in 2016.
> Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid.
A heavily renewable grid is in trouble whenever the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. A heavily nuclear grid is in trouble whenever demand happens to exceed the limited amount of baseload it can provide. These events tend to be uncorrelated, so one can expect that adding some nuclear to a heavily renewable grid (and vice versa) will save a lot on costly "grid stabilization" services from peaker plants and/or grid-level storage.
A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense. But its "baseload" profile seems to provide an attractive bundle of bulk supply plus some amount of stabilization compared to a "99%" intermittent renewable mix. Why shouldn't we try to reduce the high variable costs of storage and peaker plants to whatever extent turns out to be feasible?
Renewables are far better at throttling than nuclear or any other technology.
It's maybe the most consistently misinterpreted fact in the renewables debate.
I put this down to years of headlines about negative prices "caused by" solar, and when you go and look at the stats, there's always fossil plants running for contractual or operational reasons.
But also to a bizarre fear of negative numbers.
Running nuclear full out and using low or even negative prices when required to incentivize people to shift demand to match supply is a far saner, cheaper, cleaner way to run a grid, yet we have people celebrating the opposite.
You of course have not heard about storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
> These events tend to be uncorrelated,
Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
It does not seem like you did dare to look at the South Australian example. Again:
How will you run your nuclear plant in a grid that daily is ran to 100% by renewables?
> A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense.
Now you are making up something because you can't accept that nuclear power does not solve the problem at hand.
There you have a coal plant shutting down daily with all the thermal stresses and cycles coupled with that because otherwise they would have to bid negative.
In Europe we see nuclear plants voluntarily time and time again withdrawing from the grids due to sustained low prices.
You try to shift words and meanings to step around the question of who pays. But all you do is force people to spend 20 cents/kWh, excluding transmission costs, on horrifically expensive nuclear power.
You reason like an engineer trying to design an imaginary perfect system not seeing the forest for the trees, or caring the slightest about the cost to the end user.
That can be a fun thought exercise, but reality will laugh you out of the room.
> storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
How is storage "exploding globally" when the bulk of long-term grid storage is still provided by pumped hydro, a technology that's built out? Short-term high-flow storage can be interesting in combination with any inflexible source (either nuclear or intermittent renewables - for one thing, it can solve the "plant has to shut down and restart every day" point you mention) but is only a small part of the problem.
> Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
The point is that the correlation may be imperfect enough that nuclear can meaningfully contribute to addressing that problem, whereas extending intermittent renewables to "99%" of the grid cannot. (To be sure, there's also some limited upside from diversifying the geography of renewable sources, but that doesn't extend to anywhere near "99%".) If a shortfall remains, it can be made up by some combination of rarely-operated peaker plants with cheaper CAPEX, plus some demand response/load shedding, especially from industry.
Your link says "battery storage and pumped hydro will have complimentary roles to play - batteries focusing on the flexibility and speed and ability to provide system services, and pumped hydro on dealing with longer storage requirements, such as extended periods of low wind and solar output." It acknowledges that battery electric storage is short-term only, meant to smooth out daily peaks.
At current costs batteries are best suited for daily cycling. A few years ago batteries were best suited for multiple cycles per day on the ancillary markets.
Given the recent auctions in China we are starting to see batteries where a cycle every second or third day is enough.
It is essentially optimistic technobabble for the technology losing out about a potential issue coming in 10-15 years as we decarbonize.
Please do explain why we should lock in a solution for that today instead of solving it with the technology at hand when we get there.
The final few percentage points of reserves are almost all that matters to reliable grid operation. This can mean many things including load shedding even.
If you decided fuel costs were exactly zero for emergency reserves you would still have those being by far the largest cost contributor to the grid as a whole. Building plants that can basically cover your entire peak load and letting them sit idle is insanely expensive and would be the most subsidized form of generation on earth.
Not building them would be horrifically irresponsible.
I’ve always been talking about seasonal storage as the actual problem that matters with intermittent generation. A week long power outage for a region is a society killer if it happens with any regular frequency.
The only time I’ve ever brought up nightly storage is in the context of upper middle class folks using the grid as a free nightly battery and outsourcing their costs onto poor people - then commonly bragging about it. I would love to see net metering killed once a local grid gets above a certain inflection point of solar generation, and then only hourly market based pricing offered to anyone who wants to remain grid-tied. The market dynamics would then sort themselves out.
The rooftop solar subsidies only make sense to bootstrap an industry.
We should have been building all forms of power generation and storage over the past few decades instead of relying on inertia from the responsible generations of people that came before us. That inertia is rapidly running out, and cheap tricks like efficiency gains are no longer low hanging fruit.
As previously stated though - residential usage is not that interesting as a whole. Industrial usage is and commonly glossed over in these discussions.
Grid-tied BEVs are a laughable solution. It ignores any sort of human agency. When the grid goes down, people are not going to keep their only form of transportation plugged in for the common good. If anything they will top it off and keep it so until grid stability returns further straining a creaky grid. Again, it only solves the relatively easy problem of residential reliability and only for relatively wealthy folks.
I love how the talking point has switched from "storage can't even cover an hour" a couple of years ago to now apparently having trouble with "multiple weeks". How quickly reality shifts.
When we're talking about emergency reserves, because that is what you are trying to paint as the end of the world, then who the fuck cares where it comes from?
Having that problem means that close to 99% of our entire energy system is renewable. The final piece is trivial to solve with synfuels, biofuels, hydrogen or whatever when it is deemed necessary.
In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc. is enough to run the entire grid without any other energy source for 16 days.
That is trivially repurposed as our car fleet is switched to BEVs.
Or just use whatever aviation and the shipping industry settles on as they decarbonize.
> or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
This tells me you don't have the slightest clue how the grid works and are reasoning backwards from attempting to justify a trillion dollar handout to the nuclear industry.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.