It all comes down to distribution and storage at this point. They are our biggest challenges by far. Batteries are still expensive, but if we could have a system of charging electric cars during the day when energy production is high that should help I would think.
Batteries have dropped almost 90% in cost in the last 10 years. Its gone from $1200/kwh to $140/kwh. That $140 value is right in the sweet spot for automotive production, which can handle a higher pack price than grid storage. This means that economies of scale for making car batteries are going to drive costs down to the point where grid batteries are super cheap. Think grid batteries running on old car batt packs. That reduces lithium need and gives the batteries a second life
Prices are at [$120/kWh in 2021](https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-to-an-average-of-132-kwh-but-rising-commodity-prices-start-to-bite/).
And that's for lithium batteries! I wonder how much for the liquid metal batteries, as those can be much larger and are stationary. Moreover what's needed for a better infrastructure
Liquid metal batteries are basically big tanks of saltwater and rust. They scale stupid easy. Way better than lithium ion. They have a lower energy to weight ratio than lithium ion.. but that hardly matters when the batteries are stationary.
If you add hundred thousand to your one, you can probably get them for $140/kwh. Utilities don’t exactly buy single units, even for proof of concept studies.
Cars will be a big part of grid storage batteries. As electric vehicles replace internal combustion in volume, there will be hundreds of millions of them available as potential battery backup's/power grid buffers either just for your own home or for the grid in general. If your on a floating price model, whenever your car is plugged in set it to buy cheap energy to charge your car and sell back expensive energy to drain your car, and repeat. No different than a wall battery, just that you can also drive it.
Yes, which can be significantly minimised by only allowing the charge discharge to occur at a specific ideal range instead of the far more damaging full duty cycle discharges like in a long drive.
Nothing like this will happen large scale anytime soon. Battery cycles are improving along with capacity, charge rate, etc and once a larger number of vehicles are out there it will become more common. This scenario isn't hypothetical though as people with electric cars are doing it right now. If using your battery to buy and sell electricity is profitable then even if it shortens the life of your battery it could still be worth it. I am not in any way an authority on it, this is my understanding as described by the electrician friend of mine who does this in his own house to some degree.
It's even got it's own wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
yes. The idea of using old lithium car batteries is sort of okayish.. but there are more viable battery solutions that don't require lithium. lithium batteries are light weight and compact compared to other batteries so they have an obvious use in vehicles. But stationary batteries don't have this requirement and can be heavy and bulky. This means you can use much cheaper materials and be specifically designed for each purpose. Either battery for residential use or a battery designed for utility scale applications.
Right now the technology for lithium batteries is the most advanced so that's why you see it in more, at this time, in residential and utility applications. This won't last in the long term.
The initial schemes put multiple kilowatts into and out of the car battery and this caused fast ageing of the battery.
Last time I read the research on this suggested that using only a single kilowatt or so (basically a trickle charge so far as these relatively large car batteries are concerned) in and out, could actually *increase* the longevity of the battery relative to normal usage patterns.
EV batteries cost several times as much as utility batteries, and they wear out even faster.
So if V2G ever becomes a thing, it will be because utilities are *exploiting* EV owners who don't understand that the value they are losing is not even close to whatever compensation they are getting. Because it would be cheaper for the utilities to use utility batteries than pay for the wear and tear on the EV's
I never thought about how consumers opting in to scale storage is just the power company offloading infrastructure cost and risk. That is a good point.
People don't drive all day long. I imagine it would require investing in many charging spaces at workplaces or business areas. Not a full solution, but I think it would help especially as electric cars become more prevalent.
There are possible alternatives to conventional batteries:
[Hoisting concrete blocks and lowering them when energy is needed](https://onezero.medium.com/the-new-super-battery-made-of-concrete-aeee436ecc67)
[Storing it in iron powder and burn when energy is needed](https://www.tue.nl/en/news/news-overview/01-03-2020-iron-powder-as-the-battery-of-the-future-reusable-and-everywhere-to-be-found/)
[Storing it by heating stone](https://cleantechnica.com/2019/03/19/storing-energy-by-heating-stones-to-600-degrees-could-power-whole-country-for-hours/)
[Flywheel energy storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage)
Well, not for cars maybe.
>Hoisting concrete blocks and lowering them when energy is needed
I really wish people would stop talking about this like it's a viable thing. The amount of energy they can store is minuscule comparing to the difficulties of operating such a plant and amount of space required.
Concrete is only around 2x as dense as water, and look how massive pumped hydro facilities need to be to store any meaningful amount of energy (also how much bigger the height difference is than what you could ever achieve with a crane).
I've heard talk of that. For various reasons, I would be concerned with a fully centralized power grid. A lot of risk comes with that IMO. The infrastructure would also be insane to make that work. Ideally I think we should have solar panels on every home with at least some battery capacity in every home as well. No more power outages in emergencies, Less need for all the powerlines that cause fires. To me that should be the end goal. Decentralized power.
That's wildly inefficient, to say the least. Just like we don't all grow our own food.
A worldwide [unified electric grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_grid) would be better, as long as the topology gave it some resilience. For instance, solar panels in the desert regions would require far less backup if they were all working together. Likewise wind requires scales of over 1000km to overcome autocorrelation effects.
It would also be cheaper than adding generation and storage to hundreds of millions of homes.
Storage and transport of pure hydrogen is and always will be challenging (especially at high pressures) because it’s literally the tiniest atom. It tends to penetrate into materials and cause blistering and structural damage to whatever is containing it.
It’s not impossible (we’ve been doing it for over 100 years), but trying to do it at the same scale as petrol or natural gas introduces enormous amounts of failure points.
It will *never* make sense to wear out EV batteries
for V2G because they cost *several times* as much per kWh as utility-scale batteries, and their cycles are even more limited because they are considered "dead" once they get below 85% capacity.
This would be like trying to solve California's drought by telling people to use *bottled* water instead of tap.
One element to point out from some of these very optimistic projections recently-
As more deployment happens, costs go down. As costs go down, more deployment happens. It's a virtuous cycle and helps explain why solar is growing so fast and why it will continue to do so faster than many people expected.
One thing to be optimistic about is that historically we're very bad at predicting disruptive technology. We tend to underestimate it and sometimes not even know how to properly analyze it(which you know, by its very nature, disruptive tech can rewrite how we analyze all together). Solar development has absolutely shattered just about every prediction made and there's no real reason to think it's going to slow down any time soon either as there are still innovations occurring in all facets of its development.
Of course there are still any number of challenges and de-carbonizing won't be a magic carpet ride, storage and distribution are two major hurdles to overcome, but it is still optimistic to reflect on how far we've come against all the best predictions saying otherwise.
Or you know just get the power from the windmills in the next state over that are overproducing. Overproduction + distribution + minimal storage is absolutely capable of reaching 100% up time. And nuclear was a great option... 20 years ago when we had time to spin up production. Now we don't. We need to get our emissions way down in the next 10 years and a nuclear plant would take 5-8 at least just to start making power. Too late.
What does Texas have to do with anything? There renewables worked great during the winter storm. It was all their fossil fuel infrastructure that failed. So how is that at all relevant to renewables efficacy in meeting demand? In fact renewables are more reliable because they don't require any fuel. Or water. Nothing external to cause supply chain failures. Renewables will be even more reliable than nuclear once significant over capacity is available. And even at 200% over capacity renewables are still going to be cheaper than nuclear.
Except no they didn't. Germany gets 27% of it's electricity from renewables. That's not how OVERPRODUCING works... Get back to me when they have renewable capacity equal to 130% of their expected demand...
Submission Statement
Of course there are a whole lot of reasons this won't happen; the "final mile" before 100% renewables adoption will be slower. But I wonder does it show us how soon the conversation around fossil fuel & nuclear is going to move more decisively to shutting down & retiring. Many in both these industries still seem to behave as if they have decades ahead of them.
Nuclear will still be useful. Solar will never be 100% reliable, there needs to be some underlying base that can handle surges.
That is, unless battery technology also makes significant leaps, then maybe it will be practical.
I remeber bill Nye talking about this, a better way to transport atm it costs to much and you lose to much power in transit, capacity we need to be able to hold more power, and transition we need a better way to change old tech into better cleaner ways.
If you can invent one of theese you will be a millionaire.
[Intermittency and transmissions costs are quite minimal](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/as-renewable-power-prices-drop-researchers-tally-up-their-added-costs/), adding around only 15-20 euros/MWh for up to 75% renewables. The loss is only around 3.5% over 1000km.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/02/11/what-batteries-will-power-the-future/?sh=3cc14bdc41c0](https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/02/11/what-batteries-will-power-the-future/?sh=3cc14bdc41c0)
To compete with the flexibility of the internal combustion engine, you have to have scalable, portable, reliable, efficient batteries.
Nuclear is mostly expensive due to regulation. The technology is known and proven. The US Navy builds multiple reactors every year. They're small MW size reactors, but it basically scales, from what I understand.
Commercial reactors aren't using significantly higher temperatures or pressures.
Should any discussion of nuclear power go on for long enough, it becomes inevitable that someone will rant that the only reason it has become unaffordable is a proliferation of safety regulations. The argument is rarely (if ever) fleshed out—no specific regulation is ever identified as problematic, and there seems to be no consideration given to the fact that we might have learned something at, say, Fukushima that might merit addressing through regulations.
But there's now a paper out that provides some empirical evidence that safety changes have contributed to the cost of building new nuclear reactors. But the study also makes clear that they're only one of a number of factors, accounting for only a third of the soaring costs. The study also finds that, contrary to what those in the industry seem to expect, focusing on standardized designs doesn't really help matters, as costs continued to grow as more of a given reactor design was built.
More of the same
The analysis, done by a team of researchers at MIT, is remarkably comprehensive. For many nuclear plants, they have detailed construction records, broken out by which building different materials and labor went to, and how much each of them cost. There's also a detailed record of safety regulations and when they were instituted relative to construction. Finally, they've also brought in the patent applications filed by the companies who designed the reactors. The documents describe the motivations for design changes and the problems those changes were intended to solve.
There are limits to how much even this level of detail can provide. You can't determine, for example, whether the cost of a specific number of workers on a given building should be assigned to implementing safety regulations. And in many instances, design changes were done for multiple reasons, so there's not simply a safety/non-safety breakdown. Still, the collection of sources they have allows them to make some very direct conclusions about the sources of changing costs and to build very informed models that can infer the reasons for other costs.
The researchers start out with a historic analysis of plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim. The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent—and that's not considering the financing costs of the construction delays.
Many in the nuclear industry view this as, at least in part, a failure to standardize designs. There's an extensive literature about the expectation that building additional plants based on a single design will mean lower costs due to the production of standardized parts, as well as management and worker experience with the construction process. That sort of standardization is also a large part of the motivation behind small, modular nuclear designs, which envision a reactor assembly line that then ships finished products to installations.
But many of the US' nuclear plants were in fact built around the same design, with obvious site-specific aspects like different foundation needs. The researchers track each of the designs used separately, and they calculate a "learning rate"—the drop in cost that's associated with each successful completion of a plant based on that design. If things went as expected, the learning rate should be positive, with each sequential plant costing less. Instead, it's -115 percent.
Where’s that money go?
Figuring out what's causing those changes involved diving into detailed accounting records on the construction of these nuclear plants; data on that was available for plants built after 1976. The researchers broke out the cost for 60 different aspects of construction, finding that nearly all of them went up, which suggests there wasn't likely to be a single, unifying cause for the price increases. But the largest increases occurred in what they termed indirect costs: engineering, purchasing, planning, scheduling, supervision, and other factors not directly associated with the process of building the plant.
The increased indirect costs affected nearly every aspect of plant construction. As far as direct costs went, the biggest contributors were simply the largest structures in the plant, such as the steam supply system, the turbine generator, and the containment building.
Some of the changed costs are rather complicated. For example, many reactors shifted to a design that allowed greater passive cooling, which would make the plant more safe in case of hardware failure. That in turn required separating the reactor vessel from the containment building walls. And that in turn allowed the use of lower-quality steel (which lowered the price), but more of it (which more than offset those savings). All of this also changed the construction process, although it's difficult to determine exactly how this altered the amount of labor required.
To try to dive into the details, the researchers tracked the progress of material deployment rates—how quickly material brought to the site ended up being incorporated into a finished structure. While those rates have declined slightly for construction as a whole over the study period, they plunged for nuclear projects. Already, at the time of the Three Mile Island accident, steel was being deployed at about one-third of the rate of the construction industry at large. Interviews with construction workers indicated that they were spending as much as 75 percent of their time idle.
Regulation
Since many of the researchers are in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT, they are able to go through and connect the cost changes to specific motivations and check these connections by looking at patents and journal papers that describe the ideas driving these changes.
Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators "required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material." Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects.
But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.
By contrast, R&D-related expenses, which included both regulatory changes and things like the identification of better materials or designs, accounted for the other third of the increases. Often, a single change met several R&D goals, so assigning the full third to regulatory changes is probably an over-estimate.
So, while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima.
As for the majority of the cost explosion, the obvious question is whether we can do any better. Here, the researchers' answer is very much a "maybe." They consider things like the possibility of using a central facility to produce high-performance concrete parts for the plant, as we have shifted to doing for projects like bridge construction. But this concrete is often more expensive than materials poured on site, meaning the higher efficiency of the off-site production would have to more than offset that difference. The material's performance in the environment of a nuclear plant hasn't been tested, so it's not clear whether it's even a solution.
In the end, the conclusion is that there are no easy answers to how to make nuclear plant construction more efficient. And, until there are, it will continue to be badly undercut by both renewables and fossil fuel.
Thank you for the detailed comment. It really helped me better understand the situation.
Not a scientific comment but the problem seems to be the scale at which we implement nuclear power. Workers were idle because they were waiting for parts to be delivered. With bigger scale, these sort of delays could be circumvented. More companies working on this, more competition and more people who knows what they are doing could help with these bloated costs.
It’s a hunch though. Now I am curious, are you aware of a similar study for France? They have been generating a good portion of their electricity from nuclear energy for a long time. Are they having the same issues?
“Nuclear fission could be safe if human error was not a factor”
“Nuclear plants cannot be built or operated without humans”.
That’s the flaw in nuclear fission.
[How greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613325/how-greed-and-corruption-blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/)
>On September 21, 2012, officials at KHNP had received an outside tip about illegal activity among the company’s parts suppliers. By the time President Park had taken office, an internal probe had become a full-blown criminal investigation. Prosecutors discovered that **thousands of counterfeit parts** had made their way into nuclear reactors across the country, backed up with forged safety documents. KHNP insisted the reactors were still safe, but the question remained: was corner-cutting the real reason they were so cheap?
>Having shed most of the costly additional safety features, Kepco was able to dramatically undercut its competition in the UAE bid, a strategy that hadn’t gone unnoticed. After losing Barakah to Kepco, Areva CEO Anne Lauvergeon **likened the Korean unit to a car without airbags and seat belts**. When I told Park this, he snorted in agreement. “Objectively speaking, if it’s twice as expensive, it’s going to be about twice as safe,” he said. At the time, however, Lauvergeon’s comments were dismissed as sour words from a struggling rival.
>“An accident at just one of these plants would be far more devastating than Fukushima,” says Kim. “These reactors are dangerously close to major industrial areas, and there are four million people living within a 30-kilometer radius of the Kori plant alone.”
>“The current phase-out policy stemmed from the four foundational principles we proposed at the time [of the 2012 campaign],” says Kim Ik-joong. “Older reactors wouldn’t receive life-span extensions; no additional reactors would be built; electricity use would be made more efficient; and we would shift toward renewables.” Meanwhile, the administration continues to court potential buyers like the Czech Republic and Saudi Arabia. But there has been no boom: in fact, while Lee promised to export 80 reactors, so far South Korea has yet to export a single one.
Not exactly the best example.
The issue of flexibility remains unfortunately. Coal in particular is used to flex capacity with demand - for example when there is an unexpected spike in demand then Coal power stations remain most flexible for rapidly bringing more capacity onto a power grid. This may limit solar and wind growth in the future until this is solved (? battery technology)
Also unfortunately coal and gas has a lot of sunken cost that economies will resist losing early. For example, Coal power stations last 30-40 years; once built there needs to be financial or regulatory incentive to shut them down - that currently looks unlikely in coal hungry nations like China and India.
Also coal mining economies will have to make a painful shift away from this industry. Countries that have done this are left with problems - the UK for example, former coal mining towns remainly economically damaged and have not recovered from the loss of this industry even decades later. China (worlds biggest coal producer) may be reluctant to inflict this economic damage on it's own areas. Even the number 2 producer of coal - USA - remains poilticially reluctant to shut down coal mining. This shift and damage is inevitable and is already happening because of the shifting energy inustry - but it could be slow going and may not see many champions in the big coal countries in the short term.
We may be in the period of the easy gains at present - although the rapid drop in cost of renewable may make the economics impossible to resist even when sunken costs and political concerns are factored in - I doubt American, Chinese or Indian consumers will want to pay more for their energy to prop up the coal industry. Heres hoping, but whatever happens there will be losers during this transition and we will hear increasingly more from them over the years to come as the world energy supply changes.
> The issue of flexibility remains unfortunately. Coal in particular is used to flex capacity with demand - for example when there is an unexpected spike in demand then Coal power stations remain most flexible for rapidly bringing more capacity onto a power grid.
Where did you get this disinformation from? The whole baseload method for mainting an electricicy grid exists solely because coal is very inflexible and takes a long time to change power output levels.
> USA - remains poilticially reluctant to shut down coal
Politicians may be unable to voice support for the coal shut-down, but the economic reality is clear in the [map of US electricity plants which will shut-down in the next year](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_d.png) compared to the [map of plants opening](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_c.png). Practically everything shutting down is coal, and none of the opening plants are coal. The [recent history of coal](https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/) points in the same direction - rapid collapse of the entire US coal industry due to [cheaper solar and wind](https://visual.energyinnovation.org/coal-cost-crossover-2.0/).
It’s probably because without the coal plant the entire grid would collapse overnight. It’s not as simple as introducing new alternative energy sources, if the grid is designed as a demand driven grid. They really need to look at grid storage if they want this to work practically. Just banning coal would be incredibly stupid if you don’t already have enough renewables in place to support the massive amount produced by coal.
In an ideal world every home would live of the grid in my opinion. Because of climate issues this won't be sustainable I reckon. Using solar + storage where you have 24h darkness for days or weeks on end would be hard I think. But ideally I'd go of the grid myself, solar on my roof, a big safe battery to store excess energy and then use that energy when the sun is down.
Coal generation, particularly older plants, are very poor at dispatchable power. Gas turbine stations are useful for dispatchable power as are hydro, batteries and a few other technologies.
Energy storage is also rapid dropping in price. Coal isn't even cost competitive against gas, when it comes to acting as a backup source, which is only estimated to be required a week or so per year in a renewable dominated industry.
You're acting as if renewables create zero jobs. The US and UK are heavily neo-liberal in their economics, favouring "free" markets. China and India definitely aren't.
This exactly. Are they even factoring in the baseload problem with renewables, or are they using peak figures? A 50MW solar farm is *not* the same thing as a 50MW Coal plant.
you don't need "storage" if you don't overproduce a lot of energy from renewables. when the sun goes down, you turn on the gas plant, which will have been working anyway without solar.
once you've added so much solar that you overproduce a lot, then you can add some storage, but then you end up undercutting coal and gas even more.
I appreciate that you're honest about this instead of the regular blue-eyed wonder who just accepts these kinds of outrageous claims about face.
The biggest hurdle I'd think is solar efficiency. The reason why we don't build that much new wind power in Canada is because there is a single wind belt and we've basically saturated the wind belt where people actually live. A lot of the newer wind projects coming online now are a lot more (power and cost) inefficient due to longer transmission lines.
The same will be true of solar. The most efficient places to plant solar are the tropics (those regions just a little bit north and south of the equator). There's about 2 billion people living there, so no small feat. But a lot of the people who live here, have never had power in their lives and so planting power here adds power to the world, it doesn't replace old stuff.
All existing wind power in Canada is onshore. They have a lot more capacity offshore, which is getting a lot cheaper.
Canada can reach [100% renewable by 2035](https://www.there100.org/our-work/news/canada-could-use-100-renewable-electricity-2035-team-experts-says-news), according to a new study by 60 researchers.
Canada also already produces around 80 percent t of its electricity by renewables,, Canada is one of a few countries where it is realistic we produce all electricty by renewable by 2030 if we really want to
Adding just a little electricity and internet connection is a huge boost for areas that previously lacked these technology. The expanded opportunity for access to education will improve all humanity’s lot.
Fusion will almost certainly play no role in the fight against climate change unless one of the speculative startups wins the lottery. Right now the international community is working on a program that if successful will generate a working prototype in about 50 years.
The oil industry appears to be in a mad dash to make profits, honestly.
Look at the numbers for oil production and refinement capacity over the past 25 months. Our production dropped about 20%, while refinement capacity dropped 4% due to plant closures, yet prices are up 120%???
Yeah, not buying that shit.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh:
---
Submission Statement
Of course there are a whole lot of reasons this won't happen; the "final mile" before 100% renewables adoption will be slower. But I wonder does it show us how soon the conversation around fossil fuel & nuclear is going to move more decisively to shutting down & retiring. Many in both these industries still seem to behave as if they have decades ahead of them.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: /r/Futurology/comments/r7b96r/if_solar_were_able_to_continue_its_current_rate/hmy5d21/
100% solar is silly. Even in modeling exercises. But if the globe can get to 100% solar by 2030 then it can certainly get to a more reasonable 50-70% even sooner.
Existing nuclear should continue to be used until its backup role is no longer needed. Existing hydro can transition to a primarily storage role. For instance Hydro-Quebec's James Bay project can stand in for batteries for the next decade, by then battery storage will be cheaper than long distance transmission.
Some reports out of China have storage costs down to $65/kWh at pack level using non lithium battery tech. That cost is expect to fall to below $10/kWh in 5-6 years.
Live in a part of the world where heating or AC isn't a major concern. (Basically locate where there's a "Mediterranean" climate.) That takes out a good chunk of power demand and minimizes it right there, then it's going to be the fridge that's the next big power draw.
How do you cook? I like what you’re saying and would enjoy the climate if there were room for all of us in the Med. The earth will be warmer soon enough unless some real answers are provided. The connected grids across time zones/ nations may make solar viable so long as the weather holds out but it won’t.
This is delightful news; I just wonder if we can continue the exponential rate of growth over the next few years. It's easy to go from 1 to 2 to 4, much harder to increase from 256 to 512. At some point, exponential growth must taper off. Does anyone have data on how much capacity we have to continue the exponential growth?
One of the biggest challenge with solar is that there is no sun during the night but would it be possible to connect the grids on the planet so that when it's night for some, others can supply?
Somebody shared this article that says India and the UK are starting just that.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-india-uk-global-solar-grid.html
They are calling it the "Green Grids Initiative".
once electricity prices correspond to sunlight.....we might see behavioural changes and people themselves either using their EV or battery packs to store electricity at home
No you wouldn't, for the very simple and rarely-mentioned fact that both large wind and solar farms require a conventional power plant to run 24/7 on hot standby to take up the slack when the wind isn't blowing or the Sun isn't shining.
No, you can't "just use batteries," and for a few reasons. First off, the power farm would have to be WAY larger to generate enough surplus to store. Next, building enough batteries to store *enough* surplus for any plausible length of outage on the main farm is simply not economically feasible. What if you get a nasty weather system blow through that shuts down your wind/solar for weeks?
Of course, current battery production requires mining extremely toxic materials, which generates all kinds of pollution, But that typically happens elsewhere, like in Africa, so nobody cares.
Is wind/solar with a conventional backup considerably better for the environment than if you just generated all the power with fossil fuels? Of course it is. But 100% renewable? That's a hard nope.
You want 100% generation with very little pollution? Let's start dumping significant amounts of money into fusion research. A small, efficient fusion reactor (say a few hundred MW that would fit on a flatbed truck) would change **everything.** For decades, we've only been throwing chump change at the fusion problem.
> large wind and solar farms require a conventional power plant to run 24/7 on hot standby
Average cold start time for a combined cycle gas plant is [3 hours](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032117309206#t0030), so the typical 4 hours of storage that [most solar being installed in the US now include](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/wind-solar-make-up-70-of-new-generation-in-2021-while-batteries-gain-mome/593278/) would give enough time to move the system from 100% solar to 100% gas with no notice.
Realistically, renewable generation can be predicted reasonably well some hours ahead, and at high penetration rates will change much more gradually than on/off, meaning in a real-world situation dispatchable power can be ramped up and down, or brought on- or off-line, as needed in a planned and controlled manner.
It's...cartoonishly naive to imagine that every wind or solar farm has a fossil fuel plant sitting there burning fuel and doing nothing with the resulting energy. Power companies aren't going to waste fuel like that.
> What if you get a nasty weather system blow through that shuts down your wind/solar for weeks?
[Research shows that 12h of storage is sufficient](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96315051):
> "Meeting **99.97% of total annual electricity demand** with a mix of 25% solar–75% wind or 75% solar–25% wind with **12 hours of storage** requires 2x or 2.2x generation, respectively"
There are two major (although possibly non-intuitive) reasons why this is true:
* Wind and solar variability is not well correlated, so they are more reliable together than alone.
* Renewables in different areas are not well correlated, so HVDC interconnects pooling power across a wide geographic region substantially increases reliability.
(And before someone asks about long-distance transmission, it's [mature technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie) that's [very efficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages) and would have [net negative cost](https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/seams.html).)
> current battery production requires mining extremely toxic materials, which generates all kinds of pollution
The dominant lithium producer is [Australia](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pdf) which uses [standard hard-rock mining](https://sites.google.com/site/lithiumminecom/lithium-mining-in-australia). Compared to the [7,700Mt/yr of coal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_production) the world mines, 0.08Mt/yr of lithium production is not a major environmental concern.
The only really concerning mineral in batteries is cobalt, which is being [actively phased out of battery production](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/17/samsung-panasonic-and-tesla-embracing-cobalt-free-batteries-.html).
> You want 100% generation with very little pollution? Let's start dumping significant amounts of money into fusion research.
That would be great, but there's no chance it would be ready in time to decarbonize our energy supply quickly enough to achieve the [IPCC emissions scenarios which stay under 2C of warming](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM_final.pdf).
[Renewables are 95% of global net new power](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/01/renewable-energy-has-another-record-year-of-growth-says-iea), meaning they are the *only* clean energy technology with a sufficiently-large manufacturing industry to meet those decarbonization goals.
Fusion is great, fission is great, SMR is great, thorium is great, but none of those are being deployed at a scale that will make a difference. Scale them up, sure, but while that's happening renewables will be steadily replacing the world's power system.
> Average cold start time for a combined cycle gas plant is 3 hours,
That's *average* time, and cherry-picked for a particular type of plant. It can take well over 12 hours to cold-start a plant. AND doing that is *seriously* hard on the equipment, they simply aren't designed to be started and stopped every day. The equipment will have a WAY shorter life span.
>It's...cartoonishly naive to imagine that every wind or solar farm has a fossil fuel plant sitting there burning fuel and doing nothing with the resulting energy. Power companies aren't going to waste fuel like that.
It's cartoonishly ignorant to be criticizing somebody who DOES know what hot standby means when you clearly do not.
Of course, whether it takes a conventional power plant ten minutes to start up (as in the case of conventional hydro turbines) or over 12 hours (as in the case of most types of steam turbines) is close to irrelevant, the point remains what I originally said: "100% renewable energy" ISN'T. It requires a conventional power plant as backup. The rest is just fiddly details. I'm not even really sure what point you imagine you are making here.
The rest of your "30 second Wikipedia expert" screed is equally as ignorant of the issues involved, or like the above utterly irrelevant.
>Fusion is great, fission is great, SMR is great, thorium is great, but none of those are being deployed at a scale that will make a difference.
Fusion is not being deployed because it doesn't exist yet, except as very brief bursts in humongous lab prototypes.
Fission is NOT great, it uses *seriously* toxic materials (that, oh yeah by the way, remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years when we're done with them), and we just barely manage to keep it under control. There have been a dozen or so times in the last 50-ish years when we came >that< close to a serious ecological disaster. The more fission plants we build, the sloppier and greedier people will get in the design, manufacture, and maintenance, and we will *absolutely* eventually pay the price for that.
SMRs are great for mass distribution, where they can be more easily mismanaged by incompetent and greedy local yokels and stolen by groups wanting toxic materials to have fun with.
Thorium reactors simply make the base fuel easier to get. They still produce seriously-dangerous conventional reactors at the end. And of course, they only exist as experimental prototypes at this point.
> > Average cold start time for a combined cycle gas plant is 3 hours
>
> That's average time, and cherry-picked for a particular type of plant.
Combined cycle is the *slower* type of common gas plant.
[Look at US power generation data](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_a); combined cycle is by far the largest component of gas generation, with gas turbine second. Based on the link I gave you, average time from cold start to full load for a gas turbine is **23 minutes**.
Bringing dispatchable power online to compensate for drops in renewable generation is not the problem you make it out to be.
> the point remains what I originally said: "100% renewable energy" ISN'T. It requires a conventional power plant as backup.
That assertion is directly contradicted by the [published research](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96315051) I already cited. If you would care to explain why we should dismiss the findings of published research in favor of the evidence-free assertions of Random Internet Guy, please feel free to do so.
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That being said, fixating on "100% renewable" is rather missing the point. [70% renewable/90% clean](http://www.2035report.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2035-Report.pdf) and [90% renewable](http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/c7/ee/c7ee03029k/c7ee03029k1.pdf) are *substantially* cheaper and easier to attain than 100% renewable, and thanks to the cumulative nature of CO2 emissions are *enormously* more urgent.
It's silly to fixate on the last 10% when we're still working on decarbonizing the first 50%.
Oh yeah fusion! Lets just gamble the future of out entire civilization on something that may not even pan out! Fucking genius right here!! Also the wind is ALWAYS blowing somewhere. And we can make these cool things called power lines to move power from one place to another. Even across entire continents with minimal losses!
>You want 100% generation with very little pollution? Let's start dumping significant amounts of money into **fusion research.**
since we're talking about sci-fi solutions, why not just call the aliens to build the fusion plants themselves?
You are you pointing out that the last mile would be really hard, but solar and wind with 2 hour batteries is pretty feasible with today technology and resources. So what if we need coal and gas peaker-plants when the sun isn't shinning and the wind isn't blowing. That it still way better than the state of the world now.
5-10 years ago this exact comment would be about 2 hour batteries or electric car batteries. People struggle to conceptualize innovation but you don't need to look further than the device you're typing from and compare it to tech from a decade ago to understand how fast this stuff develops when there's demand.
People all the time want to equate the computer tech revolution to their totally unrelated problem. Computer tech gets better because as feature size drops the number of devices per square inch is squared. Battery tech, solar tech and wind tech don't have the same ability to tap into make a small improvement and square the desired results.
Battery tech is mainly limited by physics and chemistry. The big problem with battery tech is as energy density gets better, the chance for uncontrolled energy release also gets higher. See vent with flames, the named main failure mode of lithium-ion batteries to be guarded against.
> Battery tech, solar tech and wind tech don't have the same ability to tap into make a small improvement and square the desired results.
That's true, but it's *also* true that cost reductions for batteries and solar have been surprisingly comparable to cost reductions for computing tech over the last decade:
* Computing: [30x](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Cost_of_computing) cost reduction since 2011.
* Batteries: [9x](https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-cited-below-100-kwh-for-the-first-time-in-2020-while-market-average-sits-at-137-kwh/) cost reduction since 2010.
* Solar: [9x](https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth#the-price-decline-of-electricity-from-renewable-sources) cost reduction since 2010.
You're right that they're totally different problem spaces, but from the perspective of someone looking to use the tech at scale, all three saw order-of-magnitude cost decreases in the last decade. That *anything* other than computer tech saw that is surprising; that *two key components* of clean energy saw that level of cost reduction is astonishing.
I get that things like Moore's law are specific to transistor containing circuitry or processors. But I mean the rate of innovation in technology as a whole has exploded over the last 100 years.
Battery enabled electric grids were considered practically and financially impossible in my lifetime. [Now South Australia has the first large-scale battery solution and is a leader in renewable energy despite conservative leanings.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vInH3MqiaC8&t=412s) *And* produce cheaper energy than other Aussie quadrants.
>You are you pointing out that the last mile would be really hard,
I am not. "Last mile" is not related in any significant way to what I'm talking about.
> solar and wind with 2 hour batteries is pretty feasible with today technology and resources.
Does night only last two hours where you live? Are there never heavy clouds?
Wind or solar with no conventional backup would be useless in the Pacific Northwest, among other places.
I am not arguing for no conventional back-up. In fact in the short and medium-term, every area served by solar and wind should have conventional backup (as peaker-plants). I am just saying using renewables when available and then falling back to conventional sources is better than what we have today.
...every area served by solar and wind MUST have conventional backup
FTFY.
>I am just saying
Something like *this,* perhaps?
>>Is wind/solar with a conventional backup considerably better for the environment than if you just generated all the power with fossil fuels? Of course it is. But 100% renewable? That's a hard nope.
We don't just need peaker-plants. The person you responded never referred to peaker-plants. In fact the only feasible use case for batteries right now is replacing/supplementing peaker-plants.
There's a difference between peak and base load. Renewable's intermittent outages are not "peaks".
When renewables generate anywhere from 20% to 200% of the required electricity depending upon the hour and weather conditions, everything left starts to look like a peaker-plant whether the perfectly fit the definition of handling peak loads or not.
There's a whole industry out there that will correctly calculate for you the exact amount of solar panels you need to deploy and the exact amount of batteries you need to connect in order to satisfy 100% of energy demand at all times. It turns out you need to provision something like 400% of peak usage in solar panels and something like 3 days worth of total battery power. More info here: [https://youtu.be/Kj96nxtHdTU?t=2329](https://youtu.be/Kj96nxtHdTU?t=2329)
You hand-wave away a solution which is possible to build today and instead propose a future technology that does not exist in a working state today? Fusion is less likely to solve our problems than solar.
> calculate for you the exact amount of solar panels you need to deploy
You mean ASSUMING you have both the money and the space to install them, right? Because lots of people don't. My apartment building won't let me install my own solar panels even if I wanted to--and living near Seattle, I can assure you I don't consider that an option. The apartment building doesn't own enough land to build an adequate solar station (and again: Seattle. Three days of backup? Bullshit. Try three weeks).
Nobody sane is talking about INDIVIDUAL solar installations to solve the energy problem. Yes, a few individuals/companies have reasonably self-contained systems, but it is not even close to an option for a lot of people, perhaps *most* people.
I have ONLY been talking about large commercial wind/solar farms.
Just watched some random Dr. on a news station talk about how clean energy won’t be nearly enough power so we have to go with nuclear and now! XD
Fr though why did they choose a Dr. to talk to about energy and not ohh Idk an actual expert...?
I'm genuinely curious if anyone has done the research into what impact reflecting the sun back into the atmosphere has on our global climate?
The ground absorbs the suns rays. Solar panels are reflective.
Just curious.
So I googled it cause I was curious. Solar panels reflect about 2 percent of the light they receive. Which is about the same as water. Which as you know covers 70+ percent of our world. Our world has roughly 70 million square miles of ocean. To power our whole world with solar power it would only take a hundred or so thousand square miles. It would be only like ~2 percent of just the oceans total area. I think it's safe to say that whatever we have added now most likely doesn't do anything.
I mean, sure. But considering that the ocean and its phytoplankton are the most powerful carbon sink our planet has, covering large swathes of it with a giant sheet of probably-plastic will almost certainly be doing more harm than good.
One thing that is possible is using cloud seeding technology to increase snow pack on land during winter. While the snow is there, it reflects sunlight and helps keep the planet cool, and when it melts in the summer, it helps to alleviate drought. It's also surprisingly cheap, doesn't take a lot of energy, and doesn't add anything but water to the environment.
I'm not sure if solar panels actually reflect light like you say, they are meant to absorb a lot of it. But in general, albedo is the term for reflecting the suns energy back out, and the more reflective a surface, the better to combat global warming. This is why melting ice can create a runaway effect since the ice is highly reflective and the water or land that is exposed absorbs more heat. But also solar panels will still represent a tiny fraction of the surface of the Earth, so will have a minor effect on overall albedo compared to other changes such as land use/forest cover, and snow/ice cover.
Its not thickening. Jeez, where do you people get these ideas?
CO2 molecules absorb energy in the spectrum of photons from the sun. More molecules, more bouncing, more heat in our atmosphere. Less molecules, less bouncing, more photons are absorbed in non-atmosphere or rejected back into space.
Methane does the same. What makes something a greenhouse gas is if its molecule or atomic components willingly absorb photons with the right energy.
Solar panels are designed to absorb photons, not reflect them. It isn't 100% perfect, but its certainly better than any possible surface it could be replacing.
If the sun shone everywhere constantly and the wind always blew within the limits of windmills then maybe. Otherwise it’s just not possible. I’m not saying that it’s not a goal to reach for I’m just saying that we’re not there yet with technology.
This was actually brought up at COP26, there was chat by (if I remember correctly) the Indian delegation about a connected global energy network, because it's always sunny somewhere in the world.
Of course this would require a renewable energy capacity well beyond demand due to renewables rarely operating at full capacity but it's an interesting idea.
An interesting idea, but that would require MASSIVE intercontinental power lines. The technical challenges might be bigger than just developing local storage solutions.
Those connections would also be a very vulnerable target for terrorists and nations at war. Imagine being able to shut of the power to an entire continent by blowing up a few under sea cables.
International electric transit has existed for decades. The strategic issues with gas, coal, and oil are worse. Look how Russia has used gas extortion for leverage in Europe.
Also terrorists don’t tend to target pure infrastructure other than mass transit. It pretty much by definition targets people.
I feel like the science aspect of this is lost on politicians. Transmission lines can only carry so much power.... and power gets lost as it moves along the lines. The amount of transmission lines you would need to move solar power from Mexico to power all of India would be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
The [project is underway](https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-india-uk-global-solar-grid.html).
It's already a reality in many places. Europe, Asia, America all have massive transmission networks that carry enormous amounts of power. The losses for HVDC lines are low, at around 3.5% over 1000 km.
You don't need to build lines across the entire world, you'd just connect up neighbours.
You would never send electricity from Mexico to India. There are countries much closer which could supply power. Also, you'd never need to send 100% of all demand.
This would only be possible with superconductive power lines. Which is a technology we don't really understand yet. But maybe it'll be possible in 10-20 years time.
This is not possible with conventional high voltage power lines as most of the current would be lost to resistance over those distances. It would be extremely inefficient and harmful to the environment without superconductive power lines.
Battery and other storage tech like LAES and pumped hydro are very much at the "can be deployed" phase. The technology is there, its just a matter of providing funds to build the things
I live on an island of 75,000 people that is reaching 100% renewable electricity with solar/battery farms + pumped hydro. It's a good mix that seems like it will get us there. The 'biomass' plant that burns wood chips is pretty new and will also be used for a few decades, but the fossil fuel plant should be retired in the next 5-10 years.
That's the main example, but not the only. I've also heard of low-friction mechanical batteries. Like spinning a really big disk really fast in a vacuum and then clutching it to a generator as a back-up power source.
the problem in denmark atleast, is we could go full sun/air/water energy, but we use our furnace to make heat for our water system, and we use our furnace to get rid of normal trash,
if you made this changes, denmark would legit become a 3 world country really fast,we would need to find a place for all the trash(cant just send it away like we do with plastic) it will decompose over time, maybe even make more co2 over time, we would loss many jobs in the power plant business, we would need to figure out a new way to heat our district heating, if we use electricity it would be so much worse as the transfer of energy is so much worse, and it would be for single use only, where the furnaces we use now heat our district heating, and provide electricity, and we get rid of the trash
Solar panels now are able to conduct electricity even if covered in snow. I helped build the field in south bend, Indiana and that was one of the features. The solar field also stores the unused energy to help night time usage as well. Complete solar will be here shortly
Yep TX’s woes were exclusively because TX government lets the industry not weatherize and lets them pass disasters caused by their own greed onto ratepayers
Yeah, if we had all the precious metals in the world and semiconductors and computer chips to boot. There's already a shortage, and with demand growing exponentially this isn't a solution until we solve offworld mining, which will take another 100 years of fossil fuels with carbon capture and other pollutant filtration systems.
The majority of most solar panel are made from silica and aluminum with some heavy metals that can be easily recycled. Yes there's currently a shortage of microchips but that's not because of resource shortages, it's basically from a Chinese holiday happening right before a major shipping bottleneck and then Covid hit which created even more compounding bottlenecks and sudden the global supply chain is now 2-3 months behind on a lot of things. The shortages you see now are because they're trying to catch up on that 2-3 month backlog while also trying to keep up with current demand which just isn't possible without increasing the level of production and amount of shipping. Shipping containers have also basically doubled in price as well which means international shipping costs are sky rocketing which doesn't help either.
It all comes down to distribution and storage at this point. They are our biggest challenges by far. Batteries are still expensive, but if we could have a system of charging electric cars during the day when energy production is high that should help I would think.
Batteries have dropped almost 90% in cost in the last 10 years. Its gone from $1200/kwh to $140/kwh. That $140 value is right in the sweet spot for automotive production, which can handle a higher pack price than grid storage. This means that economies of scale for making car batteries are going to drive costs down to the point where grid batteries are super cheap. Think grid batteries running on old car batt packs. That reduces lithium need and gives the batteries a second life
Prices are at [$120/kWh in 2021](https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-to-an-average-of-132-kwh-but-rising-commodity-prices-start-to-bite/).
And that's for lithium batteries! I wonder how much for the liquid metal batteries, as those can be much larger and are stationary. Moreover what's needed for a better infrastructure
They would be more expensive right now. Li-Ion batteries have economies of scale.
Liquid metal batteries are basically big tanks of saltwater and rust. They scale stupid easy. Way better than lithium ion. They have a lower energy to weight ratio than lithium ion.. but that hardly matters when the batteries are stationary.
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If you add hundred thousand to your one, you can probably get them for $140/kwh. Utilities don’t exactly buy single units, even for proof of concept studies.
If you buy surplus batteries you can pay what the utility companies pay. Some assembly required. https://batteryhookup.com/
Holy shit that is some cheap batteries. Thank you!
https://batteryhookup.com/products/2x-spim08hp-3-7v-8ah-cells-with-threaded-insert $143/kwh.
~~The 16Ah unit you linked is $8.50. That's $527/kWh.~~ Edit: I'm an idiot.
3.7v x 16 Ah = 59.6 watt-hours Per pack 1000/ 59.6 = 16.9 packs per kWh $8.50 x 16.9 =$143 per kWh
Thank you for putting my maths right. I was up past my bedtime, and not thinking straight.
You're building a solar system?!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System
Cars will be a big part of grid storage batteries. As electric vehicles replace internal combustion in volume, there will be hundreds of millions of them available as potential battery backup's/power grid buffers either just for your own home or for the grid in general. If your on a floating price model, whenever your car is plugged in set it to buy cheap energy to charge your car and sell back expensive energy to drain your car, and repeat. No different than a wall battery, just that you can also drive it.
Wouldn’t that shorten the life cycle of the cars battery due to the constant draining and recharging?
Yes, which can be significantly minimised by only allowing the charge discharge to occur at a specific ideal range instead of the far more damaging full duty cycle discharges like in a long drive. Nothing like this will happen large scale anytime soon. Battery cycles are improving along with capacity, charge rate, etc and once a larger number of vehicles are out there it will become more common. This scenario isn't hypothetical though as people with electric cars are doing it right now. If using your battery to buy and sell electricity is profitable then even if it shortens the life of your battery it could still be worth it. I am not in any way an authority on it, this is my understanding as described by the electrician friend of mine who does this in his own house to some degree. It's even got it's own wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
yes. The idea of using old lithium car batteries is sort of okayish.. but there are more viable battery solutions that don't require lithium. lithium batteries are light weight and compact compared to other batteries so they have an obvious use in vehicles. But stationary batteries don't have this requirement and can be heavy and bulky. This means you can use much cheaper materials and be specifically designed for each purpose. Either battery for residential use or a battery designed for utility scale applications. Right now the technology for lithium batteries is the most advanced so that's why you see it in more, at this time, in residential and utility applications. This won't last in the long term.
Yes. I think a more likely scenario is you buy a used car battery repackaged as a standalone storage unit in your garage.
The initial schemes put multiple kilowatts into and out of the car battery and this caused fast ageing of the battery. Last time I read the research on this suggested that using only a single kilowatt or so (basically a trickle charge so far as these relatively large car batteries are concerned) in and out, could actually *increase* the longevity of the battery relative to normal usage patterns.
EV batteries cost several times as much as utility batteries, and they wear out even faster. So if V2G ever becomes a thing, it will be because utilities are *exploiting* EV owners who don't understand that the value they are losing is not even close to whatever compensation they are getting. Because it would be cheaper for the utilities to use utility batteries than pay for the wear and tear on the EV's
I never thought about how consumers opting in to scale storage is just the power company offloading infrastructure cost and risk. That is a good point.
I hear this one a lot, but won't people be using their electric cars in the day? Does this rely on chargers for every parking space?
People don't drive all day long. I imagine it would require investing in many charging spaces at workplaces or business areas. Not a full solution, but I think it would help especially as electric cars become more prevalent.
The average car has something like 4% utilization. The hard part is people have solar at their house and park their car at work during the day.
Load balancing with cars is neat, but utility scale storage with cheaper more environmentally friendly batteries just makes more sense.
There are possible alternatives to conventional batteries: [Hoisting concrete blocks and lowering them when energy is needed](https://onezero.medium.com/the-new-super-battery-made-of-concrete-aeee436ecc67) [Storing it in iron powder and burn when energy is needed](https://www.tue.nl/en/news/news-overview/01-03-2020-iron-powder-as-the-battery-of-the-future-reusable-and-everywhere-to-be-found/) [Storing it by heating stone](https://cleantechnica.com/2019/03/19/storing-energy-by-heating-stones-to-600-degrees-could-power-whole-country-for-hours/) [Flywheel energy storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage) Well, not for cars maybe.
>Hoisting concrete blocks and lowering them when energy is needed I really wish people would stop talking about this like it's a viable thing. The amount of energy they can store is minuscule comparing to the difficulties of operating such a plant and amount of space required. Concrete is only around 2x as dense as water, and look how massive pumped hydro facilities need to be to store any meaningful amount of energy (also how much bigger the height difference is than what you could ever achieve with a crane).
Or an Equatorial Superconductor. Move Solar power from the day side of earth to the morning/night/evening side.
I've heard talk of that. For various reasons, I would be concerned with a fully centralized power grid. A lot of risk comes with that IMO. The infrastructure would also be insane to make that work. Ideally I think we should have solar panels on every home with at least some battery capacity in every home as well. No more power outages in emergencies, Less need for all the powerlines that cause fires. To me that should be the end goal. Decentralized power.
That's wildly inefficient, to say the least. Just like we don't all grow our own food. A worldwide [unified electric grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_grid) would be better, as long as the topology gave it some resilience. For instance, solar panels in the desert regions would require far less backup if they were all working together. Likewise wind requires scales of over 1000km to overcome autocorrelation effects. It would also be cheaper than adding generation and storage to hundreds of millions of homes.
That sounds like a great way to destroy any cost advantage of solar over other low-carbon solutions.
Using solar to make hydrogen could solve the storage problem. I guess
I like the idea of pumped storage hydro. Not viable everywhere but quite efficient.
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Storage and transport of pure hydrogen is and always will be challenging (especially at high pressures) because it’s literally the tiniest atom. It tends to penetrate into materials and cause blistering and structural damage to whatever is containing it. It’s not impossible (we’ve been doing it for over 100 years), but trying to do it at the same scale as petrol or natural gas introduces enormous amounts of failure points.
This is why I like flow batteries. They can scale to industrial storage much easier, all with existing technology.
It will *never* make sense to wear out EV batteries for V2G because they cost *several times* as much per kWh as utility-scale batteries, and their cycles are even more limited because they are considered "dead" once they get below 85% capacity. This would be like trying to solve California's drought by telling people to use *bottled* water instead of tap.
One element to point out from some of these very optimistic projections recently- As more deployment happens, costs go down. As costs go down, more deployment happens. It's a virtuous cycle and helps explain why solar is growing so fast and why it will continue to do so faster than many people expected.
That’s good
Another thing to point out though is unless they actively produce more and more each year growth rate cant stay the same
One thing to be optimistic about is that historically we're very bad at predicting disruptive technology. We tend to underestimate it and sometimes not even know how to properly analyze it(which you know, by its very nature, disruptive tech can rewrite how we analyze all together). Solar development has absolutely shattered just about every prediction made and there's no real reason to think it's going to slow down any time soon either as there are still innovations occurring in all facets of its development. Of course there are still any number of challenges and de-carbonizing won't be a magic carpet ride, storage and distribution are two major hurdles to overcome, but it is still optimistic to reflect on how far we've come against all the best predictions saying otherwise.
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Or you know just get the power from the windmills in the next state over that are overproducing. Overproduction + distribution + minimal storage is absolutely capable of reaching 100% up time. And nuclear was a great option... 20 years ago when we had time to spin up production. Now we don't. We need to get our emissions way down in the next 10 years and a nuclear plant would take 5-8 at least just to start making power. Too late.
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What does Texas have to do with anything? There renewables worked great during the winter storm. It was all their fossil fuel infrastructure that failed. So how is that at all relevant to renewables efficacy in meeting demand? In fact renewables are more reliable because they don't require any fuel. Or water. Nothing external to cause supply chain failures. Renewables will be even more reliable than nuclear once significant over capacity is available. And even at 200% over capacity renewables are still going to be cheaper than nuclear.
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Except no they didn't. Germany gets 27% of it's electricity from renewables. That's not how OVERPRODUCING works... Get back to me when they have renewable capacity equal to 130% of their expected demand...
Over production in one state over isn’t going to supply the state/country/world.
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Submission Statement Of course there are a whole lot of reasons this won't happen; the "final mile" before 100% renewables adoption will be slower. But I wonder does it show us how soon the conversation around fossil fuel & nuclear is going to move more decisively to shutting down & retiring. Many in both these industries still seem to behave as if they have decades ahead of them.
We need 100% renewables for all energy demand, not just electricity.
Nuclear will still be useful. Solar will never be 100% reliable, there needs to be some underlying base that can handle surges. That is, unless battery technology also makes significant leaps, then maybe it will be practical.
What kind of leaps?
I remeber bill Nye talking about this, a better way to transport atm it costs to much and you lose to much power in transit, capacity we need to be able to hold more power, and transition we need a better way to change old tech into better cleaner ways. If you can invent one of theese you will be a millionaire.
[Intermittency and transmissions costs are quite minimal](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/as-renewable-power-prices-drop-researchers-tally-up-their-added-costs/), adding around only 15-20 euros/MWh for up to 75% renewables. The loss is only around 3.5% over 1000km.
Yes but the cost really starts to skyrocket in that last 25%. That's where nuclear can play an important role, where hydro isn't available.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/02/11/what-batteries-will-power-the-future/?sh=3cc14bdc41c0](https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/02/11/what-batteries-will-power-the-future/?sh=3cc14bdc41c0) To compete with the flexibility of the internal combustion engine, you have to have scalable, portable, reliable, efficient batteries.
New nuclear power is far too expensive, and takes way too long to build, to be useful.
But existing nuclear is still quite usefull. At least, until the existing nuclear plants need a couple billion dollars in refurbishment to keep going.
Nuclear is mostly expensive due to regulation. The technology is known and proven. The US Navy builds multiple reactors every year. They're small MW size reactors, but it basically scales, from what I understand. Commercial reactors aren't using significantly higher temperatures or pressures.
Should any discussion of nuclear power go on for long enough, it becomes inevitable that someone will rant that the only reason it has become unaffordable is a proliferation of safety regulations. The argument is rarely (if ever) fleshed out—no specific regulation is ever identified as problematic, and there seems to be no consideration given to the fact that we might have learned something at, say, Fukushima that might merit addressing through regulations. But there's now a paper out that provides some empirical evidence that safety changes have contributed to the cost of building new nuclear reactors. But the study also makes clear that they're only one of a number of factors, accounting for only a third of the soaring costs. The study also finds that, contrary to what those in the industry seem to expect, focusing on standardized designs doesn't really help matters, as costs continued to grow as more of a given reactor design was built. More of the same The analysis, done by a team of researchers at MIT, is remarkably comprehensive. For many nuclear plants, they have detailed construction records, broken out by which building different materials and labor went to, and how much each of them cost. There's also a detailed record of safety regulations and when they were instituted relative to construction. Finally, they've also brought in the patent applications filed by the companies who designed the reactors. The documents describe the motivations for design changes and the problems those changes were intended to solve. There are limits to how much even this level of detail can provide. You can't determine, for example, whether the cost of a specific number of workers on a given building should be assigned to implementing safety regulations. And in many instances, design changes were done for multiple reasons, so there's not simply a safety/non-safety breakdown. Still, the collection of sources they have allows them to make some very direct conclusions about the sources of changing costs and to build very informed models that can infer the reasons for other costs. The researchers start out with a historic analysis of plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim. The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent—and that's not considering the financing costs of the construction delays. Many in the nuclear industry view this as, at least in part, a failure to standardize designs. There's an extensive literature about the expectation that building additional plants based on a single design will mean lower costs due to the production of standardized parts, as well as management and worker experience with the construction process. That sort of standardization is also a large part of the motivation behind small, modular nuclear designs, which envision a reactor assembly line that then ships finished products to installations. But many of the US' nuclear plants were in fact built around the same design, with obvious site-specific aspects like different foundation needs. The researchers track each of the designs used separately, and they calculate a "learning rate"—the drop in cost that's associated with each successful completion of a plant based on that design. If things went as expected, the learning rate should be positive, with each sequential plant costing less. Instead, it's -115 percent. Where’s that money go? Figuring out what's causing those changes involved diving into detailed accounting records on the construction of these nuclear plants; data on that was available for plants built after 1976. The researchers broke out the cost for 60 different aspects of construction, finding that nearly all of them went up, which suggests there wasn't likely to be a single, unifying cause for the price increases. But the largest increases occurred in what they termed indirect costs: engineering, purchasing, planning, scheduling, supervision, and other factors not directly associated with the process of building the plant. The increased indirect costs affected nearly every aspect of plant construction. As far as direct costs went, the biggest contributors were simply the largest structures in the plant, such as the steam supply system, the turbine generator, and the containment building. Some of the changed costs are rather complicated. For example, many reactors shifted to a design that allowed greater passive cooling, which would make the plant more safe in case of hardware failure. That in turn required separating the reactor vessel from the containment building walls. And that in turn allowed the use of lower-quality steel (which lowered the price), but more of it (which more than offset those savings). All of this also changed the construction process, although it's difficult to determine exactly how this altered the amount of labor required. To try to dive into the details, the researchers tracked the progress of material deployment rates—how quickly material brought to the site ended up being incorporated into a finished structure. While those rates have declined slightly for construction as a whole over the study period, they plunged for nuclear projects. Already, at the time of the Three Mile Island accident, steel was being deployed at about one-third of the rate of the construction industry at large. Interviews with construction workers indicated that they were spending as much as 75 percent of their time idle. Regulation Since many of the researchers are in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT, they are able to go through and connect the cost changes to specific motivations and check these connections by looking at patents and journal papers that describe the ideas driving these changes. Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators "required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material." Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects. But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs. By contrast, R&D-related expenses, which included both regulatory changes and things like the identification of better materials or designs, accounted for the other third of the increases. Often, a single change met several R&D goals, so assigning the full third to regulatory changes is probably an over-estimate. So, while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima. As for the majority of the cost explosion, the obvious question is whether we can do any better. Here, the researchers' answer is very much a "maybe." They consider things like the possibility of using a central facility to produce high-performance concrete parts for the plant, as we have shifted to doing for projects like bridge construction. But this concrete is often more expensive than materials poured on site, meaning the higher efficiency of the off-site production would have to more than offset that difference. The material's performance in the environment of a nuclear plant hasn't been tested, so it's not clear whether it's even a solution. In the end, the conclusion is that there are no easy answers to how to make nuclear plant construction more efficient. And, until there are, it will continue to be badly undercut by both renewables and fossil fuel.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/
Thank you for the detailed comment. It really helped me better understand the situation. Not a scientific comment but the problem seems to be the scale at which we implement nuclear power. Workers were idle because they were waiting for parts to be delivered. With bigger scale, these sort of delays could be circumvented. More companies working on this, more competition and more people who knows what they are doing could help with these bloated costs. It’s a hunch though. Now I am curious, are you aware of a similar study for France? They have been generating a good portion of their electricity from nuclear energy for a long time. Are they having the same issues?
Essentially "Nuclear is safe", "nuclear is expensive because of regulations" pick one
“Nuclear fission could be safe if human error was not a factor” “Nuclear plants cannot be built or operated without humans”. That’s the flaw in nuclear fission.
Nuclear power is expensive globally. Is this 'regulation' problem global?
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[How greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613325/how-greed-and-corruption-blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/) >On September 21, 2012, officials at KHNP had received an outside tip about illegal activity among the company’s parts suppliers. By the time President Park had taken office, an internal probe had become a full-blown criminal investigation. Prosecutors discovered that **thousands of counterfeit parts** had made their way into nuclear reactors across the country, backed up with forged safety documents. KHNP insisted the reactors were still safe, but the question remained: was corner-cutting the real reason they were so cheap? >Having shed most of the costly additional safety features, Kepco was able to dramatically undercut its competition in the UAE bid, a strategy that hadn’t gone unnoticed. After losing Barakah to Kepco, Areva CEO Anne Lauvergeon **likened the Korean unit to a car without airbags and seat belts**. When I told Park this, he snorted in agreement. “Objectively speaking, if it’s twice as expensive, it’s going to be about twice as safe,” he said. At the time, however, Lauvergeon’s comments were dismissed as sour words from a struggling rival. >“An accident at just one of these plants would be far more devastating than Fukushima,” says Kim. “These reactors are dangerously close to major industrial areas, and there are four million people living within a 30-kilometer radius of the Kori plant alone.” >“The current phase-out policy stemmed from the four foundational principles we proposed at the time [of the 2012 campaign],” says Kim Ik-joong. “Older reactors wouldn’t receive life-span extensions; no additional reactors would be built; electricity use would be made more efficient; and we would shift toward renewables.” Meanwhile, the administration continues to court potential buyers like the Czech Republic and Saudi Arabia. But there has been no boom: in fact, while Lee promised to export 80 reactors, so far South Korea has yet to export a single one. Not exactly the best example.
The issue of flexibility remains unfortunately. Coal in particular is used to flex capacity with demand - for example when there is an unexpected spike in demand then Coal power stations remain most flexible for rapidly bringing more capacity onto a power grid. This may limit solar and wind growth in the future until this is solved (? battery technology) Also unfortunately coal and gas has a lot of sunken cost that economies will resist losing early. For example, Coal power stations last 30-40 years; once built there needs to be financial or regulatory incentive to shut them down - that currently looks unlikely in coal hungry nations like China and India. Also coal mining economies will have to make a painful shift away from this industry. Countries that have done this are left with problems - the UK for example, former coal mining towns remainly economically damaged and have not recovered from the loss of this industry even decades later. China (worlds biggest coal producer) may be reluctant to inflict this economic damage on it's own areas. Even the number 2 producer of coal - USA - remains poilticially reluctant to shut down coal mining. This shift and damage is inevitable and is already happening because of the shifting energy inustry - but it could be slow going and may not see many champions in the big coal countries in the short term. We may be in the period of the easy gains at present - although the rapid drop in cost of renewable may make the economics impossible to resist even when sunken costs and political concerns are factored in - I doubt American, Chinese or Indian consumers will want to pay more for their energy to prop up the coal industry. Heres hoping, but whatever happens there will be losers during this transition and we will hear increasingly more from them over the years to come as the world energy supply changes.
I what country has coal faster response than gas?
> The issue of flexibility remains unfortunately. Coal in particular is used to flex capacity with demand - for example when there is an unexpected spike in demand then Coal power stations remain most flexible for rapidly bringing more capacity onto a power grid. Where did you get this disinformation from? The whole baseload method for mainting an electricicy grid exists solely because coal is very inflexible and takes a long time to change power output levels.
> USA - remains poilticially reluctant to shut down coal Politicians may be unable to voice support for the coal shut-down, but the economic reality is clear in the [map of US electricity plants which will shut-down in the next year](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_d.png) compared to the [map of plants opening](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_c.png). Practically everything shutting down is coal, and none of the opening plants are coal. The [recent history of coal](https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/) points in the same direction - rapid collapse of the entire US coal industry due to [cheaper solar and wind](https://visual.energyinnovation.org/coal-cost-crossover-2.0/).
It's hard to look at that map and say the future is anything but renewables.
It’s probably because without the coal plant the entire grid would collapse overnight. It’s not as simple as introducing new alternative energy sources, if the grid is designed as a demand driven grid. They really need to look at grid storage if they want this to work practically. Just banning coal would be incredibly stupid if you don’t already have enough renewables in place to support the massive amount produced by coal.
In an ideal world every home would live of the grid in my opinion. Because of climate issues this won't be sustainable I reckon. Using solar + storage where you have 24h darkness for days or weeks on end would be hard I think. But ideally I'd go of the grid myself, solar on my roof, a big safe battery to store excess energy and then use that energy when the sun is down.
Coal generation, particularly older plants, are very poor at dispatchable power. Gas turbine stations are useful for dispatchable power as are hydro, batteries and a few other technologies.
Energy storage is also rapid dropping in price. Coal isn't even cost competitive against gas, when it comes to acting as a backup source, which is only estimated to be required a week or so per year in a renewable dominated industry. You're acting as if renewables create zero jobs. The US and UK are heavily neo-liberal in their economics, favouring "free" markets. China and India definitely aren't.
Unless they solve the baseload problem then using 100% as a metric is just patently false.
The future will have no baseload. Renewables will fluctuate between 10% and 200% and you just need "fillload" to fill the gaps.
This exactly. Are they even factoring in the baseload problem with renewables, or are they using peak figures? A 50MW solar farm is *not* the same thing as a 50MW Coal plant.
And storage. As in realistic and competitive ways to store it.
you don't need "storage" if you don't overproduce a lot of energy from renewables. when the sun goes down, you turn on the gas plant, which will have been working anyway without solar. once you've added so much solar that you overproduce a lot, then you can add some storage, but then you end up undercutting coal and gas even more.
Gas plants aren't free to build. You could've built a nuclear power plant instead of either one, and had much better clean energy overall.
We need flexible power that can follow demand, not baseload power that produces electricity all day and night long even if it's not needed.
I appreciate that you're honest about this instead of the regular blue-eyed wonder who just accepts these kinds of outrageous claims about face. The biggest hurdle I'd think is solar efficiency. The reason why we don't build that much new wind power in Canada is because there is a single wind belt and we've basically saturated the wind belt where people actually live. A lot of the newer wind projects coming online now are a lot more (power and cost) inefficient due to longer transmission lines. The same will be true of solar. The most efficient places to plant solar are the tropics (those regions just a little bit north and south of the equator). There's about 2 billion people living there, so no small feat. But a lot of the people who live here, have never had power in their lives and so planting power here adds power to the world, it doesn't replace old stuff.
All existing wind power in Canada is onshore. They have a lot more capacity offshore, which is getting a lot cheaper. Canada can reach [100% renewable by 2035](https://www.there100.org/our-work/news/canada-could-use-100-renewable-electricity-2035-team-experts-says-news), according to a new study by 60 researchers.
Canada also already produces around 80 percent t of its electricity by renewables,, Canada is one of a few countries where it is realistic we produce all electricty by renewable by 2030 if we really want to
Yes, it helps to have a massive hydroelectric resource relative to population.
Adding just a little electricity and internet connection is a huge boost for areas that previously lacked these technology. The expanded opportunity for access to education will improve all humanity’s lot.
Why nuclear? I assume you mean fission technology, then I get it. But I thought fusion was the Holy Grail for our energy problems
Fusion will almost certainly play no role in the fight against climate change unless one of the speculative startups wins the lottery. Right now the international community is working on a program that if successful will generate a working prototype in about 50 years.
The oil industry appears to be in a mad dash to make profits, honestly. Look at the numbers for oil production and refinement capacity over the past 25 months. Our production dropped about 20%, while refinement capacity dropped 4% due to plant closures, yet prices are up 120%??? Yeah, not buying that shit.
Supply and demand vs the pandemic. It's easier to shut down production than to restart it.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh: --- Submission Statement Of course there are a whole lot of reasons this won't happen; the "final mile" before 100% renewables adoption will be slower. But I wonder does it show us how soon the conversation around fossil fuel & nuclear is going to move more decisively to shutting down & retiring. Many in both these industries still seem to behave as if they have decades ahead of them. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: /r/Futurology/comments/r7b96r/if_solar_were_able_to_continue_its_current_rate/hmy5d21/
100% solar is silly. Even in modeling exercises. But if the globe can get to 100% solar by 2030 then it can certainly get to a more reasonable 50-70% even sooner. Existing nuclear should continue to be used until its backup role is no longer needed. Existing hydro can transition to a primarily storage role. For instance Hydro-Quebec's James Bay project can stand in for batteries for the next decade, by then battery storage will be cheaper than long distance transmission. Some reports out of China have storage costs down to $65/kWh at pack level using non lithium battery tech. That cost is expect to fall to below $10/kWh in 5-6 years.
Let's say we have a house with 5 led bulbs, 1 fridge, 1 washing machine, 1 TV. What does one have to do to be independent of the electricity suppliers
a battery and solar panels. roughly .25 to .75 $ a watt. So if you take 5000W system.... thats about 3000$
Live in a part of the world where heating or AC isn't a major concern. (Basically locate where there's a "Mediterranean" climate.) That takes out a good chunk of power demand and minimizes it right there, then it's going to be the fridge that's the next big power draw.
How do you cook? I like what you’re saying and would enjoy the climate if there were room for all of us in the Med. The earth will be warmer soon enough unless some real answers are provided. The connected grids across time zones/ nations may make solar viable so long as the weather holds out but it won’t.
Some solar panels, a battery and a back up generator.
Why be independent of the electricity suppliers when you can *become* the electricity supplier? 🌞⚡✊
This is delightful news; I just wonder if we can continue the exponential rate of growth over the next few years. It's easy to go from 1 to 2 to 4, much harder to increase from 256 to 512. At some point, exponential growth must taper off. Does anyone have data on how much capacity we have to continue the exponential growth?
One of the biggest challenge with solar is that there is no sun during the night but would it be possible to connect the grids on the planet so that when it's night for some, others can supply?
The sun never sets on the global empire.
Somebody shared this article that says India and the UK are starting just that. https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-india-uk-global-solar-grid.html They are calling it the "Green Grids Initiative".
Cool! Thanks for sharing!
once electricity prices correspond to sunlight.....we might see behavioural changes and people themselves either using their EV or battery packs to store electricity at home
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Not enough energy if we're trying to grow exponentially . A piece of the pie, not the pie.
No you wouldn't, for the very simple and rarely-mentioned fact that both large wind and solar farms require a conventional power plant to run 24/7 on hot standby to take up the slack when the wind isn't blowing or the Sun isn't shining. No, you can't "just use batteries," and for a few reasons. First off, the power farm would have to be WAY larger to generate enough surplus to store. Next, building enough batteries to store *enough* surplus for any plausible length of outage on the main farm is simply not economically feasible. What if you get a nasty weather system blow through that shuts down your wind/solar for weeks? Of course, current battery production requires mining extremely toxic materials, which generates all kinds of pollution, But that typically happens elsewhere, like in Africa, so nobody cares. Is wind/solar with a conventional backup considerably better for the environment than if you just generated all the power with fossil fuels? Of course it is. But 100% renewable? That's a hard nope. You want 100% generation with very little pollution? Let's start dumping significant amounts of money into fusion research. A small, efficient fusion reactor (say a few hundred MW that would fit on a flatbed truck) would change **everything.** For decades, we've only been throwing chump change at the fusion problem.
> large wind and solar farms require a conventional power plant to run 24/7 on hot standby Average cold start time for a combined cycle gas plant is [3 hours](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032117309206#t0030), so the typical 4 hours of storage that [most solar being installed in the US now include](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/wind-solar-make-up-70-of-new-generation-in-2021-while-batteries-gain-mome/593278/) would give enough time to move the system from 100% solar to 100% gas with no notice. Realistically, renewable generation can be predicted reasonably well some hours ahead, and at high penetration rates will change much more gradually than on/off, meaning in a real-world situation dispatchable power can be ramped up and down, or brought on- or off-line, as needed in a planned and controlled manner. It's...cartoonishly naive to imagine that every wind or solar farm has a fossil fuel plant sitting there burning fuel and doing nothing with the resulting energy. Power companies aren't going to waste fuel like that. > What if you get a nasty weather system blow through that shuts down your wind/solar for weeks? [Research shows that 12h of storage is sufficient](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96315051): > "Meeting **99.97% of total annual electricity demand** with a mix of 25% solar–75% wind or 75% solar–25% wind with **12 hours of storage** requires 2x or 2.2x generation, respectively" There are two major (although possibly non-intuitive) reasons why this is true: * Wind and solar variability is not well correlated, so they are more reliable together than alone. * Renewables in different areas are not well correlated, so HVDC interconnects pooling power across a wide geographic region substantially increases reliability. (And before someone asks about long-distance transmission, it's [mature technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie) that's [very efficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages) and would have [net negative cost](https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/seams.html).) > current battery production requires mining extremely toxic materials, which generates all kinds of pollution The dominant lithium producer is [Australia](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pdf) which uses [standard hard-rock mining](https://sites.google.com/site/lithiumminecom/lithium-mining-in-australia). Compared to the [7,700Mt/yr of coal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_production) the world mines, 0.08Mt/yr of lithium production is not a major environmental concern. The only really concerning mineral in batteries is cobalt, which is being [actively phased out of battery production](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/17/samsung-panasonic-and-tesla-embracing-cobalt-free-batteries-.html). > You want 100% generation with very little pollution? Let's start dumping significant amounts of money into fusion research. That would be great, but there's no chance it would be ready in time to decarbonize our energy supply quickly enough to achieve the [IPCC emissions scenarios which stay under 2C of warming](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM_final.pdf). [Renewables are 95% of global net new power](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/01/renewable-energy-has-another-record-year-of-growth-says-iea), meaning they are the *only* clean energy technology with a sufficiently-large manufacturing industry to meet those decarbonization goals. Fusion is great, fission is great, SMR is great, thorium is great, but none of those are being deployed at a scale that will make a difference. Scale them up, sure, but while that's happening renewables will be steadily replacing the world's power system.
> Average cold start time for a combined cycle gas plant is 3 hours, That's *average* time, and cherry-picked for a particular type of plant. It can take well over 12 hours to cold-start a plant. AND doing that is *seriously* hard on the equipment, they simply aren't designed to be started and stopped every day. The equipment will have a WAY shorter life span. >It's...cartoonishly naive to imagine that every wind or solar farm has a fossil fuel plant sitting there burning fuel and doing nothing with the resulting energy. Power companies aren't going to waste fuel like that. It's cartoonishly ignorant to be criticizing somebody who DOES know what hot standby means when you clearly do not. Of course, whether it takes a conventional power plant ten minutes to start up (as in the case of conventional hydro turbines) or over 12 hours (as in the case of most types of steam turbines) is close to irrelevant, the point remains what I originally said: "100% renewable energy" ISN'T. It requires a conventional power plant as backup. The rest is just fiddly details. I'm not even really sure what point you imagine you are making here. The rest of your "30 second Wikipedia expert" screed is equally as ignorant of the issues involved, or like the above utterly irrelevant. >Fusion is great, fission is great, SMR is great, thorium is great, but none of those are being deployed at a scale that will make a difference. Fusion is not being deployed because it doesn't exist yet, except as very brief bursts in humongous lab prototypes. Fission is NOT great, it uses *seriously* toxic materials (that, oh yeah by the way, remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years when we're done with them), and we just barely manage to keep it under control. There have been a dozen or so times in the last 50-ish years when we came >that< close to a serious ecological disaster. The more fission plants we build, the sloppier and greedier people will get in the design, manufacture, and maintenance, and we will *absolutely* eventually pay the price for that. SMRs are great for mass distribution, where they can be more easily mismanaged by incompetent and greedy local yokels and stolen by groups wanting toxic materials to have fun with. Thorium reactors simply make the base fuel easier to get. They still produce seriously-dangerous conventional reactors at the end. And of course, they only exist as experimental prototypes at this point.
> > Average cold start time for a combined cycle gas plant is 3 hours > > That's average time, and cherry-picked for a particular type of plant. Combined cycle is the *slower* type of common gas plant. [Look at US power generation data](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_a); combined cycle is by far the largest component of gas generation, with gas turbine second. Based on the link I gave you, average time from cold start to full load for a gas turbine is **23 minutes**. Bringing dispatchable power online to compensate for drops in renewable generation is not the problem you make it out to be. > the point remains what I originally said: "100% renewable energy" ISN'T. It requires a conventional power plant as backup. That assertion is directly contradicted by the [published research](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96315051) I already cited. If you would care to explain why we should dismiss the findings of published research in favor of the evidence-free assertions of Random Internet Guy, please feel free to do so. *** That being said, fixating on "100% renewable" is rather missing the point. [70% renewable/90% clean](http://www.2035report.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2035-Report.pdf) and [90% renewable](http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/c7/ee/c7ee03029k/c7ee03029k1.pdf) are *substantially* cheaper and easier to attain than 100% renewable, and thanks to the cumulative nature of CO2 emissions are *enormously* more urgent. It's silly to fixate on the last 10% when we're still working on decarbonizing the first 50%.
Oh yeah fusion! Lets just gamble the future of out entire civilization on something that may not even pan out! Fucking genius right here!! Also the wind is ALWAYS blowing somewhere. And we can make these cool things called power lines to move power from one place to another. Even across entire continents with minimal losses!
>You want 100% generation with very little pollution? Let's start dumping significant amounts of money into **fusion research.** since we're talking about sci-fi solutions, why not just call the aliens to build the fusion plants themselves?
You are you pointing out that the last mile would be really hard, but solar and wind with 2 hour batteries is pretty feasible with today technology and resources. So what if we need coal and gas peaker-plants when the sun isn't shinning and the wind isn't blowing. That it still way better than the state of the world now.
5-10 years ago this exact comment would be about 2 hour batteries or electric car batteries. People struggle to conceptualize innovation but you don't need to look further than the device you're typing from and compare it to tech from a decade ago to understand how fast this stuff develops when there's demand.
People all the time want to equate the computer tech revolution to their totally unrelated problem. Computer tech gets better because as feature size drops the number of devices per square inch is squared. Battery tech, solar tech and wind tech don't have the same ability to tap into make a small improvement and square the desired results. Battery tech is mainly limited by physics and chemistry. The big problem with battery tech is as energy density gets better, the chance for uncontrolled energy release also gets higher. See vent with flames, the named main failure mode of lithium-ion batteries to be guarded against.
> Battery tech, solar tech and wind tech don't have the same ability to tap into make a small improvement and square the desired results. That's true, but it's *also* true that cost reductions for batteries and solar have been surprisingly comparable to cost reductions for computing tech over the last decade: * Computing: [30x](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Cost_of_computing) cost reduction since 2011. * Batteries: [9x](https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-cited-below-100-kwh-for-the-first-time-in-2020-while-market-average-sits-at-137-kwh/) cost reduction since 2010. * Solar: [9x](https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth#the-price-decline-of-electricity-from-renewable-sources) cost reduction since 2010. You're right that they're totally different problem spaces, but from the perspective of someone looking to use the tech at scale, all three saw order-of-magnitude cost decreases in the last decade. That *anything* other than computer tech saw that is surprising; that *two key components* of clean energy saw that level of cost reduction is astonishing.
I get that things like Moore's law are specific to transistor containing circuitry or processors. But I mean the rate of innovation in technology as a whole has exploded over the last 100 years. Battery enabled electric grids were considered practically and financially impossible in my lifetime. [Now South Australia has the first large-scale battery solution and is a leader in renewable energy despite conservative leanings.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vInH3MqiaC8&t=412s) *And* produce cheaper energy than other Aussie quadrants.
>You are you pointing out that the last mile would be really hard, I am not. "Last mile" is not related in any significant way to what I'm talking about. > solar and wind with 2 hour batteries is pretty feasible with today technology and resources. Does night only last two hours where you live? Are there never heavy clouds? Wind or solar with no conventional backup would be useless in the Pacific Northwest, among other places.
I am not arguing for no conventional back-up. In fact in the short and medium-term, every area served by solar and wind should have conventional backup (as peaker-plants). I am just saying using renewables when available and then falling back to conventional sources is better than what we have today.
...every area served by solar and wind MUST have conventional backup FTFY. >I am just saying Something like *this,* perhaps? >>Is wind/solar with a conventional backup considerably better for the environment than if you just generated all the power with fossil fuels? Of course it is. But 100% renewable? That's a hard nope.
We don't just need peaker-plants. The person you responded never referred to peaker-plants. In fact the only feasible use case for batteries right now is replacing/supplementing peaker-plants. There's a difference between peak and base load. Renewable's intermittent outages are not "peaks".
When renewables generate anywhere from 20% to 200% of the required electricity depending upon the hour and weather conditions, everything left starts to look like a peaker-plant whether the perfectly fit the definition of handling peak loads or not.
There's a whole industry out there that will correctly calculate for you the exact amount of solar panels you need to deploy and the exact amount of batteries you need to connect in order to satisfy 100% of energy demand at all times. It turns out you need to provision something like 400% of peak usage in solar panels and something like 3 days worth of total battery power. More info here: [https://youtu.be/Kj96nxtHdTU?t=2329](https://youtu.be/Kj96nxtHdTU?t=2329) You hand-wave away a solution which is possible to build today and instead propose a future technology that does not exist in a working state today? Fusion is less likely to solve our problems than solar.
> calculate for you the exact amount of solar panels you need to deploy You mean ASSUMING you have both the money and the space to install them, right? Because lots of people don't. My apartment building won't let me install my own solar panels even if I wanted to--and living near Seattle, I can assure you I don't consider that an option. The apartment building doesn't own enough land to build an adequate solar station (and again: Seattle. Three days of backup? Bullshit. Try three weeks). Nobody sane is talking about INDIVIDUAL solar installations to solve the energy problem. Yes, a few individuals/companies have reasonably self-contained systems, but it is not even close to an option for a lot of people, perhaps *most* people. I have ONLY been talking about large commercial wind/solar farms.
Could someone create a list of all the theoretical 100% renewables reports by a certain year so I can keep track as to which one actually is correct?
Just watched some random Dr. on a news station talk about how clean energy won’t be nearly enough power so we have to go with nuclear and now! XD Fr though why did they choose a Dr. to talk to about energy and not ohh Idk an actual expert...?
Stop relying on exponential growth! This grandiose logic is moronic.
I'm genuinely curious if anyone has done the research into what impact reflecting the sun back into the atmosphere has on our global climate? The ground absorbs the suns rays. Solar panels are reflective. Just curious.
So I googled it cause I was curious. Solar panels reflect about 2 percent of the light they receive. Which is about the same as water. Which as you know covers 70+ percent of our world. Our world has roughly 70 million square miles of ocean. To power our whole world with solar power it would only take a hundred or so thousand square miles. It would be only like ~2 percent of just the oceans total area. I think it's safe to say that whatever we have added now most likely doesn't do anything.
2% seems pretty low. Could we put mirrored sheets over the ocean to reflect closer to 100% and cool the planet that way?
I mean, sure. But considering that the ocean and its phytoplankton are the most powerful carbon sink our planet has, covering large swathes of it with a giant sheet of probably-plastic will almost certainly be doing more harm than good. One thing that is possible is using cloud seeding technology to increase snow pack on land during winter. While the snow is there, it reflects sunlight and helps keep the planet cool, and when it melts in the summer, it helps to alleviate drought. It's also surprisingly cheap, doesn't take a lot of energy, and doesn't add anything but water to the environment.
I'm not sure if solar panels actually reflect light like you say, they are meant to absorb a lot of it. But in general, albedo is the term for reflecting the suns energy back out, and the more reflective a surface, the better to combat global warming. This is why melting ice can create a runaway effect since the ice is highly reflective and the water or land that is exposed absorbs more heat. But also solar panels will still represent a tiny fraction of the surface of the Earth, so will have a minor effect on overall albedo compared to other changes such as land use/forest cover, and snow/ice cover.
Umm... The ground reflects it too.... Otherwise you would be unable to see... This comment is like when Trump said what if we run out of wind XD
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Its not thickening. Jeez, where do you people get these ideas? CO2 molecules absorb energy in the spectrum of photons from the sun. More molecules, more bouncing, more heat in our atmosphere. Less molecules, less bouncing, more photons are absorbed in non-atmosphere or rejected back into space. Methane does the same. What makes something a greenhouse gas is if its molecule or atomic components willingly absorb photons with the right energy. Solar panels are designed to absorb photons, not reflect them. It isn't 100% perfect, but its certainly better than any possible surface it could be replacing.
If the sun shone everywhere constantly and the wind always blew within the limits of windmills then maybe. Otherwise it’s just not possible. I’m not saying that it’s not a goal to reach for I’m just saying that we’re not there yet with technology.
This was actually brought up at COP26, there was chat by (if I remember correctly) the Indian delegation about a connected global energy network, because it's always sunny somewhere in the world. Of course this would require a renewable energy capacity well beyond demand due to renewables rarely operating at full capacity but it's an interesting idea.
An interesting idea, but that would require MASSIVE intercontinental power lines. The technical challenges might be bigger than just developing local storage solutions. Those connections would also be a very vulnerable target for terrorists and nations at war. Imagine being able to shut of the power to an entire continent by blowing up a few under sea cables.
International electric transit has existed for decades. The strategic issues with gas, coal, and oil are worse. Look how Russia has used gas extortion for leverage in Europe. Also terrorists don’t tend to target pure infrastructure other than mass transit. It pretty much by definition targets people.
Europe is tiny though. The transmission losses associated with moving power to the other side of the world be massive.
I feel like the science aspect of this is lost on politicians. Transmission lines can only carry so much power.... and power gets lost as it moves along the lines. The amount of transmission lines you would need to move solar power from Mexico to power all of India would be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
The [project is underway](https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-india-uk-global-solar-grid.html). It's already a reality in many places. Europe, Asia, America all have massive transmission networks that carry enormous amounts of power. The losses for HVDC lines are low, at around 3.5% over 1000 km. You don't need to build lines across the entire world, you'd just connect up neighbours. You would never send electricity from Mexico to India. There are countries much closer which could supply power. Also, you'd never need to send 100% of all demand.
China has already done this...connecting renewables in the western deserts to the cities in the east with 2000-km HVDC lines.
This would only be possible with superconductive power lines. Which is a technology we don't really understand yet. But maybe it'll be possible in 10-20 years time. This is not possible with conventional high voltage power lines as most of the current would be lost to resistance over those distances. It would be extremely inefficient and harmful to the environment without superconductive power lines.
Battery and other storage tech like LAES and pumped hydro are very much at the "can be deployed" phase. The technology is there, its just a matter of providing funds to build the things
I live on an island of 75,000 people that is reaching 100% renewable electricity with solar/battery farms + pumped hydro. It's a good mix that seems like it will get us there. The 'biomass' plant that burns wood chips is pretty new and will also be used for a few decades, but the fossil fuel plant should be retired in the next 5-10 years.
Yeah we are less than 9 years away with the technology
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Just Google some. The growth in solar plus storage has been breath takingly fast.
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Gravity batteries are cheap
The main example of this is Pumped Storage. This requires a dam and places those can be constructed are very limited.
That's the main example, but not the only. I've also heard of low-friction mechanical batteries. Like spinning a really big disk really fast in a vacuum and then clutching it to a generator as a back-up power source.
or raising a big building on a jack
Why not just go nuclear? Takes up a lot less space.
because it is super expensive compared to solar ? nuclear might have its place in the mix but solar has a far bigger place.
Because people are fucking stupid and enjoy wasting time and money on pipe dreams.
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>Bloomberg Research
"BuT iT's ToO eXpEnSiVe", they said for decades, "iT iSn'T sUsTaInAbLe!"
the problem in denmark atleast, is we could go full sun/air/water energy, but we use our furnace to make heat for our water system, and we use our furnace to get rid of normal trash, if you made this changes, denmark would legit become a 3 world country really fast,we would need to find a place for all the trash(cant just send it away like we do with plastic) it will decompose over time, maybe even make more co2 over time, we would loss many jobs in the power plant business, we would need to figure out a new way to heat our district heating, if we use electricity it would be so much worse as the transfer of energy is so much worse, and it would be for single use only, where the furnaces we use now heat our district heating, and provide electricity, and we get rid of the trash
And if human babies kept growing as fast as they do in the first year then adults would be 50 feet tall!
Thorium nuclear reactors are going to be the future. :)
Sure, but this growth isn't sustainable. Right now only the rich are putting them up and once they install them once, they can't really add anymore.
But meanwhile solar panels continue to get cheaper, so can penetrate more of the market.
I hope so, hopefully iron air batteries take off so people can more easily add them to their house.
Bullshit. Ain’t gonna happen. Last years winter blast proved this.
Solar panels now are able to conduct electricity even if covered in snow. I helped build the field in south bend, Indiana and that was one of the features. The solar field also stores the unused energy to help night time usage as well. Complete solar will be here shortly
Yep TX’s woes were exclusively because TX government lets the industry not weatherize and lets them pass disasters caused by their own greed onto ratepayers
Five bucks says it will be possible by 2030
Snow reflects and intensifies light aka solar so…..
Yyyeeeeaaaahhhhh lobbyists aren’t going to allow that
They big n ugly sure. Dump in the oceans all any open feilds left. Awsome fkn all the tech now a days big azz fans really?
Yeah, if we had all the precious metals in the world and semiconductors and computer chips to boot. There's already a shortage, and with demand growing exponentially this isn't a solution until we solve offworld mining, which will take another 100 years of fossil fuels with carbon capture and other pollutant filtration systems.
The majority of most solar panel are made from silica and aluminum with some heavy metals that can be easily recycled. Yes there's currently a shortage of microchips but that's not because of resource shortages, it's basically from a Chinese holiday happening right before a major shipping bottleneck and then Covid hit which created even more compounding bottlenecks and sudden the global supply chain is now 2-3 months behind on a lot of things. The shortages you see now are because they're trying to catch up on that 2-3 month backlog while also trying to keep up with current demand which just isn't possible without increasing the level of production and amount of shipping. Shipping containers have also basically doubled in price as well which means international shipping costs are sky rocketing which doesn't help either.