This would have happened a bit earlier if the most efficient and long-lasting solar panels, monocrystalline silicon, had been developed by US manufacturers instead of by Chinese ones. All the tariffs applied by state and federal regulators on the import of these panels have been about slowing the rate of solar PV production in the USA on behalf of the fossil fuel and investor-owned utility sectors.
Claims that these tariffs have some human rights motivations are nonsensical, would the US block imports of Saudi oil over human rights abuses there? Of course not - but silicon solar panels, oh my!
It's no surprise that the pushback by politicians owned by investors in fossil fuels and utilities has been so intense - energy is one of the most lucrative investments, and it's rather difficult to control and meter the flow of sunlight to homes, in comparison to natural gas or crude oil.
Notably, the USA has no R & D programs or subsidy programs like the CHIPS act (for semiconductors for computation, not for power production) aimed at rapidly expanding monocrystalline silicon production.
You're forgetting labor costs in the US are much higher and environmental regulations are much more strict. So US made panels will unlikely to ever be price competitive with the Chinese made ones.
Why should the US try to lead solar panel technology ? China has many talented engineers and plenty of venture capital. I'd prefer them to invest it in solar panel manufacturing and power electronics rather than social media, ai or Telco technology.
My comment isn't directly related to the OP, but figured it'd be an interesting insight to share as it's very recent for me.
Just finished a motorbike trip in Laos. Fun fact, their largest export is electricity.
Would've never guessed that, right?
90% of the electricity they generate is exported to neighboring countries - mostly Thailand.
80% is renewable - Go Laos!
But wait, it may be renewable... but turns out the government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to the highest bidder wanting to build a dam for hydroelectric wherever they want, and usually without any sort of environmental survey - oops. It's the driest country I've been to in a while, many villages had their water access completely destroyed due to upstream dams.
Just a cautionary tale as "renewable" doesn't necessarily mean better - green-washing is absolutely still a thing out there and we should be sure to thoroughly vet information before assuming it's more viable solution for us.
It's also worth noting that dams aren't just built for electricity. They're also built to control flooding and to control water supply. I'm not saying that's the case in Laos, but it does happen.
People can live without electricity, but it's difficult to live without water.
It's the driest country I've been to in a while, many villages had their water access completely destroyed due to upstream dams.
Completely destroyed, or just no longer enough to support wasteful methods of irrigation? It's been over a decade since I was in SE Asia, but my impression was that they relied heavily on flooding fields for irrigation.
I don't think it is helpful to celebrate countries that won the "geography birth lottery" and have huge rivers that are easy to dam. See: Laos, Paraguay, Norway, Austria, etc. Nothing is "amazing" that they are mostly green energy.
Also, for other readers, Laos is a repressive "communist" dictatorship. It is no surprise that the gov't welcomed Belt & Road programme by China (with high interest loans!) to build a giant dam that enriched few at the expense of many. This is green washing at its very best.
The future of green energy is mostly about solar and wind. Yes, there are some places with easy-to-dam rivers remaining (sub-Saharan Africa), but they are few and far between.
It is still crazy to me that North Africa is not covered in solar panels that export to Europe. Same for Australia, South Africa, and many Gulf countries. Sunshine and wind is the "new oil" of the 21st Century. They can export to neighboring countries or produce green hydrogen.
You think the energy transition can be achieved without harming people? Yes if you are a river fisherman you do not live in the right century. Nor do people living in mountain villages. There are those who will get cancer from working in a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. Still it's not going to be that bad because the pollution from fossil fuel electricity generation is also causing a lot of disease and killing a lot of people.
One thing that's often overlooked in statistics like this is roof top solar because it's just not that easy to account for. In places like Australia, where double digit percentages of homes have solar and where building codes are actually being changed to require solar panels, this is a non trivial amount that is putting a lot of pressure on energy suppliers to adapt. Effectively whole states are running on solar when the sun comes out (which it does a lot over there). Whether they like it or not, demand for grid electricity drops a lot whenever these panels are producing. And of course a lot of people are installing batteries as well. That must be happening in the US as well and it must be having some impact.
https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data This article seems to suggest that the amount of installed solar has doubled in the last four years and that the pace is accelerating. Also it states that the solar market expanded by 40% last year.
One thing I have idly considered - what to do with the excess daily solar energy? Presumably the problem is only going to magnify over the coming years. Net-metering agreements are continuing to get worse, so it seems that the surplus electricity will go to waste.
Outside of bitcoin mining, is there any energy sink a residential user could engage to suck up the spare capacity? At the industrial scale - what processes can intermittently engage in production which is still cost effective if the equipment lays idle for a majority of the day?
Solar gives lots of electricity in the summer. But you have light and warmth then. In the winter when you need the electricity, you get maybe 1/10 of whatever the solar array is capable of.
Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations.
Biogas (eg anaerobic digestors) seems much more possible - but even these need warmth to run well - so aren't as good in the winter.
And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so), but that the battery will only last a few years - how people think the economics make sense is a mystery to me.
I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps.
PS - the battery thing also applies to cars. Old electric cars are basically not worth keeping after 10 years. Who would replace the old battery that costs as much as the car? Esp when the battery slots are incompatible with the latest advances - ie you can't upgrade to a better battery, but only install yesterday's tech.
Long-term trends clearly demonstrate the energy grid’s transition to renewable energy sources.
However, renewables like solar and wind come with unique challenges due to their intermittent nature. They are more variable, harder to forecast, have location constraints, and can benefit from battery storage. These factors lead to a more dynamic grid than before.
For instance, several regions in the country provide five-minute updates on their energy generation mix, enabling near real-time observations of renewable energy effects throughout the day
For example, numerous regions across the country provide updates on their energy generation mix at five-minute intervals, allowing for close to real time observations of these effect of renewables throughout the day.
To help those involved in the energy transition, I created an open-source project called Grid Status (https://github.com/kmax12/gridstatus) that provides fuel mix, wholesale pricing, load, load forecasts, and more.
Additionally, I've developed real-time visualizations to make this data more accessible and easier to comprehend: https://www.gridstatus.io
I hope making this data more accessible and understandable will accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.
It demonstrates, quite clearly, that energy cost is not a concern. We can just barrel through to the electric revolution without a single care to cost, availability, or reliability.
This article is a mess. Energy is NOT power. Reporting on energy (which is what the original publication does; and even they confuse it) is almost pointless.
We need power. Not energy.
Let me explain. There is no such thing as a useful measure of energy reliability. Energy is the accumulation of power over time. Here's a super simplistic example to illustrate the point:
You spend all day walking through the desert. Your water bottle is empty. You drank it all. You really need water, yet there's none to be found. You nearly die a few times, yet manage to make it out to a settlement by nightfall.
Someone there fills your bottle with water.
A reporter says your bottle, over that 24 hour period, was full.
That's the way you compute energy. You can have zero power for 12 hours and then have some for another 12. Energy just adds-up all the bits of power you had over 24 hours and reports it as one number.
Energy comparisons are useless.
Here's reality:
Solar is, nominally, about 50% reliable (if this term isn't comfortable, think "available").
No?
It turns off at night.
Roughly 50% of the time...it does not work.
Wind, on the other hand, does not suffer from this issue. It is much more reliable.
With the addition of a nominal amount of storage wind can easily get up to 95% reliability. Solar, with the same amount of storage, runs about 70% reliability.
This is about power delivery. Consistent. Water bottle in the desert, to use when you need water.
Ignoring all other factors (environmental, wildlife, NIMBY, noise, etc.), wind is a far better technology than solar.
Yet, again, to pull this back into the realm of what we should discussing: We need to talk about power, not energy. When you go to charge your electric car at the same time a million other people want to do the same thing, you need power.
Both are great, since while the daily cycle is a problem with solar, the seasonal variations are a far larger issue (since much mobe energy storage is needed). But both complement each other.
Wind is stronger in the winter and solar is strong in the summer. The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.
Including hydro in the renewables column made the math work. Makes it seem like we've made more progress than perhaps we have. Hydro and wind are the biggest chunks in their pie chart. And much of hydro is decades, if not centuries old infrastructure.
This would be better news if coal wasn't also being replaced by new fossil gas plants like crazy. If you look at coal vs fossil gas in the US it's a lot more depressing.
>> And even when projects are approved, developers often discover they need to pay for new transmission lines to deliver power to residents and businesses. Those transmission lines often face further permitting delays.
Just discovering this? Yeah, this has not been well planned.
OECD ecomony, averaging 80% renewables (wind, solar primarily). The other 20% is gas. They have enough generation now. To rid of that 20% (I'm not sure the economics makes sense) they need to build pumped storage.
Oh, and now they've made the transition, electricity prices are cheaper than non-renewable generation of 5 years ago.
It's so funny to read discussions of "whether or not renewables are viable for replacement of all or most of electricity needs in the U.S.". Here in Europe, we have it figured many years ago and are replacing fossil-fueled generation at a crazy rate, will probably push it to a niche use (gas peakers to fill void when there's neither sun or wind and before enough electrolyzers are put online), in less than 10 years.
"Utility Steag GmbH will add four hard-coal plants with a capacity of 2.5 gigawatts to the market within the next few weeks, while Uniper SE will prolong operations at its 345-megawatt Scholven-C hard-coal-fired power plant, the companies said on Friday. "
Is this why we were having energy shortages during the winter time and there was a rush to get the nuclear reactors back online in France ? I don't consider that having, "it figured out". If you want to discuss prices.. my place of employment is paying millions more euro this year than last. The increase in energy cost is also leading to increase in water costs.. I could go on, but you get the point.
Yet another article and discussion that mostly ignores the fact that intermittent energy sources are not viable mechanisms for base-load generation. This is a basic physics problem that no amount of legislation or green-virtue signaling is going to make the problem go away.
Until we find a reasonable way to store energy at grid scale, a continued shift to intermittent energy generation will result in dramatically higher prices and dramatically lower reliability.
It doesn't really matter if renewable generated more energy than coal for 1 day. What matters is annual generation.
Renewables generates 5 times less than coal annually and still peak for a short period of time, so this is not a big progress. Wind turbines can have big energy peaks when it's very windy, but there is no cheap way to store that energy for a long period of time, WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.
And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.
> combined wind and solar generation increased from 12 percent of national power production in 2021 to 14 percent in 2022. Hydropower, biomass, and geothermal added another 7 percent — for a total share of 21 percent renewables last year. The figure narrowly exceeded coal’s 20 percent share of electricity generation, which fell from 23 percent in 2021.
the article is speaking about average power, not peak power. how do you and the article present such different figures?
Too bad the capital requirements upfront are so expensive for nuclear and literally no one wants to fund a project that will cost at least $8 billion, won't be online for a decade, and the power it be will produce is already more expensive than that of smaller renewable projects.
Who knows maybe once renewable market penetration is nearly maxed out and if storage tech somehow hasn't caught up enough despite the great strides being made, the economics won't be so terrible for the GREENEST BASELOAD.
Nuclear is obviously an amazing source of energy, but the stigma is insane.
In high school, my Chem II class had an assignment where pairs of kids had to present on why nuclear was good or bad. Of 16 or so kids, only my friend and I presented on why nuclear energy was good. Even the chemistry teacher was against nuclear energy.
> but there is no cheap way to store that energy for a long period of time
It's getting close to the point that wind+storage can compete with nuclear, and even gas, on price. With the way cost has been developing on renewables and energy storage sulitons it's more or less inevitable. You're also starting to see off-shore wind, even floating off-shore, come rapidly down in cost, and those have more stable generation and require less energy storage.
The problem of storage is also exaggerated by people who haven't looked at the big picture. We need to replace oil/gas in lots of areas where you need to store and transform energy anyway. Like cars. Think about it.. if you buy an EV you'll generally have enough storage there to power your house for 1-3 days. In a world where all cars are BEVs we'll be well within an order of magnititude of having the manufacturing capacity to have energy storage for all homes. You can even feed electricity from BEVs back into the grid, and I already have my BEV set to only charge in the hours where electricity is cheapest right now. We're also starting to see people use smart controllers to exploit the storage capacity in hot water tanks.
Green metal production will also be a huge source of flexible load. Somewhat related to that, there's even molten metal batteries that can provide extremely cheap grid storage.
> WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.
If you need to shout I'm just led to expect you don't have much meat behind your opinion. Anyway, the problem is just this: what we really need isn't baseload.
You can't solve the worlds energy crisis without lots and lots of renewables. Going all nuclear would be too expensive, too slow, and would probably generate enough heat to slow recovery after climate change. Thermal power plants in general have a whole range of issue that makes it a bad idea to go all-in on it.
Nuclear can certainly supplement with a bit of baseload capacity. But what we need is load following and peaker plants. We need a replacement to gas power plants. Because those are what works well when combining with renewables. And without lots of renewables we have zero hope of combatting climate change.
> And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.
At least copper and steel is easily recycled, with low carbon impact. Nuclear power plants use a lot of concrete and the sustainability of that is far more uncertain.
The division of electricity production into baseload, load-following and peaker categories is just a historical anachronism.
Coal and nuclear plants have poor abilities to ramp power production up and down in response to fluctuating demand, so they were called 'baseload'. Various versions of natural gas power plants could respond more rapidly, so they were typically placed in the other other two categories.
This is all irrelevant if you have distributed wind/solar production coupled to efficient storage systems that manage the distribution using technology that doesn't have those limitations. Practically that means short term storage of power in batteries (daily), long-term storage in synthetic fuels (seasonal).
And wind requires immense use of rare metals that are often acquired through slave labour and create massive radioactive pools of waste.
It is interesting to see the responses to Nuclear of 'too much up front/takes too long' while simultaneously patiently waiting out solar/wind 'it's getting there.'
Interesting they also included biomass here as it is certainly not a carbon friendly process nor renewable.
Too much 'we've picked our winners and won't hear a negative word' in this space now, and it's getting worse.
[+] [-] photochemsyn|2 years ago|reply
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/04/14/the-weekend-read-chin...
Claims that these tariffs have some human rights motivations are nonsensical, would the US block imports of Saudi oil over human rights abuses there? Of course not - but silicon solar panels, oh my!
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/exclusive-us-blocks-more...
It's no surprise that the pushback by politicians owned by investors in fossil fuels and utilities has been so intense - energy is one of the most lucrative investments, and it's rather difficult to control and meter the flow of sunlight to homes, in comparison to natural gas or crude oil.
Notably, the USA has no R & D programs or subsidy programs like the CHIPS act (for semiconductors for computation, not for power production) aimed at rapidly expanding monocrystalline silicon production.
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konschubert|2 years ago|reply
The tariffs boosted domestic production of solar panels.
The tariffs also increased the cost of solar panels, so they slowed adoption of solar.
You can have Made in America, or you can have cheap, but you cannot have both.
[+] [-] nroets|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tjbiddle|2 years ago|reply
Just finished a motorbike trip in Laos. Fun fact, their largest export is electricity.
Would've never guessed that, right?
90% of the electricity they generate is exported to neighboring countries - mostly Thailand.
80% is renewable - Go Laos!
But wait, it may be renewable... but turns out the government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to the highest bidder wanting to build a dam for hydroelectric wherever they want, and usually without any sort of environmental survey - oops. It's the driest country I've been to in a while, many villages had their water access completely destroyed due to upstream dams.
Just a cautionary tale as "renewable" doesn't necessarily mean better - green-washing is absolutely still a thing out there and we should be sure to thoroughly vet information before assuming it's more viable solution for us.
[+] [-] revertmean|2 years ago|reply
People can live without electricity, but it's difficult to live without water.
[+] [-] snozolli|2 years ago|reply
Completely destroyed, or just no longer enough to support wasteful methods of irrigation? It's been over a decade since I was in SE Asia, but my impression was that they relied heavily on flooding fields for irrigation.
[+] [-] throwaway2037|2 years ago|reply
Also, for other readers, Laos is a repressive "communist" dictatorship. It is no surprise that the gov't welcomed Belt & Road programme by China (with high interest loans!) to build a giant dam that enriched few at the expense of many. This is green washing at its very best.
The future of green energy is mostly about solar and wind. Yes, there are some places with easy-to-dam rivers remaining (sub-Saharan Africa), but they are few and far between.
It is still crazy to me that North Africa is not covered in solar panels that export to Europe. Same for Australia, South Africa, and many Gulf countries. Sunshine and wind is the "new oil" of the 21st Century. They can export to neighboring countries or produce green hydrogen.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] timwaagh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianN|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|2 years ago|reply
https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data This article seems to suggest that the amount of installed solar has doubled in the last four years and that the pace is accelerating. Also it states that the solar market expanded by 40% last year.
[+] [-] melling|2 years ago|reply
https://www.statista.com/statistics/859266/number-of-coal-po...
They generate something like 25% of greenhouse gases. When should be expect these to be replaced, and get the 25% drop in emissions?
Replacing over a billion ICE cars seems with EV’s is going to be so much more work, for example.
An immediate 25% drop in emissions might even buy us a few more years before we need to get to net zero emissions.
[+] [-] Georgelemental|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fbdab103|2 years ago|reply
Outside of bitcoin mining, is there any energy sink a residential user could engage to suck up the spare capacity? At the industrial scale - what processes can intermittently engage in production which is still cost effective if the equipment lays idle for a majority of the day?
Fuel synthesis? Desalination? SETI-like computations?
[+] [-] verisimi|2 years ago|reply
Solar gives lots of electricity in the summer. But you have light and warmth then. In the winter when you need the electricity, you get maybe 1/10 of whatever the solar array is capable of.
Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations.
Biogas (eg anaerobic digestors) seems much more possible - but even these need warmth to run well - so aren't as good in the winter.
And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so), but that the battery will only last a few years - how people think the economics make sense is a mystery to me.
I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps.
PS - the battery thing also applies to cars. Old electric cars are basically not worth keeping after 10 years. Who would replace the old battery that costs as much as the car? Esp when the battery slots are incompatible with the latest advances - ie you can't upgrade to a better battery, but only install yesterday's tech.
[+] [-] kmax12|2 years ago|reply
However, renewables like solar and wind come with unique challenges due to their intermittent nature. They are more variable, harder to forecast, have location constraints, and can benefit from battery storage. These factors lead to a more dynamic grid than before.
For instance, several regions in the country provide five-minute updates on their energy generation mix, enabling near real-time observations of renewable energy effects throughout the day
For example, numerous regions across the country provide updates on their energy generation mix at five-minute intervals, allowing for close to real time observations of these effect of renewables throughout the day.
To help those involved in the energy transition, I created an open-source project called Grid Status (https://github.com/kmax12/gridstatus) that provides fuel mix, wholesale pricing, load, load forecasts, and more.
Additionally, I've developed real-time visualizations to make this data more accessible and easier to comprehend: https://www.gridstatus.io
I hope making this data more accessible and understandable will accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.
[+] [-] PM_me_your_math|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robomartin|2 years ago|reply
We need power. Not energy.
Let me explain. There is no such thing as a useful measure of energy reliability. Energy is the accumulation of power over time. Here's a super simplistic example to illustrate the point:
You spend all day walking through the desert. Your water bottle is empty. You drank it all. You really need water, yet there's none to be found. You nearly die a few times, yet manage to make it out to a settlement by nightfall.
Someone there fills your bottle with water.
A reporter says your bottle, over that 24 hour period, was full.
That's the way you compute energy. You can have zero power for 12 hours and then have some for another 12. Energy just adds-up all the bits of power you had over 24 hours and reports it as one number.
Energy comparisons are useless.
Here's reality:
Solar is, nominally, about 50% reliable (if this term isn't comfortable, think "available").
No?
It turns off at night.
Roughly 50% of the time...it does not work.
Wind, on the other hand, does not suffer from this issue. It is much more reliable.
With the addition of a nominal amount of storage wind can easily get up to 95% reliability. Solar, with the same amount of storage, runs about 70% reliability.
This is about power delivery. Consistent. Water bottle in the desert, to use when you need water.
Ignoring all other factors (environmental, wildlife, NIMBY, noise, etc.), wind is a far better technology than solar.
Yet, again, to pull this back into the realm of what we should discussing: We need to talk about power, not energy. When you go to charge your electric car at the same time a million other people want to do the same thing, you need power.
[+] [-] danhor|2 years ago|reply
Wind is stronger in the winter and solar is strong in the summer. The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|2 years ago|reply
Including hydro in the renewables column made the math work. Makes it seem like we've made more progress than perhaps we have. Hydro and wind are the biggest chunks in their pie chart. And much of hydro is decades, if not centuries old infrastructure.
But still! Lots of progress.
[+] [-] acidburnNSA|2 years ago|reply
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896
The fraction of energy that comes from low carbon sources is what matters.
[+] [-] kragen|2 years ago|reply
in some sense that's 'low carbon'
[+] [-] starkd|2 years ago|reply
Just discovering this? Yeah, this has not been well planned.
[+] [-] Forestessential|2 years ago|reply
and for how it compares to coal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stati...
you have like 60-65% coal fired in the States.
40% of the corn produced in US is used for ethanol which is a energy intensive process which uses fossil fuels.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] egberts1|2 years ago|reply
Now, make it a 24/7 steady supply of renewable energy.
We’ll wait.
[+] [-] rstuart4133|2 years ago|reply
You can stop waiting now. https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-hits-stunning-ne...
OECD ecomony, averaging 80% renewables (wind, solar primarily). The other 20% is gas. They have enough generation now. To rid of that 20% (I'm not sure the economics makes sense) they need to build pumped storage.
Oh, and now they've made the transition, electricity prices are cheaper than non-renewable generation of 5 years ago.
[+] [-] Proven|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anovikov|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lenkite|2 years ago|reply
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-21/germany-b...
"Utility Steag GmbH will add four hard-coal plants with a capacity of 2.5 gigawatts to the market within the next few weeks, while Uniper SE will prolong operations at its 345-megawatt Scholven-C hard-coal-fired power plant, the companies said on Friday. "
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1124448463/germany-coal-energ...
https://www.ft.com/content/9d3c8af8-ae00-4dc5-9e85-579681450...
"Germany turns to coal for a third of its electricity"
[+] [-] soitgoes511|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianN|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrPatan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stainablesteel|2 years ago|reply
renewables do not have this kind of obvious benefit, fossil fuels and fission are the best options until we can get fusion
[+] [-] gwright|2 years ago|reply
Until we find a reasonable way to store energy at grid scale, a continued shift to intermittent energy generation will result in dramatically higher prices and dramatically lower reliability.
[+] [-] jokoon|2 years ago|reply
Renewables generates 5 times less than coal annually and still peak for a short period of time, so this is not a big progress. Wind turbines can have big energy peaks when it's very windy, but there is no cheap way to store that energy for a long period of time, WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.
And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.
[+] [-] colinsane|2 years ago|reply
the article is speaking about average power, not peak power. how do you and the article present such different figures?
[+] [-] kuhewa|2 years ago|reply
Who knows maybe once renewable market penetration is nearly maxed out and if storage tech somehow hasn't caught up enough despite the great strides being made, the economics won't be so terrible for the GREENEST BASELOAD.
Who
[+] [-] tnel77|2 years ago|reply
In high school, my Chem II class had an assignment where pairs of kids had to present on why nuclear was good or bad. Of 16 or so kids, only my friend and I presented on why nuclear energy was good. Even the chemistry teacher was against nuclear energy.
Edit: This was in rural USA.
[+] [-] audunw|2 years ago|reply
It's getting close to the point that wind+storage can compete with nuclear, and even gas, on price. With the way cost has been developing on renewables and energy storage sulitons it's more or less inevitable. You're also starting to see off-shore wind, even floating off-shore, come rapidly down in cost, and those have more stable generation and require less energy storage.
The problem of storage is also exaggerated by people who haven't looked at the big picture. We need to replace oil/gas in lots of areas where you need to store and transform energy anyway. Like cars. Think about it.. if you buy an EV you'll generally have enough storage there to power your house for 1-3 days. In a world where all cars are BEVs we'll be well within an order of magnititude of having the manufacturing capacity to have energy storage for all homes. You can even feed electricity from BEVs back into the grid, and I already have my BEV set to only charge in the hours where electricity is cheapest right now. We're also starting to see people use smart controllers to exploit the storage capacity in hot water tanks.
Green metal production will also be a huge source of flexible load. Somewhat related to that, there's even molten metal batteries that can provide extremely cheap grid storage.
> WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.
If you need to shout I'm just led to expect you don't have much meat behind your opinion. Anyway, the problem is just this: what we really need isn't baseload.
You can't solve the worlds energy crisis without lots and lots of renewables. Going all nuclear would be too expensive, too slow, and would probably generate enough heat to slow recovery after climate change. Thermal power plants in general have a whole range of issue that makes it a bad idea to go all-in on it.
Nuclear can certainly supplement with a bit of baseload capacity. But what we need is load following and peaker plants. We need a replacement to gas power plants. Because those are what works well when combining with renewables. And without lots of renewables we have zero hope of combatting climate change.
> And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.
At least copper and steel is easily recycled, with low carbon impact. Nuclear power plants use a lot of concrete and the sustainability of that is far more uncertain.
[+] [-] photochemsyn|2 years ago|reply
Coal and nuclear plants have poor abilities to ramp power production up and down in response to fluctuating demand, so they were called 'baseload'. Various versions of natural gas power plants could respond more rapidly, so they were typically placed in the other other two categories.
This is all irrelevant if you have distributed wind/solar production coupled to efficient storage systems that manage the distribution using technology that doesn't have those limitations. Practically that means short term storage of power in batteries (daily), long-term storage in synthetic fuels (seasonal).
[+] [-] llukas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agentgumshoe|2 years ago|reply
It is interesting to see the responses to Nuclear of 'too much up front/takes too long' while simultaneously patiently waiting out solar/wind 'it's getting there.'
Interesting they also included biomass here as it is certainly not a carbon friendly process nor renewable.
Too much 'we've picked our winners and won't hear a negative word' in this space now, and it's getting worse.