this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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You should search the term grid scale storage and get back to me with a viable solution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Already a thing m8
You'll only need a few great lakes worth of water for most major cities.
That's the easy part we've got plenty of ocean the hard part is building the mountain
Could we use landfills? 2 birds 1 stone
Set them on fire first for the aesthetic
That's not viable everywhere or at scale. Creating new reservoirs would also cause great environmental damage.
creating nuclear plants is worse. nuclear plants have a conversion rate from thermal to electrical energy of around 35% So for every kWh you receive from your socket almost 2 kWh are used to heat or evaporate water. That is more environmental damage than a pumping reservoir.
Also the premise is wrong. We dont need the same amount of storage so we can continue using electricity like before.
Most electrical use can be sheduled to align with the availability of energy in the grid. The sun is up at noon? good time to do laundry and dishes. There is a steady wind tonight? Preheat the water in the tank and no need to heat in the morning.
The same can be done for many industrial applications. It just requires innovation and investments, which is why they rather lobby for destroying the planet.
Well since your arguments depend on niche and experimental technology I don't see why Nuclear proponents can't either. The waste heat from nuclear energy is only a concern when it is contained within water, which is pretty easy to use for warming houses or providing houses with warm water. There are already cities that do this. This has huge efficiency savings. https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants/
This all seems a bit theoretical to me. The important thing is to stop fossil fuels right now. If we use a nuclear plant to buy us 50yrs to find renewable alternatives for the specific conditions of the site in question I say go for it. Every location has unique needs here, we can't look at any one technology as a golden bullet for every problem everywhere. We don't have the decades needed for huge innovation and cultural changes to support smart grids like you describe.
We proooooibably could do that if everyone agrees and we all do it together everywhere of the world. Will that happen? No. So we can not agree on that and therefore no big nuclear Masterplan will be build.
Let's say we also try to get everyone on the full renewable boat, try really hard. Will that work so that everybody agrees? No. So as we can not agree on that no renewables will be built. Wait.. Stop.. That's wrong. I still can built renewables even alone on my house. And here is the difference. For the nuclear plan we would almost all all over the world have to agree to make it work. For renewables, it will happen, because we can do it right here right now, everywhere, large scale, small scale. Doesn't matter. It's like with gravity and religion. For religion to "work" you need to believe. Gravity will work, if you believe it or not. That's what gives me at least a little bit hope, renewables are so fucking good, they are unstoppable by now. Question is just if we are fast enough.
I don't want to be excretingly pedantic but I mean f*** it give me a couple hundred fire alarms and I'll have enough Americanium to start a breeder reactor.
Silly me I didn't realize we were just going to install mountains every time we needed a battery. Unfortunately most of humanity lives on the coast unfortunately most of the coast is flat...
Furthermore we would still need to increase a renewable production by over 60% before we would be able to maintain base load and even need the pump storage but go on.
Our country barely has any coast. And we're done with nuclear anyway, so that sounds like a you problem.
And hydrogen, and batteries, and overbuilding, and geographic distribution and a lot more but nukeheads gonna nukehead.
I do not think you comprehend how much power would need to be stored. We are steadily electrifying every single industry year after year we use more and more electricity to power that demand we are burning more fossil fuels than ever before while in conjunction utilizing more renewables than ever before well maintaining the same average nuclear load for the last 20 years....
Renewables and storage is what is gonna happen, you can argue against that as much as you want. Growth of renewables is exponential, growth of nuclear is nonexistent.
I swear to God you're going to kill me with an aneurysm. It's only non-existent because of dumbasses like you. Like facts I also do not give a single fuck about your feelings. We are at a tipping point. We cannot scale renewable production to the point we would need to scale it to In a short enough time for them to be a viable solution alone. Therefore we need to continue to implement renewables while also replacing the most egregious CO2 contributors such as coal fired plants with reactors.
Its nonexistent because its expensive and impractical. Every cent spent for nuclear is a wasted cent because you would get twice the power from renewables. LCOE.
Give it up man, I've had clashes with renewabots, and they are adamant that we can run the entire grid on tinker toys and batteries.
The sad part is they're not wrong they're just 80 to 100 years out of scope. The theory is there it's the capacity to produce and the inability to store that kills it. Also I know I'm not convincing him. The point of comment threads like this is for the people who are uninformed and undecided as of yet.
How about a mixture of batteries (redox-flow, LiFePo, NaFePO, iron-air, Li-Ion), thermal storage (porous volcanic stone, heated water, liquid salt), mechanical storage (giant rotating masses, compressed air), pumped hydroelectrical storage, power-to-gas or power to liquid(hydrogen or ammonia) and creating interconnected power grids?
That should do. Would not create a single point of failure and prevent having everything in the hands of probably a single entity.
While I agree that we need to pursue energy storage solutions In addition to investing in renewables and nuclear. I feel that it would be staggeringly inefficient to have to harvest and store and then redistribute power at the scale you are describing. The power loss and transmission alone from generation to battery to end user would be over 30% most likely. And at that point It's far more efficient to directly energize the consumer with an on-demand source such as a nuclear power plant.