this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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The memes of the climate
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You mean like the economically grounded notion of having a survivable environment?
I mean that we have solutions that don't have it's history of cost and schedule overruns.
I'd reserve judgement on that until they start building grid level battery storage on a scale an order of magnitude bigger than current setups.
I won't, because nuclear already proved it can't do it, so we look elsewhere.
Flow batteries are not that hard to ramp up.
None of these options are "that hard", but until some storage is built on the multi-gigawatt scale, any conjecture on real build cost is a waste of time.
Think in terms of probability, not absolute. I mentioned flow batteries because I think it's the most promising and developed, but there are several others. If one doesn't work, ten others are being pursued in parallel. Only one needs to work
In a five year time frame, we'll probably have at least one. More likely three or four.
Nuclear, in contrast, has trouble pursuing multiple possibilities at once. It's too expensive. A decade ago, it was the AP1000 design, which was supposed to avoid the purpose-built engineering that bogged down deployments in the past. That was a failure so hard that Westinghouse nearly collapsed permanently. Now it's SMRs, and given the collapse of the project in Utah, it's not looking good.
I'm more interested in sodium ion being produced that while having less density will charge and discharge in a theoretically endless cycle. Flow battery is great, but it needs to be scalable from the consumer all the way up to grid storage.
There are already large flow battery installations on the grid.
https://newatlas.com/energy/worlds-largest-flow-battery-grid-china/#:~:text=The%20Chinese%20city%20of%20Dalian,to%20200%2C000%20residents%20each%20day.
My point was that something that big is unaffordable, and it needs to be scalable.
Guess what else is unaffordable? Nuclear.
Yes, but I was talking about for home installations. Then economies of scale could make it affordable and scalable for everyone
Why do we need gigawatt grid level storages?
What about decentralized storages, e.g. a battery in your home in conjunction with solar power, or using your car battery? A lot of the arguments against renewable energy comes from demanding the electricity grid to follow the same principals as it did under fossil fuels. But a fully renewable grid can be governed by different principles.
For home use, sure that distributed model may work. For industrial use, it won't. The power demands are too high. Especially if you want to cut out the emissions from things like steel production.
Steel production is an example of an industry that has many activities being best suited for a base load. Many industries and also some activities in steel production would be suitable for load balancing approaches.
We currently have a demand driven grid. We should shift the paradigm to a supply driven grid. This of course runs into problems with capitalism, as a main profit driver is the externalization of the costs for damages. If we adequately price the damages into the energy provided, it will drive industries to take a flexible production approach.
To continue with the heavy industry examples, many run 24/7, not because of direct profit motives, but because of the massive cost associated with letting the process go cold. I've done work at a glass recycling plant where the said point blank: if the furnace ever goes cold, they will just close the plant entirely, since it would cost too much to clean it out and get it going again. Not all processed lend themselves to being turned on and off again constantly.
Which of those solutions are presently available for large scale implementation, and guarantees baseload coverage with no significant CO2 emissions?
In a sufficiently large grid you will always have wind and in a global grid you'd also reliably have solar as base load.
Furthermore the base load can be reduced significantly with smart sheduling of energy usage.
Finally nuclear is no gurantee of baseload coverage. Nuclear power plants require a lot of water for cooling, like all thermal power plants do. With climate change the reliability of rivers providing enough water and the water being cool enough to not cause an ecological desaster downstream is becoming less and less reliable.
Many nuclear power plants at supposedely stable rivers had to be partially or fully shut down in the last summers. Nuclear power under climate change is not a stability factor. It is a risk factor to the grid.
Yes, except even with an interconnected European grid we're still not there. While I can't speak for how much landmass needs to be covered, we need to expand the capacity of the grid quite a bit. I'm not sure where the bottleneck in Germany is now, but a few years ago Danish wind power couldn't be exported much further than Hamburg. Since then the Bundesnetzagentur seems to have been handing out expansion permits left and right, but a grid expansion just across the EU sounds like a fever dream.
Sure, and we're being "motivated" by paying a larger transmission fee during the evening peak in Denmark. But still I haven't heard of people doing much more than not running their dryer during peak or maybe scheduling their EV's charging later. For smart grids to actually work we need distributed energy storage. People still need heating during peak. And as I've stated elsewhere in this thread, storage is expensive. What I wrote about was almost going off-grid, which is insanely expensive, but storage will still be too expensive for most and impractical for many. So most people will just pay the increased price for the power, and not make the huge investment in storage.
Firstly, that depends on the implementation. You mention rivers, and your instance is a ".de", which explains your argument. But in a country like Denmark we have enough coast to build nuclear power there. Which was what was proposed back the 70s and early 80s.
Secondly, the time when we require the most power generated by power plants is during winter. As you yourself pointed out, the shutdowns occurred during the summer.
Don't let the deliberate sabotage by german politics distract from the necessity and ability to change the grid.
In a well interconnected European grid with extensive use of Offshore Wind potentials we can easily get there. It is not a lack of viability but a lack of political will. If you look at Germany, the largest donors to political parties are usually property investment groups and fossil (including nuclear until recently) power companies.
Putting nuclear plants at the cost comes with it's own can of worms. Corrosion, Floodings, Coastal stability... And in regards to the grid you run into the same issues like with offshore wind. Finally with the increase in temperatures through climate change the energy demand in summer will also rise, with the need to actively cool houses more and more. In the southern US, the grid usually fails in summer, not in winter.
Building a huge concrete plant has lots of CO2 emissions. Why wouldn't you include the construction in the CO2 emissions budget? Also, the waste heat from the plant fucks up a local waterway. It's required to be on a body of water, and no one is going to want to swim there anymore.
Windmills? You just stick them where there's wind. They don't bother anything. Construction is minimal and you can still use the land for something else.
Wind turbines come with their own environmental impact due to construction, among that is CO2. Besides that they are highly visible, to the point where I can't look at the horizont where I live, in any direction, without seeing a few, but most importantly: they can't provide baseload coverage.
Wind and solar are nice ideas, but if you want to cover baseload they're just not up to it.
Please allow me to try to explain with an example. During the months of December and January, it is quite normal to experience several periods of no wind for up to a week in Denmark. During the same period there's 6 or 7 hours between sunrise and sunset.
Let's assume that a Danish citizen is average. Avg yearly electricity use is 1.6MWh, and sorry my sources will be mostly in Danish, https://www.bolius.dk/saa-meget-el-vand-og-varme-bruger-en-gennemsnitsfamilie-279. That gives us an avg daily usage of 4.4kWh. During december usage will be 30% above average, as per previous link. That gives us a daily avg usage of 5.7kWh in December.
During this period in 2022, solar accounted for 0.6% of the electricity produced in Denmark, https://www.verdensmaal.org/nyheder/danmark-blandt-eus-tre-solkonger. So at 0.3 kWh out of the 5.7kWh it's close to insignificant. But let's subtract that and now we're at 5.4kWh.
That's 5.4kWh we need to get from somewhere, the wind turbines are barely rotating. Where do we get it? Assuming a household of 4 people that's 22kWh daily. That's where we need powerplants. And personally I prefer nuclear to coal, gas and "carbon neutral" materials like straw and wood, for the CO2, as well as the particulate, emissions. The latter of which, is the cause of about 9mil deaths each year globally, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/fossil-fuel-air-pollution-responsible-1-5-deaths-worldwide.
What about battery storage? Presently there's one vendor of flow batteries in Denmark, https://www.visblue.com/, and while I can't post link to a price, I have been quoted 400-500000 DKK, 50-67000€, for a 10kWh solution, by the company that services my wind turbine.
That's 50k€ for half a day's worth of electricity storage. Let's go back to the example of no wind for a week, you'd need to spend 700k€ for each household at that price. And no, we don't need to have each house have storage installed, and yes, the price will probably be considerably less with different vendors and larger solutions. But it doesn't change the fact that you need to store at least 7x5.4kWh per Dane in order to not need to get electricity elsewhere.
Larger grids have been argued. I don't have the stamina to go into detail on that. Suffice it to say, that describing the investment needed, to make that somewhat viable, as astronomical would be playing it down.
If you stipulate no significant co2 emissions, then you can't have nuclear, either.
Let's say we want to build 100 new nuclear reactors (this would double what the US currently has). It takes about 200,000 tons of concrete to build one reactor. Concrete production outputs about 900kg of co2 per ton.
Cars output 1.5B tons of co2 per year. For the co2 cost of building 100 nuclear plants, we could continue driving ICE cars for an additional 12 years.
This doesn't even take into account steel production, which also has significant co2 output.