Re:The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem
by Dylan16807 on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:28PM
(#26196224)
> Nuclear is great for base load, but their prohibitive upfront expenses makes load-following wildly impractical. You want to be running them at full capacity at all times.
Only for a very weak definition of "prohibitive".
Let's say nuclear costs 10 cents per kWh if run at full load. If you use only those plants, averaging 2/3 output, your power costs 15 cents (plus distribution). If you plan for really high peaks maybe you average 1/2 output and power costs 20 cents (plus distribution). None of those costs are prohibitive. It's more than 9 cents (plus distribution) from coal but not that much more.
Prohibitive is something like trying to use batteries for long-term power balancing. A battery that's needed once a year or less could cost upwards of 10 dollars per delivered kWh.
Re:The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem
by michaelbrave on Friday February 19, 2021 @12:44PM
(#26195678)
I can't find the link anymore, but a few years back they were looking into using pulley systems with large blocks of concrete to store kinetic energy in a similar fashion to pump back. I think something like that in theory could work.
Nuclear is great for base load, but their prohibitive upfront expenses makes load-following wildly impractical. You want to be running them at full capacity at all times.
> pump back hydro
Not scalable. That there are some very specific oppporunities to use pump back is great, but what are you going to do in Texas? It just doesn't scale.
> other storage solutions >People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc.
I would hope that scalability would be something that HN readers understand. We're not just talking Trillions of dollars to build out the battery networks. We're talking about spending trillions of dollars periodically as those batteries are consumables. We're talking millions of tons of toxic waste being produced as by products.
There's a reason why no one has done it yet, it's just not feasible.
The best solution would be adopting France's design of majority Nuclear. If you must use variable sources like wind and solar then have Nuclear as a baseline and supplement the intermittence with nat gas.