In order to replace fossil fuels using wind and storage you would need significant more than 4 hours, using a much slower charge cycle. If we want to have something like 1 week of storage, with an expected charge cycle of 2 weeks (ie one week where the wind is producing more than the grid, followed by one week where it is producing less), we are talking about 42x in capacity, and the investment will get repaid 14x slower for each dollar invested.
Prices will need to drop and production will need to be heavily increased before batteries is viable for wind, and until then more fossil fueled power plants is being built in order to match the capacity of wind.
If I had to choose between battery and nuclear, my choice is neither. Simply ban fossil fuels while we wait for people to make up their mind.
That's like saying that someone who owns 90% of a publicly traded company is worth $9 billion just because the stock has a market cap of $10 billion. If they'd actually try to cash that stock, they'd run out of buyers and the stock price would go way, way down.
Solar and wind are great now, because we can pick a random spot and build it without needing storage and don't have many people objecting to it. (Yes, the lawsuits are there already, but so far we've only gotten to the low hanging fruit. It'll get much worse before we're anywhere near 50% green energy.) It's cheap if you just look at the cost of the pure panels/turbines.
The earth has a finite amount of habitable land. If you start filling that up with solar panels, land price will increase because you have to buy it from people that wanted to plant crops there or live there. A few countries like the USA and Argentina have it easy, but most places don't have large swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and sun aplenty.
We currently use about 162 PWh worldwide, only 27 of which is electricity[1]. We're barely starting to make a dent in electricity production and what you hear left and right is "not in my backyard" and "not on my the neighbor's roof that I have to look at every day" (--my dad). We'd barely have the space if people wouldn't complain, let alone if we can only build it away from civilization. And that's replacing electricity production alone, we haven't really started on transportation, making things (cement, steel, plastics, ...), growing things (fertilizer, cow farts), and heating/cooling. What's more: due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage, which seems like it will easily triple the cost with current technology (my takeaway from [2], p. 76).
You might counter with putting the stuff on sea instead to avoid the finite land issue. The primary problem there is that this is not where people live, increasing the cost of construction, maintenance, and energy transportation. For example, wind on sea is about as expensive as nuclear (I should start keeping notes on which sources I looked at before and copy-paste texts instead of memorize and reiterate). Solar I don't know, but for some reason we're not doing that on the same scale as wind, presumably for a good reason. There just aren't any easy shortcuts here, only compromises.
Let's not dismiss fission energy just yet. It might seem expensive today, but between a known ~2x price increase (iirc going full nuclear would increase the energy price by that much from today's price, though France has me wondering if I might be misremembering) and a larger cost if you do solar/wind+batteries+need-to-win-lots-of-lawsuits-for-space (which works out to be about 3x for just the hardware, using today's technology), I'll have fission reactors please. Until we have better tech, let's get started with the current tech and hope it becomes obsolete and we get cheaper energy with a sunk cost rather than not try because we might sink some cost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_energy
[2] How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need - Bill Gates - 2021
So the objection is that the larger the share of renewable electricity, the higher the electricity price? I'm sure you can see why this is not really a problem? Because the higher the electricity price the more profitable it becomes to invest in renewable electricity. In fact, what currently is stalling the build-out of renewables in many European markets is that electricity prices have plummeted.
> A few countries like the USA and Argentina have it easy, but most places don't have large swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and sun aplenty.
Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
> What's more: due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage, which seems like it will easily triple the cost with current technology (my takeaway from [2], p. 76).
44.6% of Germany's power production comes from renewables and it is not seeing any need for large-scale energy storage [1]. The need for large-scale energy storage may not materialize since fluctuations in power production will be matched by fluctuations in power consumption. In other words, there is no God-given right to mine Bitcoins 24/7 at a constant and minimal electricity price.
> You might counter with putting the stuff on sea instead to avoid the finite land issue. The primary problem there is that this is not where people live, increasing the cost of construction, maintenance, and energy transportation.
Most people don't live near nuclear power plants either.
> For example, wind on sea is about as expensive as nuclear (I should start keeping notes on which sources I looked at before and copy-paste texts instead of memorize and reiterate).
According to LAZARD 14.0, offshore wind costs on average $86/MWh to produce compared to $129-$198/MWh for nuclear [2]. And for offshore wind, costs keep falling while they are stagnant or increasing for nuclear.
> I'll have fission reactors please.
Then I hope you and like-minded are willing to finance the costs of new nuclear power yourselves, because I don't want my taxpayer money to be wasted on any more nuclear boondoggles.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... [2] https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
OP is talking about generation costs. Up is bad.
> Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
To an extent, yes, but uranium doesn't leak out of your rail car the way that electricity is lost when you try to transport it. The choice is between power lines or converting it (with losses) in order to have a physical thing, like hydrogen, that can be transported.
> it is not seeing any need for large-scale energy storage [1].
Statement not found in citation. Also, they're at 8%, you found a source for electricity (not power). From my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26405701 "Germany uses ~3.7PWh of energy only 0.6PWh of which is electricity [...] No large-scale storage needed if 92% of your energy can be generated from fossil fuels on demand."
> Most people don't live near nuclear power plants either.
https://www.powerplantmaps.com/nuclear.html Without checking each individual one, notice how they typically are within regular electricity transportation distance of the next major city (<100km, often <50km). This matches what I'm seeing when looking at the distances of wind built into the sea (mostly <50km off shore, virtually always within 100km).
> nuclear boondoggles
I'm not sure why I bothered replying actually, you've already dug in your heels. When I read this last bit, I figured I might as well stop here and regret spending those 20 minutes checking stuff (and so indeed I didn't bother checking your costs for offshore wind and the argument about me paying for it - in fact I pay for a lot of shit that other people don't, like Climeworks, because yeah I do actually care and we'll need all the tech we can get).
Long-distance transportation of electricity is feasible; transmission losses are about 3% per 1,000 km for high-voltage lines https://iea-etsap.org/E-TechDS/PDF/E12_el-t&d_KV_Apr2014_GSO.... Morocco and other North African countries are building massive solar farms to export electricity to Europe.
> Statement not found in citation. Also, they're at 8%, you found a source for electricity (not power). From my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26405701 "Germany uses ~3.7PWh of energy only 0.6PWh of which is electricity [...] No large-scale storage needed if 92% of your energy can be generated from fossil fuels on demand."
Well, you wrote "due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage" so the percentage of the electricity generated by renewables must be relevant. Is your claim that the need for large-scale storage will only arise when renewables stand for a large fraction of a country's total energy production? Currently, most countries have existing large-scale storage and distribution systems for fossil fuel. I imagine that they would need to be replaced with similar systems for electricity if most vehicles switches to electricity.
> > nuclear boondoggles
> I'm not sure why I bothered replying actually, you've already dug in your heels.
All recent nuclear projects in the West have been plagued by massive delays and cost overruns: Flamanville, Hinkley Point, Vogtle, and Olkiluoto. Those who have had to foot the bill for these failures are the taxpayers. At this point, it isn't unfair to ask those who think nuclear power is indispensable to risk their own money, rather than others.
What's your opinion of mask refusers?
How about people who don't actually refuse to wear a mask but who just sabotage all societal effort to encourage mask wearing?
> Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
It's easier to import a few tons of Uranium fuel pellets every year than to export terawatts of energy.
I wish we'd just bill fossil fuel plants for their pollution. We'd quickly need new alternatives and instead of us simply telling you that renewables won't work as foreseen you could just run into the problem yourself.
We just don't think it's appropriate for everything. To have a 100% renewable grid requires renewables where they aren't a win and tons of storage, and there's a cost to all of this. Renewable isn't free or even non-polluting, it merely means limitless which nuclear effectively is as well.
"Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with current solar/wind, and it's only going to get much much worse in the next decade, especially if perovskites hit mainstream utility solar and cheap grid storage (such as that military salt water battery or increasing-density LFP) becomes a reality.
The barrage of hydrogen, nuclear, and synthetic fuel stories is indicative of the desperation of the market reality of solar/wind/electric vehicle/battery economics to oil/gas/nuclear/ICE.
Once the price curves flatten out, then maybe next-gen hydro/nuclear/geothermal can chase a stable price point. I do think nuclear can still beat solar/wind once the economics of those stabilize and with the right regulatory, after all I'm a LFTR stan.
"Old Nuclear" plants will be propped up by the military that want their weapons grade isotopes.