Where are we going to build a solar farm to cover NYC, DC, and Philadelphia? There is 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter, and it’s not exactly known for being sunny in January.
NYC alone needs 11,000 megawatt hours per day. My back of the envelope fermi estimate is a solar farm covering approximately 16,000 acres. Forget the metro area, that’s just for NYC. Probably double if you include the entire metro area.
You aren’t going to find that kind of land within 300 miles of NYC.
We do need more transmission (another thing the White House is working on: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...), but power import/export over long distances is already commonplace.
Edit: And if you really want to look to the future, you could read the proposal for a North American Supergrid: http://northamericansupergrid.org/
Anyway, the more important point is that we already have large regional grids across the country, and while it's obviously nice to have generation and consumption close to each other, it's not a requirement.
The numbers I quoted were just for NYC, and they weren’t adjusted for the winter sunlight problem. To power the entire metro area would likely require 40,000 acres. To cover the entire region likely 60,000 acres. This land does not exist.
It isn't that big an area in the scheme of things. If you try to find a single place for it it probably won't work of course, but it is a tiny little fraction of the developed land already devoted to New York.
New York State is 35 million acres. You don't think 0.2% of that, including rooftops of existing buildings, might be useable for solar/wind/battery storage? And again, NY already uses tons of out-of-state energy.
2) Rooftop solar
3) National grid improvements that make transferring power from renewable sources further away more efficient
4) There are massively huge areas of empty land within 100 miles of NYC. This map shows roughly the 100 miles west of NYC. Take note of all of that unused space, which is most of it: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7560624,-75.4552232,170414m/...
And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.
“Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.” Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010.
https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...
Norway has a lot of hydro which they used the revenues from North Sea oil to install. (Their geography and population density also helps.)
I don't know, that's pretty impressive. Maybe they have international connectors with other countries? I think Germany buys Nuclear power from France? or maybe they have a super stable kind of wind.
We do not have a date for when fossil fuels will be removed from the energy grid. No date, no plan, no strategy, nothing. What we do have is three distinct plans in order to address the stability problem from renewables.
1: Continuing subsidize fossil fuel plants to operate in ready mode for when demands exceeds that of renewables. Oil for now, natural gas in the future.
2: Expand the ability to buy fossil fueled energy from nearby countries for which we sell our green energy. One can pretend that the import of dirty energy does not exist if the total amount of green export over a year is higher than the import.
3: Future technology that does not exist yet and tend to change from year to year based on what currently sounds like interesting-but-decades-from-being-invested-in tech. This year it is wind to hydrogen in dedicated ocean windfarms with massive pipelines of hydrogen, burned in retrofitted natural gas power plants. It has the upside that more natural gas power plants (and pipelines for natural gas) can be built in the pretense that at some later date we can use that wind produced hydrogen if it ever get built.
The result is investments and subsidies goes to mix of renewables and fossil fuels, which is a far cry from 100% renewables.
I am reminded of the quote attributed to Arthur C Clarke.
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
There are scientists and engineers who say getting to a 100% renewable grid is possible.
Just the production side, the cost in a 2019 study put the numbers around $7-9 per kg of hydrogen. This does not take into the account the cost of the pipeline, the storage facility, or the gas powered power plant. Remember that return of investment only occurs when demands actually exceeds that of cheaper renewable production, unless government steps in and adds subsidies like it does today with oil.
Is massive amounts of hydrogen a cheaper and safer alternative to nuclear? Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms I suspect the answer is no on the commercial side. On the safety side it would be interesting to hear about operating large liquid hydrogen pipelines and storage facilities.
Any energy system large enough to power the world will be a very expensive thing. Fortunately, the world economy is also a very large thing, and can pay for it.
We can say with some confidence that while this renewable energy system will be expensive, it will be less expensive than a nuclear energy system that serves the same purpose, and likely cheaper than a system with any substantial amount of nuclear energy.
> Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms
This is a completely bogus argument in an environment where natural gas is still plentiful and legal and its carbon largely untaxed. The CO2 tax needed to get to wind farms + hydrogen being competitive is likely much less than the CO2 needed to get nuclear to be competitive (against natural gas).
With enough batteries and 2x-3x power production over demand you can have 100% renewable grid.
It might require to cut amazon forest and cover it with solar panels, but possible, yes.
As long as you are able to scale your storage, you'll be able to fill it up with solar energy.
> The reason solar is winning is because the manufacturing technology can be iterated every six months, so the learning curve is much faster. Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not.
There's definitely an argument that some part of that slow iteration speed for nuclear is political and unnecessary. Clearly if we built more plants they would iterate faster. But realistically at this point...is it going to happen?
Personally, I think looking at the data so far, we should just stop investing in fission plants, continue research of fusion plants, but put a practical focus on building renewables to meet climate targets to get the most reduction for the buck.
All other AP1000 projects in the US have been cancelled. No one in the US is going to order an AP1000 unless the government takes on construction risk.
I do not care only about the climate - I care about the environment. The entire planet should not be covered with solar panels and wind turbines. Whether or not it is more expensive, I support nuclear because it is the right thing to do.
You don’t need to cover the whole planet.
In Fukushima total cleanup costs could go up to a trillion dollars : https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020