I tend to agree with you that the ship has sailed, though. If we had just kept building at the same pace as 40 years ago (linear extrapolation, not exponential) then we'd recently have celebrated the completion of a zero-emission grid. Unfortunately, we chose to pump the atmosphere full of CO2 instead. Ugh.
Nuclear power requires millions in its initial investment. It has a not-insignificant profit margin over other power sources, but it also has a significant chance for large liabilities (more often due to changing laws than meltdowns). The result is an investment with an extremely high investment threshold (you don't build small nuke plants) with a decent short term prospect and a poor long term prospect that's extremely hard to get out of. This makes nuclear a really bad option for private investors when held up in comparison to tech and the like.
Meltdowns can happen and they're catastrophic but the bigger impediment is the unpredictable legal and fiscal liabilities involved. And, honestly, it's my personal opinion that a fair amount of these post-de-facto fiscal liabilities are extremely just and fairly applied - they're externalities we were ignoring decades ago.
This is a segment of the market where we need government funding and guarantees to get things done - and we should do so since nuclear is an extremely safe and clean option for power generation.
Hmmm https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49823305
"Hinkley Point C nuclear plant to run £2.9bn over budget"
> Last week, prices for new wind power delivered by 2025 were set at prices as low as £40 per megawatt hour. By comparison, power from Hinkley Point C is expected to cost £92.50 per megawatt hour.
If that were the case, then this would not be required: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821
Where's the compensation for all the deaths due to coal plants? Unlike nuclear, they spew carcinogenic crap in the atmosphere by design. And some radioactivity too.
Like you know, the risk to end organised civilisation through climate change. Haha, funny
It's a tragedy of the commons scenario. I don't understand why politicians don't just do the hard/right thing. Supposedly that's why we have them. If they always just do the popular thing we could cut them out of the picture and go to direct democracy. I'm not advocating for that, but we need politicians to step up and do their jobs competently.
Additional taxes, in the US at least, as currently seen as being contrary to the American experiment by a large enough segment of the population that consensus won't be gained when, while driving on the highway, we see the bridge out ahead sign - nor when we see the cliff in the distance - nor even when we feel the front walls fall off into air. We'll reach consensus when we look out the front windshield and see the earth racing up to give us a kiss... At least that's my pessimistic opinion.
Is it actually sufficient? Feel free to link even technical sources (as long as it is not paywalled without way of checking quality).
My impression is that right now "bunch of energy storage" is 100% unfeasible to provide power from renewables without blackouts. And existing ones work thanks to nearby countries with scalable non-renewable on demand power, with rare exception of countries with low population density and great opportunity for hydropower that is available on demand.
It would require a better interconnected grid, overbuilt renewables, and plenty of storage with some level of on demand generation like gas. A good percentage of baseload power like hydro and nuclear certainly help, but it's not required.
It's just a matter of how much are you willing to spend as opposed to something that's physically impossible.
I believe renewables + grid scale batteries are already cheaper than new nuclear and much lower risk and much faster to deploy. The momentum is in favor of widening that gap.
And just 2x renewables overbuilt would regularly run below demands - sadly solar/wind is not acting on demand. And during drought also hydropower may be unable to work.
And in most places hydropower, geothermal is unable to provide enough power.
(please correct me if I am wrong! But last time I checked nearly no place can run on renewables without relying on importing fossil-based power, and places that succeed have ideal places for hydropower/geothermal)
Also, not all renewables are intermittent. Apart from hydro, geothermal comes to mind. (Although with climate change-induced changes in rainfall it's not clear that hydro will be reliable on the timescales we talk about either....)
I wish this were true, but it’s not. There aren’t competitive grid scale batteries.
Aside, I think a big battery in Australia makes a lot of sense because they have lots of sun year round and lots of unused space. So you are pretty much just storing for night time and can easily build solar panels.
In many other places, you have to store for much longer term which means you need much bigger batteries (and bigger generating plants).
This is to say I think the cost in a place like Australia may be 100s of times less than places in most of the USA (which is where I live).
Yeah, that doesn't make sense. Overbuild and interconnect rather.
You can't do things like store summer solar energy for the winter. But there are plenty of places in the US where the sun is nearly always shining. If you can share that energy across the county you're in good shape. Likewise with the wind.
Again it helps you have solid baseload power. It's just nuclear is so expensive and takes so long to build that you can build twice the capacity in solar and wind plus a battery, plus a gas plant for a backup in less time and for a similar price.
I think a cross USA interconnect is within the reach of current technology.
Telsa’s prototype in Australia was able to prove you can stabilise a grid at scale, profitably and with simple enough technology. In addition to Li-ion (that provides good response) you can have gravity-based capacity (essentially a crane), heat-storage (rocks kept at 4000ºC feeding a thermal power plant) and liquid-metal batteries. Two of those are mostly century-old tech redesigned for a word with cheap intermittent energy; the third seems like the best, most reliable, simplest, most scalable idea out of MIT from the last decade.
I have the impression that these represent enough options, with enough evidence that it will be profitable within a short lifespan, so I’m not even sure you want government support. But if they can facilitate permits, access to the grid, etc. why not get the help? All those will stabilise the grid no matter what source of power we have, so why not implement what we can at scale, see how it helps, and double it six months later if it works? After five years, we should have enough to tell how much wind and sun it can cover but I can’t see why it wouldn’t handle 100% of demand. All of those ideas can be any size, from a hand to a large city; all have many alternative elements to adapt to circumstances, price point; there are complementary and work well together.
How large overbuilt of renewables would be needed to avoid blackouts during windless snowy winter months?
My suggestion is to build: * 1 GWh capacity of those gravity-fed; and * 1 GWh of concentrated solar heat storage — it won’t be as effective in winter but let’s try; and * 1 GWh of Li-ion batteries; and * 1 GWh of hydro-storage; and * 1 GWh of liquid metal storage.
And see which one scales, and what cost, with what retention, reactivity, how is the maintenance. All should, there’s no reason a larger pile of rocks doesn’t retain heat any less well than a smaller pile, or that what you can’t get from one mine shaft doesn’t work in another mine shaft. If you think that’s too much for Poland, let’s try one in Arizona, Iceland, Australia, Kazakstan, Hawaii, and see which one works best and adapts to Polish climate.
I’ve never seen an inventor that didn’t iterate from a working prototype (which we have for all these) to a larger one, to a larger still, until they hit scaling issues. And I don’t know of currently salient scaling issues in any of those (that haven’t been addressed recently — there were targeting problems with concentrated solar that found a solution recently for instance).
“Will it scale?” isn’t the questions that an engineer would ask on any of those at this stage of the project, but rather: "How fast can we make one twice bigger?" When we hit roadblocks that can’t be fixed, we can ask about scale, but right now, all those have a clear path.
"Overbuilt" assumes that renewable capacity doesn’t adapt to winter condition but it might: cooler external temperature could mean that geo-power, or heat stored from the summer represent a higher differential, and more energy. Or it assumes that capacity is expensive, which has never really been the case with variable prices: not for gas plants, not for renewables that are not constrained by context.
If you are worried about European winter overall, that makes sense, but the solution for that is rather obvious — enormous, but so much cheaper than anything else comparable: giant capacities in North Africa, big cable through Spain and France. From there, the extra capacity in Europe can serve Northern Europe. Scandinavia continues enjoying their massive boost in renewable hydro in winter, and the winds in the North Sea will definitely need exporting too. “Windless winter” isn’t apparently a common thing there. That might require more international solidarity, but people will do that quite keenly if there’s money to be made.
New innovations in nuclear maybe have a chance to change this, but renewables are still getting cheaper so even if they succeed they must still beat the moving target.
In another world where we had embraced nuclear long ago and kept innovating it would have made so much sense. It still will be a part of the solution, but the economics really aren't there and the private sector isn't dumb. Markets will allocate capital according to risks and returns and nuclear will continue to be overlooked until it can compete.