Giant 3h system “400 MW of solar energy and store up to 1200 MWh of energy“: https://www.tdworld.com/distributed-energy-resources/energy-...
Example of using that for peak demand: https://www.reutersevents.com/renewables/pv-insider/giant-or...
To be clear a 4GW PV instillation would be 4GW * 4h or 16GWh. That 4GW produces ~30% of maximum output per day or 4GW * 0.3 * 24h = 28.8GWh per day. 28.8GWh - 16GWh = 12GWh after charging batteries. So for ~10h you get 1.2 GW with surplus charging batteries, and for the other ~14 you get 1.14GW.
It represents less than 10% of the max power output of the plant (380 MW)
When I read "The battery section will provide four hours of storage capacity at full discharge" I understand that it will provide 4h x 30MW = 120 MWh of energy. Do you understand it as 4h x 380 MW = 1520 MWh of energy ?
[EDIT] From other source [1] it seems my interpretation is the correct one: "The onsite battery storage facility will be capable of providing 30MW of continuous power for four hours."
That completely changes the narrative: the total energy the battery storage can deliver by itself is less than what the solar + wind provides at full power in half an hour. Also, this amount of energy will be delivered at a peak power of less than 10% than the peak power of Solar + Wind
[1]: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/wheatridge-renewab...
Anyway, I think it’s reasonable to think in terms of “50 MW of PV solar and 30 MW * 4h of battery storage” + a wind farm because they normally charge batteries from solar via DC to avoid DC>AC>DC losses. But it might be a true hybrid system.
So you'd have to transform the electricity to high voltage, low current. But we already do that to pretty much arbitrarily lower Ωlosses on high V lines - the USSR made a transcontinental line back in the sixties with MV (yup, mega volts).
Optimistically, it’s just about possible in principle if you don’t mind paying SpaceX to expand by a few orders of magnitude. But I don’t think anyone will be very happy with even one gigawatt of orbital lasers, no matter how much the satellite owner insists (possibly even accurately and with reference to the laws of physics) that it can’t be turned into a death ray.
(And if you can use beamed power safely from orbit, with emphasis on safely, why not use the same beamed power horizontally at ground level around the world? Power at night from space implies an orbital-to-ground distance comparable to planetary radius).
There was a scifi short story, were a system was wrecked, aeons after a war, by what was essentially missed shots.
This is what makes the expanse so creepy. Every PDC round not finding a target- finds a target eventually. On the other side of the system, totally not intended, but it finds one. Even thinks doing the marathon with ion-engines can become lethally over time.
Voyager is another systems bullet.
Also, PV unlike concentrated solar does produce power during storms it’s just significantly less than normal.
Overbuilding generation capacity, either of renewables or here by peaker gas plants, rather than storage is generally recognised as the most economical way forward.
Nuclear is already a bad idea under normal circumstances, given that no country has a long-term solution for dealing with the waste, molten-salt reactors are vaporware (usually because it turns out molten salts are highly aggressive) and fusion has been "it's ready in a decade!!!" for like, what, half a century now. And that doesn't even take stuff like "who, other than the taxpayer, will foot the bill for tearing the reactors down" or "who, other than the taxpayer, picks up the tab in the case of an accident" and other financial questions. Nuclear is only "cheaper" because these side effects get conveniently ignored!
But it is an especially dumb idea in California with its earthquake fault lines. Have two large reactor accidents not proven by now that nuclear fission is extremely unsafe?
But they're still a bad idea. Nuclear waste implies a strong, competent, and stable state that is able to secure it for millennia. Fifteen years ago when I arrived to the US the Americans I spoke of couldn't conceive their hegemony collapsing or the US state becoming incompetent.
This, I think, is the strongest argument against (current) nuclear power - in time it appears that all regimes collapse, geographic areas fall into anarchy and chaos. Human society simply doesn't have the proven long term stability to secure nuclear power.
Specifically, for the U.S at least, in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste that have been generated since the 1950's to now, all capable of fitting inside a single football field to a depth of just under 10 meters, and no more than 400,000 tonnes globally. That's pretty much all of it so far (sources: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/P1799_web.pdf, https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... ). Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make their 80,000 tonnes.
Also, given the average density of most spent nuclear fuel, 80,000 or even 400,000 tonnes is not a tremendous physical volume to find some safe place for in the largely stable countries where most of it has been produced for many decades. There are far more immediately dangerous substances and objects in much less stable storage conditions all over the world (small arms, conventional explosives, landmines, toxic chemicals we have no way of not producing etc) that should warrant far more concern for the deaths they could or even do already cause per ton of weight....
Also, to debunk a few general misconceptions about storing nuclear waste. Yes the source has a certain bias, but it delivers well-reasoned points and offers sources of its own: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
But never-mind the technicalities, you cannot dismiss the geo-political implications. We have barely existed as a species in the time length nuclear waste decays. We have only 5000 years or so of statehood, the vast majority of them since collapsed.
Unless you propose burying the waste in the Marianna trench (I think there is merit there), I really need to see the stability concerns addressed.
EDIT: And yes, I am "aware". I stated my undergrad in a nuclear eng program, and switched to physics after a few courses. I still have friends in the industry and to say morale is low is an understatement.
If you are "aware" you might know that 99% of nuclear waste is low-level (contaminated hospital waste, rags, paper) or intermediate-level (cladding, concrete or chemicals from decommissioned reactors that are irradiated). These will never go critical. Even high-level radioactive waste doesn't go critical because the hot parts are either (a) valuable and get reprocessed into new fuel or (b) have short half lives and decay within a few month in the spent fuel pool of the power plants before being shipped away.
There's 47 k tones of high level waste in the US alone [1].So I think it's fair to assume that your 80 000 tonnes world wide was high level waste.
Which has to be kept far apart from each other since they decay and at the very least generate heat. Therefore, apartness is an integral part of repository design. Yucca Mountain has a capacity for 70 000 tonnes. That is, its not big enough to store the world's waste despite nuclear power having a small fraction of the overall worldwide power production over the last 60 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...
Sure we do. Stick it somewhere dry and remote. Thanks to climate change, brought on in part by anti-nuclear activists, we’ll have plenty of both well into the future.
The only thing that will attract is terrorists. No matter how remote, "dirty bombs" are a real threat. And in densely populated Europe, we don't have the luxury of such places at all.
> Thanks to climate change, brought on in part by anti-nuclear activists
Sorry, what? Climate change has been brought on by fossil fuel companies:
- 20 companies are responsible for a third of all historic emissions: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed...
- BP is the inventor of the "individual carbon footprint", inarguably one of the most devious PR campaigns that moved "responsibility" from the government to individual people so that the fossil fuel industry could make money without problems: https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...
- hotly contested, but fossil fuel companies may have had a hand in the decline of public transportation systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
- not to mention the countless "donations", bribes and other lobbying efforts from the industry to politics over the last 50 years that made sure that cars were prioritized and emissions controls weakened (the latter only ended with the Dieselgate scandal).
All the nuclear waste of Europe could go in a building that's about one hectare. Yet there is enough place for both ten thousands of hectares of open pit coal mines, and hundreds of hectares of totally unprotected and open-air ash ponds containing toxic sludge that is guaranteed to more dangerous to your health - and sometimes also more radioactive - than just about any nuclear reactor waste.
Face it, the "Green" movement in Germany which has lobbied to replace nuclear power with wind/solar in the last decade (instead of replacing coal with renewables and nukes) are responsible for gigatons of carbon emissions and will be rightly vilified by future generations.
Nuclear has externalities. But carbon-based has much more.
You mention solar panels. What are the externalities of those? Lots of harsh chemicals go into batteries, and we need a buttload of batteries to make solar work at scale.
We don’t have a foolproof plan for long term storage of nuclear waste. But we have no plan at all for longterm storage of CO2 or battery/solar panel chemicals.
Regarding the accidents, I can only assume you mean Three Mile Island and Chernobyl or perhaps the Japanese tsunami. If you look into it a bit more you’ll notice that those were technologically ancient reactors.
Japan had several reactors - some with the older design, some more modern. They all got hit by a massive tsunami, much more than the design spec called for. The old ones leaked. The modern ones shut down safely, exactly as planned.
Anti-nuclear = anti-science
Fixed the typo, thanks.
> You mention solar panels. What are the externalities of those? Lots of harsh chemicals go into batteries, and we need a buttload of batteries to make solar work at scale.
Battery production in itself isn't as toxic as you make it out to be.
> But we have no plan at all for longterm storage of CO2 or battery/solar panel chemicals.
Long term CO2 storage has an easy concept: trees. Solar panels can easily be recycled these days - they are mostly glass - and battery recycling efforts are already underway, they should be at mass scale once the problem becomes relevant (since even used electric car batteries can have a long second life as decentral storage units).
> Regarding the accidents, I can only assume you mean Three Mile Island and Chernobyl or perhaps the Japanese tsunami. If you look into it a bit more you’ll notice that those were technologically ancient reactors.
Most reactors in operation today are ancient reactors, new constructions (Flamanville!) are plagued by cost and time overruns that put the infamous BER airport to shame, and possibly-new constructions (MSRs) are a pipe dream and/or have plutonium proliferation concerns.
> They all got hit by a massive tsunami, much more than the design spec called for.
California is deemed way overdue for a big earthquake (per https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-earthquake-drought-o... and others). It is a really, really bad idea to build a nuclear plant anywhere close.
The solutions are pretty clear: solar, wind, tidal/other water potential energy, battery backed storage and gas peaker plants (as these can be retrofitted to burn synthetic gas and are the cleanest technology of fossil energy that we have). And especially: a grid that has enough capacity to distribute power across continents.
That's easy to write, but very hard to envision the scale. The grid transports very small fraction of the consumed power over large distances, most of the power gets consumed along the way. But what you are proposing involves transmitting all the power that a far away community consumes several time zones away
We have this in Europe ffs. Almost all of Europe, parts of Asia (Turkey) and North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunesia) run in a synchronized-phase grid, and we have interconnection links to the insular ones (UK, Nordic countries, and a small one tying us to Russia). The entire former Soviet Union runs on a synchronized-phase grid.
America is the only developed country / large geographic area that does not run a single synchronized-phase grid.
> most of the power gets consumed along the way
Nope. Germany averages about 6% of transmission loss ("Netzverluste"): https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
"Nope. Germany averages about 6% of transmission loss"
I wasn't referring to ohmic losses, or transmission losses. I was referring to consumed along the way. The power generated in Vladivostok doesn't reach Germany not because the line losses are real, but because there'a country of 150 million inbetween.
"We have this in Europe ffs. Almost all of Europe, parts of Asia (Turkey) and North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunesia) run in a synchronized-phase grid, and we have interconnection links to the insular ones (UK, Nordic countries, and a small one tying us to Russia). The entire former Soviet Union runs on a synchronized-phase grid"
Indeed you do (and there's problems with that), and it's not the impressive frankly (N. America has the same, with HVDC interconnects). But the OP was (clearly?) suggesting transporting all the power needed in Europe in, say, the Gobi desert. That's a scale of grid capacity that you do not have.
Which ones? Our grid is extremely resilient - the last major customer-visible nation-wide outage was in 2006 when a mistake during the shutdown of a power line for the crossing of a ship underneath led to a failure cascade. Meanwhile, the US has outage reports every few months, including such absurdities as rolling outages to prevent wildfires from shoddy unmaintained networks. Or the shit that went down in Texas, which refuses interconnections to avoid federal regulations.
> But the OP was (clearly?) suggesting transporting all the power needed in Europe in, say, the Gobi desert. That's a scale of grid capacity that you do not have.
We don't need a grid powerful enough to shift all the power around, as we have plenty of local renewable electricity from various sources. For the rest? Italy is planning to build a new submarine interconnect to Tunisia (https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000121873523/italiens-netz...), sized enough to transport energy towards Northern Europe.
Cascading failures. Those are very effectively blocked by power islands connected by HVDC lines (like Texas is). A power outage like the North East in 2003 is unlikely in Europe because of your mild weather being unlikely to put your infrastructure to the test.
"the last major customer-visible nation-wide outage was in 2006 [...]."
You're comparing Germany (?) to the US more than six times as populous and far larger in extent and far lower density? The last outage that impacted me in my corner of my continent was back in 2003.
Europe literally has the most benign weather on Earth. Barely any tornados. Barely any hurricanes. Barely any Blizzards. Heck you don't even have good thunderstorms - trust me, I grew up in Europe, there's no good thunderstorms there.
"Meanwhile, the US has outage reports every few months, including such absurdities as rolling outages to prevent wildfires from shoddy unmaintained networks. Or the shit that went down in Texas, which refuses interconnections to avoid federal regulations."
You really have little appreciation of the scale of California and Texas. Cali is 30% larger than Germany, twice as long, with taller mountains, little to no water, and full of combustible material.
Texas' outage had nothing to do with its interconnections. A rare weather event froze the gas pipelines at the same time they were supposed to pick up the slack from derated renewable generations. Texas' neighbors had no electricity to give (and in fact, the neighbors complained that Texas stopped exporting power - Texas IS connected to the rest of N. America).
Now, you could point out that Texas should have been better prepared for rare weather. I agree. So should have the Rhine Valley Region.