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Re:Big money, nuclear subsidies, and systemic corruption (2021) by credit_guy on Monday May 30, 2022 @09:12PM (#31565219)
Renewable are intermittent and seasonal. Intermittency can be solved with batteries, but seasonality can't. The capital cost for batteries is too high to be recouped by charging and discharging only once a year. By a factor of about 1000. So, unless batteries get cheaper by a factor of 1000 (they won't), a different form of storage is needed. Europe is betting on hydrogen. It is betting hundreds of billions of dollars (euros). It's unlikely they are completely stupid. Other solutions sound promising as well (ammonia, iron, syn fuels).

But people need to realize batteries are completely useless for seasonal storage.

Given that, all comparisons of solar vs nuclear are simply not apples to apples.

How about wind? For wind the situation is not as clear-cut but you still have a difficult problem. If you know you can have outages of 3 days about once a year, then you need to build batteries that can provide 3 days of consumption, but they'll be able to sell electricity only once a year. The capital cost of these batteries is going to be very high per kWh. One needs to look at the statistics of power generation with wind to see if batteries can offer the storage solution. My guess is that they still can't, but they are probably off only by a factor of 10 or so. Gas peaker plants may be a good intermediate solution.

Re:Big money, nuclear subsidies, and systemic corruption (2021) by maliker on Tuesday May 31, 2022 @10:11AM (#31569700)
I expect we'll overbuild renewables to handle the high demand season and then dump excess renewables in the low demand season. I've seen this result in a couple cost optimization models like [0]. Optimistically, we might see demand react to the seasonal price differences and readjust via e.g. weatherization, or running industrial load seasonally.

But yeah, seasonal storage makes my head hurt. Getting 1 cycle a year out of technology built to deliver 2,000 or more cycles seems like a huge waste. The idea of financing a project to pay back over 2000 years is bizarre. Of course the hardware would fail for other reasons over that period. Hell, the concrete it's resting on would probably crumble in 100.

[0] https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/research/publications/feasi...