We don't know how feasibly we can get Uranium. The market is unstable right now because of political problems.
The topic is very complex, there are disadvantages with every form of energy production and nuclear isn't an exception. It is only clean if you reduce the question to CO2.
Not sure about the rest of the world, but in the EU we basically maxed out those years (decades?) ago. We won't be getting much more. (I mean, without actual mountains, your pump storage plant is going to be prohibitively expensive.)
> The topic is very complex, there are disadvantages with every form of energy production
True. In France, we had a very recent report[1] that outlines various scenarios towards 2050, and it appeared that the least risky ones involved a fairly diverse energetic mix.
[1]: https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2022-01/Energy%20p...
Pumped storage is not limited to hydro power dams. All you really need is a hill and water, although it costs less with a depression near the hilltop. No watershed needed.
Actually you do not need the hill. An underground cavity suffices.
And, there are numerous other cheap alternatives.
Right now I would bet on a highly unfavourable comparison to be honest. Dams have the overwhelming advantage of letting you build a relatively small wall (compared to the lake you're holding), to hold a gigantic volume of water. The mountain an the river are already there, so you don't need to build them.
Hydro power systems need to store a year or more. Utilities will need at most a few weeks. You don't need or want a river. Dams are f'ing expensive because they need geological support for extreme pressure. An earthen dike suffices if you don't already have a depression.
Only the penstock needs to hold back high pressure.
I'm aware of dams. I'm not aware of your fancy alternatives. It is therefore reasonable to assume that those fancy alternatives aren't widely deployed. And that the main reason for this is that they're more expensive (per energy unit).
Without sources, your (admittedly plausible) qualitative arguments are just a pretty story.
California has constructed dozens of high-altitude, low-head earthen dams on the same principle, over the past century, with penstocks down to lower-altitude turbines, and has lately converted many of them for pumped hydro.
When there are articles about pumped storage plants the usual problems are not legislative or infrastructure. The biggest issue is that investors don't like to create overcapacity, which mean that there isn't a lot of available renewable energy to buy cheap in order to sell expensively later to recover the cost of storage. When overcapacity occur the enthusiasm for more capacity quickly drop. The secondary issues tend to be more physical in nature. Salt water is very problematic in any situation, so putting pumped storage plants near the ocean has many problems. If you use fresh water you compete with existing utilization, and most suitable locations for pumped storage already have existing hydroelectric power. Fresh water has often a very complex ecosystems and everything from nature to human depend on it.
Hydroelectric power and pumped storage have synergies, they aren't competing.
Stored power isn't overcapacity. Investors care about expensive energy and renewables are the cheapest and cleanest option.
All the existing pumped storage facilities that I know of do not generate their profit from buying low and selling high. They generate profits by providing a service of balancing the grid for short duration so that when a power plant is ramping down, there is a equal force being provided as a service so that the grid doesn't break down. The period of ramping down/up need to be covered somehow, a cost that either the grid operator or the individual power plants need to pay for. The end customer who pays by the kw/h do not see this cost, and it is a very insignificant cost of the whole since it only occur at start and stop.
But I am happy to be proven wrong. Please give me that link of one that buy low and sell high. A commercial operated pumped storage that buy renewable energy when its low and sell when it is high can be scaled up to be used whenever the price difference between low and high is great enough. The cost of operation and investment just need to be low enough that the margin between low and high price points can support it.
It is extremely disingenuous, not to say dishonest, to make up scenarios based on status quo when there is still very little renewable generation capacity.
If you want to blame the lack of renewable generation capacity then feel free to do so. Pumped storage could in theory, in the future, when the time is right, be cost effective. We don't know. We are not there yet. Its a financial model to be to be tested when and if we get there.
For now the financial model for existing pumped storage do not care about the purchasing price or selling price, or what kind of power it is being charged with.
Utilities will need storage, and will build whatever is cheapest. In some places that will be pumped hydro. End of story.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/18/portugal...
This was probably made possible by the half-dozen pumped storage hydro plants in Portugal. Now they’re putting floating solar on some as well.
But thanks for that link. Tâmega energy storage complex is actually looking like it will be a real renewable storage, using two attached wind farms. Just like with solar, when renewable is combined with storage it makes more sense when the renewable plants is located next to the storage and operated by the same company.
It would be really interesting to hear some numbers from that plant, like how much money they gain by storing the wind power and selling it at a later point in time. It would also be very interesting to see the cost per kw/h, even through at this point in time with energy prices being what they are, I will likely not matter too much.
Ofcourse, you first need surplus solar and wind, and that's what the real problem is. There is still plenty of headroom to build more solar and wind for immediate use before we reach the point where some of the produced energy needs to be stored.
Ammonia will probably turn out more practical as a transportable storage medium. Hydrogen works stored underground.
Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...
It's more expensive than mining but not by an order of magnitude
If every country over provisioned renewables, then you have a transmission problem not a storage problem.
The sun does always shine, the wind does always blow.
A worldwide grid is absolutely possible from a technical perspective even with boring non-superconducting aluminium and/or copper, it's just that the combined cross section needs to be in the order of 3m^2, which is 17 years of current global output of both metals combined and has a current cost of a few trillion USD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32198057
(That said, my old linked estimates are over-simplified, that's a single minimal ring, and only works if the 64% resistive losses for current existing HVDC cables over that distance match the possibly lower demand because people do less at night).
I'm kinda leaning towards expecting batteries (specifically batteries and not storage in general) to be the first way a continental power grid gets to 100% renewable, even though I prefer the aesthetic of a global grid. But I don't have any skin in the game, and wouldn't bet against e.g. a cheap high temperature superconductor grid or liquid hydrogen.
My guess is this transition will take 15-20 years to complete, but I have low certainty on that.
The loss is 2-3% per 1,000 km depending on the voltage of the system.
The response was around how the newest transmission technology isn't so lossy. But that would mean we'd have to replace all transmission lines.
This doesn't apply to nuclear because it doesn't rely on generation potentially coming from 500 miles away to make it work.
Technically if you were to over provision, yes that would work, but the problem is more that you cant even do it because of multiple different reasons. It's easier to understand when you realize that we don't have more hydro because most of the good places already have a damn. The best place for mills is currently in Denmark where they are being deployed at sea, thats not most places.
Nuclear is the way to go for base power and the voltage adjustments can be done with windmills, solar and as a last resort with a coal/gas plant.
Denmark is not the only place the wind blows in the world. There are many windy places globally.
But I agree nuclear is another option, but it’s not the only way
This would solve storage issues, vehicles could be refilled pretty much the way they are now, gas boilers could be swapped for hydrogen, no need for polluting batteries, no major upgrades of electric grid, etc.
From "Electrochemical synthesis of ammonia as a potential alternative to the Haber–Bosch process" (2019) :
Water electrolysis, combined with an improved smallerscale Haber–Bosch process, seems to be a short-term solution for the generation of ammonia from renewables at a matching scale. There is a major research focus on reducing the NH3 synthesis reaction pressure and temperature, while keeping the catalyst cost and means to follow the intermittent electrical power input. These technologies are anticipated to be developed within next few years. Electrochemical ammonia production is much more distant from commercialization, however, potential benefits of electrochemical ammonia production, such as reduced energy consumption and associated footprint, scalability, lower process pressures and temperatures, the ability to follow the intermittent electrical power input and use nitrogen with reduced purity justify further research.
From "Electrochemical Synthesis of Ammonia: Progress and Challenges" (2021) :
On the whole, a lot of attempts and significant progress have been made, but the electrochemical synthesis of ammonia is still in the infancy stage with great challenges remained to be addressed.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and is found in great abundance in all galaxies. It is particularly present in the Sun, which is problematic because it is not very accessible to us :) On Earth, there is also a lot of hydrogen in water and in hydrocarbons. However, it does not exist in free form, i.e. just hydrogen. It is always associated with something else, for example with oxygen in water, or with carbon in hydrocarbons.
There are, however, small sources of native hydrogen in the earth underground, but the quantities are nowhere near what we would need to use if we wanted to do anything significant with it. At least not beyond what we are already doing, because hydrogen is already used a lot these days. Nearly 100 million metric tonnes of this element are produced in the world every year.
To be transported, hydrogen must be kept under high pressure or extremely low temperature. This should already raises some question about the feasibility :)
Half of this production is used to de-sulphurize fuels and the other half to make fertilizers (Haber-Bosch process). Thus, hydrogen is already used extensively in the world, but there is a small problem: it is made from hydrocarbons, fossil natural gas, oil or coal, which represents 10 to 30 (metric) tonnes of CO2 per metric ton of hydrogen.
With the way it is made, should we go even further towards this fuel despite global warming? We could then imagine making hydrogen for other applications that do not exist today. For example, like you imagine, to power vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells or to make steel without emitting CO2.
There is a process for making iron with blast furnaces that do not emit CO2. There are also plans by steelmakers to make steel without emitting CO2 by converting iron ore into iron with hydrogen. The hydrogen then removes the oxygen from the iron ore, which is released into the atmosphere as water vapor. To do this, large quantities of hydrogen are needed and, for example, to replace a blast furnace, a nuclear plant is needed to generate the electricity that will enable the water to be electrolyzed, which is the only way to make "clean" hydrogen without emitting CO2. Something like a thousand wind turbines would be needed to replace a nuclear plant (and remember: wind turbines does not work all the time)
When you see the amount of electricity it would take to be able to produce carbon-free hydrogen in large quantities, you realize that there will never be much of it in transport. Not all the world's aircraft will be replaced by hydrogen-powered aircraft, for example. The applications that could then be made with carbon-free hydrogen would be to keep the production of fertilizers and carbon-free steel. Achieving this would already be a big step.
Your calibration is off by quite a few years. The current off-shore turbines being built are 15 MW with capacity factors of around 60%.[1] So lets do 50% for wind and 90% for nuclear.
Wind: 1,000 * 15 MW * 0.5 = 7.5 GW
Nuclear: 1 * 1650 MW (EPR) * 0.9 = 1.485 GW
The HYBRIT plant, a pilot project for fossil free steel is going to utilize an over sized green hydrogen production side to enable it to work as a smart consumer and therefore balance the grid. Thus it is completely dependent on cheap renewables to operate and enables deeper penetration of renewables.
> The HYBRIT initiative was launched in 2016 by the three owners; SSAB, LKAB and Vattenfall. The hydrogen storage facility will play a very important role in the overall value chain for fossil-free iron and steel production. Production can take place without a storage facility, but storage provides the opportunity to vary the demand for electricity and ensure stable production. By producing hydrogen gas when there is a lot of electricity, for example when there is a lot of wind, and using stored hydrogen gas when the electricity system is under strain, will ensure production.
> “The hydrogen storage facility has a stabilising effect on the electrical system. It reduces the risk of the system overloading. We want to develop HYBRIT technology so that it is in line with the future electricity system with more weather-dependent electricity generation,” says Mikael Nordlander, Development Manager for Vattenfall’s industrial partnerships.
https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/hybrit-a-unique-hydrogen...
[1]: https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW/V236-1...
I'm thinking a key metric is the efficiency of it all.
If you wouldn't mind, could you please source the charts?
> The base load[1] (also baseload) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week. This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market.
Wind and solar are intermittent sources.
If you add batteries to the mix, nuclear is better.
Not to mention the quantity of power produced. Nuclear is expensive because it's long term investment.
Renewables also cost more in resources (concrete, steel, copper), there are sourced charts about this.
Renewables are better than coal and gaz, but not better than nuclear.
There's nothing wrong with renewables, but it's not enough to offset co2 emissions.