Nuclear power is too slow

Re:Nuclear power is too slow by Manuel_D on Friday December 16, 2022 @05:37PM (#34021571)

40% of electricity may be produced by gas on a given day, but that 40% is being produced mostly at night - which is is not going to be displaced by further investments in solar. "Base load" isn't a reference to generation, it's a reference to demand. Base load refers to the load during the lowest period of energy demand in a 24 hour period. Unfortunately, load peaks when solar is producing no energy and load at its base when solar is producing the most energy [1]. Without storage, these excesses of solar production when load is at its base cannot be shifted to the time when load is at its peak.

Renewables look great if you just look at generation. But the goal isn't simply to generate clean energy, the goal is to displace fossil fuels. This is why non-intermittent sources like nuclear and hydroelectricity are, contrary to your assertion, far more valuable for decarbonization.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve#/media/File:Califor...

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by nine_k on Friday December 16, 2022 @06:10PM (#34021891)

I live in NYC, and about 50% of energy coming to my apartment comes from nuclear and hydro sources, according to the energy company.

But NYC has a few gas-fired peaker plants, and during summer they are fired at the hottest time of the day, when AC load soars.

More solar power would certainly help this specific problem. I suppose that somewhere farther from ocean, where day and night temperatures vary more, a solar plant should have an even bigger effect in the summer.

(In the winter though the picture changes.)

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by Manuel_D on Friday December 16, 2022 @06:16PM (#34021953)

Unfortunately the solar potential north in New York is pretty bad. It's not just the weather, it's the angle of incidence with the sun. The further away from the equator you go, the less light per square meter of land you get.

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by nine_k on Friday December 16, 2022 @06:26PM (#34022070)

Indeed so! But I suppose there may be enough slanted surfaces facing approximately south. If solar were cheap enough to depoy, it could help. But possibly it may be not, due to labor costs.

I still see some (tall, multifamily / office) houses in Brooklyn and even on Manhattan adorning their roofs with solar panels. I know only one house that incorporated them right from the start though, it's on Coney Island, facing the ocean.

I think when someone comes up with translucent solar panels which can work as window shades on a skyscraper while looking good from the outside and not requiring a fortune to deploy, that will change the face of metropolises around the globe.

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by cedilla on Friday December 16, 2022 @06:47PM (#34022283)

New York is at 40°N. It's more southern than most of Europe, where massive amounts of solar power is produced cheaply.

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by Manuel_D on Friday December 16, 2022 @06:56PM (#34022361)

Actually, Europe's renewables - besides hydroelectricity - are mostly wind precisely for this reason. Wind is 12% of the EU's electricity generation as compared to 6% for solar [2]. Nuclear power is more than both combined at 25% [3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Uni...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

3. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by smcl on Friday December 16, 2022 @07:35PM (#34022716)

Just wanted to say that your responses throughout this thread have been excellent

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by Schroedingersat on Friday December 16, 2022 @11:55PM (#34024857)

Europe's renewables are mostly wind because they have good wind resource and terrible local weather for solar. 40 degrees latitude makes very little difference to output and the 10% CF during mid winter available for fixed utility solar in new york still makes the energy considerably cheaper than nuclear.

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by cedilla on Saturday December 17, 2022 @04:58AM (#34026441)

The market disagrees with you. Solar booms in Europe. including the haunted frosty lands of Spain.

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by Schroedingersat on Saturday December 17, 2022 @06:16AM (#34026834)

Most of what's south of switzerland or north of estonia has decent local weather for it. Finland's resources are quite good compared to even some equatorial places like PNG, just with higher seasonal variability. It's more the central part + UK. The point being that latitude is less important than weather, and as such claiming that solar is untenable in northern US or southern canada because it's merely okay in england is an obvious lie.

All of which is not to say solar won't be more important than gas, coal or nuclear in central europe going forward. Just that wind will take the front seat.

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by Manuel_D on Saturday December 17, 2022 @02:24PM (#34031204)

Finland has good weather for solar? You realize how far north they are? They gave good weather for solar in the summer when they don't need electricity for heating anyway. How much solar are they getting right now?

In case you aren't aware latitudes reduce solar energy collected per square meter of land. This can be motivated by tracking solar panels. But what can't be mitigated are shorter days in winter that get more extreme the further your are from the equator. In Helsinki right now the sun rises at 9:30 and sets just after 3pm.

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by Schroedingersat on Saturday December 17, 2022 @06:47PM (#34033483)

If you lack the critical reasoning ability to understand how that could be useful or to understand that adding a thing that's biased towards summer to a thing that's biased towards winter gives you energy all year around, then we shouldn't really be listening to your energy infrastructure advice.

https://polarnightenergy.fi/sand-battery

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by Manuel_D on Saturday December 17, 2022 @07:07PM (#34033642)

How many gigawatts of sand storage have been provisioned (in terms of electricity output, not thermal output)? How many years of operational experience do we have? In fact I'm not aware of any project using thermal sand for electric storage, only for district heating. Finland uses about 87TWh electricity annually, working out to about 230 GWh daily. I'd be a lot more convinced of it's viability for seasonal storage if they're able to provision at least a day of storage.

I don't doubt your critical reasoning ability, but I do doubt the wisdom of treating the challenge of provisioning and operating massive seasonal storage on the order of terawatts as a solved problem because of a few district heating projects.

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by Schroedingersat on Saturday December 17, 2022 @09:48PM (#34034620)

> How many years of operational experience do we have?

Yes. Huge problem. Very nice and good faith objection to something that can be done incredibly simply with a few dollars per kWh. What if some hot water or sand leaks out and contaminates an entire country?

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Re:Nuclear power is too slow by avar on Saturday December 17, 2022 @04:30AM (#34026291)

Aren't you quoting numbers on grid electricity production?

In Europe many household solar installations are connected to batteries, and don't feed directly into the grid. You won't see such use in production statistics, only indirectly as a reduction in demand.

Some of those also don't produce electricity, but use solar for heating.

Maybe I'm wrong (either the numbers encompass that, or the difference isn't substantial). But it seems to me that you'd get a bias against solar if that's correct. Wind installations are usually more centralized, and feed into the grid.

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