Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.

Does that price include enough storage to heat the entire Twin Cities area (~4M people) for six continuous weeks of average -20C weather with overcast skies, where power failure means widespread death and property damage (broken pipes)? It might do, I don't know, but I'm skeptical. That's a lot of power! My gut feeling is a baseload solution is better for that kind of situation, though what I'm really advocating for is for every option to be on the table for the real experts (not me!) to decide.

Pump water uphill on sunny & windy days. One thing that MN doesn't lack is water.

During the long winter season, that water is largely in solid form, making it less useful for hydro-battery use.

Hydro plants in cold regions usually have an "ice laying" period where they reduce the output to form a thick layer of ice at their desired level to enable the flow they need and prevent ice-slush from entering the turbines.

Seems like Minnesota is more lakes, but that same concept should apply, and it is not like they freeze to the bottom each winter.

You've also got a sizable river on the eastern border that extends up into northern Minnesota.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monticello_Nuclear_Generating_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Crosse_Boiling_Water_Reacto...

Wtf does six weeks of peak power consumption for a city look like in volume of water? Probably bigger than a city

bit short on hills though

Nope. The only "cost-competitive" solar+storage installations I've seen lack sufficient storage to maintain their advertised overnight--even after a perfect, sunny day! For solar with sufficient storage to handle consecutive cloudy days (when panel production is <30% of max), the cost would be many times higher than natural gas. And solar that can't handle consecutive cloudy days requires redundant backup capacity... which, oddly, is never priced in!

In 20 years I think we'll look back on this idea that cheap solar could be the cornerstone of our electricity production as a goofy idea which was about as realistic as the ethanol fuel schemes of the early 2000s.

But at a grid scale we don't need a single installation to provide continuous power and it wouldn't necessarily make sense for it to do so. Load is not uniform across the day and other sources may be cheaper at any particular moment.

Weather patterns can be very large. So essentially all installations in one area will act same way. And we are not really doing any intercontinental grids with large enough capacities to move whole demand. Or overprovisioning in each area so that also other areas can be covered...

At a grid scale you don't have to do everything all at once. Overprovisioning takes time, as does interconnection and storage.

We need a New Deal-type mobilization to build https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Communit... everywhere across the country. Like building the Hoover Dam, it will generate massive amounts of carbon-free energy for a long time and with a relatively short ROI. It's embarrassing parallelizable. We could be off fossil fuels for heating in fifteen years across all homes, saving thousands of dollars a household per year.

52 entire dwellings on 250 acres? Thanks but no. You would literally need to pave America to make this happen.

50 dwellings on one acre is at the low end of the urban density scale.

First, that's literally not even close to true about paving.

But I meant retrofit all existing housing stock with solar collectors and heat storage, neither of which require much room.

It is though. This is a net 5 acres per dwelling, there are only ~300 million arable acres in the USA and there are 200 million households.

This is a tangent. Only the garage roofs have solar thermal collectors on them. Every existing suburban area in the USA regardless of density has enough building roof volume to fully supply a Drake Landing-type thermal system and eliminate heating inputs. Drake Landing shows it will work even in the exurbs. I would guess it could provide enough heating for low-rise apartments and row houses as they have reduced heat loss compared to SFH to make up for the lower available roof area. They cover the deep bore thermal system with dirt and make it a park. I would expect you could put a building over it too. It literally doesn't need to take up any additional land area, so the fact that Drake Landing is an exurb does not mean the system would only work there.

What I haven't read enough about is whether it's limited to a certain geology. I assume it wouldn't work in Florida, but it's not needed there.

Back to your tangent, Drake Landing isn't a giant paved area: the vast majority of the area is not paved or building. I also don't know why you're counting only arable acres as they're houses not farms. Since the system only needs a large-garage-roof-sized thermal collector and the average house roof is larger than that (and if the roof is even smaller so is the thermal load) it's completely irrelevant.

You might be surprised at the rigor applied in studies like the NREL Standard Scenarios, viewable here: https://scenarioviewer.nrel.gov/. I'm guessing the Twin Cities region doesn't actually see 42 days of overcast skies, but if it does, that can be captured in these studies. And transmission is important - load in the Twin Cities area does not have to be served by generation in that area.

Batteries in their current form are incredibly harmful to the environment, and I think would need to be replaced more than nuclear fuel sources.

Exactly, and the reason why they're cheaper now is because it's easier to dump their externalities on developing countries with lax environmental policy, whereas nuclear has unreasonably strict safety requirements which drive up costs substantially, along with the lost expertise in the work force by pausing it for so long.

TANSTAAFL

Batteries, if recycled, have less environmental impact than the massive amounts of concrete used in a nuclear facility.

Absolutely not. You might want to look up where that cobalt for batteries comes from as well and how much recycling actually gets done.

In 2023 stationary storage batteries don't use cobalt.

Stationary storage batteries are expected to last 25 years. Given that we've only been doing stationary storage batteries for about 5 years, it's not really surprising that they aren't being recycled.

What's your point here? You're only supporting my stance.

LiFePO4 batteries need no cobalt. You do not need fancy batteries for stationary services. Grid-scale storage batteries can be as big, heavy, dumb, and cheap as you like. You don't even need lithium really.

Cool. Would you like to let us know where all the other materials are mined from and how environmentally friendly that is? I suggest you look up nickel mining.

LiFePO4 batteries don't use nickel either.

I see that now. Yes, they seem to be a better option than other batteries. However, you're still mining stuff from the earth and the idea that disposing of current vehicles (or other fossil fuel powered things) is better for the environment is just silly.

You also didn't address the recyclable part. From what I can see LiFePO4 batteries are supposedly easier to recycle but I'm going to take that with a grain of salt. Almost all the things they've told us are being recycled just get dumped in the ocean in China. I have my doubts that anyone is actually recycling these batteries effectively.

> Almost all the things they've told us are being recycled just get dumped in the ocean in China.

Post-consumer recycling is quite poor, but post-industrial recycling is much better because they don't have to sort out random junk. Many battery plants already recycle the batteries that fail validation.

Cars are recycled quite thoroughly. In the US: 99% of lead acid batteries are recycled. 95% of vehicles are recycled, and of those 95%, 80% of the materials in the vehicle are recycled. (mostly steel).

This lie is promulgated by the oil industry.

The oil industry uses slave labor to mine cobalt in the congo with zero environmental concerns on how they get it out of the ground?

Your lie is promulgated by the "green energy" industry.

There's just as much money and bs coming from the other side. You can't pretend there's not when you have massive donors and and entire elitist political party backing something like that.

You have fallen into a trap. You are informed enough to be concern-trolled by fossil fuel propaganda, but not well-enough informed to realize it. Many battery technologies need no fancy metals. Even lithium is optional. But lithium, even if we have to get it, has an environmental footprint far smaller than fossil fuels production. Other things that have dramatically larger environmental footprints than lithium include soap and table salt.

Oh stop with the strawman attacks and wake up. You're being fed bs by your side just as much as the oil industry feeds their "constituents" lies. Big Green energy is backed by massive amounts of money and political interests just like big oil and it's not even close to replacing fossil fuels as a main energy source. All you need to do is ask Europe how things are going now that they don't have natural gas coming in from Russia.

Here's the deal... right now, fossil fuels heat my home, get me to work, cook my food, create a massive amount of the household products I own. They've kept my family alive and well and several generations back as well. Green Energy CAN'T do this effectively at all right now.

If/When it does I'll switch. However, I'm not going to listen to some shill, bully and shame me into using something because they feel they're morally justified in doing so.

Green energy does not have to be able to do 100% of everything to be useful. It is not as simple as CAN Vs CANT. And it won't suddenly flip from CANT to CAN in an instant.

You're strawmanning again.

The issue here is everyone knows green energy can't provide enough energy on it's own and yet governments and sjw's every seem to think it's a good idea to pull the rug out of the average middle class person and force them onto green power by taxation, social pressure etc.

And your "everyone knows" is an "appeal to the people" falacy. The grid operator in the UK certainly thinks it is possible to have a 100% renewable grid.

Although I guess that the political situation in the USA precludes a rational policy. Every argument turns into a culture war sooner or later. The opposition is criticised for moral weakness (child slave battery) whilst your own side are blameless victims.

WOW you're going to use the UK as an example for renewable energy right now??? Have you been paying attention at all?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/05/uk-prepares...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uk-wind-solar-builde...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/01/uk-effor...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/21/energy-cris...

https://e360.yale.edu/features/africa-europe-solar-wind-powe...

I'm actually surprised you had the gall to even make this comment.

This ISN'T a political side argument. It's a reality argument and it's time for you to wake up. I'm choosing the side that keeps my family I alive during the winter. When/If renewables do that I'll embrace them, right now they aren't cutting it.

The hilarity here is you've chosen some cult type rational to convince yourself "renewables" are your Jesus and you'll never stop praying to your renewable "God" even when it strikes you down over and over again. Stop drinking the koolaid bud.

The issues ovet winter in the UK were caused by gas supply concerns and low availability of French nuclear power. I am not really sure why you think that is the fault of the renewable industry. But anyway I pointed to the UK because the grid operator has a plan to deliver 100% renewables. But it doesn't need to be reached immediately and may never be reached. It is not a binary thing. The brilliant thing about electricity is that it is fungible. It is the same regardless of which particular "god" you have faith in. I actually live in a country with full electric heating and much of the electricity comes from renewables. Have not had a power cut for years and am still alive and warm. It is not faith in fossil fuels or renewables that keeps me alive but high quality engineering. That can exist in fossil fuel or renewables.

You're right, it's not a binary thing. So, stop using legislation to remove fossil fuels from the people that can't afford your renewables, and then turning around and taxing the shit out of those same people to push renewables that can't stay on par with fossil fuels yet.

Yep... and the cobalt they need to in order to be produced it mined by child slave labor in the Congo.

People need to realize nothing about living in our modern culture comes without a cost.

I’d like to read about this - can you point me towards some reputable articles

Not an article, but I find the summary from Sabine Hossenfelder neutral and trustworthy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo

That's a great video, and I think it's important to point out to the other jackass in this thread that the issue is relevant to Germany because most of that country is north of fucking Saskatoon while this article is about Georgia which is at the same latitude as Iraq.

That video is missing demand response enabling sector coupling.

Take green steel using hydrogen as a chemical feedstock. Oversize the electrolyzers and add some storage and the plant is now able to utilize low prices and leave the firm 10% to more important consumers, while enabling more producers to exist.

This without paying the round-trip cost.

Almost all studies looking into 100% renewable systems finds them easily possible globally but a holistic approach is required. Simply shifting the current electricity sector to renewables won't cut it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

Right, does it survive week with bad weather and max load ? Coz that's called "a winter"

Gas peaker plants solve the problem, with no additional costs.

We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions.

At that point it would be much cheaper to look elsewhere for more improvements. There's no need to invent a reason for massive new energy infrastructure. The gas plants already exist; no exotic solutions are required to give 100% continuous power supply.

Europe can not continue to rely on natural gas and fossil fuels for the next 20-30 years, nor will the climate goals be reached if power consumption and thus gas consumption are increased.

Gas peaker plants are also not cheap. People think they are cheap when looking at the theoretical cost, but having energy plants in stand-by mode costs a lot of money. Generally those are paid by either taxes or as part of the grid connection cost because governments will pay a lot of money to have grid stability. In theory we could remove those subsidizes and let the market pay to have grid stability, but no governments in Europe do this.

Europe also do not have any easy access to natural gas. The only country would be Norway. Being energy self-sufficient is important from a geopolitical perspective and I doubt anyone is unaware about the strong connection between current wars and fossil fuels. Nuclear fuel can be both mined and constructed in EU, the fuel is much less sensitive to geopolitical events, and the diversity in the nuclear fuel production chain is fairly good. Countries can much easier store up decades worth of fuel.

So you are going to have nuclear plants in standby? Then I have a bridge to sell you.

Of course not, but is that question even asked in good faith? Are you not aware that the European grid is made out of multiple different technologies each with a different benefits and drawbacks?

Right now the most important aspect of the grid is not price, it is the reduction of fossil fuel dependency. It is not sustainable to use fossil fuels in the short run and it is definitively not sustainable in the long run. Countries need to invest and start building replacement for existing fossil fuel power plants, and they also need at the same time increase capacity. On top of that we also need to start replace and remove part of the hydro energy production in order to prevent several extinctions.

It is also not morally or economically sensible to continue spend subsidizes on fossil fuel plants. A minimum requirement for government subsidizes should be zero green house emissions and geopolitical self-sufficient within the borders of EU.

The problem with nuclear is that every dollar spent on nuclear could have displaced more fossil energy if invested in renewables. Any investment in nuclear prolongs the climate crisis.

The next problem nuclear faces is that the CAPEX heavy economic model requires them to run at 100% all the time, they used to be able to do that but renewables undercut them wildly.

Now you start to lower the capacity factor of the nuclear plants, which has now gone from $0.15/kWh to ~$0.3/kWh when operating at 50% capacity factor.

Who even wants electricity for that price? It's beyond what we today call an "energy crisis". This is locked in until that nuclear plant has paid of its initial investment after 40 years.

> The problem with nuclear is that every dollar spent on nuclear could have displaced more fossil energy if invested in renewables. Any investment in nuclear prolongs the climate crisis.

Every dollar spent on nuclear, or every dollar spent on gratuitous nuclear regulation? Renewables kill many more people and render far more land uninhabitable per kWh generated; if we normalized our safety requirements then we'd turn off more coal more quickly by going to nuclear.

Germany switched their policy away from nuclear and the result is they've spent more money (just look at the cost of the required grid upgrades alone from their renewable programme) and generated more CO2 (with coal plants being kept open past planned shutdowns, and in some cases even restarted).

There's plenty of space for renewables in the mix, but opposing nuclear doesn't mean more money gets spent on renewables and certainly doesn't mean more emission reduction; quite the opposite.

> Every dollar spent on nuclear, or every dollar spent on gratuitous nuclear regulation? Renewables kill many more people and render far more land uninhabitable per kWh generated; if we normalized our safety requirements then we'd turn off more coal more quickly by going to nuclear.

Ehh what. None of this is true.

> Germany switched their policy away from nuclear and the result is they've spent more money (just look at the cost of the required grid upgrades alone from their renewable programme) and generated more CO2 (with coal plants being kept open past planned shutdowns, and in some cases even restarted).

The great thing is that we are in 2023 and not 15 years ago. Germany spearheaded the renewable transition with the subsidies and huge buildout they enbaled. Today we can utilize the fruits of that.

We make choices based on the options today, not past results.

> There's plenty of space for renewables in the mix, but opposing nuclear doesn't mean more money gets spent on renewables and certainly doesn't mean more emission reduction; quite the opposite.

Then the money gets spent on other economic activity, rather than siphoning state subsidies to a pet nuclear project.

The market should deploy the cheapest grid possible that can produce emission free energy. We should be using those market forces.

The problem that we have is that governments steps in to subsidize grid stability. Industries and citizens in general do no accept a government that allows for black outs, and they also do not accept a government that allow the energy price to reach the natural market price when supply is very low and demand is high.

A second major problem is that if cheap renewables can produce 90% of supply and we need to 10% of expensive storage to meet demand, the cost that customers will have to bear is as if 100% of the produced energy came from the expensive storage. This make it very expensive to customers to have a combination of very cheap and very expensive energy production.

And finally, EU law dictate that if a country has surplus energy production then they must sell it to countries that has a deficit in energy production. This makes grid stability an EU wide issue, and even if a single country has an very stable production they will still share the high costs of energy unstable countries.

All of it create a market where the cost of $/kWh of energy created within a country is just loosely connected by the real price that customers pay. This winter demonstrated that multiple times, and all the governments subsidizes and price roofs illustrated how ready governments are to pay when the real cost of grid stability lands.

> The market should deploy the cheapest grid possible that can produce emission free energy. We should be using those market forces.

We are. Marginal cost + paying for CO2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emissions_Tradi...

You are missing the time factor. Supplying 90% means that a vast majority of time they fulfill 100% and the expensive storage is not required. All based on the marginal price market Europe employs.

The storage would still be needed, but it is not the marginal cost and maybe storage is not the right path? Maybe it is sector coupling? Maybe it is demand response from hydrogen production for industrial use? Maybe it is not charging most cars for a couple of days?

As with all capitalistic systems a holistic organic approach will emerge. If it is not good enough adjust the market conditions. Sweden is already putting most stabilization services on an open market, with the goal to trade all day-ahead like power.

Pulling out a five-year plan of having nuclear solve it in 20 years will only lead to pain.

If that were true then we wouldn't see large wind/solar regions where the average cost during this winter were at $0.3/kWh or above. Wind and solar did contribute a lot, but it was quite rare that they hit 100%. Instead it was gas prices that controlled what the energy prices was. It was this fact that resulted in many country implementing a roof of how much profits those renewables could earn, redirecting those profits in order to pay the bill for more fossil fuels.

Sweden is a prime example of a country that is paying the cost of stabilizing the grid for the rest of the continent. They could have had one of the cheapest energy grid in EU thanks the the large stable production from nuclear and hydro, but because of how the EU system is setup the opposite occurred. The result is the highest inflation rate in EU coupled with a significant hit to the economy. Germany in contrast is using the profits they historically gained by using cheap natural gas from Russia and injected billions to their industry in the form of energy subsidizes, sheltering their economy from the same fate. Who cares if the energy prices reaches well above $1/kWh if the government foot the bill?

Massive subsidizes and huge difference between marginal cost and actually price is not a free market. There is nothing free about it.

No, decarbonize the grid the way France did it. Don’t follow Germany’s example.

It’s that simple.

The French example is amazing. A bunch of negative learning by doing and then the total boondoggle of Flamanville 3. Lets emulate.

Have a look at this crudely drawn graph to see the nuclear French cost over time with Flamanville 3 added as a cherry on top:

https://imgur.com/6G2RBa0

On the other hand Germany has gone from about zero to 50% renewables while spearheading the renewable market. Sure, personally I would prefer if they had closed fossil generation before nuclear, but Fukushima threw a wrench in that plan.

To not utilize the fruits of Germany's efforts today would be insane. We are making decisions 2023, not 2005.

What fruits? German co2 emissions per capital are similar to coal heavy Poland. Energiewende is a massive failure and a great example of politics screwing people and environment over.

Which is amazing considering that Germany has 2.8x the GDP per capita of Poland. As I said, I do not agree with phasing out nuclear before renewables.

Short of that transforming the electricity sector of Germany from all fossil and some nuclear to 50% renewables in 15 years is nothing short of incredible.

Add the current exponential growth in renewables to that, now when the cost side does not require subsidies anymore, and we have an incredible future ahead of us.

Or as wiki puts it, they choose after Fukushima to not use nuclear as a bridging technology.

> The key policy document outlining the Energiewende was published by the German government in September 2010, some six months before the Fukushima nuclear accident.[1] Legislative support was passed in September 2010. On 6 June 2011, following Fukushima, the government removed the use of nuclear power as a bridging technology as part of their policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende#Status

Per capita per gdp it's 70% higher than France. Going 50% renewables was a huge undertaking but it's clear it wasn't the right thing to do considering this money could've been spent on building more nuclear. It's all about decarbonisation, not about increasing share of renewable energy. Climate doesn't care about your share of renewables. Another thing to consider is that this transistion was in large part built on gas imported from Russia which funded the current war in Ukraine. And I would argue that growth of renewables in Germany has largerly stalled, barely any new wind farms are added to the grid nowadays. More solar has been added in recent years but Germany is so far north that it doesn't make much sense to build solar there (esp. considering energy requirements for winter). Energiewende is a big failure and the faster Germans notice the better.

You are stuck in the mindset of a blank slate with Energiewende as one of the options ahead of you. That decision is done, you can not revert it. The cost is paid.

We are now in 2023. This is how the cost for solar PV and wind have transformed, since that decision.

https://www.lazard.com/media/451886/grphx_lcoe-09.png

We are at the end of that graph. The outlook is not 2009, it is 2023. In 2023 renewables are the only choice, economically. When we hit 70-90% penetration depending on country there will be new problems to solve, but we are extremely far from that.

The current large build-out is off-shore wind, since that has higher capacity factors. We will see to what percentage of penetration that brings us. Then some sprinkling of solar on top because it is essentially free.

Nuclear and renewables both compete for the slice of the energy market being the most inflexible cheapest power source. Renewables win that by a landslide. Now nuclear becomes load following, and that horrific investment became even worse.

LCOE doesn't account for storage, backup and grid costs, please don't use it as a go to indicator that renewables are cheap. How much offshore capacity was added in the last 3 years in Germany? Zero? Or am I mistaken?

Energy grids tend to converge to LCOE of the producers. Just look at the average prices before the current crisis haphazardly replacing Russian gas with alternatives. We are also talking about the 70-90% case here, for that case no storage is needed. That is the point.

A stupid solution, which is cheaper than nuclear, is simply burning hydrogen in turbines like todays peaker plants. We are not at the point where it is needed, so everyone is instead looking for smarter solution.

The European grid is interconnected. UK awarded contracts to add 7 GW @ 60% capacity factor = 4.2 GW average last summer.

Germany seems to have added ~500 MW in off-shore wind in the last three years, so with that generations capacity factor about 230 MW in average power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in...

It just doesn't make sense to only use LCOE for weather and season dependent sources of energy, of course you need storage if you don't want to burn gas/coal during Dunkelflaute. Just look at German grid and what's happening right now (614 gCO₂eq/kWh, mostly gas and coal). Meanwhile France is at 92g. Are you really proposing countries like Poland decarbonise like Germany instead of following France's example? Interconnected or not, you do need cheap and dependable energy and the only clean source of that is nuclear. Hydrogen is just a greenwashed natural gas. And 500MW in 3 years is quite far from being meaningful.

>We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions.

Not just wrong but backwards, we in fact need to REMOVE gigatons of carbon to avoid dangerous, possibly catastrophic warming of the planet.

We do need to get carbon production to zero, and then negative. But first we need to lower carbon production. Gas peaker plants make a good intermediate step. We can work on renewable electricity. And then work on more renewables and storage to get rid of all carbon, and finally even more renewables and carbon capture.

I have heard that 3x normal load in renewables is enough for nearly all the time with storage for load-shifting during the day. That results in extra capacity most of the time which can be used for carbon capture, making hydrogen, and making legacy fuels.

> Gas peaker plants solve the problem, with no additional costs.

> We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions.

And now instead of paying for the expense nuclear power plant, you have to pay:

- Pay for 3x the raw capacity of the plant in solar and wind because they never run at peak capacity

- Pay for the battery for storage

- Pay for the Gas power plant that will never be cost effective because running 10% of the time.

And you still emit more CO2 than a damn nuclear power plant.

Ah downvoted. In front of mathematical evidence, the anti-nuclear run away and downvote ? Or you are working for the gas industry maybe ?

I've been pleasantly surprised by the impressive recent results that multiple groups have gotten with potassium-based dual-ion batteries. The dual-ion battery stores both positive (in the anode) and negative (in the cathode) ions, which means that both electrodes can be made of carbon rather than metals. Storing negative ions in the cathode also eliminates the major hurdle with sodium-ion: the large Na+ ion doesn't like to be yanked out of the metal-oxide cathode's crystal lattice. I'm not sure why the best stability results I've seen have been with potassium, but anyway:

1500 cycles, 95% capacity retention: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ee/c7ee0...

2000 cycles, "100%" capacity retention (degradation below measurement limits): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202001...

It's rare that I see a battery that meets the triple criterion of high stability (>>1000 cycles), cheap materials and high current efficiency (which in a large installation is also related to heat dissipation), but these seem to do it. The density is too low for vehicles, but fine for grids.