Just use the existing fossil fuels plants on those days and build some extra capacity for carbon sequestration...

Are there any realistic carbon sequestration methodologies (other than planting trees) that scale?

planting trees isn't a realistic carbon sequestration. it just delays when the carbon is released (dead decaying tree). The only proper carbon sequestration is to capture it and stick it back in the ground from where it came. there's obvious challenges with that.

Standing forests are perpetual carbon storage. At some point a given area of forest reaches maturity/stability and the rate of tree decay is more or less matched by the rate of tree growth. Once in a while the forest burns down, grows back and reaches maturity again, and once again becomes stored carbon. On average, an area of land that is forest will be carbon storage (as well as wildlife habitat etc).

Trees are great: solar-powered, recursive, self-assembling, carbon sequestration tech.

Forests can't be the only solution to carbon, because of the scale of emissions, but they can be a fraction of the solution.

You're describing temporary storage. That's very different from sequestration. If you don't do something like bury charcoal, it's more or less irrelevant to trying to drain a continuing large supply of carbon.

I agree with your reply. As long as the amount of stored carbon by the forest increases, it is a valid form of carbon sequestration, and, IMHO, the most beautiful.

Regarding other methods, people should Google for: norway carbon sequestration. Note: The volumes are very limited -- not enough to burn coal as your primary energy source, then capture all the CO2 and pump it underground.

To be clear, I am not shilling for non-forest/peat based carbon sequestration. To me, it is mostly a green washing game by big oil, gas, and utility firms to delay action and avoid responsibility.

They all scale if somebody goes and scale them up.

It just a money problem, if the technology has money momentum scaling up issues will also be solved with the same momentum. The collective west just decided nope on nuclear. Which i think will not bite them in their asses now that China and Russia are moving forward.

I'd say that the immediate problem is the electricity generation.

There is no reason at all to scale carbon capture before the electricity generation is mostly carbon-free. As there is no reason at all to scale storage before most of the generation is intermittent.

What leads to ignorant people deciding that since nobody is doing it, it must be impossible.

If you're only using the carbon-intensive power sources as backup power for calm cloudy days, then you don't necessarily need great sequestration -- the expensive crappy natural gas sequestration plants "work" but you wouldn't want to run your whole grid with them. They'll do just fine in a low-carbon world;

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...

Pity they can't just connect to their neighbors grids then.

Funny you should say that: Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.

0. https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/12/20/poland-has-installed-...

1. https://www.world-nuclear.org/world-nuclear-performance-repo...

What is installed in one year has little relevance to what eventual installed capacity will be for solar/wind/nuclear. Once solar/wind becomes a larger amount of installed capacity the immense problems with storage will likely become a huge limiting factor. Have you considered how much storage poland (or any country with large seasonal variation in sun/wind) would actually need for having 50% of it's capacity in solar?

5.3GW global nuclear power capacity globally seems off. Individual plants are on the order of 1-5GW

edit: checked your source and it in fact says global operating nuclear comes to around 370GW which makes more sense. Not making a comment on your point, the numbers just seemed off in my experience

> Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

This will not extrapolate linearly into the future though. The grid is already being destabilized by all the local generation of solar (most of the installations are on roofs of people's homes). This caused the government to change the law on how much it's paying the individual producers who sell their excess electricity to the grid and now, you're getting paid the actual, momentary price of kWh (which means that, on sunny days, you'll be paid hardly anything at all), instead of a fixed sum that was paid out before. This decreases the profitability of new solar installations by a lot.

That's a political choice being made by those who oppose renewables. It's not a limitation of the technology.

It's not opposition, it's just not overpaying any more.

> Funny you should say that: Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

With less than 30 hours of sunshine in December it contributes to the grid amount known as "fuck all": https://i.imgur.com/QVNpl06.png Capacity was over 10GW at this point.

It was installed only because of net metering policies, so you generate energy in summer when it does not really matter, and receive it in winter where there's lack of it. Bad policy.

Even wind generally fares better: https://i.imgur.com/2R2nfF2.png 1,3 GW out of ~8GW capacity.

On the other hand, the 5,3GW of nuclear capacity displaces 10x more fossils, because it's actually 5,3GW you can generally count on.

>For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.

Yet, we install tens or hundreds of solar "capacity" that end up not generating any power or overgenerating when we have too much of it. It's pointless, especially in our climate.

The batteries are going to get better and cheaper so much faster than you think. It will seem obvious in hindsight!

I'm not sure thats true, it kind of depends on what the 10x is based on, but regardless its not realy a sensible grid mix:

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

32% solar and 60% wind, with an overbuild of 2.5x peak demand each (so 5x peak combined) is the cheapest option, according to the above analysis, filling the remaining 8% with other low carbon options.

In practice, this site shows you need to have ability to fulfill pretty much 100% of your demand via gas alone: https://i.imgur.com/TKGbsHK.png

There's zero chance, just politically, that anyone in this country will agree on additional gas dependency. Does this "cheapest option" actually includes cost of 30GW gas plants anyway?

Anyway I don't see any actual numbers on this page so it's hard for me to treat this seriously. "Cost comparison" only talks about whether "could POLAND run by only building new solar, wind and batteries?" which is very not interesting to me compared to having 30-50% of nuclear generation.

Its not a gas dependency. It's synthesised within your own borders from the overprovisioned solar and wind.

The model has several conservative assumptions that mean no power is imported as fuel or via cross border wires.

Thats fine, its just a model, the main point is that even with those constraints, renewables can provide 92% of power directly, and provide the power to meet the other 8% too. In Poland! (many other countries are more blessed with renewables).