@MattMastodon@Sodis Only about 40% of demand can be directly met from volatiles (wind and solar), i. e. no intermediate storage. The rest has to come from »backup« or »storage« or however you call it.
Current storage tech is still almost 100% pumped hydro. Batteries have not made a real dent there yet. But pumped hydro is not enough by far, even potentially, and batteries have a long way to go to be even as scalable as pumped hydro.
So, backup. The only clean, scalable backup is nuclear.
@Sodis@MattMastodon Nuclear power plants can quite easily do load following. It happens regularly e. g. in France. However, since it has the lowest running costs, other sources are usually cut first as far as possible.
@MattMastodon@Sodis Careful about labels. »Renewables« often includes biomass (which is just fast-track fossil tbh) and hydro (which is not so volatile). I'm talking about wind and solar specifically (volatiles).
40% is roughly the mean capacity factor of a good mix of volatiles. This is what you can directly feed to the user from the windmill/panel, without storage. You can expand a bit by massive overbuilding, but you can't overbuild your way out of no wind at night.
@MattMastodon@Sodis Again: that demand is lower at night is already factored in. Roughly 40% of demand can be directly met by volatile sources. You may think nuclear is slow to deploy, but it's still much faster than anything that doesn't exist.
The gap is 60%. Gas is a fossil fuel. Varying use is mostly a euphemism. If you hurt industry, you won't have the industry to build clean energy sources.
@MattMastodon@Sodis If you include construction and disposal (and transport and so on…) it is called lifecycle costs. First image shows that per energy produced (sorry german, »AKW neu« is new-built nuclear).
Uranium comes from all over the world. Second image shows the situation a few years ago. Niger is place 5, Russia place 7.
@MattMastodon@Sodis We're going in circles. Volatile sources can only supply 40% of current demand for £50/MWh. The question is what fills the rest.
If storage, then the price goes up immediately by at least two conversion losses from/to storage, in addition to the cost of storage itself. Which doesn't exist at the needed scalability.
Pointing to single projects is not meaningful, as we need to build a fleet anyway, which has its own dynamics.
I'll try to explain the 40%, sorry for the parts that you already know.
Electric energy is always produced at the same time (and »place« roughly) as it is consumed. (You can't pump electricity into some reservoir to be consumed later, you always need a different energy form for storage.)
The problem with volatile sources is that they mostly (more than half) produce energy at the wrong time and/or the wrong place, and at other times produce nothing.
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⇒ Aside: the »place« problem is that you can't build solar panels and wind turbines just anywhere, and they need a lot of space. E. g. Germany has now the problem that the wind blows much better in the north, but the industry is more in the south. So, you need a lot more/stronger transmission lines. Same for offshore wind: more wind at sea, but you need a lot of cables.
The more wind and solar you already have, the more the good places are already taken.
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⇒ (But at least we already have transmission tech, it is now just a question of materials and effort.)
So, assume that we have enough wind and solar that we can regularly produce 100% of demand from them. You can imagine peaks just touching the demand line at top demand.
(You could imagine more than that, but that would mean overbuilding, which hurts the economics quite badly while not making the end result much better.)
⇒ Now the volatile supply line has valleys between the peaks. If you integrate over time and place, the supply line covers about 40% of demand in this situation.
That is /very rough/ and depends on a lot of factors, but my point is the same if it were 30% or 60%: where does the rest come from?
Transmission: as already mentioned, we know how to transmit electric energy, it's just material and effort. This smoothes out the »place« dimension.
⇒ - Storage: obviously, we'd want to smoothen out the time dimension as well. This means adding storage that can meet 100% of demand as well (volatile sources frequently drop to 0), and feeding it with enough additional clean sources that it can fill every expected gap (and gap accumulation).
And here I'd like to repeat my point from before: the best (most effective) storage we have right now is pumped hydro, by far. And pumped hydro is not enough, by far.
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⇒ - Backup. Of course, anything inherently CO₂-producing is out for this, and this includes gas, obviously, and biomass (maybe less obviously, but think about it). And that leaves?
So, this is my plan: keep building solar and wind till peak demand is sometimes met, build nuclear to replace all the fossil »backup«.
@MattMastodon@Sodis My thinking about biomass: if we don't burn it, it will not be released as CO₂ to the atmosphere.
I guess the thinking about biomass was: if we only burned biomass, not fossil mass, then we'd have an equilibrium and no problem. But saying that biomass is net-zero gets it backwards. The CO₂ doesn't care where it's coming from. It is our task to produce as little CO₂ as possible. The goal is to get below the amount of CO₂ /captured/ by biological processes.
Without klicking anything, 61 million € is practically nothing, so I do not expect this to be a big, impactful project. It might be a nice little extra income from surplus hydro power (Norway is almost completely running on hydro).
Then looking into the links, this supports just a small fleet of up to 40 ships. Which is good.
I think it can be a good way for this niche, and it might be one little thing less to worry about.
Yes, shipping in general, especially long-distance, is a huge issue. But it is only solvable through economics. A solution must be at least as effective and efficient (from a business perspective) as the current dirty oil burning, /and/ significantly better at something to overcome inertia.
My bet would be #nuclear power for that: already being done for decades (mostly military though), and the environment seems ideal (no cooling issues).
I'm not saying 100% nuclear would be best, but I /know/ that 100% volatiles + storage + transmission are practically impossible.
Up to around 40% volatiles can be compensated by a large grid. The rest can, with current or near-future technology, be nuclear and/or hydro. With middle-future technology, this /might/ be gradually replaced by more volatiles+storage+transmission.
This is just the fact: there are, at the current state, only two energy sources that can form the backbone of a decarbonized grid, and they have proved it, hydro and nuclear.
Hydro is not available everywhere, however, as it has really large area demand, and geological requirements.
And I repeat: nuclear /is/ very capable of load following.
And I repeat: batteries at the needed scalability don't exist (yet?).
There are already single events of more than a few hours where sunshine and wind are lacking. But that is only the immediate perspective; you need to integrate over at least several years to see the longer-term shortages that need to be handled as well. And that is quite obviously much more than a few hours. Therefore, I have some problems regarding such studies as credible.
You seem to assume that only one reactor will be built at a time, and nothing learned. But that's not how you do it, and not how France already did it, obviously.
I have a little problem understanding how one can acknowledge the success of the Messmer plan and at the same time claim it unrepeatable.
If you don't have power output from storage equal to PEAK demand, it's the same argument for any storage. And storage doesn't /produce/ energy, it /consumes/ it (because of conversion losses, which are significant).
At least Germany never had subsidies for commercial nuclear power.
On the other hand, »renewables« are still subsidized heavily, and there is much moaning right now because the build-out is slowing down, as the best places are taken.
And France has no /real/ problem with its riverside plants. Last year (much bemoaned) had 0.05% (one twentieth of a percent) curtailing for river temperatures.
Nuclear is faster at load following than everything but pumped hydro and (very dirty) gas peakers. It was even a design requirement for the german Konvoi type in the 70s and 80s.
You seem to argue that our /current/ fossil grid would also need more storage, but it works just fine as is. Nuclear is better at load following than fossils, so what gives?
Yes, but I'd like to add that we need to think about lifetimes.
Let's imagine having built all we need in 30 years, through sometimes extreme efforts.
Current solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries have a lifetime of (a bit generously) 30 years. So we'd have to immediately start again with the entire effort just to keep it up. I'm worrying that this might not be … sustainable.
Sorry, but the term »degrowth« is a red flag for me.
Sure, we are getting more efficient over time. That's why even Germany's emissions fell over the last two decades.
But cutting power that is actually needed means poverty, and that will immediately end support for long-term thinking as well as severely limit our technical options.
There are too many people for romantic visions of rural self-sufficiency.
How dependent is France on Niger's uranium? (www.lemonde.fr)