[PavlovsCat]

> The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible.

Well, if that "counts", then solar power will become totally free and have a net positive environmental impact, we'll just plant some nanobots that grow and repair solar panels inside a marked area, and can be scooped up should we need them elsewhere, hence "100% free once we perfected them". They'll smell like vanilla, and change color according to the moods of people using the energy.

Latter on we make nanobots and send them to the sun to hang out there for a few thousand years and grow a scaffolding from, uhh, space dust or something, and then we shoot nanobots at it that grow solar panels on it, and we have our Dyson sphere. Add some nanostuff that creates material from energy and flings that at Earth, then convert material back to energy.

This didn't even take me 5 minutes, so I really don't get what the problem is :P

[ThomPete]

You can say the same about solar which needs fuelcell technology we dont have. Nuclear waste is not problems that we have no idea to solve.

[pfdietz]

Solar doesn't need fuel cells.

Fuel cells are a high capital cost solution to the problem of turning hydrogen into electricity, at higher efficiency. That's not what solar or wind need -- they need low capital cost, mediocre efficiency backup sources.

[ThomPete]

And if they cant get that then they will never be a baseline energy source as you cant count on them, so keep dreaming.

[ben_w]

On the contrary, current efficiency of even cheap-and-dumb electrolysis is 70% {1}, which means that cheap solar like the 2.155¢/kWh plant from 6 montgs ago {2} can easily provide baseline load.

This is pretty much entirely because PV keep getting cheaper faster than everyone expected — even as recently as five years ago, pessimism like yours wouldn’t have been unreasonable, and yet the problem is now essentially solved and all we need to do is build the stuff at the prices we can already afford.

{1} https://web.archive.org/web/20120322204531/http://www.grid-s...

{2} https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/14/new-us-solar-record-2-1...

[ThomPete]

Of course they can't and of course it doesn't get cheaper unless you decide to frame it in a way that not at all realistic.

Solar is less then 1% and that's with 300% increase it's not even close to being able to deliver baseline anything regardless of how cheap it gets. It's a dream that's not even close to be realistic and frankly highly naive.

Again 47w per m2 vs. 1000w per m2 and with solar panels needing continous repeairs and no grid or fuel cells in sight plus reliance on coal, nuclear and oil for when the sun doesn't shine.

Good luck.

[ben_w]

Your first sentence is missing a word. Can’t what? I gave you links to show my working.

I have no idea what you’re referring to with “47w per m2”, can you elaborate?

Ditto “needing continuous replairs“. There’s a rover on Mars that’s been running for about 15 years continuously on solar with no human maintenance.

From an engineering point of view (though not political), you don’t even need to worry about night time, because the earth is round and even planet sized grids don’t lose enough power to raise my example of 2.155¢/kWh to even as high as coal. And that’s if you refuse to use the fuel cell tech that already exists.

[pfdietz]

They can, when teamed with dispatchable sources, destroy the economic case for expensive baseload sources.

This is why you're not seeing new nuclear plants much in the west. The decision makers know they face huge risk from future cost declines of renewables which, combined with gas, would leave those reactors unable to amortize their construction, financing, and fixed operating costs.

There are other solutions for long term storage of renewable energy to make it dispatchable. For example, making hydrogen, then burn it in turbines. The efficiency of this is lousy, but the capital cost can be quite low.

[ThomPete]

I don't see nuclear plants much in the west because of political opposition and public ignorance nothing else.

[pfdietz]

I see plenty of self-inflicted damage. Inability to meet cost estimates for new nuclear plants, for example. If nuclear had been as great as the salesmen had told us, the opposition would have been much less, and would likely have been steamrolled. As it stands, utilities largely don't want to build new nuclear plants. They even shit talk it in public. They aren't doing this because they are secret radical ecoterrorists; they are doing it because they are hard nosed business people with no time for failures.

This is nothing new. As the Forbes cover story on Feb. 11, 1985 said: “The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale… only the blind or the biased can now think that the money has been well spent.”

In recent years, they gave nuclear another chance. And it failed again. You are unlikely to get a third chance anytime soon.