[sir_bearington]

There isn't remotely enough storage available to make wind and solar feasible. To put this in perspective, the world consumes 60 TWh of electricity daily, about 2.5 TWh per hour. We have only a couple GWh of battery storage. Hydroelectric provides more, but that's harder to scale because you need the right geography.

Once solar saturates daytime demand, provisioning further solar power doesn't contribute to decarbonization. This is why nuclear is really the only known path to decarbonization. Maybe we'll figure out scalable ways to provision hundreds of terawatt hours of storage, but we might be waiting a long time.

[toomuchtodo]

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/faculty-and-impact/news/recent-new... ("The US can reach 90 percent clean electricity by 2035, dependably and without increasing consumer bills")

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/europe-win... ("Europe has space for enough wind turbines to power the entire world, study finds")

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/ee2523dc632c9b01df... ("Australia is the sunniest country in the world and one of the windiest. Australia’s potential for renewable energy generation is 500 times greater than current power generation capacity.")

https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/why-africa-is-the-ne... ("Africa has an almost unlimited potential of solar capacity (10 TW), abundant hydro (350 GW), wind (110 GW), and geothermal energy sources (15 GW). The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that renewable energy capacity in Africa could reach 310 GW by 2030; which would put the continent at the forefront of renewable energy generation globally.")

[sir_bearington]

Neither of these articles offers a detailed plan on how this storage will be provisioned. The second doesn't even mention storage at all, only that Europe has enough wind power to power the whole world. Sure, but that's not very useful if that power isn't delivered when you need it.

[7952]

Easy. Create a market that makes it profitable to build storage and encourages price reduction.

[sir_bearington]

I like framing the problem in this term. Our ultimate goal is decarbonization: $1 million per gram of C02 emitted unless equivalent mass is sequestered.

Do we have a realistic plan to built a wind and solar grid under that market? I don't think so, wind and solar are useful for taking a bite out of natural gas but not actually serving as the backbone of an electrical grid. The amount of storage necessary to decarbonize with wind and solar is not feasible, and essentially amounts to betting on some future invention of a cheap mass energy storage device that works everywhere.

By comparison we have demonstrable examples of countries going 80+% nuclear, and the US is already at 20% nuclear power generation. Building four nuclear plants for each existing plant is a lot more achievable of a goal than first building a massive amount of solar and wind, and building extensive HVDC transmission, and building tens of Terawatt hours worth of storage. The first step in the latter is cheaper than building nuclear, it's the other two steps that are wildly expensive if they're even possible. If we actually enacted a binding rule of zero emissions by 2050 people would start building nuclear power plants.

[andromeduck]

yeah and we'll have fusion in 10 years

[Hammershaft]

We have methane seeping through thawing permafrost today. We can't delay decarbonizing our energy mix for technologies we haven't even invented yet, let alone mass produced.

[andromeduck]

Yes that is the point, it's basic risk management. Betting the farm on future breakthroughs if you consider climate change to be an existential threat is being on fire and waiting for the fire department because you don't wan't to get your soiled jumping to a pond nearby.

Nuclear is by far the best technology we have today so we should go with it until we have better options in our hand.

[toomuchtodo]

Cost effective fission and fusion are always 10 years away.

[andromeduck]

just like cost effective and environmentally advantageous grid scale batteries at the scales required to smooth day and week scale intermittency

[toomuchtodo]

EDIT: My comment was made before you edited your comment from "just like cost effective grid scale batteries" to what it is now.

http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-facts...

* In 2020, the U.S. had over 23.2 GW of capacity in energy storage compared to 1,100 GW of total installed generation capacity.

* Globally, installed energy storage capacity totaled 173.6 GW.

* 1,355 energy storage projects were operational globally in 2020, with 11 projects under construction. 40% of operational projects are located in the U.S.

* California leads the U.S. in energy storage with 215 operational projects (4.2 GW), followed by Hawaii, New York, and Texas.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/broad-reach-pow...

"Two of the planned 10 MW batteries are up and running already, with a total of 10 expected online by year's end, Vavrik said. That means that BRP and Key Capture are running neck and neck for operational capacity in Texas. The title of biggest battery operator in the state could change hands repeatedly based on the order in which those companies' projects wrap up.

The broader story is that multiple experienced energy investors are converging on Texas simultaneously. The interconnection queue contains more than two dozen batteries that are each larger than 100 megawatts; some go up to 300, 400, even 500 megawatts."

[sir_bearington]

To put these in perspective, the US consumes 500 GWh of electricity every hour. Of the 23 GWh of existing storage, 20 GWh come in the form of hydroelectricity. 100 MWh of storage only amounts to 1.4 seconds of electricity storage. We don't need megawatt hours worth of storage. We don't need gigawatt hours worth of storage. We need terawatt hours worth of storage. We're 6+ orders of magnitude off between the amount of storage necessary, and the storage we can feasibly build.

[andromeduck]

Yes you're missing the point. Most of that storage is hydro and there's a huge gulf between what's required to cover prolonged lulls in such as weeks as was observed recently in Texas and regularly elsewhere - and to peak shave, regulate frequency, and cover until CCGTs can spin up as we have now. Until we start getting to the multi-GWh scale it's a nonstarter.

Again, you either think climate change is an existential problem in which case relying on magic pixiedust in the future is an absurd, or you don't. There's no two ways about it.

[PoignardAzur]

That's the joke.

[bob29]

Actual experts have studied this. Full decarbonization by 2050 with <2% GPD spending per year. No new, and phasing out existing nuclear. Overprovision renewables and produce carbon neutral synthetic fuels with excess power production. Nuclear will never power chainsaws which many across the world depend on.

https://www.evolved.energy/post/2016/02/16/deep-decarbonizat...

[nmfisher]

This is a terrible article. It's basically a single chart showing (what I can only assume) projected energy demand in the USA for a 5-day period in March, and some dispatch figures between various energy sources, and a couple of random generic infographics. Zero explanation of:

- where those demand projections came from

- the feasibility of building capacity for the projected dispatch

- the cost of doing so

I'm not saying that the premise/conclusion is wrong, just that this article in particular adds nothing to the discussion. I can only hope that the linked reports actually address those questions.

[bob29]

The associated report does have more details whether or not you agree with them. The article is more of a summary.

re: demand projections "the carbon neutral and carbon negative scenarios were required to meet the same demand for energy services, for daily life and industrial production as the business as usual reference case from the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook and used its assumptions for population, for GDP and industrial production. So that's very much nothing changes in the world except for the energy system... kind of a view. And the modeling only allows technologies that are commercial today or that have been demonstrated at large pilot scale today. So in effect, I think that really sets a pretty high bar because in reality, I would expect a number of those things to change over the next 30 years. For example, I would expect probably lower population growth than EIA projects and considerably lower demand for energy services and industrial production as a result of a slowing economy. And I would have said that before we have the added effects of the pandemic. " re:feasibility "I think at it's core backcasting is about trying to understand what's entailed in the physical transformation. So the legacy of this work is in that discussion about feeling like that's the analysis that's needed. Not necessarily understanding what does a carbon tax do on the margin or what to other approaches do sort of in the short term and in the macroeconomic system. But really understanding how many more widgets do we need and how quickly do they need to be deployed if you don't want to do early retirement. So that context of the questions we're trying to answer really sets up the insights that come from backcasting. So one of the things we think a lot about is stock turnover. So sort of one of our modeling principles is that we don't do early retirement of any resources except for potentially an electricity supply. So for things like light-duty vehicles or industrial boilers, we really need to understand how long do those resources typically stay online? And that means if it's a 15-year turnover rate for something like a furnace or maybe it's a 30-year turnover rate for something like an industrial boiler."

re:cost "And we find that that case at a net cost of 0.4 percent of GDP in 2050 is able to achieve carbon neutrality. So that 0.4 percent of GDP in 2050 over the reference case, it really represents some major shifts in terms of monetary flows. So we're spending $950 billion on efficiency, new supply for low carbon solutions, and we're saving $800 billion on fossil fuels that are no longer being burned. So our analysis really only looks at the energy costs for the total system for that transition. We're not accounting for things like co-benefits or economic benefits from the avoided damage of climate change or other potential impacts, as well as potential health or environmental benefits. That total energy spending declines from about five percent of GDP for the energy system today to around four percent in 2050. " -quotes from podcast linked in first article

https://www.unsdsn.org/Zero-Carbon-Action-Plan

https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/6f2c9f57/files/uploaded/...

[marcosdumay]

What isn't surprising, because up to now, grid storage was only profitable in very few niche cases, and for a very short time. Besides, there has been no government program to invest on those.

So you are saying that there is some business that has always been certain to lose money, and had never had government help, and nobody ever invested on it. And you are using this fact to suggest that in the near future, when that business will become needed and profitable, nobody will invest on it either... what isn't a conclusion one can make.