[it_citizen]

Lately I have been surprised at how much solar and wind play the main role in most reports building pathways to carbon neutrality.

I always believed that the intermittency of solar and wind would be too problematic and that's why people advocated for nuclear energy. However in most recent pathways stamped as "realistic", it seems that nuclear stays pretty much at its current level and solar and wind grows exponentially.

Is intermittency and dispatchability a problem we can really overcome with DC long transmission lines, synthetic gaz, smarter energy consumption and batteries?

I have a hard time understanding to which extent each of those solutions can help solve the dispatch problem. I would love to be pointed out to some good up-to-date resources that go in-depth into that topic.

[ben_w]

(Extremely) long distance transmission lines are theoretically useful because nighttime for you is daytime 12 timezones away; and even in the same time zone, winter for you is summer on the other side of the equator.

I don’t know what the cost of the stuff is, nor the geopolitics, but the losses are low enough (3.5%/1000km [0]) to at least be worth asking that sort of question — if the answer is “that’s fine”, you only need to store energy for non-static use, like phones and cars.

Batteries may or may not be a viable solution. On the “it’s fine” side, if you can electrify every car, then you are close to the production level needed to get enough batteries even for a no-intercontinental-transmission-winter scenario (83 kWh is a large Model 3, that per American household is fine for summer but marginal for winter). On the “perhaps not” side, there is no guarantee that the impressive current growth of batteries will last long enough to get us there.

Synthetic gas and smarter energy consumption: I know far too little to comment.

[0] https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... page 11

[ncmncm]

Nukes are not the solution because they are mature tech. They are very expensive, always have been, always will be. Nuke plants have to be big to be worth building, but like any big public works project, they attract corruption. Most of the price of a typical nuke plant in the US is (100% legal!) graft. That won't change either. It takes many years to build a nuke plant because nobody involved wants the gravy train to stop. Finishing means it stops.

(A fusion plant would need to be enormously bigger than any fission plant, so would attract enormously more corruption, and probably never be finished.)

Solar and storage prices are still in free fall. Battery tech optimized for utilities rather than phones and laptops is coming to market at 1/3 of lithum's price, and will fall from there.

There is no lower limit on useful size for solar. It can start producing useful power immediately while you add capacity. It is more valuable with storage, but works without. The more storage you add, the better it is, but even a little storage pays for itself immediately.