[epistasis]

They will be serious if they actually build it, unlike Flamanville.

While you call non-nuclear options "virtue signaling," the attempts at building it in France and the US have been virtue signaling. We don't have the industrial capacity to build nuclear.

Meanwhile, we are deploying GW of solar, wind, and storage on time, on budget, ar ever decreasing costs.

Locking in the high costs of nuclear, for the 60 year lifetime of a nuclear reactor, after a 15 year delay for building, is not a serious solution for climate change.

[yason]

The cost of nuclear goes down if we build more of smaller standardized reactors rather than a huge, advanced plants every few decades where everything is new and untested each time, warranting long periods of validation and certification, and where the people building it have changed after each built power plant.

[sirk390]

I doubt that there are numbers to prove that. SMR might just be a buzzword. From the page below there don't seem too many operating or under construction (5 operating, and 4 under construction). https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

[southerntofu]

france has a bunch of standardized reactors: doesn't mean they don't suffer from engineering issue, that they don't leak hot water or radiation every now and then, or that we even know how to tear them apart when they reach end of life.

You should probably do some reading about the many scandals of the nuclear industry in France, from colonial exploitation for uranium to jailing/crippling/assassinating anti-nuclear protesters, with a bunch of nuclear scandals and accidents in between.

[dgellow]

From what I understand small modular reactors are not ready for production. Macro announced government money to help their research. The goal is to a have a prototype end of 2020s.

[simion314]

>Meanwhile, we are deploying GW of solar, wind, and storage on time, on budget, ar ever decreasing costs.

That is the easier part, show me the battery deployments please , the ones that can backup the country/state for a week.

[epistasis]

We are just as of 2020 reaching cost effectiveness for batteries, and planning by utilities is often on five year time lines and uses outdated data, so they are slow to pick up new technology.

Nonetheless, storage is ready, and even in profit driven grids like Texas' ERCOT:

> Citing lower costs and increased renewables, momentum continued in the growth of battery energy storage systems in 2021, roughly doubling with 1,262 MW online, compared to 640 MW in 2020. ... with the next two largest systems in Texas, namely the 102-MW Gambit Battery Energy Storage Park and the 100-MW North Fork Battery Storage Project.

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

If you want week long batteries, you'll first have to show the need for that, but something like that won't be built until it is needed: enough cheap solar and wind on the grid.

With how slow utilities are to adopt cheap new technologies, that will be a while. But cost-optimization strategies for carbon free grids tend to select a lot of excess solar and wind capacity, and almost no nuclear at all. Though I would say that those models are flawed in that they assume that nuclear can be built, when the last decades have shown that it can not really be built.

[simion314]

>If you want week long batteries, you'll first have to show the need for that, but something like that won't be built until it is needed: enough cheap solar and wind on the grid.

This is not realistic, you could build storage but if is super expensive who wants to pay for that.

We will probably have to have an excess of solar and waste energy rather then pay for ton of batteries.

[midasuni]

> growth of battery energy storage systems in 2021, roughly doubling with 1,262 MW online

That makes no sense. How much do they store?

[epistasis]

Grid assets are usually measured by the size of their grid connection. These are lithium ion batteries, and in the 100+MW power capacity, you will usually have 2-4 hours of duration, as the economic use case for something that big usually requires replacing gas peakers to some degree.

Prior generations of lithium ion on the grid were more used for frequency regulation, and would be far smaller and have far higher power/energy rations, like 15-30 minutes. Though this was an extremely profitable market for a while, once people figured out how easy it was to get batteries to do it the market was flooded and frequency regulation does not take a massive amount of battery to accomplish.

Though lithium ion is generally viewed to cap out at 4 hours of duration, I'm thinking that it may get cheap enough per kWh of capacity to install undersized inverters and go to 8-12 hours of capacity. This could compete with other emerging battery technologies targeting that length of duration. An early test of this will be the "long duration storage" component of the replacement package of Diablo Canyon; I dont think that a particlular vendor has been chosen, but most people seem to think that it will be non-lithium-ion that will win the bid. There are other early stage battery startups with ~100 hour duration chemistries. All of these vary based on round-trip efficiency, cost per kWh of energy capacity, and lifetime over cycling.

[midasuni]

If it can provide 100MW for 4 hours why can’t it provide 10MW for 40h?

[ksec]

I wonder if a country will just mandate every household to have a Tesla like PowerWall installed within x years. Or some sort of incentives to have it installed. You can then have additional Grid Battery as backup. It is quite hard to store a week long electricity needs without some redundancy.

[simion314]

This won't be possible in all homes, batteries are a security risk so for sure you need safe conditions and space to install similar on how you need to pass inspections for gas. The only way I could see it working is introducing an increasing electricity tarigf. First 50Kw are cheap, next are 25% more expensive, next 50% etc (this are random number I don't stand behind them)

[pydry]

China has about 40 GW of pumped water storage.

A week of no solar power or wind is unheard of. A week of no wind is very very rare.

[simion314]

We would need to build much , much more storage, and I hope you know water dams are not easy to build(a lot of humans and wild life needs to be moved), if you don't already have them probably is impossible to create them.

>A week of no solar power or wind is unheard of. A week of no wind is very very rare.

You don need no solar or no wind, you need a few weeks of super low solar and wind, like say in winter, solar efficiency is much lower in winter.

[pydry]

We would need much much more of anything to make our power fully renewable.

It's still cheaper and faster building pumped storage, wind and solar (all < 7 year lead time) than building nuclear plants (up to 20 years).

This is not even accounting for the nearly free insurance granted to nuclear plants putting taxpayers on the hook for costs like the $800 billion cost of dealing with fukushima (which involved burning a lot of coal and gas).

The economics of nuclear power as green energy only really make sense because it lets you share some of the rather high costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal. The environmental movement is being coopted/guilted into supporting its subsidization.

[simion314]

>It's still cheaper and faster building pumped storage, wind and solar (all < 7 year lead time) than building nuclear plants (up to 20 years).

Any numbers on that pumped storage? how much is needed to store 1 week of France energy needs ? How much it costs then?

[ZeroGravitas]

France has never generated more than about 75% of its electricity (not power which is much lower because of diesel cars, fossil heating etc.) with nuclear.

It regularly imports electricity from its neighbours, as well as selling its surplus (which it has even at only 75% electrical because the supply doesn't match the demand peaks.)

The current best nuclear rollout on the planet falls far short of your test for being able to run France for a week, has never passed that test, and will never pass that test so why is this considered an argument against renewable plans?

[MrPatan]

And a week of less solar and wind than usage?

[sendben2]

Yes. This. Storage is still expensive. Also France is already a world leader in nuclear grid energy. They already have a long history of building and maintaining nuclear plants.

[hardlianotion]

The nuclear grid in France is ageing, as is the expertise needed to construct and maintain. The decision seems to come at a critical time to maintain France's nuclear capability.

[natmaka]

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

[simion314]

"urope could make much better use of its wind resources if capacity was spread out instead of being concentrated around the North Sea."

It does not claim that wind and solar can replace gas and coal 100% just the super obvious conclusion that we could do more if we invest more in wind turbines and also in the grid (the disadvantage is how you balance the surplus, like companies from country A and B and C have too much electricity most of the time but only 25% could be sold so who gets screwed and has to turn off it's production? If they get screwed then why invest ?

[natmaka]

Nothing can replace gas 100%. Hyper-nuclearized France always produced (and now produces) between 7% and 12% of their gridpower thanks to fossil fuel (gas/petrol/coal). This is not about 100% but about obtaining a baseload.

"we could do more if we invest more in wind turbines" is not obvious when it comes to continuity of production.

Selling anything (even only 25% of your production) can be a financially wonderful operation if done when many customers need it.

Turning off production is only necessary if you cannot store more of it.

[simion314]

>Turning off production is only necessary if you cannot store more of it.

Storing is not cheap and batteries are also diry. not green. My idea is that we need to work on all in parallel, solar, wind, research better and cleaner batteries, nuclear, fusion, invest in the grid and try to connect over larger distances. There will not be 1 solution that fits every place in the world.

[natmaka]

> Storing is not cheap

True, however energy produced thanks to renewables already costs way less than its nuclear counterpart (and the gap is growing), offering a way to recoup investments (grid, storage...). Bonus: no risk of major accident, no fuel (uranium), no nuclear waster... https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020

Batteries aren't the sole way to store energy. Dams (potential energy), for example, are another one (already exploited and quite powerful and flexible). There are many other ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Methods

"work on all in parallel" <=> (often massive) investments aiming at designing something isn't recouped as efficiently as possible (less units built). "work on a single one" <=> bumping the probability of failure (all eggs in the same basket) There is a middle ground to find!

"invest in the grid" is of paramount importance. Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid

"connect over larger distances": indeed, and ways to do it are quickly progressing, as do relevant projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

[southerntofu]

> That is the easier part

No, that's the hard part. The easier part is to reduce energy consumption and adapt to production. The problem is some people think we can live in eternal abundance and not think about it, and these people are making billions of dollars of tax money on "green new deal" types of contracts.

But the truth is degrowth and lowtech are the only option for climate change. Look what "green capitalism" has done for us since the 60s: yes things keep getting worse, and it's not gonna change as long as money and industry are involved, as they are the problem not the solution.

[simion314]

>But the truth is degrowth and lowtech are the only option for climate change. Look what "green capitalism" has done for us since the 60s: yes things keep getting worse, and it's not gonna change as long as money and industry are involved, as they are the problem not the solution.

You can't just close coal plants and petrol industry and replace it it with dreams, even if you reduce word wide consumption you still need to replace existing dirty fuels with cleaner ones.

We were burning coal and wood here in Romania before capitalism so energy is needed for all political systems to improve the population life.

sure we can invest in better isolation, tax dirty industries and services but is not enough. Am I wrong can we stop burning coal and extracting oiuld and gas and survive as a civilized species?

[southerntofu]

> We were burning coal and wood here in Romania before capitalism

Sure, but on what scale before capitalism (16th century)? Yes, some cultures have disappeared due to over-using their resources, but none threatened to take away humanity and millions of other species along with it. Or did you mean before the collapse of USSR and so-called socialist countries (which are arguably State-capitalist and very similar in terms of industry).

> energy is needed for all political systems to improve the population life

Yes, but what energy and on what scale? Clever engineering enables crazy optimizations. When you see people building wooden houses that can be heated with simple candles, it's quite a feat of engineering. Or passive heating from the sun or underground heat. Same goes for the heating system: using a thermal mass with a little wood to burn is orders of magnitude more efficient than electric heating or a commercial woodstove.

When i say low-tech i explicitly don't mean primitivist. I mean our understanding of sciences has progressed enough that we now know that our industrial way of life is not efficient and we can do much with less resources.

> Am I wrong can we stop burning coal and extracting oiuld and gas and survive as a civilized species?

Then again, depends on what scale. Personal cars for people in remote areas is not the main source of pollution. And i'm personally glad we've got some stuff like hospitals which may be a major source of pollution but i personally think are worth the trade-off.

But there are bigger sources of pollutions we could do without. How do you explain there's more smartphones on this planet than human beings yet we keep making more? Why do we keep building more cars and make it impossible to repair the old ones? All environmental studies point out that over the lifecycle of an object, production has the most environmental impact; disposal/recycling is also something we don't know how to do (apart from shoving it down the surface to pollute everything else).

These polluting schemes were invented by the industry to keep profits going after WWI when there was massive overproduction of goodsI'm. They do not benefit humanity or the public, or the exploited workers, or the polluted communities. They benefit only shareholders and politicians who get to shake hands with them.

I'm not saying i alone have the best answers to our problems (far from it). But if we want to build a breathable future for our children, there's certainly quite a few radical changes we could envision that would not damage the way of life of common people but would certainly trade shareholder's profits for humanity's survival.

[simion314]

Reducing consumption is part of the solution and only on some countries. Solar panels are also part of the solution but batteries might be more toxic/dirty then nuclear plants.

[visarga]

Once a few years, we get a few weeks without much wind and solar. What do we do then? Solar and wind can't store enough energy to last for weeks.

[epistasis]

However we do it, it looks like nuclear won't be it, because we can't build nuclear. Some of the more likely routes, with clearer cheaper cost curves than advanced nuclear or SMRs:

1) advanced geothermal (using drilling tech developed within the last decade, not the older ones)

2) flow batteries

3) chemical storage of electricity, whether as ammonia, hydrogen, methanol, or whatever tech path becomes cheapest.

4) for cold climates: district/neighborhood heating with massive seasonal storage

All of these are being developed, and experiencing falling prices on the tech. In contrast, building the same nuclear reactor design gets more expensive successive time it is built. This is true even of France's builds in 70s.

If we are betting on future tech, nuclear is not in the cards. It would have been great it nuclear had put coal out of business in the 1980s, rather than having a ton of build delays in the 1970s that jacked up nuclear's price. But it's ship has sailed, until nuclear can build.

If France completes a single reactor by their planned 2035 date, I will be seriously impressed. However, 1GW in 13 years is not a climate solution.

[BurningPenguin]

I'd say it's very unlikely that there will be no wind or sun all over Europe. There is constant exchange of excess energy between the countries anyway. Regardless of that, there are other options too. Like water or geothermal depending on the country. Sometimes there even will be too much energy. I can imagine this being used to make some hydrogen for later use.

[polskibus]

Lack of enough wind and sun is basically what happened in EU end of last year and caused energy and gas prices to sky rocket. It is not as rare as you think, moreover it happens over large areas at the same time which exacerbates stress on the grid.

[misja111]

This is nonsense. The crazy gas prices had two main causes: insufficient gas buffers during the uptick of the economy after Corona, and Russia closing part of its huge gas supply to Europe.

[thow-58d4e8b]

> insufficient gas buffers during the uptick of the economy after Corona

this is true

> Russia closing part of its huge gas supply to Europe

this isn't, afaik. Russia doesn't sell on spot market, they prefer long term futures contracts, on which they reliably deliver. They delivered on their 2021 commitments a bit earlier, hence they closed off the valves

Basically, the gas supplies were low during summer, but the spot prices were significantly above long term average, so energy companies delayed their purchases, hoping the price will come back down soon. It didn't, reserves dried up, and everybody was forced to buy at the same time

[cocoggu]

The gas prices spike has also other causes, like gas-powered electricity plants replacing or partly replacing nuclear facilities like Fessenheim in France. Gas-powered electricity plants are flourishing everywhere in the world, including China to diversify from coal, obviously at some point the available offer is not going to be enough.

[polskibus]

Some businesses have a choice whether to use gas or electricity for example for heating. High prices of one caused them to switch too. I agree that effects on gas demand were secondary relative to energy, nevertheless my point stands that it is not unusual, and also we can’t count on gas when wind and solar farms are quiet.

[tjoff]

... very slight difference between excess energy and let's import a contries worth of energy. The cost of transmission will be insane, the grid is not meant for those kinds of transfers.

[phicoh]

The cost of nuclear is also insane at the moment.

For example, the Netherlands has plenty of space for wind on the North Sea. But sometimes of course there is no wind. If there is no wind in the Netherlands, there is a good chance there will be wind north of Scotland.

With the current prices for nuclear power plants, you can easily run cables from the Netherlands to the north of Scotland and still be cheaper than nuclear.

At the moment new nuclear is insanely expensive. So we can do a lot of really weird stuff and still be cheaper than nuclear. Will nuclear get cheaper? Who knows.

What we do know is that the EU has targets for 2030, 2040, etc. We don't have time to wait for nuclear to get cheap. We need to act now.

[hardlianotion]

In 2021/22 year there was low levels of wind powered generation in the whole system.

[natmaka]

Such long-distance backbones and interconnections between nations are quickly gaining speed in Europe since the 1980's, as they reduce the risk of blackout and enable savings (a temporarily useless production unit here is used to feed a another nation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

[MrPatan]

How about less sun or wind than is necessary, instead of the strawman "no wind or sun"?

[visarga]

You got me. You're right, of course.

[phicoh]

We have plenty of storage options. We can produce various chemicals, hydrogen, methane, ammonia. Production scales, storage scales.

But, it is very expensive. At the same time new nuclear reactors are also very expensive.

So we just don't know. Countries like France should build nuclear reactors and see if they can get the price down.

Countries that are opposed to nuclear, like Germany, should investigate storage solutions and see if they can get the price of that down.

[thow-58d4e8b]

We fire up coal/gas/biomass plants. Nature doesn't care about the ideological purity of the electricity grid - all that matters is total cumulative emissions

People treat this question with religious mindset, as if burning fossil fuels is a sin that must be banished. In reality, there's nothing wrong with powering countries ~80% of the time with renewables + storage, and ~20% of the time with fossils - that's still a decently decarbonized grid

[makomk]

Most developed countries have net zero goals that are not consistent with continuing to pump out 20% of current electricity-related CO2 production forevermore. Also, keeping those coal and gas plants operational isn't exactly cheap either, though it is probably still cheaper than storage.

[mrep]

Yes you can. Methane is already stored and used for electrical grids on a massive scale and you can make methane with electricity [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

[chha]

That depends on how you want to store the energy. There have been some talk in Norway about using excess energy to pump water from ground level to fill up existing lakes as a form of energy storage. There seems to be quite a few power plants based on hydro power other places in Europe as well, so it could be a feasible strategy there as well [1, page 5]

[1] - https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/hydropower_press...

[lagadu]

In Portugal and Spain we have pumping stations doing exactly that. I couldn't find a link in English but maybe you'll find this useful: https://www.iberdrola.com/sustentabilidade/central-hidreletr...

[chha]

Nice! It turns out we have a few (12) pumping stations here as well, but there is little information on how often they've been used. The high electricity prices we've seen lately have reactualized this, with spikes of around $1 USD/kWh.

Current water levels are at approx 47% capacity [1], compared to around 64% same time last year. Unless we get a wet spring and summer it could get exciting come next year...

[1] - https://www.nve.no/energi/analyser-og-statistikk/magasinstat...

[lagadu]

Same, we're also facing issues with water level this year, to the point that several of the dams were ordered to stop producing electricity in order to save the water.

[innermate]

Batteries can store enough energy to last for a few weeks.

[azinman2]

Industrial-scale batteries are far from a solved problem, and require a lot of excess energy production to fill them that doesn't already get depleted at night.

A far more realistic solution is to be able to flex with things like gas plants that don't need to be always running and can function on demand.

[epistasis]

We are going to have massive amounts of excess energy production as renewables gain higher penetration on grids. The rea problem will be transmission capacity, or alternatively phrased, making sure storage is close enough to the generation.

California usually curtails large amounts of renewable energy in the spring, but even their smallish installs of 1-2GWh of storage recently has massively reduced that wasted energy. And they aren't even at super high penetration yet for renewables.

We will probably keep lots of backup gas turbines for a decade or two, but by the time significant nuclear could come online, other tech will probably have solved it.

And unfortunately in the US, our nuclear fleet is really close to retirement, and we are going to be losing a ton of nuclear generation capacity soon, with no way to rebuild it. We need other solutions fast.

[AtlasBarfed]

Sodium Ion is supposed to commercialize this year if you can believe CATL, with high temp range, good safety, good charge cycles, all supposed to be better than LFP at ?half? the cost (we'll see when it hits the market).

I think sodium ion batteries will be the game changer in utility storage, like good-density (200 Wh/kg) LFP will for mass EV/PHEV electrification (sodium ion will help there too in hybrid batteries).

If we get sodium ion grid storage, another 50% drop in wind/solar utility LCOE, and residential solar gets on par with natural gas LCOE, and good-density LFP batteries deliver 100 mile PHEVs and 250-300 mile EVs in 10 years, then we might actually have a cslim hance of handling global warming

It isn't a solved problem, but there is already industrial scale deployments happening, and what that means is there is a massive market to chase and the ball is rolling fast. It's not like fusion where we are waiting on tech hurdles before the economics are even tackled.

Gas plants will have to do for flexing, much better than coal. It's not like politically they'll all get shutdown (I mean, they should or get a two year warning, but that won't happen).

I think residential solar should be vastly more subsidized. That way the solar that does get made doesn't have as much transmission losses through the grid, it gets used directly, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

I would also like a good synthetic fuels strategy that isn't a creep marketing conspiracy to keep fossil fuels business running (hydrogen "green/blue/gray" color BS falls into this category), that could handle aviation, long haul shipping, and home heating at at least carbon neutrality.

[kwhitefoot]

> the solar that does get made doesn't have as much transmission losses through the grid

Transmission losses are really not a significant problem. Average US transmission losses are less than 6%, Norway just over, and UK about 8%.

Large solar farms are much cheaper to build per kW and are still quite local to where the energy is consumed so the losses for them will be much less than the current national averages

Mind you I'm not arguing against subsidizing rooftop solar, just that transmission losses are not a major factor in the argument.

[pfdietz]

> I think residential solar should be vastly more subsidized.

I don't. The grid has to be sized for the worst case load, not for the average load, so reducing the latter with residential solar doesn't reduce the cost of having the grid around. And utility-scale solar is much cheaper per unit of power than residential solar.

[natmaka]

There is a way to tackle part of this challenge by using distributed generic resources ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ), especially thanks to a smart grid ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid ).

Gas plants can burn hydrogen (or methane...) produced thanks to electricity overproduced (produced when the grid doesn't need it) by renewables.

There are many ways to store energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Methods ).

[guiriduro]

Isn't pumped hydro-electricity a solved problem for off-peak energy storage? Granted, only for countries with hills/mountains (not the Netherlands etc.)

[ohgodplsno]

You still require a place to pump that water into. Forming a lake isn't exactly a very ecology-friendly thing, and as much as you'd love to drown <city>, requires absurd amounts of work.

[atlantas]

Then we need to remove the 15 year delay. It's not a law of the universe that it needs to be that slow.

[fulafel]

It's a relatively new development that solar and wind are so cost effective, even though nuclear had a decades long head start and enormously more taxpayer subsidies over decades and decades. Maybe it's not a law of the universe, but there is a lot of experience showing it's slow, risky and expensive.