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