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of 2020 reaching cost effectiveness for batteries, and planning by utilities is often on five year time lines and uses outdated data, so they are slow to pick up new technology.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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
There is no anti-renewable plan.
I want to install a solar roof, my brother has one already, in summer he sells electricity but in winder he has to buy. So what happens when we all have solar roofs or we are powered by solar and is winter so cloudy for 2 weeks?
It is obvious that private companies or people will not buy some extremely expensive batteries for 1 week a year, it will not make economic sense. T he country needs some power plants that could work extra in winter or low light conditions, or we all buy 3x more solar panels and expensive batteries.
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.
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.
"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 ?
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.
>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.
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!
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.
>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?
> 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.
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.
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.