[MikeCapone]

The problem with battery supply is that it would be better to use that supply on EVs to displace oil rather than on massive stationary grid storage for intermittent sources.

Instead, for the maximum cleaning up of energy, we should build nuclear for the grid and use batteries on transportation.

[bhuber]

This makes sense for lithium based batteries, but those aren't the only ones around. Iron flow batteries, for example, consist mainly of iron, salt, and water. There's no shortage of ingredients. They're too big and heavy to be practical for most transportation applications, but they have a number of desirable properties for utility-scale energy storage. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1046365/grid-sto... is a pretty good writeup.

[ncmncm]

Molten metal batteries have the advantage of not wearing out, and of welcoming heat produced when charging.

[scythe]

Flow batteries are pretty questionable. Moving parts suck. Zinc-bromine in particular was around for a long time as a flow technology but only started to move towards mass production when a non-flow version was developed.

But in particular, the iron-flow battery story going around recently stinks pretty badly. It's being heavily promoted almost entirely by one company, ESS, and their first real client is -- wait for it -- SoftBank [1]. The academic reports on iron-flow batteries [2] make the technology sound a lot less mature than the ESS website [3], which incorrectly refers to vanadium and lithium as "rare-earth metals".

A 2018 publication [4] from Narayan's group at USC boasts that:

>Thus, by operating at 60°C and a pH of 3 with ascorbic acid and ammonium chloride, we achieved a coulombic efficiency of 97.9%. While this value of coulombic efficiency is among the highest values reported for the iron electrode in the context of the all-iron flow battery, further improvement in efficiency is needed for supporting repeated cycling.

However, further work by Narayan's group led them to replace iron chloride by iron sulfate in 2020 [5] which was celebrated by USC in a press release [6].

It was shortly after this that ESS burst onto the scene claiming iron chloride batteries with extremely long cycle life using "carbon composite" electrodes, "porous polyethylene separator" and a "polypropene spacer" [3], which are suspiciously similar to the graphite electrodes, mesoporous hydrocarbon-polymer-not-disclosed (Tokuyama A901 [7]) anion-exchange membrane, and polypropylene housing used in the Narayan group's 2016 paper [8] proposing all-iron-flow batteries for grid storage. It's worth noting that chemically unmodified polyethylene is probably not a suitable material for an ion-selective membrane, but it wouldn't even be the second-worst mistake on the page.

Yet ESS, despite having supposedly solved major problems that are obviously of scientific interest to active researchers, does not appear to have any names on its website, and cites no publications. Frankly, it sounds like another EEStor.

1: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/10/07/first-ess-iron-flow-bat...

2: https://dornsife.usc.edu/labs/narayan/all-iron-redox-flow-ba...

3: https://essinc.com/iron-flow-chemistry/

4: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245191031...

5: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ab84f8/...

6: https://news.usc.edu/166306/flow-battery-renewable-energy-el...

7: https://watermark.silverchair.com/jeecs_18_2_024001.pdf

8: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0161601jes/pdf

[mbjorkegren]

Here’s another interesting one, storing energy in heated metal, and later converting the emitted light back to electricity using specialized PV cells: https://youtu.be/Gn7pfYKB7DA

[ncmncm]

Diverting money from renewables to nuclear brings climate disaster nearer.

A dollar spent on renewables buys several times what a nuke could produce, and immediately, not ten years from now and buying fuel in the meantime. The money spent just on the fuel over that time would mostly pay for building the renewables.

[xbar]

I see why you're saying that, but I'd love a reference that supports the per-dollar argument.

Is it possible to just spend infinite dollars today and solve the climate crisis by tomorrow?

[epistasis]

For the costs of nuclear, they are pretty abysmal, because it's a construction project and Western countries are terrible at construction logistics. One cost estimate:

https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

Every year the cost of nuclear increases because we have fewer examples of successful construction and more examples of failed construction. The industry is in shambles, effectively dead. The US attempts at construction of AP1000s resulted in 2/4 failing, and the other two reactors being several multiples behind in schedule and pricing. The latest excuse for the failure is that they began construction before design was complete, so of course they failed. However this was the request of the nuclear industry, in an attempt to bring down prices, and the entire regulatory approval process was changed to accommodate this, which was supposed to bring down prices and prevent the failure of construction. Look at any attempt to build nuclear in a modern economy and you will find failure, not success.

As for spending infinite dollars to solve climate change, no, that is not possible. There are real productive limits to capacity to build things. The solar, wind, and storage industries are growing at massive rates, but still its only barely enough to meet the speed needed for our energy transition.

If we had infinite money to spend on nuclear, we still would not be able to build sufficient new restore by, say 2040. In the US alone we would need to build ~100 reactors simply to replace those reaching their end of life. We do not have the construction capacity for that, much less a design to build, or willing financial backers.

For the foreseeable future, nuclear is a dying industry in the US, not because of regulation or public backlash, but because the industry can't build.

The only hope for nuclear in the US or Europe is for small modular reactors, a design that in the past has been rejected for being too expensive. But since it's closer to manufacturing (like a plane) than like construction, there's hope, even if it's a long shot.

[ncmncm]

There is too little scope for graft in modular nukes to be feasible in the US.

I.e., if you are trying to scare up money for a big enough nuke plant to be worth installing, the stakeholders you would need on board will see noplace to skim off the money they demand to greenlight the project.

Thus far solar and wind seem thus far resistant to graft, for reasons that are easy to speculate about, but hard to prove.

[epistasis]

Honestly I think it's exactly the opposite, there's way too much opportunity for graft, and that's the only reason they ever get pursued.

It's much easier to take some graft off a super size construction project with few bidders and massive transaction costs compared to small repeatable transactions that happen with smaller projects.

Nuclear construction often ends up with people in jail. It's happening in South Carolina, and happened in South Korea too, and up until the corruption was found, SK had been touted as a modern nuclear success story that could maybe be replicated in the US.

So we are left with only China and Russia's Rosatom as the only builders that claim to be able to deliver at a reasonable cost. We just need to trust the builders enough to construct in our countries, with our workforces, and somehow get a hugely complex construction project with lots of high-precision welding and construction pours done on time and accurately.

[ncmncm]

Point was that modular nukes would have well-known prices: a plant with two dozen modules would be expected to cost 24x the public price of a module. It is hard to bury much graft in the land acquisition, and hard to stretch out the construction time, or pad the cost. So you can't drum up enough support to start it.

Solar projects are useful at smaller sizes, so need fewer stakeholders, making it easier to find honest ones. People choosing to be involved with renewables are more often self-selected for idealism.

[throwaway0a5e]

>Thus far solar and wind seem thus far resistant to graft,

That's because the graft happens earlier in the process before the actual "build the thing" portion so you don't notice. The developer typically pisses away money directly or indirectly getting on the good side of the local powers that be before actually pulling the trigger on the project.

Contrast with nuclear or any other centralized power generation where the state gets involved. Sure, money gets pissed away in similar ways on those projects (pay off special interest X, promise a favorable rate for Y, etc) but it tends to not technically be graft because it's all done through the official processes.

[ncmncm]

Anybody can count panels and turbines, look up their prices, and compare them to the project budget. There is just noplace to hide the grift. Undoubtedly that is slowing deployment of really big installations, but economy of scale is much less for renewables, so instead plenty of small installations go up. A single wind turbine or few acres of solar has close to the same value, per unit cost, as a GW-scale installation.

[ncmncm]

We are limited by the rate that manufacturing capacity can be scaled up, and then by the rate that product can be built out. I.e., it takes time to build factories. Spending more, you can get more factories, but they are not done sooner. A dollar can be spent on more factory, or on factory output. The factories you have so far can produce at some maximum rate. More factories than you expect to need later are hard to get financing for.

Prices for big solar installations are in the public record. And for nukes. Recently North Carolina and Georgia spent, what, $15B for exactly 0 watts out. They were quoted another $10B to get the 2GW they had signed up for, which they had expected to pay, what, $8B for, total? They won't get any of it back.

The corruption tax on nukes is withering. Nobody involved wants the money to ever stop flowing, as actually delivering would cause.

The best I have seen for nukes is $2B/1GW, but nobody knows how to get that with any reliability; and that is discounted by a huge government disaster-insurance subsidy, and excludes ~$1B end-of-life decommissioning. I see $1B/1GW for recently finished solar projects, but prices are still falling fast.

[freemint]

> Is it possible to just spend infinite dollars today and solve the climate crisis by tomorrow?

No. Factories need to be build, infrastructure needs to be build with infinite money and an coordinated centrally planned effort it should be possible within 15 years to be net neutral.

This would include: electrifying all of africa, world wide giga grid, replacing all combustion motors, building a new fleet to replace all cargo vessels, build rail to curb all non trans ocean flights, radically cut down militaries all over the world, build a lot of heat pumps, building a lot of buildings in a carbon neutral way, also a lot of other environmental concerns (species protection, eco system protection) would need to be curbed for it to happen in 15 years, more flexibility if you relax that timeframe.

[_ph_]

Not infinite, but that doesn't make an argument. We definitely can speed up the transition to renewables by spending more money though, and that is what we should do. Investing more will accelerate the construction of the factories for batteries and solar panels and generate more research into the topic.

[pstuart]

I'm totally pro-renewables but think that there's enough money out there so that it doesn't have to be an either/or scenario.

Modular thorium reactors would be a huge win if realized.

[ncmncm]

Money is fungible. Money spent on nukes is unavailable for renewables.

You need to watch some thorium debunking videos. I live near Indian Point, recently shut down. They tried thorium, early on. It cost too much. Every single thing about nukes costs too much.

[pstuart]

But that supply of money is not a single pool. I think of it as hedging bets.

I skimmed the Indian Point reactor -- it appears to be a non-LFTR reactor, and that seems to be where the excitement continues.

But yeah, renewables are great and only getting better. If we had taken a trillion dollars out of the fiasco of the Gulf Wars (ostensibly for "energy security") we could have done significant things. For example, I'm enamored with the possibilities of geothermal around the Yellowstone caldera -- if we could figure out how to do that without destroying the local environment.

[ncmncm]

There is some likelihood that geothermal can be made compatible with any locale, using new drilling tech. But geothermal is likely to remain substantially more expensive than solar and wind, whatever happens: steam turbines are expensive to maintain. It might win at latitudes above 50-60 degrees, if it can compete with ammonia imported from the tropics. But shipping is absurdly cheap.

[pstuart]

There's something to be said about having the energy sourced domestically, and it would make a nice baseload service. I believe that dealing with the waste water can be challenging but again, having a spectrum of energy source would be really nice.

Rebuilding The Grid with HVDC would help too, as well as an ammonia economy to utilize excess power from wind. It all seems very technically doable, it's the politics and petrol people that stand between us and a carbon free energy ecosystem (well, with reasonable exceptions for aerospace and other special cases)

[adrianN]

Yeah, modular thorium reactors would be awesome. But at the stage of development they're currently at, we'd better be very close to carbon neutral by the time the first one could be connected to the grid.

[ncmncm]

Thorium has had catchy promotion. The reality is less appealing.

Really, anything that needs a steam turbine is going to cost too much to compete.

[_ph_]

There is certainly not enough money invested in solar and storage. It is ironically that Musk rather spends money on buying twitter than investing into more battery production at Tesla.

[cycomanic]

> The problem with battery supply is that it would be better to use that supply on EVs to displace oil rather than on massive stationary grid storage for intermittent sources.

If your electricity generation is fossil moving to EVs is of questionable benefit.

> Instead, for the maximum cleaning up of energy, we should build nuclear for the grid and use batteries on transportation.

We are talking about solar power costs exponentially dropping and your suggestion is to build nuclear, the slowest to build and already much less economical than solar. By the time your nuclear power plants are build you could buy ~10 times the capacity in solar and likely would not need any battery storage.

[semi-extrinsic]

Once the energy storage demand follows the PV exponential curve a little longer, it will be obvious to everyone that batteries won't cut it, and you will see people starting to deploy stuff like hydrogen electrolysis and liquefaction for storage combined with hydrogen fired gas turbine powerplants.

Several of the established players are close to achieving dry-low-NOx 100% hydrogen gas turbines. Then you are talking about >500 MW power per unit and a thermodynamic efficiency of >65%. If you are in the "extremely abundant but too variable renewable power" scenario, these things will be the major stabilisers. You can easily imagine smoothing out even seasonal fluctuations with them.

[adrianN]

Even if electricity generation is from coal, EVs produce less CO2 than ICEs, because big power plants are much more efficient than small engines. Plus all the other benefits they have, especially in cities.

[cycomanic]

This is quite disputed still, mainly because of the high weight of the batteries and the large energy cost of manufacturing these batteries. The studies I'm aware of, pretty much agree on that for 100% coal based electricity, ICEs are better, and for 100% renewables EVs are better. The dispute is at what percentage EVs become better.

[epistasis]

For that matter, it would be good to prioritize EVs to those that drive the most, or have consistent long commutes.

There has been some work on modding how well this could work for changing EV rebate incentives, but getting legislatures to adopt such complicated ideas is nearly impossible.

Another approach would be to add a realistic, risk-adjusted carbon tax to gasoline (probably north of $200/ton co2, or $2/gallon gasoline) and let the market sort it out. Unfortunately when it comes to car purchasing, consumers are less economically rational than even legislators.

[nostrademons]

If you take a snapshot in time, maybe.

Over the long term, any batteries sold are good batteries, because batteries exhibit large economies of scale. Profit on existing sales can fund new production facilities; incremental improvements in battery technology; R&D into capacity increases; improved distribution networks; R&D into new sources of lithium; and so on. The way you get dirt-cheap storage is to build lots of it.