Because you can start a project with the existing, proven and expensive tech today. Grid-scale storage is purely theoretical today (bar pumped-up hydro, which is infeasible in most locations). There's lots of hope, and money should be invested in the various alternatives, absolutely. But nobody can say when and if that tech would be ready.
You make it sound like it's some SciFi tech where in reality Germany has replaced half of it's whole production with true green energy in the last two decades. Replacing nuclear years ago.
That's inaccurate. Germany has replaced half of its _electricity_ production with renewables (modulo dispatchability), but electricity only accounts for a quarter of the energy usage. We frequently have to import electricity from France now, where it's largely made by nuclear, and electricity in France is a lot cheaper than here. Closing the German nuclear plants was grand scale stupid.
We buy sometimes electricity from France on the EEX because it's cheap. Not because we lac electricity. We actually sell more than we buy and that never changed.
France has to sell cheap because they can't shut down their rotting fleet. They HAVE to produce and they HAVE to sell. Even when the price is low. This is just another reason why the company running this hilarious "business" is bankrupt.
Germany has long ago replaced what nuclear has produced.
The only thing we HAVE to buy is gas because we need it for heating. Something nuclear can't replace since we don't even have 5% electrical heating in this country.
This is really not correct at all. Half of the utility-scale generating projects waiting for interconnect approval are combined solar and battery installation. Grid-scale storage is a solved problem, technically and economically. There were over 400GW of grid storage project proposed in the U.S. at the end of 2021.
Looks like they should do it and we shouldn't in America unless we can somehow allow them to build ours (I think a fear of competition will make this infeasible but if we're lucky we'll get the stuff).
This is inaccurate, GW scale batteries could be deployed today, but because storage is so scalable it's often a better idea to build multiple smaller batteries that help alleviate grid congestion.
A month or so back someone posted a report by a financial investing advisor for the energy sector, and they were pretty clear what is and what isn't economical viable right now.
Solar + storage of 1-6 hrs can be made economical viable as long as the storage can have 365 discharge cycles each year, assuming prices get high enough each such cycle. Each unit of storage get a return on investment each day, and each are used fully at the point in time when the market price is at peak.
Under those precise circumstances the economics of storage is cheaper than nuclear. The only other cheaper alternative to nuclear is to use renewables when the weather is optimal and fossil fuel when the weather is not optimal, or just use fossil fuels (through that is just a waste of money and the climate).
Naturally this advisor firm could be wrong and someone here could start the world first economical viable operation that uses wind for renewables and then charge a reverse hydro operation. It would make for a nice news item.
Making such broad statements about economical versus not economical is difficult, because batteries serve so many purposes and have so many revenue streams that deployment is highly locational, depending on the specifics of the grid and where and when demand causes congestion.
There's also little incentive to install storage when solar and wind penetration is low, but as higher percentages of the grid is powered by renewables, then storage quickly becomes far more attractive.
Currently, there are 14.5GW of batteries in development across the US, and this is just a tiny nascent industry. Even as a small industry, this is many times the power capacity of nuclear currently in development.
This biggest challenge with batteries right now is low supply, and competing with demand from EV production, which provides higher margins:
If we are talking about the US and not like places like northern Europe, then they have a lot of existing capacity for fossil fuel production. The cheapest way to produce energy would be to just add more renewables and use that fossil fuel whenever that weather isn't optimal. Batteries might be competitive to fossil fuel in places such situation as highlighted by the financial advisor, ie when they can discharge fully each day of the year at the maximum price point.
The batteries can often be cheaper than fossil fuels, especially when colocated with existing solar. Most solar designs currently under size the inverters compared to maximum solar power output, to get the cost optimal balance. Batteries on-site allow storage of that extra DC energy, and then reuse of the same inverters outside normal solar generation hours to discharge the batteries.
This means that hitting the cost peak is really easy for batteries.
As this cheapest form of energy begins to dominate, and the "baseload" generators like coal or combined cycle gas become more expensive than solar, then it becomes less economical to run the "baseload generators because they don't have sufficient price support during the peak solar output times. This will raise the night time prices of energy, as the daytime prices decrease, and eventually storage plus solar becomes cheaper than new "baseload" facilities, and then cheaper than continuing to run existing "baseload" facilities.
I put "baseload" in quotes because on the past baseload meant cheapest energy, in addition to slow and expensive dispatchability. That is all changing.
A big variable too is the price development of batteries, which is trending in the right direction due to more and more production capacity coming on-line but once grid storage and EVs start to compete for those batteries the price could well be going up.
Storage is not not purely theoretical!! In fact there are <lists five completely theoretical storage methods that rely on stable climate or perfect geography>.
They aren't in short supply, but aren't present everywhere - e.g. in Europe there's nothing north of Slovakia. If Denmark wants storage, they have to work with other countries and rely on transit. It's even worse for the Baltics.
Hedging your bets. We know nuclear works. Grid-scale energy storage for renewables still feels far fetched. Maybe it's not. Either way, we should not put all our eggs in one basket.
We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. But I don't think rapid growth of the battery industry is far fetched at all. It has already experienced massive growth and is ridiculously mass producable. And we will need batteries anyway for electric cars.
The battery capacity needed to replace all cars with electric ones is about two orders of magnitude lower than the battery capacity needed to replace all fossil fuels with wind and solar, at least in temperate regions, where you need heating during the winter.
According to this MIT study, the cost (LCOE) of doing this today, would be $3000/MWH:
Even if the cost of batteries continue to come down by x4 in price every decade from now on, it will take 30-40 years for prices to come below current energy prices.
If we hit an S-curve before then, it could take much longer.
I was arguing that we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket and the scale of the challenge really confirms that. But yes, I do think that the battery industry has the best chance of scaling up and achieving order of magnitude improvements. But we don't actually need that for that industry to play a part in defeating climate change. And failure to meet some hypothetical objective does not invalidate that. Again, we don't need to put all our eggs in once basket and that certainly means not relying 100% on battery storage.
That link is summarizing a nonpublic paper from a research group making the case for hydrogen as grid storage for California, not a very strong cite for this.
Generally keeping houses warm with low evergy is solved, well insulated passive houses need little heating energy even in places with long cold winters.
> Generally keeping houses warm with low evergy is solved, well insulated passive houses need little heating energy even in places with long cold winters.
What is your definition of "places with long cold winters" and how much energy do you think it takes (kwh) to heat a house in such climates during winter?
Have a look in eg p.43-46, 75, 117, 143 in https://portal.research.lu.se/en/publications/passive-houses... for one case of building standards back in 2009. There isn't really a energy efficiency limit there being approached, just a matter of what had been picked as a cost
efficient target, so there are no absolutes. I'm betting current designs are more efficient, as that has been a constant trend, but don't have newer references on hand.
In practice it seems going much lower than half as much as hot water uses may be wasteful investment as long as water is not heated with local renewables.
Because transitioning over to green technology is a decades-long project, it's not something you can just snap your fingers and make happen, as many countries are discovering. You still need non-renewable energy sources to fill in the gaps that renewables currently have.
You don't have to transition completely in decades. You can start today. Meanwhile building a single nuclear reactor is a "decade-long" project, you can't start today and in the end you're still left with an old and expensive tech while the green tech moved ahead rapidly during the same time.
When they started out the technology was terrible and managed to do all that despite a just recently retired government which did everything to stop further expansion.
> You don't have to transition completely in decades. You can start today.
Yes, I agree. If you start today, you’ll be done in decades. The boneheaded move is to start a green energy transition and immediately start decommissioning existing nuclear power plants and stonewall creating new ones by throwing up your hands and saying “well it’ll take forever to build them.” By the way, have you ever considered why it takes so long to build nuclear power plants? It’s a political and environmental special interest problem, not a technical one.
At the end of the day, when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, you still have to generate power somehow. Until the day that problem is solved (that’s the “decades” part), you want something like nuclear power to fall back on.
I don't know why you're ignoring my reality example. Germany is part of a EU wide market and it just works. Also it's not like you put all your wind on one spot. There is always wind somewhere for example.
The idea that it's an "political, environmental and special interest" problem while we're watching several nuclear plants being FAR over budget and over due being constructed in pro-nuclear countries proves that your argument is false.
So basically: everything you wrote there is wrong...why are you doing this?
There is always wind somewhere. But grid capacity is not free, in fact it is quite expensive. Let's say, on a given day, the only place in Europe with reasonable winds would be west of Cadiz, transporting all that power through Spain, Portugal and France to cover the needs of all of Europe, would require immensive grid capacity expansion. And even with super-high-voltage, the losses before the power reaches Estonia would be huge.
Also, if this load causes a brownout in Spain, due to improper maintaince, for instance, all of Europe could go dark, cold and stop moving (in a time after fossil fuels).
(I can imagine seeing this from space during some cold winter night around 2045, all the lights in Western and Central Europe disappear at once. Only Norway and parts of Sweden can be seen, since they have their hydro power.)
In other words, while a better grid can mitigate _some_ of the variability of renewable supply, you still need massive expansion of storage capacity when you stop using natural gas, especially when you switch heating and transportation to use electricity too.
Seen from the outside, it surely looks like the German population has been seriously misled.
> There is always wind somewhere. But grid capacity is not free, in fact it is quite expensive.
No it's not...as I said several times over: IT'S ALREADY WORKING and has been for years...
> Also, if this load causes a brownout in Spain, due to improper maintaince, for instance,
This is not the US here. We have the most stable grid on the whole planet. Countries do maintain their networks here.
> In other words, while a better grid can mitigate _some_ of the variability of renewable supply, you still need massive expansion of storage capacity when you stop using natural gas, especially when you switch heating and transportation to use electricity too.
Sure more storage is nice. Especially if you want to profit locally but it's not something which would make true green energy possible NOW. Because: as I said several times over: IT'S ALREADY WORKING. We have been "pumping" massively energy into storage in the alps. Now with NordLink we do the same in the other direction too. It's all there.
> Seen from the outside, it surely looks like the German population has been seriously misled.
This must seem so if you're completely uninformed or even misinformed as you have shown here. In fact though as g8oz says: you should be thankful for us showing the world that true green future technology can be made to work and power a high tech and densely populated country. We'll keep on showing you and those countries which WASTE taxpayer money on nuclear just that.
If Germany wants to replace all uses of fossil fuels for heating, transportation, industrial use, etc, with renewables, HUGE investments remain.
In particular, giving up the ability to smooth out variations in production without the use of fossil fuels will be extremely costly, unless the cost comes down by at least a factor or 50.
> Still, only 16% of Germany's total energy consumption comes from renewables:
Sure but this has nothing to do with nuclear.
Germany heats with gas and oil. We don't even have 5% electrical heating here.
> In particular, giving up the ability to smooth out variations in production without the use of fossil fuels will be extremely costly,
It's not even close to how costly nuclear is and will continue to be for GENERATIONS.
Germany is connected to the most stable continental grid on this planet. Something other "developed" countries like the US can only dream of. Germany has been expanding their national grid and will continue to do so. Also we have build up renewable energy for the whole world. Paying for it. So don't worry. We'll manage. It's the rest of the world you have to worry about since they're stuck in the past. Especially France with their single source which is a rotting fleet run by a bankrupt state company eating up taxpayer money with no end in sight.
Germany, for all it's renewables, let out significantly more greenhouse gases per capita than surrounding countries, such as France.
> It's not even close to how costly nuclear is and will continue to be for GENERATIONS.
Modern nuclear plants are designed to last for a minimum of 60 years, and can be renewed to last another 40.
Modern wind turbines as well as most solar panels have an expected lifetime of around 25 years.
> Also we have build up renewable energy for the whole world. Paying for it.
Germany even pays Denmark to shut down their wind power on days when production is high, to make the statistics of German renewable production look prettier.
Germany is still using fossil fuels for most of their energy.
> Also we have build up renewable energy for the whole world.
Norway has been on 100% renewable electricity since forever, and unlike Germany, Norway actually uses electricity for heating. Fossil fuel heating was banned in Norway i 2020. So Norway uses electricity for everything, meaning the population is not willing to pay German prices for much longer. Most likely, the Norwegian government will have to strangle exports through Nordlink and similar cables in the coming winter, if prices remain high.
Norway did NOT need German help for that.
On the other hand, Norway also provides Germany with a large percentage of Germany's fossil fuel needs, both natural gas and oil (most of the imports not coming from Russia comes from Norway).
> Modern nuclear plants are designed to last for a minimum of 60 years, and can be renewed to last another 40. Modern wind turbines as well as most solar panels have an expected lifetime of around 25 years.
What does that have to do with the sentence you've quoted? They don't leave us with radioactive waste, we have no space to put away. "Modern" is also relative in this case since before you have one of those "new" reactors running, renewable tech made several technological jumps and most of "new" is still in development and/or of questionable use/improvement like SMRs: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2111833119
> Germany even pays Denmark to shut down their wind power
Why do you even bother quoting me when you're not answering to this?
> Norway has been on 100% renewable electricity since forever, and unlike Germany, Norway actually uses electricity for heating.
Good for Norway. What do you suppose? Give an electric heater to 95% of all German households? I mean seriously...what is this?
Btw: while Norway runs green, they dig for oil and gas and sell it to others making all the good on the environment bad again.
> Norway did NOT need German help for that.
Nobody said they need it. It's one of the batteries for the rest of the grid. This is how the grid works.
That’s not cheaper. Run the numbers and you’ll see. Solar by itself is indeed pretty cheap per kWh if you don’t care about matching supply with demand, but storage very much is not. If it was, you’d see investors build standalone storage, to buy cheap electricity, store it, and resell when demand goes up. This is not what’s happening: instead, existing projects are based either on heavy government subsidies, or on vanity buyers, who want to pay above market prices to signal eco awareness, like Starbucks in one of your links.
The problem with running the numbers is that the actual numbers for nuclear are basically unknowable and most governments have given a taxpayer insurance that covers this unknown number "in blanco".
This means that most of the costs that will be caused by operating a nuclear power plant are not included in the costs of operations, and therefore not in the "price per MWh" or similar numbers. We don't know what this number is but we do know it's a very large number, and by removing it from the resposibility of the plant operators it represents a very large hidden subsidy for nuclear power.
Chernobyl and Fukushima are the familiar elephants in this particular room of course with he most recent estimate for Chernobyl passing 600bn usd in 2016 (and counting still of course and for the forseeable future) but I like to use the Asse II salt mine in Germany as a more digestable example.
This mine was used to store nuclear waste in the 70s which turned out to be a very bad mistake that has to be fixed in the coming few decades. The cost of this project, (estimated to be at least several bn euros) is not added to the cost of nuclear, it's just charged to the current taxpayers. The power plants that generated the waste stored in this mine are closed long ago but they keep costing money decades later.
Nuclear seems cheap because we're paying for it with credit cards issued to our grandchildren.
How much of that is just sensitivity to the cost of battery cells? If most of the world can buy lithium iron phosphate cells at $100 a kw/h, would battery storage be cost effective in ways it isn't at $300 a kw/h?
(I'm not sure what the actually LFP cell wholesale costs are these days; I get the impression that historically they've been a lot cheaper in China due to patents, but the last of the major patents expired about a month ago so maybe low cost cells will show up everywhere if production can keep up with demand. As a retail customer though in the U.S. it's really hard to find anything under about $300 a kw/h -- if utilities are paying a similar price, I can understand them not wanting to go all-in on battery storage. There's no reason for them to continue to be that expensive.)
I'm not sure he's lying on purpose. But it's pretty common that people just stop thinking further when someone tells him what they want to hear.
The article certainly dismisses the need for storage way too easily, imo. It claims that consumption can be adjusted to match supply. There are not that many uses of electricity where you can simply lower your consumption when the supply is low.
There are some cases, like car batteries that can, sort of, be seen as consumption, but unless your car has some extreme storage capacity, you typically want to be able to recharge it when YOU need to have that range, instead of when the power company has additional supply.
And if you don't want to use fossil fuels for heating, the power saved by not charging your car is NOT enough to keep your house warm for a few cold days with no winds (unless you live in a place with no real winter).
