[epistasis]

There are very few locations where renewables have high enough penetration for dispatchability to be the slightest concern for new additions.

In locations with lots of renewables already, new projects are including storage, cost-effectively, which turns non-disparchable power into dispatchable.

I think it's pretty clear that $58/MWh was never going to be achieved, and as with most nuclear projects, reality is 1.5x-3x of what the boosters promise. But even $58/MWh is not cheap enough to match the bids seen for dispatchable renewables+storage.

[AtlasBarfed]

And, consider that the new projects won't be online for 5-10 years, during which time year-on-year improvements to cost of solar and wind will likely continue to decline 5-15% per year.

Nuclear projects are turtles chasing rabbits at this point, and the rabbit has head start.

[Manuel_D]

Except where the part where the rabbit start saturating markets during peak production. Then further progress starts to crawl as less and less of the actual generation capacity is usable. At least not until a breakthrough makes energy storage feasible.

The only countries that have successfully moved all or nearly-all of their electricity to decarbonized sources have done so primarily with dispatchable sources: hydroelectricity (E.g. Norway, Brazil, Albania, Uruguay) and with a mix of nuclear power filling in where hydro isn't enough (France, Sweden, Switzerland). All of those countries generate a single digit percentage of their electricity from fossil fuels. Nobody has decarbonized primarily through a source of decarboinzed energy source besides hydroelectricity or nuclear power.* Unless there's a storage breakthrough on the horizon, we'll still need to derive a significant chunk of our electricity generation from dispatchable sources.

* One minor counterexample is geothermal power, but like hydro it's geographically dependent.

[AtlasBarfed]

Solar can be installed on roofs. Costs go up, but resiliency goes way up and less grid complexity and transport is needed, and it solves the "holy crap how will we charge all these consumer EVs".

The EV(s) can function as some of the battery backup, especially since most EVs will be about 80% overprovisioned for everyday driving. Tesla is already doing it in California.

Storage breakthrough: sodium ion goes into mass production at 140-160wh/kg by CATL next year. In addition to being usable for the 200-300 mile EV, that will mean cheap grid batteries.

But this obsession with dispatchability at scale shows that there is too much focus on grid-scale solar and storage and centralized control. Yes the upfront costs are cheaper, but grid solar should be hand in hand with a VERY aggressive home/business solar+storage subsidy.

It's dumb that a natural disaster knocks out power for the entire area because transmission lines go down. With distributed solar and storage, that wouldn't be nearly as bad. Old guard electric can't wrap their heads around a country where every roof has solar doing most / all / surplus power generation.

[Manuel_D]

> Solar can be installed on roofs. Costs go up, but resiliency goes way up and less grid complexity and transport is needed, and it solves the "holy crap how will we charge all these consumer EVs".

Resiliency how? It makes the grid more fragile since cloudy days make for big energy shortages. It also doesn't solve EV charging. Plenty of people charge their EVs at night because they drive during the day. They also want to charge their EVs regardless of weather.

> Storage breakthrough: sodium ion goes into mass production at 140-160wh/kg by CATL next year.

Define "mass" production. For context, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day, or about 2,500 GWh of electricity per hour.

The concern with dispatchability is entirely reasonable because energy needs to be supplied when it's in demand, and storage isn't anywhere near the required scale. You can't just hand-wave this away by encouraging homes and businesses to buy storage.

> It's dumb that a natural disaster knocks out power for the entire area because transmission lines go down. With distributed solar and storage, that wouldn't be nearly as bad. Old guard electric can't wrap their heads around a country where every roof has solar doing most / all / surplus power generation.

Quite the contrary. Decentralized power generation actually means more transmission lines to transport energy long distances from the places where it gets generated to the places where energy is in demand. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...

[Schroedingersat]

> Then further progress starts to crawl as less and less of the actual generation capacity is usable. At least not until a breakthrough makes energy storage feasible.

That happened. It's called off river or blue field pumped hydro and sodium batteries.

[Manuel_D]

> It's called off river or blue field pumped hydro

This isn't built in sufficient quantities, and hasn't seen significant growth in decades.

> and sodium batteries.

This hasn't even been commercialized at all yet, let alone at grid scale.

[Schroedingersat]

Well, which technology passes this high-vault bar? Surely not one that is flat and possibly shrinking and is operating at a scale that is similar to that of grid storage and also needs storage to meet variable demand?

[Manuel_D]

None: there is no feasible method of grid storage at the moment. Hence why dispatch-able sources of clean energy are necessary

[midasuni]

Nuclear was a great solution back in the 90s and early 00s. Not effective now - the cost in both time and money means it’s not worthwhile.

[Manuel_D]

> new projects are including storage, cost-effectively, which turns non-disparchable power into dispatchable.

Such as? Most storage facilities are targeting a few hundred megawatts of storage, usually enough for a few hours of power but not enough to even out a full night.

[epistasis]

Because the storage is targeting the evening part of the duck curve, and there's no need for night time generation right now.

As the market changes and it becomes profitable to supply power at night, more batteries are trivially added. But while we still have so many fossil sources for the lull in demand at night, energy prices are at their lowest during the night.

As more fossil generation is replaced with renewables, more storage will be added.

[Manuel_D]

Adding battery storage is going to be anything but trivial. Existing global battery production amounts to 10-15 minutes of electricity use. And this is assuming a total elimination of EV production while storage is built out.

[epistasis]

What a weird thing to say, comparing existing production captaincy to what could be... Existing SMR production is what, exactly?

Batteries have a clear scaling path, plenty of materials, and are growing 10x at a predictable rate.

Scaling batteries is utterly trivial compared to the challenges facing SMRs.

The historical record is right there for everyone to see. Batteries are a serious industry, at a serious scale, with serious engineering and real timelines and improvements. The entire nuclear industry are charlatans and lightweights compared to what's happened in batteries and renewables. Which is a shame, because nuclear could have had a chance, perhaps.

[Manuel_D]

We don't need small modular reactors, we have much more experience building larger PWRs - and regulation effectively mandates it the way that each plant needs to pay more than a third of a billion dollars in fees to get certified. Had nuclear production continued at the same pace it did during the 1960s and 70s in the US, we'd have had a completely decarbonized grid by now. And that's exactly what happened in France: they continued building nuclear reactors and reduced fossil fuels to essentially zero. Compare that with Germany, renewables' posterchild, that still uses combustibles for most of its energy production - wind and solar is only 30% of its energy mix.

Scaling batteries is the opposite of trivial. I don' think you comprehend the mismatch between our battery supply and what grid storage demands. The US consumes about 500 GWh of of electricity every hour. This is more than the cumulative global battery production in all of 2021 [1]. And the cost of batteries has stopped shrinking and started rising [2]. The reality is that we'll be hard-pressed just to keep battery production growing fast enough to satisfy EVs. Lithium battery production will probably double or triple, but that's still not enough to make grid storage feasible.

How many countries have provisioned a day's worth of electricity storage? Half a day? An hour? For all the talk about nuclear power being charlatans and lightweights, no country at al has produced the majority of its electricity from intermittent sources. But nuclear has [3]. Pretty good for a bunch of charlatans!

1. https://www.interactanalysis.com/lithium-ion-battery-market-....

2. https://www.ft.com/content/31870961-dee4-4b79-8dca-47e78d29b...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

[pydry]

Snowy 2 stores 350 GWh. Fengning stores 40 GWh.

One more snowy 2 (or equivalent) and Australia can get to ~97% solar+wind+pumped storage powered.

The only reason existing pumped storage sites used to target a few hundred MWh was because they were historically used for regulating the grid, not providing large scale storage.

The geography to do this is plentiful too, as multiple studies have confirmed.

[Manuel_D]

Snowy 2's actual storage capacity is estimated to be ~40 GWh https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...

[Schroedingersat]

The paper they're quoting doesn't actually say that and it's double counting some parts of the system that are already accounted for in the 350GWh figure. Try again.

[Manuel_D]

There's no double counting. The estimate of 350 GWh ignored the fact that the lower reservoir of Snowy 2 is smaller than the upper reservoir.

In case you're unfamiliar with how pumped hydro works: There's an upper reservoir and a lower reservoir. To charge the system, water from the lower reservoir is pumped into the upper reservoir, and to withdraw energy the water is passed to the lower reservoir driving a turbine.

In Snowy 2, the upper reservoir is large enough to accommodate 350 GWh of energy. But the lower reservoir is not, and actually attempting to actually use that much storage would cause the closed loop system to lose water and permanently reduce the storage capacity unless additional water is added. If I have a 100 liter bucket up top and a 10 liter bucket down below. If I fill up the 100 liter bucket to the brim I could drain 100 liters once, but then I'd lose 90 liters and only have enough water to fill it back up to 10 liters. So does it have a capacity of 100 liters? In a pedantic sense, yes, but in practice you only have 10 liters of usable capacity.

Pumped hydro storage requires very specific geography to function, so deceptive messaging is often required to convince people of its efficacy.

[Schroedingersat]

I'm quite aware of how it works, but I guess it was too much to expect a good faith response. That 200GWh that is 'lost' is dispatchable energy that recharges after a few months, after it is dispatched, about ~240GWh can be cycled and another 100GWh can be dispatched. The 40GWh is only a limit in precisely those cases where the dispatchable energy isn't being utilised

The 240 and 40 are also a lowball because parts of the losses were already accounted for at the beginning. That part is the double count.