[goethes_kind]

Which is easier:

1. Build solar and wind, anywhere across the globe to 4x overcapacity, and then use power-to-gas technology to store the energy into synthetic hydrocarbons, which can be plugged directly into our current infrastructure.

2. Reinvent the whole of society to run on lithium batteries.

[jfengel]

Lithium batteries are used mainly in transportation. And we're already shifting towards them, because they're just plain better.

If we were to start over from scratch, the whole notion of covering the landscape with chemical dispensers would be considered absurd: smelly, toxic, and inconvenient. Why wouldn't you just go home and plug your car into your house? Why have a car with thousands of precision moving parts when you can just have a battery on an oversized skateboard?

We already have electric distribution infrastructure. It needs to be upgraded, but not created from scratch. The only thing that needs large lithium batteries is vehicles. You can use different chemistries for stable objects like the grid itself, or your house -- which is a nice bonus, in that you can run your house even when the infrastructure is down.

And then you can let a whole separate parallel energy infrastructure degrade and vanish. No more gas pipelines or gasoline tankers as we gradually get rid of the dependencies on them. It's not "current infrastructure" forever: it has to be maintained. If we're going to do maintenance anyway, why not put it into the existing electric grid rather than both that and the fossil fuel system?

[mirko22]

Spending all that money on nuclear is easier, and in long term, better option along side with using wind and solar for daily spikes.

[pfdietz]

This is completely wrong. Nuclear is more expensive. The optimal strategy going forward likely involves no new nuclear construction.

Solar/wind and nuclear do not play well together. The former will push the latter completely out of the market unless nuclear becomes considerably cheaper (and that is a forlorn hope, given the history of the technology.)

[mirko22]

History if it working reliably and providing best base load power supply over 70years?

And if you’re referring Chernobyl and Fukushima try seeing how many people die cos of burning coal… It might put things into perspective

[pfdietz]

History of it being expensive and having poor (or negative) learning effects.

The coal point there is completely inane, as we were not discussing coal as an alternative.

[mirko22]

What do you mean by poor learning effects?

I was assuming that by history mean nuclear is not safe so I brought up coal.

From the sources I can find it shows nuclear being as expensive as offshore wind.

And I can’t find any sources on how expensive is to store energy produced by solar to provide base loads over night…

[pfdietz]

You assumed wrong. I was talking about history of nuclear's economics. It has failed to show good learning effects (that is, getting cheaper as more units are built.) If anything, it has shown negative learning effects -- getting more expensive as more units are built.

Contrast this to photovoltaics, which have declined in cost by something like a factor of 300 since they came on the market. PV has shown a robust learning rate of 20% cost reduction per doubling of cumulative production.

It should be no surprise that nuclear is sputtering to extinction with such poor cost trends. In contrast, all the competing technologies -- solar, wind, storage -- are showing excellent learning. So, it's only a matter of time until nuclear dies.

[civilized]

It's a great question! I'd like to think we have good answers or are hard at work on them, but I don't know where to find them.