[adrianN]

How is it magical thinking? The plan is very explicit and all the parts are available: We build gas peakers that are H2 compatible; we build electrolizers; we upgrade the existing methane storage to be H2 compatible; we store hydrogen and burn it when needed. There is no "magic" there. Hydrogen is needed anyway to decarbonize industrial processes, so the cost for the infrastructure has to be paid.

[troupo]

You're omitting one tiny detail: we just have to build that at scales never attempted before.

Also, omitting the tiny detail of how complex it is to store hydrogen which you assume is the way to store energy.

[adrianN]

We literally have the infrastructure to store TWh of methane, so we have already built at the necessary scale in the past. It is also not terribly complex to store hydrogen if you're okay with losing a few percent per year. You might be thinking of cryogenic hydrogen storage, which is definitely not the plan.

[troupo]

Everything is simple if you ignore everything. Because in the mind of renewable proponents all that grid-level storage is either already available or can be easily and cheaply built, no biggie.

"We have existing infra" ignores that this infra took decades to build.

"We know how to build" ignores that the storage costs can vary between 7 EUR/kg and 1040 EUR/kg [1]

and so on and so forth.

The capability for wishful thinking in renewable space is staggering.

Note: no one is saying it is impossible BTW.

[1] Great article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...

[adrianN]

I don't think anybody ignores the costs. It's just that every other option is more expensive.

[pfdietz]

Yes, an energy system to supply the world is not a small thing, regardless of where the energy is coming from. The world is going to spend something like a quadrillion dollars on energy over the next century. There's a very large budget to do this.

I will note that the same hand wringing would apply to nuclear, only in nuclear's case it means we can't keep using today's burner reactors, since cheap uranium runs out. In contrast, we already have electrolysers (the pacing technology) at less than $3/W in China.

[troupo]

The thing is, that "hand wringing" is what renewable proponents always apply to nuclear. However, the moment you ask them about storage, "oh it's a solved problem"

[pfdietz]

No, what renewable proponents do is point out nuclear's egregious demonstated economic flaws. This is not a case of hypothetical problems, it's a case of actual repeated failure.

[troupo]

> is point out nuclear's egregious demonstated economic flaws

No, they don't. They point at an industry which was for decades was vilified, ignored and obstructed, and say "see, this is hard, costly, and nearly impossible"

[ben_w]

The industry was for decades vilified and obstructed, but not ignored, because of the nature of the failure modes.

Mean cost vs. worst-case cost.

The mean cost of cleaning up nuclear reactors is tiny.

Eyeballing this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy I think we've had around 100 PWh total generated by nuclear reactors over history?

There was only one Chernobyl ($340 billion inflation-adjusted), only one Three Mile Island ($2 billion adjusted), and only one Fukushima (probably around $200 billion adjusted).

If so, those accidents cost $542bn/100 PWh = 0.5¢/kWh, which is a trivial excess on even cheap (5¢/kWh) electricity: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%24542bn%2F100+PWh+in+u...

Unfortunately, two of those three demonstrate how expensive these can be when they go wrong, and that number is sufficient to just bankrupt quite a lot of countries — for example, Ukraine, which is where the Chernobyl reactor is, has a nominal GDP less than the cost of the Chernobyl cleanup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...