Comment by energy123
4 days ago
"Base load" can be achieved with renewables, batteries and natural gas. There have been lots of simulation studies demonstrating this. Not only is it achievable, it's also significantly cheaper and faster than fission with natural gas, even after accounting for all costs related to renewables such as the need for more transmission lines. This is especially true in the United States, which is uniquely blessed with abundant solar resources and well diversified wind resources.
Fission as a solution is something that is popular on social media, for reasons that are utterly mystifying to me. The arguments are invariably a few words that reach sweeping conclusions with no actual data backing it up, and lots of data contradicting it that the individual appears oblivious to.
I suspect the main reason fission is having a resurgence of popularity is because it maintains the current power structure of a rare large facilities controlled by a handful of actors. This has obvious advantages if you are a rich person concerned about keeping wealth concentrated into a few sets of hands.
Renewables are by their nature much more distributed in space, which makes them much harder to enclose and control in the way required to reproduce the current structure, especially as they are mainly being built by challengers who aren't really interested of forming monopolies with the fossil industry.
Well it's theoretically possible to supply industrial base load with battery storage but with the rate that demand is growing and the constraints on battery manufacturing that just won't be realistic for many years to come. How many battery cells does it take to keep a steel mill running through the night, and how will that impact power prices for large customers? As for natural gas, we're going to increasingly need that as a chemical feed stock to sustain the reindustrialization. So that leaves fission as the only known long-term option for sustainably meeting a large increase in base load demand.
Your one and only argument is that supply of batteries cannot keep up with demand. This is not only false, it's actually the inverse of the truth, due to Wright’s Law.
Current supply of storage matches current demand. Supply is low only because demand is low. However, as demand increases, supply will continue to match demand, and moreover the price will actually decrease because of the fact that the learning curve is a function of production volume.
This has been a steady empirical phenomenon for 30+ years, and it's predicted by basic economics principles. It's not going to change now!
This is true for all battery types, but especially for sodium ion and iron air, which are constituted of abundant materials. Sodium ion in particular has very similar behavior and cost to lithium ion.
This confusion you're having is you seem to be conflating manufactured goods (like batteries) with scarce goods like land or services, whereby there's a fixed supply that can't be increased and where Wright's Law doesn't apply. This is not correct.
Storage is more like televisions or light bulbs, where you can basically make as much of it as you want, and the price will keep declining as more is made. And supply will always be there for demand, whatever the level of demand happens to be (in this case, a lot).
> How many battery cells does it take to keep a steel mill running through the night, and how will that impact power prices for large customers?
Steel mills run when power is cheap. They historically have run at night (and only minimum power during the day) because cheap power is available at night. Of course there are lots of different steel mills, older ones can't shut down - but modern ones don't run 24x7, they run when power is cheap. Even the old 24x7 ones did their yearly maintenance in December - when power demand is highest (Christmas lights).
Wind and solar are easially predicted a few days in advance with high accuracy, and thus the mills change their shifts/output to follow the cheap power. If it is cloudy/no wind they will send their employees home (with pay) or do maintenance for that week while waiting on more cheaper energy. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to melt iron and so they manage this carefully because it makes them money. They can't deal with months of no production, but they can manage a week here and there.
Battery manufacturing has to be at massive scale even in a nuclear powered world, just to supply battery electric vehicles.
Converting every passenger car and light truck in the US to a BEV would involve enough batteries to store something like two days of the average grid output, which is more than would be needed for a cost optimal wind/solar/battery/hydrogen system for a 100% renewable grid.
> Converting every passenger car and light truck in the US to a BEV would involve enough batteries to store something like two days of the average grid output, which is more than would be needed for a cost optimal wind/solar/battery/hydrogen system for a 100% renewable grid.
Assuming the power stored in these vehicles can be reclaimed by the grid anytime they want?
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"we can get clean energy by continuing to burn fossil fuels".
If this isn't about ceasing carbon emissions then none of this is necessary. Fire up the coal plants!
Calculate the area-under-the-curve (AUC) of two time series over, say, the next 50 years:
(1) the emissions of a 98% renewable + 2% natural gas grid that comes online in 6 years, assuming fossil fuels for t between [t, t+6 years].
(2) the emissions of a 100% fission grid that comes online in 16 years, assuming fossil fuels for t between [t, t+16 years].
If you insist on ignoring the temporal nature of cumulative emissions, then sure, you can arrive at a convenient but false conclusion. But any honest analysis will consider the emissions in that [t+6 year, t+16 year] interval.
(... it would also consider things like social licensing risks leading to early plant closures like what's happening in Germany, or the fact that nuclear will likely be paired with natural gas too because demand itself is variable, and overbuilding nuclear is expensive.)
Ehm, you should be fair and not fudge the numbers in your favor. :-)
Start both with the same (current) % for renewables and (1) have some realistic ramp-up of renewables to reach 98%, and (2) keep the renewables more modestly rising in the fission version, while fading-out fossils in favor of fission
You should also account the carbon foodprint of grid-level energy storage (yes, it will be needed, even with the natural gas plans), vs the foodprint for fission plants (undoubtedly quite bad).