Comment by thelastgallon
5 hours ago
Instead of batteries, why not green hydrogen or green ammonia? Ammonia is needed for fertilizer, storage/logistics are a solved problem. Emergency plants around that can use ammonia as fuel can solve the dunkelflaute problem?
Another option is natural gas peaker plant on a ship/barge. Have a fleet of these around that can dock at any port and supply electrictity. A peaker powership is essentially a mobile, marine-class version of an onshore peaking power plant.
What would be best long term if we have a few hundred - few thousand nuclear ships/subs that can go anywhere and supply power.
It can be the sharing economy for clean power at scale.
Capital costs and round-trip efficiency are the primary reasons. Even at constant utilization, electrolyzers are expensive enough that it's hard to replace fossil-fuel generated hydrogen at the moment.
Once you 2x-10x the cost of electrolyzer capital by only using it rarely, more generation and throwing away the excess electricity often makes the most sense.
Nuclear ships are similarly super super expensive. The only reason we build them at all are for their unique and wonderful operational capabilities, as in not needing to surface or refuel. Using nuclear ships for power would so expensive that we may need to up our GDPs 10x before such wasteful use makes sense. (Though I'm hoping we do reach such future luxurious lifestyles!)
> Another option is natural gas peaker plant on a ship/barge. Have a fleet of these around that can dock at any port and supply electrictity. A peaker powership is essentially a mobile, marine-class version of an onshore peaking power plant.
Why would you want this?