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New research shows renewables are more profitable than nuclear power
(www.pv-magazine.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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The question has always been what does one do when the renewables aren't providing enough power (ex: nights, etc). The current solution is natural gas. It would be a big improvement if we would use a carbon-free source like nuclear instead.
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is an old and proven method for load balancing intermittent power sources. Would like to see more of that as geography permits.
The "as geography permits" part is a big obstacle, unfortunately.
Actually it isn't if you stop only looking at places that are also suitable as power plant, that is, have a big river flowing through them.
You can do pumped hydro in an old mineshaft.
It's an obstacle for anything, including nuclear. Just ask Japan.
Not in China.
According to the article, the researchers concluded that nuclear reactors are not a good fit for that role.
Here's an example of what can be done with 5 hours of storage. 5 hours is a 25% participation rate of V2G where the participants offer a third of their battery capacity.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for-australia-is-feasible-and-affordable-with-just-a-few-hours-of-storage/
If going with the (false) assumption that nuclear can hit 100% grid penetration, it would take decades to offset the carbon released by causing a single year of delay.
The lowest carbon "let's pretend storage is impossible and go with 100% nuclear" would still start with exclusively funding VRE.
The growing idea is to just have a shit load of renewables, everywhere. The wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun shines through the clouds. If you have a ridiculous excess total capacity then even when you're running at limited capacity you could still cover the demand. Basically, most of our renewable infrastructure would actually be curtailed or offline a lot of the time.
And that opens up opportunities for energy intensive industries like aluminium or hydrogen production to run whilst there's an excess of energy
I'm all for green hydrogen production, it's using hydrogen in place of fossil fuels that bothers me. We already have a shit load of demand for hydrogen from industrial uses, and it would take 3x the world's total renewable capacity in 2019, dedicated solely to hydrogen production, to meet this with green hydrogen. If we start adding transportation into that demand we'll never make it, and it will be far less efficient than other energy sources (eg batteries).
So yeah, we should have green hydrogen production, but we shouldn't listen to those same people when they say they think it should also be used for transportation. That's just trying to increase the size of the market to increase profits.
Hydrogen works well with a renewable grids because you can take advantage of the times there is excess energy production so that power doesn't just go to waste.
We do need to be careful because hydrogen is often sold as a pipe dream by gas companies to convince us to use gas (e.g. "this new gas turbine power plant can be converted to hydrogen", even though that'd be a workload less efficient than fuel cells).
As for its use in transport, it looks like battery electric vehicles have won that battle for personal vehicles. Both have their advantages but in practice there are few enough fuel stations for hydrogen and enough chargers that that's not going to flip.
However, batteries are entirely unsuitable to long distance, high load transport like trucks. Ideally they'd be replaced by rail, but that's not happening anytime soon in many places so hydrogen likely will be the solution there.
From the linked paper. They mention some other options for storage like batteries (plenty of environmental issues there though) but based on the quoted text I have a hard time taking this seriously if they actually expect people to change their behavior.
Plug in car. Press the "I would like to only pay $100/yr to fuel this please" button.
Later when you leave for work press the "I would like the house to be cool when I get home and also want to pay half as much for AC" button.
Buy the 1.5m wide water heater that stores 10kWh of hot water and lasts a week between heatings rather than the 70cm one that lasts a day.
Such an unconscionable burden.
I think innovation at the consumption end is going to help a lot. On Technology Connections I saw an electric induction stove that could be powered from a regular socket. It had a battery that would trickle charge throughout the day and then use the batteries to power the induction cooktops, as well as a couple of plugs. If widely deployed and in other appliances, with a little smarts that could provide power leveling at the home level.
Another solution would be adding some intelligence to water heaters. Have a temperature control valve on the output where you set the temperature, and program the water heater get to 160-180°F when electricity is cheap. This would be a thermal battery that would easily level out demand for electricity for heating water.
Or you could do thermal storage by heating a house very warm/cold prior to a large cold snap/heat wave, and letting it coast down/up to a temperature instead of heating/cooling a lot during the cold/hot weather. He's got a video on this technique here
This has been done for close to a century in wind or run of river hydro heavy countries (as well as some coal ones).
The water heater has a buffer tank and is attached to a meter that only runs when a signal is sent across the power line. This stores about 20kWh for a 300L tank.
Modern insulation would allow going up to a few m^3 for a couple weeks' worth.
Combine that with some radiant floor heating on a nice thick concrete slab and you could use the battery for home heating. (Though it would need a lot of water.)
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We have to start looking at personal renewables more? Each home could have their own small windmill or solar panel. Let's point in that direction.
Those potentially have the same issue. The solution to filling the gaps in production from renewable sources is not necessarily more panels or more windmills, it's having energy storage somewhere to keep surplus energy when it's being produced (e.g. during the day, or when the wind is blowing) available to be used when it's not.
So in your example, each home could also have its own battery bank. Or, a larger battery bank could be placed somewhere on the electricity grid.
It could be a wall of small wind wheels for the home and yes a stored battery location on-site. A friend of mine took us to see their friend who had their own small(ish) wind turbine and it only had to have 10 large batteries. That was years ago.
If your appliances are efficient and your usage is moderate, you don't need much to generate enough power to run your home. And, provided you don't also need to charge an EV in the garage...
The 8 Bit Guy just did a video detailing his setup, which is all solar panel driven, and he rode out a day in the recent Texas heat running his air conditioners and so forth just on his solar panels and stored backup power. He has a comparatively rinky-dink number of panels, just a few over his little side porch and a couple more hung on his fence.
I imagine someone with one side of their roof paneled plus or minus a small windmill could easily power their own home as well as provide a surplus to charge a battery bank.
Just to add to this, we had 14 panels installed with a powerwall on an Easy/slightly NE, West/slightly SW roof at 55°Northern latitude. In the 7 weeks since we had them installed, every day we've made more than enough power for our usage. On more than 60% of the days so far we've filled the battery too and had to put up to 7kwh into my car. The worst days we've still made enough to power our house for more than 24 hours. This is genuinely way more than I ever expected to make and if we get a fraction of that through winter we'll not need to charge the battery from off peak electricity as much as I had planned.
Now, granted this far north we'll cycle from one extreme to the other but it seems like such a simple win to have panels for when you can and storage to smooth out usage on everything we can. You can get a surprising amount of power from just a "bright" day, even with cloud cover.
55 degrees North? Damn, we're in Seattle and we're at 47.6 so that's some seriously lacking sun compared to the rest of the US. That's incredible news.
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That's exactly what I'm talking about, I really hope it catches on.
What makes you think personal renewable are going to be more efficient than large scale renewables? The sun doesn't magically shine in the middle of the night on personal homes, the wind doesn't magically blow only in residential areas...
While I agree completely, it is troublesome that you, BombOmOm, are saying this... :/ username checks no fly list out.
Sometimes, a kinetic response is the only reasonable reaction. ;p Asking nicely doesn't stop a Russian war of conquest.
Nuclear is a terrible fit for peaker plants, that's not how it works. If it isn't selling energy at as close to 100% of the time as is feasible it's losing money.
The best solution is having EVs plugged into the grid at night. VTG is the easy solution to peaker needs.
Then you are getting into the issue of the power company eating up your charge cycles on your EV battery. Who pays for the fact that my battery now has half the design lifetime due to constant cycling because it's feeding the grid?
These are easily solved details. For example, by providing power on the grid you are in essence a power company. Perhaps you get reimbursed based upon what you provide. You know net metering is already a thing, right?
I’m just saying that we might need to get away from the idea that a car battery is solely an owner expense. They’d have to be subsidized or there would be huge equity issues. And yes “I do know about net metering,right.”
Yes you are correct in stating that if you used your car battery for grid usage you would need to get reimbursed for that. And I gave you an easy solution. This could actually be a profit center for EV owners and if you have your car plugged into the grid at peak times, you would get reimbursed more per kWh (ie TOU) with the net metering. Win/win for everybody except utilities and fossil fuel providers.
Nuclear is not, and cannot be, a gap coverage solution. Due to xenon/iodine poisoning and decay heat management you need to keep a reactor critical as long as possible to be economical. That's independent of the problem of keeping the water hot that fossil fuel generators share. You can't just turn a reactor on and off.
It can provide a baseload though where solar can provide extra power during the heat for places where the summer and days are the power intensive part, rather than winter and nights. You still need a short-term stop gap as the sun sets but it's still hot out, but even if that was just powered by NG it would be a huge step forward. Adding greener energy storage options to store extra power nuclear or wind could generate overnight would be better.
Btw, could a small percent of nuclear reactors be turned on/off seasonally, potentially transporting fuel between the north in the winter and the south in the summer?
Yes, but if you spend the money making a reactor, you really should just use it. Uranium is pretty cheap, it's the reactor that's expensive.
Fair. If a grid was just powered by batteries, solar, wind, and existing nuclear plants, which would be the most effective to turn off when demand is too low?
Keep the reactors running to avoid that issue. As long as they are providing enough power when the renewables aren't, we successfully cut out natural gas from the power grid.
The renewables-only crowd is just ignorant about this simple fact.
The future of energy will be dominated by solar and nuclear power. With hydro, geothermal and wind playing supporting roles, depending on geography.
The only question is, how much fossil fuels do we burn until then?
Those who oppose nuclear are really just in favour of burning fossil fuels in the interim. But the inevitable switch to nuclear will come as fossil fuels are depleted.
Nature has given us the atom as the most dense and durable way to store energy. That will never change.
Typical energy density of ore in a new uranium mine burned in an LWR is about the same of coal.
All of the economic/not too damaging stuff together would power the world for about 3 years.