When probed on how to address intermittency, many wind and solar advocates propose things like hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air, or other solutions that are currently in the prototyping stage and have yet to actually be deployed to a grid and demonstrate viability.
This is the chief advantage of nuclear power: it works and we have over half a century of production experience with it. Betting on one of those storage solutions panning out is betting on a big unknown.
The next level is using residential HVAC systems the same way. Comfortable temperatures are a range, so heating/cooling can push the temps to one end of the range, and when there is less electricity available, they can drift to the other end.
The charger for your electric car is another very practical sink for cheap electricity.
This is accomplished by having a spot price for electricity, and then people buying thermostats that query the spot price and turn HVAC, hot water heater, car battery chargers, etc., on and off.
This can be extended EVEN FURTHER by heating/cooling a pile of rocks to later use to heat/cool the house.
A battery consisting of a pile of rocks can't be expensive.
The idea is to not only adjust supply to the demand, but to shape the demand to the supply.
I am utterly astonished that this is never, ever discussed when talking about solutions to fluctuating supply. Having fixed electricity rates 24/7 is simply madness in today's electricity generation situation.
As the poster above you pointed out the capacity of LI batteries is tiny. Yet you tout car batteries as though that were a new idea and a meaningful solution. And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.
You also ignore the losses from your solutions. What is the round trip loss from heating up rocks and getting the energy back? It is huge. And you artfully forgot to mention all the equipment needed to get the energy back out in usable form such as electricity.
All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea". The problems with load shaping are many. If you shut a factory down to spare the grid, then it is not producing. So all else being equal, you need more factories for the same production. Building and maintaining those extra factories takes labor, management, and energy.
Getting people to turn off air conditioning means that they are less comfortable, or perhaps unable to sleep, or unable to work. The South of the US more or less became viable economically due to air conditioning.
This is not unique to you, but I am really fed up with people spouting half-assed ideas and thinking that they constitute a solution.
As they said in the dot.com era - ideas are cheap.
If you store the energy by heating the rocks, you can recover it to heat your house by simply blowing air over the rocks. No need to convert it to electricity, which would indeed be silly.
The same goes for air conditioning. Excess electricity could be used to cool the rocks, which then can be used to cool your house when electricity is expensive.
The detour through the rocks (or anything with thermal mass) costs next to nothing.
I am not talking about using the EV battery to run the house. I am talking about using the EV battery to run the EV. Simply charge it when electricity rates are cheaper. It's shifting the demand.
> thinking that they constitute a solution
They are perfectly and cheaply implementable, and are part of the solution.
> half-assed
I actually have a degree in mechanical engineering. You shouldn't be so hasty in your inferences.
I don't think that's the right way to phrase it. The South was clearly economically viable before A/C. It's kinda like saying that New York City wasn't economically viable until the invention of the safety elevator.
Overall I agree with your views on "half-assed ideas". I want to elaborate on this one topic a bit more, because it presses a button of mine.
On thing A/C did was make it possible to build cheap homes following northern tastes and styles, on the assumption power would remain cheap. Northerners could move in without having to adapt their customs and practices much.
Southern vernacular architecture includes high ceilings (so the heat rises above the people), lots of windows (to let the air go through and heat escape), and with the house raised off the ground (so cooling air flows underneath). This describes the A/C-less Florida house I grew up in. An even more traditional design would have a wraparound porch, to provide extra shade and let the windows stay open even when it rains.
OTOH, A/C encouraged house designs which require A/C to be comfortable - a sort of co-dependency. These vernacular features make the A/C bill higher, so they weren't included in newer homes. I tried living in a Florida home designed for A/C, but without using the A/C. Not only was it much less comfortable, as you write, but we started getting mold because of the humidity. A house made for A/C doesn't have much air flow.
So I don't think the argument is simply 'getting people to turn off air conditioning', but 'getting people to design houses which are a better fit for the local climate and have better long-term sustainability.'
That's of course hard, and expensive.
It's also hard to change lifestyles to fit the climate. Eg, the dominant US culture doesn't appreciate or tolerate siestas, even if it's locally more appropriate.
Oh, and this isn't unique to the South. It's cheaper to build a frame house in Arizona, which requires A/C to be livable, than to build an house (like an adobe house) with thick walls that moderate the temperature fluctuations.
Nor is it just A/C. Earthship designs, for example, show what is possible ... for people who are willing to put more work into daily maintenance. Which is part of the lifestyle change that's hard to do.
Okay, depressing button. :)
No he didn't, the rocks are for asynchronous heating/air conditioning, all you need to get the energy back is a water pump or air blower and tubes.
Your reply is unnecessarily dismissive and snarky. All of those ideas are easy to do projects for individuals.
The only thing you need to implement on a global/national/regional scales is a spot market for electricity accessible for everyone. Then you can lean back and watch people implement all those simple ideas and many more.
All in all, your reply is unnecessarily dismissive and snarky. Those ideas are not "brilliant ideas" (btw you should learn about correct quoting). Of course those won't solve the problem all at once, but they will have a huge impact.
That said, the parent comment's ideas are bad and ignorant, for the reasons you mentioned and more.
> And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.
well, actually car are parked and not used most of the time, even more during nights when there is no solar energy. And TBH this is my mid-term plan: solar panels to charge it by day and use its battery by night for lights and electric appliances (moving to an electric cold/heat pump for heating it's out of my budget currently, I'm on natural gas)
> And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.
Most people drive about 20 - 40 minutes per day. In large cities, it is 2+ hours. The remaining 22 hours, EV is an energy sponge. Take the current peak load, produce more renewables than the peak, turn renewables to 11, absorb all the excess free energy. EV is primarily an energy storage device, some people take trips on them once in a while. None of this energy is wasted. There is no need to think of a round trip for this scenario. All energy for transportation can be free and clean, we are capturing excess production. Utilities are curtailing renewable production, this is a shame, we have built solar/wind farms, but not using free energy! This is a huge barrier for new renewables, producers have to consider growing curtailment.
> All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea". The problems with load shaping are many.
Utilities are a monopoly, guaranteed a cost + profit formula. Utilities increase their costs to increase the profit. We see the same formula play out in health care, hospitals charge $1,400 for a band-aid. Energy can be a lot cheaper, and zero. It is entirely possible for Utilities to pay us for using our electric cars storage, they provide the best grid stabilization and smooth out demand and supply curve, flattening the peak rates. Instead of paying 10 - 20x for peaker gas plants, why can’t Americans be paid? There is a nexus of Utilities (generators, producers, distributors) and jacking up capital costs.
> All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea".
Because these are produced by the utilities. Economists and scientists are funded by the industry to write their view. This happened and continues to happen. [1]
Lead is a gift of God. [2], this view was supported by scientists, surgeon general, AMA, public health and nearly all Govt bodies. Industry sets the rules for all of us so they can continue to extract profits for as long as possible. With this rule, we are all poisoned by lead for ~100 years. Lead poisoning is permanent! "lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears. modern man’s lead exposure is 300 to 500 times" [4]. We not only have polluted ourselves, but made a permanent toxic change for all of humanity. For what? To make the richest people a little bit richer?
Koheo's rule (put in place by the industry) was used and continues to be used for thousands of other toxins.
"Using the Kehoe Rule, Ethyl Corporation was a winner in either situation: if its product was actually safe, Ethyl would be seen as a responsible party. If, however, its product was unsafe, it would take decades to demonstrate that with certainty. The process of getting to certainty could be prolonged by challenging the methods and results and calling for more data, and while it was going on the product would continue to generate profits. Kitman indicates that the strategy taken by the lead industry, referring to use of the Kehoe Rule, similarly "provided a model for the asbestos, tobacco, pesticide and nuclear power industries, and other(s)... for evading clear evidence that their products are harmful by hiding behind the mantle of scientific uncertainty."[4] Kettering Laboratories under Kehoe's leadership also certified the safety of the fluorinated refrigerant, Freon, "another environmentally insensitive GM patent that would earn hundreds of millions before it was outlawed."" [3]
Innocent until proven guilty is for people. Should we use the same rule for stuff that harms us? How can we prove this harm when all the studies on harm are done only by the insiders?
The internet that we see today, all the things that are happening in the tech space directly result from the breaking up of AT&T monopoly. We went from circuit switched to packet switched networks, built the underlying networks to throw packets at each other."AT&T, a powerful gatekeeper, controlled innovation by controlling access to the resources needed to innovate – the wires – the physical layer of the telephone network. AT&T's view of Paul Baran's packet-switching design was: ‘It can't possibly work, and if it did, damned if we are going to allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves.’ [5]
The current configuration of the grid is a creation of this utility nexus. We must break this monopoly. If we can figure out how to sling IP packets at each other, surely we can imagine a reconfiguration of the grid that will let us throw electrons at each other. This will result in upto a thousand dollars/month saved for all of us (residential use), as well as making all the energy clean and renewable. Forever.
---
[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/industry-weaponizing-scie... [2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.75.4.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe [3] https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/the-hour-of-lead.pdf [5] ATT and packet switched networks: https://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/mod/oucontent/view.php?...
[4] https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2000/03/02/... "Lead is poison, a potent neurotoxin whose sickening and deadly effects have been known for nearly 3,000 years and written about by historical figures from the Greek poet and physician Nikander and the Roman architect Vitruvius to Benjamin Franklin. Odorless, colorless and tasteless, lead can be detected only through chemical analysis. Unlike such carcinogens and killers as pesticides, most chemicals, waste oils and even radioactive materials, lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears.
For this reason, most of the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United States in the twentieth century remains–in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modern man’s lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels. Indeed, a 1983 report by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that lead was dispersed so widely by man in the twentieth century that “it is doubtful whether any part of the earth’s surface or any form of life remains uncontaminated by anthropogenic [man-made] lead.”
(edit: formatting)
Ridicule and condemnation was heaped upon me, all explaining how it simply must take 2 years at least.
And yet it was released 6 months later, more or less doing what I suggested.
I'm going to be proven right on this one, too :-)
Nothing will work in 100% of the world.
The point is, do it where it does make sense.
Most homes don't have enough free space for a big pile of rocks to increase thermal mass. My home has pretty good insulation but on hot days we're going to be miserable without AC in the evening regardless of how much we chilled the house down earlier.
Linky is an electric meter connected to the grid through PLC but it embeds the required hardware to eventually drive appliances consumption.
It provides a dry contact which can be open or closed remotely via the grid’s PLC. So it can be open or closed even without internet.
You can imagine to use this contact to drive a power line dedicated to your water boiler, electric car …
IIRC, atm, the only provided possibility is to open/close the contact via a web API / a smartphone app. But in the future, it may become controllable by the electricity provider to be automatically opened / closed based on the grid’s state (and the electricity price)
That’s a matter of forced mixing. The temp coming out of the hot water heater itself should have very little to do with the faucet temp in 2021. (Yes I realize it still does)
Again, we're just talking the thermostat for it.
> I don't think there are even any widely available on the market today which will automatically increase the temperature at mid day in anticipation of an electricity shortage later.
Why should there be? Electric rates are fixed 24/7. All the power company has to do is provide an API to get the spot price, and start varying the electric rates according to supply. The market will adapt.
> Most homes don't have enough free space for a big pile of rocks to increase thermal mass.
Criminy. Do I have to design it, too? Most homes have a basement or a crawl space.
Our house built 7 years ago has an Enefarm fuel cell/hot water heater. Every house in our neighborhood and every house I’ve seen by the same builder has one. It approaches things a little bit differently but to the same effect. It learns your energy use patterns and turns on the fuel cell (using LP gas) when you usually use electricity, generating hot water as a side effect. The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
https://www.j-lpgas.gr.jp/en/appliances/index.html#ENE-FARM
> it's a safety hazard in homes with small children; hot water temperature should never be hot enough to cause burns when someone turns on the faucet.
Internally it stores water at 65 degrees C but mixes it with cold water to to supply all water to the house at a certain temp. We have ours set to 40C but you can change it on a control panel. Of course, there are mixing taps at the sinks/showers. It’s very common for shower temp controls here to have a extra stop at 40C that requires pressing a button to exceed.
> Most homes don't have enough free space for a big pile of rocks to increase thermal mass
I don’t know about cooling but the ones that take advantage of cheap electricity at night to store up heat and release slowly over the day are not massive.
https://catforehead.com/2014/02/17/getting-warm/ https://www.sanica.co.jp/aldy/products/rdf40.html
(Disclosure: I work for this company, although not on these products.)
In many areas wholesale markets work on a spot price basis (although players in the market can of course hedge against low/high prices), but consumers have been very reluctant to go with spot price contracts.
This will probably not be helped by the experience of those consumers in Texas who got $10000 electricity bills during last winter's storm, as the prices skyrocketed.
Also, in any cold climate, 'surplus of energy' is generally associated with the presence of sunlight, i.e. at times when heating the house is typically not a great priority. You want that heating on when it is coldest, which typically coincides with the lowest renewable energy production as well.
Charging and decharging your car sounds great, but it means your battery is deteriorating while you aren't even driving.
Criminy. Of course it isn't. It's a storage device for HOT WATER.
I have an experiment you can try. Unplug your hot water heater. See how long the hot water lasts. (For me, it remains hot enough to shower for TWO DAYS.) That suggests, to ignorant me, that one does not need to heat the water in it at a moment's notice, but it can be deferred to the cheaper times of the day.
Furthermore, water doesn't have to be heated to a precise temperature. The temp of your shower is controlled by mixing it with cold water. Hence, one can heat the water to a much higher temp when electricity is cheap, further extending the "battery" effect of storing hot water.
I'd be very surprised if France didn't do things like this. edit: googled it:
https://thegoodlifefrance.com/french-hot-water-tanks-tarrifs...
So, one of the "unacceptable" solutions to fighting climate change, is something that countries with the highest nuclear mix have been doing for ages.
Example of a proof of concept for electricity to heat and reverse via rock heating is the Siemens Gamesas Hamburg plant: https://www.siemensgamesa.com/explore/innovations/energy-sto...
Additionally, I would add that there electricity for generation of hydrogen or synth fuels for airline or seafaring industries:
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2021/05/17/construction-starts-...
https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/major-green-hydrogen-facilit...
And electric cars actually tend to get charged at night, while people sleep, when solar isn't generating.
Because there's no incentive to do otherwise. Of course people don't time shift their electric use when there's no incentive to.
This is available in the UK, using a thing called the Economy 7 tariff on electricity [1]. You have two sets of circuits on this plan. One set is the normal set that provides electricity 24/7, so you get expensive electricity when the rate is high and cheap electricity when the rate is low. The other only provides electricity when the rate is lower, such as at night (the 7 in "Economy 7" refers to 7 hours of cheap electricity at night).
There are water heaters designed specifically to work with this [2]. They have a main heating element that does most of the work, which you connect to a circuit that only provides power when the rate is low. These tanks also have a boost heating element that is on a 24/7 circuit meant to just provide any extra heating you need for hot water use during the day.
They also have tariffs that provide a fixed rate 24/7, which should be cheaper than Economy 7 during the day but more expensive at night, so whether Economy 7 saves you money depends on how much of your electricity use is at night.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
[2] https://www.cse.org.uk/advice/advice-and-support/economy-7
I'm not surprised to be honest. On a forum like this, you'll get a bunch of very smart people talking about something they don't know a lot about, but authoritatively. (Just look at the incredibly snarky and dismissive responses you've received)
It's certainly talked about in industry and work is going into implementing it.
I work in the electricity-tech industry but I've given up on trying to talk about things like demand response as I'm always shouted down
Never mind that the pump price of gas changes every day, especially when there's an oil refinery explosion, or glut, or whatever. It's a classic example of demand shaping via price. And it works because demand for gas is elastic.
The only time this did not work was when the government regulated oil prices and which stations got a gas allocation. Older folks like me might remember this - long gas lines in the 1970s. Gas lines that disappeared literally overnight when Reagan repealed the price and allocation controls.
Geographically independent power, no carbon emissions, and no intermittency. It fulfills anything we'd get from fusion, except we have 70 years of experience using it in our power grids.
The problem is humanity needs to get it's act together and stop allowing politics, NIMBY and a severe lack of understanding of science from getting in the way of saving itself.
Nuclear proliferation is the least of our problems if we can't grow our food outside anymore and half our cities are underwater.
Is building nuclear power faster than building Lithium Battery Factories?
> The idea is to not only adjust supply to the demand, but to shape the demand to the supply.
> I am utterly astonished that this is never, ever discussed when talking about solutions to fluctuating supply. Having fixed electricity rates 24/7 is simply madness in today's electricity generation situation.
It might not be the same everywhere but in France and Belgium at least, it is very common to have two rates: peak and off-peak. A signal is sent by the provider to your electrical meter (basically 220V when off-peak, 0V when peak) that can pilot a switch that turns the hot water heater on only during off-peak hours.
Some electric heaters also work on that principle, they are filled with bricks and heat up during off-peak hours then release the stored heat later, when it is needed. That's your "battery consisting of a pile of rock". However, I have lived with those things and it doesn't work at all because storing heat in anything else than water just doesn't work well. Basically at the end of the day, when you come back from work and need the heat that was stored during the night, it's already gone (and totally wasted as the house was empty). The most modern designs don't work much better. I think these only still exist because the idea seems good enough to convince people to buy them, but it's not actually technically feasible.
Anyway, everything you say is already possible in western Europe, and already done (except for HVAC, but that's mostly because HVAC in private homes isn't very common in the first place). What could be improved is to have more dynamic off-peak hours, but that's not a technical problem, everything would already work as is.
However, that doesn't help during period when there is hardly any wind. It is not as if you can stop heating your house for a couple of weeks.
I'm curious have this will play out. On a bright summer day, there is plenty of solar power. So it make sense to do everything during the day. During winter, it is better to distribute the load and move load to the night. That requires quite a bit of signaling to get right.
I have a Swedish fireplace. The firebox is very small, and the masonry is rather massive. The idea is for the masonry to soak up the heat, then slowly release it long after the fire dies down. Apparently the Swedes have used this design for centuries. I don't imagine the Swedes are such fools that they wouldn't notice for centuries that it doesn't work (it does!).
People also used to put rocks in the fireplace, then pull them out to put in their beds to warm them at night. This is just a primitive method of doing the same thing.
https://www.eeca.govt.nz/assets/EECA-Resources/Research-pape...
Besides, if you could buy an electric water heater that runs when electricity is mostly free, wouldn't you replace your gas heater? I would.
This is completely backwards. Demand is highly price inelastic and inversely correlated with the supply of renewables. People usually eat at night. They heat their homes overnight. None of these things will change based on energy prices.
What you're proposing is a tax on the poor, and no practical benefit to boot.
> The charger for your electric car is another very practical sink for cheap electricity.
I don't have an electric car. I do not know anybody with an electric car. And wouldn't the surplus show up specifically when those cars aren't at the home?
> A battery consisting of a pile of rocks can't be expensive.
No, but the labor cost of hooking up your pile of rocks battery will be impractical for almost everyone.
> The next level is using residential HVAC systems the same way.
Again, I don't know anybody with an HVAC system. Everything here in the UK is based on natural gas and would cost an unbelievable amount of money to replace with electric.
There's no evidence of that. The only evidence is that when the price is exactly the same 24/7, no elasticity is observed.
> and would cost an unbelievable amount of money to replace with electric
I've had to replace gas furnaces and gas water heaters now and then. They don't last more than 10 years or so.
BTW, everybody in Arizona has A/C. Amazingly, A/C demand peaks when the sun is high in the sky.
> I do not know anybody with an electric car
You will.
The first is dubious, the second is... highly location dependent.
Peak demand in California matches peak solar output pretty well; before solar was big, supply concerns focused on peak demand hours, in the afternoon; now they are in the evening because solar has made the highest gross demand time the time where there is the least concern for supply.
> No, but the labor cost of hooking up your pile of rocks battery will be impractical for almost everyone.
The labor cost of hooking it up isn't that bad, geothermal heat pumps aren't that costly.
Insulating the pile of rocks battery is probably the hard part.
He basically shared that some costly energy consumption (such as water heating) can be easily shaped to the supply.
It's not that no one talks about this stuff, it's just that it's as with all things in the utility space projects take time and a lot of the work being done is still exploratory.
No one I work with seems to think this stuff is a magic bullet either, just part of the solution (of which nuclear is another important part).
I should also note that these DERMS projects are very software reliant and I think all of us here on HN know quite well that reliability can be an issue in the software space...
Also, for shops, mall, offices, there is a prolongued pic during the day, and you can't offset that.
Also, your solution assume:
- a lot of smart connected systems (for the heating, the washing machines, etc)
- massive EV parks
- rétrofit buildings to fit those big rocks, heat them, and get heat from them
This is not trivial and would add to the cost to sell renewable energies, which are already not easy to market.
I've lived somewhere with storage heaters. They are horrible, practically indistinguishable from no heating at all. A large enough thermal mass would require a complete rebuild.
You, the consumer, can override it. You get to decide between donning a sweater or paying more. Isn't that objectively better than some bureaucrat simply turning off the power to your neighborhood (rolling blackouts)?
A missing link is indeed a cinder block energy storage pile that could be set to preheat water going into the hot water boiler, or to cycle through water going into heating.
I already do this manually. I unplug it before taking a shower and plug it again at night. Of course, doing it automatically is the only way is going to be done at scale.
NIMBY as in NOT IN MY BATTERY! :-)
Even if it is only 10%, that's 10% less grid storage batteries needed.
Ya know, car engine efficiency has improved dramatically over the last 50 years. Each specific improvement was small - but the aggregate adds up.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-sola...
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-rec...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108
https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-boost-for-renewables-grid-...
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
Lithium ion battery production is at only ~400 GWh per year. By comparison, the US uses 12,500 TWh of electricity daily, or just over 500 GWh per hour. And this is only electricity, not total energy usage. Attempting to provision widespread lithium ion storage would lead to demand shock and skyrocketing prices. Not to mention it would involve delaying transition from ICE vehicles to EVs.
You're right in some scenarios: if a country has extensive dam networks, then yes renewables + storage could be cheaper. Dams provide immense energy storage capacity. Close the turbines when solar and wind are producing, open them when they're not. If a country is blessed with extensive hydroelectric potential then great.
But hydroelectricity is a matter of geography, and plenty of regions do not have the right geography to construct dams. Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage. Other proposals like hydrogen storage, flywheels, etc. have not actually been deployed to the grid so we have no real-world cost history for these systems. Somebody writing a white paper claiming $X/KWh of storage and actually building a system are two very different things.
I was suspicious of your numbers so I did a bunch of math and then realized you're using the European comma rather than a decimal. So 12,500 means 12.5, not 12500.
(EIA.gov says the U.S. used about 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours in 2020 [1]. 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours equals 3.8 billion megawatt hours, equals 3.8 million gigawatt hours, equals 3.8 thousand terawatt hours per year or 10.4 twh per day. If we figure the U.S. has about a hundred million households and divide 3,800 twh by that, we get 38 megawatt hours per household per year. This is a very rough estimate, as it doesn't include industrial/commercial/government users. If we divide by 365*24 to cancel out the time units, we get an average consumption of .004338 MW or 4.338 kilowatts per household. That sounds about right.)
Current battery production is only just barely getting started. China dominates production of LFP cells (which are ideal for grid storage) because of patents which are expiring, so hopefully we'll see more production outside of china in the near future.
LFP cells aren't bottlenecked by nickel or cobalt, and so the main resource constraints I believe are lithium, aluminum, and copper which are all quite a bit cheaper and available in bigger quantities. I think prices are expected to eventually settle somewhere around $80 per kwh of capacity for the cells, and I don't think we're that far off that now. (LFP may eventually be displaced by something else, like lithium sulfur or solid state batteries or something, but I think LFP is probably good enough.)
Maybe lithium or copper will become bottlenecks and prices will rise. Let's say prices do hold at about $80 per kwh. Maybe we'll round up to $120 per kwh to account for pack construction, a building to store the batteries, inverters, chargers, and so on. If the average U.S. adult-aged person uses about 2kw on average, then they need 48kwh of storage for 24 hours. That would be about $5760. If we amortize that over ten years, it's about $48 a month. That's kind of expensive, but it's within the realm of what can be done without assuming any major technological breakthroughs. We probably don't need 24 hours of storage, though, if we have enough renewable energy over-production and backup fossil fuel plants to use in extreme situations.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...
It may not be so now, but in 7 years, or in other words, by the time a nuclear power plant commissioned today starts producing power, it definitely will.
Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024:
https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-...
Without a sudden, disruptive change in the cost and rate of deployment of nuclear there doesn't exist a path for it become a significantly larger part of the energy mix.
You're simplifying out that electric consumption varies during the day.
Look at the chart in your last link:
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
They match up demand with load by using a buttload of hydro and and even larger amount of natural gas. We can't use natural gas if we're trying to get rid of fossil fuels and we can't use hydro in places without appropriate geography, so then what?
To say nothing of what happens when solar and wind are "it's cloudy and there's no wind right now" intermittent rather than time-of-day intermittent.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou...
> To start, we’ll consider Sanders’ claim that “scientists tell us” that it’s possible to get to a zero-carbon electrical grid without nuclear power.
> “The shortest answer is yes, that’s true. Scientists do tell us that we can,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
> Ryan Jones, an expert in electricity systems and a co-founder of Evolved Energy Research, a consulting company that models low-carbon transitions, agreed. “Anyone who says that nuclear is 100% necessary on a technical basis, I would claim, just hasn’t looked at the alternatives in enough detail,” he said in an email.
> Most experts FactCheck.org contacted, including those who think nuclear power should remain an option, said that from a technical perspective, nuclear is not needed to decarbonize the grid.
If they can beat France on cost then here is a political win to be made. Be it using lithium batteries to store up 3-4 weeks worth of the nations energy consumption, or the more likely green hydrogen which is commonly suggested as being more likely choice for wind energy.
The current commercial viable lithium battery solution, that which solar farms has written articles about, is around 4 hours of 80% capacity. Not bad. Every day the batteries get charged when the sun is at its peak and powers prices is at its lowest point, and every day when the sun goes down they can utilize the highest price point as demand exceed supply of cheap energy.
For wind it is a bit more complicated. You can have a few weeks of good weather, followed by a long period of low wind conditions and high demand. A few hours won't cut it, and the more capacity you add the slower the discharge cycle will be. Green hydrogen would be a more economical storage medium, but right now the technology is having a hard time to be economical viable. That said it would benefit the world if Germany made a run for it so we can compare the cost to nuclear.
Unlike pledges, which can be produced instantly, actually bringing reliable power online takes more than 3 years.
It's these types of pledges that make the public view these replacement efforts as fundamentally unserious.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of nuclear and think the industrialized west should follow in France's footsteps. But we will not get there by 2025. We may never get there as long as we approach this problem in such an unserious manner.
Solar and wind often overproduce (leading to negative prices). This (otherwise useless energy) will be used to produce dihydrogen (water electrolysis), which will be stored, then used to produce electricity (fuel cell).
It's as simple as that. They are an exporter.
If we don't have a viable and economically well understood solution for nuclear waste handling , any cost calculations for nuclear is a waste of time .
It's plutonium.
There are treaties that say you can't use spent fuel from civilian power reactors to make nuclear weapons, so nobody admits to doing this, but they probably are. That's where it goes. But since nobody can admit to it, the representative from coal country gets to say 'what about nuclear waste' whenever somebody wants to replace coal with nuclear and nobody can tell them the answer because they're not allowed to admit it. But it's not a bug, it's a feature.
There are also newer reactor designs that can run on plutonium (permanently eliminating it) and also intentionally produce Plutonium-240 in amounts that make it impossible to use for weapons. If that's what we actually wanted to do with it.
We currently do not have a viable economically well understood solution, not hypothetical plans which may work to use plutonium effectively [1] at costs we have no idea about or disposal facility for which costs are not really known yet for all types (HLW/ILW and LLW) waste products we cannot talk costs of ownership.[2]
That doesn't mean we shouldn't do nuclear or not build new plants, but without knowing these costs any estimate of cost of ownership is useless numbers in the air as nobody knows what it is going to actually cost yet.
[1] Again engineering and economics, engineering maybe well understood, costs are not, we don't know the costs until we build a few, nuclear is notorious for widely over running cost estimates compared to any other power generation method.
[2] We don't need to measure thousand years of disposal to know the costs, we just need to run an actual disposal site for few years to really estimate the costs .
See this graph for the spread based on Z number (Protons + Neutrons).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#/media/File%...
> Since breeder reactors on a closed fuel cycle would use nearly all of the actinides fed into them as fuel, [the] volume of waste they generate would be reduced by a factor of about 100
> In addition, the waste from a breeder reactor has a different decay behavior, because it is made up of different materials. [Its] fission products have a peculiar 'gap' in their aggregate half-lives, such that no fission products have a half-life between 91 years and two hundred thousand years. As a result of this physical oddity, after several hundred years in storage, the activity of the radioactive waste from a Fast Breeder Reactor would quickly drop to the low level of the long-lived fission products.
> ". In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries"."
I have been following FBR progress especially thorium based ones, as it was considered to be India's path to energy independence since the 1950's. The progress has been slow and expensive and still a lot of research is left to do, so to say meaningfully that waste will reduce is not a viable plan today or next 20 years.
Between dying in next 100-200 years because of climate change or risking nuclear contamination problems 100's of years in the future in concentrated locations the later is always preferable yes.
I am not saying there is no good reason to move to nuclear, but cost is not one of them, as literally we don't know what it will cost yet.
One plant should not be judged on its intermittency alone. Its just not how the system works at a connected-grid scale.
So we can store our storage centers closer to population centers, but we can't generate it close by. We now have lots of transmission losses and opportunities for failures.
The problem with all this is that it is exceedingly complicated and most people are trying to simplify the problem. But here even including second order factors doesn't give you good approximations of the solution.
While costs of transmission infrastructure required for country scale (larger distances for lower correlation) energy dispatch are recognized, its more abstract challenges are less well acknowledged. Dispatch at this level is not just about developments in grid integration or hardware like solid state "transformers", it also has a complex routing coordination aspect requiring research in control and even game theory [1].
A lack in wind and solar can sometimes occur simultaneously. Analysis of German wind turbines data observed that experiencing a stretch of almost a week with generation as low as 10% installed capacity was likely within a given year [2]. Surprising/extreme weather events like Europe's recent "wind drought" are rare but there remains a large amount of uncertainty in how changes in climate will affect the tail of this distribution. Tools such as coordinating distributed generation and improvements in storage tech will surely help smooth generation, nuclear is another powerful tool in that toolbox.
[1] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy15osti/63037.pdf
[2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab91e9/...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812...
The problem is that Nuclear may not be economical if it is only used when both solar and wind run out. Nuclear has large fixed costs. And almost zero marginal costs. So the average costs -- what needs to be charged in order to avoid bankruptcy, increase as you use it less.
That means every solar panel you add makes the nuclear power a bit more expensive. And that incentivizes adding more solar. Up until you drive the nuclear out of business, and then suddenly you don't have reliable power anymore.
Then you are faced with a situation of
a) only having nuclear power which can provide for all of your needs, in which case adding solar is an unnecessary expense
b) only having solar+wind and an unreliable grid, which means you need to add batteries to cover solar+wind. And the price of those batteries may be more than the price of the nuclear plant.
c) having nuclear and solar both, with enough subsidies given to the nuclear plant to keep it in business so that the total solution is more costly than just going with nuclear.
So yeah, there really is a tension between nuclear and solar.
This is not the situation, however, with solar and coal. Because coal plants are damn cheap, and they have higher marginal costs. Thus solar can coexist with coal or with gas much better than with nuclear.
Therefore the economics is such that as people promote solar the result is a decrease in nuclear and an increase in coal and gas.
Also, be careful when looking at wind and solar minimal percentages. It’s the difference between median output and minimum output that matters not maximum output. Long term it’s likely something like 30 to 50% of all solar generation is going to be wasted simply because it’s just that cheap.
I’m not an energy grid expert but I guess it’s hard to have nuclear, gas wind and solar playing together because if it weren’t, people would just get on with it?
What's the uptime for fission plants? I recall that our "local" nuclear power plant (Trojan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant ) being down more often than it was up. Maybe it's because it was an old design or something, but it went online in 1975 which doesn't seem that old. It operated from 1975 to 1992.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-capaci...
Long way of saying I agree with you; to make a reasonable comparison, you need to include an over-building factor to account for the variable nature of renewables. I'm not sure what that factor is (obviously it depends on a lot of variables), but I know it's been studied.
This estimation is a depressing reading:
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/12/3036/htm
Estimated energy return on energy invested:
onshore wind 2.9:1 offshore wind 2.3:1 photovoltaic 1.8:1 concentrated solar power <1:1
Cryogenic energy storage ("liquid air") plants have been deployed - a 15 MWh (5 MW peak) grid-scale demonstration plant has been operating in Greater Manchester near where I live since 2018, and there's a permanent 250 MWh (50 MW peak) plant under construction on the opposite side of the city region.
Granted that peak energy usage in the UK today was around 42 GW, so it's a small fraction (OTOO a tenth of a percent at peak) of what's needed, but... it's coming.
I fully agree with you, though, that nuclear is needed. Renewables + storage can't be the complete answer. I'm a wind, solar and nuclear advocate.
https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/uk_to_host_europes_l...
The EU would need about 10k Cerro Dominador's (which would cover about 1% of the surface area of the EU) to supply its energy needs at worst case (using ~1kwh/m2/day seen during dec/jan).
In fact, for some weird reasons, I see cost reports in France factoring in wiring for wind energy, but not for nuclear.
Also nuclear assume good relationship with nations providing the fuel, which is costly: see Mali war for my country.
Getting your hands on objective calculations to compare cost for all energy types it something I seem to never be able to do.
