That’s good, I’m stealing it.
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This isn’t true. Large scale grid storage is actually a really hard problem that we haven’t solved yet. It’s the primary barrier for going fully renewable right now.
There are many many schemes being tried- batteries, flywheels, pumping water up hill, pushing concrete blocks up funiculars, compressing air into tanks, all sorts of crazy stuff. However none of it scales very well or can be used in very many places. Lithium ion battery banks have the best shot right now, but those have a host of manufacturing, safety, and maintenance issues of their own.
Fossil fuel power plants never had this problem because there are several types that are easy to spin up and down quickly to meet demand. The challenge of storage was sidestepped for 150 years. We have to confront that problem now.
Renewables + Grid Storage is also a pretty poor solution to the base load, since it is by definition constant. Wearing out batteries, flywheels, or pumps constantly to maintain that is silly. This where nuclear is a perfect option, but people are irrationally afraid of it, unfortunately.
That’s not to say we won’t solve these problems. We will. But don’t pretend it’s easy. This is about more than political will. There are genuine unsolved technical barriers here.
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Well the pumped storage thing has been in regular use for decades, with facilities all over. The Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia has been operating since 1985, and can generate 3000 MW with a total storage capacity of 24,000 MWh, which makes it a pretty big battery. There are similar installations around the country, and it’s a fairly mature technology.
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Maybe the solution to that obstacle is interconnected microgrids?
This one employs a combination of fossil fuels and has build out capacity for renewables…
The storage problem is not insurmountable, especially if we start thinking outside of the macroscale.
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Pumped storage is great, and of course it should be used where we can. However, its problem of scale is that of geography. You need two reservoirs near one another that have a large vertical separation for it to work, and there’s really just not many places where it is available. Also, its capacity is limited by the volume of the reservoirs.
To truly scale storage, we’re going to need a number of different technologies to get over the difficulties that we face. Yes, we’re going to need pumped storage and batteries, and there are a number of short-term storage options being developed, such as compressed air or flywheel storage. However for the seasonal storage capacity that we will need if we’re using wind or solar power , then we really need some form of electricity to fuel storage. At the moment there are three main options, all of which need investment to make them more efficient- Electricity to Hydrogen, Electricity to methane via the Sabatier process, or electricity to ammonia. The fuel can be stored (possibly in our existing fossil fuel network) and used in thermal generators when needed. This is scalable, allows for long-term storage and crucially can be phased in alongside our current systems
I’m also reminded of this previous boing, which covered a nice combo of battery storage and hydrogen generation:
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I agree with all you wrote except for this one. There are a lot of very rational reasons to continue to phase out nuclear, amongst which
- the price per MWh is now way higher compared to renewables. New plants are now built only due to massive state subsidies (see, e.g. Hinkley Point C), and retrofit of old plants to put them to current safety standards is prohibitively expensive.
- Operating nuclear power plants is highly risky. We just can’t trust the power companies and their (usually captured) regulators to adhere to all the necessary safety standards in construction and operation. I mean, it’s plainly stupid to put your emergency diesel generators in the basement for a plant at seafront, but that’s exactly what was the case in Fukushima Daiichi. The stakes are just too damned high: as demonstrated by Fukushima, an incident can lead to a sizeable portion of land being lost for decades or centuries.
- Even if operated safely, running nuclear power plants produces radioactive and toxic waste for which so far no safe method of disposal exists. Already the by-products of nuclear fuel production are basically a nightmare.
- Proliferation: a large part of commercial reactors run on enriched uranium that can be used to build bombs. In fact, all nuclear weapons programmes depend on nuclear power plants. Military and non-military uses are deeply intertwined.
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Does this assume there would be no effort to increase efficiencies/decrease waste?
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