Grüße gehen raus an unsere Gaskathi
Now we just need a cheap sustainable storage medium for all that solar power and were golden. Anyone?
Batteries would like a word. They’re already storing solar power, getting cheaper, and improving at a pace nuclear construction schedules can only dream of. For longer gaps, pumped hydro and thermal storage can pitch in. Turns out the answer isn’t one magical box, but a bunch of technologies that actually exist.
From what I know, for large scale solar farms, batteries arent there yet. The maintainance and replacement costs cut into the money saved by using solar by quite a lot.
From what I know there are many many many such projects in the permit phase in Germany, all of them run on capitalist interest without state funding. The only thing between now and them getting build is our government which seems to prefer a 180° turn into the fossil age.
That’s an argument from 2017. Today the Technologies are there, and we can build it on scale. Battery for short term, green gas for the longer term.
It doesn’t really matter what we have if it’s not commercially viable, or we are missing something from the supply chain.
Adding to the other answer, for longer lulls in energy generation, the power can be used to create hydrogen gas that can be burnt in gas plants.
So, why isn’t everybody building hydrogen burning generators?
Because hydrogen-ready power plants are not the same as natural gas power plants, as hydrogen gas is not a drop-in replacement for natural gas. And right now, when natural gas is still relatively cheap and renewable energy is not yet absolutely dominating the energy mix, politicians are fearing the cost of building the infrastructure for generating, transporting, storing and burning hydrogen gas.
In the future, hydrogen gas plants promise to be the best fit to pair renewable energy with, but right now the cost of it and the availability of fossil fuels do not force the hand of the people responsible for planning the future of the energy grid.
Turns out the sun has a few competitive advantages over nuclear: free fuel, no radioactive waste, and it doesn’t need a decade of permits before it starts shining. The real bottleneck now is grids and storage. Imagine losing the energy race to a giant fusion reactor 93 million miles away. 😎
The real bottleneck now is grids and storage.
And turns out nuclear has a few competitive advantages over solar. They are both great and serve different purposes.
Nuclear is simply incompatible with renewables, if the price tag is of any concern to you. Nuclear reactors take long and cost a lot to build, still aren’t cheap to operate if you include the infrastructure cost of getting, handling and storing the fuel, can’t respond to chaning demand quickly and are centralized.
Nuclear power plants need subsidies over their whole life, mainly to handle the risk inherent with nuclear fuel and the finincial risk of having to handle spent fuel for centuries to come. Nuclear power plants need to run at full power, which costs money every time renewables are pushing the energy price into the negatives. Nuclear power plants need a centralized power grid.
Renewables work in exactly the opposite way. They are cheap to build and maintain, they are variable and decentralized. So to use renewables effectively, you need to build a decentralized grid and ideall, on-premise energy storage.
Renewable energy simply wins in terms of cost, risk-management and scalability. So the energy grid of the future will be purpose-built to accomodate renewable energy. Trying to force nuclear energy generation into that mix only makes sense, if you have a clear, non-monetary reason to do so, like enriching uranium for bombs. For strictly commercial use, nuclear power is dead.
Nuclear’s big selling point is that the sun goes down. Batteries have apparently missed that memo: they keep getting cheaper, better, and more efficient. Storage won’t solve every grid problem overnight, but pretending today’s limitations are permanent is a strange way to plan tomorrow’s energy system.
another big selling point of nuclear is it’s easy to drop in at old coal plants that already have grid connections ready to go.
pretending today’s limitations are permanent is a strange way to plan tomorrow’s energy system.
how long are you willing to wait for perfect energy storage?
obviously battery tech will improve, but the point is we cannot afford to assume that problem will be solved 100%, meanwhile experiencing more and more irreversible damage to our environment. We need to put our eggs into all clean energy baskets to get off CO2 as soon as possible. Not whenever battery tech happens to be ready to handle everything.
“it’s easy to drop at a place that has grid connections”
Funny, because solar or literally any other plant will also benefit from having existing connections, and all of them are easier and cheaper to build than nuclear.
Nuclear is dead but for niche applications.
Nobody’s asking us to bet on miracle batteries: Wind and solar paired with storage are already cheaper than building new nuclear. Reusing a coal plant’s grid connection doesn’t magically make a reactor cheap or quick to build. If speed and CO2 matter, follow the numbers, not the nostalgia.
“Cheaper” is not the most important metric.
In your world, is “tomorrow’s energy system” exclusively solar/hydro?
No, in my world tomorrow’s grid uses whatever delivers reliable electricity at the lowest total cost: solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, storage, and yes, nuclear if it can compete. This isn’t a religion with approved energy sources. It’s an engineering problem with a price tag, and nobody gets bonus points for glowing in the dark.
Exactly, this is an engineering problem. You’re talking it like it’s an accounting one. Reliability, emergency use, redundancy, generating potential and universal scalability are the most important factors. Cost is a completely separate issue governed by separate factors, many of which are 100% artificial.
You’re stringing worlds together at this point.
Cost is the single largest factor in the deployment of new power plants, and solar is just impossible to match right now.
You could spend literally decades and billions building a nuclear plant, or start deploying solar right this minute and immediately reap the rewards of that investment.
It’s a no-brainer.
But it doesn’t need to be one or the other. The more diverse the grid the better. I’ll also say again, cost on both sides is mostly artificial anyway.
nobody gets bonus points for glowing in the dark.
where the fuck did anybody say that?
“Glowing in the dark” refers to nuclear power sources. Hope this helps.
Approaching this problem like it has one perfect solution is pure ignorance.
It doesn’t need one perfect solution, just needs the best solution to become dominant. Obviously solar is not perfect or even best in every situation, but you don’t need 100%.
In the end, the cheapest reliable kilowatt hour wins. Not the technology with the loudest fan club, the best nostalgia, or the most impressive lobbying budget. Energy markets don’t award participation trophies for expensive electricity.
Not really addressing what I said at all. But hey, the words sound good if you’re ignorant on the subject.
Then, by all means elaborate on your perspective.
I personally view this issue as a fight between energy technology and energy resources.
If the main energy system is based on a technology that utilises the environment, such as solar, wind, hydro, tidal and others, of course energy output fluctuates due to conditions, but you can mass manufacture and slowly iterate on them overtime, just like how solar pricing has dropped almost exponentially.
If the main energy system is based on utilising a resource, such as natural gas, coal, uranium, thorium and others, of course you’ll get a ton of energy output and systems within can keep it perfectly stable, but the downside is that emissions, accidents, centralisation and the ethics of mining these resources are a pretty substantial issue.
Ideally, we should have an energy grid mostly consisting of passive technology based energy systems, with suitable resource based energy systems coming in second, since we can have the benefits of decentralisation allowing building based and community micro grids to continue functioning, while also having the redundancy of resource energy systems to account for any defects caused by environmental issues, such as volcanic ash blocking the sun in certain areas, but realistically the need for resource energy systems would be low, as the whole environment can’t be nullified by conditions. If there isn’t sun, there would likely still be wind, tidal and hydro, and vice versa for all.
It’d be interesting to see your take.
I don’t believe a decentralized grid is a good thing in most situations. In fact I think that’s extremely dangerous. So, we likely won’t find common ground there. I wont waste time trying to convince you otherwise.
The crux of your point seems to be that renewables should be the majority (excluding nuclear) and fuel based systems (including nuclear) should be the minority. If we take nuclear out of the equation I agree with you. I’m not anti renewables, I’ve spent my career working in various forms of generation, including oil, gas and hydro. My stance is that they all have a place, even gas and oil but especially nuclear.
Side note, the ethics of mining could be pointed at heavily for the current state of battery and solar pannel tech as well.
Thank you for putting it this way. I hope it helps others.
