This gets to another point that bugs me in these discussions... the pushback against wind/solar dominance by the pro-nuclear crowd. Insisting that nuclear power is the right way to go is western-centric. It's fine for the US, Europe, Japan, and other advanced nations that have the infrastructure to support it. But is it a solution for Peru? For Somalia? Of course not. Wind/solar/storage, on the other hand, is totally viable as a solution for even the poorest nations. This alone is an argument for solar over nuclear.
Many of the wind/solar advocates, on the other hand, are strongly anti-nuclear. Given the state of the climate that just doesn't make sense to me. All these technologies have their own advantages, and we should use each where it's most effective.
Firstly, there is the traditional concern of the green movement with nuclear waste and nuclear weapons proliferation. Nuclear advocates say these concerns are misplaced because of nuclear technology innovations (although its not clear how close the new technology is to wide deployment).
Secondly, there is an economic and free-market concern. Nuclear power plants generally only get built in highly regulated, centrally planned electricity markets with a great deal of Government financial support.
The projects to build them, at least in modern Western states, tend to be complex, expensive and prone to overruns. These projects generally need the plants to run all the time with guaranteed rates for the business case to stack up.
This is entirely at odds with solar and wind, which are highly democratised -- your Aunty can put solar on her roof -- and even when deployed at 'grid scale' tend to suck the profits out of wholesale electricity markets, because they have the lowest short-run costs and always out bid other energy sources.
In deregulated electricity markets renewables plus gas beat nuclear on price. We need storage to push gas out of the market.
Or are you arguing that Westerns should adopt solar so that African villagers get slightly cheaper solar? That seems like an inefficient form of aid.
On a side note: solar is not cheap on a small scale, it might be convenient, green, safe, etc. but not cheap (cheap infers low cost versus conventional power generation)
And narrowly measuring "cheap" in cost per kwh does not address my point - that the up-front cost to get power at all is far cheaper for solar/wind + storage. A village is not a city. It doesn't need a gigantic power plant, and can't afford one. Look at it this way - I could buy myself a can of soda for a buck, or I could buy a bottling plant for a million bucks. In terms of cost-per-liter, the bottling plant is a huge bargain. But I don't need a bottling plant! It's actually useless to me. A can of soda? That's useful, and scaled correctly for my budget and needs.
I don't think this is hard to understand.
I argue against wind and wind alone, it is a very unreliable source of energy, I think it is crazy to rely on gusts of wind to power a population. Nuclear is the only technology which offers a base load without burning fossils.
Solar I am happy with, it could be better than nuclear but the storage problem needs solving before it gets onto everyone's roof.
That's another problem with solar, people are putting up fields of the stuff when there is already enough roof space. In my mind large retail shops should be mandated to fill their roofs with solar.
First, nuclear can be extremely inefficient since it's heavily centralized : I have friends working for energy distributors telling me they can lose more than half the energy between the power plant and the client's house.
More importantly, nuclear waste disposal and power plant cleaning costs are heavily underestimated. I've worked for the CEA, the French nuclear agency where they invented the first French atomic bomb and reactor in the sixties, and some experiments aren't still cleaned up yet in 2010's (the current objective is to fully clean up the laboratory in 2025-2040). That is a massive cost which is not factored into the kW price.
I think decentralized technologies are the way to go regarding energy (using local loops and "smart grids") even if they aren't viable now (solar panels cost more in energy to produce than they give back during exploitation for example).
You don't need baseload. It's a concept that makes sense when you have power plants with flat output profiles.
What you actually need is to always match the demand. Nuclear isn't some magical silver bullet here. As it turns out, it's simply far too expensive to use for fulfilling the daily peak demands.
We're turning a bandwidth problem into a caching problem. That's the game-changer.
Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just build transmission lines, more solar/wind, and more storage even if it were marginally more expensive just to avoid the headaches of nuclear energy.
Wind and solar, like nuclear, have costs dominated by capital cost, but with less predictable output. To run civilization on those alone, we'd need quite a bit more storage, to cover times when it's cloudy and still for a couple weeks. Long-distance transmission helps but that's not free either.
Particularly now that Gen III+ plants are on the market, fast reactors are maturing (in Russia at least), and half a dozen startups are working on molten salt reactors, I wouldn't take nuclear off the table. We need every non-carbon energy source we can get.
PV Solar is also vary steady in the areas you would put it. (AKA not the South Pole.) Storage is useful, but transporting power over distance is much more useful than you might think.
Finally, Hydro has a lot of built in storage allowing you to double output for weeks at a time.
Now, new small fission reactor R&D may work out differently, but we have yet to see any of those efforts come out of the gate in terms of being even close to ready-to-install states.
You'll never be able to compete with that, fission, fusion, whatever. We still don't know where to put the waste, we still refuse to acknowledge the ability to reprocess said waste, and so forth. You don't even need more storage to run wind and solar as base load; you simply need to overbuild capacity and maintain a sufficiently intelligent transmission network. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere.
Solar and wind will win the day.
Under any scenario, you're going to need some kind of power grid. That grid is going to have a non-zero "base" load as batteries charge, etc. Nuclear is perfect for generating this base load - it's reliable, clean and not subject to the variability that solar and wind are. Don't get me wrong, solar and wind are going to be a big part of the grid, but you want diversification of technology so that if you have a cloudy, but not very windy day, the grid can still keep up.
Also, fission reactors are being miniaturized, and at the timescale we're talking about, fusion may be an option as well. I don't think nuclear will be 50% of energy generation or anything, but it's a good, reliable technology that can supply a consistent amount of energy in any weather conditions.
(On the flip side, we're in one of the world's best areas for wind and tidal power.)
The point is, the far north (think Scandinavia, Russia, the UK) really needs non-solar. And the far-far north is a lousy environment to go out and fix a broken wind turbine. So there's probably a role for nuclear there.
There may also be a role for nuclear in shipping, although civil nuclear shipping peaked early (in the 1950s/60s) and the only folks currently doing much of it are the military and the Russian arctic icebreaker fleet. If oil becomes too expensive for propulsion, nuclear may be necessary as backup for wind power (sails and weather satellites work great together -- until you're becalmed).
The interesting thing here is probably the change over time. In 2005 the distribution was 72 TWh (hydro), 70 TWh (nuclear), 0.9 TWh (wind), 12 TWh (other). With wind growing by 13x and the others staying relatively static, and energy use going down slightly. [1] There is quite a lot of variance per year, as the winter weather changes energy consumption quite significantly.
Electricity export has gone from about zero (2005-2007) to 15 TWh (2012-2014).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sweden
"Solar + a small battery may get someone in Germany to 70%, and someone in Southern California to 85%, but the amount of storage you need to deploy to increase that reliability goes up steeply as you approach 99.99%."
I believe the same logic applies to grid-scale storage. Getting rid of those reliable, dispatchable base-load nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants is going to be very expensive.
I think that's a simplistic view. Yes there is tremendous energy in the movements of air in the atmosphere, and water in the seas, even more in the daily exposure to sunlight, and quite a bit in the geologic forces operating in the earth's interior. That's all well and good, but what matters in terms of powering a modern civilization is energy density, portability, and durability. Electric power isn't going to get a lot more portable than it is now. Storage improvements will make it more durable. But in terms of density the only sources we have are heat cycle sources dependent on fossil and nuclear fuels. Storage advances don't magically make renewable sources dense enough to replace the power we now get from non-renewable sources.
Edit: I should also have mentioned the obvious non-heat cycle source, hydro, which is dense enough in some places to be a very significant contributor.
The point is that wind energy is too diffuse and the capital costs of tying up that much land in wind generators is astronomical - and there is a very real degradation in site quality as you use up all the good sites first. It's pointless to say it's always windy somewhere, because transmission losses and costs make that unfeasible.
Solar is even worse because at even the best site on the best day you only get 50% of energy generation time, so event with perfect storage you have to have 2x the generation capability.
All this is the reason why - even right now with massive subsidies and compensation and special protection from environmental standards other developments have to adhere to - wind and solar account for about 1% of worldwide energy generation.
There is a limited role of grid top-up for solar and wind, but the future of energy generation is not either of them. The near term is in more efficient and less polluting modern gas and coal plants, with conventional nuclear filling increasing in use to provide clean energy without airborne pollution.
If the public can ever get over three decades of nuclear hysteria, that is.
Just cutting electricity usage to zero emission would mitigate the worst of global warming.
Also it doesn't solve anything for space travel which I don't believe are going to be put on hold.
But it will definitely be great.
You still need to get better return on capital before wind and solar are competitive on cost alone. Wind turbines don't last forever (and are hard to recycle well, since they need to be made of tough materials, which leads to some interesting but probably scalability-limited schemes to reuse old blades for things like bus shelters and playground equipment -- look up Wikado Playground in Copenhagen, for instance) and neither do solar panels.
Maybe that's also something they'll fix "in the long run" but it's really not a fundamentally different class of future-problem than improved storage.
Energy is big business, revenue will be there for servicing once market share is there.
The cost should be lower for a utility to do this than for individual homeowners to do so for equal capacities.
So I ask are we seeing this behavior?
On a slightly different note, it doesn't seem that the article is addressing vehicles. Battery powered cars are not yet practical enough for the mainstream, and aircraft are still entirely dependent on the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels.
I could see batteries becoming feasible for cars "soon" with the current rate of advance, but charging stations don't make sense to me. You want easily accessed battery packs in cars and battery-swap stations. This is a huge infrastructure change, but for out-of-city travel (i.e. a trip where you would need to charge before you get to your destination), you want the equivalent of a gas station, which is 1-10 minutes for a stop, not 45+.
As for aircraft, I don't see them using batteries soon.
Not quite "energy arbitrage", but ~hour long "frequency regulation" that was apparently once the domain of natural gas peaker plants are now being handled by a few flywheel energy storage designs.
"Energy Arbitrage" over a 24-hour period could be next.
I appreciate that 'time is money' and people want to get where they are going sooner rather than later... but I wonder if there are social benefits from a transport infrastructure that requires us to stop for 45 minutes to recharge, not just the car but the body? Could potentially result in fewer road fatalities from fatigue if technology enforces a break on drivers? And potential economic benefits for small towns to offer charging stations right by a place to buy a meal...
Would they be able to outweigh the social benefits (and reduced energy use) of traveling 45 minutes slower?
Hence my question. Do we actually see any utilities making steps in this direction?
If it really were possible, you'd see companies like Exelon attaching battery storage to their nuke and coal plants to feed it back at a profit during peak rate periods.
My guess is that isn't cheaper than using peaker plants yet.
The other issue is that our current infrastructure isn't designed for peer-to-peer transmission, with neighborhoods pumping large amounts of power into the transmission lines during peak solar hours. Some areas of Hawaii have had to put a moratorium on installing rooftop solar to prevent potential damage to the branch circuits.
Long story short, it's not simply a matter of storage costs undercutting retail power costs, there are also maintenance costs for the grid that are invariant on demand, which will have to get paid one way or the other.
It'll be interesting to see if if PSH ever really takes off, or if it really does get left in the dust by batteries and other things.
It's cheap, effective, scalable, and highly efficient.
It's also got limited sites and localized environmental impacts.
Where you been hiding?
Battery - 0.7%
Compressed Air - 0.5%
Concentrated Solar Power Storage - 1.3% (which doesn't always exactly count)
Flywheels - 0.2%
Pumped Storage - 97.4%
You can also see that the average operational year for pumped storage is 1974, not anytime recent. You could weight the years by capacity, but most plants are pretty big, and it shouldn't change it too much. Also, pumped storage capacity only totals 21.6GW.
As for where I've been, I've just been stupidly busy. I keep meaning to jump back in, but I never seem to have the time.
Missing in the math is logic. If enough people do this, the price will even out and the arbitrage opportunity will vanish.
It's like an arbitrage trading a model that makes money when paper trading but loses money when live because the effects of live trades on the market wasn't considered.
Also electricity companies would be very slow to adjust to reduced demand by lowering prices, making this work for longer than a naive analysis would predict.
Spotting a leftover cookie on the table means you will probably be able to get a free cookie. It doesn't mean that you have found a way to solve world hunger.
It's not perfect, but those natural gas plants will still be kept around as peaking plants and they're an order of magnitude cleaner than coal plants (as well as producing much less CO2 per unit of power generated).
Electricity in our homes is so widespread and popular because it just works. We don't need to think short-term about how or when we use it (although we should and can if you want to). You flip a switch, the light comes on, and you flip the switch again when you're done.
In my mind, there are only two factors that need to be there for widespread adoption: the price needs to come down, and the battery or other storage medium needs to just disappear into the background of in-home electricity usage. Most people will just want to see a lower bill without any costs to their ease of use regarding electricity.
Every time I hear about advances in renewable energy I get a little sad. I've rented for the last decade plus, and unless I get married and decide to settle down, will probably continue to rent for the next decade plus.
Homeownership would allow me to take advantage of these sorts of advances, but so would the ability to take advantage of this as a renter.
Looks like only ~35% of US households rent, according to http://www.nmhc.org/Content.aspx?id=4708%20 , so perhaps that's why.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Pumped hydro is unbelievable. Tour a pumped hydro facility if you ever get the chance, and ask about the economics. They're buying a dollar of energy at night in Spring and selling it on hot summer days for something like five hundred. (Probably not quite that much, but it was a crazy ratio, to the point where efficiency barely matters - also, free energy from rain!)
> Most flow battery companies have $100 / kwh capital cost as a target
With typical power plants generating e.g. 500 MW 24 hours long, the storage is going to be 100000 $/MWh * 500 MW = 50M/hour. If we assume that a solar plant generates power for 12 hours, and the batteries feed the consumers for 12 more hours, it's going to be 600M for storage alone. The solar power plant with a peak power well above 500MW (to feed the day load + charge the batteries for the night) will cost you extra.
I still think that a Thorium molten salt reactor is a strong contender in a price landscape like this. (It also has a nice ability to burn our current stockpiles of radioactive waste from Uranium reactors.)
By rough calculation, if 10% of cars in my city (Perth, Australia) were electric, their batteries could supply the entire city's demand for duration of about 2 hours (or 10% of demand for 20 hours etc). This could work really well for demand balancing and peak shaving - overcapacity (which in Perth is massive, since the policy is to maintain supply even on extremely hot days, when demand shoots up and generation capacity goes down) and spinning reserve could be tremendously reduced.
I suspect some good software and a little hardware will be needed to account for the owners' needs optimally.
Grid transmission can be as low as 0.5% per 100 miles already. Batteries lose about 10% of the energy by storing it, that leaves you with needing to go at least 2000 miles in order to make up the battery loss difference, plus needing the energy to move the batteries physically.
We could repurpose those oil pipelines we no longer need. :-)
We already do that with alkaline batteries, and we pay premium price per BTU because of the convenience of begin able to carry small quantities of electricity around. But if you want to move city-powering amounts of it (think millions of Megawatt-hour), I am guessing a grid is more efficient.
Nuclear is not getting cheaper, not significantly, so what does this imply for the next five years? The answers are obvious, and non nuclear.
New Zealand, where I live, declared itself nuclear free in 1984. We are currently generating 70-80% of our electricity using renewable/low/zero emission methods.
The big advantage of nuclear is it's relatively safe and readily available. How many people have been killed in nuclear related incidents in the past 30 years vs people killed in coal mines, for instance?
Regarding France, that argument works both ways.
And whatever advantages nuclear may or may not have, that doesn't matter if it's too expensive.
Back when I was an Engineering Technician my thermo fluids lecturer commented that if the main reservoir for the labs compressed air system burst it would flatten the entire lab block.
/r/april30th2015
There's resource limitations on lithium ion, lest we run into the same scenario.
When you read a comment like the above, your response shouldn't be to demand for sources, your response should be to go research the topic on your own.
This site would be much better if folks understood that HN itself isn't a place for someone to "get wonky".
On my debate team, we had a rule of "no wonking". HN would be a better place if it too had the same rule.
There are definitely a lot of knowledgable people who read this site. Why wouldn't you want them to contribute and take deeper dives? Superficial conversations are essentially noise.
Yes, i.e. discovery of "unknown unknowns".
