~~And which storage system is that?~~ (parent post was edited with links after my response)
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.
> "By comparison, the US uses 12,500 TWh of electricity daily"
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.
Just because CATL can manufacture LFP cells at $80/kWh doesn't mean the end-to-end system is available at that price. Home battery storage is nowhere near $80 or even $100 per kWh. It's at $500-$1000/kWh. Tesla Powerwall 2 has the best price per kWh available on the market, at $560/kWh. Inverters able to handle the currents necessary for turning on an electric oven are in the thousands. Installation costs are in the thousands. And then, these batteries do not last forever - they're rated at 3000-5000 cycles
If we imagine a near-future scenario - a battery powered house heated with heat pumps, driving an electric car, during central European foggy winter, which tends to last for about a week at a time. Let's say they use 60kWh/day. We're looking at $100k just for the batteries and installation, even assuming electricity comes free. In ~15-20 years, the batteries reach their recommended cycle life, requiring a choice of another $100k or accepting that what used to be a 3-day storage becomes 2-day
This is not some "extreme situation". It's a completely predictable scenario that recurs with near 100% probability every single year. Then there are places like Ganges river, Bangladesh or Indonesia, home to hundreds of millions of people, where neither solar, nor wind is viable (and land is scarce)
Those prices for home storage units are the price we pay for not having significant domestic LFP production. Maybe making a cheap battery unit is harder that I think but to me it sure looks like there isn't a lot of serious competition in that space, otherwise the units would correspond better to battery costs. (And why would you try to build a company around a product that some Chinese company can make the product at a cheaper cost because they have access to the necessary patents on more favorable terms? Maybe everyone knows that and is staying away, at least until LFP cells become a thing anyone in the world can buy at roughly-equal prices.)
I think it's useful to think in terms of cars. I'm actually doing an EV conversion right now, and I have a motor controller that puts out about 100 kilowatts of 3-phase AC. It came with the motor so I don't have an exact price, but fair market value is probably around $1500. (That's retail cost in quantities of one. Wholesale cost is presumably somewhat less.) It weighs maybe ten pounds or so. That's adequate to power probably about a dozen houses. I don't know if it puts out a sine wave or a square wave. Even if it's the latter, you could imagine a hundred of these things putting out square waves with, say, randomly-varying pulse width and having it average out to a sine wave. There's probably better ways to do that, but anyways the point is that we do have the capacity to switch enormous amounts of power in a very small package for pretty low cost. It's actually kind of amazing.
Maybe if the batteries feed into an HVDC line or they're co-located with a solar plant, then you don't even need to deploy more inverters.
A battery management system for my conversion is a little over a thousand dollars for a setup with about 48 cells. In a big installation you could amortize BMS costs by using bigger cells, or placing them in parallel groups -- the downside being that it might take longer to notice if a cell is going bad. My BMS is made by a company that caters to EV conversions; they're doing low-volume sales. A major utility ordering the equivalent for hundreds of thousands of cells probably can get a nice volume discount.
As far as foggy winters go: renewable energy needs to be traded over a wide geographical area. Purely local generation doesn't really make sense, unless you have some useful purpose for unpredictable amounts of surplus energy. Wind power would need to be a part of it. Even fossil fuels are a reasonable option as long as they're not used very often. Running natural gas plants for a week or two in the dead of winter or in case of grid disruptions seems like a reasonable use of fossil fuels. Indonesia has a lot of land outside of Java. Even Java is pretty sparsely populated outside of cities. Most of it is jungle which we'd like them to keep and farms, but solar doesn't need to take up a huge percentage of available land. Even solar panels on roofs can go a long way.
LFP is also actually the perfect battery for urban transportation in tropical countries. Their low cost and economics would ensure a big transformation in coming years because few people understand the tremendous impact they have on lifecycle cost (due to high no of cycles).
I personally feel that in 10 years in India it will be cheaper to rent an electric car running on LFP for trips < 300 km along with a driver (cheaper here) than buy your own car.
> Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage.
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:
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.
So 3 years from now, global lithium ion battery production will add up to ~3 hours of USA's electricity consumption? If we stop building EVs, electronics, etc. and dedicate all lithium ion battery production worldwide to grid storage in the US for 8 years we'll have enough for 1 day of electricity storage. Just for the USA. And how much storage we actually need? For 0% fossil fuel usage, some estimates place storage demands as high as 3 weeks [1]. This is still far from viable, even if the predictions hold true.
It's also ignoring that electricity usage is predicted to increase substantially worldwide as countries develop, and that these predictions of lithium ion battery production might not pan out. It'd also severely delay adoption of electric vehicles, as battery capacity is being diverted to grid storage away from EVs.
You usually oversize your production in renewable and get extra energy in your peak production.
Here in Quebec we have a new tarification and smart water heater, house heating that do peak shaving.
Some industries will have access to almost free energy in peak production period and will have incentives to do something valuable with it
Charging of EV will certainly play a role too.
Still nuclear can be useful if some country are able to build them fast enough and cheap enough.
3 hours of storage is massive, and enable super high penetration of renewables, above 80% of electricity generation.
Even the much vaunted France doesn't have 80% nuclear on their grid.
Plus, energy storage production capacity is growing at an exponential rate. It's doubtful that we could grow our nuclear construction crews at that pace.
It's going to be very hard to nuclear to scale as fast as renewables and storage are, if there's even an economic case to be made for nuclear construction, and somebody finally solves the logistic problems of large construction projects in the modern Western world.
We know we can build storage and renewables, but we don't know how to build nuclear anymore, and none, absolutely none, of the nuclear proponents have any proposals to fix it. The best is an entirely new type of small reactor that has been rejects in the past because of its high per unit cost. Perhaps it will work, but who knows? It's a big risk, whereas storage and renewables are a sure bet.
It really isn't. For reference, across Europe we're currently having a meteorological phenomenon with bad weather, clouds, little wind, and low temperatures. It has been ongoing since ~october and is projected to continue into the winter. When Texas was hit with terrible weather last year, it lasted a few days. Multi-day storms, which take out solar and wind, aren't unheard of. 3 hours of storage is OK to even out things, but isn't nowhere near close enough to guarantee reliable electricity.
The numbers I've seen say you need ~12 hours of storage to support 80% solar/wind generation composition and 2 weeks to hit 100%. And we're just talking about the US right now. What about the rest of the world?
Personally I think small mass manufacturable fission reactors are the best bet but why are we hung up on either/or? We should aggressively pursue both nuclear and solar/wind generation.
I agree that we should invest in both. But it is not as easy as waving a magic wand. Energy project development is a complicated dance between local power market regulators, local and federal incentives, private investors, and shovel ready/cost-effective technology. And in the rare occasions when congress opens up the wallet, it is a small pie that everyone is fighting over, so the lobbyists start slinging arrows.
The fact is, nuclear can and will be a really great addition to the energy mix. But there are models out there that show that we can build a carbon free grid without it. The big question mark is on the future cost of storage. The consensus is that those costs are going to come down considerably. If so, then going all in on renewables likely gets us to a carbon free grid faster. But this is also a very US centric take. For example China likely has much easier road to rolling out nuclear (less regulatory hurdles, less local interference/input). Where as in the US, I am sure we can build a big national pro-nuclear movement, but the second someone proposes a real life project, the NIMBY's will come out of the woodwork.
> (less regulatory hurdles, less local interference/input)
This is not the current hurdle when it comes to more nuclear in the US or Europe. Nuclear is very welcome where it is currently under construction, and there's no regulatory reason that these sites have all become construction disasters, it's just bad execution of the reactors.
Even China's attempts to build the French EPR design took twice as long to build as they had estimated initially, and we don't really know how much more in cost.
Nuclear's path to new reactors begins with being able to build on a reliable schedule without exorbitant cost. There are many sites that would welcome more nuclear that would not have NIMBY problems, there's just no one willing to bear all the risk of finding that unicorn contractor that can actually build.
This same problem was also evident during the late 1970s and early 1980s nuclear projects. There was NIMBYism back then affecting projects, but there was also lots of construction malpractice that resulted in big cost overruns. US utilities can not bear the construction risk of a $10B project. Few entities can.
> Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024
But we need all of that to electrify transportation, so where do you get the ones for the power grid?
Also, what happens to the price of batteries if you get rid of baseload and cause demand for batteries to spike much higher than even the increased amount of battery production capacity?
Because we simply are unable to do so fast enough. China recently started a massive, largest in the world project to add 150 plants over the next 15 years. That's 10 reactors annually, or an estimated 10GW using the current 49.6GW from 50 units they have already.
Adjusted for capacity factor this is maybe going to keep up with solar deployment, but definitely not with wind capacity growth in the same country. And China has been the world leader in nuclear deployment for a while now.
Renewables win on a "worse is better" basis - yes, they're intermittent, but they're cheap and deploy in a matter of months without too many specialists involved.
You didn't explain why we shouldn't do both. Just because it takes a long time doesn't matter. If we want to ensure we have consistent energy production then nuclear should be built. Even if we can build a massive amount of storage it may not be enough. Global warming is supposed to cause extreme weather. Why not create nuclear which can work regardless of weather?
Excellent point. Peak electricity consumption occurs during the evenings when solar is producing little, if any, electricity. Daily fluctuations of electricity usage put an even greater demand on electricity storage.
Due to AC usage, electricity demand tends to be much higher in the summers than in the winters. And the demand profile in the summers peaks in mid-late afternoon. i.e You are not looking at the highest overall peak of the year, just the hourly peaks from the last few days.
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.
Overbuilding renewables (and accepting seasonal curtailment), utility scale battery and hydro storage, and HVDC transmission and robust interconnections between grids/systems. Whatever is left will be a pragmatic amount of natural gas/green hydrogen/ammonia mix for combustion.
> 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.
Woopty doo, you don’t “technically” need nuclear power to go carbon neutral.
If it shaves a decade or two off the process isn’t it worth it? Eventually you can start retiring nuclear plants, but in the mean time isn’t it better to focus on the carbon issue?
> Most experts agree that Sanders is correct that it’s technologically possible to decarbonize the grid without using nuclear power. But many researchers also say keeping nuclear on the table makes decarbonization easier and more likely.
> But technically possible is not the same as practically feasible, or the most cost-effective. In that regard, many, although not all, researchers say nuclear — or something like it — is likely to be necessary to some degree. And even if nuclear is ultimately not needed, they say, the safer strategy is not to exclude it.
But what does "technically" mean?
> “All the evidence says it is possible to decarbonize the energy system in the U.S. without using nuclear power,” said Jones. But, he added, there are cases, such as places that don’t have good wind resources, in which building new nuclear plants can reduce the cost of decarbonizing. Depending on the region, he said, “getting to 100% renewable energy is either very expensive or necessitates significant new transmission to import resources from elsewhere.”
> That’s where nuclear can be helpful. It doesn’t have to be nuclear — Jones said carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, for example, would also work. Sanders’ plan, notably, specifically excludes CCS.
> A large number of scenarios expanded nuclear power, Shindell said, to around double today’s level. He estimated that 90% of the scenarios included nuclear capacity above today’s level, and just one or two scenarios phased out nuclear entirely by 2100.
And the article, that YOU LINKED, goes on like this. I feel like you are being very disingenuous. I don't think anyone (or at least anyone that is informed, but then again that's probably too much to expect here given comments), is saying that nuclear is _absolutely_ necessary. I do think people are saying that it is much easier and cheaper if it is included within the solution. I do think people mischaracterize the arguments though and frame it as "all nuclear" vs "all renewables" but the truth is that both those solutions are absurd. We want a mixture and what that mixture is is going to depend on the region and country that is producing power. It is rather complicated and nuanced and the conversations typically don't acknowledge this.
Maybe part of the problem here is scientific lingo. We say "technically" and "possible" a lot of times, even if our confidence intervals are pretty small. This is something we can work on, but it is often to avoid infighting because someone else will argue "but 'technically' it is possible, just really unlikely/difficult" and you'll have to concede. You'll see this in any "nerd debate".
Either way, I'm going to call you out for misrepresenting your source.
To demonstrate that I’m arguing in good faith, I will bet you a $1000 donation to a charity of your choice if any developed country successfully commissions a new commercial nuclear generator (with energy actively supplied to a grid connection), that has not yet broken ground as of today, within ten years of this comment’s timestamp.
I’m not splitting hairs, I’m arguing very clearly that nuclear won’t get built, it won’t be needed, alternatives will meet demand, and that energy consumption and generation modeling by a variety of energy analysts (across commercial and academic institutions) supports my thesis.
You’re not betting directly on either of the issues being discussed though. The person you’re arguing with made no claim that anti-nuclear advocates won’t be successful, only that intermittent renewables plus storage won’t allow hitting near term decarbonization targets. It’s kind of weird for you to win the bet if you’re wrong about the actual issue in the most dire way…
I'm not going to take that bet because I don't have faith in the political will to follow science. That is a more general trend than just climate, mind you. Practically, I do agree with you, that we likely aren't going to see reactors built. But I do want to say that this is contrary to the advice from the scientific community. I do think it is important to push back on claims like yours though, because part of the political will is because a lot of people believe that this is in line with the scientific consensus (again, a common problem and why I call out armchair experts a lot).
That's his thing. He makes broad to the point of indefensible claims, backs them up with a laundry list of tangentially related links, almost always from the news (and we all know how much the news loves to report "the whole truth"), and then when he gets called out he moves goalposts around muddies the waters and does all sorts of tricks that are SOP when arguing in bad faith. If he were not constantly arguing for viewpoints that more or less correlate with the net average HN user his posts would have been defaulted to dead long ago. I think he believes his own BS so it's debatable whether he is technically arguing in bad faith but it sure fails the duck test.
Would you mind pointing out my indefensible claims or where I moved the goalposts? The Lazard LCOE v15 analysis link I posted at top level of this thread specifically shows that solar paired with storage is cheaper than nuclear on a per kwh basis. My other links demonstrate that base load is unnecessary, and also substantiate that renewables and storage are cheaper than nuclear. Finally, if factcheck.org's conversation with various experts demonstrating that nuclear isn't necessary to decarbonize (and my willingness to put $1000 at stake, to demonstrate I'm arguing in good faith, that no new nuclear will be built successfully in the developed world), what evidence would be valid? I'm always happy to provide citations and references, but you can't discuss a topic in good faith with someone if every citation or reference is rejected as "fake news." Some objective observations and truth must be present and agreed upon.
To be frank, it sounds more like you are disgruntled and are unhappy when the facts presented (as well as the general consensus of the forum, as you mention in the comment I'm replying to) don't align with your belief system. I don't mean to be rude by any means, but I'm unable to come to any other conclusion based on my (imho, polite) interactions with you. I do believe my conclusions based on the data I present. Why would I comment and participate if I didn't? I don't take issue if you choose to not engage, but I'd appreciate if you'd tone down the libel and attacks on my character in a public forum if you choose to not bring facts and argue ideas.
Germany should pick this up and pledge to be free of fossil fueled power plants by 2025, banning energy generated from fossil fuels from being bought and consumed.
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.
> pledge to be free of fossil fueled power plants by 2025
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.
The parent post is claiming that the storage solutions are right now cheaper than the alternatives. If they are already here in terms of costs then bringing them online should be fairly quick ordeal.
I agree with you however that it will take much longer than 3 years. Lithium batteries can be done today for the kind of storage solution which they are suitable, but not for wind. The green hydrogen might work, but we have yet to see large scale production and we are nowhere near to have it operate as an alternative to natural gas on a nation scale. Germany should really make an attempt if they wish to take a different path from France, but it will likely take a few decades if its successful.
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).
Although I love the concept, it seems hydrolisis isn't very efficient transforming electrical energy to chemical energy. Until it is ready, it is not ready.
Canadian politicians are pledging to develop blue hydrogen in Alberta. That means transforming hydrocarbons into hydrogen.
Yep, it is as stupid as it sounds. Consume fossil fuels to produce hydrogen and label it blue energy.
Electrolysis is decently efficient (>70%), but turning the Hydrogen back to electricity loses quite a bit. Nevertheless, the real question is cost, not efficiency. As you noted during peak production the electricity is essentially free. If it's cheaper to use existing NG infrastructure to store Hydrogen and run gas turbines with it than building an equivalent amount of batteries, then we should go for it. Given that world lithium battery production is insufficient right now, and different battery chemistries are still experimental, proven technology like electrolysis+gas turbines seems like a good idea.
We are not embarked in a race on efficiency. A system able which is:
- able to store otherwise is wasted energy
- affordable (the total price of this storing-then-reconversion into electricity is OK) is adequate
- storing in adequate volumes
is adequate, even if its total efficiency is below .01
Blue hydrogen isn't good (emission-wise), but may be used as a way to evaluate and enhance what will ultimately be a green (electric energy only produced by renewable used to obtain dihydrogen) system.
Moreover there are quick and decisive progress towards better efficiency.
If you take $1 of electricity and water, you can convert it to $.50 of hydrogen bond energy, and then you can take the hydrogen run it through a fuel cell and get $.25 of electricity. It’s never going to be an alternative to battery chemistry which yields $.95 back.
Please read my other reply published nearby: we are not embarked into an efficiency race. Efficiency (of any renewable-source based system) is a mean, not an end.
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...