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Not building new nuclear power plants in the last 30 years was a major mistake, in terms of energy supply security as well as CO2 emissions.
If we then configure all our electric cars to charge during the day, and discharge from 6pm onwards, we can address a lot of the evening peak.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wind and solar are pretty cheap and storage keeps getting cheaper, that's why they make sense.
We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes...…
Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausible over the scale of a decade or so and we would need that timescale to build the renewables themselves anyway)[0], and the batteries are in addition to existing pumped hydro, and even in the current “low wind” scenario the UK is still getting 3.8 GW (~11%) from wind[1][2] rather than getting nothing.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201
Not building new nuclear power plants in the last 30 years was a major mistake, in terms of energy supply security as well as CO2 emissions.
What about building huge solar plants in Western Sahara and Morocco? The Moroccan Government seems pretty friendly and stable. If we then configure all our electric cars to charge during the day, and discharge from 6pm onwards, we can address a lot of the evening peak.
(I’d go for these and nuclear myself, but nuclear isn’t generally popular and I don’t see that changing).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Some) Advantages of nuclear power in comparison to 'renewables': - EROI (energy return on energy invested) - ratio of land required / energy produced - much lower flow of materials (rare earth etc.) - constant and very high power output (no storage needed)
Well yes, but I'm a bit skeptical that nuclear is also cheaper.
There’s no reason that I’m aware of not to cover the grounds of nuclear power plants in PV.
It would take about 115k square miles of normal solar panels to cover the world energy use (23000TW), this translates to about 340 miles side square of land, I'm sure we could split this to various solar efficient locations and just close the deal with all this hydrocarbons Et al. BS. And can be solar parabolic-through systems instead of PV, no efficiency loss and night thermal storage built in. But of course we'll n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(If you are looking for the angled quotes ('«', '»'), depending on your system and layout, try [RightAlt]+[ ]. There are keyboard layouts using four layers - regular, shifted, alternate and shifted-alternate, together with the combinations (e.g. [RightAlt]+[:], [u] → 'ü') )
Thanks, but sadly doesn't work on this laptop, (UK keyboard), hence taking the lazy option.
Not building new nuclear power plants in the last 30 years was a major mistake, in terms of energy supply security as well as CO2 emissions.
Possibly there are large interconnects between the French and German grids levelling out wholesale prices, but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power for this imagined scenario where nuclear makes a big difference.
Not building new nuclear power plants in the last 30 years was a major mistake, in terms of energy supply security as well as CO2 emissions.
French generation is ~70% nuclear (10% wind/solar) and German is ~10% (~40% wind/solar). Yet their prices track each other closely. So I think this explanation is too simplistic. Possibly there are large interconnects between the French and German grids levelling out wholesale prices, but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power for this imagined scenario where nuclear makes a big difference.
Not building new nuclear power plants in the last 30 years was a major mistake, in terms of energy supply security as well as CO2 emissions.
French generation is ~70% nuclear (10% wind/solar) and German is ~10% (~40% wind/solar). Yet their prices track each other closely. So I think this explanation is too simplistic. Possibly there are large interconnects between the French and German grids levelling out wholesale prices, but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power for this imagined scenario where nuclear makes a big difference.
It would take about 115k square miles of normal solar panels to cover the world energy use (23000TW), this translates to about 340 miles side square of land, I'm sure we could split this to various solar efficient locations and just close the deal with all this hydrocarbons Et al. BS. And can be solar parabolic-through systems instead of PV, no efficiency loss and night thermal storage built in. But of course we'll n…