401–410 of 435 posts
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Thanks, but sadly doesn't work on this laptop, (UK keyboard), hence taking the lazy option.
You are writing in English and quoting an English statement, why not use the native ("") quoting style ?
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Which is not a problem in designs that incorporate passive safety (FAST, slow wave).
Or already tested out (including in an accident ) SVBR design... unfortunately, other than the geopolitical issues, it is partially locked by low supply of bismuth (it has a variant without bismuth, but it's not without downsides, iirc)
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Because they at least can store months worth of gas/oil/coal on their own territory.
You can store months worth of hydrogen from electrolysis too.
I don't think that all these are true.
Yes, the technology definitely exists.
But as far as I know there's no country (yet) that has existing infrastructure that merely needs some upgrades (with the effort for these upgrades being significantly smaller than the total effort that went into building the existing infrastructure or would be necessary for building completely new infrastructure) to enable storing of months worth of hydrogen.
So I wouldn't support the claim "You can store months worth of hydrogen ...".
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Is it? Are you taking into account battery degradation from 1 cycle every day? The vast majority of battery chemistries won't last more than 3-4 years under those circumstances, and those that would are either much more expensive or experimental. As of now storing 10kWh at 1kW costs around 1000$ from the cells alone. If you're changing them every 3 years then you have to spend 10 000$/kW over 30 years whereas nuclear…
> battery chemistries Ah, you're focused on chemical batteries. Hauling a lot of water up a mountain at times of low demand, and releasing it through a turbine at times of high demand, is a type of battery; it seems to me a reasonable approach to smoothing supply and demand for wind/solar. I agree that it's going to be a long time before grid-scale chemical batteries can help much with demand-smoothing.
Pumped hydro is promising but it's going to be as expensive as regular hydro.
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Battery backed solar/wind is cheaper than nuclear these days. It's not been that way for long though. Economic grid scale batteries are here but still relatively new. It makes sense to continue running old nuclear plants but not to build new ones. Much too expensive.
Is it? Are you taking into account battery degradation from 1 cycle every day? The vast majority of battery chemistries won't last more than 3-4 years under those circumstances, and those that would are either much more expensive or experimental. As of now storing 10kWh at 1kW costs around 1000$ from the cells alone. If you're changing them every 3 years then you have to spend 10 000$/kW over 30 years whereas nuclear…
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
And gas is a lot cheaper than nuclear.
Theres a new battery backed solar plant in california that can service the early evening peak times with cheaper electricity than coal.
Battery prices have been plummeting consistently for the last three years.
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Or, if you want: Not building twice as many (wind/anything) was a major mistake. Nuclear power plants fail sometimes, just like the wind fails. In 2016 almost a third of the plants in France were offline at the same time, some for planned maintenance, some unplanned, and the peak prices were higher than now. All these things are fixable by overbuilding enough. There's nothing special or magic about nuclear.
> There's nothing special or magic about nuclear. Apart from the technology, safety profile and generally being the cleanest source of energy ever discovered. And being able to stockpile enormous amounts of energy in a small heap if necessary ^^. And if we could just convince people to accept it only causing say, half as much damage as coal it would be ridiculously cheap too. These appallingly high safety standards a…
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Calling it one grid is kind of misleading. There is nowhere near enough transmission if all power production in say Spain failed even if in theory there is enough excess capacity across the EU to provide power to Spain. Limits on transmission result in individual countries generally having significantly different wholesale prices.
Isn't that the case with a grid of any size? The British grid has a North - South imbalance, if I understand that correctly 20% of power would be lost with a 1500km transmission distance. Replacing all the power of Spain would be very inefficient, even if the connections did exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain) (Power Flow section)
Over 1500km you can keep losses under 10%, but building infrastructure isn’t free. East to West links tend to work better because you can time shift demand and thus build fewer power plants.
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Batteries are so expensive that it is unclear whether they will ever solve the large scale storage problem: yes they're getting cheaper, but they have to continue to get cheaper for a long time before they're suitable, and it's unclear whether fundamental limits will be hit before that. If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main…
Batteries are not supposed to solve the large scale storage problem. They're best at solving the small scale storage problem. Recently they solved the problem of small scale storage on wheels. > If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy. Batteries are not the only way of storing electricity.
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"Net exporter" doesn't really matter for the specific conversation at hand. A better way to quantify grid health would be to identify periods of peak demand across northwestern/central Europe, and then tally who is selling power to whom at those inflated prices. I have solar panels on my home, as do most of the homes in my neighborhood. However, we recently had to have a natural gas substation built adjacent to the c…
Just out of curiosity, assuming your internal batteries are charged to the max (e.g. after a sunny day), about how long can you go if it starts snowing or is very cloudy, before you need to start pumping in natural gas? Maybe my understanding of how it all works using your own solar panel and the neighborhood's gas lines is too simplistic, though, to answer.
The solar panels just feed power into the grid. This is the standard model used all over the Western US.
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Nuclear and renewables don't play well together. It really is an antagonist relationship for fundamental reasons.
Would anyone happen to know what those reasons are?