Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

At this point, the untested "future tech" is nuclear. Storage is far more reliably produced than nuclear, and its silly to pretend otherwise when we have extremely robust supply chains for storage that produce absolutely massive amounts, whereas nuclear just creeps along with failures and schedule delays and excuse after excuse after excuse.

Nuclear is not a serious tech, it's barely a tech at all because it gets more expensive rather than cheaper the more we discover about it. Almost an anti-technology in fact, mostly a boondoggle to fund decrepit contractors that have killed subways and transit and all sorts of other construction in the Western world.

Current lithium ion storage production is at 200-300 GWh/year, which, with daily discharge is 8-12 nuclear reactors' worth of energy. Per year. And this capacity is growing 10x every 5 years, and massively dropping costs. Every. Single. Year. Nuclear is an absolute joke compared to that.

So, during summer, you don't need to pay to have ammonia shipped in. During winter, on occasions when wind threatens to die down for longer than your stock of ammonia will last you, you order a shipment.

What you wrote does not make sense.

On the prices, I haven't heard much optimistic news, the last I heard was at best, parity with current lithium ion prices:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...

But that was five years ago, and as a manufactured product perhaps they can achieve better pricing over time.

Lithium ion has no disadvantages for stationary storage, and it has one absolutely massive advantage: there are lots of higher-margin uses driving production scales up, and manufacturing costs down.

If the dropping price of lithium ion batteries suddenly opens up new markets that are so huge, that demand can not be met, prices plateau for a long time, then I hope that other technologies can catch up. But as it is I see little chance for other chemistries or technologies to scale to match lithium ion in the near term future. I'm perhaps hopeful for iron-air batteries from Form Energy, but that's only because their management team has lots of hot shots, and not as much because they have an innate technical advantage. At this point in time, execution is everything, and there's precious few people with the executive capacity and the names that would allow them to attract sufficient capital to compete with the lithium ion juggernauts.

(I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong. And I have been proven wrong on my skeptical tech takes in the past, so I know I'm not invincible here.)

Sorry but that's just theory next to propaganda in the sense that we can play math games like "hey but you produce 120-130% of the total energy you need", yes, only I need energy on 24h so while theoretically I produce more than I consume in practice evening-night-early-morning-noSunnyDays I use the grid or I need a stable source of energy, that's to say how certain analyses are just optimistic math often commissioned to back some PR target with something that appear science.

"Thermal Energy Storage" is just an experiment no one know if can work in production and on scale, "Pumped storage power plants" is classic mountain hydro, VERY effective, but need mountains and water, for instance just Swiss and Norway who NORMALLY have plenty of both this summer have had significant issues due to water shortages, they import more energy to backup, energy coming mostly from nuclear (Sweden and France) and a bit from oil&gas, "kinetic rotational mass storage" are classic flywheel UPS, something we have almost abandoned because of costs and very small effectiveness, they do not "store" for long, like ultra-condensers they can be just quick stabilizer who can cover 1-3' short spikes letting other systems have time to ramp up or down, hydrogen is a recurrent myth some try to sell, nothing we will ever seen on scale etc.

Long story short: you collected some scientific evidence, that's scientific, positive, but in practice is just a theoretical game. I've experience the same in my small setup: in theory microgrid stability is assured, Victron even say their MultiPlus is a pure-sine-wave UPS quick enough for the entire house and under certain condition most of the time is true, unfortunately there are also some other conditions, not so rare, and that's why in practice I have to keep small UPS for home rack and desktop FORMALLY uselessly redundant.

At grid scale is even worse: we predict enough to speculate how much energy we will produce with a very good precision but we can't predict instantaneous variations, or to simplify given an hour timeframe we can predict what's up in the means in such hour, but we can't predict many peaks during that time. Keeping the grid practically stable so far means rolling blackouts: when too many loads appear we cut some to lower the total load keeping the frequency up enough, when too many goes down we cut-out some generators to keep the frequency low enough, statistically it's very well, we guarantee stability in 99% of the case, blackouts tend to be just few minutes per localized area etc. In practice is just like 1.x℃ global warming is a mean value that means for some areas +10/+15℃ in summer, witch have a VERY DIFFERENT face at such zoom level.

Your operator can say "hey we just have had a ∑ of 99.99999% of reliable works on scale, unfortunately the nearby hospital have had to put many UPSes to avoid the "just a minute" blackouts that happen weekly and heavily impact their IT tools. Some again optimistically respond "but hey, you just need a PowerWall, a vehicle-to-load application!" yes, on scale. Try to compute how much backups we need for a manufacturing plant with CNCs operating 24/7/365 or just for apartments where there is no room to install such systems physically. Doing so it's very USA: being optimistic, project yourself and fix on the go or fail and restart. For a company who can fail that's work, for a society is a recipe for disasters so ample that's CRIMINAL trying at such speed and manner.

Being "smart" like having a parallel data network quick enough, with enough bandwidth, with enough IT safety and reliability, with all electricity producer and consumers just tell "I need xkW in y time" and get "we ramp up production for you" theoretically can be a game changer, I do not even imaging how such monster can be built and maintained. Not only: we need such system on scale, witch means substituting 100% off all equipment. Did you have experienced some large-scale changes like shifting from analog terrestrial television or radio to digital? Now try to imaging how much we need electricity 24/7/365 respects of TV/radio.