181–190 of 276 posts
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And you cannot empty the river neither, especially during a drought, can you?
My hunch is evaporative cooling uses not very much water. You could also fill a small dam when the water flow is higher. All means higher cost, of course.
That's nice, but there is a long way to go, also it would probably be better to see batteries as a part of the 'storage' bracket, after all the batteries don't generate electricity, they store it. It's a bit like lumping fields of grain in with bags for grain. The one is useful all by itself, the other can't function without some other generator doing its job first. Typically the use for storage in the form of batter…
We know that when renewables become more than 20% of power generation, every GW of renewables you add should be matched by a similar order of magnitude of batteries.
So if we start reporting this way, you can immediately see if we're building enough energy storage or not.
If you wanted to make the amount of power actually produced comparable you could reduce the amount of reported GW of bother renewables and batteries by 50% so they add up to a realistic capacity number.
But capacity numbers are never really comparable anyway. Perhaps best to report raw numbers and assume readers are smart enough to understand that for every source you need to know the significance of what a "GW" means.
Like, a "GW" of a gas peaker plant does not mean much regarding how much energy it produces. That "GW" is actually much more comparable to battery energy storage "GW"
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The graph looks rather exponential (and decidedly _not_ logarithmic) to me.[0] The story is actually "the growth rate becomes more rapid as you accumulate experience manufacturing , which also grows as a function of the stock." AKA Wright's Law.[1] You may notice this is faster than your definition of exponential growth, because Wright's Law also counts the decommissioned panels too. The industry still got that manuf…
PV has been growing with a time constant short compared to the lifespan of PV modules, so most of the cumulative production is still in operation today. This is also why PV recycling hasn't had a chance to really get going -- very limited potential input to the process yet.
Spangry's "the growth rate becomes more rapid as the stock of the thing gets larger" was confused enough to made exponential growth sound vaguely absurd, but in fact it's perfectly expected (and indeed observed).
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French nuclear power has a levelized cost of about $70/MWh - which is about the same cost as the levelized cost of solar or wind in France, without most the headaches of intermittency. (Remember the average French person lives further north than the average Canadian...)
> which is about the same cost as the levelized cost of solar or wind in France As of 2024. Remember that solar and wind are still on a downward price trajectory and the reduced investment in Nuclear has meant that the prices to up. So if you have a figure for example of $70/MWh for PV and wind in mind from a couple of years ago, then this figure might be slightly outdated now and more slightly outdated tomorrow. PV…
It depends on what it will cost to level out times of no sun.
> Nuclear. Start-up of the fourth reactor (1.1 GW) at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear power plant I checked the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... > Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed in July 2023.[9][10][11] This last report blames the latest increase in costs on the contractor not completing wor…
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French nuclear power is still not particularly economical and they didn’t build as many plants as originally planned because of it, nor do they plan to build a sufficient number of new plants to sustain current capacity over the next decades. France justifies the expense with their nuclear bomb program that benefits from a strong civilian nuclear industry.
French nuclear power has a levelized cost of about $70/MWh - which is about the same cost as the levelized cost of solar or wind in France, without most the headaches of intermittency. (Remember the average French person lives further north than the average Canadian...)
The opposite is true, I think.
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French nuclear power has a levelized cost of about $70/MWh - which is about the same cost as the levelized cost of solar or wind in France, without most the headaches of intermittency. (Remember the average French person lives further north than the average Canadian...)
> which is about the same cost as the levelized cost of solar or wind in France As of 2024. Remember that solar and wind are still on a downward price trajectory and the reduced investment in Nuclear has meant that the prices to up. So if you have a figure for example of $70/MWh for PV and wind in mind from a couple of years ago, then this figure might be slightly outdated now and more slightly outdated tomorrow. PV…
Coal does. According to this IEA table, India and China achieved under $10/MWH
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/levelised...
Calculation of battery capacity one can build for 34B 0.3k$ per 1kWh of battery storage [1] (0.3$/Wh) Battery capacity = 34B$ /(0.3$/Wh) =113.3GWh (1G$=1B$) The 34B battery capacity will be equivalent to 113hours of operation of 1GW power plant. (4.7 days) [1] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf
That's not the main use of grid batteries. The main use of batteries is 1) to soak up power that is otherwise not needed when there's too much of it. 2) to deliver that power back when there's too little of it. This is something that happens very often for typically short amount of times (hours). Batteries help smooth this out. The mistake you are making is only thinking about when there's not enough power. The real…
I think the confusion comes from associating more current capability (parallel) as meaning more power, but the same applies to voltage anyway, so it's not relevant.
Look at the stock prices of the companies installing owning and operating solar and wind farms. They are dogshit. I think the boom is to capture the transmission system capacity near the best wind/solar sites, try and stay in business for the duration of the 20 year energy purchase agreement signed with local utility, and then mergers and aquisitions so that the larger entity can exert leverage upon renewal. Power ou…
Not necessarily a problem; recall that the way economics works is the market will have marginal businesses that are on the verge of being unprofitable to run - so seeing some borderline cases is not troubling. It looks like solar is finally becoming economic; so it is reasonable that the marginal producers right now will be solar farms. But assuming the price trends continue businesses will start to appear that make…
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> no matter what the energy capacity of these battery installations is going to be, running the whole grid on batteries over the periods of low renewable generation is going to require still orders of magnitude more batteries. I live in CA (Bay Area) the solar people just wandered up to my front door to "sell me" the other day. I do want to go solar in light of my PGE bill. The sales guy was super sharp and addressed…
At least a rooftop PV installation breaks even* here in Finland with scarce sun and cheap power. Batteries are not there yet. If you don't need the battery as a UPS, I would wait still a few years before going for a home battery. *: Easily half of the cost is the installation labor. If you can DIY at least parts of it, you can get decent ROI.
Those with homes with solar are going to end up saturating the grid (duck curve) to the point where renters can buy batteries and "coast", through the peaks of power cost.