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For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

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Re: For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

#131

Post by nitwit005 »

contubernio wrote: post #29
mchusma wrote: post #3

I do think the Iran crisis should continue to push countries towards nuclear + solar. Like Ukraine helped shift some in Europe back to supporting nuclear after foolishly shutting down reactors.

The wars in Ukraine and irán have also highlighted what a horrendous insecurity nuclear power plants are. A direct missile attack on one could be catastrophic. The idea that such will never happen is as silly as the idea that there will never be an accident or a tsunami. But passive safety won't stop a missile.

They were designed with that in mind though. They were built to withstand an plane crash or attack.

You may have seen the famous test of ramming a F4 Phantom into a reinforced concrete walls without much effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ

It's certainly possible to blow them up, but they very unlikely to melt down like Chernobyl did anymore due to all the effort put into preventing that. Easier to just launch radioactive materials at your enemy if that's the result you want.

Re: For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

#132

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dctoedt wrote: post #115
philipallstar wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A missile hitting a coal power plant will also be pretty bad, and there's not a giant shield around it.

> A missile hitting a coal power plant will also be pretty bad, and there's not a giant shield around it. Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW. (See: Fukushima and Chernobyl.)

Coal is shockingly nasty. Combustion concentrates heavy radioactive elements that are present in the coal. Coal and nuclear plants can't be built too close together or the exhaust from the coal plant will set off the radiation alarm at the nuclear plant.

It also does the same thing to heavy metals in the coal like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. More than 90% of coal is carbon and therefore becomes CO2, but because of the huge difference in energy density, the coal plant has to burn millions of times more coal than nuclear reactors consume uranium, and thereby generates tens of thousands of times more toxic and radioactive coal ash than the nuclear plant generates nuclear waste.

Then they put the stuff into "wet surface impoundments" which is industry for dumping the toxic sludge into a lake. Those things frequently poison entire towns without any kind of terrorist attack.

Re: For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

#133

Post by dctoedt »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #132
dctoedt wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A missile hitting a coal power plant will also be pretty bad, and there's not a giant shield around it. Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW. (See: Fukushima and Chernobyl.)

Coal is shockingly nasty. Combustion concentrates heavy radioactive elements that are present in the coal. Coal and nuclear plants can't be built too close together or the exhaust from the coal plant will set off the radiation alarm at the nuclear plant. It also does the same thing to heavy metals in the coal like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. More than 90% of coal is carbon and therefore becomes CO2, but becau…

Agreed — but we’re talking about a catastrophic missile strike, not longterm operations.

Re: For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

#134

Post by UltraSane »

gpm wrote: post #102
UltraSane wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"over-building so you have enough in winter" This makes wind and solar much more expensive to the point where nuclear is cheaper. " we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar." But not in grid storage. That is still incredibly expensive.

> But not in grid storage. That is still incredibly expensive. The price of grid storage is absolutely falling exponentially with respect to time.

Please provide proof

Re: For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

#135

Post by UltraSane »

epistasis wrote: post #68
UltraSane wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grid Storage is very expensive and right now only has a few hours of capacity. We would need weeks to really replace nuclear.

Saying that grid storage "only has a few hours of capacity" is like saying that a nuclear power reactor "only has 1GW of power." You solve both issues by deploying more. And if you want a longer lithium ion battery installation without the additional power capacity, you can save a bit on inverters. Grid storage is cheap enough that Texas, a purely profit-driven grid is now overtaking California in the amount of batte…

All current grid storage will fully discharge in less than 4 hours at max watts. It is designed to level daily demand variability. To make a 4 hour battery last for a week at the same wattage would make it cost 42 times as much.

Re: For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

#136

Post by UltraSane »

thomasmg wrote: post #73
UltraSane wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stored electricity is much more expensive than nuclear electricity. To replace 1 GW of nuclear running at 92% CF with solar+storage, you need 3-4 GW of solar nameplate plus enough storage to cover nighttime AND multi-day cloudy periods AND seasonal winter deficit. The seasonal piece is what blows up the cost, you'd need weeks of storage, which at current Li-ion prices is economically absurd ($1000s/MWh delivered).

For the few days without wind, natural gas is cheaper than nuclear. There is also biogas and hydro. Nuclear is not cheap to turn on off. Also, the insurance cost of nuclear power is not accounted for: basically, there is no insurance, and the state (the population) just have to live with the risk.

Natural gas emits CO2. The risks of climate change caused by CO2 utterly dwarf those of any nuclear reactor. Nuclear power in the US has the lowest deaths per joule of all of them.

Re: For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

#137

Post by gpm »

UltraSane wrote: post #134
gpm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But not in grid storage. That is still incredibly expensive. The price of grid storage is absolutely falling exponentially with respect to time.

Please provide proof

See the first graph on this page for example: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

Re: For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

#138

Post by AnthonyMouse »

energy123 wrote: post #31
nradov wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we want to have an industrial economy with 24×7 heavy manufacturing then we need nuclear power for the base load. There's no need to change output much. The amount of batteries needed to keep a huge factory running is ridiculous.

The world's biggest industrial economy, China, installed about 300x more renewable energy than nuclear last year. New nuclear sucks, and baseload is a false concept that can (and is) being synthetically replicated with over-building + storage + transmission + peaking.

> The world's biggest industrial economy, China, installed about 300x more renewable energy than nuclear last year.

Comparing nameplate capacity for generation methods with much different capacity factors is misleading. China generates the majority of its electricity from coal, and is still adding more. They're adding more in renewables than coal by nameplate capacity, but coal likewise has a higher capacity factor than renewables, so it's really about the same. Then they say "increasing the proportion of renewables" because the initial proportion of renewables was close to 0.

Coal is a baseload source but not one you actually want to use.

Re: For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

#139

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dctoedt wrote: post #133
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal is shockingly nasty. Combustion concentrates heavy radioactive elements that are present in the coal. Coal and nuclear plants can't be built too close together or the exhaust from the coal plant will set off the radiation alarm at the nuclear plant. It also does the same thing to heavy metals in the coal like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. More than 90% of coal is carbon and therefore becomes CO2, but becau…

Agreed — but we’re talking about a catastrophic missile strike, not longterm operations.

What do you think happens if you send a missile to the "wet surface impoundment" that releases the contents of the lake into the town or the groundwater?

Re: For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

#140

Post by epistasis »

UltraSane wrote: post #135
epistasis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that grid storage "only has a few hours of capacity" is like saying that a nuclear power reactor "only has 1GW of power." You solve both issues by deploying more. And if you want a longer lithium ion battery installation without the additional power capacity, you can save a bit on inverters. Grid storage is cheap enough that Texas, a purely profit-driven grid is now overtaking California in the amount of batte…

All current grid storage will fully discharge in less than 4 hours at max watts. It is designed to level daily demand variability. To make a 4 hour battery last for a week at the same wattage would make it cost 42 times as much.

Yes, this is how the basic arithmetic works. What's your point?

I see now that your original post had a fantastical claim that we need weeks of battery storage, which is a fantastical claim. In reality we will need variable amounts of battery but a "week long" battery is not supported by a single detailed grid study I have ever seen.

When I have asked Pell to justify claims of "weeks long battery" the only justifications have been "I heard it from someone else", or napkin math that contains many errors, and in places where there are not errors choices are made to estimate an upper bound rather than a lower bound, indicating that the calculator doesn't understand how napkins math can be useful.

And for super cheap infrequently used storage, here's a recent purchase at $33/kWh of a 30GWh battery by Google:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176841

I don't expect such batteries to be used much, despite being a fraction of the cost of current LFP batteries, because we really won't need much storage with such a low power:energy ratio.

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