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I had the same thought reading the article, but after some thought, I doubt it. Grid transmission can be as low as 0.5% per 100 miles already. Batteries lose about 10% of the energy by storing it, that leaves you with needing to go at least 2000 miles in order to make up the battery loss difference, plus needing the energy to move the batteries physically.
Float them down a river. \s
Random idea, if batteries are cheap enough could we charge them up and ship them on trains back forth instead of building high voltage transmission lines?
I had the same thought reading the article, but after some thought, I doubt it. Grid transmission can be as low as 0.5% per 100 miles already. Batteries lose about 10% of the energy by storing it, that leaves you with needing to go at least 2000 miles in order to make up the battery loss difference, plus needing the energy to move the batteries physically.
We could repurpose those oil pipelines we no longer need. :-)
If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just…
What about something unexpected like superconducting transmission lines between temporal energy producing / consuming zones?
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Storage helps nuclear too, with less demanding requirements. You can keep running your nuclear plants at full blast and use storage to average the load. If the storage is cheap enough that'll cost less than partially idling the nuclear plant. Wind and solar, like nuclear, have costs dominated by capital cost, but with less predictable output. To run civilization on those alone, we'd need quite a bit more storage, to…
Wind over a large area is far more constant than you might expect the problem is you need a vary large area (east - west coast) to see this. http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2010/04/averaging-us-east-coas... Still the major advantage to wind is it's the cheapest power out there. (Yes lower than coal, nuclear, hydro, etc.) PV Solar is also vary steady in the areas you would put it. (AKA not the South Pole.) Storage is us…
To average wind over the entire US, a big network of ultra-high-voltage transmission lines would be needed. This is quite possible; China is building one, with transmission distances up to about 1200 miles. Acquiring the right of way for a UHV line, which has roughly the space requirements of an interstate highway, is the main problem in the US. Long-distance UHV lines are usually DC; the conversion equipment is cheaper than running 3 wires instead of 2. There was talk a few years ago of an "energy corridor" going up through the Texas panhandle and northward, to the good locations for wind and natural gas. The corridor would carry both power lines and pipelines.
[1] http://www.caiso.com/green/renewableswatch.html [2] https://www.pjm.com/about-pjm/renewable-dashboard/wind-power...
Got any real numbers to back that up? I'm guessing that it just feels good to bang on your chest and make that call. The reality is probably a lot different. How are all the megacities going to get enough solar and wind power, for example? Tokyo, NYC, Mexico City, Shanghai, etc. all running from solar? How big will the grid need to be to power NYC? Anyway, I'd love to see a deeper analysis and less chest pounding.
When you read a comment like the above, your response shouldn't be to demand for sources, your response should be to go research the topic on your own.
This site would be much better if folks understood that HN itself isn't a place for someone to "get wonky".
On my debate team, we had a rule of "no wonking". HN would be a better place if it too had the same rule.
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I don't think that's quite true. You don't need a lot of storage to make the peak-shaving, time-arbitrage setup he mostly talked about economic. But you need a whole lot of storage to make a reliable grid out of unpredictable generators. The author briefly touched on this in the context of home battery usage: "Solar + a small battery may get someone in Germany to 70%, and someone in Southern California to 85%, but th…
Base-load nuclear is the opposite of dispatchable. Dispatchable means you can turn it on and off at will. It takes a long time to shut down a nuclear plant and start it back up again (on the order of days not minutes). By contrast, natural gas plants can be highly dispatchable hence their use as operating reserve in many ISOs.
But, my understanding is that dispatchable is the opposite of intermittent generation (solar, wind), because you can choose when it's running or not. Also, baseload is the opposite of peaking, because baseload generators take a relatively long time to turn on/off.
Thus nuclear would be dispatchable, baseload power since you can decide when it runs, but it takes a long time to get there.
Or am I totally off base here?
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Nuclear plants take years to build and have shitty failure scenarios. Best to stopgap coal until renewables take over with combined cycle natural gas plants, fueled by cheap natgas from fracking. It's not perfect, but those natural gas plants will still be kept around as peaking plants and they're an order of magnitude cleaner than coal plants (as well as producing much less CO2 per unit of power generated).
> Nuclear plants take years to build and have shitty failure scenarios That's only because we won't build any newer designs that don't have shitty failure modes and insist that we keep old reactors with very shitty failure modes online, though.
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Fortunately, solar photovoltaic doesn't need servicing. Energy is big business, revenue will be there for servicing once market share is there.
Solar photovoltaic probably needs more servicing per kWh than any other method. If those panels aren't clean, you don't get the expected return.