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karthun posted:I've always been skeptical of the hydrogen economy after it was pushed HARD by the Bush administration. The promise was always electrolysis but the goal was steam reformation of methane and that CCS will be 10 years away. It's now been over 20 years and CCS is still 10 years away. And I don't trust you that electrolysis will be more efficient than steam reformation. you have matched the keywords of what im talking about while not understanding what I'm talking about we are talking about what a wind or solar farm does with all its curtailment after renewables have gotten deep penetration (say 50%) of the grid none of it ever leaves the site, it has nothing to do with distribution, it has nothing to do with any existing market or supply chain besides the grid. it has nothing to do with the bush administration, it has nothing to do with CCs. MightyBigMinus fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Aug 21, 2022 |
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Aug 21, 2022 18:20
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MightyBigMinus posted:none of it ever leaves the site, it has nothing to do with distribution, it has nothing to do with any existing market or supply chain besides the grid Aren't they already experimenting with mixing hydrogen into natural gas used for home heating etc? That'd also be a pretty decent use case to deal with excess generation capacity, to minimise curtailment. Another thing that will be steadily more relevant is desalination of salt water for potable water.
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Aug 21, 2022 18:27
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MightyBigMinus posted:you have matched the keywords of what im talking about while not understanding what I'm talking about And how many wind and solar farms have this installed currently? I'm guessing some experimental setups but nothing in production. What will really happen is that power companies will bid out super cheap electricity rates for the next few hours if they are seeing an oversupply. High electrical intensity users that can deal with intermittency will buy up the electrical contract for pennies on the Mw-hr and your curtailment systems will never kick in. This dog and pony show was pushed by the Bush administration 20 years ago.
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Aug 21, 2022 18:34
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Wibla posted:Aren't they already experimenting with mixing hydrogen into natural gas used for home heating etc? That'd also be a pretty decent use case to deal with excess generation capacity, to minimise curtailment. Yep but it's grey hydrogen produced from natural gas. It's literally less efficient than just burning methane because hydrogen has greater losses during storage and transport. Don't worry, CCS will come out by 2012 at the latest.
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Aug 21, 2022 18:37
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Dameius posted:Literally anything else other than nuclear, no matter the cost/feasibility. Since we live in hellworld, they are going to use toxic waste rather than water and let it spill after a few years, for that sweet schadenfreude on people clamoring to make warehouses able to last until the heat death of the universe for nuclear waste.
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Aug 21, 2022 18:45
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karthun posted:Yep but it's grey hydrogen produced from natural gas. It's literally less efficient than just burning methane because hydrogen has greater losses during storage and transport. Don't worry, CCS will come out by 2012 at the latest. I should have been clearer in my previous post, I am referring to mixing in hydrogen from electrolysis in this instance, there would be no point in making hydrogen from natural gas and then mixing that back into the natural gas lines going out to consumers  E: Seems this method has issues, so we'll see what actually happens with it. There's also this research project that seems very promising to generate hydrogen from natural gas with direct CO2 capture, I think I've mentioned it before. Wibla fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Aug 21, 2022 |
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Aug 21, 2022 18:47
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Wibla posted:I should have been clearer in my previous post, I am referring to mixing in hydrogen from electrolysis in this instance, there would be no point in making hydrogen from natural gas and then mixing that back into the natural gas lines going out to consumers methane to hydrogen is getting grants and financing in multiple european countries if the energy used in the process comes from renewables, so karthun strategy would mean extra profits for shell and friends.
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Aug 21, 2022 18:50
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SlowBloke posted:methane to hydrogen is getting grants and financing in multiple european countries if the energy used in the process comes from renewables, so karthun strategy would mean extra profits for shell and friends. I don't actually give a poo poo about paying Shell or Equinor for natural gas if that natural gas is used to generate hydrogen with carbon capture, like I mentioned in the post above. It still beats burning it directly.
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Aug 21, 2022 19:01
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hasn't been said in this exact thread though that that process is still more carbon intensive somehow than just burning it directly
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Aug 21, 2022 20:08
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Wibla posted:I should have been clearer in my previous post, I am referring to mixing in hydrogen from electrolysis in this instance, there would be no point in making hydrogen from natural gas and then mixing that back into the natural gas lines going out to consumers DTurtle fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Aug 21, 2022 |
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Aug 21, 2022 20:09
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mediaphage posted:hasn't been said in this exact thread though that that process is still more carbon intensive somehow than just burning it directly the article posted:“Currently established methods have energy efficiency ratings of between 70 and 75 percent, but our approach has a potential efficiency of 90 percent”, says Harald Malerød-Fjeld at CoorsTek Membrane Sciences in Oslo. “The end product is compressed hydrogen with a high degree of purity. The ceramic membrane reactor also separates carbon dioxide more efficiently, enabling the greenhouse gas to be easily transported and sequestered”, he says. the article posted:A major problem associated with steam reforming is that the process is energy-demanding and takes place in several stages. It also has CO2 as a by-product. The new technology, on the other hand, requires no external heat to drive the steam reforming process. A key to the new process is that heat is produced automatically when the hydrogen is being pumped through the ceramic membrane. In this way the heat is generated exactly where it is needed.
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Aug 21, 2022 20:19
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MightyBigMinus posted:it will absolutely without a doubt certainly be cheaper than li-ion storage >10hr and by definition cheaper than idling spent capital (wind & solar capacity) when again they could be making literally *anything* more than zero. You were talking about using curtailed electricity to create hydrogen as a storage mechanism ignoring turnaround efficiency* because the power is essentially free. It is very fanciful as noted by others so while we are being fanciful, I extended it to say why do hydrogen when you can just do hydrocarbons which can be transported and stored in tanks, can be burnt in current and even older generators that are burning hydrocarbons this very day. It also has the added benefit of being able to be used in jets, boats and other things that there is no sensible renewable solution for yet. The USN actually worked out it could do this on nuclear carriers using seawater as the source for carbon. Just that an aircraft carrier has bigger priorities for space aboard than reducing the number of replenishments at sea it needs. * MightyBigMinus posted:when renewables (especially solar) exceed marginal amounts of the energy supply there will be soooooooooo much loving curtailment that it doesn't matter if electricity->hydrogen->electricity is ONE percent efficient, if its free loving money its free loving money. spare capacity will be monetized however the gently caress they can and every loving penny of it will be profit. VVV that is the biggest issue with curtailed renewable power, it is way too peaky and any sort of chemical plant wants to run around the clock. Even RO plants which are relatively easy to spin up and down don't like it VVV Electric Wrigglies fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Aug 21, 2022 |
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Aug 21, 2022 20:26
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Even if the electricity is free and 1% efficiency is enough to get a benefit, building the industrial facilities to actually use the energy isn't anywhere close to free. Building a plant that can turn air + water + energy into sugars or hydrogen or hydrocarbons isn't cheap. If you only get to turn your factory on when there would be curtailment otherwise, it's even more expensive to build the infrastructure that you don't use all the time. I can't imagine inventing an automated, industrial process to electrolyze hydrogen or perform industrial photosynthesis is going to be cheap, let alone actually building and operating the factories. It's a chicken/egg problem; if we need something enough to build a billion-dollar factory to make it, we don't want to just get half as much as we actually need, and if we don't need something enough to warrant building a billion dollar factory ahead of time, we can't just toss extra electricity at it every once in a while to get free stuff.
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Aug 21, 2022 20:58
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Apparently it wasn't too expensive, as it has already been invented and the first commercial sites have been running for several years already. The advantage of power to gas (whether hydrogen, or even more so methane) is that the infrastructure to store and use it already exists.
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Aug 21, 2022 21:44
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GABA ghoul posted:As far as long term storage is concerned, hydrogen from electrolysis might become a practical solution by that point. Maybe not from a market perspective, but if there is a regulatory demand to keep a certain amount of it storage for energy security reasons it could be a solution. The energy market is already heavily regulated with security in mind today.
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Aug 21, 2022 21:49
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MightyBigMinus posted:by definition cheaper than idling spent capital (wind & solar capacity) when again they could be making literally *anything* more than zero. It's absolutely possible that just idling renewables could be cheaper. Even assuming that you get the power to run the electrolyzer for free, capital and operating costs can be higher than the expected price you get at the exchange for the stored electricity. You would be operating your storage at a loss.
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Aug 21, 2022 22:53
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GABA ghoul posted:It's absolutely possible that just idling renewables could be cheaper. Even assuming that you get the power to run the electrolyzer for free, capital and operating costs can be higher than the expected price you get at the exchange for the stored electricity. You would be operating your storage at a loss. If long term carbon storage works, and to say the least I am skeptical that is does, then the best thing would be to run direct air capture of CO2 using the spare energy rather then running an electrolyzer or steam reformation of methane.
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Aug 21, 2022 23:30
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These guys seem to be doing cool stuff with renewables and hydrogen, and they have started several projects in iberia. Jurys still out if its cost efective though.
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Aug 22, 2022 12:37
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https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/german-minister-rules-out-keeping-nuclear-plants-running-save-gas-2022-08-21/ The German economy minister has ruled out not shutting down the nuclear plants. Things are going to get fun in Europe this winter.
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Aug 22, 2022 14:27
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quote:Separately to the debate over gas savings measures, Habeck said he was open to extending the lifespan of one nuclear power plant in Bavaria if a stress test showed this was necessary to ensure the stability and supply of the electricity network in winter, he said.
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Aug 22, 2022 14:37
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ah yes maintenance. good thing no gas plants require maintenance eh
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Aug 22, 2022 14:39
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anyone have any info on China's SMRs? At least from the video it looks like construction is well on its way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw_NVKoFHvE
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Aug 22, 2022 16:36
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mediaphage posted:ah yes maintenance. good thing no gas plants require maintenance eh Maintance and similar predictable outages are the nuclear waste of renewables. By that I mean that Nuclear has to plan for waste disposal in ways that other energy sources can wave away even while radioactive coal slack poisons rivers. Similarly Renewables have to provide redundancy and storage for outages while turbine power can just handwave it away while syncronized outages of those shut down a grid.
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Aug 22, 2022 16:49
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I'm not sure of the maintenance schedule for the French reactors and I know historically the French built them efficiently but operating them was different (longer outages, over manning, etc). Is there a chance the French are just knocking over a lot of maintenance pre-winter ready to run them bad boys flat out and at great profit? VictualSquid posted:Maintance and similar predictable outages are the nuclear waste of renewables. That's a little unfair as historically when people weren't opposed to coal or nuclear in say Australia or France respectively, there was never any outages of much scale simply because of the orderly construction, buildout and replacement of generating plants. Everyone got onboard the no new coal or nuclear power stations, now you hate coal and nuclear because they weren't allowed to continue building out sufficient to have a good mix of new, medium and old and end-of-life redundant power stations? Electric Wrigglies fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Aug 22, 2022 |
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Aug 22, 2022 17:16
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Infinite Karma posted:Even if the electricity is free and 1% efficiency is enough to get a benefit, building the industrial facilities to actually use the energy isn't anywhere close to free. Building a plant that can turn air + water + energy into sugars or hydrogen or hydrocarbons isn't cheap. We can get specific here, where the real world stand-in for your hypothetical example of air+water+energy = food would be the Haber process, whereby 5% of extracted natural gas is used to provide both the enthalpy and hydrogen to manufacture nitrogenous fertilizers. Humanity is fed at present largely due to the prevalence of this process.  link There are alternatives to the Haber process that crack and fix the nitrogen through other means. Without natgas as a precursor, they're energy intensive; a ballpark figure derivable from "about 5% of our natgas makes food fertilizers" is that we'd be looking at single digit percentages of humanity's already-strained energy output being dedicated to whatever alternative processes we can come up with to unfuck our carbon dependence for nitrogen fixation. Clearly, again, that means we should be turning off clean power sources lol lmao
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Aug 22, 2022 17:23
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Is there a chance the French are just knocking over a lot of maintenance pre-winter ready to run them bad boys flat out and at great profit? Covid lockdowns made them postpone a lot of maintenance, now it's all catching up, plus they found extra issues in their aging plants that also needs fixing.
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Aug 22, 2022 17:27
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Whoever uncritically linked the
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Aug 22, 2022 17:29
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Electric Wrigglies posted:That's a little unfair as historically when people weren't opposed to coal or nuclear in say Australia or France respectively, there was never any outages of much scale simply because of the orderly construction, buildout and replacement of generating plants. I haven't looked into what is happening in France right now exactly. But for example the outage after it snowed on the turbines in texas was mostly caused by their organisational culture. There were solar plants nearby that predicted that they have to turn off a week in advance. And the gas plants guranteed that they can keep running, so nobody worried. Their culture of assuming that 100% uptime and name plate power is possible and necessary makes it impossible for them to predict outages. And I assumed that a similar culture is responsible for the lack of maintance staggering in France. And the other half was of course the lacking long range power grid. After all only renewables need an interconnected power grid. France sanely has that part which is why they currently buy renewable power from Germany while their nukes are down for maintance. My actual point is that both renwables and nuclear are done a disservice by them having to plan for unlikely worst cases and having to make extreme far future predictions that are intrinsically unrealistic due to simple time span. While coal and gas get away with just handwaving them away.
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Aug 22, 2022 17:35
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VictualSquid posted:While coal and gas get away with just handwaving them away. The handwaved cost of sequestering emissions factors into this as well.
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Aug 22, 2022 17:38
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His Divine Shadow posted:Covid lockdowns made them postpone a lot of maintenance, now it's all catching up, plus they found extra issues in their aging plants that also needs fixing. They should also probably replace a lot of the instrumentation that was not rated for near-freezing temperatures.
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Aug 22, 2022 17:46
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Electric Wrigglies posted:I'm not sure of the maintenance schedule for the French reactors and I know historically the French built them efficiently but operating them was different (longer outages, over manning, etc). France uses almost waaaay more power in winters than during the summers (heating? more light?) so I assume they'd normally do all maintenance and refueling during the summer. No idea why could would cause anyone to postpone maintenance of a loving nuclear plant though  Last August  Last February 
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Aug 22, 2022 18:14
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Potato Salad posted:We can get specific here, where the real world stand-in for your hypothetical example of air+water+energy = food would be the Haber process, whereby 5% of extracted natural gas is used to provide both the enthalpy and hydrogen to manufacture nitrogenous fertilizers. Humanity is fed at present largely due to the prevalence of this process. My understanding is that we have the scientific knowledge to make nitrogen fertilizers from atmospheric N2 and oceanic H2O from first principles, that's not that complex. But have we invented working machines where you can flip a switch (because there's excess power to run it) to start sucking in air and water from the environment (or getting them trucked in from an offsite facility that does the same), and have that multi-step chemical process performed on an industrial level to spit out ammonia and nitrate from a pipe on the other end? I think we haven't yet, and my original point was those factories are going to be expensive, expensive enough that we'd rather run them at full capacity as often as possible, and have extra renewable generation to make up the energy shortfall, than to idle the nuHaber plant so our energy grid is more efficient.
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Aug 22, 2022 18:44
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Infinite Karma posted:My understanding is that we have the scientific knowledge to make nitrogen fertilizers from atmospheric N2 and oceanic H2O from first principles, that's not that complex. But have we invented working machines where you can flip a switch (because there's excess power to run it) to start sucking in air and water from the environment (or getting them trucked in from an offsite facility that does the same), and have that multi-step chemical process performed on an industrial level to spit out ammonia and nitrate from a pipe on the other end? You've got industrial chemical synthesis nailed pretty well here. We can make drat near anything in a lab with time and great expertise for the weight of product. Like, here's the viral replication inhibitor in Paxlovid:  Just look at this fucken thing. No wonder it's so unbearably difficult to manufacture at scale. So, yes, there's numerous ways to create nitrogenous fertilizers. Many. The question concerns which is easiest to plumb together with as few reactors as possible that are as simple as possible at "Effectively all food on Earth depends on this" scale. It's going to be a hell of an optimization problem compounded with a capital investment problem, all sitting atop the question of where all that new power capacity is going to be installed and how all these new reagents are going to be sourced. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Aug 23, 2022 |
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Aug 23, 2022 19:44
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it's the kind of problem that takes an industry decades to sort out through trial and error and iteration and logistics optimization and that's just one tiny slice of the challenge of tackling food stability in a climate disaster world This is the main reason why my policy stance is "buy every smart grid connection, every solar cell, every windmill, every hydro plant expansion, every nuke we can build or queue today, on debt spending." Right now, money is cheaper to take out on debt for these kinds of projects then it will be as this pickle continues to sour and the disaster worsens, and the time to worry about the energy generation component of these problems is right the hell now. Every watt of new capacity is going to be in critical demand in 5, 10, 15 years from now as power generation and transport infrastructure that we start breaking ground on today come online in earnest and at scale. Further, cheap and abundant energy generation is exceptionally attractive to business, and it is fantastically surprising to me that our conservative voters in general have been hoodwinked into fearing the kind of industrial policies that would combat offshoring and foster domestic manufacturing capacity. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Aug 23, 2022 |
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Aug 23, 2022 19:50
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There are alternative pathways for nitrogen fixation, but the Haber process only uses natural gas in order to produce hydrogen. If hydrogen were being produced by electrolysis plants from just electricity, it would make the Haber process simpler. Methane doesn't affect the important part, which is literally just N2+3H2->2NH3 and using methane means you need a steam reforming section, a water-shift section, and a CO2 scrubber section, before you get to the actual ammonia-producing section. Electrolysis is more expensive than methane reformation, in part because we tend to make electricity from natural gas anyway, in part because electrolysis has fairly large capital costs, but there's no real obstacle besides price to keep us from doing it on an industrial scale. My guess is other pathways wouldn't be as efficient as electrolysis anyway. Like look what was in the news today, Germany wants to buy hydrogen from Canada produced by wind power, and part of the plan is to use the hydrogen to make ammonia.
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Aug 24, 2022 01:19
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Does anyone have any good and reliable studies on the problems of large scale energy storage, what kind of resources it'll require and if it's feasible or not.
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Aug 25, 2022 09:01
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Yeah, I'd be interested in sources on that too. I would award bonus points for sources which: 1) Are more recent and capture the more up-to-date developments in electricity/energy technology 2) Are technology-agnostic, and aren't written by authors who are ideologically committed to securing the existence of nuclear power plants and a future for nuclear electricity
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Aug 25, 2022 13:43
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His Divine Shadow posted:Does anyone have any good and reliable studies on the problems of large scale energy storage, what kind of resources it'll require and if it's feasible or not. https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/executive-summary Lots of good general materials information here, with more digging they may have specifics about storage materials somewhere. E: they have a very nice inputs chart for generation. We can probably find a figure on what % needs to be stored and extrapolate a bit from there if we can't find a good source that did it already. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Aug 25, 2022 |
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Aug 25, 2022 14:00
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Are there specific recent developments you have in mind, s_k? Also any authors you wish to conflate with Nazis in advance, rather than after they are cited? Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Aug 25, 2022 |
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Aug 25, 2022 14:01
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I did find this which has some numbers: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/energy-storage-analysing-feasibility-grid-scale-options/
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Aug 25, 2022 15:04
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