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cat botherer posted:The unfortunate thing with concentrated solar thermal is that it only works with direct sunlight, which pretty much limits it to deserts (not that that's a dealbreaker). It's also quite a bit more expensive than PV at this point. On the other hand, I've seen a solar power tower IRL and it is crazy badass and that should make up for these disadvantages. The plant at the California/Nevada border now has massive arrays of photovoltaic panels in addition to the solar-thermal stuff.
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Jun 15, 2023 18:23
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His Divine Shadow posted:Reality has also shown that all this massive ramp up of renewables is worth less per unit of power as well than a lesser but steady and reliable amount of generation. That's what europe desperately needs now. And of course an energy source with higher nameplate power but a lower capacity factor can produce less energy overall than an energy source with lower nameplate power but with a higher capacity factor. This doesn't change the fact that the last decade has proven that renewables are more than capable of ramping up faster than nuclear energy ever did in actual energy production in the real world.   Dameius posted:Not that this would invalidate your point on its own, but I'd be hesitant to compare industrial build out capacity for energy across such a large time span as pre-chernobyl and now and draw too many conclusions or make many definitive statements when you're viewing it purely from nameplate capacity coming online. The world and energy markets are in just such different places. Wibla posted:Solar is great, but where do you get power from at night? QuarkJets posted:The qualifier of "let's not keep building fossil fuel power plants" was, I assumed, the point of the question You then created a completely unrealistic scenario of what the best way would be to generate 10 GW of base load power with no surrounding infrastructure, interconnections, storage, demand fluctuation, existing energy production, etc. You've basically created a scenario as far away from the real world as pitting two men without armor on an open flat grass field 300m apart from each other in order to compare personal weaponry. In that case, the bow and arrow would be the best weapon for all of history until the first good rifles start appearing. Which might be true in that contrived scenario, but has almost nothing to do with the real world. The real world has proven that renewable energy is adding actual generation a lot faster then nuclear energy ever did: Electric Wrigglies posted:I think a lot of "what is possible" is being done by China. It does have the safety considerations of nuclear but no-where near the same level of NIMBYism or effective green resistance to nuclear. China had great ambitions of building out nuclear but tempered them over the last decade or so (but always in parallel with massive buildout of wind, hydro and solar and transition coal, gas, etc). China is approving new nuclear stations at a rate that can be supported by the scale up in heavy industrial capacity but also operators, supplier and regulator institutional knowledge.  cat botherer posted:"Dispatchable power" in this case is fossil fuels. That's what we need to get away from. If you think nuclear "can't make sense", fossil fuels really really can't make sense. This is what we need to adress: 
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Jun 15, 2023 19:02
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VideoGameVet posted:The plant at the California/Nevada border now has massive arrays of photovoltaic panels in addition to the solar-thermal stuff. Which one? Ivanpah doesn't do molten-salt storage, and in fact it burns a considerable amount of natural gas in auxiliary boilers to get the working fluid up to temperature as quickly as possible once the sun comes up. Their website doesn't say anything about photovoltaics. Crescent Dunes, the molten-salt facility, never produced more than a fraction of nameplate and the operator went bankrupt. Supposedly someone else bought it and it's producing again but details are sparse and I don't see anything about photovoltaics there.
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Jun 15, 2023 19:05
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DTurtle posted:The numbers I quoted were production, not name plate capacity. We are still not at a point where real life energy systems can't deal with additional renewable energy production. We are still at a point where every bit of fossil free generation helps. And renewables have proven they ramp up faster than nuclear. OK still doesn't change the point I was making about the importance of reliable baseload. 1000 reliable megawatts of production are worth more than 10,000 intermittent megawatts of production (this number was made up). For renewables to work, we absolutely need to expand nuclear as fast as possible as well. Just expanding renewables just means there's gonna be a lot of excess production that can't get to where it's needed and that there will be times when despite massive incredible surpluses, the opposite will happen. Particularly since research posted in this thread shows all of europe can often be windless. Most of these are things that can be addressed in time, though probably even slower than nuclear in the case of trying to supersize the grid to cope and with it's own set of nimbyism issues.
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Jun 15, 2023 20:26
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DTurtle posted:There is so much power generation that has to be replaced, that we are not going to run out of enough dispatchable power. Right now adding fossil fuel free power generation as quickly and rapidly and massively as possible is what counts. In order to take full advantage of wind and solar - especially at the point where we want to replace base load - there should be focus on scalable, affordable, and ecologically friendly energy storage. Batteries or pumped hydro ain't it.
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Jun 15, 2023 20:58
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DTurtle posted:Wind and storage. No I didn't. I don't know why you're tacking on all of that other poo poo, my sole point (one that you apparently agree with) was that you need storage for wind and solar if you want substantial quantities of baseload power, otherwise you wind up burning substantial amounts of fossil fuels.
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Jun 16, 2023 03:44
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His Divine Shadow posted:OK still doesn't change the point I was making about the importance of reliable baseload. 1000 reliable megawatts of production are worth more than 10,000 intermittent megawatts of production (this number was made up). For renewables to work, we absolutely need to expand nuclear as fast as possible as well. Just expanding renewables just means there's gonna be a lot of excess production that can't get to where it's needed and that there will be times when despite massive incredible surpluses, the opposite will happen. Particularly since research posted in this thread shows all of europe can often be windless. This is why I don't get the anti NG take. Excess renewables can be turned into NG as a closed loop system. Making use of existing infrastructure to move the power. It's not efficient, but it doesn't need to be as excess solar and excess nighttime wind is currently going to waste. Anything is better then not using it as we are now. Also yeah more nuclear power.
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Jun 16, 2023 06:46
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I imagine a renewable to natural gas loop is not often done because it's a large investment with a poor return. If you're burning the natural gas on site to help cover intermittency then that's also pretty inefficient, and I wonder if you'd be better off just assembling a bunch of batteries
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Jun 16, 2023 09:40
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QuarkJets posted:I imagine a renewable to natural gas loop is not often done because it's a large investment with a poor return. If you're burning the natural gas on site to help cover intermittency then that's also pretty inefficient, and I wonder if you'd be better off just assembling a bunch of batteries There's probably going to be a number of solutions including demand response. I've been seeing more work go into using industrial scale heat pumps for energy storage for heating/cooling which is potentially quite a lot of storage. It may not be economically feasible on the scale of a house but for large industrial and commercial complexes and public institutions it makes sense. And dustrict heating systems obviously.
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Jun 16, 2023 10:38
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cat botherer posted:The issue with space-based panels is you still have to transmit the power to the ground with microwaves. The power density of the beam has to be low enough to not immediately fry birds or kill anyone if it gets off track. That limits you to on the order of tens of watts per square meter, so you're talking an absolutely enormous collector. Then there's also the problem of unavoidable diffraction, which scatters the beam out significantly.  DTurtle posted:The numbers I quoted were production, not name plate capacity. We are still not at a point where real life energy systems can't deal with additional renewable energy production. We are still at a point where every bit of fossil free generation helps. And renewables have proven they ramp up faster than nuclear.  The OL3 plant was the first new one to be ordered in Europe in fifteen years. Sure the project was a mess and ran way over time but Finland is now 98% carbon-free, the same can't be said of any renewable grid (that didn't just luck into massive hydro). Sorry to drag Germany into this again but how long had they been rolling out renewables now? Let's see how that's working  Oooh but Merkel sabotaged it, having 2x of installed capacity isn't enough! Let's imagine we doubled both solar and wind installation instantly, how much would that help? You'd probably have 100% solar between like 10 and 4pm and the rest of the day would be still like 500g/kWh.
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Jun 16, 2023 11:02
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mobby_6kl posted:Oooh but Merkel sabotaged it, having 2x of installed capacity isn't enough! Let's imagine we doubled both solar and wind installation instantly, how much would that help? You'd probably have 100% solar between like 10 and 4pm and the rest of the day would be still like 500g/kWh. Yes, Merkel sabotaged it. For example by turning off the Nuclear plants last year instead of in 2036. And by fully defunding the build-up of grid and storage, which imo did more damage to the carbon load then her mostly defunding the solar and wind investments. And I will never grow tired of repeating this: The official pro-nuclear position in Germany is that ALL real problems of the Atomausstieg have been solved by Merkel's payouts to the nuclear power investment companies. If you do not believe that you are not pro-nuclear as the term is used in Germany.
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Jun 16, 2023 12:09
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VictualSquid posted:And I will never grow tired of repeating this: The official pro-nuclear position in Germany is that ALL real problems of the Atomausstieg have been solved by Merkel's payouts to the nuclear power investment companies. If you do not believe that you are not pro-nuclear as the term is used in Germany. You have to give me a source for that claim. Maybe that's what some political group stated, but that's far from the position I see on the street.
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Jun 16, 2023 13:13
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cant cook creole bream posted:You have to give me a source for that claim. Maybe that's what some political group stated, but that's far from the position I see on the street. It is the CDU position, last time I checked at least. And you don't see cdu voters on the street, I suppose. I actually have never seen a pro-nuclear activist ever on a street, which is why I can confidently state that I have never seen one opposing the Merkel Atomausstieg.
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Jun 16, 2023 14:44
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DTurtle posted:The fact of the matter is that right now, right this moment renewables are already ramping up very, very quickly and eating into the amount of energy produced by fossil fuels. Storage hasn’t stopped that ramp up from happening. The difference between capacity and actual production hasn’t stopped that from happening. Intermittency hasn’t stopped that from happening. you're ignoring the fact that this ramp was permitted by fossil baseload and fossil peaking the current massive ramp of renewables is not sustainable without fossil base load and fossil peaking. that's a huge carbon liability that's going to require some kind of shift to truly green baseload and peaking technologies. whether that will be hideously expensive outsize battery storage or a combination of nuclear base load and peak shifting battery storage has yet to be seen. no serious research into our energy pathways forward neglected to comment on the way in which the current growth of renewables is entirely dependent on extant baseload and peaking technologies, which are overwhelmingly fossil. that has to change. battery is an option, but as has been beaten to death several times this year already, battery alone is monstrously expensive, as in the whole integer factors more expensive than a grid that incorporates low teens % of non-battery baseload. there has got to be some kind of zero/low emission baseload generation capacity in the mix that does not incur the unsustainable expense and material expenditure of an overbuilt monoculture of battery-only peak shifting as a substitute for true baseload. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Jun 16, 2023 |
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Jun 16, 2023 14:59
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Potato Salad posted:you're ignoring the fact that this ramp was permitted by fossil baseload and fossil peaking Yes, that is why 100% of Green proposals for more renewables include demands to build or invent such grid support technologies. There are a few places where there is already enough renewable generation that such grid support expansion will lower carbon output more effectively then building even more renewable generation. I live in one, but most of the world is not like that. And from a tactical argument choice perspective, which is what started the current discussions, that argument is terrible. Because the research into storage technologies and the infrastructure investments were primarily stopped by political parties that identify as pro-nuclear. They did so for unrelated reasons, admittedly but it makes the argument very clumsy if you try to convince someone of being pro-nuclear. Now, saying that that grid buildup will take as long as building new Nuclear plants is indeed a good reason for starting both right now. At least to me personally, but I would not expect that to easily convince anybody.
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Jun 16, 2023 15:13
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VictualSquid posted:Because the research into storage technologies and the infrastructure investments were primarily stopped by political parties that identify as pro-nuclear. This is the first I have heard of this. Storage would have helped nuclear if someone was a 100% nuclear generation only proponent. Can you elaborate further?
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Jun 16, 2023 15:22
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Potato Salad posted:no serious research into our energy pathways forward neglected to comment on the way in which the current growth of renewables is entirely dependent on extant baseload and peaking technologies, which are overwhelmingly fossil. I'm really interested in this point for my sources, if you could point me the way to a citation I'd be super grateful!!
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Jun 16, 2023 15:23
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Electric Wrigglies posted:This is the first I have heard of this. Storage would have helped nuclear if someone was a 100% nuclear generation only proponent. I am preferring primarily to the Merkel government rolling back the funding that was planned by the red/green government previously. Which is the most explicit incident that I know off. But there is a historical trend for conservative parties to be the most pro-nuclear ones in most places. And a trend for conservative parties to oppose funding for infrastructure investments and basic research for renewables.
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Jun 16, 2023 15:31
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VictualSquid posted:I am preferring primarily to the Merkel government rolling back the funding that was planned by the red/green government previously. Which is the most explicit incident that I know off. That just sounds like economizing. We all know proper grid scale storage has not been invented outside hydro so not spending money on it makes sense if there is nothing to invest in (aside research like fusion, pebble reactors, battery chemistry, etc).
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Jun 16, 2023 16:10
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Electric Wrigglies posted:That just sounds like economizing. We all know proper grid scale storage has not been invented outside hydro so not spending money on it makes sense if there is nothing to invest in (aside research like fusion, pebble reactors, battery chemistry, etc). Stopping the already planned research projects that was intended to invent grid storage is something that you would do? And also reducing the existing grid redundancy which lead to both grid failures and the existing inability. Battery research was also defunded, but that was mostly picked up by the mobile and EV industries which is why batteries have advanced so much. I think that proper grid storage could have been invented with proper research funding. But we won't know if we refuse to actually fund the research. I absolutely agree that it was done primarily motivated by austerity and penny pinching. Which is also why the conservatives oppose spending money on new nuclear plants despite identifying as pro-nuclear.
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Jun 16, 2023 16:24
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What grid storage was going to be invented? The Energy Vault?
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Jun 16, 2023 16:47
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mobby_6kl posted:What grid storage was going to be invented? The Energy Vault? I don't know I wasn't a academic researcher of grid storage tech in 2010. Though back then even lithium batteries were quite experimental. I do believe that the government should fund fundamental research. And in long term projects like building power grids and nuclear reactors. You believe that the government should only invest in things that give results in the near future. This is not a debate about energy policy and your arguments will only convince people who already share your assumption.
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Jun 16, 2023 17:06
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Why don't we just compare cost and feasibility of grid-scale battery storage vis-a-vis nuclear power? It's clear that wind and solar are cost effective ways to generate power - nuclear is great and doesn't need to compete with the sun and wind during the day. Batteries suck, they suck a lot, they're expensive and not durable and bad for the environment and can only provide baseload power for a pretty limited time. 1 GW of Nuclear power has to be able to beat 1 GW of battery power when you factor in time and the excess power to charge the batteries in the first place.
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Jun 16, 2023 17:08
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IMO large scale grid storage is a pipe dream and would've been a pipe dream regardless of money spent on it by the Merkel government or not, it's a problem on par with fusion. You can't just solve it by throwing money at it.
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Jun 16, 2023 17:15
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Phanatic posted:Which one? Ivanpah. Loads of photovoltaics now. Mirror/Tower stuff still there.
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Jun 16, 2023 17:27
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I am kinda neutral on grid storage. Which is why I support also building nuclear plants. Would be cool if it works and we should try. I do think that building a more robust power grid will prevent outages and lower the need for grid storage. But, I also think that climate change can't be solved by penny pinching. The argument you are bringing against infrastructure investments are also all arguments against building new nuclear power plants.
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Jun 16, 2023 17:33
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Nuclear power plants are things that actually exist and that can be built right now, that's the difference. We should fund research in grid scale storage but we shouldn't count on it.
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Jun 16, 2023 17:46
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QuarkJets posted:Nuclear power plants are things that actually exist and that can be built right now, that's the difference. We should fund research in grid scale storage but we shouldn't count on it. Long redundant power lines are things that actually exist and that can be built right now. If the existence of dumb ideas in the field is an argument against investments then the existence of dumb fusion ideas is an argument against nuclear power.
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Jun 16, 2023 17:49
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VictualSquid posted:I don't know I wasn't a academic researcher of grid storage tech in 2010. Though back then even lithium batteries were quite experimental. Government can and does invest in tech, universities have heaps of grants for researcher from government agencies as well as private ones. Private ones being generally more developmental focussed (reduce the vibrations on a very large turbine with magnetic control) and government being more greenfields (fusion, mapping out half reaction energies in plasma fields) research. The thing with greenfields research is that it is not a dollars in, predictable result out. It is quite possible that 50% of the working population of Germany could be devoted solely to grid storage research for five years and still not have a viable method worked out for economical grid storage. Additionally, a lot of research is sequential. Developing iterations of an experiment takes time and can't be parallelized. TL DR, as another poster said, economical grid storage that is not pumped hydro is a problem of the scale of fusion, it is quite possibly unsolvable with tech available for the next 50 years. That the money comes from government or private wallets is beside the point and a distraction.
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Jun 16, 2023 17:53
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Government can and does invest in tech, universities have heaps of grants for researcher from government agencies as well as private ones. Private ones being generally more developmental focussed (reduce the vibrations on a very large turbine with magnetic control) and government being more greenfields (fusion, mapping out half reaction energies in plasma fields) research. The original plan was for the research to take from 2010 to 2050. But that is besides the point. You are saying that this impossibility of grid storage justifies all energy investment cuts of the Merkel government, I consider that argument insufficient. There were plans to build more redundant power grids with small scale grid storage that could react to emergencies and distribute power from variable sources more efficiently. There were plans to build large scale grid integration so that variable power can be distributed to consumers further away lowering the need for grid storage. There were plans to investigate the feasibility of new technologies for large scale grid storage. There were people calling for the construction of new nuclear power plants, thought from different lobbies. The Merkel government said no, we need to save money at any cost. You are saying they were correct because large scale grid storage is impossible.
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Jun 16, 2023 18:04
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VictualSquid posted:Long redundant power lines are things that actually exist and that can be built right now. The argument is that you shouldn't go all in on research that may not pan out for decades, if ever. Fusion energy is more akin to grid scale storage than nuclear power. I think it's good to invest in fusion energy and grid scale storage, but it doesn't make any sense to compare those projects to fission energy Let me repeat that since it seems like you may have misread my post: I am in favor of grid scale scale storage research. I just think it's important to temper expectations
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Jun 16, 2023 18:09
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QuarkJets posted:The argument is that you shouldn't go all in on research that may not pan out for decades, if ever. Fusion energy is more akin to grid scale storage than nuclear power. I think it's good to invest in fusion energy and grid scale storage, but it doesn't make any sense to compare those projects to fission energy Yes, I have fairly low expectation of large scale grid storage. I think that we should still try, just like we should build nuclear plants despite that also taking a long time. I do have high expectations of large scale grid interconnection and also of local consumer oriented storage. But, the discussed arguments against grid storage research mostly comes from a perspective of Austerity politics. And that thought process also opposes realistic grid improvements and the construction of new nuclear plants. But, with the way the German nuclear lobby has reinforced their commitment to "the free marked will solve climate change" I do think that Germany will likely not even start building new power plants before that grid storage research is finished. In 40 years.
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Jun 16, 2023 19:09
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Fundamentally we can conclude that the government, if not most of the governments of the world should be embarking on a world wide scale version of the Manhattan project, investing hundreds of billions if not a few trillion into every conceivable project that would allow for industrialized civilization to continue growing while significantly decarbonizing. Like the B-29 project was basically just as expensive if not more so than the bomb and was the plan B plan relative to the B-36 project (or this is backwards but anyways). We should be rolling out nuclear plants like Walmart's at government expense, funding renewables and grid storage and transmission research in addition to planting trees and refurbishing buildings and so on all at the same time.
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Jun 16, 2023 19:10
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Raenir Salazar posted:Fundamentally we can conclude that the government, if not most of the governments of the world should be embarking on a world wide scale version of the Manhattan project, investing hundreds of billions if not a few trillion into every conceivable project that would allow for industrialized civilization to continue growing while significantly decarbonizing. We have to either fix or go around the current "profit guaranteed even you don't finish it" economic model for utilities. They have no incentive to get stuff done on time or even finish it. Result? https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ “But many of the US' nuclear plants were in fact built around the same design, with obvious site-specific aspects like different foundation needs. The researchers track each of the designs used separately, and they calculate a "learning rate"—the drop in cost that's associated with each successful completion of a plant based on that design. If things went as expected, the learning rate should be positive, with each sequential plant costing less. Instead, it's -115 percent. ... But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.”
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Jun 16, 2023 20:12
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I wonder if deep well geothermal could price compete with nuclear at similar capacities. It's kinda the forgotten other option of green baseload. Geothermal: it's just nuclear with extra steps.
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Jun 18, 2023 05:45
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I mean with current technology, no I don't think it's even feasible in most places. With the new millimeter wave drilling tech being developed, hopefully it will be a game changer. But that's, ironically, all up in the air so far.
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Jun 18, 2023 06:34
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We currently go deeper for oil then what most places need to go for starting temps. For areas not near a rift zone you need to go around 5/6km to start the good heat. At those depths you can start dropping functioning geothermal wells on the east coast. Google says deepest well in the US is about 6km and the worlds deepest oil well is around 12km.
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Jun 18, 2023 07:01
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Zelthar posted:I wonder if deep well geothermal could price compete with nuclear at similar capacities. It's kinda the forgotten other option of green baseload. For places that happen to have high-temperature hydrothermal reservoirs, loving yeah take advantage of that poo poo. Unfortunately that's not all that common, but it does seem like an underutilized resource in the US But for the same reason that most sites aren't suitable for geothermal power, geothermal heat pumps for homes I think are a sleeper technology in the same way that rooftop solar used to be. Compared to air source heat pumps, they are much more efficient at heating and cooling, they operate over a much higher outdoor temperature range, they require less maintenance, and they last much longer. They cost a lot more to install, but they are so much more efficient that the breakeven point is on the scale of 5-10 years according to the EPA; I'm guessing that estimate already counts the 30% federal tax credit that they come with atm There are also dual-source systems now, these take an air source heat pump and add a short geothermal loop to improve efficiency for a little more installation cost.
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Jun 18, 2023 07:20
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Zelthar posted:We currently go deeper for oil then what most places need to go for starting temps. For areas not near a rift zone you need to go around 5/6km to start the good heat. At those depths you can start dropping functioning geothermal wells on the east coast. Google says deepest well in the US is about 6km and the worlds deepest oil well is around 12km. And the expense and effort of doing those things is only done because of the oil. You wouldn't ever do that just for the geothermal heat.
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Jun 18, 2023 08:51
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An ever lasting power supply will pay for itself and profit in time. Especially given there is no fuels upkeep. Maybe not fast enough for a quarterly focused corporation, but a government could handle it. Also you said it was a tech issue and now you moved on to cost. Do you have any idea what the costs are or do you just not like geothermal? A new oil well is in the millions range btw, a new power plant, coal or nuclear, is in the billions.
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Jun 18, 2023 18:43
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