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Relying on Renewables Alone Significantly Inflates the Cost of Overhauling Energy (technologyreview.com)
A growing number of US cities and states have proposed or even passed legislation that would require producing all electricity from renewable energy sources like solar and wind within a few decades. That might sound like a great idea. But a growing body of evidence shows it's not. From a report: It increasingly appears that insisting on 100 percent renewable sources -- and disdaining others that don't produce greenhouse gases, such as nuclear power and fossil-fuel plants with carbon-capture technology -- is wastefully expensive and needlessly difficult. In the latest piece of evidence, a study published in Energy & Environmental Science determined that solar and wind energy alone could reliably meet about 80 percent of recent US annual electricity demand, but massive investments in energy storage and transmission would be needed to avoid major blackouts. Pushing to meet 100 percent of demand with these resources would require building a huge number of additional wind and solar farms -- or expanding electricity storage to an extent that would be prohibitively expensive at current prices. Or some of both.
TFA is nonsense anyway. The actual paper appears to be this one: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content...
The abstract says:
We analyze 36 years of global, hourly weather data (1980â"2015) to quantify the covariability of solar and wind resources as a function of time and location, over multi-decadal time scales and up to continental length scales. Assuming minimal excess generation, lossless transmission, and no other generation sources, the analysis indicates that wind-heavy or solar-heavy U.S.-scale power generation portfolios could in principle provide â¼80% of recent total annual U.S. electricity demand. However, to reliably meet 100% of total annual electricity demand, seasonal cycles and unpredictable weather events require several weeksâ(TM) worth of energy storage and/or the installation of much more capacity of solar and wind power than is routinely necessary to meet peak demand. To obtain â¼80% reliability, solar-heavy wind/solar generation mixes require sufficient energy storage to overcome the daily solar cycle, whereas wind-heavy wind/solar generation mixes require continental-scale transmission to exploit the geographic diversity of wind. Policy and planning aimed at providing a reliable electricity supply must therefore rigorously consider constraints associated with the geophysical variability of the solar and wind resourceâ"even over continental scales.
Which contradicts what is said in the summary and TFA. In fact it seems like the author of TFA is illiterate and can't understand clear, simple English statements.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It has also become clear that renewables are an equally poor tool for full power satisfaction.
Except actual studies show that grids get *more* reliable when renewables are added. Funny thing about the sun, it doesn't go out all at once the way a 500MW coal plant does when a turbine overheats. Tesla's Big Battery in South Australia has compensated for several fossil-plant shutdowns much quicker than spinning reserve can--eventually they will be able to reduce the amount of spinning reserve in favor of batteries. But you're absolutely right, we don't have anything to worry about until we actually hit that 80% mark, and by that time we're likely to have even more solutions available.
ROI with subsidization isn't really ROI. Be generous with your figures.
Which form of energy is not subsidized by the government? If you look at fossil fuels and renewal energy, fossil fuels produce about 4 times more energy but enjoy 7 times more subsidies. It takes a lot of government money to keep coal and oil prices so low, almost twice as much money per unit of energy produced than is spent making renewable energy cheaper.
Subsidy comparison
Energy Production comparison
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
... (the rich, the Pelosi supporters, etc.) will be assigned July and August while the "bad" families (Trump supporters, NRA members, etc.)...
You have strange fantasies.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.
Come on, man, this is just blatant FUD. "Periodically" meaning 3 real incidents, EVER. Compare deaths from nuclear to constant deaths from solar (workers falling off roofs), wind (workers falling of turbines), hydroelectric (workers falling off dams, dams failing and wiping out entire towns), natural gas (workers dying in fires), coal (workers dying in fires AND dying in mines AND bystanders dying from lung disease), and you see that nuclear is far and away the safest energy source out there. Three completely separate references for you, all of which concur:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
There are a few good reasons to be wary of nuclear - frequent schedule/budget overruns being chief among them. There's also a huge cost for facility decommissioning that hasn't really been handled adequately. But safety concerns are outright lies - nuclear energy is literally and provably the safest form of energy that exists. That argument is bad and you should feel bad for making it.
The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.
They do? Periodically? Like continuously every couple of years or something? To date there has been one meltdown due to insanity, one due to equipment failure, and one due to a natural disaster.
Interestingly 2 of the 3 scenarios are not possible with any Gen III reactor design let alone Gen IV and the third one isn't possible with most reactors.
I think you need to look up the word "periodically" in the dictionary. ... Or look up how nuclear disasters happen and why your comment is silly.
The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.
The US has had exactly one reactor undergo partial meltdown since nuclear power became a thing roughly fifty years ago. To say you "know" nuclear plants experience meltdown "periodically" is utter nonsense and unsupported by any facts you can cite.
Or perhaps you want to cite Chernobyl? Gee, what happens when you turn off all the safeties and try to run a reactor with a positive void coefficient in a haphazard manner? Never mind that no reactor currently in operation in the US has such a design. Never mind Chernobyl operators purposefully disregarded every rule in the book. Nah, let's blame new-kew-lar powar for it!
Or perhaps you want to cite Fukushima? Yeah, the reactor built last century that survived an earthquake and tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people around it and was put in situations it was never designed to withstand in the first place. Yeah, let's use that as an example of how unsafe them nukes are! That'll show 'em your mastery of statistical analysis!
And while you're at it, completely ignore the fact that Fukushima has not one single fatality attributable to any radioactive release from the plant despite what happened to it. Just kinda sweep that under the rug the same way you ignore the 15,894 people who were killed, the 6,156 injured, and the 2,546 people missing due to the quake and tsunami...none of which had anything to do with a meltdown.
And will do it more often as they age.
Again, a supposition unsupported by any facts. Reactors are routinely inspected and have licensed lifetimes. Their license to operate can and will be revoked if they're run haphazardly. They must renew the license periodically and have set lifetimes that can only be extended if safety checks show it to be safe to do so.
But sure, let's just go with your idea and say they're gonna kill us all anyway. Probably spawn a wave of incredible hulks while they're at it. Or Godzilla.
The model does not include the cost of the damage done by global warming.
Perhaps because such quantification is impossible given the ridiculous number of variables involved. Nah, never mind that! That's just crazy talk!
Or rather, it assigns that cost to renewables by failing to credit them for saving the Earth.
"saving the Earth"??? Hyperbole much?
The model does not consider the effect that radical energy use reductions would have on the overall cost.
Nor does your pie-in-the-sky "idea" consider the radical effects on society and economies that "radical energy use reductions" would impose. Nah, let's forget even thinking about the consequences of what you propose. Just gloss right over that. Nothing to see here.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Not to mention that Germany pays about 2 to 4 times for power what the US pays...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
a. Privatization in America is pretty much inevitable because Americans do not trust government. It's cultural. It's hammered into you when you're young and impressionable.
b. Nuclear disasters are much, much worse and they affect everyone around for miles, not just the people in the immediate vicinity of the disaster.
There's a reason NIMBYism exists. It's irrational rationality. Running an unsafe nuclear power plant because you don't like paying taxes and don't trust the government is irrational. But if you've already accepted that level of irrationality then the next rational thing to do is not run the plant in the first place.
It's a catch 22 in the literal sense of the word. You'd have to be crazy to do it but you'd have to be crazy to not do it.
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So, after coal plant exhaust is scrubbed, what is done with all that fly ash? The radioactivity that coal plants used to emit is all in the coal ash.
We do know how to dispose of waste from nuclear plants. The omni-obstructionists just will not permit it. They want the waste to stay right where it is, in cooling ponds a nuclear power plants, where they can get filmed for the evening news wringing their hands over it and wailing "The horror, oooo, the horror!"
As for a disposal site, go to Google Earth and search for "Sedan Crater". Scan south. That's the general area of Yucca Mountain, an lunar landscape of atomic bomb craters lined with completely uncontained fission products and unburned plutonium. No anti-nuke has ever given a remotely adequate explanation of how glassified, contained waste is more of a problem than what is already there.
I did something anethema for Slashdot... I actually read the study. And while most of it was fairly reasonably done, the cost aspect seems to be handled as an afterthought tacked onto the end. There was no estimation of the costs of using HVDC links at all (I've seen studies that did so, and they came to a much more favourable conclusion). As for their battery storage they state that large batteries currently cost $500/kWh. No, they don't. Over a year ago, the price on power-focused Powerpack systems was about $350/kWh. Energy-focused systems will be even cheaper per kWh. And that's old pricing, let alone current pricing, let alone future pricing. Gigafactory was established to bring costs down to under $100/kWh - and Semi appears to be priced on batteries under $100/kWh. A price that the paper mentions as a target but doesn't appear to believe that it will happen in the next couple decades. Next couple decades? Try "next couple years". They also assume a 10 year service life. Power-focused, frequently cycling powerpacks last 15 years; energy-focused systems should last longer due to how less frequently they go through cycles.
In short, the paper is assuming that the future - even the fairly far future - will have worse energy storage tech than we have today.
They also make claims like "For context, storage totaling 12 hours of U.S. mean demand, 5.4 TW h of energy capacity, is 150 years of the annual production capacity of the Tesla Gigafactory (35 GW h)". No, it's not. Gigafactory 1 (note: not "The Tesla Gigafactory", it's called Gigafactory 1, as it's a first generation which they tend to replicate around the world) has a projected output this year of 50 GWh. Design projection at completion is 150 GWh/year. Again: the paper is treating decades in the future as if they won't have what we already have today.
Colour me unimpressed. I've read much more impressive research, where they actually laid out smart grids and did detailed cost calculations on it.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"