Slashdot Mirror
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.
Renewables are always cheaper. The price of fuel for fossil fuels will go up. The price of decomishing a nuclear site will double again in the next 10 years.
What makes renewables bad is that we don't have reliable storage.
Long term is every home can cover 75% of their bas usage with solar and batteries then the need for large grid scale systems shrinks. The large grid is fragile and a mistake in Ohio, can wipe out new York City for 12 hours. (2003 blackout)
More distributed renewables and smaller but numerous storage. Would strengthen the grid with excess.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Gee, it's as if overhauling an infrastructure which was built predominantly on oil might cost a lot of money to retrofit to handle solar, wind, water, and nuclear!
No fucking duh. However, once you've got the renewable energy sources in place and harvested, the cost will die out, quickly. It's called ROI, and the smart people have obtained almost insane ROI (on the order of 3 months in some related techs like LEDs powered by renewable resources up to 5 years for full solar+wind-powered farms) so they really don't have to worry about this.
Which means Americans have this problem, and not many other people.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm about as much of a greenie as you are likely to run across. I'm strongly of the opinion that we cannot get solar and wind power to be major parts of the grid fast enough. We also need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels (which we do globally to the tune of about $5 Trillion annually) and force them to cost the full economic value of the pollution they cause. That said, the notion that we can rely solely on wind and solar (and hydro where available) in the near future is preposterous. Doing that in a rational way would take a century just due to the cost alone. Fossil fuels simply aren't going away for many decades at minimum no matter what. Fortunately we don't need to get carbon emitting energy sources to zero. We need to get them to a level that the ecosystem can handle which is obviously much lower than it is today. Use nuclear to replace fossil fuels where possible and solar and wind for most of the rest. Yes we will need batteries too. The grid WILL need to be updated no matter what so I don't see that as a bad thing. But if we need to spend the money to keep the planet habitable then no real benefit to waiting.
One beef with the summary is that there currently is no such thing as fossil fuels with carbon capture technology. There is NO industrial scale carbon capture or carbon sequestration technology available nor any reasonable prospect of such technology in the near future. So take that off the table as an option until such time as it becomes a real thing.
I live in the US, particularly Washington state, where most of our electricity is derived from hydro. It's used because it's readily available but it does have its side effects. Just like where I live solar is used with a diminished effect. (I live on the western side of the state with tall trees and cloud cover) If I lived in Arizona, I could bank a very good output of solar, but not so much on the hydro. Shouldn't this be the way we look at our energy? A combination of all power types would be good in the correct situations. Not all areas are blessed with natural resources to be 100% renewable.
...adapt devices to power output. Use them only when electricity is available.
What are the odds that a whole town would decide to run their AC on the same day?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The alternatives are just kicking-the-can-down-the-road... How much will it cost to retrofit or decommission that nuclear plant in 15 or 20 years? How much will it cost to get the carbon out of the atmosphere after it messes up our weather to the point where the growing season is unstable and it's hard to grow crops reliably?
There's an old saying... You can pay now or you can pay later, but it usually costs more later.
There are two sides of such an argument.
1. Just because it works in Europe it doesn't mean it will work in the USA.
2. Just because it works in Europe it doesn't mean it will not work in the USA.
We were able in the past make a trans-continental railroad, an Interstate system, That connects every state together. Nearly every home has access to Clean Water, Electricity, Telephone... These improvements while cost a lot, helped build the United States into an Economic Power house. Because the 325Million people have access to a wider infrastructure and be part of society, while having the property and space to utilize their own means.
This was all fine and good until the stupid Abortion Debates, where peoples view on the topic, painted the other side as morally deficient. Calling the Other side Misogynists or Baby Killers. Which after a few generations of this, has created a polarized society where working with the other side is considered bad. Even if it for all best interests.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Coal should have died in the 60s but groups like Green Peace saved it by driving the cost of nuclear through the roof. 60s nuclear technology was safe, we even knew how to safely dispose of waste in the 60s. We couldn't dispose of it with zero radiation leak but guess what the world is mildly radio active anyway and coal, that thing that replace nuclear, spreads radio active material more than nuclear does.
Ten years ago we solved a lot of the problems with renewables, it was called variable pricing for electricity. People and their appliances can be incentivized to use electricity when it is produced by changing less when the wind blows or the sun is shinning and charging over $0.70/kwh when it isn't. This saved consumers money and saved the utilities even more. Unfortunately the utilities that took a risk and tried this got fucked over by their public utility commissions. (Oklahoma public utility commission almost single handedly set back renewable energy by 5 years)
Last it will never make sense for urban homes to have battery back up. It is always better to share your capacity among several houses, or several thousand houses. Like maybe make it a public utility to store and deliver electricity
Also get white roof shingles!!!
These are all easy things, things that could have already done with a little leadership and maybe getting some of these Green groups to actually think instead of parade around trying to get attention for themselves.
Lastly fuck the pro-rail crude oil transportation advocates. They often go by the anti pipeline crusade.
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.
Do modern nuclear plants *really* melt down that often or at all? CA is ~20% nuke powered and it has, to my knowledge, never experienced a meltdown. The only meltdowns that have happened are due to negligence and a natural disaster happening all at once.
And really, if you're that NIMBY about it, just put the plant in the middle of nowhere and run a giant superconductor to the nearest power hub.
I think too many people played Sim City and thought it was a reality simulator.
Wrong: Coal power is. It's destroying the planet, and yet we're still using a lot of it.
You have price confused with "cost"-- our energy markets are no where near sane about capturing externalities (with the possible exception of nuclear, where we insist on paying full-life cycle charges up front, including waste handling).
... (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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Possibly, but that maxes
out at around 40 percent of our current electical power
needs (not including HVAC and transportation, even). So what else do we do?
The second step is to cover the parking lot, especially where I work. As an added source of revenue, I would PAY to park my car in the shade of the panel.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba