If solar were free, but we still needed to pay for battery storage, how would it then compare in cost to fuel-based alternatives (fossil fuel, nuclear etc)?
replies(6):
https://dercuano.github.io/topics/solar.html and in particular https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-storage-efficiency.h..., https://dercuano.github.io/notes/heliogen.html, and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/balcony-battery.html and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/the-suburbean.html explore the question at the household scale.
More recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26219344 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229595 explore this question in more detail, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308189 explores specifically what it would cost for California to switch to an all-solar grid with only battery storage over the next decade.
David MacKay wrote a wonderful and highly accessible overview of the topic in 02009 as part of his excellent book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which is specifically about sustainable energy in Britain. Unfortunately it needs to be updated—in particular, it doesn't consider utility-scale battery facilities at all—and he is sadly no longer in a position to update it. The license does permit third parties to provide an updated version, but he did not publish the source code. Still, here it is: https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_186.shtml
My fondest dream is that they'll stop dotting the countryside with those ridiculous pole-mounted "security" lights, and we'll be able to experience nighttime again.
Maybe when we have smaller houses and don't have a bajillion devices plugged in all the time.
Also, hydro dams kill a lot of people when they have accidents.
Maybe in the USA.
> which is way more than rooftop solar can provide.
Maybe in your part of the world this is true, but it is not unrealistic in many places.
Also, why are you limiting your thinking to rooftop solar?
The average house doesn't need to source 100% of their electricity from rooftop solar. Electric utilities are how most people will still get a significant portion of their electricity, even those with rooftops solar.
Also, the average household's electricity needs could be reduced significantly while increasing comfort via better insulation, air sealing, and higher efficiency appliances.
I would absolutely love this, but I still find it hard to imagine this changing in any significant way in the next 25 years.
When land is at a premium, most people aren't going to cover their yard with solar panels. . Rooftop is already generally accepted.
edit: bad math, had $60k
It wouldn't be enough for winter heating though.
Play with the assumptions and find out.
I would bet on price going down slightly with scale, but one can't really tell now what will happen: it might go up a lot, it might go down a lot, or it might stay flat.
That could add maybe US$2000 per TEU, which is 21 tonnes of cargo such as solar panels. You can ship a TEU anywhere in the world for US$3000 or less. A 1m² solar panel might weigh 20 kg, so that's roughly 1000 solar pannels, or US$2 per solar panel. That solar panel is about 200 Wp, so this works out to US$0.01 of shipping cost per peak watt. Or less.
The solar module itself costs some US$0.18/Wp wholesale (the article cites higher prices, but see http://pvinsights.com/ https://www.solarserver.de/pv-modulpreise/ https://www.energytrend.com/solar-price.html for more detailed and reliable pricing info), and the whole installation including the panels maybe US$0.50/Wp. So there's no way that an extra US$0.01/Wp could double the cost of the installation. Bump it by 2% maybe.
China isn't the source of key materials. There aren't any key materials; the ingredients in PV cells, except for silver, are abundant everywhere. It's the source of the fully manufactured photovoltaic modules, a finished product that you can prop up in the sun and connect to a battery through a diode. If shipping costs were so high relative to the value of the finished product, every country would have its own solar-cell manufacturing plants, the way every country has its own liquid-oxygen plants, and there wouldn't be such a thing as a worldwide concentration of PV manufacturing in China.
Batteries have the advantage of being explorable at a small scale. Now that the potential market has become so clear this is happening, in many companies.
https://constructionreviewonline.com/biggest-projects/top-5-...
And uranium seawater extraction already exists: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
It's more expensive than mined uranium, but since fissile material is so energy-dense that increase in fuel cost amounts to hardly any change in overall cost.
It's used in cars and consumer devices because it can store a lot of energy for its size and weight and you don't have to mollycoddle it to avoid memory effects.
Those are much less important concerns for this application. You'd build you battery facilities somewhere outside your cities, perhaps near where you build your solar farms, and you don't need the batteries to move. Batteries that take up more room and/or weigh more than lithium batteries for a given capacity should be fine.
No, we're engaging in the "this has been resistant to being invented so far, so let's not bet everything on it showing up tomorrow" argument.
> Uranium quickly runs out if the world is powered by burner reactors and known uranium resources
You could quadruple the present rate of uranium use, representing in a major contribution to mankind's energy use, and have 35 years of supply, just using known reserves and no breeding.
And if you were using that much uranium, more reserves would be quickly proven. Do you think we've found all the uranium we'll ever find, even if market prices go up significantly?
And breeding is possible, and understood. Yes, there's proliferation concerns, but that's not the end of the world.
And seawater extraction is practical without much increase in cost.
No one is saying "no renewables" or "no battery storage" or "no pumped storage". Or "no power to gas to power". We need all of these things. And we need the diversity of having nuclear in the mix, too.
Seawater uranium extraction is at a much lower TRL (technology readiness level).
This is an excellent example of your hypocritical double standards on this subject.
You insist that hydrogen is so technically ready, yet nobody is using it.
Dude. You are falling back to the "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done" argument. Please stop this foolishness.
Hydrogen is being stored in a few places. That the storage isn't larger isn't because of any technical obstacles, it's because there's no reason to store it now. In particular, when we can burn natural gas without CO2 charges, using the hydrogen for energy storage is pointless.
This doesn't mean hydrogen CAN'T be stored, it just means the market conditions for widespread adoption of an off-the-self technology aren't there yet.
It's not just a question of storage, you can just use a salt cavern for that.
It's also a question of electrolyzing water into hydrogen efficiently.
And converting it back into electricity efficently.
And building all of these systems cheaply.
And deploying all of these systems at massive scale.
We're still on the first phase of that. As per your other comment we still don't even have effective elctrolysers to do this cost-effectively [1].
Will hydrogen storage pan out? Maybe. But until then it's not a solution. It's a potential solution, like fusion, or algae in vats, and thermal storage, and all the other potential solutions being proposed. It's not a solution that has actually demonstrated viability.
Why shouldn't nuclear plants scale? They're mostly just steel and concrete. Uranium is more than 40 times more prevalent than gold, and it's energy density is such that it represents a negligible cost of operations. The technology is just scaling up existing components, we had nuclear powered submarines for a while. This is what people thought about nuclear power in the 1950s and early 60s. As plants actually started being constructed problems such as corrosion, large amounts of earth moving, metal impurities, and more were discovered and made the plants more expensive.
We haven't discovered these issues with hydrogen storage. We won't discover these issues until we actually build hydrogen storage facilities at scale. We don't know what challenges will lie in store when building hydrogen storage, because we've never done it before. This is why it's useless to talk about the cost of hydrogen storage until we actually have experience building and operating hydrogen storage plants. Our knowledge of cost of hydrogen storage is in the same situation as nuclear power in the 1950s.
Partially this is because we have similar views on a lot of the challenges facing a move to renewables. I think sometimes this comes across as being sceptical of the progress of renewables.
In my case, and I suspect in yours, that's not really the case. In fact I'm excited and interested in how we will solve these problems in a variety of different ways.
I think we are in agreement that lithium isn't going to be the answer to energy storage at grid scale. If for no other reason than being in direct competition with the electrification of transportation isn't ideal.
Personally I'm hopeful that Ambri's liquid metal battery will materialize.
What developments do you have your eye on?
So 1 kilowatt-hour is 3.6 million joules. One liter (kilogram) of water weighs approximately 10 newtons.
So take one cubic meter (1000 kilograms) of water and move it up one meter, and you have stored 0.0028 kWh. You can see this is where the math becomes tricky without using geology for help.
Let's say you can create a height differential of 50 meters by building in a smart way - each cubic meter of storage you build will now store you 0.139 kWh. And a cubic meter is quite a lot. A full Olympic-size swimming pool stores only 2500 cubic meters, equivalent to only 347 kWh.
That's only the battery capacity of three and a half Teslas, equivalent to the daily consumption of ~12 US homes. You need a lot of these 50-meter elevated Olympic-size swimming pools, and the water and generators to run them. I suppose it's sort of feasible engineering wise, but I doubt it'll be cheap enough. Comparing with the Teslas - can you get this done for the less of the order of $300,000, minus the cost of three luxury cars worth of components?
With batteries, we're getting there fast, and in a way that's economically sound.
"Survey of Hydrogen Production and Utilization Methods"
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19760008503/downloads/19...
250 MW, Rjakon, Norway, built 1965
170 MW, Kima, Egypt, built 1960
125 MW, Nangal, India, built 1958
90 MW, Trail, Canada, built 1939
25 MW, Curco, Peru, built 1958
See https://electrek.co/2020/05/19/tesla-bidirectional-charging-...
[1] https://microsites.airproducts.com/gasfacts/hydrogen.html
Sure cell batteries might not work, we can try out flow batteries, we can try liquid metal batteries, we can try hydraulic hydro storage, we can try out hydrogen, we can try compressed air, we can try electrolyzing iron or aluminum, we can try another dozen different things and it is highly likely that at least 3 will work out just fine.