Climate Change Tracker

But solar still has the same storage problem in the power grid. You need something to keep the lights on at night. Lithium batteries are cost effective when it means you can avoid the cost of the whole ICE powertrain and replace buying gas with cheap daytime solar -- which also means that the production capacity for lithium batteries is going to go there.

But then you start talking about electrifying heat, for which the peak demand is when it's colder. At night. And for that it makes sense to build some more nuclear reactors.

It's possible that it will keep going long enough to be competitive, but it's not a safe enough bet to put all the eggs in one basket.

If we build a lot of nuclear reactors and then it turns out that storage becomes cheaper, it will cost an amount of money in line with what we currently pay to generate electricity, much of which will be paid by the investors who bet on the wrong horse. If we don't build a lot of nuclear reactors and then it turns out storage is not cheaper and so we keep burning fossil fuels, that is bad.

Batteries are a storage technology, but we're going to be putting the bulk of battery production capacity into electrifying transportation for the foreseeable future.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...

But they lobby against anything that could practically reduce dependence on fossil fuels, not just nuclear. If you want to do anything about it you have to overcome that.

You need to replace fossil fuels with <whatever you think is the solution>. If you are convinced that solar + batteries can do it, then you need to rethink about orders of magnitudes.

Even nuclear cannot reasonably replace fossil fuels in the timeline that we need (i.e. before global instability that may well slow down many things). Solar is far behind.

Also never forget that we are living a mass extinction right now (it is happening, it is a measurable fact), and that is solely due to human activity in a world with abundant energy. If you find a solution to replace fossil fuels, you may save what remains to be saved on the climate front, but you will finish killing biodiversity. I don't know about you, but that is catastrophic to me.

Conclusion: we need to use much less energy, and therefore we need to be more minimalistic and stop growing just for the sake of growing. It's called "degrowth", but some people don't like that word because they think it means "go back to Middle Age". Instead it just means: engineers (like everybody else) need to work hard on clever solutions that rely less on energy. That's not Middle Age, it's just not the Silicon Valley world.

I certainly hope we have learned the horrors of colonialism and won’t repeat that disastrous period.

Second, you need to specify what kind of storage you are talking. We will need a lot less short-term storage for overnight than we need for cloudy, calm days. Batteries make sense for short-term storage but are too expensive for long-term. Generated fuels, like hydrogen, may work well for long-term storage and we'll them for other things.

Third, we can overbuild solar and wind. It might be cheaper to make 3x or 5x than needed. Finally, we are going to need extra energy for carbon capture and generating fuels.

How are you going to get people to build nuclear power plants when they could make more money on solar?

Who is going to pay to decommission nuclear power plants when they go bankrupt? Solar drives baseload plants bankrupt, which is why coal plants are going out of business.

That obviously depends on the cost of storage relative to the cost of building more plants, but you don't even need to ask the question until after you've already built enough plants to replace all of the existing fossil fuel baseload, so let's start there.

> How are you going to get people to build nuclear power plants when they could make more money on solar?

Regulatory reform to address the maliciously, intentionally high cost of construction and operation, resulting in competitive prices.

> Who is going to pay to decommission nuclear power plants when they go bankrupt?

They don't get decommissioned because they don't result in that kind of bankruptcy. They cost a lot to build, but once they're built, they're going to exist for decades.

If something else turns out to be much cheaper the people who invested in it may get a below market rate of return, but still it doesn't get shut down, because the initial capital expenditure is a sunk cost that has already been paid. The incremental cost of continuing to generate power is much lower.

> Solar drives baseload plants bankrupt, which is why coal plants are going out of business.

Coal plants have a substantial fuel cost, which puts them at a disadvantage. They operate at a loss if the price of electricity drops below the price of coal, and then shut down, and then have to recover their capital costs by operating for fewer hours. Nuclear plants continue to operate at 100% output pretty much regardless of the price of electricity because their fuel cost is negligible. Notice that it's the existing coal plants going out of business and not the existing nuclear plants.

Nuclear also has untapped potential for things like cogeneration, thermal storage and on-site desalination, all of which would make it more cost competitive but are not currently being exploited.

The trouble is they're both intermittent, even independent of time of day. For solar that's much less trouble because the demand is higher during the day, and aligns extremely well with air conditioning load in the summer.

But if you're relying on wind at night and then there isn't any, and you also have no solar because it's night, what's left?

> Generated fuels, like hydrogen, may work well for long-term storage and we'll them for other things.

At which point you have to add the cost of production, storage and generation facilities for some other generating technology.

> Third, we can overbuild solar and wind. It might be cheaper to make 3x or 5x than needed.

But how does that fix it? Sometimes it's calm for weeks, so your wind turbines are generating at 5% capacity for that long. Are you going to overbuild by 20x? Or build enough storage to power the entire grid for that long, even if you only use it for two weeks every three or four years?

> Finally, we are going to need extra energy for carbon capture and generating fuels.

This is a generic argument for building more of any kind of non-carbon generating capacity.

Your thinking is that we can't build solar panels and nuclear reactors fast enough, but we can build housing fast enough to move a significant fraction of the population to higher density areas where they don't have to drive as much? Because that's the low-hanging fruit on energy consumption, and it's a massive scale long-term construction project with significant political opposition.

And we should still do it, if only to get housing prices out of crazyland. But what makes you think we can do it any faster than we can build generation capacity?

Overbuilding means that can use solar and wind more of the time. Partly because wind and solar are anti-correlated, partly because you build them in different spots, and partly because there is some energy being generated. 3x means that only need a couple weeks per year need backup. 5x means that couple days per year need storage.

The generated fuel production would already exist because need them as fuel. Repurposing natural gas storage should work for hydrogen and there is lots of that available. The power plants would need to sit around but should be able to convert natural gas to hydrogen.

> 5x means that couple days per year need storage.

But that's the problem. If you need the long-term storage at all because you have a period with ~0 output from renewables, you then need to maintain enough generating capacity to run the whole grid from something else during that period, even if you only use it once a decade. Which is enormously expensive.

> But night time usage is small, and things like charging cars can be delayed.

The night time usage is about half the peak daytime usage during the summer, and a significantly higher proportion in the winter. And it will get even higher if we switch to electric heating from fossil fuels.

You already want to be charging cars during the day anyway because solar is cheaper, but none of that is included in the existing numbers because the current number of electric cars isn't a major proportion of power consumption. We could perfectly well charge electric cars entirely from solar, but you still need to handle the existing nighttime load with something.

I guess my point generally is that it is super hard to solve, because it touches everything. But it seems clear that we won't be able to compensate for fossil energy in the needed timeline. For nuclear plants, because it's super slow to build. For solar/wind, well we can't control them (if there is no sun, you get no photovoltaic energy) and we can't properly stock the energy they produce. And in any way, changing everything everywhere to work with electricity instead of fossil fuels is super hard, time consuming, and won't work for everything (oil is used for everything, not just cars).

So yeah, it's super challenging, it requires a lot of work and care everywhere. But the first step is to accept that we can't solve the problem by throwing more technology to it. We need to use technology wisely to get as much energy as we can, but in any case we have to drastically reduce our consumption, and therefore change society.