The most interesting thing here to me is the paragraph that alludes to a potential future where Norway becomes the battery of Northern Europe.
Norway has a ton of natural places for pumped hydro installations. In most of the world, installing dams involves displacing thousands or even millions of people and doing vast environmental damage. But due to Norway’s unique geography, this is typically not the case there. Norway has an absurd number of natural, deep, steep-walled valleys and fjords.
Norway already is the battery for Denmark and some of Germany. This is exactly how Denmark gets over 50% of their electricity from renewables—they always have Norway to send electricity to when wind generation is high and the reverse when generation is low.
That's not quite a battery. There's no energy storage going on this relationship, just using trade to balance out highly variable energy production through trade.
A hydro lake is exactly like a battery - potential energy filled by a river.
Also if Germany sends excess wind/solar electricity to Norway, and the hydro lake is emptied slower because of that, then the hydro acts exactly the same as battery storage — no pumping required. However some lakes have a minimum rate of outflow: when rivers need a minimum flow for sports, ecological, or downstream dam capacity reasons. Also during dry periods when lake capacity drops, the ability to be used as a battery also drops. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28898426
Because central government has a history of riding roughshod over the wishes of the local people. Not everyone is keen to see the place they call home or a place they enjoy holidaying in drowned under hundreds of metres of water.
Pretty much all the easily (both physically and politically) developed hydropower in Norway has already been at least partially developed.
Nonetheless there is a lot of potential for new and improved hydro stations and the work is ongoing.
An increasingly-viable alternative to global transmission interconnectivity is distributed energy resources (behind the meter, on utility-customer sites).
The latter offers better resiliency and lower transmission / distribution losses.
A well-insulated building and its hot-water tank are both (thermal) energy storage systems, that are more durable (and more affordable) than electrochemical batteries. A building can be pre-cooled or pre-heated when on-site solar is plentiful, to the end of the occupant's comfort range. This means a smaller on-site battery bank is needed to achieve year-around grid independence (for a conditioned / comfortable building).
It seems that we're just getting started with on-site flexible-load control, and building energy automation generally. The higher electric rates in some markets make it financially viable for end users today.
I live in a 200 year old house in Mexico. The walls are half a meter thick. At night we open the windows, which are oriented toward the prevailing winds, and the house cools down. Mid-morning we close it all up and it stays cool all day. Meanwhile people with modern houses have to run their air conditioning to keep cool.
I have had arguments with Americans who are absolutely convinced that wasting energy in an AC is good and something to be proud of, while opening windows is primitive, and bad. It was funny.
Passive solar design is such a beautiful elegant thing.
A fun book here is Let it Shine by John Perlin. He shares examples from around the world, over the last 6,000 years.
The author also made a good point that despite wind and solar being intermittent, they are actually fairly predictable a or less day in advance (thanks to weather forecasts).
> So that I can take advantage of these low rates at night, I use a roughly 16kWh battery that I just happen to have lying around. I charge it up over night starting at 10pm on the dot, and it's done charging usually by 3 or 4 in the morning. I keep it topped off until around 7, and then I start using it during the day. And it doesn't need to be charged again until the evening. Now the reason I just happen to have that battery lying around, is because that battery... is my house.
It'd be interesting if you can scale and reach profitability.
It seems like a reboot of EnerNoc and has much of the same team. EnerNoc was burning ~50 million/y on 400 million revenues before it was purchased at a discount by Enel. [0]
Yep, much of the same team, with a different strategy (more tech-focused and participation in more energy market programs). Regulation of DERs largely killed EnerNoc, now Enel X, and the like. Voltus' CEO helped repeal the order[1], ensuring DERs make parity with conventional generators.
> if you can scale and reach profitability
I don't know what I can actually reveal, but scaling is our focus right now.
In power markets, it's really hard scaling around each market/state's idiosyncracies almost like it's not a technology problem and more regulatory/financing. Hope you guys figure it out.
100%, well put. Our energy markets team is larger than our engineering team :). But it's also certainly a technology problem in that meeting each market's idiosyncratic requirements requires technology.
One another option is gravity storage- with (exotic idea alarm) a ice piston in isolation material. Basically create a artificial vertical glacier and transport the heat from the cooling into a separate storage "hot well". Then use and abuse accordingly.
That's really cool (dad pun intended). I don't understand the ice component though... is the heat capture an ancillary benefit? One web-search result uses a rock mass: https://heindl-energy.com/.
> … (thermal) energy storage systems, that are more durable (and more affordable) than electrochemical batteries…
Agree, I think for so long the whole renewable build out has ignored storage costs which will really come to bite electrochemical battery dependent systems in the ass (because banks like UBS have long projected that costs will be harder and harder to bring down and ACS has long talked about the difficult to deal with chemistries with all the different batteries out there [and with the inherit degradation of the system over time]).
I think in the long run (well, unless our political challenges with nuclear get solved), on the utility level (potentially even behind the meter for specific high energy applications that have space to construct/"mine" their own solar field), molten salt storage will take the lead (esp as salt mixtures/chemistries get cheaper, have higher thermal operating ranges, storage and transportation gets better).
Thermal storage in hot sand seems superior. Sand is cheaper, capable of operating at high temperature, and allowing heat exchange to the working gas by direct contact in a fluidized bed heat exchanger.
I deff would like to see a 100MW sand system built out.
I think the sand direction is deff an improvement over the 300 delta_C systems now with (NaNO3, KNO3, NaNO2) at the 900 delta_C in used in the pdf, but idk if it will win out in the long run with the need for direct contact vs some kind of sCO2 system with higher delta_C mixtures (for example a theoretical mixture CaCl2 + MgCl2 with 1500 delta_C, or even engineered metamaterials[0, i've only seen some specific examples of electromagnetic metameterials when i was in school about a decade ago, this post was about a year after i left] in a mixture to have even higher delta_c).
There's only so much one can do when one limits the materials used for heat capacity to naturally occurring ones (i imagine that compounds in the future could be engineered to be at least a order of magnatude higher in delta_c from natural mixtures).
One issue with that sand system is that the sand is hot enough to generate too much thermal NOx in an open Brayton cycle (or combined cycle) system. Which is sad, because that kind of system could save a lot of complexity. One could add a selective catalytic reduction stage afterwards but that increases complexity again.
A very interesting possibility, I think, is to replace the sand with some other mineral and make the solid part open cycle. That is, instead of retrieving and recycling cooled sand, a new stream of pulverized minerals would be used. This could be useful if heat treating those minerals does something desirable. A particular case would be heat treatment of serpentinite to make magnesium oxide and silica, which would then be used for CO2 capture/sequestration.
This isn't a thermal option, but the iron-air chemistry has promise too. It's basically rusting and de-rusting iron. Much more environmentally benign than lithium ion, and likely way less expensive. AFAIK, this company is the frontrunner: https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
Iron-air are just another kind of metal-air batteries. The problem with all of them is that hydrogen-air batteries have existed for decades and is basically the same thing. If it wasn't for 20 years of marketing propaganda we'd realize this and never bothered with reinvesting the wheel with another chemistry.
I hear you that marketing spin is a factor here. But if Form Energy can achieve the $20/kWh price that they're pursuing... iron-air is quite different from other chemistries on the financial front.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/form-energys-20kwh-100-hour...
(I have no affiliation with this company.)
By hydrogen-air battery do you just mean a water electrolyzer system paired with some kind of hydrogen fuel cell?
If so, the metal-air systems have a major advantage on the discharging side of things by avoiding the need of a fuel cell and being able to harvest electrons directly via galvanic current.
A hydrogen system is basically the two sides of a battery split into separate components. It's fully possible to build device that does both, although as of today this is less efficient.
The galvanic discharge rate is extremely slow and not really suitable as part of a rechargeable battery system. Any practical metal-air will have some way of discharging faster. The problem is that we have basically solved this for hydrogen-air but not for anything else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJunxkln578 more on the UK to Morocco solar / wind farm plan. 3,800km times four HVDC cables for redundancy. Global capacity around 4,000km of cable per year. So to make this project happen, need to open a new cable manufacturing facility.
This video also suggests that this sort of renewable project will have an average cost of 48 GBP/MWh versus 92.50 GBP/MWh for new nuclear.
...need to open a new cable manufacturing facility.
No, they don't. [1] https://www.nsw.com/en/cable/submarine-power-cable/ has plenty of capacity. They have been in the local, regional and sometimes national news for having to sit on their product, because for environmental reasons some (otherwise fully operational) offshore wind parks couldn't get connected. Maybe some other factory in the same region also. Expected boom, and then busted by regulation. Meanwhile investigations because of cartel allegiations in that sector, but not them. Anyways, out of work, profit, changed owner two times.
Whatever, it mostly just sits there, way underutilized.
Deal with it! :-)
> But why would you lay it to UK when you could do US, hence supply sun energy at night? My estimates was about 40% loss tho.
This is a most wonderfully HN-ish of comments.
Someone mentions a mammoth infrastructure project, that's doubtless involved many hundreds of person-years of effort to realise, and with the scale and money involved everything from the business case through to the final engineering proposals would have been reviewed, vetted, considered, analysed, checked, and audited dozens of times over.
The reactive response is - why didn't they do something totally different?
FWIW, absent any research, my responses to that question included scale (it's huge, but still a much shorter distance), they could skirt the coast, so they wouldn't have to contend with a famously deep trench in the middle of the Atlantic, they'd probably been at this for some years and the USA leadership <sic> has been famously against renewables for 4 of the last 5 years.
With a few minutes research, I now know xlinks is a British start-up - so they'd probably not be interested to just be a deal broker for renewables between Morocco and the USA. A straight-line (routing around Iberia) path according to google from Morroco to Cornwall is ~ 2350km - so if they're citing a 3800km path it looks like they're staying close to the coast (as I expected). Morroco to the USA is ~6,000km (as the sardine swims) so even a direct route path would be twice the everything.
I can't find definitive answers about power cables over ocean trenches, but it looks like the (predominantly comms) cables that go that way are tiny - several cm diameter at most - and relatively lightweight. I'd guess they're a tested tech in those environments, have lots of existing redundancy, and are (relatively) inexpensive to re-run if they break.
In contrast, these 4 x power transmission cables are 150kg / metre, and no one has any long-distance experience with them. They'll be extremely expensive and time-consuming to repair or replace, and a failure of one of them will cause protracted, huge disruptions.
> ... but you didn't have to go against the rules with your response.
Do you mean this one?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."
So the answer to the question 'why are they doing what they spent so much effort working out what was the best thing to do?' is self-evident, I would have thought. A combination of market need, feasibility of technology, timing, cost, etc.
Losing much more of the product (power), to go twice the distance, to a place with a comparable geography / climate arrangement (ie. cloudy / short day in the north, access to mostly clear / consistently long days to the south) might make commercial sense, but given no one's doing it, one has to assume that it does not.
> Marocco to US minimum is 4700km. So difference is comparable.
First, where are you getting 4700km from? Playing with google maps a bit here, and the closest I can get is 5100.
Second, Morocco to UK minimum distance (by sea) is 1900km - so those numbers can definitely be compared, but they're certainly not similar.
> p.p.s. I did LCOE maths for this before, but since you're an asshole I'm not bother to look for it now.
Well okay then.
Perhaps you should share it with xlinks. It's a $21.9 billion project, but they may be able to change the route now if it makes more sense to go to a different country.
I think the problem is this is already on the edge of what is technically possible.
To provide power to the US it would presumably be easier to take advantage of US deserts and lay cables over land rather than cross-Atlantic. This avoids security and engineering problems as well as reducing transmission loss.
Also batteries mitigate the timing delay problem. Also these are not exclusive projects can do both if there is demand.
> To provide power to the US it would presumably be easier to take advantage of US deserts and lay cables over land rather than cross-Atlantic.
This would appear to be a much easier, more robust approach, yes.
Press pieces on the project cite Morocco's minimum 10-hours of sunlight a day, and their latitude is similar to the most southern parts of the USA, and certainly (given we're talking international trade here) there are large areas of Mexico that could offer similar climate.
High-level grid interconnection isn't so useful if one (or more) of the lower-level grids being interconnected is so badly maintained that it frequently has to be deenergized.
The future probably looks like microgrids, with MID/neutral-forming transformers [1] which generate their own 60 Hz pilot signal and allow multiple producers, batteries, and consumers to coexist on a common protocol even in the absence of the utility grid.
The nice thing of interconnected grids is that you can route around the bad bits. There's no such thing as a global shortage of power generation. Blackouts happen when there are local shortages. Which in turn usually means problematic local suppliers and a lack of connectivity to external suppliers. The key challenge on e.g. the European grid is moving renewable over production to where the demand is. E.g. Southern Germany firing up more coal/gas when the north has ample wind production is because they lack the transport capacity (i.e. cables). Grid interconnectivity increases the profitability of renewable.
Microgrids and batteries are indeed popular in much of the developing world where grids are very unreliable and power generation lags way behind demand. India, the middle east, much of Africa, and probably South America, etc. Grids are much less reliable there and investing in private capacity is essential and something that people do as much as they can so they can keep the fridge on, their phones charged, the AC on, etc.
In developed markets, people do the same but more for cost than resilience reasons. Though I can imagine Texans might be considering both after this year.
I'm not sure what massive blackouts you are referring to. There were none where I live that I can remember; or in the years since; or before. Just not a thing in Northern Europe.
The electrical engineer in me wants to see bigger and better grids that allow us to better utilize more renewable (and intermittent) sources. Show me that transcontinental or intercontinental or transoceanic HVDC backbone that lets electricity slosh around all over the planet. Just in the US I fantasize about an HVDC line that runs the length of I-40 alongside an aqueduct covered in solar panels to knit together the eastern, western, and Texan grids while also bringing the southeast's excess fresh water to the southwest.
The pragmatist in me (and the witness to the difficulty of getting anything built, and the greater difficulty of getting anything maintained) thinks grid investment is both unlikely to happen and even more unlikely to work well. In particular, transmission is low-value, high-risk, and expensive. It's low-value because distributed generation and storage are getting cheap. It's high-risk because high-power-density things are dangerous (check out all the Western fires started by electric utilities' transmission lines and switchcraft). It's expensive partially for good material and access reasons, but also for bad political reasons (NIMBYism and the fragmentation of responsibility for large land areas) and simply real estate rights cost. It's like trying to build California's high-speed rail but with less value-add, so it's going to be a horrible uphill slog of questionable merit.
So yes, I agree with you. More microgrids with more distributed generation and storage are inevitable. And I think that they're probably going to destabilize and likely kill the large-scale electric utility as we know it in ~50 years. I often wonder why more power companies haven't already become telcos to utilize their poles to distribute internet access.
In Europe it is distinctly less risky as you get arbitrage between different parts of the grid. You make money as long as their is a price difference. The technology is well understood. California is hardly a good case study.
I think the way grids develop does still depend on local factors. In the UK rural substations have quickly become constrained and have limited export capacity. Urban areas have more capacity and are seeing peaker and battery installation. But large arrays of solar and wind just need a big connection to get power from the middle of nowhere into big cities. Places where land for batteries or peakers will be super expensive and where solar and wind are impossible.
Also, if you are going to setup this kind of generation why bother selling to the public anyway. Find a ceramics factory or an steel works and run a private wire. You get a guaranteed customer who will agree prices years in advance.
> In Europe it is distinctly less risky as you get arbitrage between different parts of the grid. You make money as long as their is a price difference.
Yes, and in theory, the market can decide whether spatial arbitrage via long interconnections or temporal arbitrage (via batteries, shutting off industrial consumers, pre-running air-cons, etc) is better.
Perhaps a combination of approaches will prevail:
The different arbitrage opportunities mostly make money off the price spikes they can smooth.
Simplified: the first long range cable you install earns the most money, because it can pick off the highest spikes. The second cable will cost just as much as the first one to install, but will have to find its profits in a world with already slightly blunted price spikes.
Similarly for batteries. But eg batteries and long cables can pick off slightly different spikes, and the back-and-forth flow in cables doesn't have to average out to zero (like batteries do).
> I often wonder why more power companies haven't already become telcos to utilize their poles to distribute internet access.
I think there is a business side to this wherein big cable co made some compelling economic argument and exclusivity arrangement with the power company.
Clearly, utilizing the pre-existing infrastructure and doing it all in-house would yield high-quality engineering outcomes.
I don't see how grid transit is a long term solution. Ultimately it doubles down on the problem of renewables. If Florida is consistently exporting solar power to the North East then it's two regions that go down if Florida is unusually cloudy.
sounds like a dismal future. I want to live in a future where we invest in infrastructure, not some dystopian world where tech-bro fantasy provided the rational for systemic disinvestment
Economic progress means doing more with what you have, and the reason why economic growth is exponential is that you are creating more capital as part of the production process.
Doing more with any given amount of capital is very much part of economic progress. (Of course, if you can grow your capital, that's maybe even better. But capital ain't free: what goes into capital production doesn't go into consumption. And what goes into capital production for purpose A, like infrastructure, doesn't go into capital production for purpose B.)
yes, I'm glad you agree. It's not about doing more with less. It's about doing more with what you have. Capitalism does not promote reduction of either the capital stock or human capital -- in fact, just the opposite!
Norway mostly generate electricity from renewable sources, some 99% of our annual production (~120TWh, if memory serves) is hydro-electric.
We've seen prices becoming more volatile in later years as our domestic market has become more interconnected with that of continental Europe.
Normally, I'd be all in favour of being part of a larger, working market; however with European countries phasing out coal (makes sense) and nuclear (makes less sense), supply is being cut while demand soars; hardly a recipe for stable prices.
It would be nice to serve base power needs by nuclear power, then use hydro (which can be regulated up and down much faster than thermal power plants) to handle the peaks.
Well, Europe's nuclear power plants are on average more than 35 years old, they simply can't be operated for centuries, instead the are becoming unreliable. In 2019 France had 5580 reactor days with zero production. Regarding new builds in Europe, those still being built are behind schedules, OL3 in Finland with a 12 year delay. https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-un...
You can build a lot of wind and solar parks in that time and updated old one-way dams with pumps to have them a large scale batteries. All that decentralized, thus creating jobs all over the country.
China also builds wind, solar, and electrical transmission projects faster and cheaper than Europe. China has lower wages and planners can ignore local objections to infrastructure projects more easily than in Europe. This leads to better outcomes by the numbers but it's not an unmitigated good.
It's not just that. When you build reactors in series, you have economies of scales in term of accumulated expertise, amortising R&D costs, etc. France for instance finished building up its nuclear capacity at the end of the 80s, and every reactor built since has been unique, extremely costly and behind schedule. But the day they will replace their whole estate, the economics will likely be very different.
We don't know how they'll perform as they age. If we calculated quality as you suggest, they would probably win.. but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants.
In your formula, where do you envision the number of incidents being derived from?
China excels at hiding important information from public view, so I would take their data, and data indirectly sourced from them, with a grain of salt. And oh, by the way, one could say the same about the nuclear industry and its captured regulatory bodies in general as well.
That is true, which is why I specifically mentioned "severe" incidents - even if less severe stuff happens and is hushed up, it's impossible to keep radioactive particles blowing across the globe quiet, so we'd surely know of those.
According to the IEAA power plants have a typical design lifespan of 30-40 years which can be extended with proper care https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/extending-operational-l...
and let's be honest, the US aren't that much better:
> "Since 2001, the ROP has resulted in more than 4,000 inspection findings concerning nuclear power plant licensees' failure to fully comply with NRC regulations and industry standards for safe plant operation, and NRC has subjected more than 75 percent (79) of the 103 operating plants to increased oversight for varying periods" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-06-1029.pdf
Those findings are mostly small unimportant issues, but if the lifespan of a plant creeps upwards the severe issues will become more common.
Those 5580 were 1700 more than planned. It's like saying: I can use my car two months a year due to maintenance and being fine with it not working for a third month. I
The cancelling of power plants is a political decision due to the lack of popularity of nuclear. It's not that we can't build plants, it's that there is no political will to do so.
> Those 5580 were 1700 more than planned. It's like saying: I can use my car two months a year due to maintenance and being fine with it not working for a third month.
Welcome to the real world of industrial processes, these aren't cars. Maintenance are run on tight schedules[1], so there can easily be delays (this isn't specific to nuclear though, you'd find delays during maintenance for every kind of electric production site). Also, small problems happen all the time, and because of nuclear's super high safety requirements, when those small things happen, you stop the reactor and fix it.
BTW, around one third of those 1700 days came from small issues at Fessenheim that EDF decided not to fix and keep the reactor off because the plant was planned for closure by the end of the year. You're not gonna fix you car if you know it's gonna be seized soon right?
[1] mostly because like in every business, project manager are like “it's late: workers were lazy. It's dine before the deadline: we gave them too much time”.
The cancellation of new nuclear power plants in the US was overwhelmingly due to economics. In the first nuclear buildout, reactors came in more expensive than promised, demand growth slowed, and then the grids were opened to non-utility generators. This happened again more recently with the nuclear renaissance: projected demand growth again failed to materialize, reactor construction was more expensive than promised (Watts Bar 2, V.C. Summer, Vogtle), and large quantities of fracked gas became available.
Hydro is amazing when it comes to electricity generation, but for that reason it has already been developed as much as possible during the whole 20th century and there's really little room for enhancement (and when the technology progresses, it's quickly deployed).
In fact, I like to say that the only viable option to get 100% RE is to lower our energy consumption until hydro can cover the majority of our needs.
There isn’t enough hydro potential on the planet to produce the amount energy we need.
It’s also worth pointing out that while hydro is renewable, it isn’t clean. Dams are ecological nightmares.
Hydro will like be part of our energy profile indefinitely. But it will never be more than a small fraction. And in the long run that fraction will get smaller as global energy demand continues to grow.
There is enormous potential for off-river pumped hydro storage, though. Geography that doesn't have much if any natural water flow can still hold vast amounts of water in enclosed areas.
IMO, most industrialized nations have already tapped hydro about as much as it can be tapped, given some constraints about wildlife habitat. But I'd be happy to be corrected -- what new hydro projects do you think we should be doing, and how much power do you think they'd provide?
It is also very hard to get buy-in for large new hydro plants.
The resevoirs behind the damms cover a lot of area and people don't like their homes being under water.
There are also ecological considerations like trout and salmon migration.
Due to this they are actually demolishing old, low power legacy hydro plants and re-naturalizing the river.
Yup. Somehow climate change is supposed to be this planetary existential threat, but not, you know, so existential as to allow a salmon to be endangered or to risk building a nuclear plant.
Those are huge, huge numbers! But to put them in perspective, it's less than the difference between living in, say, present day US vs present day UK. Big impact, but hardly planetarily existential.
And, yes, there's more to live than economics. But if life goes on normally enough that we can even not only still talk about GDP with any meaning, but even say that we are going to preserve 80% to 90% of GDP, things won't be too apocalyptic.
Keep in mind that this is 80% of a far larger pie than today, since normal economic growth will continue.
> say that the global economic impact of climate change will likely amount to about 10% of world GDP, and perhaps as much as 20%.
So maybe that's why governments don't act, relying on abstract GDP numbers. «A good chunk of the tropical era of the world is going to be uninhabitable[1]? Who cares, it's only gonna cost us 10% of GDP».
No, its that it will grow to that share by 2050 (which is less than 30 years away) and keep growing.
> At a (somewhat generous) 3% baseline growth rate,
At a fairly generous 3% baseline growth rate, 2.35× current world GDP, for a projected population of 9.7 billion to todays 7.9 billion, so (pre-climate change impacts) a little under double the current GDP/capita.
Of course, the losses arent, expected to be evenly distributed among countries, regions, etc., so if you aren't a well-diversified capitalist (say you are working class) and in the wrong place or industry, you have a good chance at seeing dramatically* greater impacts.
Yes, those are big impacts. Just not existential impacts even just for humanity.
> Of course, the losses arent, expected to be evenly distributed among countries, regions, etc., so if you aren't a well-diversified capitalist (say you are working class) and in the wrong place or industry, you have a good chance at seeing dramatically* greater impacts.
Yes, averages hide a lot of variance.
Of course, this is another good reason in favour of allowing freer migration around the globe.
Why? For those people it's at worst a neutral argument, as getting migrants ain't bad for you (and is arguably good).
Of course, now we'd have to discuss who 'you' is. If you are talking about individual people, or about eg some statistical measure of the country or county as a whole.
Careful there: you might mess with the salt and mineral concentrations in the Mediterranean Sea. And, of course, there's lots of shipping through the straits of Gibraltar that you have to accommodate.
No problem withbsalinity in the most extreme varuants of this - you effectively let the whole Mediterranean Sea evapirate and only let in enough water to keep it this way, effectively making the whole scheme solar driven. That way you can also build multiple dams between island chains and get even more power, before the water eventually evaporates on the bottom most salt pan.
Also takes care of shipping. ;-) Although I guess you could build a near shore shipping channel, possibly filled with fresh water from rivers.
You can't easily turn just any dam to do pumped storage - you essentially need at least 2 dams, pumping from the lower one to the upper one. Normal dam will simply not have enough water "under" its single dam to pump up when needed.
Not to mention the power transfer to pump water up & down being possibly a big multiple of what a regular hydro plant on that one spot would even need to transfer.
On the other hand, pumped hydro doesn't require the substantial average flow that a hydro generator would need. One build pumped hydro systems where there is no sustained source of surface water flow at all -- for example, in deserts. A proposed pumped hydro facility in Arizona would lose (to evaporation) an order of magnitude less water than a nuclear power plant with capacity = that hydro facility's average throughput.
Unfortunately lots of windy locations in Europe are not good locations for hydro-works, too. I’m thinking Netherlands and Northern Germany (even though knowing the Dutch they might come up with something), and closer to me (I’m from Eastern Europe) the locations close to the Black Sea, which are excellent for wind farms yet are a poor choice for hydro solutions.
Of course, you could let’s say transport the energy produced by wind farms from Northern Germany to hydro projects built in South Germany, but that opens a new can of worms: loss of energy because of the transport itself, extra costs, actually building the energy transport infrastructure (a huge task in a NIMBY world).
The transport losses are by far the smallest part of that. HVDC is available at 3.5% loss at 1000km as a standard product, but if building it at the required scale was trivial we’d be doing it rather than talking about it.
Biggest issue lately seems
to be right of way/approvals - most of the paths between hydro and wind sources are overland.
Most of the existing HVDC interconnects are undersea.
You don’t need to deal with 10k different landowners each wanting their own special deal if you’re connecting Tunisia and Spain, vs North and South Germany.
Of course, and probably 50% or more of those landowners are going to fight you tooth and nail in court in that proceeding. Some so you’ll pay them more to settle/go away, some because they just hate you on an ideological level or refuse to budge [https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...]
If you’re covering significant distances that people live in, you can expect to spend a decade or sometimes more in court before being able to build - if ever.
Because of course there are the environmental reviews, the impact assessments, etc. and each of those will be hundreds to thousands of pages long, and you’ll likely have to fight over each page, also in court, with folks who don’t like that you’re going to dig up that random patch of flowers to install your power line or whatever.
And that is assuming you’re lucky enough to not have any endangered species in the way, in which case you might literally not be able to build at all if it is in an area you have no choice to go through.
So far no one is staking out patches of ocean floor, and generally even if they did, the topography is usually more forgiving there. So all you need is landing approval, which means one government and one compliant landowner on each side somewhere along each coast that is close enough to an existing grid that you can interconnect to it. Much more solvable. Still not easy or straightforward.
In California it took me 4 years and $18k worth of professional help to get approval to do completely standard fuel reduction work on a completely uninteresting plot of land that was super overgrown with brush and dead trees - with no one objecting to it - in the middle of a historic wildfire crisis in California that actually expedited the process.
I had to notify 10 something local native tribes (in case they maybe were somehow attached to the land, which they weren’t), had to do a detailed archeological survey, had to have a licensed biologist do a detailed walkthrough to look for endangered species (there were none).
Meanwhile the 3 largest fires in the states recorded history burned nearby, and they wouldn’t let me clear brush and remove dead trees from a clear fire hazard area and it’s a miracle the place didn’t burn to the ground.
this is an important story ! you might need to bolster the facts with some non-anonymous details (not here) but if this is as you say - your County officials are certainly not going to be pleased at the portrayal.. so you need to skip them somehow and get to the public.
This is CalFire - it’s a state responsibility area. These rules also apply state wide, however. It’s a well known problem in the state. My 4 yr timeline was, as I mentioned, expedited due to the fires. 6 yrs is more typical.
your experience is directly at odds with the policy story that some govt elements are trying to present, along with numerous, repeated stakeholder processess that claim to be trying to do exactly what you were trying to do .. You are saying that the current, expedited and "combined " permit process as recently amended by the Governor's Office, reduced your "years of applying for permission" from SIX to FOUR at a time of catastrophic fire hazard.
The details will have to speak for themselves and this is not the forum, however I strongly encourage you to seek some kind of outsider, and avoid those for whom the reputational damage occurs..
Lol, are you saying the PR
doesn’t match the reality with CA gov’t is news?
I got my thing approved and done with (finally), zero interest in getting involved any more. Everyone else involved knows this is how it goes too.
If you think me going to some news agency is going to do anything but get me stomped on in some future year (and it ending up being a decade instead), you might want to take a look around first.
edit: all these records and more are also public records and should be trivially available via FOIA requests - which said PRcoughnews outlets would be pulling if they wanted to know what was really going on.
There are only 100k private timberland owners in CA (and mostly nutballs like myself that seem to like pain and suffering in the form of paperwork), so it’s an easy group to stomp on, relatively speaking.
Most places you can do that without any permits at all. Or maybe a burn permit from the fire warden, but that is $10 and issued in 10 minutes unless there is fire danger that day.
You can remove small amounts of nuisance stuff in small areas, and burn in small piles during days you are approved to burn (which are limited). Maximum pile height of 3 ft, and 3x3 ft diameter if I remember from the last burn permit I pulled?
You can clear up to 1/3 of an acre, or emergency thin I think up to 3 acres if you comply with those rules, but the 3 acres they reserve the right to come in and fine you if you do something they don’t like, and you have to file a permit to do that too. Any trees about a certain diameter or of certain species, regardless of
level of disease or danger they might require you to keep. A dead tree that might have an owl or protected animal in it? Ho boy.
It would take several lifetimes to even attempt that on 60+ acres of overgrown timber. I spent a week and barely did 1/4 of an acre working full time, and it still wasn’t adequately thinned.
In the end, it took a crew of 4 with purpose built heavy equipment (a masticator), working full time over 4 months to do it to state standard -once the paperwork finally cleared this summer.
Ah sorry about that. Yes, most places it is pretty mellow and focused on stopping nuisances. Here it seems to be an excuse to build a Giant bureaucracy and associated fiefdoms that need to be protected.
Each one of which has some plausible reason for it to exist that nominally make sense, but starts of choke out a ton of reasonable behaviors pretty quickly.
There's only so much a landowner can. Roads and utility corridors are built and expanded every day. It's a fairly common occurrence.
Oil pipelines are bit different because there are tons of people and organizations outside of those directly impacted who are willing to join the fight.
It happens very regularly. Roads and utility corridors are built and expanded every day. Eminent domain doesn't generally directly impact enough people to make a serious election issue, unless we are talking about either very local elections, or when the thing being built is something people feel strongly about like an oil pipeline.
By very regularly, you mean ‘regularly tarpitted for a long time anytime there are a decent number of people near
the work’? Bridge widening work on 101 has been delayed for decades by this in the Bay Area, CalTrain electrification was delayed by over a decade, etc. etc.
Most utility corridors are in the middle of nowhere and already established (and people stay away because of this), so reusing an existing corridor is relatively easy - unless it widens into someone’s yard. Then it’s a matter of how much money that person has.
For connecting previously not connected areas with a new line, especially if it goes through somewhere folks are living? Be prepared for the actual work making whatever you are doing to be a tiny tiny percentage of the time
and costs involved.
In most of the rest of the country we manage to build new roads and new transmission lines without the extreme issues you're describing. Over the last few years, I can think of hundreds of homes and businesses near me that were moved to widen existing roads or build new ones. A few people/businesses tried to fight it, they all lost quickly.
You can't take the experience of a private citizen trying to clear some brush, bridge widening delays in one of the most regulation heavy states in the country, and oil pipeline opposition, and apply it to building HVDC between countries in Europe.
Unlike your examples, HVDC lines have no real negative impact on anyone but the immediately impacted property owners. If you're building HVDC transmission lines between countries, you can also very likely reuse existing utility corridors for much of it, and build through lower density areas for most of the rest. The actual number of property owners directly impacted won't be high enough to make an impact on elections.
One thing to consider here too, as I think we might be talking about two different types of situations.
Even in the US (which is very low density compared to most places), most people live in cities or denser suburban areas (80.7%). 97% of all land Area in the US however is Rural.
So you are right in that this is not a problem in most of the US (by land area), and this isn’t a problem in elections in those areas either - it won’t negatively impact enough individuals, and problem cases can often be routed around, because the pop density is low.
However, this IS also a problem for most of the US (by populations), as this directly impacts costs and infrastructure upgrades for the majority of the population in the US.
Europe is even denser, and some locations have just as bad if not worse regulatory environments, so it’s the same factors at play. Some countries in Europe excepted of course.
You can't take the experience of a private citizen trying to clear some brush, bridge widening delays in one of the most regulation heavy states in the country, and oil pipeline opposition, and apply it to building HVDC between countries in Europe.
Or some random place in Ohio for that matter.
The regulatory hell that cities and states wealthy enough to afford it impose on themselves is not representative of the entire country.
I don’t think that map is either evidence in favour or against your position: HVDC has minimal impact, yes, but partly because you can bury the cables more easily, and buried cables are still more expensive.
HVDC is (I think) the only thing that can be used for underwater connections, so it’s used where the price makes sense. If the question is regulation we should also see all proposed and recent AC lines in Europe.
It is dramatically more expensive running HVDC under water than above ground, as the cables need to be incredibly tough even compared to buried land cables. I ran across a price quote that seemed like 10x the cost per km installed. If you can do suspended overhead cables, even cheaper. HVDC has pros/cons around the inversion/rectification on either end.
Yet essentially all planned or existing HVDC lines (at least ones notable enough for the map), are undersea cables.
They seem non-notable enough I had a hard time finding a good combined list anywhere.
I ran across plenty of references to HVAC being used for offshore wind turbines and the like too.
And they were the default standard (and still are for shorter runs and where the grid frequency matches). There are AC solutions for lack of grid frequency matching and the like.
I can’t find a list or easy map for major new on land grid connections - if you can find one, that would be great. Might be national security concerns or something?
Maybe because they can be implemented with only one pole/conductor for the underwater part. AFAIUI two poles go to the shore, where one pole ends in a metal-mesh underwater, using the salty sea as conductor until the remaining single cable reaches the other shore, where another underwater metal-mesh exists, and from that emerges the remaining piece of dual pole HVDC overland.
I know of at least one such solution between Germany and Sweden trough the Baltic Sea.
It’s even easier to do that on land by the way. You’d use large Earth grounds, which also don’t corrode as badly as grounds in saltwater. And running it on land (minus permitting, right of way, etc) is dramatically cheaper as the cable itself also doesn’t need to be as sturdy.
AC has a capacitance/inductance issue in any sort of run where it is surrounded by metal or metallic elements. Usually the runs are short enough and inconsistent enough it doesn’t matter. Metal shielding (required for undersea and most underground) and certain types of soils are pretty much terrible. That said, for ‘short’ runs of less than a couple hundred km, the cost of the HVDC inverter/rectifier drowns out the losses most of the time, so AC still wins most of the time. Sometimes there are still niceties around HVDC (like easier load management) that can still tip the scales.
If it’s a 1000km single run, the math is definitely different, but there aren’t a lot of those. If there are transformers, taps, generators, or other live equipment in the middle, those also change the equation, and in a grid environment, there are a ton of those.
There is such a project already in the planning stage, called SuedLink, and consisting of high-voltage underground DC transmission lines from the north of Germany (where it will connect not only to German wind power but also hydropower in Norway via the existing NordLink project) to the south, where solar is the order of the day.
How's that increased democracy? Muzzle is also an interesting choice of words. It reminds me more of totalitarian utilitarianism, fascism or communism when you suddenly don't care about objections or "the little/common man".
The opposite. I care about the"little man" as opposed to those with the wherewithal to mount sustained challenges just because the proposed action "disfigures" their local landscape.
Like Trump vetoing a wind farm because it could be seen from one of his golf courses in Scotland.
> and updated old one-way dams with pumps to have them a large scale batteries.
can that be done in all cases? Most dams I've seen IRL didn't seem to have an area downstream big enough to collect the water to be able to pump it back up.
Long distance (relatively) water pipelines are not to expensive as long as it isn’t vertical cliffs and unstable slopes on the way, so a catchment at the lower drainage or even a low dam can provide the necessary temporary storage, even if 5-10 miles or more away.
Still not super cheap of course, so then the classic ‘what will this get us for the cost, and does it pencil out as profitable’ (generally a good proxy for worth the time and expense) starts to come into play.
Thinking about it, many hydropower schemes are already built as cascades - that could be retrofitted as pumped storage quite easily, if you can interconnect the dams for reasonably cost.
Edit: According to the paper, it's economically viable when the output power price (post-pumping and running through the turbine again) can be > 2X the price of the hydropower, which with seasonal variation and spikey but 'free' sometimes power, could definitely help. Preferring something like solar over running a turbine could also help.
The challenge of course is that many times hydropower is nearly free and available in large quantities, as the dams are also used for flood control, so they either toss large quantities of water over the spillways (wasting it), or run it through a turbine - but they can't NOT move the water.
Telling that nuclear is a bad technology (compared to wind and solar that are not even competing with nuclear) then suggesting to use a WAY worse technology (reverse dams). Is there any advantage of having a reversible dam compare to a nuclear plant ? I'm not asking of being better, but only ONE advantage, I don't see any.
That's actually the positive thing about covid, is that we had a preview of how the climate crisis is going to be handled. That's going to be a mess, everyone will think they are an expert
The possible liability from a nuclear accident so large that it basically isn't insurable, because insurance agencies won't promise to pay a sum that large. A dam may be located in such a spot that the worst-case liability is insurable, ie. the electricity can be fairly and properly priced in our present model of society.
(Not necessarily. If the dam could flood Paris and the smaller cities further down the Seine, insurance agencies might refuse to insure that one fully, of course.)
That's just one of few reasons why nuclear power plants shouldn't be owned by private corporations. They should be owned and ran by national operators, so then you don't have the issue of insurable events or worry about private operators not paying for decommissioning the plants at the end of their livespan. Power generation is a matter of national security, so nations should be paying for those plants from the national budget.
Worry about insurable events doesn't go away — the central bank can only print money as long as trust in the currency stays, and that trust isn't infinite.
> the central bank can only print money as long as trust in the currency stays, and that trust isn't infinite.
The central bank can print money without bound. Some of the effects of money printing changes with confidence in the currency, but the core effects that it targets don't really change until people radically change behavior to reduce use of the currency as a medium or even measuring stick for routine transactions.
If people stop treating it as money, then is the thing the central bank prints still money? It can print more of the thing, sure.
Anyway, this isn't relevant to my argument upstream — it just changes the reason why nuclear reactors aren't properly pricable in our market economy, from "can't be insured due to worst case" to "worst case can destroy the currency". (It also doesn't rule out other argumens, pro or contra.)
Why do you think pumped storage hydro plants are worse (thank what) ?
They are not ever strictly power plants, rather they provided the much needed buffer to store energy during fluctuating demand and/or supply.
Pumped storage is also completely compatible with both nuclear base load (store extra from base load that can't be easily throttled) and unpredictable renewables sources (store extra when needed, cover - reasonably short - periods of no supply from the source.
Of course wind and solar compete with nuclear. At large penetration, wind and solar make the grid unfriendly to nuclear, as the price drops too often for a nuclear power plant to be economical. Both renewables and nuclear are inflexible, and are competing for the ability of the grid to deal with inflexible sources.
If you look at model solutions to a renewable/storage/nuclear grid, the solutions tend to flip from "mostly nuclear" to "mostly renewable" with little overlap, depending on cost assumptions.
Nuclear should be subsidized to keep them online for sure. All governments should want a backbone that can work under any circumstances (excerpt flooding I guess )
A bigger subsidy issue is wind/solar being given credits for power produced. So, they keep pumping out and putting power onto the grid even when prices go negative. Only when the negative price is lower than -subsidy do they curtail. This is terrible for existing nuclear plants.
What the grid really needs is transparency at the customer level of real time power costs.
I'd like to see a system that prioritised power purchasing depending on predictability, not instant price.
So first buy goes to power plants (including virtual power plants) that can provide stable power generation given a specific window of time - whether that that's nuclear, hydro, or solar+wind+battery+hydrogen - so long as it's close to zero emissions and will pump out required power no matter the weather over specified time.
Let wind/solar fight over peak power, or consolidate into virtual power plants with storage operators (it should also incentivize buildout of storage, so win-win in my book)
I would like to see uncertainty and intermittency exposed to consumers, with contracts that allow power to be curtailed in various ways. The less you value consistency, the less you would pay (up to a point.) Or, if you contract for a certain level of reliability, you could stipulate the payment you'd get if that were violated.
This is already done for industrial consumers that have necessary infrastructure installed - there are also some projects to enable demand response for individual consumers.
The problem is you can't just expose the prices without appropriate infrastructure support on the consumer side.
I was imagining consumers having contracts that stipulate how much the utility can turn their consumption on and off, and how often, and under what circumstances. This wouldn't necessarily require any real time decisions on the part of the consumers, although smart appliances that the utility could control would help. This is already available to a limited extent, with things like remotely controllable water heaters and AC compressors.
There's a bit of a backlash again shutting down right now. Fingers crossed Germany doesn't get what it wants for the EU for a change, and that pans out.
(Editted to make clear I meant EU wide, not within Germany)
There's only 8GW remaining nuclear capacity in Germany. Shutting that down won't be a major challenge or matter that much in the grand scheme of things. 8GW is only a tiny percentage of the overall market. Germany had 22GW 20 years ago. 16 is gone, the rest will be gone in a few years. It won't matter. Wind and solar each provide close to 3x the capacity nuclear ever did.
Likewise, nuclear darling France is looking to reduce nuclear from about 70% of their energy supply now to about 50%
Baseline power is a concept suitable only to describe a grid that operates in a specific configuration (cheap slow stable source + expensive dispatchable source), but not in any way a principal requirement.
You can have a stable power grid with ample supply and 0% "baseline" generation no problem (other than the usual generic ones).
If you have specific concerns about renewables please be more specific. Yes, they have different issues and different benefits. They are surmountable.
I think baseline means power plant that is always available, except for outages planned well in advance, and runs 24x7 at a given output. Generally baseline power doesn’t depend on the weather.
You could have a stable reliable grid consisting solely of wind and solar but it would also require a lot of storage, which would be insanely expensive in order to achieve the level of reliability we take for granted today.
I am sure we will find the limit of penetration for wind and solar, and already people are willing to give up and accept blackouts like in California instead of brushing under the power lines and cutting down trees which might fall on them proactively, which is expensive, they just have a blackout on hot windy days.
Baseline power is slow to change. Not all always-available power is slow, thus not all is baseline. It is not even a desirable quality except for the associated low running costs.
To a large degree, storage is interchangeable with transport, so we would not necessarily need a lot of storage even if we wanted to disqualify sources other than wind and solar.
That being said, in long term, I think we will have a lot of storage and storage-equivalent in industrial chemical and technical processes once they switch to electricity, in consumer batteries (EVs), generally more flexible load, etc.
Baseline / baseload power sources not only is always available, but it is always generating as well, at a relatively constant output.
I would disagree that it is not a desirable quality.
Storage and transmission are interchangeable, both are expensive. I agree storage will win out since it is easier to build unless the transmission path is underwater.
Demand response will continue to generally be emergency reserves, since it means that there is power not being generated and consumed that could have been.
Peak shifting is viable, as long as my car is charged in the morning I don’t care when it happened - although how long do cars take to charge at home? There isn’t that much flexibility in there. I also don’t want my battery cycles used to provide $1 of electricity.
Exactly. Baseline power is a very poorly and loosely defined term that has no base in reality that people wield to argue against much cheaper renewable energy without actually providing any numbers. "we need unspecified amounts of nuclear, coal, and what not to deal with unspecified capacity loss for an unspecified number of days/months/years while some unspecified apocalyptic circumstances wipe out 100% of all solar and wind power on this planet. As soon as you start specifying any of that it becomes clear that is it pretty easily mitigated otherwise.
Wind power is rarely zero; certainly not everywhere. Solar of course is but at a rather predictable schedule, which is why it is often combined with battery and wind. If you can have extra energy generation, you can charge some batteries. The rest is just math related to how much energy generation and battery capacity you need.
I'm the author of the comment. The definition of base load:
The baseload[1] (also base load) on a grid is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week.
A renewable system has to meet this minimum demand too, otherwise the lights go out.
> The rest is just math related to how much energy generation and battery capacity you need.
I'm very pro-renewable, but aware of how difficult this is going to be. These are massive social and engineering tasks. For example, to look at the numbers in the UK, we're talking about construction of big new hydroelectric storage stations, or millions of batteries (potentially as EVs). [2]
The need for renewables to provide baseload power demand depends on big infrastructure development. Germany hasn't kept pace with this need, relying on French nuclear instead, which is why I said their Energiewende hasn't always been practical.
Baseline/baseload as the minimum you need to provide to meet demand over a period of time. [1]
The concept doesn't become irrelevant just because you're using renewables. Renewables still need to serve baseline power demand, through interconnection or storage.
They can't do this at the moment, and Germany is relying on countries with nuclear that provide this.
Your reinterpreted definition is misleading. If you have enough generation to serve baseload, you have enough to power a single instant over a week. You need to serve the entire load.
Germany may be importing energy, but more baseload generation is only one solution, and probably not even a particularly efficient one - you'd have a lot of leftover energy in peak times.
I elided a few words from the Wikipedia article, it is:
The baseload[1] (also base load) on a grid is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week.
It was unintentional to reinterpret the original sentence.
If I were to clarify my original comment, it would be to add I was referring to the concept "baseload/baseline demand", not "baseload generators". It's true you don't need baseload generators to meet the baseload demand.
My point was, as in the graph, Germany hasn't provided flexible backup to their renewables. They've relied on baseload nuclear generators from France being the backup.
To put it bluntly, if you have enough to power baseload, you have nothing, except maybe pitchforks in your face.
WRT baseload demand, I don't see how it's relevant to pretty much anything. Baseload power - I don't see how one would use it as a backup, unless you're throwing energy away, or it's variable, hence not baseload.
> To put it bluntly, if you have enough to power baseload, you have nothing, except maybe pitchforks in your face.
I don't know what you are saying here.
> WRT baseload demand, I don't see how it's relevant to pretty much anything.
The concept is relevant as renewables cannot currently provide baseload power demand without infrastructure that hasn't been built yet, ie. storage and interconnects.
> Baseload power - I don't see how one would use it as a backup, unless you're throwing energy away, or it's variable, hence not baseload.
Throughout this thread, you have continued to ignore that I have explained baseload power demand and baseload power generators are not the same concept.
Baseload power generators, as the Wiki article mentioned, traditionally provided baseload power demand, but there's no reason why baseload power demand needs to be met by baseload generators. Variable generators can provide baseload power demand:
Historically, most or all of baseload demand was met with baseload power plants, whereas new capacity based around renewables often employs flexible generation instead.[1]
"Baseload" is not shorthand for "baseload generator", but rather used to describe the minimum demand you need to meet without the lights going out.
> "Baseload" is ... minimum demand you need to meet without the lights going out.
No.
You need to meet all of the demand or you get blackouts / curtailment / power goes out. The least and smallest of the demand over a week is baseload. If you can only provide that, then you will have blackouts all of the time. And pitchforks in your face.
> [Germany] relied on baseload nuclear generators from France being the backup.
Baseload generators are pretty much fixed output (otherwise they wouldn't be called baseload generators). In what clever way do you expect to use a fixed output generator as a backup for your variable output generator?
Baseline power is a concept as long as you don't go for blackouts and utility-controlled demand (which can mean that no, you're not going to cook now, because there's not enough power).
Baseline is the floor of the demand for power. It doesn't disappear just because you don't have plants that can operate on schedule, it just becomes very expensive to mitigate the intermittent supply in absence of fairy magic storage and 10-25x overbuild in generation.
Do then I understand correctly, that if we have baseline power, from static output nuclear or whatever, then we don't need blackouts, controlled demand, and you can cook anytime because there is enough power?
As you say, baseline is the floor of the demand that holds everything else above (except the weekly instant with minimum demand that it merely matches).
Baseline power is essentially the lowest the demand ever goes to. I.e. at any point during a given schedule window, the demand does not go under that. Then you have peak power, which is the highs of demand.
The problem with lacking power plants that can provide stable scheduled power is that you then can't meet even that minimum, or peaks that happen outside of power generation peaks (While solar has happy correlation with daytime power usage, apparently the high peaks at least in Poland aren't when the solar output is highest, and wind tends in many areas to peak during the night).
Ultimately, what you want is supply synchronized with demand - and either you make supply side capable of following demand, or you need to start telling people there's no energy for whatever they need it for.
The benefit of having static power generation from nuclear power plants or whatever else is that we could then concentrate the storage to help the peaks, which is much easier and less resource intensive than trying to totally smooth out lack of predictably dispatchable power.
Also, in case you end up with not enough storage to cover peaks with renewables, it's much easier to have controlled demand from big industrial power sinks provide the latitude to respond to peak demand rather than find out you don't have enough power for the base minimum pretty much all the time and have to institute rolling blackouts on unpredictable schedule.
> Ultimately, what you want is supply synchronized with demand
Agree. We need to provide this, with allowances from inter-region transport, storage and acceptable demand shifting.
In fact, average generation must match average consumption (+losses) over storage timeframe. Peak demand dictates what generation (+ storage) is needed, at that time. Nondeferrable demand - unschedulable generation dictates how much schedulable generation (+ storage) you need.
Minimum demand dictates ... how much static generation can you use without throwing away energy or using storage, but you want to use storage, so you can use more, and you want to use solar/wind so you need to subtract that, and now we're getting quite disconnected baseline demand, so I really don't see the point of baseline power.
Another way of thinking about "baseline" power is that is produces power 24/7. Energy demand fluctuates a lot during the day[1]. Cheap, reliable sources of energy serve as a "baseline", and additional "peaker" plants spin up to serve the spikes in demand during the day.
Solar and wind are unreliable power sources. That is OPs point - you can't compare nuclear and solar kw for kw because they are not the same. Nobody has near enough storage to allow solar to be treated as a 24/7 reliable power source.
I know the theory; the practice is different though: plenty of places doing just fine on solar, wind, and battery.
Wind still blows at night though. And if you install a bit more than you need, you can deal with temporarily reduced local capacity as well. And with the cost savings, 2x or 3x is entirely feasible (but probably overkill). And if you use interconnected grids like this article talks about, it's always going to be windy somewhere and you can add remote solar setups, hydro, batteries, etc. to the mix. Batteries alone remove most of the need for expensive gas peaker plants in a lot of places already. Interconnecting a diversity of solutions provides plenty of base load and resilience. Texas could have uses some when their baseload providing gas, coal, and nuclear failed them last winter.
The issue I have with "base load" is that it's a very fuzzy term that seems to be rarely specified in GW. As soon as you do that or specify the amount of time you need to bridge with that capacity, the relevant unit becomes GWH. Which of course is a common unit of storage and energy production. Plenty of ways to provide large quantities of that sustainably; and people already do in many ways. It's just a function of cost and engineering proper solutions. It's not even that expensive mostly. Especially compared to building nuclear power plants.
> plenty of places doing just fine on solar, wind, and battery.
Do you have more information about this?
I've seen lots of claims about "X city/country is running on 100% renewables", but these are always talking about net numbers. i.e. they produce enough renewable energy to power themselves if they had the storage, but they don't. They still import fossil fuel electricity when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
Indeed, lots of people have the concept of base load as qualitatively different kind of electricity lodged in their mental model too firmly. Electricity consumers expect it because suppliers have provided it for a long time.
Baseline is a hard political requirement. The alternative is just turning people’s power off when there isn’t enough sunshine. Literally no electable party will make that choice; it’s electoral suicide. They’ll all choose to produce power with coal before they’ll choose to turn their citizens lights off.
The grid could use intermittent sources + storage and the lights never need to go off. And it can be cheaper than coal (w. associated environmental costs) or nuclear, especially with projected cost declines.
First, this is still baseline power, it’s just coming from batteries. The imperative to always keep the power on remains, but there are several ways to do it from an engineering perspective.
Second, we’re not there yet. Until we have enough batteries to cover that, baseline will need to be provided by some other form of power generation. Currently this is natural gas (America) and coal (almost everywhere else). On the balance I think it would be best for us all if it was nuclear until we have enough grid level storage to make this discussion moot.
Third, if you interpreted my comment as anti-renewables then you misread me. Renewables are great, I have them on my house, but it’s important to acknowledge that always keeping the power on is a political reality. We need to engineer around that requirement for now, and hopefully one day that’ll be trivial for renewables.
So .. if we plot the electricity demand curve, baseline would be a level line going through the (weekly) bottom of the curve. Baseline power is below the line and the rest is above, correct?
Renewables and more specifically storage is not ready, so the part that is below base line is currently served by gas (and some coal/nuclear) and the part that is above is delivered by renewables without need for storage?
Yes. Baseline is essentially the line below which demand doesn't drop.
A problem with renewables is that they still need storage to work as peakers, because in many places renewable production doesn't happen in peak times.
So, is below baseline powered by gas and coal? If so, why? Wouldn't it make more sense to cover as much as you can with renewables, including as much below and above the baseline, then cover the rest with gas for now and HVDC/storage/demand shifting/.. later?
I.e. calculate demand - renewables. Cover that. Don't see the point of baseline.
You do realize that every country is already doing what you are suggesting? The point however is that unreliable renewables doesn't cover anything at all reliably, so you need reliable power to cover 100% of demand or you will have regular blackouts. You can achieve that by having enough battery storage to fuel the whole country for months to last the whole winter, or you build reliable power plants like nuclear, coal or gas. We aren't even close to having the battery solution even within decades, so the only alternative are the unrenewable power plants.
And no, betting on a good winter isn't a solution. If those batteries runs out and large swathes of the country blacks out for months during a cold winter many will die. That is not a good solution.
Using batteries to get renewables to 100% is bad systems engineering. It's cheaper to use something like hydrogen for the last 10-20%, and for seasonal load leveling.
If you notice, you have mentioned baseload, baseload power generation, baseload demand or base-anything exactly 0 times, because it has near 0 relevance, which is the point of the entire discussion.
> So .. if we plot the electricity demand curve, baseline would be a level line going through the (weekly) bottom of the curve. Baseline power is below the line and the rest is above, correct?
Correct.
> the part that is below base line is currently served by gas (and some coal/nuclear) and the part that is above is delivered by renewables without need for storage?
Pretty close, but a bit of an over simplification.
Exactly what percentage of the grid is renewables at any given moment depends on the installed ("nameplate") capacity of various generation sources, and their mix. Even today it's not uncommon for the vast majority of a grid's demand to be met by renewables for short periods of time. The issue is that we can't do it reliably enough yet.
Some sources of power are very slow to change their production (coal, nuclear), and therefore are designed to produce constantly[0]. If your grid has a lot of these, then your description above will be correct; your baseload plants will produce a constant level of power with renewables and imports handling demand spikes above that need.
On the flip side, if your grid has a lot of natural gas or hydro, then you can spin these up and down to cover the difference between what your consumers want and what your renewables are creating (plus or minus big industrial loads that can be shed on demand). Batteries fit into this category, and theoretically a grid with a ton of batteries wouldn't need anything other than sufficient renewables and batteries to meet demand.
Until such a time that we have enough batteries to make a fully renewable grid possible, your grid must have a mix of nuclear, coal, or natural gas[1] to keep the lights on.
For a direct illustration, consider California's mix right now. If you read carefully you'll notice that nuclear and coal power remains extremely flat in CA (16MW and 1140MW or so respectively), while natural gas and unspecified imports tend to move in inverse correlation to the amount of power generated by renewables. If the renewable production were bigger, it possibly would have eclipsed demand mid day and enabled the export or shutdown of that Coal power. On the flip side you also have to note that currently solar power is dropping off in CA right as demand is spiking. A true renewable grid would need enough batteries to provide 26,000 MW of capacity or so for for hours, plus enough renewables to cover demand + charging. It's doable, but it'll take time.
Also, right now CA is producing a mere 459MW worth of energy from its grid scale batteries, which is roughly 1/3rd of what CA's one nuclear power plant provides. They're planning on shutting this plant down, rather than building new ones.
0 - Confusingly these are called "baseload power plants".
1 - Or hydro, but that's really region dependent. The power coming from the utility company here is 42% Hydro, but that's because I live in a mountain state.
Batteries are for diurnal leveling. You don't need 24 hour storage for diurnal leveling.
For long term or rare event storage, something like hydrogen will likely be cheaper. Efficiency is lower, but that's a good tradeoff to get lower per-kWh-capacity cost.
We're still a long way from diurnal leveling though. Currently CA's battery output can't even match a single nuclear reactor; it's currently outputting 459MW to Diablo Canyon's 1,140MW.
France is not trying to reduce the amount of energy produced by nuclear generation, e.g. by actively phasing it out.
Instead, France strives to produce more energy with solar and wind generation, increasing its ratio to 50%. This will shift the ratio of nuclear down to 50%.
Well they gave a rather large amount of plants reaching their end of life pretty soon and a clear plan to not replace most of that with new nuclear plants. Hence the decreasing ratio. No framing, just announced reality. Not surprising, most nuclear nations have similar plans.
He just wanted to make sure the right couldn't use nuclear as a campaign point so he said France would focus on SMRs. They're still reducing their nuclear power from today's levels to about 50%, so their long term strategy isn't affected by this play. This is not surprising. Having as much nuclear power as France has at the moment is not the most optimal energy mix in today's energy landscape.
The last nuclear power plant in Germany will get shutdown in less than 15 months. With that in mind, there have been no investments into them for years. You won't be able to keep them running by simple maintenance. That ship has sailed for years. What do you expect to happen?
A couple years of worse prices from phasing coal out more quickly seem like nothing compared to the long term effects of climate change.
If we're taking about nuclear: I don't see any chance of Germany halting its phase-out of current nuclear plants. New plants meanwhile don't seem sensible economically
The big risk here isn't just worse prices, but the grid failing entirely and people not being able to get electricity at any price. And even if it doesn't quite go that far, a whole bunch of businesses will fail and a large swathe of people will have to choose between heating and putting food on the table - and there's no clever tricks with subsidies or redistribution of cash that can avoid that, because the whole reason the prices are so high is because there's not enough energy for everyone.
Heating in the EU is mostly oil and gas. It needs electricity to run, but not enough that electricity prices are a major issue.
In the end the question is how fast the market reacts. Plant shut downs are predictable events years into the future, and in the event of an impeding black out energy prices on the spot market are going to be insane. That seems like a great incentive to build anything you can get past Nimbys fast enough. And the biggest industrial consumers shut down anyways as electricity prices rise (bad for the economy, great for the grid).
If we want to adequately prepare for the long term affects of climate change it seems like dykes, irrigation projects, improved farming methods, displacement preparation for affected third world areas, and solutions to mitigate effects regardless of source would be wiser. Freeman Dyson spoke about this. There’s by no means a guarantee that stopping anthropogenic climate change would stop the long term deleterious effects of natural climate change from still occurring.
Making the power grid less responsive and more weather dependent is making civilization less adaptive to climate change with no guarantees of stopping climate change, so treating a phase out of coal without adequate replacement like it’s beneficial in the long term doesn’t make sense to me. Reducing coal makes sense, but not at the expense of a less adaptive more weather dependent power grid. Nuclear salt reactors seem like the obvious choice for a replacement from all angles, including CO2, access to fuel, energy output, independence from weather, etc. The only reason why they’re not replacing coal and renewables seems to be regulation and PR. I think the R&D for a lot of them are already done, and they’re much cheaper to maintain and produce/believe a lot of modern designs are quite simple. Most of the expense seems to be from regulatory burden and old laws about different reactors.
We are building plenty of dykes. But every additional centimetre of sea level rise we cause is at least one more centimetre of dyke we have to maintain along all shores, indefinitely. And on top of that all the additional defences against intense rainfall in cities and along all major rivers. From a purely monetary standpoint it's hard to find an investment that pays greater dividends for a society over the decades and centuries than one that reduces climate change
That assumes we know definitively to what degree reducing anthropogenic climate change will reduce overall climate change, and that creating energy grids with more problems and less adaptability (which lessens our ability to create the kind of infrastructure we would inevitably need to protect vulnerable areas from natural climate change) and the downstream losses from that will prevent interventions that we might need to do anyway with less energy and wealth.
Nuclear seems like a great option because it avoids needing to resolve that cost benefit analysis. It reduces CO2 without causing energy grid problems. The newer reactors in particular seem like a pretty definitive win on all fronts. There are a bunch of promising sounding companies trying to get into that space and it sounds like the major roadblock for all of them is regulatory, not technicals or R&D expense at this point (seems like there are existing designs which have been prototyped/are ready to go, just can’t get built due to red tape; one US company moved to Indonesia out of frustration, design seems safe and low cost -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-500?wprov=sfti1)
The problem is that power from wind is random. To match supply=demand, a regulating/controllable power-source like coal/gas/hydro is needed. Because Europe is closing their coal/nuclear plants and hoping to replace them with wind, they end up using Scandinavian hydro-power to match supply/demand.
This is currently a catastrophe for Scandinavian prices.
My electricity bill for september is 10x (ten times) what it was one year ago, very similar kwh. I like being connected to the bigger market alot :D /s
You can but that doesn't help if there is no surplus water to store. You can store 82TWh and your yearly consumption is about 500TWh. NO3 and NO5 are pretty much at their lowest points in the last 28 years, it's not a problem at all though because right now that's about 71% and 61% respectively. There are of course up- and downsides to being connected. An important upside would be that when you're connected to other markets you can import electricity when the price is low and pump the water back into the reservoirs to release it when the price is high again.
> We've seen prices becoming more volatile in later years as our domestic market has become more interconnected with that of continental Europe.
Differences in prices both between locations and over time can be turned into money. The first with cables, the second with batteries. In the process, the arbitrager smooths out the price differences.
Give it a bit of time, and you'll see more stable prices again. (Unless politics throws a spanner in the works, of course.)
> It would be nice to serve base power needs by nuclear power, then use hydro (which can be regulated up and down much faster than thermal power plants) to handle the peaks.
Oh, and don't forget the ability to regulate demand up and down. Plenty of industrial consumers already have contracts like that, and thanks to 'smart' devices, this technology can come to private consumers as well.
Eg assume your short term weather forecasts says that we have plenty of wind now, but there will be a lull in fifteen minutes. So you just tell all the fridges and hot water tanks to cool respectively heat now, so they have some stored thermal energy to get over the lull. Similarly for electric cars charging (you don't even have to take energy out of their batteries back into the grid, it's already useful to be able to suspend their charging for a while and resume later).
This is mostly not a problem of high technology, but a problem of coordination.
In principle, you also don't need your power company to directly talk to your fridge: whatever controls your home just needs a short term forecast of electricity prices in the next few hours, and can then decide autonomously and in harmony with your preferences.
I read somewhere that Norway could become Europe's "battery" - the terrain is ideal for building pumped-storage hydro plants, which can store and release electricity to even out the gaps in renewables.
Things like "there's more potential available in the spring than in the fall (or winter).
> Those margins are doubly difficult to master given the temperamental pulse of a river whose volume increases by a factor of five every spring as snow melts in the Rockies. Within the river’s seasonal changes come manmade fluctuations: every morning its dams awaken the Columbia with surges of water to satisfy the Northwest’s demand for electricity, and every evening the dams tighten their gates to put the river back to sleep. And every other second, an automated system assesses the supply of electricity against demand and makes tiny adjustments to the volume of water moving through each dam’s turbines.
> In the table above, the lower the capacity factor, the more susceptible the system to potential interruptions or drops in performance. We can see that solar and wind technologies, which are notoriously weather-dependent have the lowest CF numbers. At the same time, nuclear power and coal systems are most advantageous when operated continuously and at full load.
Nuclear has a capacity factor of 90.3. Hydro is 39.8. Concentrating solar is 33, wind is 20-40 range depending on geography and photovoltaic solar is 15-19.
Hydro is the best of the renewable non-fossil fuel base load sources, but it still is poor compared to nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation for base load.
Hydro isn’t that reliable because in a dry year, you run out of power.
New Zealand has a power shortfall about once every ten years when lake levels drop towards critical levels. In 1992 it was severe enough that nationwide cuts of 15 per cent were needed and the GDP dropped by 0.6%. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/how-we-learned-the-lessons-fro...
In theory if the world was one contiguous landmass with uniform population distribution you would always pull solar energy from few longitudes away to fulfil your peak demand of 6 - 10 pm from domestic perspective. At large enough scales even today, I believe there are enough markets where such long distance transmission adds a layer of redundancy that possibly energy storage cannot. Free market or International intervention, either routes point to only more interconnectedness of global grids than less.
Here's a paper on a study of a 100% renewable grid for North America. The interesting conclusion is that increased transmission is not needed or even particularly valuable.
Does anyone know the relative efficiency of, say, pumped hydro or lithium battery storage vs, say, a 1000km transmission line? I'm curious how local storage stacks up against something like sending solar power half way around the globe.
Battery storage is the most likely thing, although there is also kinetic storage (flywheels) and some other ideas as well (ultracapacitors, for instance).
Modern pumped hydro gets about 80% round-trip efficiency, perhaps 75% for older plants get 75%. Interestingly, grid scale batteries seem to get something close to that, 80-85 percent - I would have expected more.
Transmission losses for 1000km are something like 2%-3%. So halfway around the globe isn't efficient, but 1000km might as well be considered "local" and transferring across the whole EU would be more efficient than local storage.
The loss from 1000 Km of transmission is probably comparable to the loss from good case lithium ion (making transmission better much of the time). Pumped hydro is worse than both.
Pumped hydro is usually built when it will directly reduce overall grid costs. For example, the Ludington Pumped Storage plant in Michigan was built by utilities to make their generation more cost efficient overall, the energy efficiency of the storage system only needs to be good enough to accomplish that goal.
I don't think it's about the efficiency, it's about managing waste. Currently, a lot of hydro generation is wasted at nighttime because there is less demand, so it's burnt off. Even if inefficient, it would be better to shift this energy to somewhere where it isn't night time
I wonder how these grid interconnections would be at least partly secured against attack, by a nation-state and/or by terrorists — it seems like increased vulnerability should be a concern.
> What's particularly different about these compared to the thousands of miles of existing power and pipeline infrastructure?
Don't know; it just seems as though the greater the interdependency between geographically-separated modules in a system, the greater the chances that damage to one module can take down remote modules and perhaps even the entire system.
Example: Oceangoing vessels are generally designed with watertight compartments, so that damage and flooding in one compartment won't necessarily doom the whole ship — as happened to the Titanic, which sank in part because its transverse internal bulkheads didn't extend high enough to prevent seawater spillover from the iceberg-damaged sections to undamaged sections as the ship started to sink by the bow.[0]
Example: The Great Texas Blackout in February 2021 resulted in part from electrical power being knocked offline for some natural-gas compression facilities, which resulted in still-other electrical-generation facilities, powered by natural gas, failing for lack of fuel. [1]
Texas also had the problem that the grid was isolated. Energy consumption spiked in neighboring states as well, with some problems, but nothing as severe as Texas.
I suppose there can be a difference between interconnection and interdependence. Unnecessary interdependence creates the possibility of failure cascades, but interconnections can provide resilience without necessarily increasing the likelihood of problems.
I think the national security aspect can be mitigated by keeping many of the existing fossil fuel plants operational as an emergency backup, but not running them in normal circumstances.
> How does one protect against catastrophic cascading power failures in the event of solar flares, given this greater interconnectivity?
Does the risk of damage go up, practically speaking, when comparing a country-wide guide to a continent-wide one? As in, is there any equipment that would survive the former but not the latter? Or mitigation techniques that work in the case of the former but not the latter?
It depends in part, on the length of conductors. In the 1989 magnetic storm, long-distance lines in Quebec were blown, while shorter length runs weren't as badly affected. Multiple short spans not all lined up the same way but carrying the same amount of power, is far less vulnerable than one 1000 km long wire.
HVDC lines are immune to solar storms. The problem for the grid is DC currents induced in AC lines, causing failure of transformers. But on DC lines, it just perturbs the voltage slightly.
I wonder how much of an issue this is for long distance undersea power cables? If you temporarily disconnect both ends during a solar storm, does the fact that they're under a great depth of electrically conductive salt water serve to protect the cables themselves?
This article frames power grid integration across the European continent as a solution to unpredictable power production from wind power for each country. This makes less sense when you factor in that the wind is highly correlated in nearby countries. The ones that are the easiest to import power from. Long distance power export is also lossy. Regulating power is hard to find now and will be even harder in the future as more production goes towards wind and solar.
If there are disputes about consumption and production across national boundaries, who resolves that? Different parts of the world don’t even have similar objectives within the energy market. I also think an unaccountable international power utility that can control if I survive the winter or not is a terrible idea.
https://archive.is/SAn6I