> And other than wind and solar, we also have hydro and geo-thermal.
These are geographically dependent. You can't build the where you need them.
> As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants).
Large scale electrolysis remains unproven. This goes in the "scientific breakthrough required" bucket.
> Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%
Also geographically dependent. You basically need an alpine lake handy to build pumped storage.
Carbon sequestration at anything close to relevant scales also has never been done.
> The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.
No, this isn't a problem with nuclear. Most energy demand is in cities. And since nuclear plants are not geographically dependent, you can build them near places with lots of energy demand. As opposed to renewables which might need to be built very far away in places with large solar or wind potential.
Geo-thermal is a little bit geographically dependent, but by far not as much as you make it sound. Hydro is indeed very geo-dependent, no contest there.
Large-scale electrolysis is not unproven. E.g. Air Liquide operates a 20MW plant producing 3000t/annum near Quebec already[0]. Other projects in development aim for 200MW facilities. Granted, that isn't yet massive scale, just about 99,000 MWh/annum of usable energy (about 33kWh/kg for hydrogen), and the smallest US nuclear plant is theoretically capable of 5,098,320 Mwh/annum or around 50 times more. But large scale enough to act as a proof of concept in my opinion.
Pumped storage is a bit geo-dependent, but you do not need an alpine lake, you need an empty space somewhat higher up where you can pump some water, preferably without loosing too much water due to evaporation and other factors, and some water, preferably fresh water to avoid corrosion as much as possible, maybe desalinated. But if need be salt water and an artificial hill will do.
As for the deployment and logistics of nuclear, it is certainly a problem. Our current grids, independent from the form of electricity generation, are usually not designed to handle the growing demand that electrification probably will create. You can see what happens when the demand somewhat suddenly rises (and the EV introduction is still somewhat "sudden" in the time scales grid operators and infrastructure planners usually consider) e.g. in Kazakhstan when the Chinese bitcoin miners moved there[1]. Furthermore, planning, building and testing new nuclear plants is a massive capital expenditure even without technology research, as well as a political hot topic in a lot of places (and even in nuclear-friendly regions I'd bet that NIMBYs would form real quick once a location for a new plant gets discussed).
Last thing I read by the way is that the EU gets about 20% of the Uranium it uses to fuel existing nuclear plants from Russia (at least until now), with another ~20% coming from Kazakhstan[2], which is somewhat closely allied to (and for sure scared of) Russia. Another ~20% come from Niger, a country not exactly renowned for being a politically stable and human-rights respecting nation. Maybe the EU can source elsewhere, even if the demand increases as potentially more nuclear within the EU goes online, but it surely has a rather problematic political dimension attached aside from general nuclear politics such a nuclear proliferation. And it's not just the EU which needs to switch to electrification, either. Where will Africa or Latin America or Asia get their nuclear tech and nuclear fuel?
Nuclear, like oil, creates international political dependencies in a lot of places, while most renewables would not necessarily do the same.
Geothermal is indeed geographically dependent. You need to be on a fault line, or otherwise have heated rocks near the surface. Most places do not have these conditions.
The hydrolysis example you provided is tiny relative to the requirements of grid scale storage. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses 500 GWh of electricity every hour. And this will increase as electrification progresses, electricity only accounts for about a third of total energy production. Producing grid scale hydrolysis remains unproven.
The same reliance on a globalized economy still exist with intermittent sources. The copper used in wind turbine generators probably comes from Chile, for instance.
With laser drilling, geothermal is no longer geographically dependent.
That will, of course, still need to be developed to production. But it is a (large) incremental process improvement, not a whole different technology.
First you said hydrolysis was not practical at all. Today you say 200 MW facilities are not big enough. What will you say tomorrow? Why not admit it now?
You could point to flywheels as a form of energy storage. But unless you actually have the ability to operate them at sufficient scale, that's irrelevant. People have been investigating laser drilling for a decade at least [1], yet it hasn't resulted in widespread geothermal adoption.
Throughout this whole thread you've been pointing to proposals and plans as though simply having plans is a demonstration of viability. Unless people are actively implementing the solutions you're proposing, then those solutions aren't proven to work. There's a massive difference between pointing to an entrepreneur that promises this special drill will be able to build geothermal plants anywhere, and actually building geothermal plants in the middle of Germany. There's a massive difference between plans that promise to store X amount of hydrogen, and actually building and running said storage plants. Electrolysis has been known for at
As far as I'm concerned, both hydrolysis and this geothermal-anywhere approach fall into the bucket of "scientific breakthroughs". Could they be viable if they pan out? Sure. But it's highly unwise to bet the future of civilization on something that might work out, as opposed to something that's been operating at scale for most of a century.
Thus, it is good that nobody is talking about betting the future of civilization on any such thing. We have well-proven storage methods, and a large variety of promising alternatives, almost all of which depend on no new physics, just old-fashioned civil engineering. Any of those few that would need a "breakthrough" they don't get will be easily forgotten. Most of the failures will be for alternatives that turn out to be slightly less cheap than others.
60 years, by the way, pushes the boundary of "most of a century".
We have well proven storage methods that don't scale. We have unproven storage mechanisms that we hope will scale.
Let's actually put this in perspective: Global electricity consumption is about 60 TWh daily, which works out to about 2.5 TWh per hour or 40 GWh per minute. Plans to run a wind and solar grid predict a 12 hour storage requirement to generate 80% of our energy from wind and solar [1], and weeks of storage for a 100% wind and solar grid. And remember, this is on top of the cost of actually generating all that energy in the first place. If people want to prove that these storage mechanisms are viable, then how about they build one minute's worth of storage. If we don't even have one minute's worth of storage provisioned, then I see zero reason to be confident in the ability to build hours, days, or weeks of storage.
By comparison, we'd need to build 9 nuclear plants for each one that presently exist to generate all of our electricity from nuclear. Any only 8 if we eliminate everything but nuclear and hydro. Also, It's 68 years since the first nuclear electrical plant and 80 years since the first fission reactor.
If nuclear is to power the world it also needs technologies that have not been proven.
Today's thermal reactors, if they provided the entire 18 TW of primary energy demand, would consume in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year. This would consume known uranium resources in less than a decade.
So, either seawater uranium would be needed (which would have to be scaled up by something like 11 orders of magnitude from what has been demonstrated) or breeder reactors would be needed (also not a proven technology, and likely more expensive than thermal burner reactors.)
The real figure [1] is 60,000 years worth of uranium with our current nuclear energy production, which is about 10% of our electrical demand. So 6,000 years for a 100% nuclear grid. Electricity production is about 25% of total energy demand, so call it 1,500 years for all energy converted to nuclear.
Furthermore, moving nuclear seawater extraction - even at it's present costs, without economies of scale - would not significantly impact nuclear's costs [2]:
> Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.
> So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
Electrolysis was well understood for a century before we knew fission existed.
Pumped hydro has always worked at scale.
You keep repeating that storage is not built out. We know. Before it can have been built out, it will need building out. But nukes are also not built out. Which can get done faster?
You just really wish storage tech was harder than it is because you need that for nukes not to look like the obviously bad investment they have proven, by "most of a century" of experience, to be.
Nuclear is much more built out as compared to storage. We need only one order of magnitude increase to decarbonize through nuclear. Actually, slightly under one order of magnitude, only about a factor of 8 increase depending on how much hydroelectric plants we keep.
By comparison, we need 6 to 7 orders of magnitude increase in our existing hydro and battery storage capacity to decarbonize through renewables. And an infinity order of magnitude increase in electrolysis storage, because we don't have any such storage at all. It's not that they haven't been built out. They haven't been built, full stop.
I don't need to make storage tech look any worse than it is. How much electrolysis storage capacity do we have, worldwide? Zero. I think you're the one engaging in wishful thinking, treating these totally unproven systems as certain when nobody has ever operated a grid storage electrolysis facility.
If someone told you they have plans for a supersonic passenger jet that will be even cheaper than normal airliners, would you believe them? If they actually had working planes, and they were actually able to build and operate a batch of a few dozen planes more cheaply than typical airlines then yes. But if they only had one plane, and little operational experience I wouldn't. And if all they had were plans on paper, I certainly would not - this is the stage that storage mechanisms other than hydro and batteries are in.
You wish that costs for renewables were not still plummeting, and for storage were not falling more than twice as fast as for renewables, and that costs for building and operating nukes were not, instead, rising. But they are, they are, and they are.
Pretending that "breakthroughs" will be needed to field storage must be your last hope, but building out storage is just construction. You will continue to be disappointed.
You insist storage costs are cheaper, but the reality is that we can't know the cost until storage plants are actually built. You're comparing the actual costs of nuclear, with the promised costs of storage. We have actual costs for hydro and battery storage, but they are too high. We only have promised costs of electrolysis, ammonia, or what have you because none of the approaches have actually been built.
Come back to me when electrolysis storage systems are actually built, and we can examine the actual costs of storage the same way we examine the costs of nuclear: by looking at the bill after the plant has been built. If you really are so confident in their efficacy, then this should be no problem.
There will be no artificial hills for pumped hydro. (Usually those are called "water towers" when used for municipal water storage under pressure.)
But deep subterranean cave and sub-ocean tanks for pumped hydro will be a thing. These make pumped hydro storage practical in radically more places than usually imagined. Combined with hill reservoirs, they multiply the storage capacity per unit mass of water.
A hilltop reservoir is, incidentally, an excellent place to site a solar array, which is cooled and more efficient by the water under it, and in turn radically reduces evaporative loss and biofouling in the reservoir.
These are geographically dependent. You can't build the where you need them.
> As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants).
Large scale electrolysis remains unproven. This goes in the "scientific breakthrough required" bucket.
> Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%
Also geographically dependent. You basically need an alpine lake handy to build pumped storage.
Carbon sequestration at anything close to relevant scales also has never been done.
> The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.
No, this isn't a problem with nuclear. Most energy demand is in cities. And since nuclear plants are not geographically dependent, you can build them near places with lots of energy demand. As opposed to renewables which might need to be built very far away in places with large solar or wind potential.