Solving renewable energy’s sticky storage problem

When the Sun doesn't shine and the wind is calm, humankind still needs power.

See full article...

 

[Veritas super omens]

Say it with me NUC-LE-AR POW-ER. Stop building a small number of giant plants. Build a giant number of small plants. We already have massive experience with this tech. The US Navy's nuclear plants are already the right scale, and have never had a accident.

Please go away. Nuclear power is DOA. Just the turbine generation portion is more expensive in many areas than installing wind and solar. Add the opportunity cost, time to delivery and the dead horse you are flogging has been eaten by vultures, turned into vulture guano, fertilized a saguaro cactus that is now 40 years old.

 

[yootis]

It's baffling how this is even a controversial opinion. We need nuclear, and we need it yesterday.

Of course we need nuclear yesterday. The question to ask is whether we need it tomorrow. Or really, 25 years from now, since that’s how long it takes.

 

[OrvGull]

After some research, I found that CA has 49,776 MW of solar installed as of last year! Wow! It's true, at peak production we do have more solar than we can use.

Yup. And since the "fuel" is free, there's no incentive to cut back on production once it's installed.

 

[OrvGull]

TL,DR
Carbon tax is a good idea but ultra rich don't get ultra richer fast enough, therefore doom.

People also have a tendency to protest carbon taxes, or vote out people who introduced them. See the yellow vest protests in France, or Trudeau's polling in Canada. This is exactly the kind of stuff that's accelerated the move to the right in global politics.

People in a democracy won't stand for having their short-term cost of living increased, even if it's for long-term gain.

 

[Nufflechunk]

That used to be true. Modern combined-cycle thermal plants are over 50% efficient, and the record is 62% efficient on average.

https://www.araner.com/blog/combined-cycle-power-plant-efficiency-what-you-need-to-know

Yes, but if the plant is only going to be used for short periods intermittently, the economics say build a cheap "gas peaker" plant (usually now also capable of burning hydrogen if that becomes a fuel). The interest savings on the lower capital cost offset the cost of fuel for the short periods it will be used. Basically you're just building a stationary jet engine, aka gas turbine.
In Australia, where we are a long way along this transition to a fossil free stationary power system, gas peaker plants are seen as the current most likely solution for the last 5 - 10%.
South Australia (380,000 sq miles, so much bigger than Texas, but with a population of only 1.8 million, will become the first Gigawatt scale grid to reach 100% net renewable using only wind and solar. The state currently leads the country, and the world, with an average share of more than 72 per cent renewables (all wind and solar) over the last 12 months, and has recently accelerated its target of reaching 100 per cent net renewables to 2027, rather than 2030 as first planned.The state is too flat and dry for any significant hydro. This was where Tesla built a big battery as part of a bet.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/cis-auc...in-world-to-reach-100-pct-net-wind-and-solar/

 

[n-d]

Thermal plants are about ~35% efficient and the process to create bio fuels(you are thinking synthetic hydrocarbons probably, not bio process corn) is quite lossy already. Depending on how long you would want to store it just storing the energy as liquid salt is probably more efficient.

Once you have converted electricity in some kind of gas, you do not have to convert it all back to electricity when later on. A lot of energy is needed for heating. You can burn the gas with 100% efficiency.
Admitted, if you have a heat pump that is 400% efficient, it might just offset the energy loss that occurs when gas is converted to electricity.
And if heat is what you need, one could tap the heat that would otherwise be lost off the conversion from gas to electricity, and transport it to homes as hot water.

So the conversion from gas to electricity can be done in a less lossy way!

 

[n-d]

I'd be interested to hear about the demand side of the equation. Certainly all demand isn't the same, is it feasible, technically and more importantly politically, to partition the power grid in a manner that "Life Support" demand (hot water, HVAC, et cetera) is more important than non-life-support demand (TV, Playstation, Bitcoin Mining, graphic's rendering)?

Outside that, It feels like the answer is likely something like alot more "local" potential energy storage. But that just shifts the demand in time.

But that just shifts the demand in time.

That is what the whole exercise is about!

 

[THT]

After some research, I found that CA has 49,776 MW of solar installed as of last year! Wow! It's true, at peak production we do have more solar than we can use.

Hmm, based on gridstatus.io, I think I've only seen about 16 to 25 GW of solar on CAISO. Does that 49 GW number include commitments (includes solar that has not turn on yet, some even haven't broke ground, but they have funding)?

Then, solar on CAISO can be greater than demand, but only over the past couple of years (after about >18 GW) and primarily in the spring. For almost everyday in spring time, CAISO had solar generate more than demand for at least 15 minutes of the day. Then there were a couple of days where storage was higher than gas in the evening, for maybe an hour. That's a milestone worth remembering.

You can take a hack at how much storage is needed by looking at gridstatus.io, to cover an entire evening and morning (12 hours or so). So, that 50 GW is a number that needs to feed CAISO, perhaps even more to achieve a netzero grid. And CA really needs to deploy offshore wind, like 40 GW of it.

CAISO's energy cost to consumers is the same story everywhere else in the USA, including most other industries. The USA is the king of the middleman getting their cuts. These soft costs only ever increase unless there is a regulatory reset. I think CAISO said a big portion of the increases come from increasing grid safety and resiliency (fires et al), but since natural gas is the majority energy source in the USA, you can put the blame squarely on Putin. Then, double everything, maybe triple, for all the middlemen.

 

[Nufflechunk]

HVAC has inductive coupling with the ground and towers, and losses incurred mean HVDC becomes competitive at around 500km, but doesn't speed-of-light start to have consequences at those distances too? At 500km, signal delay is on the order of 10% cycle time. How do you transmit AC power over significant distances when signal delay puts you significantly out of phase? That phase imbalance is explicitly how power is transmitted over an AC network, but is this just one of those things that "works itself out"?

Meanwhile, in China,

Type	overhead transmission line
Type of current	Ultra HVDC
Total length	2,210 km (1,370 mi)
Power rating	8,000 MW
DC voltage	±800 kV
No. of poles	2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Hami–Zhengzhou_UHVDC

 

[n-d]

It’s shining and blustery as hell someplace else. Also the tide and waves are always going and geothermal vents don’t take days off. That’s why you put a whole bunch of things in a network and then some of them are always making plenty of power right?

There is not too much energy in tides and waves, and what there is is hard to get. Where the tides are strongest, there are is also the most sand in the seawater, clogging the machinery.

Geothermal energy is also not without problems. And it is not renewable. The mantle cools 50 Kelvin in 500M years, I have read. Well, that's not an immediate worry then. But getting it is costly and risky.

 

[Fatesrider]

Why no commentary on using excess power to create biofuels to feed the existing power plants? It seems that if you've already got a massive infrastructure for boilers and power generation that converting them to operate on bio-derived fuels is a much lower infrastructure option than any of the ones mentioned.

Technically, biofuels still put carbon into the atmosphere, since they're all combusted for the energy. Even if they're "net zero" or whatever irrational nonsense that may be, putting carbon into the atmosphere is worse than "carbon zero", which adds none during operations (they both add carbon during construction, of course).

The reason I say this should be fairly obvious: The CO2 content of the atmosphere is too high already. We can't be "net zero". That just maintains the levels we have, which are not conducive with slowing or stopping climate change. We have to be net negative, and reduce CO2 levels. So emissions have to become not only negative, but enough to offset what is in the atmosphere to lower atmospheric CO2 levels.

Otherwise, climate change will continue apace. Worse, with tipping points falling, it's becoming far less possible for humans to mitigate the overall CO2 levels. Obviously, mankind isn't the ONLY contributor of CO2 to the atmosphere, even if we're the only source that might be able to reduce our contribution. And if nature creates more of a contribution due to falling tipping points than humans did to start the process, well, there's nothing we can do to make that better. Even if mankind itself contributed nothing, climate change will continue and the tipping points will all fully fall.

We MIGHT buy some time going "carbon zero", but without de-carbonizing the atmosphere on planetary scales, we will not be able to stop catastrophic climate change from happening. At best (and it's a slim best) we can buy a little more time to adapt to what's coming and MAYBE keep civilization from crashing, likely taking the human race when it crashes.

That's because our tribal natures mean we don't get along well with each other as a species and we will fight over what's left with whatever weapons we think will help us win, or deny others their futures if we can't be there, too. We're just not a rational enough species to mutually cooperate for mutual survival at those scales.

 

[n-d]

Storage has a role to play for sure, in "moving" energy across TIME (from when we have it to when we want it). But I'm quite surprised that the article doesn't discuss the MUCH more cost-effective strategy of moving energy across SPACE (from where we have it to where we want it).

The "dunkelflauten" idea of "dark calms" is naive. Dark calms are geophysical phenomena caused by meteorology and astronomy, and quite predictable. Most importantly, they have a characteristic radius of about 1000 km in the middle latitudes of planet Earth. To the extent that the power the grid is larger than this characteristic size, dark calms have less and less impact on the balance between supply and demand.

Balancing power supply and demand (a.k.a. "load") on a 21st century grid is accomplished by a combination of
1) Mixing generating supply with complementary time properties (wind vs solar vs hydro vs geothermal vs nuclear)
2) Peak shaving (demand management via smart grid tech)
3) Long distance transmission via high-voltage direct current and
4) storage (including batteries and all the other innovations discussed in this article)

Certainly storage is an important component here, but it's best seen as a very expensive "last resort," along with nuclear and advanced geothermal ("clean, firm power"). Only by integrating all four strategies do we get a power grid that's clean, reliable, and affordable. ALL THREE!

Jumping straight to storage or nukes implies that "affordable" doesn't matter.

The idea of Dunkelflauten is not naïve, not here and now (Germany, Netherlands, France). This year we have a lot of it. And, while we have seen a lot of growth in solar, wind on land is much more difficult to install due to resistance of many people. So, even it blows fine, energy prices get up if in these weeks of short cloudy days.

 

[tgx]

I like the kinetic storage systems they are building in Europe. Cannot find the article at the moment but basically you siphon off some electricity from the grid to lift weights to a height connected by a cable. When you need power you let the weight fall which spins a turbine. When the first weight in the system reaches near the end of travel it releases the next. It's a lossy system but elegant and clean and doesn't involve a lot of advanced geo-sciences nor rely on batteries. Not sure how many kwH one of the buildings can store.

 

[Stuart Frasier]

Once you have converted electricity in some kind of gas, you do not have to convert it all back to electricity when later on. A lot of energy is needed for heating. You can burn the gas with 100% efficiency.
Admitted, if you have a heat pump that is 400% efficient, it might just offset the energy loss that occurs when gas is converted to electricity.
And if heat is what you need, one could tap the heat that would otherwise be lost off the conversion from gas to electricity, and transport it to homes as hot water.

So the conversion from gas to electricity can be done in a less lossy way!

Combined cycle gas turbines can be over 60% efficient. You come out way ahead with a heat pump.

 

[Veritas super omens]

People also have a tendency to protest carbon taxes, or vote out people who introduced them. See the yellow vest protests in France, or Trudeau's polling in Canada. This is exactly the kind of stuff that's accelerated the move to the right in global politics.

People in a democracy won't stand for having their short-term cost of living increased, even if it's for long-term gain.

Yep. Shows one of the fatal flaws of a representative type government.

 

[n-d]

The simplest solution is to decentralize how power is stored by moving the generation to households (alongside meaty subsidies) where applicable. If each household were to buffer 100KWh of battery (alongside solar) this would almost remove the need for a power grid altogether, as well as greatly reducing the inefficiencies related to distance.

I think the scale of a neighbourhood is more optimal for storage than the scale of a household. Let the household do 10KWh (the energy for 1 or 2 days, not counting heating), and let the neighbourhood (100 homes) do 10MWh electricity (for 10-20 days) and a separate installation to buffer heat directly (a house-size insulated pile of basalt)

https://cesar-energystorage.com/hoe-het-werkt/ (I hope the browser will translate the Dutch into English)

 

[Beanjammin]

Another Take: Of course storage is necessary, however the potential for grid based solutions should not be ignored Ultra high voltage DC transmission is being built in China. The same between continents would reduce storage needs and increase reliability.

Edit: Add ultra. Doh.

 

[olly2001]

No mention of biofuels in the article is shameful. In the UK coal power plants come online during winter when energy prices are higher, and because coal can just be stacked up you can store a lot of it. You know what can also do that? Biofuels. Stash them up over the year and use them in the winter.
Of course the problem wouldn't be so bad if you weren't like Germany and you actually matched production to demand, there is no battery that stores power cheap enough for long enough. Atomkraft? Nein, Danke!

You may be happy to know that as of September this year the U.K. has no coal power plants online. The era has ended.

 

[Quiet Entropy]

Carbon generating power taxes itself. Costs money, time and labor to get it, use it, and clean up after it. Carbon tax is more of a revenue grab then anything else. California is not cheap but it has been reliable. Our battery capacity also means we bank the sun and wind for later. Amazing build out this year.

Not impressed by all the shilling for nukes. I lived in the footprint of Chernobyl's fallout. Also more of em' in the Ukraine which just happens to be a war zone. Also Three Mile Island and Fukushima. NIMBY is also a factor when it comes time to decommission plants and disposal of old fuel rods. Yucca Mountain will never happen.

 

[42Kodiak42]

I'd be interested to hear about the demand side of the equation. Certainly all demand isn't the same, is it feasible, technically and more importantly politically, to partition the power grid in a manner that "Life Support" demand (hot water, HVAC, et cetera) is more important than non-life-support demand (TV, Playstation, Bitcoin Mining, graphic's rendering)?

Outside that, It feels like the answer is likely something like alot more "local" potential energy storage. But that just shifts the demand in time.

Once you start rationing power between different appliances within the same building, you're talking about a task that can only be carried out by the end user. While it's not technically impossible to re-engineer all of our breaker boxes to have separate 'non-critical' circuits, and it's not technically impossible to enforce regulations regarding appliance priority; it's more trouble than it's worth.

As in, for everything smaller than the bitcoin mining operation, you're spending an inordinate amount of time, energy, and money (rewiring homes in suboptimal ways, paying inspectors and auditors) to attempt to ration a relatively small amount of electricity. The only methods of electrical rationing that are worth pursuing are the ones that cost you next to nothing: Varying the price of electricity and asking people nicely to turn off appliances they don't need.

Beyond that, I'm willing to bet that you're better off paying for the electrical infrastructure to support those appliances.

 

[Veritas super omens]

Carbon generating power taxes itself. Costs money, time and labor to get it, use it, and clean up after it. Carbon tax is more of a revenue grab then anything else. California is not cheap but it has been reliable. Our battery capacity also means we bank the sun and wind for later. Amazing build out this year.

Not impressed by all the shilling for nukes. I lived in the footprint of Chernobyl's fallout. Also more of em' in the Ukraine which just happens to be a war zone. Also Three Mile Island and Fukushima. NIMBY is also a factor when it comes time to decommission plants and disposal of old fuel rods. Yucca Mountain will never happen.

BULLSHIT!. Carbon industry gleaned insane profits while POISONING THE BIOME. Any niggling clawback will be a rounding error compared to the what? hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions of dollar differential between pricing the externalities in as soon as they were recognized.

 

[OrvGull]

BULLSHIT!. Carbon industry gleaned insane profits while POISONING THE BIOME. Any niggling clawback will be a rounding error compared to the what? hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions of dollar differential between pricing the externalities in as soon as they were recognized.

They'll just pass any taxes straight through to consumers.

 

[Wickwick]

Technically, biofuels still put carbon into the atmosphere, since they're all combusted for the energy. Even if they're "net zero" or whatever irrational nonsense that may be, putting carbon into the atmosphere is worse than "carbon zero", which adds none during operations (they both add carbon during construction, of course).

The reason I say this should be fairly obvious: The CO2 content of the atmosphere is too high already. We can't be "net zero". That just maintains the levels we have, which are not conducive with slowing or stopping climate change. We have to be net negative, and reduce CO2 levels. So emissions have to become not only negative, but enough to offset what is in the atmosphere to lower atmospheric CO2 levels.

Otherwise, climate change will continue apace. Worse, with tipping points falling, it's becoming far less possible for humans to mitigate the overall CO2 levels. Obviously, mankind isn't the ONLY contributor of CO2 to the atmosphere, even if we're the only source that might be able to reduce our contribution. And if nature creates more of a contribution due to falling tipping points than humans did to start the process, well, there's nothing we can do to make that better. Even if mankind itself contributed nothing, climate change will continue and the tipping points will all fully fall.

We MIGHT buy some time going "carbon zero", but without de-carbonizing the atmosphere on planetary scales, we will not be able to stop catastrophic climate change from happening. At best (and it's a slim best) we can buy a little more time to adapt to what's coming and MAYBE keep civilization from crashing, likely taking the human race when it crashes.

That's because our tribal natures mean we don't get along well with each other as a species and we will fight over what's left with whatever weapons we think will help us win, or deny others their futures if we can't be there, too. We're just not a rational enough species to mutually cooperate for mutual survival at those scales.

Burning biofuels adds no more carbon to the atmosphere and, importantly, removes just as much carbon from the atmosphere as renewables. Namely, zero. Importantly, reusing extant infrastructure will put less carbon into the air during construction than will building new batteries or whatnot.

Decarbonizing is a separate discussion from meeting 24/7 power needs. Obviously, one would turn off active carbon capture systems in the event of a long-term loss of renewables.

 

[Wickwick]

I like the kinetic storage systems they are building in Europe. Cannot find the article at the moment but basically you siphon off some electricity from the grid to lift weights to a height connected by a cable. When you need power you let the weight fall which spins a turbine. When the first weight in the system reaches near the end of travel it releases the next. It's a lossy system but elegant and clean and doesn't involve a lot of advanced geo-sciences nor rely on batteries. Not sure how many kwH one of the buildings can store.

What you're describing is the very small-scale version of pumped hydro.

Think of the mass of water and then consider it can be pumped hundreds of meters in height. Of course, if the upper reservoir of a pumped hydro system also happens to be filled by rain you also have a net power generation system with your pumped hydro storage.

 

[dio82]

Storage has a role to play for sure, in "moving" energy across TIME (from when we have it to when we want it). But I'm quite surprised that the article doesn't discuss the MUCH more cost-effective strategy of moving energy across SPACE (from where we have it to where we want it).

The "dunkelflauten" idea of "dark calms" is naive. Dark calms are geophysical phenomena caused by meteorology and astronomy, and quite predictable. Most importantly, they have a characteristic radius of about 1000 km in the middle latitudes of planet Earth. To the extent that the power the grid is larger than this characteristic size, dark calms have less and less impact on the balance between supply and demand.

Balancing power supply and demand (a.k.a. "load") on a 21st century grid is accomplished by a combination of
1) Mixing generating supply with complementary time properties (wind vs solar vs hydro vs geothermal vs nuclear)
2) Peak shaving (demand management via smart grid tech)
3) Long distance transmission via high-voltage direct current and
4) storage (including batteries and all the other innovations discussed in this article)

Certainly storage is an important component here, but it's best seen as a very expensive "last resort," along with nuclear and advanced geothermal ("clean, firm power"). Only by integrating all four strategies do we get a power grid that's clean, reliable, and affordable. ALL THREE!

Jumping straight to storage or nukes implies that "affordable" doesn't matter.

Jesus... So many words and just about everything is wrong.

"Dunkelflauten" are real and this November/December we had already three of them in Europe.

Wind power is <I>uncorrelated</I> over distances of more than 1500km. They are NOT <I>anti-correlated</I>. This means that in 1500km distance you can expect wind power to produce it's statistical expectation value, which is around 10% nameplate power for onshore and 20% nameplate power for offshore. Ups.

Long distance electricity transport also doesn't work on the scales necessary. It is good for taking out the edge of grid constraints, but that's it. It took nearly 50 years to build up the infrastructure to transport 10-20GW from one corner of the EU to another, but we need to transport rather 300-500GW for the renewable revolution to happen. If the stars align right, then maybe we may be able to double that capacity in 15-20 years.

Demand management is a 150 year old dream of power hungry narcissists and authoritarians. It failed for 150 years and it will continue failing the next 150 years. Especially when it effectively comes down to two week long blackouts for everyone in Winter.

Storage, maybe. But LiFePO4 is really only viable for day to day and intra-day arbitrage. The only ideas that so far sketch out to roughly the correct scale is hydrogen storage in natural gas storage facilities and nuclear power.

Take your pick.

But for nuclear power you'd need to scrap all existing regulations and laws and designs and build everything from the ground up new with current technologies and an eye for cost efficiency.

I once worked in the nuclear industry. It's dead and hopeless. Nobody is willing to invest that political capital.

I'd rather bet on storage (conventional LiFePO4 + hydrogen) and BECSS (political darling and moneyed interests) and just plain boring high efficiency measures like passive house building codes.

Will all of this lead to net negative GHG emission?

No.

But we (as in all of mankind) could drastically decrease those emissions to a tiny fraction of those of today (think 90-95% reduction). That would be a future where one can still find hope for survival of the human civilization.

 

[numerobis]

For those advocating for new build nuclear, what do you do with the plant for the other 51 weeks of the year when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing and the grid is being flooded with cheap energy?

They say they should ramp down to zero and then argue that this doesn't change the economics at all, because they're bad at math.

 

[numerobis]

People also have a tendency to protest carbon taxes, or vote out people who introduced them. See the yellow vest protests in France, or Trudeau's polling in Canada. This is exactly the kind of stuff that's accelerated the move to the right in global politics.

People in a democracy won't stand for having their short-term cost of living increased, even if it's for long-term gain.

Trudeau won two elections with carbon pricing in place (2019 and 2021), so clearly it isn't that big of an issue.

His current polling has to do with the fact that he's walked back on half of the ideas he ran on in the first place back in 2015, and hasn't come up with new ideas since then. He won re-election in 2019 as a minority government. In 2021 he rushed an election to capitalize on the pandemic, which reset the clock and means we're voting him out in 2025 instead of having done so in 2023.

 

[numerobis]

Demand management is a 150 year old dream of power hungry narcissists and authoritarians. It failed for 150 years and it will continue failing the next 150 years. Especially when it effectively comes down to two week long blackouts for everyone in Winter.

Power-hungry, sure -- that's why we have a power grid after all.

Narcissists and authoritarians -- I guess, arguably, it's mostly large industry that goes into this kind of stuff. Not particularly unusual for the C-staff to have such traits.

But "dream"? We've had demand response and time of use schemes and marketing campaigns my entire life.

 

[CircleBreaker]

For regions that don't have consistent access to solar (e.g. high latitudes) or very routine winds then white hydrogen should not be overlooked. Sure, every other colour of hydrogen hasn't worked out, but that's because of at least one of two major problems: high cost to make it; and/or, difficult to store it. White hydrogen avoids both of these problems because: it is already made by nature; and, it is already stored by nature.

It also gives oil and gas companies something pro-climate to do.

 

[whquaint]

Thank you for publishing an article saying what I’ve been saying on this forum, and getting downvoted, for years. It’s not true that we can just go 100% renewable now and that it’s cheaper to do so. There are technical issues and cost issues making the transition much slower than people want. Lots of smart people are working on it, but we can’t “just do it now”.

 

[wagnerrp]

Oh, I'm totally with you on that. I'm a firm advocate alternative energy. But I suspect -- strongly -- that it will have to be complemented with a substantial nuclear power presence. I have no idea what drives the only-alternative folk's antagonism to nuclear power. Thankfully, they're just an over-represented fringe element on sites like ars and will become more so as time goes on.

How much would you consider "substantial"? We have somewhere between 5-8Mt of natural uranium, and our current reactors produce just under 50GWh/t. That's a remarkable 250-400PWh of remaining energy. Current worldwide energy consumption is around 25PWh/yr and rapidly growing. We could easily see that doubled as transportation and industry is moved off fossil fuels.

My aversion to nuclear is purely pragmatic. Even if you ignore the costs, we just simply don't have the fuel for it, not as long as we continue using enriched uranium. You want to start talking uranium breeders and thorium breeders, go for it, but there's no future in anything that runs on U-235.

 

[numerobis]

The entire article is poorly framed. All the technologies they look into, except hydrogen, are short-term -- a few hours' worth. So they are looking at alternatives in case lithium ion batteries that offer the same thing but possibly at a slightly lower price. Hydrogen is the only one where storage might be cheap enough to change the equation.

And it completely ignored the idea of overbuilding generation capacity. Per the numbers in the into, Germany is losing half its renewables in these dreaded dunkelflaute events. Which is cheaper: building extra generation capacity, or building storage? At equal cost, building extra generation capacity would be superior because they could sell the excess for the 50 weeks a year or sufficient generation and only shut those extras down for 2 weeks a year.

 

[Eldorito]

They'll just pass any taxes straight through to consumers.

In the end, it has to, otherwise it's not a tax. But hopefully consumers will choose the cheaper option. A gas tax that actually factors in costs of CO2 would drive (pun not intended) people to EVs or more fuel efficient vehicles.

In terms of the grid, they're selling it at market prices. It'll become harder to compete in that market and investment will flow towards more profitable ventures, firmed solar and wind. Short term, prices will go up for consumers (because new energy can't come in overnight) but it'll mean a faster move to renewables.

The idea that taxes are just passed on without impact is something dreamt up by every large company when faced with paying more tax, it's the line they use to drum up public support. It ignores that they're already charging the maximum they can to generate as much profit as they can. If they could have charged more before they would have done it already.

 

[Tracking turtle]

Just use the solution we already have - natural gas thermal plants. The cost is not much greater than renewable, much less than than nuclear, already in place, with gas supply and grid connection. They can be started quickly. Yes, CO2, but stop looking for perfection. If they run only 10% of the time, you've reduced the CO2 emissions by 90%. We're mostly screwed anyway at this point.

 

[sjl]

Let me put that into perspective, that's about 720 million Tesla powerwalls. There are 24 million homes in the UK, so that's 30 each, at a retail cost of about £180k per home. With electrification (heatpumps, EVs) that figure is only going to rise substantially.

(Edit: yes I know the Powerwall at £6k for 14kWh is a pretty awful deal, but it's a handy ballpark as it's an all in one package, rather than pricing up batteries / inverter / installation / etc separately)

That's basically putting an upper bound on the cost. A Powerwall is a combination of inverter and batteries. If what you need is energy storage, you need batteries. If what you need is power output, you need an inverter. Separating the two means that you can size the inverter according to the required output, and the batteries to the required storage capacity.

To illustrate the point: I have a 5 kVA inverter from Victron. I also have 14.4 kWh of LiFePO₄ batteries. If I want more power (as I do during the evening peak when I'm cooking dinner, if I want to also run the air conditioning), I need to bump up the size of the inverter. If I want to capture more of the solar energy that I'm generating during the day (I've pumped out over 40 kWh to the grid so far this week, even after fully charging my car), I need more batteries. I can do one, the other, or both, as finances allow.

I've been told that it'll be around $2-3000 AUD for a second inverter (bringing it to 10 kVA). It's about $AU2400 for a 4.8 kWh battery module. A Powerwall would be about $10,000, not counting the gateway and installation; the price is comparable to the price for the second inverter and three modules, but that ignores the fact that if I need or want to expand further, it'll only be the batteries - not the inverter, which makes the Powerwall an economical dead end for me. (Historically, I've never gone above 6-7 kW of load, so I only need to bump the inverter once.)

Then there's also the point that this is looking at the retail costs, for installation in a home. Building this stuff at scale is going to be significantly cheaper; there are a great many reasons why Tesla has the Megapack for utilities rather than bundling large numbers of Powerwalls.

(Bear in mind that I already have the solar infrastructure in place and it's designed to be expandable in this way, which is why the cost for bumping the size is so low for me. It would be significantly more to go from zero to what I have now, but that's a sunk cost.)

You can have cheap or you can have reliable.

Or you can overbuild the cheap to get to a level of reliability that is good enough. If there's too much power available, you can either dump the excess through banks of resistors, or find some way to make use of it that doesn't need a consistent power supply.

We don't build breeder reactors, and we stopped reprocessing because of cost.

Partly the cost, and partly the proliferation risk: the technology required to reprocess spent fuel is extremely similar to the technology required to extract plutonium for weapons. Sure, if you're breeding plutonium you want to keep the depleted uranium slugs in the reactor for a short space of time (too long and the build up of Pu-240 becomes problematic), but if you have reprocessing technology, it's a very short step to being able to manufacture weapons grade plutonium.

The US Navy's nuclear plants are already the right scale, and have never had a accident.

So you want to build civilian reactors that are fueled using uranium that's enriched to a level sufficient to build a nuclear weapon. That sounds like a great idea to me... I'm sure there's no way that that could possibly go wrong.

 

[RZetopan]

I'm not so sure that would work. H2 is a much smaller molecule than the hydrocarbons in natural gas. This means it doesn't take a very big hole to leak a lot of hydrogen.

You don't even need a hole for hydrogen to leak. The atom is so small that it can even leak through the metal lattice of steel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

 

[OrvGull]

In the end, it has to, otherwise it's not a tax. But hopefully consumers will choose the cheaper option. A gas tax that actually factors in costs of CO2 would drive (pun not intended) people to EVs or more fuel efficient vehicles.

It's the poor people who can't afford EVs or the inflated rents of areas with public transit who'll suffer the most.

 

[zombi3g]

During the last dunkelflaute, Germany had to import around 1 TWh. This led to a price spike on the electricity market and some unpleasant comments from politicians from Sweden and Norway (where electricity is imported from and where prices also rose).

Building a battery storage facility for 1 TWh would cost about as much as 10 to 20 EPR nuclear reactors (at 13 billion euros each) and use the entire global production of lithium-ion batteries for a year. Of course, it is economically better to let electricity prices spike. But to become CO2 neutral, some smart and cost-effective solutions are missing.

Sodium ion batteries are a thing and are much cheaper. And if you build small batteries in neighborhoods instead of one large centralized battery, you get a more resilient grid.

 

[camchatt What]

Energy Vault should be mentioned here as an opportunity for viable storage at a macro scale. They basically move giant bricks around to distribute energy in response to demand. Who needs a power wall when a 10 ton brick has the potential energy to power your house for a day?

It's not really feasible for localized applications, but it's one of the simplest, most innovative energy storage technologies out there. The concept is being tested for commercial architecture as well.

If i recall, they've been contracted to power an entire data center. All built around kinetic energy. Anyway, it's a beautiful idea that actually seems to be panning out.

 

[wagnerrp]

Giant flywheels and caverns full of compressed air are both terrifying

How so? I mean, in a relative sense. The other things we're considering are nuclear, coal, natural gas, etc. Most of them involve setting things on fire, the other splitting the atom. All in all, a mechanical device and a hole in the ground are probably the most comforting things I could possibly thing of in the realm of the energy industry.

When they fail, they fail catastrophically and near instantly.