Yes, because profit is what’s so important and not part of creating the problem, right?
Why not use both?
No reason to fight the tide. Renewables and storage are enough.
People just say “storage” as if it’s some simple solution. It’s not. Pumped hydro can work in some places but it can also cause pretty impactful disturbances for the local ecosystem so it needs to be planned with care. Hydrogen storage is not a mature technology yet, it’s still in the trial stage and has pretty poor performance (something like 35% round-trip efficiency), not to mention the issues with hydrogen gas leaking due to its small molecular size. Shouldn’t even start discussing lithium ion, but the danger of thermal runaway should alone be enough of a reason to plan it very carefully.
Don’t get me wrong, renewables + storage is the future, aside from eventual fusion power it’s the cheapest and most environmentally friendly alternative. But a lot of people talk as if there aren’t enormous technical challenges in stabilizing a power grid with renewables at the moment. Remember that precisely all of the power that is put into the grid has to be pulled out of the grid, every minute of every hour of every day of the year, as soon as that equilibrium is broken in either direction we experience significant issues.
There’s so much years old anti storage propaganda in your text, it’s painful.
Hydrogen storage is not a mature technology yet
What makes a tech mature to you? We have all the components of a hydrogen storage path up and running everywhere around the world. They’re not profitable, at least not without government incentives, but solarpunk is anti-capitalist, so profitability shouldn’t be among our primary concerns.
something like 35% round-trip efficiency
That’s a worst case figure for purely electrical round trip efficiency. We could use waste heat of the fuel cell process (to a lesser extent also the electrolysis process) in order to bump that number up considerably.
not to mention the issues with hydrogen gas leaking due to its small molecular size
That has not been an issue for quite some time thanks to advances in materials science. Also, we could use methanation, of course sacrificing some more efficiency, but then we could even use old natural gas infrastructure without an issue.
Shouldn’t even start discussing lithium ion, but the danger of thermal runaway should alone be enough of a reason to plan it very carefully.
Lithium-ion batteries are environmentally bad for sure, but talking about thermal runaway? Really? You need very high temperatures for that to happen. Most stationary storage applications will never see such high powers that they come even close to thermal runaway by themselves. If in a high power application, you’ll have better battery management systems supervising the temperature and reducing the allowed power. It’s really a non-issue if you have engineers who know what they’re doing working on it.
Coming bad to environmentally bad: see sodium-ion batteries.
What makes a tech mature to you?
When significant issues have been worked out and it is, if not profitable, economically justifiable.
solarpunk is anti-capitalist, so profitability shouldn’t be among our primary concerns
I’m not primarily concerned with a Lemmy instance, I’m more focused on the world that we live in.
That’s a worst case figure for purely electrical round trip efficiency. We could use waste heat of the fuel cell process (to a lesser extent also the electrolysis process) in order to bump that number up considerably.
It’s a reasonable estimate, not a worst-case figure, and waste heat works well when additional heat is required and incredibly poorly when it is not. Heat storage is also an alternative but now we’re talking about requiring heat storage in order to make hydrogen viable, which bumps up the cost and reduces availability even further.
That has not been an issue for quite some time thanks to advances in materials science.
So this is not entirely true, leakage represents about 2.9-5.6% and hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that can potentially have a 10 times bigger impact than CO2 over a 100-year period. Let’s not fix problems by potentially causing more problems.
Lithium-ion batteries are environmentally bad for sure, but talking about thermal runaway? Really? You need very high temperatures for that to happen.
All that you need is bad luck with dendrite formation and the battery can combust during regular cycling. An energy storage facility in Australia caught fire a few years ago. The ship off the coast of the Netherlands that burned just weeks ago was potentially caused by brand new EV batteries combusting. It is a significant concern.
It’s really a non-issue if you have engineers who know what they’re doing working on it.
I am an engineer.
Coming bad to environmentally bad: see sodium-ion batteries.
What do you mean by “Coming bad to environmentally bad”? I think sodium-ion batteries represent an exciting step forward in battery development since it would reduce the need for a material which is often environmentally disastrous to extract. There are also other storage mediums that are developing, Liquid- and Compressed Air Energy Storage, Flow Batteries, and Liquid Metal batteries to mention a few. There’s also the rust battery that’s under development by Form Energy. I don’t know why people get so hung up on hydrogen and lithium-ion batteries as if they’re the only two possible alternatives when at least one of them sacrifices safety and longevity for weight in a use-case where weight isn’t an issue.
I am interested in the tech, I’m trying to keep up to date with recent developments as it’s both interesting and in the same field as my degree, and I do think that it’s both inevitable that it will end up as the best alternative for the grid in the future and that there are exciting opportunities today. But we don’t have to ignore risks and cram other technologies into there just because fossil fuels are bad, we can phase them out and make right decisions for the future at the same time.
Not everywhere, not all the time. Were that the case we’d be much farther ahead in getting rid of fossil fuels.
For everywhere else we can count on power lines
That shows quite some misunderstanding of how power transmission works…
Also, there’s a very significant part of the world population living on islands. Even disregarding efficiency losses, do you want to crisscross the oceans with power lines?
Why not? We have plenty of cables and so forth down their anyway and they are hardly that bad. Besides efficency losses for hvdc are at 3.5% for 1000km. So you could transport electricity from any place to any other place on earth with max loss of 49% using that technology. You also do not need millions of power lines and mostly not across oceans, but connecting islands with the next continent. Even then most islands with high enough population for nuclear to be even be reasonable are both large themself or close to some other continent or large islands. As for costs there is a serious private venture to built a direct undersea power line from Morroco to the UK. It is not cheap, but it certainly is not crazy. Obviously we have an electricity grid in most places in the world already, with 87% of the worlds population having electricity and nearly all who have no access are in Africa.
Because we only have limited resources and they have to be used wisely. So if it is cheaper to build solar, rather then nuclear, we should use our workers to build solar. The other problem is that nuclear reactors do not last forever, so over time, they will be phased out, just due to economics.
The problem is it’s not that simple from a climate perspective. Solar and wind are great but are incredibly variable which is not good when you need a guaranteed baseline electricity production. There is no situation under which a large nation could reliably just use wind/solar to power the country. Currently nuclear is the only renewable, clean energy source that can produce a stable output.
Nuclear is not renewable. It uses uranium as fuel. It is low carbon and emission free, but not renewable.
There are two solutions to intermittency. First one is a large grid with a lot of differen renewable power sources. It is always sunny somewhere, so when you can move the electrcitiy around, you have much less of a problem. Even better ifyou have wind power as well. With a continent sized grid, you basicly avoid the problem of cloudy days.
Next part is storage. Due to the large grid size you have the ability to use hydro power plants with reservoir as long term storage for particullarily cloudy days or winter and battery and pumped hydro for nights. Biomass is also an option if need be. Maybe we later hydrogen as long term storage as well, for really bad weeks and using it mainly for say chemical plants. Again the better large and interconnected the grid the less storage is needed. In some regions namely large sunny deserts having a nights worth of storage and some emergency backup biomass power plants would be enough. Basicly it runs down to less then a day worth of storage
There are also actually renewable baseloads like hydro power for flow power plants and geothermal, which are also good options. Also variable demand is a thing, which allows for even more renewables.
Seriously intermittency is much less of a problem, then it is made out to be. You just have to add a bit of interconnection and storage to it, but even that is not that expensive and seriousyl usefull.
You and many people overestimate the effect of clouds on solar power generation. Even on cloudy days solar panels still produce mostly the same amount of power. On the absolutely darkest cloud days, solar panels still put out about 50% the same amount of energy they generate on perfectly clear sunny days. And that’s only for the absolutely darkest cloud days, whereas if it’s just a typical overcast kind of day the output will be a lot higher. So even if society went to being completely solar powered, you’d only need 50% more solar power generation to be completely meeting your needs even on the cloudiest days.
Isn’t the issue more going to be the solar power generation during winter - which happens to also be when energy demand is greatest?
Is that counting the massive storage costs necessary for running a fully renewable grid? Including the low saturation point for cheap storage like pumped hydro and increasing costs with increasing scale due to material shortages? It is definitely cheaper per kwh right now, but we want to know the overall cost going forward.
We need to do both. The amount of renewable energy that we need to decarbonize or economy is enormous.
Right now we don’t have the industrial capacity to manufacture the amount of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries needed for the transition. We need to ramp up the production, it means new factories, new trained engineers and technicians, new mines for the ore… All of that takes years or even decades to setup. The estimates I saw for the amount of lithium needed implied that we need to multiply the production by a factor of 20 !! Renewables energy also requires a lot of copper. New mines can take decades to open.
We already have some industrial capacity for building nuclear reactors do we should use it. Same for renewables and ramp up as much as we can.
I’m 2020 this is the world primary energy mix :
- Coal: 27.6%
- Oil: 31.6%
- Gas: 25%
- Nuclear: 4.4%
- Hydropower: 7%
- Wind: 2.6%
- Solar: 1.4%
- Other renewables: 0.5%
Right now fossil fuel are still above 80%, it needs to be close to 0% in 25 years. We need to use all the tools we have available: nuclear, solar and wind.
Remember that, capitalization is important for people looking for those nice profits. And earnings come from differential capitalization. The issue was never that they are or not profitable, but if the ‘big capitalists’ are even willing to participate in making ‘abundance’ even a possibility.
I’m pretty sure that if we put our time and effort in organize ourselves we can handle most of the problem with power, but trying to get them to work in the “green capitalist” way is just not understanding how capitalism works. Its about control of production, not some ambiguous idea of a free-market with god-like awareness.
Hope these technologies develop faster, yet, I know if they are even implemented around the world with the idea to improve peoples lives: will not be under the state of capital.
You can’t infest every house on every street on every neighborhood with door to door nuclear power plant salespeople. Profitability is the least important metric in my mind for such a huge topic as energy production.
@pizzaiolo Even with the extreme subsidies given to nuclear, it still doesn’t make money. Insurance payout cap, govt responsibility for cleanup, the fact most of the tech was paid for by public money, massive state and federal subsidies for plant operation… it still can’t turn a profit. lmao. That’s the real reason PGE was going to shut down Diablo. It’s too expensive to operate, and it has unfunded maintenance liabilities that total near the original plant construction cost.
…so?
For the article, which you apparently didn’t read:
“Given enough time, it may be possible to build a nuclear power plant to the highest safety standards and remain economically relevant, even taking into account the costs of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years,” the scientists concluded. “However, building nuclear power plants requires many years of planning and construction and is expensive, while the climate crisis demands urgency and requires such large investments that profitability is paramount.”
“However, building nuclear power plants requires many years of planning and construction and is expensive, while the climate crisis demands urgency and requires such large investments that profitability is paramount.”
…they say as they ignore the glaring fact that prioritising profit over everything else is literally what got us in to this urgency-demanding mess in the first place, and that depending on the “good will” of people who will refuse to act until and unless something is proven to make them money is only ever going to continue serving them, not the rest of the planet.
I think the person you replied to is valid in wondering why anyone thinks this is a positive development when all it is is more fucking around within the rules of capitalism and somehow expecting capitalism to change…
