Nuclear had it's day and it's over. At this point subsidizing it is just creating a mess so that we can give money to GE et al for providing something that--thanks to technology--has no value. If you really want to, just give GE the money directly so that we won't have to bother decommissioning some disaster decades from now.
But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate.
Maybe. But nuclear does not require batteries.
> But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate.
I do don’t have the numbers from Australia at hand. Do you? Is it really cheaper than nuclear, or they heavily overpaid for them, or Telsa sold it with large discount?
I have looked into all of these storage mechanism, and not one is actually really read for the market and is mass deployable quickly.
We just have to hope Tesla can actually spit out many tera of batteries by 2030 and the other companies match them.
Here in South Australia where I live the Hornsdale installation (the Tesla one) is capable of storing 150MW. Its purpose is not to drive the entire grid every day, but to help deal with minor fluctuations in supply and demand, and mitigate brown/blackouts during emergencies. In-between those times it stores electricity while prices are cheap, and sells when the prices are high to turn a profit
The overwhelming source of electricity across Australia is supplied by fossil fuels (despite our abundance of clean nuclear fuel).
The entire reason the installation was built in the first place was because of a series of brownouts and blackouts caused by interruptions in the supply of electricity from interstate one day (we don't generate enough by ourselves sadly). It caused a fairly large political situation to develop, and resulted in the construction of the Hornsdale installation.
Contractually Hornsdale is obliged to be able to supply 70MW for 10 minutes, or 30MW for 3 hours on demand during emergencies. For some perspective, the current load on the grid as at the time I started writing this is 2150MW(6pm local time).
Australian battery installations are simply not operating at the scale you want them to be here. Hornsdale has a niche it is filling quite admirably, but be careful when you use it as an example of grid-scale viability. It's simply not.
Here’s a video discussing the drawbacks [0], the guy doing the video can be kind of abrasive at times but worth watching/skimming as a counterpoint.
One set of estimated from Lazard: advanced nuclear at $118-$192/MWh, and lithium-ion charged from directly attached solar at $102-$139/MWh [2].
Lazard have analyses for energy generation costs by technology, and storage costs based on use case and scenario. (Note that the storage use cases include the cost of charging the storage system.)
These cost estimates work hard to simplify a hugely complex subject, by estimating a levelized cost of energy, which is then of course an oversimplification. It doesn't consider the value of when energy is delivered, or the price of when the storage is charged. EIA, filled with a lot of hard energy guys that are dismayed to see renewables outperforming in cost, puts out ridiculous numbers, but has also embraced something called the LACE to try to compensate. However they have been so wrong on hard numbers that they can't be trusted when it comes to renewables.
The design of energy markets has absolutely huge impacts on the profitability of storage as well, and it can still be very hard to get compensated for the value provided to the grid. There probably would already have been GW of batteries on Texas' ERCOT grid if they buy/sell dual nature had been legal earlier.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/the-story-of-che...
A nuclear power plant is fairly self-contained.
A giant black solar installation captures a lot of heat that would’ve been reflected back into space.
Wind farms slow down wind (obviously..)
We all know how important the gyres in the oceans to preserving the current ecosystem.
Everything is in a delicate balance, if we start messing up something new who knows what would happen.
Are there any studies in this area?
Nuclear plants take energy sequestered in matter and unleashes it to a form that ultimately will decay to heat just the same. This outcome is the same regardless of the power source.
If climate change is a relevant concern to the discussion then alongside discussing of sustainable energy there's an equal topic of how we re-sequester or eject the additional energy we've so far pumped into the atmosphere in the form of energy decaying to heat. Not to mention how to curb our energy demands so that we don't continue to worsen the situation.
>Wind farms slow down wind (obviously..)
Yeah quite a lot on the scale of large farms, slowing wind speeds by up to 50%. The optimist in me thinks this could be a beneficial thing given our atmosphere is generally expected to become more chaotic with stronger winds as a result of climate change, but the realist in me thinks it's largely irrelevant since turbines can't operate during the extremes, which are expected to become more commonplace.
>Are there any studies in this area?
Not sure, but it's an interesting question.
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