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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

Is there a plan to eliminate coal and gas as big elements in USA's eletricity production?

If Form Energy (or Ambri or other sub 50$/khw battery system) succeeds, gas and coal are done. Even combined cycle LNG can’t compete with wind/solar + multi day storage on cost. If it looks like one of the major grid scale battery projects will work, gas plant financiers will not risk new projects as their assets will get stranded before they pay off.

Battery storage can, and most likely will, be the solution for day-night fluctuations in energy use. However, for the amounts of energy that seasonal energy storage would require, it's not really a viable solution.

Regarding clean seasonal energy storage - UK, French and German authorities all independently came with studies(1) that arrived to the same conclusion - synthetic methane is the only viable option. Very expensive, but the engineering is doable. Gas plants are here to stay.

(1) https://english.bdi.eu/media/presse/presse/downloads/2018030...

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1...

I think that natural gas plants will be a significant part of power grids for a long time. Maybe they will not be primary generators, but they certainly will stay as backup. At the very least until the grid-scale storage problem will be properly solved (i.e. you need to store at least several days of consumption, ideally several weeks). I don't think that any kind of chemical batteries is the solution to this problem. Personally, I hope that hydro pumped storage in artificial underground cavities will become mainstream one day.

> Personally, I hope that hydro pumped storage in artificial underground cavities will become mainstream one day.

That would have massive (environmental and financial) costs.

https://youtu.be/JSgd-QhLHRI

Is a great video discussing the practicality and finances involved in hydro pumped storage.

Have you missed the underground part? Ideally both reservoirs would be kept underground, thus minimizing environmental impact and water loss to an absolute minimum.

I agree that such storage would require huge CapEx, but on the bright side OpEx will be relatively small. And no need to bother with recycling of megatonnes of batteries every decade. Also because stored energy is proportional to volume and height difference you it's possible scale such storage quite flexibly (assuming an affordable technology for creating such cavities will be developed).

> Have you missed the underground part? Ideally both reservoirs would be kept underground, thus minimizing environmental impact and water loss to an absolute minimum.

Nope, but you still need to dig a lot in rocks, and divert water to fill up the reservoir in the first place, which aren't without environmental consequences.

Furthermore, as the video i linked explains, you need very specific conditions for pumped up hydro to be viable (size, height, water, etc.) which IMHO makes it a non-starter in many places.

California stopped renewing contracts for coal fired electricity. They are probably still buying it on the spot market though.

I think you guys need gas as peak power long time but coal is now in borrowed time. At least Germany is started moving towards power to hydrogen but it takes like 10+ years to build truly big industrial scale production for P2H. Same for grid scale batteries eg which are moving right direction but not there yet.

Even gas might dwindle faster than you'd think.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/new-study-a-zero-emi...

Is producing hydrogen a sustainable process, as in, the cycle does not spit out waste products that are un usable?

Of course, this is assuming that the power to produce Hydrogen is from renewable sources.

If it’s cloudy and an extended period of calm wind, it’s unacceptable for me to not have electricity, and neither is it for hospitals or nursing homes. We will always need some form of petro backup unless our queasiness with nuclear is solved.

Nuclear is most economical when run 24/7. So I don't think it will be a good backup. Hydrogen and its derivatives (ammonia, methane) will take that role, I guess.

Liquid-air batteries. Big ones.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/18/worlds-b...

https://highviewpower.com/

I also hope that efficient scale batteries become possible. But if there is an extended deficit with wind / sun then even a battery might not do it. One undeniable advantage of petrochemicals is they work at any time, consistently, and are a solid backup. Maybe we are OK as a society with backup generators being petrochemicals, rather than going nuclear.

> “if there is an extended deficit with wind / sun then even a battery might not do it.”

It’s always windy (and sunny) somewhere. The combination of energy storage and grid transmission alleviates intermittency.

Chemical batteries are very useful, but far from the only way to store energy.

It's always sunny somewhere, but if that is on the opposite side of the earth during the night, good luck building grid transmission.

It's always windy somewhere, but that also might not be on the same continent as you need it.

So if you don't like gas peakers or don't run a nuclear baseload you need to bridge those short non-windy winter days or weeks with batteries. Multiple nation scale terawatt-hour batteries. Which means millions of Tesla li-ion megapacks or millions of pumped hydro plants - which gets expensive and unfeasible real quick as you run out of either the battery raw materials for the former or suitable sites for the latter.

Fossil fuels store energy like batteries too. You could store excess wind energy as synthetic diesel[0] or gasoline, it's just not commercially viable yet.

[0] like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-diesel - the input is water, CO2 and electricity, and as such it's carbon neutral.

That backup needn't be fossil fuels or nuclear. It can for example be Methane made from water and carbon dioxide.

That's an exceptionally inefficient way to do it, and it comes with the risk of methane leaks (which would then have a climate warming effect).

Hydrogen can be used directly, which skips one conversion step and doesn't need air capture for the CO2. These days no gas plant should be build that can't be converted to 100% hydrogen in the future.

Yes that's true. But Methane is easier to store than Hydrogen. Most countries already have infrastructure in place to store months worth of Methane. And who knows, maybe we figure out some cheap redox-flow batteries or something so that neither option is the cheapest solution. In any case, there is no need for coal or fossil gas as backup, and nuclear is probably out for economical reasons (unless we have some breakthrough in reactor design in the next five years or so)

"nuclear is probably out for economical reasons (unless we have some breakthrough in reactor design in the next five years or so)"

We are discussing artificial fossil fuel production with terrible efficiency, in that context nuclear is very viable.

I'm not convinced. Solar is cheaper than nuclear and making Methane can be done when production exceeds demand. Why do you think that nuclear would be better suited for the task?

Its cheaper, but you are converting it to methane and back to electricity at abyssimal 15% efficiency, and paying for all that extra conversion infrastructure, so your costs are like 10x.

By the time your now started nuclear project is finished, renewable energy will be less than 1/10 the cost if current trends hold even remotely.

I think you'd have to look at the statistics for consecutive windless days for the given location to rule out battery storage? Also in the US, I think natural gas peakers are more common than petro.

Michael Shellenberger is very good on the realities of this but sadly this site will quickly flag anything that is inconvenient to the preferred narrative. https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/finally-they-adm...

This is some serious biased data selection going on there.

For example he claims that renewables can't replace fossil because of their unreliability. And shows a graph of global energy use that shows that overall percentage of renewables did not grow between 2009 and 2019 despite significant growth in total output. He the compares this to local data which shows that _locally_ turning on and off a nuclear power plant has a significant effect on the _local_ carbon emissions.

You can't really compare conclusions from global and local studies. By his own argument nuclear can't function without fossil either, because over the same time frame as the report he quotes nuclear energy output rose as well [1] (except for a drop due to the GFC).

What the global data really shows is that global energy demand has increased rapidly largely in countries like China and India etc. who build (cheap) coal plants to keep up with tha demand. It will be interesting to see developments now that China is moving away from growing at all costs.

Regarding the baseload myth, it has been debunked many times [2] [3]

[1] https://nwenergy.org/featured/debunking-the-myth-of-baseload... [2] https://nwenergy.org/featured/debunking-the-myth-of-baseload... [3] https://reneweconomy.com.au/dispelling-the-nuclear-baseload-...

Shellenberger is running an Astro-Turf campaign against renewable energy for the nuclear industry. It's good he is flagged where serious discussion is encouraged.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-stories-michael-shel...

https://nuclear.foe.org.au/michael-shellenbergers-pro-nuclea...

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/review-bad-scienc...

I don't know why you're being downvoted, because you're right.

Nuclear is the good solution, not renewables.

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