Safety is no longer the reason Nuclear is not worth it.
The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free!
The wind -- caused by solar heating -- also generates free power.
The cost of harvesting it is now so low, and will always continue to decline as any technology will, that any fuel-based generation mechanism is going to be rendered uneconomic with time alone. They depreciate faster as time goes on!
Investing in any such generator needs to be for other reasons like land scarcity.
There was a comment here about cleanup costs of nuclear vs. solar, that was deleted while I was typing my response to that. I'm just gonna copy in my response here, because I think it's an interesting topic:
Are we really sure solar panels are much easier to dismantle on a euro-per-kWh basis though? That is, if you divide the total cost of dismantling and recycling a solar power plant, divided by the total amount of energy produced over the lifetime, does solar power do much better than nuclear?
Nuclear power in Germany (17 powerplants) has produced well over 5 million gigawatthours over the lifetime so far. It's hard to put good numbers on the cleanup costs, but somewhere in the ballpark of 50 billion euros is probably correct. (Keep in mind that some cost is the government paying the powerplant owners compensation because they are forcing them to shut down long before end-of-life).
So that gives you around 0.01 euros per kWh. A solar panel with 20% efficiency placed close to the equator produces 500 kWh/m2/yr. Over 30 years of lifetime that would produce 15 000 kWh/m2.
Are you sure you would spend significantly less than 150 euros per square meter of panel to dismantle, transport and recycle the solar panels?
Solar panels aren't the only way to generate energy using the sun. You can build a concentrated solar farm (see: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/06/motorsport/morocco-solar-...) which uses mirrors and salt to produce up to 580mw of power, with a cost of just under $1bil.
My neighbor heats their pool using solar, it's just a bunch of tubes that cycle water over their roof. They got rid of their gas heater. Given that most backyard pools are used in the summer, why can't we swap these to using solar?
From what I can find, Saudi Arabia is one of the best locations for solar power globally, and they have a total solar influx of 2300 kWh/m2/yr. Commercially available solar panels have efficiencies of 22% at best.
For the second point: I'm not saying people aren't recycling solar panels in a good way. I'm saying it doesn't look like the cost of that is significantly lower than for cleaning up after nuclear power.
And, by pairing your comment with parent, a nuclear power company would have a competitive advantage over solar, but for the head start that solar go due to gov incentives, massive investment, and lack of a scare movie like Chernobyl.
Installing a solar panel can be done today, for a $100. Tomorrow it will be $50, and it’ll keep going down until the market dictates the price.
Nuclear takes years to build and generate output, and the price is going up. It would be foolish to build a nuclear plant today unless you have a specific need for it (small location, little sunlight/wind).
Personally I think that in 20-40 years time most people will get the bulk of their energy from local solar panels, with the grid, backed by a mix of renewables and existing non-renewable sources filling in all the gaps.
The whole point of this system is that its also quick to install, and cheap. Its not a custom designed for each mega site type of setup like traditional reactors.
People who make solar panels for a living say yes, the curve has been astronomical and beyond predictions, but, we're closer to a wall than we are halving costs again
The sun and wind are both very low energy density, and are intermittent sources. The sun is only available for part of the day, and wind is highly variable in a short term time frame.
The real cost of using renewables for a primary source of energy is the cost of storage. Using renewables for 80% of our energy demand would require 12 weeks of storage - to get to 100% it would take 3 weeks of storage [1]. These are staggering amounts of storage. Most countries have energy storage that is measured in the seconds or minutes, not in hours let alone weeks.
Solar and wind would be great if we had a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. But until that happens, we're going to be burning fossil fuels. There's a reason why Germany, which invested heavily in wind and solar, still emits 10x the carbon emissions from electricity generation as compared to France, which invested in nuclear.
what about cultural changes ? serious question. less living at night, less energy consumption, making sun randomness a bit less of an issue. Just asking.
Cultural changes don't fix the duck curve. Around 4-7 PM is when virtually everyone is running their HVAC the most. This is also where you are starting to lose most of your solar generation capacity. There is a solid 4-5 hours of thermal momentum that needs to be compensated for before everyone hits set point temperatures and units cycle off on the hottest days.
Unless you are proposing that we do away with basic comfort in many regions, or spend hundreds of billions of dollars tearing down every structure and re-engineering them for passive comfort, I do not think there is much choice other than to bring in more peak generation capacity or employ currently-infeasible grid scale storage.
By "cultural changes" you mean energy shortages. Realistically, this would most likely result in leaders getting elected out of office and resuming the use of fossil fuels. Regular blackouts are immensely unpopular.
Those of us who lived through the oil shock in the 70s are having a laugh at the 'just cut the energy supply' path. Would love to hear from people who endured the UK at the height of their 3-day week to see how keen people were about this forced change...
The expensive bit about nuclear is not the fuel. It's making sure that the fuel stays where it is supposed to be. A different design might change the cost of that dramatically.
Not really. It's rather expensive (billions of dollars) to setup a nuclear plant in the first place, even before a single fuel rod shows up. Meanwhile solar is so cheap and easy that you can install panels on your roof yourself.
I agree that traditional nuclear makes little economic sense. But I disagree that this is inherent to nuclear power, because there might be a different reactor design that doesn't cost billions of dollars to set up. We just haven't found it yet.
One of the specific targets of the modular reactors that are now getting approval are these cost issues. If you build one reactor a year it will be big, bespoke, and incredibly overpriced. If you build a hundred modular reactors every year the cost will drop significantly.
> The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free!
Are going to clean solar panels/mirrors for free?
> Bahawalpur is desert terrain , having high dust count, therefore, the efficiency of panels were reduced by 40%. It required 30 people to clean panels with 15 days to restore the panels back to their full capacity, which reduced production of installed 100MW plant to below 18 MW
30 workers isn't a lot for a power plant. According to this article[0] (ignore the coal stuff) a decent gas turbine plant takes ~25 workers to keep it running, and that's for a system whose energy source can just be piped in rather than having to be constantly babysat so it doesn't irradiate the tri-county area. That's kinda the flaw of a steam turbine based system; it doesn't matter if the heat comes from coal, uranium, concentrated solar, whatever, you still need people around to make sure the system with superheated steam and a big heavy turbine spinning really, really fast doesn't go wrong.
Do you get out of your car to wipe your windscreen when its raining? This cleaning problem seems like something that would be super easy to automate, I dunno why they would higher 30 people to do this when you could higher one engineer.
Nuclear power provides enough megawatts for creating sustainable, electricity based heavy industry. If we're going to become zero carbon, that means we also need a system to fuel steel foundries, chemical manufacuring, and cement mixers without coal.
Nuclear is the only way we’re going to be able to get ahead of climate change. Renewables do not have the energy density required at this point. In the 70s? Sure, we might have been able to get ahead of it. At this point, we’re going to need nuclear whether we like it or not. Nuclear is the only option that will provide enough power to both scrub out existing carbon from the atmosphere and reduce our output of carbon while we do it.
50m2 Solar on the roof top of every household would power An average western country. That is not a lot. And that is is an upper band as we have wind power, biomass, hydro power geothermal and many other sources of clean energy.
Offshore wind is getting really cheap and offers vast amount of unused space.
As I mentioned we got tons of other options besides solar power.
EVs are now increasingly beating gasoline cars on cost of ownership and these often have batteries large enough to store the power required for 4 days of a regular western household.
I doubt you will be entirely without sunshine for 4 days straight.
Repeating myself for the 3rd time: There are other options beside solar power, so why keep harping on this?
In fact Denmark gets about 65% of their power from wind. The UK also gets a lot of their power form wind. For many norther countries, wind power has quite a lot of potential.
> In fact Denmark gets about 65% of their power from wind.
Not true. Just 47% [1], and Denmark is a country with the most favorable conditions for wind generation. Statistics are easy to manipulate if you allow yourself to add 15 percent here, subtract 15% there..
Also, Denmark relies on Sweden (who utilize nuclear power a lot) and Norway to provide power when renewables are not providing enough power
You refer to 2019 when renewables gave 50% of Danish power.
> Also, Denmark relies on Sweden (who utilize nuclear power a lot) and Norway to provide power when renewables are not providing enough power
Yes, but the capacity for import and export is limited. Despite these limitations Denmark has managed to run on 65% wind power in 2020 without breaking the grid.
Thanks to COVID19 we get a look at the future in terms of how much of electricity production renewables can handle.
This is a nonsense argument. How does the energy density of renewables prevent them from providing all the energy we need? Show us the quantitative argument (spoiler: you will not be able to do so.)
It’s not about total capacity they can provide, it’s how quickly and efficiently they can provide a unit of energy capacity, and how much carbon those materials themselves produce during manufacturing. Nuclear is, across the board, more efficient. Solar simply isn’t efficient enough, strictly speaking in terms of output per unit of input, to generate the energy we will need to reverse climate change and reduce current emissions enough.
Carbon produced during manufacturing is a bad metric right now. If producing a MW of levelized capacity for solar (say) causes emission of twice the CO2 of a MW of nuclear, but displaces much more CO2 of fossil emission per $ invested than nuclear, then going with solar displaces more CO2 than going with nuclear, for a given investment budget.
Also, the CO2 emission is a function of the level of fossil fuel use remaining in the rest of the economy. Transporting materials to the site depends on whether those vehicles are burning fossil fuels or not, for example. The focus on current CO2 from manufacturing is implicitly assuming that we will always need fossil fuels to build these things, that the processes and materials can never be performed/made with non-fossil inputs. With that assumption, we're doomed, so the difference is irrelevant anyway.
The glaring problem (pun intended) with solar and wind is that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow and we don't have a good way to store energy for those sunless and windless intervals.
We do have a good way to store energy. It's called batteries, they are already cost effective in several use cases, and their cost is going down about 5% per year.
The US has about 8 seconds worth of battery storage. By comparison, to use renewables for 80% of our electricity we would need 12 hours of energy storage. For 100%, 3 weeks of storage [1]. 1 hour of energy storage in the US is 500 GWh. This amounts to more than the sum total of global lithium iron battery production (currently about 300 GWh) [2].
Critically, batteries aren't cost effective for the use case in question: storing solar and wind energy in a world where these are the primary energy sources. They're going down 5% per year, but who knows how long that trend will hold, especially if we're talking about a wide-scale switch to unreliable power sources (driving up the demand for batteries).
I want to live in a world powered by solar and wind, but we can't just wish away the reliability issues. And I don't think we should keep burning fossil fuels while we chip away at the storage problem. And we don't have to--we can build nuclear plants while we work on the storage problem.
As an aside, I think it would be really cool if something like Energy Vault (https://energyvault.com/) could be the solution (at least for the majority of use cases); however, I have no idea how feasible it is.
I have played around with a simulator for this. Wind and solar is so much cheaper than nuclear power that you can simple build a lot of overcapacity to deal with much of the storage issue. Wind almost never go to zero during a year.
For the rest of the time you just use gas power plants. According to my calculations I could get lower kWh price than with nuclear and only provide 10-20% of the power from natural gas.
We can run on 10-20% natural gas for a while until we develop better storage.
That is not an extraordinary claim. This is well know. Look up levelized cost of energy on Wikipedia e.g. or lookup the latest British Government report on current and projected Energy cost.
> I looked, and what I've found tells me that you make a false claim. Your lack of sources is just as telling.
God... so frustrating dealing with dumbasses that don't know even the most basic shit about energy production and cost. Not sure if you are just trolling. But here goes. Here are costs by different sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Costs will vary between country. But here is cost e.g. for France. Nuclear EPR is 100 euro/MWh. Solar farms is 43.24 euro/MWh.
Next, the UK. Nuclear PWR is 93-121 pounds/MWh. Onshore wind 47-76 pounds/MWh. Solar 71-94 pounds/MWh.
How about the US. Advanced Nuclear 71-92 dollars/MWh. Onshore Wind 28 to 62 dollars/MWh. Solar 29 to 48 dollars/MWh.
> Solar and wind power have their merits, but they are not the ultimate solution to clean power problem.
Said nobody ever. Solar and wind are dirty cheap hence any clean energy system will have to try to use as much of these as possible to save money where possible. We can supplement with geothermal, hydropower, biomass, power-to-gas, compress air storage, flow batteries, metal powder combustion, and even SMR with molten salt thermal energy storage.
Your own sources, if you dig into them, conveniently split generation costs (of which Lazard's cited report says that wind and solar generation is competitive only when subsidized by the US government) with storage costs. If you factor storage costs into the equation, your economy would look way different. Lazard has a report on storage costs too.
I'm withdrawing from further discussion due to your petty manner to use insults instead of arguments.
Insults are there because you said I made false claims and lacked sources. That is basically calling me a liar.
The sources was easy to look up. Claiming storage costs must be included is moving the goalpost.
Gas power plant plus wind is e.g. a perfectly valid choice which cause significant CO2 reductions, and which is entirely cost competitive. Biomass is another viable choice.
Many places hydro plus wind and solar is a viable choice.
For many using you EV will provide you with storage for a very low cost. With Tesla’s million mile battery, there is minimal cost to using EV battery cycles to power your house when the sun doesn’t shine.
Point is, there are tons options and choices and so claiming wind and solar must be paired with storage is disingenuous.
Don't oversell them. Batteries as they are today are much too expensive to cover all needs. You need a way to store weeks of power consumption for large areas. Batteries are too capital intensive for that. They can take the role of peaker plants, but they are currently unsuited for storing energy for dark, windstill winter weeks. For that other technology, for example Power-to-Gas is needed currently.
When people talk about the cost of solar they ignore the price of batteries and underestimate the amount of batteries required. Watch this video about renewables in California[0]. The video mentions a study that would put the cost of energy storage required for California to be 100% on renewables would be over $3.6 trillion which is equivalent to an entire year's GDP for the state. The video author explained that study's methodology got that number by assuming enough to store excess capacity during the summer to provide power in winter when not enough would be generated on most days. This isn't great because li-on batteries are not great for long term storage and would lose power over time.
A Tesla model 3 can power a regular house for around 4 days. It comes with bidirectional charging and so does plenty of other modern EVs. Tesla is soon coming with their million miles battery which makes this even more feasible.
You charge the car to the max while the sun shines and drain it when the sun does not shine.
> Investing in any such generator needs to be for other reasons like land scarcity.
Or maybe time constraints ? Because we can't accommodate our growing energy needs fast enough with renewable only and we need fossil to sustain our civilization until renewable output is high enough to phase out non-renewable ?
Does that make sense ? (I don't know the first thing about the economy and the engineering behind it at all)
The problem with these renewables over time is that their energy density is fundamentally limited compared to nuclear by physics. We need sustainable _ecologically_ friendly energy sources and at scale unfortunately density becomes all important. People can and will quickly point out the ecological nuclear disasters that have occurred. I only say this - be intellectually honest with yourself about those disaster zones _now_. Compare them to the alternatives and think about it. You will also point out - renewables are becoming much more efficient over time! This is true, but there is an enormous asymmetry in investment between renewables and nuclear, so to compare recent efficiency gains of renewables with the current status of nuclear seems unfair. From a purely theoretical level the energy density of nuclear gives many potential environmental benefits:
1. Less raw material: this has a huge impact on society as a whole. Solar panels and wind turbines require a lot of raw materials that must be mined, refined, transported and built on site. Nuclear requires these things too of course, but it is more energy dense - requiring less given similar levels of technological innovation.
2. Less space: I've seen solar panels go up in various institutions around where I live. They're awesome! But many times they replace what once were fields, forests or pasture land. Wind turbines are even worse, always altering the natural landscape. Do _not_ get me wrong - I fully support these renewables, but once again they are not as space efficient as nuclear at scale.
3. Less workers: purely an economic efficiency principle. At scale density matters with respect to cost effectiveness. Given the same innovation and investment as renewables, nuclear can bottom out in a cost effective way that could really reshape our current energy landscape. Renewables have a much higher threshold requiring a higher percentage of our overall economic output to be dedicated to them. This means many other initiatives (like - for example - many other innovations sorely needed to mitigate carbon emissions) simply won't have resources because our society has taken those resources up building less efficient renewables.
The distributed nature of renewables is actually a huge advantage. It means the renewable system is extremely fault tolerant. Not only does that help in operation, but it means installation is much more forgiving of low quality work (so you can use cheap labor that's easy to train). Screw up 1% of the modules in a PV field and output is down 1%. Screw up 1% of the welds in a nuclear power plant and you have a world of pain.
This is a very weak argument for renewables. You have to make the case that nuclear is fundamentally not able to work in a similar way. The very article we're commenting on is demonstrating the more 'distributed' nature a new generation of nuclear power plants can offer.
Your other argument about cheap labor is completely ignoring principle 3. above. Saying cheap labor for an industry is _inherently_ good is basically saying we should go back to the dark ages. This is probably the only principle both capitalists and socialists agree on (at least our 21st century brand of socialists that hope for a UBI utopia)!
Anti-nuclear has almost taken on a religious fervor that I don't understand. Safety is a property of an implementation, not a fundamental law of nature. Please! We're arguing for the same ultimate goal!
It's not a weak argument at all. The units in renewables are small (for PV, very very small), compared to the units in SMRs. What's more, the consequences of failure of the units in renewables are minor, compared to the consequences in a reactor.
It has not been demonstrated that the diseconomy of scale in SMRs is actually tolerable. The experience at NuScale is not providing much comfort there.
Of course the lower demand for skilled labor is good. "Civilization advances by increasing the number of things that can be done without thinking about them." The simpler the task, the less training is required, and the faster workers can be brought up to speed. The high skills needed for nuclear work are one of the reasons nuclear builds are in trouble.
(You might object to that if you are a skilled laborer feeding off this trough. Well, too bad, the purpose of energy isn't to employ you. You are a cost, not a goal.)
Nuclear has taken on an religious fervor that's not based anywhere in reality. Nuclear is demonstrably a failure, yet the proponents are blinded by their dogma.
> Safety is no longer the reason Nuclear is not worth it
Why "no longer"? I did some reading on Fukushima the other week (I think it was an anniversary of the accident?) and was surprised to learn that multiple studies predicted the disaster years before it happened, only to be ignored. Even as engineering advances, if people keep choosing to take shortcuts and ignore glaring concerns, does it really matter? Is there a reason to believe that nuclear (or the energy industry in general) is acting more prudently than in the past?
All indications are that much was learned by industry and the NRC after TMI:
"...The NRC said the TMI accident also led to increased identification, analysis and publication of plant performance information, and recognising human performance as “a critical component of plant safety”. Key indicators of plant safety performance in the US have improved dramatically. Those indicators show:
• The average number of significant reactor events over the past 20 years has dropped to nearly zero.
• Today there are far fewer, much less frequent and lower risk events that could lead to a reactor-core damage.
• The average number of times safety systems have had to be activated is about one-tenth of what it was 22 years ago.
• Radiation exposure levels to plant workers have steadily decreased to about one-sixth of the 1985 exposure levels and are well below national limits.
• The average number of unplanned reactor shutdowns has decreased by nearly ten-fold. In 2007 there were about 52 shutdowns compared to about 530 shutdowns in 1985."
No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been safer than all the alternatives that were available.
Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could've let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would they have covered it if 200 thousand were evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?
It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
>The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free!
From the surface of the Earth we can capture 1/100000000000000000000000000th of its output per square meter, for $100.
That's because it's not really in the sky, as a bird or plane might be. It's 93 million miles away.
As a result hardly any light makes it to Earth over a small area. You need like $1000+ of paneling and many square meters to capture enough of it to operate a hairdrier electrically. Which makes sense because a hairdrier uses a lot more energy than drying your hair by standing in daylight. On a cool morning you'd start sniffling from cold before the sun dried your hair. No animal gets its energy from photosynthesis, they wait for stationary plants to do it over months and years and then eat them. The sun is just not that energetic seen from Earth.
So yes it is a 384.6 yottawatt nuclear power plant. But we're so far away we can get a hundred watts of it for $100, on a good day.
Could be cool to send something there to collect and ship us electricity in bundled form though.
Land usage is a big factor. Most people are interested in solar because they care about the environment so taken up vast swathes of land for all the solar panels, destroying habits, is counter productive. Another downside of solar or wind is that it is intermittent and thus will require massive battery systems or alternative conventional power plants to provide energy the rest of the time.
If you are short on space for your solar panels put them on your roof, problem solved. There are cheaper better ways of storing electricity like water stores, and this is what they use not batteries, they have never used batteries thats just a Tesla thing.
This is why solar kills more people every year than nuclear, and your hydro storage and batteries are not even a drop in the ocean compared to total load or daily capacity of even a small grid.
Roofing is dangerous, but using a product such as Tesla or GB Sol solar tiles means that installing solar is no more dangerous than roofing without solar.
Wha? Becuase stuff falls off your roof and kills them? How does that compare to tiles falling off your roof and killing people? This doesn't sound like a real thing.
Hydro storage is quite literaly a drop in the ocean, get it.
No, because people installing solar routinely fall and die. Because of the low power density of renewables like wind and solar you need a lot of installation sites and constant maintenance of same, which means a lot of opportunities for people to have fatal accidents. Nuclear has the lowest death rate per joule of energy provided of any available power source.
It's kinda silly, but that's also the point. People who think nuclear power is dangerous are silly. Solar power is more dangerous simply from the number of people falling off of roofs!
It is dangerous but in an entirely different way. Saying nuclear isn’t dangerous is like saying terrorism isn’t dangerous because more people die fitting roof tiles.
Like a terrorist attack, a nuclear accident, especially a meltdown is a concentrated dramatic event with serious psychological trauma.
One of the really profound effects of Chernobyl was the mental health problems it induced on a large portion on the population.
You got areas in Ukraine such as Rivne where 1/3 of babies born have deformations.
What does that psychological do to people living there you think?
There was hundreds of thousands of cleanup workers and they have 3x the cancer rate of the rest of the population. Yet the UN claims Chernobyl caused no more cancer because they look at the whole Ukrainian population and its cancer numbers which is really hard to do for a country which went through an economic collapse.
In short a lot of official statistics on the impact of nuclear power is highly misleading. Putting such statistics together with statistics of people falling of rooftops is utter nonsense.
That is such a ridiculous and disingenuous argument. The numbers are minuscule compared to fossil fuels it is replacing. You make it sound like solar power is dangerous. That is total BS.
And nuclear numbers are totally unreliable so this is just an apples to orange comparison anyway.
You have made a lot of claims about solar power that have been completely unsourced and are easily shown to be false. For all of the scary noises made by anti-nuclear activists it is actually a power source with an extremely good safety record. Solar and wind power kill more people every year, but the deaths are spread out and appear to be routine so no one really notices. This is why ignorant people are afraid to fly but have no problem driving hundreds of miles -- the incredibly rare airplane crashes kill hundreds and make headlines around the world while driving kills thousands every day and no one notices.
It captures part of the story hidden by your "statistics" about nuclear power.
Chernobyl was so full of lies and coverups that it is hard to know the full truth. What we know is that this accident has enormous cost and psychological impact all over the world.
In my home country Norway 37 municipalities still struggle with radioactive fallout from Chernobyl 33 years later. It is affecting the agricultural sector. That is just my home country. This kind of issues exist all over Europe. I remember what this was like in the aftermath because I lived through it.
But there is always some young punk who thinks he is a smart ass and knows everything, but never actually lived through it. You read some statistics years later, which doesn't capture of fraction of what it was like.
Fukushima is the same lie. People are like, nobody died so it was all cool... yeah.... except the cleanup is a crazy complicated an massive job which by some estimates could cost up to 660 billion dollars.
A smaller country experiencing such a disaster would have their whole economy destroyed by such an expense.
I am a reasonable guy. I say we can keep the safest reactors. The rest we close down. Perhaps we build new reactors if they can prove the design sufficiently safe. This guys might be okay: https://usnc.com
But really I don't see the point. It is a risky power source, we don't really need more of given that we have excellent alternatives.
Land usage is not as big problem as it seems. E.g. wind turbines must be spaced out far from each other but most of the land between them is perfectly usable for farming and animals.
As for solar. For an average western country 50m2 of solar panels on top of each household covers all electricity needs of a country.
Obviously this power is not delivered exactly when you want it but it is to give some perspective on the space required.
And you don’t need massive batteries. Many countries are building pumped hydro to store power.
You can use biomass, geothermal power. MMR and SMR reactors with molten salt thermal storage as a way of storing energy.
Thanks for bringing up these two points. I have heard people saying lets put solar plats in deserts. They don't realize the deserts also have an Ecosystem.
As populations move north to escape climate change those areas will also become more adaptable to solar. Plus the areas they left will be well suited for solar as long as there is adequate infrastructure to move the electricity north.
Wind and solar are very diffuse forms of energy, so harvesting them is hard and costly both in money, and most importantly for the biosphere. For instance, the universe radiates 3K of heat, which we could harvest and use. We don't because it's too diffuse.
And I'm not talking about the intermittency problem.
And yet, the cost of a kWh from renewables is less than from nuclear, for all the supposed advantage of nuclear's energy density. This should tell you that energy density is not actually a good metric.
Comparing a source controllable uninterrupted source of energy with an unreliable intermittent one doesn't make sense. Having power when you need it is very valuable. And in the case of renewables, you'd need to account for storage, after which the prices explode.
What would you say if you could only turn on AC in the 3 months of winter?
But there is another ugly side with regards to price (which are heavily subsidised): it is mostly cheap because offer far exceeds demand when power is available, because when it's sunny, it's sunny everywhere nearby so there's nobody wants to buy. Peak demand are at 7-8pm on during week days in winter. Good luck with solar or wind.
On a bigger scale, see Denmark (invested heavily on wind) vs Norway (almost entirely hydro). When wind is up, Denmark, which _has_ to sell this energy, sells it to Norway, which will buy it at the effective operating cost of hydro, which is ~$0. And when there is demand, Norway will happily sell it to Denmark at a normal price. In effect, Denmark pays twice.
Intermittency and power density are two entirely different things. I was addressing the former there. But elsewhere in this thread, I address the intermittency issue. Constancy is an advantage, but not an unlimited one. If renewables have a sufficiently large levelized cost advantage they can push nuclear entirely out of the picture, even though they are intermittent.
There will be a moment in the human evolution that even the total power of the sun is not enough. We need to explore alternatives to escape our planet, otherwise we are doomed.
There is actually an apparent upper limit on energy usage once countries reach a certain level of development. See for example [1] and [2]. Total energy consumption in Western countries has been level or dropping for years as devices that use energy become more efficient.
Yeah, that's until the price of solar reaches a point where desalination becomes economic. The fact that today is not a day when it's profitable to cover the world in solar panels means as little as the fact that today oil can be more profitable.
Using present-day numbers to say that solar deforestation will not be a problem is just as fallacious as using today's temperature to say that global warming is not a problem.
Present day worldwide energy usage is a real metric which allows us to calculate the present day 200,000 sq mile figure. Today's temperature doesn't allow calculating anything relevant to global warming.
I assumed you were being hyperbolic and thought some readers might be curious about the hypothetical area of panels required to meet the entire world's energy demand. It's an interesting figure to put things in perspective.
But a claim that widespread solar power will be a leading cause of deforestation is entirely devoid of evidence and fails the basic napkin-math test.
Energy usage will increase over time. Interestingly, so does solar panel efficiency. And most solar panels won't be built in forests. And the Earth will never be 100% powered by solar.
But most compellingly, even if you did have to build solar farms only in forests, and even if you did need to provide 100% of the Earth's demand for energy through those farms, you could do it today with only 40% of the deforestation that's already occurred over the last 25 years.
It's also nice to consider that solar panels built in deserts can even be beneficial to local flora and fauna (although not universally). [1]
Existing deforestation is already done to collect solar energy, to power crop growth.
>Today's temperature doesn't allow calculating anything relevant to global warming.
Yes it does, it allows us to calculate the extent to which global warming has progressed... to date. Just like the current global energy usage lets us calculate the progress of energy use growth, to date.
Where there is forest there is rain. Where there is rain there are clouds. Where there are clouds there is less sun. Any large scale Oil replacing energy production with solar will be more efficient in places where there is no forest or crop production. Hence the threat for the forest due to solar is not that high. Also where human settle there is no forest afterwards but there are roofs, where they can put PV on. By the way there is a dicusion to make that mandatory.
That is extremely unlikely. You need to cover single digit percentages of the world with solar panels (depending on latitude) to cover all our energy needs.
The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free!
The wind -- caused by solar heating -- also generates free power.
The cost of harvesting it is now so low, and will always continue to decline as any technology will, that any fuel-based generation mechanism is going to be rendered uneconomic with time alone. They depreciate faster as time goes on!
Investing in any such generator needs to be for other reasons like land scarcity.