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Storage is a solvable problem
I'm not convinced it is. Storage technologies exist for sure, but the general public seems to grossly underestimate the scale of storage required to match grid demand and renewables only production.
Again: This is just the beginning! We're like
five years intoat the beginning of an energy revolution and you are drumming against it because you're "not convinced", rooting for stuff we already discarded because it's uncontrollable and will poison our planet for centuries. Get out of the way, boomer!Germany has over 400 MW of solar-plus-storage projects under development, with notable installations like a 100 MW/200 MWh battery system in Bavaria. This is way more than even the green minister of economic affairs set as a goal for 2045. California leads globally with 6,600 MW of battery storage already operational and an additional 1,900 MW expected by year-end, totaling 8,500 MW. By 2045, California aims to expand its capacity to 52,000 MW. Australia is also scaling rapidly, with around 9 GW of utility-scale battery projects underway or completed. Soon EV batteries get to feed energy back into the grid, we're becoming one huge decentralized batterie mosaic. It's gonna be beautiful!
We're like five years into an energy revolution
Exactly, after working on it for over 30.
It seems like theyre not even planning on going fossil free.
That quote, again, not mentioning stored energy. How do they not understand that storage needs to be specified in both power and energy?
The fossil industry, which earns 1 billion dollars a day since the 1970s, won't go down without a fight. They are very powerful, able to start wars and overthrow governments. These fossil destroyers know they are dying, but they will fight back to make money as long as possible. The best we can do is drain their business model by going renewable, and fast. Nuclear is not an option anymore, they know that as well, it's already way too expensive. But they use it anyway to buy some time. Making more money while we are debating instead of building renewables and batteries like our lives depend on it.
I already imagine Henry Ford after building his first cars. People would laugh at him: "And how do we fuel these?! You want to pave every road and build a web of gas stations all over or country? You are insane!"it's already way too expensive.
If you don't account for the storage problem, renewables look like a cheap solution, indeed. And you end up with renewables + huge reliance on fossil fuel.
This is an ideal scenario for the fossil industry.
I think you underestimate how much storage power is currently being build and how many different technologies are available. In Germany alone there currently are 61 projects planed and in the approval phase boasting a combined 180 Gigawatts of potential power until 2030. Those of them that are meant to be build at old nuclear power plants (the grid connection is already available there) are expected to deliver 25% of the necessary storage capacity. In addition all electric vehicles that are assumed to be on the road until 2030 add another potential 100GW of power.
Of course these numbers are theoretical as not every EV will be connected to a bidirectional charger and surely some projects will fail or delay, however given the massive development in this sector and new, innovative tech (not just batteries but f.e. a concrete ball placed 800m below sea level, expected to store energy extremely well at 5.8ct / kilowatt) there's very much reason for optimism here.
It's also a funny sidenote that France, a country with a strong nuclear strategy, frequently buys power from Germany because it's so much cheaper.
Another important note about France: They are the second country alongside Germany heavily pushing for an upscaled green hydrogen market in the EU. Because -just like renewables- nuclear production doesn't match the demand pattern at all. Thus it's completely uneconomical without long-term storage.
The fact that we seem to constantly discuss nuclear vs. renewables is proof that it's mostly lobbying bullshit. Because in reality they don't compete. It's either renewables+short-term storage+long-term-term storage or renewables+nuclear+long-term storage. Those are the only two viable models.
upscaled green hydrogen market
That's been the talk in town for 40 years now. Green hydrogen has never gotten beyond proof-of-concept.
The fact that we seem to constantly discuss nuclear vs. renewables is proof that it's mostly lobbying bullshit.
Sadly, it's because the political green parties available to me are anti-nuclear.
It's either renewables+short-term storage+long-term-term storage or renewables+nuclear+long-term storage.
Why is nuclear+short term storage not an option, according to you?
It's funny that according to the popular imagination, political green parties are able to make change in exactly one specific issue and not any of their actual priorities.
Here's how the world works: profitable shit happens, no matter what the hippies have to say about it.
Why is nuclear+short term storage not an option
Because cold winter days exist. Yes you can only build nuclear capacities for the average day and then short-term storage to match the demand pattern. But you would need to do so for the day(s) of the year with the highest energy demand, some cold winter work day. What do you do with those capacities the remaining year as throttling nuclear down is not really saving much costs (most lie in construction and deconstruction)?
Due to the recent nuclear hype uranium price will rise and keep in mind that the resource will not exceed a century.
It's not just power that's needed (MW), also stored energy (MWh).
Germany consumes on average 1.4TWh of electricity a day (1). Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.
Worldwide lithium ion battery production is 4TWh a year (2).
It's also a funny sidenote that France, a country with a strong nuclear strategy, frequently buys power from Germany because it's so much cheaper.
Isn't that normal? The problems with renewables isn't that they generate cheap power, when they are generating. Today windmills even need to be equipped with remote shutdown, to prevent overproduction.
The problems arise when they aren't generating.
Another problem arises when you're generation 63.688 after today and still have to keep maintaining deadly waste from nations that don't exist anymore, because they produced "cheap" and "clean" energy for a couple of decades.
Come on, Jesus died like 2000 years ago, this stuff will haunt us for centuries. Arguing in favor of something this unpredictable is just selfish, stupid and shortsighted.Your estimation goes way off because you still believe lithium ion to be the only viable solution. By now Sodium-Ion batteries are already installed even in EVs and can be produced without any critical resource like lithium.
And then of course there are all the other storage solution. Like I said, there even are storage solutions like concrete balls. Successfully tested in 2016, here an article from 2013.
By now it wouldn't be wise to stifle this enormous emerging market of various technologies by using expensive, problematic technology (not just because the biggest producer of fuel rods is Russia).
I don't think lithium ion is the only storage technology. I was using it for scale.
The most cost effective storage is pumped storage. But even that wouldn't reach the scale necessary.
6 MWh pumped storage proof-of-concept won't l, either.
The watthours is what gas is for. Germany's pipeline network alone, that's not including actual gas storage sites, can store three months of total energy usage.
...or at least that's the original plan, devised some 20 years ago, Fraunhofer worked it all out back then. It might be the case that banks of sodium batteries or whatnot are cheaper, but yeah lithium is probably not going to be it. Lithium's strength is energy density, both per volume and by weight, and neither is of concern for grid storage.
Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.
That's physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.
is what gas is for
Wouldn't it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change. And the fact that the gas needs to be shipped all the way from the US.
That's physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.
Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?
Wouldn’t it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change.
Gas can be synthesised and we're going to have to do that anyway for chemical feedstock. Maintaining backup gas plant capacity is cheaper than you think, they don't need much maintenance if they're not actually running.
That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.
Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?
It's not technology it's physics. It is impossible for there to be no wind anywhere, at least as long as the sun doesn't explode and the earth continues to rotate and an atmosphere exists. If any of those ever fail electricity production will be the least of our worries.
Technology comes into play when it comes to shovelling electricity from one end of the continent to the other and yes we need more interconnects and beefier interconnects but it's not like we don't know how to do that, or don't already have a Europe-wide electricity grid. The issues are somewhere in between NIMBYism regarding pylons and "but we don't want to pay for burying the cable earthworks are expensive".
Gas can be synthesised
When's that going to happen? Right after the green hydrogen revolution?
They've been saying that for decades. It isn't happening.
It's not technology it's physics
Sorry, I didn't think someone would deny the existance of dunkelflautes. It's currently happening in Germany. (1).
When’s that going to happen? Right after the green hydrogen revolution?
Already happening, on a small (but industrial) scale. You can buy that stuff off the shelf, but it's still on the lower end of the sigmoid. Most new installations right now will be going to Canada and Namibia, we'll be buying massive amounts of ammonia from both.
Sorry, I didn’t think someone would deny the existance of dunkelflautes. It’s currently happening in Germany.
Yes and elsewhere in Europe the wind is blowing. Differences in solar yields are seasonal (that's what those three months storage are for, according to Fraunhofer's initial plans), but reversed on the other side of the globe, and Germany would be better situated to tank differences in local wind production all by itself if e.g. Bavaria didn't hinder wind projects in their state. The total energy the sun infuses into the earth does change a bit over time, but that's negligible. In principle pretty much zero storage is needed as long as there's good enough interconnectivity.
...meanwhile, we'll probably have the first commercial fusion plant in just about the mean construction time of a fission plant.
Already happening, on a small (but industrial) scale.
I mean, isn't that the problem with all storage technologies?
Is the goal of renewables to do 90% of the year with renewables, and 10% of the year with fossil fuel?
Hopefully one day, the last 10% is "green hydrogen", "syngas", "synpetrol"? That's how the intermittancy problem is "solved"?
In essence, yes. And we need the hydrogen/ammonia/methane/methanol/whatever anyway to do chemistry with, so we'll have to produce them in some renewable way anyway, and at scale. Using them in peaker plants is only a fraction of the total use.
Even with fusion up and running we're going to do hydrolysis. You can run a car on electricity, or domestic heating, also aluminium smelting, but not a blast furnace to reduce steel nor a chemical industry. Hydrogen, in one form or another, is the answer to all of those things. As things currently stand the market is in its infancy but the first pipelines are getting dedicated to hydrogen, the first blast furnaces made for operation with hydrogen are up and running... and the hydrogen mostly comes from fossil gas. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem you need demand to have supply but you need supply to have demand, so kick-starting the demand side by supplying it fossil hydrogen makes a lot of economical sense, that means that the supply investments can go big and be sure that they'll have customers from day one.
Ok but maybe a counterpoint is we are overestimating the ability of the atmosphere and ocean to absorb CO2 and maintain a habitable planet. I'd rather store isotopes in the earth (where they came from anyway) than carbon in the air.