It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
The sun always shines somewhere and wind always blows somewhere. Now we just have to install x-times the global energy demand in production capacity and also the infrastructure to distribute it around the world and also make sure that this hyper centralized system is not used against us and then already we have a perfect solution without nuclear. Ez pz, no more CO2 in 500 years.
You don’t need to install X-amount of global demand. Battery/hydrogen storage can solve the issue as has been demonstrated repeatedly in various research. And with home battery solutions you can even fully decentralise it.
I don’t understand your centralisation argument, nuclear is about the most centralised power source there is. And it can be threatened, as seen in the current Ukraine-Russia war.
Solar and wind can scale up to the demand. Nuclear actually has a much harder time doing that, as materials are far more rare and expensive, and it takes much longer to build. If anything, the time argument works against nuclear, not in favour of it.
Hydrogen storage, you have got to be kidding me. It is abysmally inefficient and the same kind of FUD spread by the fossile industry.
Batteries are so extremely expensive that also has to be a joke. How much does a battery for a single day cost? Say, relative to the GDP?
Nuclear is far more local than solar and wind transfer in-between continents, obviously.
Batteries are becoming less expensive every day. The market doubles almost every year, which is impressively high-paced.
You also don’t need battery storage to last a day. Most places only need approx. 6 hours, with particularly sunny countries being able to get away with having only 4 hours.
You maybe also be confusing local generation with centralised power generation. Nuclear is local, but also extremely centralised. Solar/wind transfer is very decentralised, same goes for battery storage.
Hydrogen is in its infancy. The tech is promising but whether or not it will prove its worth is still to be seen.
There are about 2 weeks without sun and wind in the whole EU every once in a while (don’t remember, like every 3 years?). How are 6 hours supposed to help? How much would these only 6 hours of storage capacity cost (pick some country, perhaps not Norway or Iceland).
I doubt that’s true. Especially no sun sounds highly dubious, I don’t think the Earth stops spinning every now and then. Oh, and do note that solar panels are still producing even in cloudy conditions.
There’s no period during which renewables stop producing. “6 hours” refers to the capacity if renewables stopped producing entirely, but in reality this never happens. At worst efficiency drops far enough to dip below demand, at which point the storage would have to kick in to make up the difference.
Building that much storage still costs a lot of money. I haven’t seen many cost estimates actually, probably because the market is developing at a very quick pace at the moment, driving costs down. A decent home battery solution costs 4000-10000 euros per household, but doing it at a larger scale may be cheaper.
Why would you even say something so stupid? I highly doubt that you are interested in a discussion.
But just in case, it is called “Dunkelflaute”. And no, we do not constantly produce so much more energy that losing a lot of capacity makes us “dip below demand”. We constantly only produce as much as we need. But why even discuss this here? People spend their whole career figuring this out, it is obviously not as simple as you make it out to be. Here a report from the EU. Just to show the scale of the project:
Please keep it civil. You provided very little context in your original argument, which made it very hard to give you a meaningful response.
Your link regarding Dunkelflaute helps to provide context, thanks for that. I had not heard of this phenomenon before. The research paper in the citations does mention that while it occurs somewhat regularly for an area e.g. the size of a country, it rarely happens simultaneously for say the EU-11 mentioned (most of northern Europe). The page also mentions importing power during these periods from other regions would mostly resolve this problem. Seems important to take into account, but not an impossible problem to deal with, especially given that it already happens and we already use inter-grid connections to handle it? What’s your perspective on this?
I certainly don’t mean to pretend this is a simple problem by any means. Conceptually, sure, it’s “simple”, but bringing it to practice is much harder. It’s also why I’m perhaps more pessimistic about the timeframe in which we can execute these plans, particularly also because we need to scale up battery production by a factor of at least 10. It’s why I think we also need to invest in research regarding higher-capacity batteries made from easier to procure materials. Certainly a difficult endeavor by the way, but absolutely necessary. We’ve made promising progress on that front at least, but we’ve got a long way to go still.
In my opinion, focusing on renewables + storage has the highest long-term chance of success combined with manageable costs. If you’re willing to up the chance of success offset by incurring higher costs, adding nuclear to the mix is perfectly acceptable to me. But even longer-term (especially post net-zero) I think it’s almost inevitable that fission reactors will end up not economically competing with alternatives.
Thank you for proving me wrong regarding the discussion. It just felt insulting to read, as if the sun only stops shining when the earth doesn’t spin. The tiny fraction of output on overcast days is negligible.
Yes, Dunkelflaute is not impossible to deal with. But we can not bridge these gaps with batteries, as you already pointed out. I doubt that we can bridge it with power from intercontinental transmission lines, given how the politics look like today and how much they need to change first + then actually starting to plan and build it… In 50 year perhaps. But we need a CO2 reducing solution now. Right now. Not in 30 years. Batteries are not relevant now and won’t be in the foreseeable future due to monetary, resource and manufacturing bottlenecks. Storage of electricity to later use it as electricity is simply not feasible right now, apart from the minutes you get from existing hydro storage.
Right “now”, so in the next decade, if we push modern nuclear instead of fossiles (which we need to keep building due to said fluctuations) we will get far less CO2 quickly. At the same time, we can burn the old nuclear “waste”.
Weird, I’ve never seen these magical two weeks.