If you are pushing nuclear power by saying renewables are non-starters, Texas would like a word. 40% of our electricity is renewable.
It takes less than a year to build wind or solar farm.
It takes three to six YEARS for nuclear — and the power is more expensive. About triple. That’s insane!
The SPOF are also higher with nukes.
Read a great article where people are using heat energy as batteries. Upside is they are cheap and have no failure points. Unlike chemical batteries, they can be reused up to 50 years.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/12/16/climate/solution-hot-rocks-renewable-energy-battery/index.html
I honestly like this idea. It’s simple and it just works.
Here is an example. The solar array of photovoltaics in the background heat up the carbon blocks in the insulated box that says “Antorra” — that is a battery and stores 10 times the energy of a lithium ion battery. Bill Gates has invested cash and they were at the climate conference.
It’s a really cool and simple tech.
Another competitor is using plain old bricks!🧱
I thought that was awesome and seriously low tech!
BTW, no one is talking about concentrated solar power.
This uses normal photovoltaics. Excess power is used to heat rocks as a thermal battery.
Some people need to read the article, yo.
@feloneouscat the economic incentives about this should've resulted in policy 40 years ago. They resulted in flaggelation only.
@feloneouscat FFS, Nixon established the EPA. Shit's gotten weaker every admin since then. And the shitstorm I thought would hit my grandchildren has me considering whether I need to sell the house and move inland even in my lifetime. JFC.
“In 2022 Costa Rica produced a whopping 98% of its electricity from renewable sources for over eight years in a row.”
And the US can’t even get to 50% because we might make Big Fossil Fuel or Big Nuke angry.
It’s like we abdicated our technological future to other countries.
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/11-countries-leading-the-charge-on-renewable-energy/
@feloneouscat We have idiots claiming windmills cause mass bird deaths. Fucking whole millions on Don Quixotes, who would've thought. JFC.
@feloneouscat We have a rather large front bay window. At least three birds a year smash into it (but, not to their death). Ella stays indoors. You're right!
Yes.
I am a big fan of "Rocks in a Box" for both industrial heat, and as energy batteries.
Simple
Cheap
Very little, to no, rare-earth materials.
Low Maintenance.
Easily scaleable.
@corlin @feloneouscat CSP's potential for energy storage/buffering have historically received a lot of hype and attention.
Honestly, I'd be over the moon if it actually turned out to be viable in practice - the "power" in power engineering means thermal/steam power, so it'd certainly keep me employed - but so far CSP has mainly been a big 'ol flop for a variety of reasons.
Pumped hydro and even compressed air energy storage have seen far more successes so far.
@feloneouscat @corlin Hmm, good point, I missed that - saw solar, saw hot rocks, briefly skimmed, assumed it was the same as about a million different CSP projects. Thanks for pointing that out!
I do wonder how it competes with something like a molten sulfur battery - those are some pretty cool tech, even if there are some serious kinks that need ironing out.
@feloneouscat @corlin Hmm. Cycle life of sodium-sulfur batteries isn't as good as I remember companies promising they would eventually be back in the day.
I seem to recall there was chatter about the potential to develop sodium-sulfur batteries with a theoretically infinite cycle life because of the liquid anodes and cathodes... but it looks like in practice the solid electrolyte ended up being a weak link. Too bad.
@corlin @feloneouscat In the city where I grew up, they had a CSP pilot plant (using molten salt storage), and they were planning to go full-scale if it worked.
I was hoping to get the chance to work there eventually... then they shut down (and dismantled, IIRC) the pilot plant because it failed to achieve its objectives (it barely worked at all, from what I heard).
When I looked into it, I found that to be emblematic of a larger pattern within the nascent CSP industry as a whole, sadly.
@feloneouscat CSP has a long track record of hype, buzz, and epic failures...
Hardly any actual successes.
PV is dominant for reason.
@feloneouscat Thank you so much for mentioning the harms of nuclear power.
I think people are still being sold a bill of goods that it is safe, cheap and clean, when it is not.
Additionally, those fissionables are limited and once we use them up, we're SOL. We shouldn't be blowing them on boiling water during the primitive stage of our civilization. We're going to need that stuff later.
@feloneouscat But even our illustrious republican political heroes will insist that our renewables are a step in the wrong direction. Look at where they tried to place the blame during snowmageddon. The were of course lying, but they will still look you in the eye and tell you the same exact lie today.
Yup!
The Snowpacalypse was all about natural gas and guess what the Republicans decided the solution would be? (Not a joke):
MORE NATURAL GAS POWER PLANTS!
@feloneouscat And a sternly worded recommendation that they should maybe winterize their facilitates, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, whenever they feel like getting around to it.
Oh, we passed a bill for that, but it’s worded in such a way that no one is being FORCED to do it, just if they, you know, want to do it or something.
Texas is the pussy state when it comes to forcing businesses to do the right thing.
@feloneouscat Yeah, exactly what I was talking about. It's really nothing more than political cover followed by a wink and a nod to their umm... donors.
@feloneouscat As I've said, getting to 40% isn't a problem.
It's the remaining 60% that's the problem.
How are you accounting for the fluctuations in capacity - running gas peaker plants?
Building grid-scale Li-ion battery energy storage when we don't have enough known extractable reserves of the elements used in their manufacture to make that an option for more than a few countries?
Building pumped hydro facilities when we simply don't have enough viable sites to store that much energy?
@feloneouscat Building vast amounts of excess capacity, with hugely oversized grid interconnects to match, to try to ensure that even on the worst day there'll be enough power to go around? (that's not going to be commercially viable)
Just accepting the need to perform controlled blackouts whenever capacity dips below demand? (economic impacts will be enormous, and people will die)
None of these "solutions" are good.
So far as I can see, we don't *have* a viable solution right now.
@feloneouscat I mean, orbital solar would solve that problem, but transmitting the power down to the ground would be an immense engineering problem to say the least, and there is significant potential for weaponization of such a technology.
I don't think we want anyone to have a steerable 10GW microwave beam satellite. Seems quite likely it would end up repurposed from powering the grid to cooking people, frying electronics, & the like.
@feloneouscat So, I used to work on wind farms. Wind and solar are both limited by available land. This only works in Texas because we have lots of empty land of low value that has tendency of creating pressure differentials over surface features that are great for wind power. Basically, lots of hills and plateaus.
Wind turbines are also fairly loud. The blade tips are often moving in excess of 100mph. It's like living near a highway.
(cont)
@feloneouscat Nuke plants have a drastically smaller footprint and may be a better solution when discussing power for areas like Central Texas where land value and population density are much higher.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution. For many regions, renewables like wind and solar may not be the best fit.
Also worth mentioning, Texas wind farms partly exist because of a buttload of federal subsidies. Thanks Obama!
@FreedomATX @feloneouscat Have you looked into liquid thorium nuc plants? Basically waste from coal plants provides cleaner nuc fuel.
Yes and not impressed. What it all boils down to is nukes are expensive and construction heavy. When you have a LOT of money, you have the potential for corruption (and it does occur with nukes — this isn’t even debatable).
Solar and wind are cheap to build. I’ll let you figure out why Republicans in Texas all of a sudden hate renewables.
@feloneouscat @FreedomATX I never saw as many wind turbines as I did driving (from Colorado) between Lubbock and San Angelo and that was over 10 years ago. Texas is ridiculous. Lots of money always invites, and usually manifests, corruption, yes.
We have a LOT OF WIND in Texas. When we were building the horse shelters it would piss me off a lot (moving sheet metal when there are 20 mph gusts is not fun — esp 8-12 feet up).
It’s extremely profitable for ranchers and farmers — the leases can be worth more than what ranchers or farmers make in a bad year.
It’s about the ONLY thing Rick Perry did right as Governor.
Which is funny because we are strongly thinking of installing solar. I crunched the numbers and we could easily run our house off of solar.
It’s not “one or the other” with renewables. For urban areas go solar.
Wind farms do not preclude farming on the land. And the US has a LOT of farmland. A single turbine lease pays out about $8,000. Farmers can make extra cash by leasing ag land with a turbine (and do).
@feloneouscat @FreedomATX I considered leased solar last year but the salesperson was obnoxious and also didn't offer me enough of the rent they were trying to hoard during the 6 months electricity here spiked because of Ukraine. I told him what price per kWH I was willing to pay and he never counteroffered. I'm sure this year he's not asking for 27.5c.
It’s amazing the number of homes I see with solar on their roofs here in Texas. If Texas would offer more incentives we wouldn’t NEED more natural gas power plants (which will only exacerbate the problem with natural gas, not fix the issue).
Again, Republicans in this state are shortsighted only seeing fossil fuel as the main source of electricity generation.
We have TWO nukes in Texas. They are not popular.
@feloneouscat I acutally worked on a wind farm in Nebraska where the turbines were in corn and soybean fields 😂. Also, some in North Texas that were in cotton fields.
Exactly my point. And a nuke DOES preclude multi-use.
You could literally put a solar farm in the middle of a wind farm!
“Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant sits on 10,000 acres between Glen Rose and Granbury”
“STP occupies a 12,200-acre (4,900 ha) site”
Nuclear has a HUGE footprint.
@feloneouscat The cost barrier-to-entry for nuclear is extremely steep. I believe that's intentional, to make sure that only the wealthiest organizations can afford to do it.
I'm not a fan of nuclear, period. But we could have been using safe, versatile, low-tech, cheap pebble-bed reactors this whole time. But then even a small muni would be able to generate cheap power. We wouldn't want that. How are you supposed to control people without holding lack and scarcity over them as a prod?
And the mind boggling reality is that if you want to reduce climate change quickly, renewables are faster to implement, cheaper to run and result in a power that is less harmful to people than nuclear (which ALWAYS hurts poor people in the same way coal mining does).
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1W909I/