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Anon questions our energy sector
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this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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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).
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.
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.
That's physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.
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.
Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?
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.
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".
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 just natural gas.
Sorry, I didn't think someone would deny the existance of dunkelflautes. It's currently happening in Germany. (1).
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.
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.
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 nuclear energy is just selfish and shortsighted.