@Emil You know, in a sane world, moving a handful of effectively harmless concrete blocks around wouldn't be newsworthy.

But even in our world, I think that the message should focus more on how little that actually is, how it is all there is, and how obviously it can be successfully done.

Leave some burns on fear-mongers while you're at it.

@Emil OK, it's a start. Once regulatory and economic processes are in place, there will be an option to become much more ambitious here, depending on how other plans turn out. Good.

@Lats @ajsadauskas @australianpolitics The problem as I see it is that solar+wind+storage alone will not get you there ever. It will go up to 40% solar+wind, then maybe 10—30% with storage+solar+wind (depending on your technooptimism). And then you start replacing everything built every 20 to 30 years. Buys time, but not sustainable.

What you say is true: you need to build up the entire nuclear industry. International cooperation for bootstrapping will be important. Better get started.

@planet @clojure That link seems broken, even if it has a real date. But this one seems to work: https://xtdb.com/blog/dev-diary-feb-24

@ajsadauskas @australianpolitics

What would »grid scale solar & storage« cost, and how long would it take?

This is the competition:

1. Nuclear power plants
2. Storage of the same scale, filled by solar of the same scale

No one in the whole world has ever built (2). There is no mature industry, and no technology even matching the only grid scale storage we have so far (pumped hydro).

For (1), there are several international players with established designs.

I wouldn't stop either one.

@kuna I like the irony of it being a webp.

@MattMastodon @Pampa @AlexisFR @Wirrvogel @Sodis

A few points to factor in:

- A nuclear power station has a much longer lifetime than batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines.

- You need not only the batteries, but also the panels/turbines to fill them.

- Conversion and storage losses are significant. Attached is a rough overview for H₂.

- Transmission infrastructure costs to/from individual cars are significant.

- 24 h is not enough by far to balance out usual fluctuations.

@MattMastodon @Sodis

⇒ (But at least we already have transmission tech, it is now just a question of materials and effort.)

So, assume that we have enough wind and solar that we can regularly produce 100% of demand from them. You can imagine peaks just touching the demand line at top demand.

(You could imagine more than that, but that would mean overbuilding, which hurts the economics quite badly while not making the end result much better.)

⇒

@MattMastodon @Sodis

I'll try to explain the 40%, sorry for the parts that you already know.

Electric energy is always produced at the same time (and »place« roughly) as it is consumed. (You can't pump electricity into some reservoir to be consumed later, you always need a different energy form for storage.)

The problem with volatile sources is that they mostly (more than half) produce energy at the wrong time and/or the wrong place, and at other times produce nothing.
⇒

@MattMastodon @Sodis Again: that demand is lower at night is already factored in. Roughly 40% of demand can be directly met by volatile sources. You may think nuclear is slow to deploy, but it's still much faster than anything that doesn't exist.

The gap is 60%. Gas is a fossil fuel. Varying use is mostly a euphemism. If you hurt industry, you won't have the industry to build clean energy sources.

@MattMastodon @Sodis Careful about labels. »Renewables« often includes biomass (which is just fast-track fossil tbh) and hydro (which is not so volatile). I'm talking about wind and solar specifically (volatiles).

40% is roughly the mean capacity factor of a good mix of volatiles. This is what you can directly feed to the user from the windmill/panel, without storage. You can expand a bit by massive overbuilding, but you can't overbuild your way out of no wind at night.

@Sodis @MattMastodon Nuclear power plants can quite easily do load following. It happens regularly e. g. in France. However, since it has the lowest running costs, other sources are usually cut first as far as possible.