How about the fact that we know that fossil fuels and nuclear (and hydro and geothermal if the geography allows it) can actually power a modern economy? Is there a comparable example you can point to where solar or wind successfully replaced traditional power generators?
You don't have to convince me fossil fuels are shitty and need to be replaced. I'm with you. Tell me how solar/wind replaces those.
Batteries and building _more_ of it. Batteries work. We know how to store energy. And we don't need some perfect, uber efficient storage system yet to at least begin heavily investing.
Fossil fuels have an artificial advantage simply due to oil subsidies. Even Germany is 20% wind power already.
>Batteries and building _more_ of it. Batteries work.
Point me to a battery deployment that can store enough energy to power a modern reasonably-sized city for even hours at a time, much less days or weeks.
That Tesla battery deployment in Australia? It provides a few seconds of energy.
>We know how to store energy.
No. We don't. Not at the scale we need to power an economy. That's the problem.
>Even Germany is 20% wind power already.
Sure. And the rest?
Germany is signing multi-decade, multi-billion dollar deals with autocratic Russia to import their natural gas. Is that because they believe that wind and solar can fully replace fossil fuels? Or is that they know, that solar and wind have a hard ceiling on how much power they can provide and the rest needs to be bridged by burning natural gas, or coal, or biofuels (i.e. garbage, or corn, or whatever) to make it work?
> Point me to a battery deployment that can store enough energy to power a modern reasonably-sized city for even hours at a time, much less days or weeks.
The battery’s purpose is to provide power during peak hours of demand, to enhance grid stability and deliver juice during black-start conditions in case of emergency. The system is expected to peak-shave about 8% of Dalian’s expected load when it comes online in 2020.
> Point me to a battery deployment that can store enough energy to power a modern reasonably-sized city for even hours at a time, much less days or weeks.
> That Tesla battery deployment in Australia? It provides a few seconds of energy.
Let's see.
129 Megawatt-hours.
The 20th largest city in Australia has about 90 thousand people.
One estimate says that if this battery is drained at the designed 100MW it can power 30 thousand homes. And there's 2.6 people per household. So if the battery was adjusted to drain at 115MW it would power that city for over an hour.
Another estimate is that Australia averages 10MWh per person per year, that's about 103 megawatts for 90k people.
So if we pick the 23rd largest city instead then we can supply 100% of the city's power with this single installation for well over an hour.
That's a lot better than "a few seconds".
You can't drain lithium ion batteries in "a few seconds" anyway.
And for that many people, it cost around a thousand dollars each. With electricity around 30 cents a kWh, you could take a third of that and install another hour of battery each year.
> It would be seconds for a city with a few million people...
Australia only has two of those.
If you get picky enough about what counts as a city, then the problem solves itself; they become irrelevant compared to the bulk of the population.
You don't need one facility to feed an entire city.
What matters are the per capita numbers. $1000 per head, lasts an entire hour.
Install 300 of those batteries and it will cover the entire country.
And "seconds" is still wrong.
Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. 3rd, 4th, and 5th largest cities in the entire country. If you feed one of them off 129 megawatt hours, it's somewhere in the low hundreds of seconds.
>What matters are the per capita numbers. $1000 per head, lasts an entire hour.
Australian GDP per capita is $53k. So a national battery deployment to supply overnight power is roughly 1/5 the GDP of Australia. But we need more than overnight storage, since we need to account for daily and seasonal variability. Estimates range at around 8-16 weeks of storage. This isn't even remotely in the realm of reality. For comparison, at the peak of World War 2, American defense spending was roughly 1/3 of GDP.
You do not use lithium ion batteries for seasonal storage. Use something else, or build enough generation for the weakest season.
1/5 of one year of GDP is not unreasonable for a major component of energy infrastructure. It's not going to be built all at once. I can't find the exact numbers for Australia, but the US has a similar GDP, similar use, much cheaper electricity, and pays 6-8% of GDP for energy. That does include more than electricity, but it's all relevant expenditure.
A fraction of 20% of GDP, because it's across many years, is firmly inside the realm of possibility. If we had to double energy costs it would still be feasible, but that's overkill. We need less than that feasible amount to fund all the necessary construction.
>You do not use lithium ion batteries for seasonal storage. Use something else
Like what?
You think I'm saying these things because I hate renewables. I'm trying to understand what people are arguing for! So you say Lithium ion batteries shouldn't be used for seasonal storage. News to me. News to a ton of people who believe that Tesla battery site can scale to that level. What is the battery technology that can store enough energy for weeks at national-scale.
Maybe there is no battery technology? Then why are coming up with these examples that you know don't work! If you look at my original post that all I said is that there is no battery technology that scales to economy-size and therefore you need fossil fuel backup for solar and wind... Which part of that is wrong?
This is my frustration because regular people and experts just handwave the answers. Germany is all on in solar and wind and fighting climate change and is hailed as a model for the world and also invest billions into gas pipelines to Russia to provide them with huge volumes of natural gas for decades!!!
What the fuck is going on? I just want to know. I'll post something, told I'm wrong but nobody will post the answer.
Most of that is negated by the rest of the sentence you cut off.
If you build enough generators for the weakest season, then you don't need to store energy for seasonal variations.
It's an option that exists as a worst case, and it's not that bad. If you're extremely worried that all your renewable generation might fail for over a week then you can have backup fossil power plants that run an average of a couple days per year.
It's not cheap but it's not outrageously expensive either. It's entirely possible to afford if it was a priority. I might even argue that it's easy for the US to afford it, if we increased electricity prices to match Australia's...
But as for long term storage, there are a few options. Other kinds of batteries exist, and are in development. Producing hydrogen or other fuels is possible, and would be carbon neutral. Even if it has bad efficiency, we'd have tons of extra electricity during the good seasons.
> all I said is that there is no battery technology that scales to economy-size and therefore you need fossil fuel backup
Well that's not the post I was arguing with. The post I was arguing with was calling it impractical to store energy for a few hours!
If we can't store for a few hours, then we need a base load backup half the time.
If we can store for a few days but not more, then we need a base load backup 1% of the time.
Huge difference. We can do the former. We can maybe do seasonal storage, but it's the former that matters.
Well, like I said, 30 cents per kWh gives you a huge budget. If you can add one hour of capacity per year, and the battery facilities last 30 years... seems affordable.
Also wind does not stop overnight. You don't need to supply all the power.
I was assuming 100% solar, but sure you could go for wind.
There is the general game of how much overcapacity you are willing to build -> in traditional grids your generation is slightly exceeding you peak needs. However, in renewable grid you probably should build significantly more (>>2X) than your peak needs, and minimise your need for battery storage.
That gives funny dynamics, where for some days electricity prices could be 0 or even negative.
To be clear, fossil fuels are already insufficient to power a modern day economy without trillions of artificial subsidies.
We are not in a mode where we can wait to deploy perfect technology. We will also not be going solar 100% anytime soon, but perhaps in the next few decades. The atmosphere and ocean are already unhappy, and maybe if we also invest in carbon sequestration technology we can roll back a century or so worth of damage.
You're in this mindset that immediately it's all or nothing, and that's not the case. But we do need to start investing large sums of money now instead of making oil cheaper than it would normally be on a free market.
>To be clear, fossil fuels are already insufficient to power a modern day economy without trillions of artificial subsidies.
The subsidies are part of the economy too, so clearly fossil fuels are capable to power a modern day economy. Else the economy would have gone down (due to the subsidies cost).
The problem with solar/wind is that even with the same or larger subsidies we haven't yet solved many problems for powering a modern economy with them. Even if we had a huge budget to do so with just the proviso that no fossil/nuclear is used.
And that doesn't even include the problem of replacing the fossil fuel based infrastructure itself. We don't even have enough electric battery making capacity for double the insignificant amount of electric cars sold now for example, much less for replacing every gas based car with an electric equivalent...
