solar + batteries scales to any size. The bigger it is the cheaper per w/wh. It is by far the cheapest energy. It does generate seasonal surpluses, and requires a “dump/optional” load. dump loads can be hydrogen/desalination, and optional loads can be datacenters that scale down during winter. Significant battery fraction can come from EV penetration. Some (mostly chinese) EVs can pay for cost of the car by just keeping it parked in driveway and earning 3c/kwh profit from night discharge rates relative to day charge rates.
Wait, is your claim still that EVs will form a significant portion of the grid? I thought that trope died sometime around 2020 when it was obvious that Elon is a megalomaniac.
Industries need massive amounts of energy, and reducing emissions necessitates a significant increase in electricity use (e.g. hydrogen synthesis which is required for many processes to go green is very energy intensive). EVs just aren’t going to feed that. Lithium batteries won’t feed that.
If we figure this out with batteries, it’s likely going to be sodium or some other storage method. So far large-scale storage methods have been utterly underwhelming and it often borders on sci fi.
Here’s the thing. I want to reduce carbon emissions now, not in 30 years. That means fusion is not under consideration, and it means that we need way more electricity. Solar and wind are, as you pointed out, cheap ways to add electricity to the grid, but there’s a reason why no grid runs solely on solar and wind for any meaningful amount of time, and that’s because it’s not physically possible. There’s not enough lithium on this planet to realize that fantasy. Sodium, yes.
So until we actually have an example of energy storage that can deliver to keep steel works and factories going, and that can scale, I’m gonna call bullshit.
s your claim still that EVs will form a significant portion of the grid? I thought that trope died sometime around 2020 when it was obvious that Elon is a megalomaniac.
China is over 60% car sales as EV share. Massive battery capacity just from EVs available, from an auto market 5x the size of the US. LFP continues to have advantages over Sodium Ion (that needs vanadium to be "useful competitor), and lithium is abundant.
but there’s a reason why no grid runs solely on solar and wind for any meaningful amount of time, and that’s because it’s not physically possible.
False but the only path forward is not thinking you must nuke all other energy from orbit and turn a switch. Path forward is ever more renewables additions, and using existing infrastructure as backup/winter generation. Getting to 100% renewables is a journey. More and more renewable additions every year. Not a “impossible because it is not current reality” conclusion.
In Finland we have a hydroelectric plant on every single river leading into the Baltic Ocean apart from Tornionjoki because half of it belongs to Sweden. We can’t have fish swimming upstream from ocean to lakes because of this. Don’t go overboard with hydro.
Exactly this. And remember, Finland has some of the best water resources on the planet (highest concentration of lakes anywhere in the world). So most countries couldn’t do what Finland is doing even if they wanted to, and Finland is still building new nuclear.
Germany opened a new battery storage just this week. It has so much capacity that it can power a city like Leipzig over a night completely. And there are plans to upgrade it from 500 megawatthours to 800 megawatthours before 2026 ends. That’s not just remote cabin scale to me.
Hydro, although great in many ways, causes immense ecological devastation and is not suitable for all places.
Okay, here i gotta agree with you.
Nuclear also has issues but a mix of wind+solar on a base of hydro+nuclear is probably the ideal.
“Issues”. Yeah. The deadly waste nuclear plants produce is just a minor “issue”. And I’m not even talking about safety in general (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island).
I’m not even necessarily against nuclear, but this is a weird argument. How many times have solar panels blown up and made entire cities uninhabitable for decades, and how many are there total in use ever?
The percentage of failures of nuclear power plants may be low, but the fallout (literally) is incredibly devastating.
Even comparing human deaths per unit of electricity, nuclear has a lower death count than wind and only slightly above solar, and that includes Chernobyl.
Solar panels have a lifespan of a decade or maybe two if you’re lucky, after which it becomes mostly e-waste. So there is more to consider than you would make it seem.
More like 2 to 3 decades minimum and then they can be recycled. Don’t forget the speed and the extreme low cost in which solar can be deployed. There really is no meaningful benefit of nuclear against solar.
Ah, well that’s good news, maybe I had some older data then. But even if it’s 25 years it’s still much less than the life cycle NPPs. And after that you have to go into another process of recycling that requires even more energy and time. And as we’ve seen with plastic recycling, it never works as well as promised.
There really is no meaningful benefit of nuclear against solar.
The meaningful benefit of nuclear over solar is the fact that we don’t have sun for at least 50% of the day and the NPP can continue to run around the clock.
In fact, solar panels have a maximum power capacity of only 25% compared to nuclear’s 93%.
So it’s actually much worse than just the 50% of the day when it is nighttime.
You still need baseload power during the times when solar or wind doesn’t cut it.
Battery storage is an option but we already can’t mine enough lithium to make batteries for all cars to transition to EVs. And while we’re hearing about new battery technologies every day and some kinetic or thermal storage technologies you will always need extra resources and space just to provide baseload power. You realistically can’t make enough storage capacity for the entire electric grid worldwide. So yes, there will always be a need for NPPs, since baseload power is now mainly provided by coal and gas plants.
I’m sure batteries will play an important role in the future, but it’s not significant today and I don’t see any indication of this changing rapidly in a meaningful way. I’d love to be wrong though.
Regarding the issues with nuclear power, the ecological impact is far better than hydro and health impact/deaths is also significantly better. I’m not trying to badmouth hydro here, but I think it’s important to be fair and acknowledge that on those two issues (ecological impact, human health) nuclear has a better track record.
Even in US, $100/kwh retail battery price points with bms, 48v, exist. Utility scale in rest of world is much cheaper. China is $51/kwh for a containerized full battery solution with (4 hour) inverter. At 7% ROI (to pay for full 30 year mortgage on LFP batteries as that is their life expectancy at slow charge/discharge rates) means just 1c/kwh discharge profit is required to pay for $55/kwh batteries. Similar calculation for just 4 sun hours/day. $600/kw installation costs at 7% ROI, means 3c/kwh daytime electricity rates.
There’s not just exponential growth as @Hellgruen@lemmy.zip pointed out, it is dumb to do anything else.
Ok man good luck with that. Since the economy is so overwhelmingly in your favor, we should see battery capacity outpace energy need growth any time now.
Not sure if you are actually pretending its out of reach. China’s battery additions including EVs is 39% of massive electricity production increases. Rate of growth in battery sales about double while energy growth is 5-8% range. That is much easier for any country that isn’t the absolute global manufacturing nexus.
For context, that’s growth, not total capacity. And after covid one would suspect ppl would understand exponential growth and to understand what that means for a business Modell $$$
Also we don’t need capacity for the whole output of a year.
That doesn’t change the fact that battery storage is a business case with exponential growth and is just taking off while nuclear power is expensive, takes long time to plan and build and all the new fancy stuff is still hypothetical and it’s not certain it will ever take off in regard of recent bankruptcy’s in the smr field
True, and if we can make cheap batteries (e.g. sodium based) at scale then it absolutely could become a thing over the next decades. I just don’t want energy transition to hinge on unproven tech. We can’t play around with this, climate change is way too serious.
Yes, like those. Your three examples show how benign nuclear power is, factoting in the absolute worst of circumstances and most ridiculous levels of incompetence.
Maybe you should do your own homework before linking Wikipedia at me. Nuclear is safer than hydro in terms of human casualties per energy produced as well as per land mass destroyed, and if you want to make a counter-argument or add any other variable the burden of proof is on you.
Solar+battery is not an actual thing. We’re talking society scale here, not remote cabin.
Hydro, although great in many ways, causes immense ecological devastation and is not suitable for all places.
Nuclear also has issues but a mix of wind+solar on a base of hydro+nuclear is probably the ideal.
solar + batteries scales to any size. The bigger it is the cheaper per w/wh. It is by far the cheapest energy. It does generate seasonal surpluses, and requires a “dump/optional” load. dump loads can be hydrogen/desalination, and optional loads can be datacenters that scale down during winter. Significant battery fraction can come from EV penetration. Some (mostly chinese) EVs can pay for cost of the car by just keeping it parked in driveway and earning 3c/kwh profit from night discharge rates relative to day charge rates.
Wait, is your claim still that EVs will form a significant portion of the grid? I thought that trope died sometime around 2020 when it was obvious that Elon is a megalomaniac.
Industries need massive amounts of energy, and reducing emissions necessitates a significant increase in electricity use (e.g. hydrogen synthesis which is required for many processes to go green is very energy intensive). EVs just aren’t going to feed that. Lithium batteries won’t feed that.
If we figure this out with batteries, it’s likely going to be sodium or some other storage method. So far large-scale storage methods have been utterly underwhelming and it often borders on sci fi.
Here’s the thing. I want to reduce carbon emissions now, not in 30 years. That means fusion is not under consideration, and it means that we need way more electricity. Solar and wind are, as you pointed out, cheap ways to add electricity to the grid, but there’s a reason why no grid runs solely on solar and wind for any meaningful amount of time, and that’s because it’s not physically possible. There’s not enough lithium on this planet to realize that fantasy. Sodium, yes.
So until we actually have an example of energy storage that can deliver to keep steel works and factories going, and that can scale, I’m gonna call bullshit.
China is over 60% car sales as EV share. Massive battery capacity just from EVs available, from an auto market 5x the size of the US. LFP continues to have advantages over Sodium Ion (that needs vanadium to be "useful competitor), and lithium is abundant.
False but the only path forward is not thinking you must nuke all other energy from orbit and turn a switch. Path forward is ever more renewables additions, and using existing infrastructure as backup/winter generation. Getting to 100% renewables is a journey. More and more renewable additions every year. Not a “impossible because it is not current reality” conclusion.
In Finland we have a hydroelectric plant on every single river leading into the Baltic Ocean apart from Tornionjoki because half of it belongs to Sweden. We can’t have fish swimming upstream from ocean to lakes because of this. Don’t go overboard with hydro.
Exactly this. And remember, Finland has some of the best water resources on the planet (highest concentration of lakes anywhere in the world). So most countries couldn’t do what Finland is doing even if they wanted to, and Finland is still building new nuclear.
https://www.pv-magazine.de/2026/08/13/batteriespeicher-mit-rund-500-megawattstunden-kapazitaet-in-sachsen-anhalt-eingeweiht/
Germany opened a new battery storage just this week. It has so much capacity that it can power a city like Leipzig over a night completely. And there are plans to upgrade it from 500 megawatthours to 800 megawatthours before 2026 ends. That’s not just remote cabin scale to me.
Okay, here i gotta agree with you.
“Issues”. Yeah. The deadly waste nuclear plants produce is just a minor “issue”. And I’m not even talking about safety in general (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island).
You named 3 incidents. Now name all nuclear power plants ever. Compare the numbers.
I’m not even necessarily against nuclear, but this is a weird argument. How many times have solar panels blown up and made entire cities uninhabitable for decades, and how many are there total in use ever?
The percentage of failures of nuclear power plants may be low, but the fallout (literally) is incredibly devastating.
Even comparing human deaths per unit of electricity, nuclear has a lower death count than wind and only slightly above solar, and that includes Chernobyl.
Solar panels have a lifespan of a decade or maybe two if you’re lucky, after which it becomes mostly e-waste. So there is more to consider than you would make it seem.
More like 2 to 3 decades minimum and then they can be recycled. Don’t forget the speed and the extreme low cost in which solar can be deployed. There really is no meaningful benefit of nuclear against solar.
Ah, well that’s good news, maybe I had some older data then. But even if it’s 25 years it’s still much less than the life cycle NPPs. And after that you have to go into another process of recycling that requires even more energy and time. And as we’ve seen with plastic recycling, it never works as well as promised.
The meaningful benefit of nuclear over solar is the fact that we don’t have sun for at least 50% of the day and the NPP can continue to run around the clock.
In fact, solar panels have a maximum power capacity of only 25% compared to nuclear’s 93%.
So it’s actually much worse than just the 50% of the day when it is nighttime.
You still need baseload power during the times when solar or wind doesn’t cut it.
Battery storage is an option but we already can’t mine enough lithium to make batteries for all cars to transition to EVs. And while we’re hearing about new battery technologies every day and some kinetic or thermal storage technologies you will always need extra resources and space just to provide baseload power. You realistically can’t make enough storage capacity for the entire electric grid worldwide. So yes, there will always be a need for NPPs, since baseload power is now mainly provided by coal and gas plants.
I’m sure batteries will play an important role in the future, but it’s not significant today and I don’t see any indication of this changing rapidly in a meaningful way. I’d love to be wrong though.
Regarding the issues with nuclear power, the ecological impact is far better than hydro and health impact/deaths is also significantly better. I’m not trying to badmouth hydro here, but I think it’s important to be fair and acknowledge that on those two issues (ecological impact, human health) nuclear has a better track record.
Even in US, $100/kwh retail battery price points with bms, 48v, exist. Utility scale in rest of world is much cheaper. China is $51/kwh for a containerized full battery solution with (4 hour) inverter. At 7% ROI (to pay for full 30 year mortgage on LFP batteries as that is their life expectancy at slow charge/discharge rates) means just 1c/kwh discharge profit is required to pay for $55/kwh batteries. Similar calculation for just 4 sun hours/day. $600/kw installation costs at 7% ROI, means 3c/kwh daytime electricity rates.
There’s not just exponential growth as @Hellgruen@lemmy.zip pointed out, it is dumb to do anything else.
Ok man good luck with that. Since the economy is so overwhelmingly in your favor, we should see battery capacity outpace energy need growth any time now.
Not sure if you are actually pretending its out of reach. China’s battery additions including EVs is 39% of massive electricity production increases. Rate of growth in battery sales about double while energy growth is 5-8% range. That is much easier for any country that isn’t the absolute global manufacturing nexus.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-battery-storage-capacity-additions-2010-2023
Well fortunately you are wrong
For context, global energy output is 30k TWh/year. That’s T for tera.
For context, that’s growth, not total capacity. And after covid one would suspect ppl would understand exponential growth and to understand what that means for a business Modell $$$
Also we don’t need capacity for the whole output of a year.
For even more context, the annual growth in electricity output is about 5x the addition of battery capacity.
That doesn’t change the fact that battery storage is a business case with exponential growth and is just taking off while nuclear power is expensive, takes long time to plan and build and all the new fancy stuff is still hypothetical and it’s not certain it will ever take off in regard of recent bankruptcy’s in the smr field
True, and if we can make cheap batteries (e.g. sodium based) at scale then it absolutely could become a thing over the next decades. I just don’t want energy transition to hinge on unproven tech. We can’t play around with this, climate change is way too serious.
Like Fukushima, three miles island or Tschernobyl?
Yes, like those. Your three examples show how benign nuclear power is, factoting in the absolute worst of circumstances and most ridiculous levels of incompetence.
Oh, there are so many more incidents.
Maybe you should do your own homework before linking Wikipedia at me. Nuclear is safer than hydro in terms of human casualties per energy produced as well as per land mass destroyed, and if you want to make a counter-argument or add any other variable the burden of proof is on you.
Sure it is, buddy
Grid battery storage is booming right now, one of the biggest scaling technologies right now. No cabins involved.
This guy has no idea what he’s talking about.