this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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The memes of the climate
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Which of those solutions are presently available for large scale implementation, and guarantees baseload coverage with no significant CO2 emissions?
In a sufficiently large grid you will always have wind and in a global grid you'd also reliably have solar as base load.
Furthermore the base load can be reduced significantly with smart sheduling of energy usage.
Finally nuclear is no gurantee of baseload coverage. Nuclear power plants require a lot of water for cooling, like all thermal power plants do. With climate change the reliability of rivers providing enough water and the water being cool enough to not cause an ecological desaster downstream is becoming less and less reliable.
Many nuclear power plants at supposedely stable rivers had to be partially or fully shut down in the last summers. Nuclear power under climate change is not a stability factor. It is a risk factor to the grid.
Yes, except even with an interconnected European grid we're still not there. While I can't speak for how much landmass needs to be covered, we need to expand the capacity of the grid quite a bit. I'm not sure where the bottleneck in Germany is now, but a few years ago Danish wind power couldn't be exported much further than Hamburg. Since then the Bundesnetzagentur seems to have been handing out expansion permits left and right, but a grid expansion just across the EU sounds like a fever dream.
Sure, and we're being "motivated" by paying a larger transmission fee during the evening peak in Denmark. But still I haven't heard of people doing much more than not running their dryer during peak or maybe scheduling their EV's charging later. For smart grids to actually work we need distributed energy storage. People still need heating during peak. And as I've stated elsewhere in this thread, storage is expensive. What I wrote about was almost going off-grid, which is insanely expensive, but storage will still be too expensive for most and impractical for many. So most people will just pay the increased price for the power, and not make the huge investment in storage.
Firstly, that depends on the implementation. You mention rivers, and your instance is a ".de", which explains your argument. But in a country like Denmark we have enough coast to build nuclear power there. Which was what was proposed back the 70s and early 80s.
Secondly, the time when we require the most power generated by power plants is during winter. As you yourself pointed out, the shutdowns occurred during the summer.
Don't let the deliberate sabotage by german politics distract from the necessity and ability to change the grid.
In a well interconnected European grid with extensive use of Offshore Wind potentials we can easily get there. It is not a lack of viability but a lack of political will. If you look at Germany, the largest donors to political parties are usually property investment groups and fossil (including nuclear until recently) power companies.
Putting nuclear plants at the cost comes with it's own can of worms. Corrosion, Floodings, Coastal stability... And in regards to the grid you run into the same issues like with offshore wind. Finally with the increase in temperatures through climate change the energy demand in summer will also rise, with the need to actively cool houses more and more. In the southern US, the grid usually fails in summer, not in winter.
Building a huge concrete plant has lots of CO2 emissions. Why wouldn't you include the construction in the CO2 emissions budget? Also, the waste heat from the plant fucks up a local waterway. It's required to be on a body of water, and no one is going to want to swim there anymore.
Windmills? You just stick them where there's wind. They don't bother anything. Construction is minimal and you can still use the land for something else.
Wind turbines come with their own environmental impact due to construction, among that is CO2. Besides that they are highly visible, to the point where I can't look at the horizont where I live, in any direction, without seeing a few, but most importantly: they can't provide baseload coverage.
Wind and solar are nice ideas, but if you want to cover baseload they're just not up to it.
Please allow me to try to explain with an example. During the months of December and January, it is quite normal to experience several periods of no wind for up to a week in Denmark. During the same period there's 6 or 7 hours between sunrise and sunset.
Let's assume that a Danish citizen is average. Avg yearly electricity use is 1.6MWh, and sorry my sources will be mostly in Danish, https://www.bolius.dk/saa-meget-el-vand-og-varme-bruger-en-gennemsnitsfamilie-279. That gives us an avg daily usage of 4.4kWh. During december usage will be 30% above average, as per previous link. That gives us a daily avg usage of 5.7kWh in December.
During this period in 2022, solar accounted for 0.6% of the electricity produced in Denmark, https://www.verdensmaal.org/nyheder/danmark-blandt-eus-tre-solkonger. So at 0.3 kWh out of the 5.7kWh it's close to insignificant. But let's subtract that and now we're at 5.4kWh.
That's 5.4kWh we need to get from somewhere, the wind turbines are barely rotating. Where do we get it? Assuming a household of 4 people that's 22kWh daily. That's where we need powerplants. And personally I prefer nuclear to coal, gas and "carbon neutral" materials like straw and wood, for the CO2, as well as the particulate, emissions. The latter of which, is the cause of about 9mil deaths each year globally, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/fossil-fuel-air-pollution-responsible-1-5-deaths-worldwide.
What about battery storage? Presently there's one vendor of flow batteries in Denmark, https://www.visblue.com/, and while I can't post link to a price, I have been quoted 400-500000 DKK, 50-67000€, for a 10kWh solution, by the company that services my wind turbine.
That's 50k€ for half a day's worth of electricity storage. Let's go back to the example of no wind for a week, you'd need to spend 700k€ for each household at that price. And no, we don't need to have each house have storage installed, and yes, the price will probably be considerably less with different vendors and larger solutions. But it doesn't change the fact that you need to store at least 7x5.4kWh per Dane in order to not need to get electricity elsewhere.
Larger grids have been argued. I don't have the stamina to go into detail on that. Suffice it to say, that describing the investment needed, to make that somewhat viable, as astronomical would be playing it down.
If you stipulate no significant co2 emissions, then you can't have nuclear, either.
Let's say we want to build 100 new nuclear reactors (this would double what the US currently has). It takes about 200,000 tons of concrete to build one reactor. Concrete production outputs about 900kg of co2 per ton.
Cars output 1.5B tons of co2 per year. For the co2 cost of building 100 nuclear plants, we could continue driving ICE cars for an additional 12 years.
This doesn't even take into account steel production, which also has significant co2 output.