Utahn here. We don't have a water problem so much as we have an alfalfa problem. It consumes most of our water with very little economic benefit to the state as a whole.
There are very few locations where renewables have high enough penetration for dispatchability to be the slightest concern for new additions.
In locations with lots of renewables already, new projects are including storage, cost-effectively, which turns non-disparchable power into dispatchable.
I think it's pretty clear that $58/MWh was never going to be achieved, and as with most nuclear projects, reality is 1.5x-3x of what the boosters promise. But even $58/MWh is not cheap enough to match the bids seen for dispatchable renewables+storage.
And, consider that the new projects won't be online for 5-10 years, during which time year-on-year improvements to cost of solar and wind will likely continue to decline 5-15% per year.
Nuclear projects are turtles chasing rabbits at this point, and the rabbit has head start.
Except where the part where the rabbit start saturating markets during peak production. Then further progress starts to crawl as less and less of the actual generation capacity is usable. At least not until a breakthrough makes energy storage feasible.
The only countries that have successfully moved all or nearly-all of their electricity to decarbonized sources have done so primarily with dispatchable sources: hydroelectricity (E.g. Norway, Brazil, Albania, Uruguay) and with a mix of nuclear power filling in where hydro isn't enough (France, Sweden, Switzerland). All of those countries generate a single digit percentage of their electricity from fossil fuels. Nobody has decarbonized primarily through a source of decarboinzed energy source besides hydroelectricity or nuclear power.* Unless there's a storage breakthrough on the horizon, we'll still need to derive a significant chunk of our electricity generation from dispatchable sources.
* One minor counterexample is geothermal power, but like hydro it's geographically dependent.
Solar can be installed on roofs. Costs go up, but resiliency goes way up and less grid complexity and transport is needed, and it solves the "holy crap how will we charge all these consumer EVs".
The EV(s) can function as some of the battery backup, especially since most EVs will be about 80% overprovisioned for everyday driving. Tesla is already doing it in California.
Storage breakthrough: sodium ion goes into mass production at 140-160wh/kg by CATL next year. In addition to being usable for the 200-300 mile EV, that will mean cheap grid batteries.
But this obsession with dispatchability at scale shows that there is too much focus on grid-scale solar and storage and centralized control. Yes the upfront costs are cheaper, but grid solar should be hand in hand with a VERY aggressive home/business solar+storage subsidy.
It's dumb that a natural disaster knocks out power for the entire area because transmission lines go down. With distributed solar and storage, that wouldn't be nearly as bad. Old guard electric can't wrap their heads around a country where every roof has solar doing most / all / surplus power generation.
> Solar can be installed on roofs. Costs go up, but resiliency goes way up and less grid complexity and transport is needed, and it solves the "holy crap how will we charge all these consumer EVs".
Resiliency how? It makes the grid more fragile since cloudy days make for big energy shortages. It also doesn't solve EV charging. Plenty of people charge their EVs at night because they drive during the day. They also want to charge their EVs regardless of weather.
> Storage breakthrough: sodium ion goes into mass production at 140-160wh/kg by CATL next year.
Define "mass" production. For context, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day, or about 2,500 GWh of electricity per hour.
The concern with dispatchability is entirely reasonable because energy needs to be supplied when it's in demand, and storage isn't anywhere near the required scale. You can't just hand-wave this away by encouraging homes and businesses to buy storage.
> It's dumb that a natural disaster knocks out power for the entire area because transmission lines go down. With distributed solar and storage, that wouldn't be nearly as bad. Old guard electric can't wrap their heads around a country where every roof has solar doing most / all / surplus power generation.
Quite the contrary. Decentralized power generation actually means more transmission lines to transport energy long distances from the places where it gets generated to the places where energy is in demand. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
> Then further progress starts to crawl as less and less of the actual generation capacity is usable. At least not until a breakthrough makes energy storage feasible.
That happened. It's called off river or blue field pumped hydro and sodium batteries.
Well, which technology passes this high-vault bar? Surely not one that is flat and possibly shrinking and is operating at a scale that is similar to that of grid storage and also needs storage to meet variable demand?
I explained this in the first comment to which you responded [1]. Hydroelectricity is by far the most effective source of energy generation, although it has the distinct disadvantage of being geographically limited. Nuclear power is the most effective dispatchable source after that. Every country that has decarbonized their electricity grid has done so primary through a combination of hydroelectricity and nuclear power. No developed country has deployed a majority wind and solar grid, ever.
Mined, from the earth. Unlike lithium [1] uranium prices are not experiencing cost overruns. And unlike grid storage, nuclear power already makes up 10% of the world's electricity generation. We only need an 8x increase (another 10% of electricity already comes from hydro) instead of a 1000x increase like we do with grid storage. The thing about nuclear energy is that there's so much energy contained in uranium that more exotic forms of extraction like seawater absorption [2] is feasible. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of lithium. Some estimates predict that lithium reserves may be exhausted by EV production alone [3]. The volume of lithium required for batteries is considerably greater than the amount of uranium needed for fission, which makes seawater extraction non-viable.
> Unlike lithium [1] uranium prices are not experience cost overruns
The 2007 Uranium bubble called. They would like to sell you some lithium futures for delivery on 2028 at costs based on an exponential fit.
> And unlike lithium, nuclear power already makes up 10% of the world's electricity generation. We only need an 8x increase (another 10% of electricity already comes from hydro) instead of a 1000x increase like we do with grid storage.
So after adding the first load for these reactors using hope, then operating them for 15 years, what do we do about the other 12TW of energy? What about the heavy casting facilities needed for thousands of reactor vessels? All the other critical minerals such as around half of the world's chromium production, vast quantities of precious metals and 100s of billions of litres a year of sulfuric acid production to process all the incredibly low grade uranium ore?
> The thing about nuclear energy is that there's so much energy contained in uranium that more exotic forms of extraction like seawater absorption [2] is feasible
I thought things that hadn't been done were completely impossible? Or do we get to acknowledge the TWh scale sodium ion supply chains and 100GW per year electrolyser supply chains that are being built right now as being vastly more realistic?
In any event, either this is a complete fantasy or the Vanadium that you necessarily get in much larger quantities even when using a sorbent that is as selective as possible for Uranium will provide half an hour to two hours of storage for capacity exceeding that of the nuclear reactor every time you refuel it. So at least filling the ocean with broken polymer ribbons will have a minor long term benefit.
> The 2007 Uranium bubble called. They would like to sell you some lithium futures for delivery on 2028.
Was this due to a sudden increase in reactor construction? There was no spike in nuclear power plant operation in 2007. Speculative bubbles are different from actual commodity shortages.
> So after adding the first load for these reactors using hope, then operating them for 15 years, what do we do about the other 12TW of energy?
By "the other 12 TW of energy" you mean other sources of primary energy? The good thing about nuclear power is that it produces thermal energy. This enables things like thermochemical hydrogen splitting which is more suitable to production of hydrogen for transportation fuel and green smelting. The waste heat from nuclear plants can be scavenged for heating and desalination. This is a distinct advantage over wind and solar that do not directly produce thermal energy and have to be converted from electricity to thermal energy.
> What about the heavy casting facilities needed for thousands of reactor vessels?
What about them? The amount of steel needed for reactor vessels is a drop in the bucket of the overall steel market.
> All the other critical minerals such as around half of the world's chromium production, vast quantities of precious metals and 100s of billions of litres a year of sulfuric acid production to process all the incredibly low grade uranium ore?
Again, what about them? Chromium is widely used for stainless steel. Sulfuric acid is widely used for plenty of things like fertilizer production, hydrocarbon refining, and car batteries. An 8x increase in nuclear power wouldn't substantially affect the markets for these resources. Do you have a reason to think that nuclear power production will cause shortages in chromium or sulfuric acid? If so, let's see that analysis instead of just postulating it as fact.
> I thought things that hadn't been done were completely impossible? Or do we get to acknowledge the TWh scale sodium ion supply chains and 100GW per year electrolyser supply chains that are being built right now as being vastly more realistic?
Please read sources before commenting on them: uranium seawater extraction has been successfully performed - not at costs competitive with traditional mining, but as explained in the source the cost of raw uranium is negligible for nuclear power
> In any event, either this is a complete fantasy or the Vanadium that you necessarily get in much larger quantities even when using a sorbent that is as selective as possible for Uranium will provide half an hour to two hours of storage for capacity exceeding that of the nuclear reactor every time you refuel it. So at least filling the ocean will have a minor long term benefit.
This is not how seawater extraction works. The same mass of adsorbent won't collect larger quantities of other elements. The 6 grams of uranium collected per kilogram of adsorbent doesn't turn into a 6 kilograms of material per Kg of adsorbent for a material that's 1000x as concentrated in the ocean. It will fill up faster for a more concentrated element, but you're still retrieving similar amounts of material for the same amount of adsorbent. You have to make 1000x as many trips to collect 1000x as much material, regardless of concentration.
The cost of this extraction is entirely comprised of deploying and retrieving the adsorbent material - letting a buoy sit in the ocean for 2 months instead of 1 week costs nothing. This is why seawater extraction is prohibitively expensive for most applications, uranium's incredible energy density is what makes it a viable application.
> Was this due to a sudden increase in reactor construction?
Mild delay in a mine opening. A sudden increase in reactor construction would be much worse.
> This is a distinct advantage over wind and solar that do not directly produce thermal energy and have to be converted from electricity to thermal energy.
CSP exists and is going down in price rapidly.
> Sulfuric acid is widely used for plenty of things like fertilizer production, hydrocarbon refining, and car batteries. An 8x increase in nuclear power wouldn't substantially affect the markets for these resources
1kg of Uranium from inkai or husab uses 50-100kg of sulfuric acid. And this is high grade compared to the 600,000 tonnes per year you are proposing using. Doubling world sulfuric acid production is about the right magnitude.
> uranium seawater extraction has been successfully performed
Make up your mind about what is possible and what is impossible. If doing it once to publish a paper and then pencilling out the costs of raw materials counts then we can all just use AlS batteries and go home.
> This is not how seawater extraction works. The same mass of adsorbent won't collect larger quantities of other elements. The 6 grams of uranium collected per kilogram of adsorbent doesn't turn into a 6 kilograms of material per Kg of adsorbent for a material that's 1000x as concentrated in the ocean. It will fill up faster for a more concentrated element, but you're still retrieving similar amounts of material for the same amount of adsorbent. You have to make 1000x as many trips to collect 1000x as much material, regardless of concentration.
> The cost of this extraction is entirely comprised of deploying and retrieving the adsorbent material - letting a buoy sit in the ocean for 2 months instead of 1 week costs nothing. This is why seawater extraction is prohibitively expensive for most applications, uranium's incredible energy density is what makes it a viable application.
Natural Uranium in a burner reactor is not very energy dense in the scheme of things. Much higher than coal, but about the same power output as a similar mass of silicon in a photovoltaic cell (but at 75% CF for 6 years rather than ~15-25% for 30-50).
At ~3g/kg the uranium only has about 10x as much energy as you'd get by burning the polymer or 5x in the current nuclear fleet (wonder how much it takes to make?). There goes the much vaunted EROI unless you get quite a few reuses (hint: you only get a few).
Also what I said is exactly how sea mining works. Please at least try to understand these technologies before pushing them. You get more vanadium than Uranium in any realistic use case https://www.osti.gov/pages/biblio/1234341
The longer you leave it, the more Uranium gets displaced by Vanadium. At 2 months you get 5x as much.
1kg of natural uranium has a power output of about 1-2kW for 6 years and then it's gone. 1kg of vanadium can store 350-650Wh.
Such a simple plan with so few completely deal breaking oversights compared to building sodium ion factories which is already happening and building more pumped hydro which we know how to do.
> at ~3g/kg the uranium only has about 10x as much energy as you'd get by burning the polymer or 5x in the current nuclear fleet (wonder how much it takes to make?). There goes the much vaunted EROI unless you get quite a few reuses (hint: you only get a few).
Except the polymer is re-usable.
> The longer you leave it, the more Uranium gets displaced by Vanadium. At 2 months you get 5x as much.
Until it's saturated, then you can leave it out all you want and it won't collect any more. And I had thought you were referring to lithium seawater extraction - you just tossed out vanadium without actually explaining how you'd use it and I assumed you mistyped lithium.
Unfortunately vanadium redox batteries are not nearly built at the scale of lithium batteries - which are themselves not built at a scale large enough for grid storage - as well as poorer round trip efficiency.
As I said, there goes your eroi. At 10mg/kg you're producing 10,000 tonnes of polymer per year per reactor and harvesting it 3-6 times. This is supposed to be economical? That's 10 million tonnes of plastic waste per year just for one terawatt or 10% of world plastic waste to replace FF electrical generation.
> Until it's saturated, then you can leave it out all you want and it won't collect any more.
If you leave it in too long the Uranium starts going out because Vanadium has higher concentration and similar affinity. But long before that, your polymer breaks down and becomes microplastic pollution.
> Unfortunately vanadium redox batteries are not nearly built at the scale of lithium batteries - which are themselves not built at a scale large enough for grid storage - as well as poorer round trip efficiency.
So now we're back to this incoherent dissonance where doing something once on a tiny test platform makes it a definite solution to world energy, but something being produced at GWh scale in the real world is not big enough? That's a truly stellar amount of double think you've got going on there. I'm sure there'll be even more interest when your magic $20/kg unlimited supply vanadium machine running at 20x current total production is up and running.
The adsorbent loses efficiency after a couple elution cycles, but it is regenerated by an alki wash. Read this [1] if you want a better explanation. No, you do not need to keep producing tons and tons of polymer. You have to treat it with chemicals after a couple cycles, but you don't need to throw the whole polymer away and start anew.
Regardless, this whole seawater extraction tangent is only a contingency if no new terrestrial reserves of uranium are found. Unlike intermittent sources which require massive amounts of grid storage, uranium seawater extraction isn't going to be necessary any time soon which is why I'm not super concerned about how seawater extraction isn't being commercialized.
On the other hand, renewables are already starting to saturate the market during peak production today. In order to make intermittent sources viable we need storage systems now. It's not dissonance, it's the fact that there are presently functioning alternatives to seawater extraction that will continue to work for the near to mid term future. Whereas there are no storage systems capable of delivering energy at grid scale.
> The adsorbent loses efficiency after a couple elution cycles, but it is regenerated by an alki wash. Read this [1] if you want a better explanation.
..The longest lasting method in that paper is a scale model in idealized conditions of the same method I linked to but the first was in more realistic conditions... they ran one in the ocean but not more than once.
> Regardless, this whole seawater extraction tangent is only a contingency if no new terrestrial reserves of uranium are found. Unlike intermittent sources which require massive amounts of grid storage, uranium seawater extraction isn't going to be necessary any time soon which is why I'm not super concerned about how seawater extraction isn't being commercialized.
So we're back here. To match the scale of renewable when they start to run into the constraints that require scaling up storage, you need about 3TW by 2030 (before then a mix is viable along with using surplus for replacing non-electrical fossil fuels such as H2). That's 10,000 tonnes of fissile material up front, and another 10,000 every reload. You need to open every mine on the planet today and empty them by 2040. Then your sea mining rig needs to be ready to go (and hilariously has to be installed on a greater net capacity of offshore wind turbines than the capacity of nuclear reactors it supplies). After that you still need just as much storage for variable loads because ramping isn't an option as idle capacity would reduce your fuel runway by 6 years.
All this because you think lithium production can't double when the extraction started a year ago? It's actually a comically bad plan. Well done. The bit where it needs the wind turbines was comedy gold.
> ..The longest lasting method in that paper is a scale model in idealized conditions of the same method I linked to but the first was in more realistic conditions... they ran one in the ocean but not more than once.
Sure, they may need to regenerate the adsorbent after just one use. But the polymer survives. Even if the adsorbent retains most of its efficacy after one elution cycle, it could be more efficient to refresh it to maximize the material collected per trip. You seemed to have been under the impression that the entire polymer needed to be replaced when you talked about how it'd be more effective to burn the polymer: "at ~3g/kg the uranium only has about 10x as much energy as you'd get by burning the polymer or 5x in the current nuclear fleet"
For what it's worth I am confident that lithium ion battery production will continue to increase and double, triple, or even quadruple over the next century. But that will be barely enough just to satisfy EV demand for batteries. Even just provisioning 12 hours of grid storage worldwide would need 30,000 GWh at present electricity demand. That's close to a century of production at present rates. Doubling, tripling or even quadrupling production still means we'd need to dedicate several decades worth of battery production just to satisfy 12 hours of present electricity demand. Not to mention the fact that electricity demand is going to increase as more transport moves to EVs and as poorer countries develop. Not to mention the fact that these batteries need to be replaced after a few thousand cycles.
I'm confident about battery production doubling or tripling, it's the factor of 10 to 20 that I'm more skeptical of - and that's the kind of increase we'd need to make battery grid storage feasible.
The polymer is the sorbent. Please actually read the sources you send. Normally it is on a higher strength belt, but this scheme puts it in a plastic shell. That's the bit their charts show with tens of thousands of tonnes needed per fuel load (which turned out to be optimistic when someone checked).
> For what it's worth I am confident that lithium ion battery production will continue to increase and double, triple, or even quadruple over the next century. But that will be barely enough just to satisfy EV demand for batteries. Even just provisioning 12 hours of grid storage worldwide would need 30,000 GWh at present electricity demand. That's close to a century of production at present rates.
You're off by over a factor of 3. There's around 1TWh/yr now, and 5TWh/yr under construction due before 2030. And only a few hours needs to be high power. The rest can be thermal, PHES, CSP dispatch, virtual batteries via load shifting, hydrogen for emergencies, and so on.
> I'm confident about battery production doubling or tripling, it's the factor of 10 to 20 that I'm more skeptical of - and that's the kind of increase we'd need to make battery grid storage feasible.
It's happened, if it were a nuclear project then it'd be at the stage where they've already declared it finished, but shut it down straight after loading and said it will reopen in a month. Other industries do things a little differently, but either way it'll mostly be running around 2028
Quite the contrary, CSP fell out of favor because PVs outcompeted it. What is making CSP better? Did mirrors suddenly improve?
> 1kg of Uranium from inkai or husab uses 50-100kg of sulfuric acid. And this is high grade compared to the 600,000 tonnes per year you are proposing using. Doubling world sulfuric acid production is about the right magnitude.
Did you just pick these figures out of thin air? Reduction of uranium in sulfuric acid is nowhere near 100 : 1 ratio. Unless you're talking about 600,000 tons after enrichment, in which case your figure for uranium consumption is off by an order of magnitude. A 1 GW reactor requires 27 tons of uranium per year [1]. The world uses an average of 2,500 GW of electricity meaning we'd need 68,000 tons of uranium fuel per year. The world produces 231 million tons of sulfuric acid annually [2], so even if we run with your un-sourced numbers this only requires an increase of 2-3%.
> At ~3g/kg the uranium only has about 10x as much energy as you'd get by burning the polymer or 5x in the current nuclear fleet (wonder how much it takes to make?). There goes the much vaunted EROI unless you get quite a few reuses (hint: you only get a few).
Except unlike solar power, the nuclear fleet doesn't require vast amounts of energy storage. It produces the amount amount of electricity regardless of sunlight or wind speed.
Here's the future of renewables: We keep building it opportunistically to displace natural gas. But once they saturate markets during peak production, they become far less effective at displacing carbon emissions because most of their energy is wasted.. After some time scratching our heads struggling to build energy storage at anywhere near relevant scales, we realize that dispatchable energy is necessary and we build it the only ways we know how: hydroelectricity where geography permits, and nuclear power. Or we can jump straight to the the last part and skip building a bunch of intermittent generation that will be made redundant in the end anyway.
> What is making CSP better? Did mirrors suddenly improve?
Yes. Thanks for noticing: https://www.reutersevents.com/renewables/csp-today/self-alig... I think the first projects using them are just about done. Heliostats now require much less foundation and are much cheaper to install. The remaining portion is almost identical to the cheap part of many of the SMR concepts, but on a stick instead of in a gigantic steel and concrete room.
But the main driver is actually that it is dispatchable. If you make the hot bit bigger and combine it 5:1 with PV with a little battery on the side you get a millisecond response, grid forming, 24/7 dispatchable power station that is presently about the same price as a NPP but is actually going down rather than up. They're only good in low clous regions, but there is enough good resource for it to make a contribution on the same order as nuclear.
> Did you just pick these figures out of thin air? Reduction of uranium in sulfuric acid is nowhere near 100 : 1 ratio. Unless you're talking about 600,000 tons after enrichment, in which case your figure for uranium consumption is off by an order of magnitude. A 1 GW reactor requires 27 tons of uranium per year [1]. The world uses an average of 2,500 GW of electricity meaning we'd need 68,000 tons of uranium fuel per year. The world produces 231 million tons of sulfuric acid annually [2], so even if we run with your un-sourced numbers this only requires an increase of 2-3%.
It's for getting it out of the ore at 1-3ppt. Do you not even understand that not all uranium resource is like cigar lake where you just find some yellow and green rocks, pour a bit of heavy water on them and call it good? Go look at the sulfuric acid consumption of rossing or inkai, realise those are high concentration compared to the other 7 million tonnes and lower concentration needs more, then come back and apologise.
Most of the ore you are proposing mining is no more energy dense than oil.
> Except unlike solar power, the nuclear fleet doesn't require vast amounts of energy storage.
One kg of natural uranium cannot produce enough energy to wear out an LFP battery made with 1kg of lithium -- and the lithium can be recycled. I think we're good.
> new projects are including storage, cost-effectively, which turns non-disparchable power into dispatchable.
Such as? Most storage facilities are targeting a few hundred megawatts of storage, usually enough for a few hours of power but not enough to even out a full night.
Because the storage is targeting the evening part of the duck curve, and there's no need for night time generation right now.
As the market changes and it becomes profitable to supply power at night, more batteries are trivially added. But while we still have so many fossil sources for the lull in demand at night, energy prices are at their lowest during the night.
As more fossil generation is replaced with renewables, more storage will be added.
Adding battery storage is going to be anything but trivial. Existing global battery production amounts to 10-15 minutes of electricity use. And this is assuming a total elimination of EV production while storage is built out.
What a weird thing to say, comparing existing production captaincy to what could be... Existing SMR production is what, exactly?
Batteries have a clear scaling path, plenty of materials, and are growing 10x at a predictable rate.
Scaling batteries is utterly trivial compared to the challenges facing SMRs.
The historical record is right there for everyone to see. Batteries are a serious industry, at a serious scale, with serious engineering and real timelines and improvements. The entire nuclear industry are charlatans and lightweights compared to what's happened in batteries and renewables. Which is a shame, because nuclear could have had a chance, perhaps.
We don't need small modular reactors, we have much more experience building larger PWRs - and regulation effectively mandates it the way that each plant needs to pay more than a third of a billion dollars in fees to get certified. Had nuclear production continued at the same pace it did during the 1960s and 70s in the US, we'd have had a completely decarbonized grid by now. And that's exactly what happened in France: they continued building nuclear reactors and reduced fossil fuels to essentially zero. Compare that with Germany, renewables' posterchild, that still uses combustibles for most of its energy production - wind and solar is only 30% of its energy mix.
Scaling batteries is the opposite of trivial. I don' think you comprehend the mismatch between our battery supply and what grid storage demands. The US consumes about 500 GWh of of electricity every hour. This is more than the cumulative global battery production in all of 2021 [1]. And the cost of batteries has stopped shrinking and started rising [2]. The reality is that we'll be hard-pressed just to keep battery production growing fast enough to satisfy EVs. Lithium battery production will probably double or triple, but that's still not enough to make grid storage feasible.
How many countries have provisioned a day's worth of electricity storage? Half a day? An hour? For all the talk about nuclear power being charlatans and lightweights, no country at al has produced the majority of its electricity from intermittent sources. But nuclear has [3]. Pretty good for a bunch of charlatans!
One more snowy 2 (or equivalent) and Australia can get to ~97% solar+wind+pumped storage powered.
The only reason existing pumped storage sites used to target a few hundred MWh was because they were historically used for regulating the grid, not providing large scale storage.
The geography to do this is plentiful too, as multiple studies have confirmed.
The paper they're quoting doesn't actually say that and it's double counting some parts of the system that are already accounted for in the 350GWh figure. Try again.
There's no double counting. The estimate of 350 GWh ignored the fact that the lower reservoir of Snowy 2 is smaller than the upper reservoir.
In case you're unfamiliar with how pumped hydro works: There's an upper reservoir and a lower reservoir. To charge the system, water from the lower reservoir is pumped into the upper reservoir, and to withdraw energy the water is passed to the lower reservoir driving a turbine.
In Snowy 2, the upper reservoir is large enough to accommodate 350 GWh of energy. But the lower reservoir is not, and actually attempting to actually use that much storage would cause the closed loop system to lose water and permanently reduce the storage capacity unless additional water is added. If I have a 100 liter bucket up top and a 10 liter bucket down below. If I fill up the 100 liter bucket to the brim I could drain 100 liters once, but then I'd lose 90 liters and only have enough water to fill it back up to 10 liters. So does it have a capacity of 100 liters? In a pedantic sense, yes, but in practice you only have 10 liters of usable capacity.
Pumped hydro storage requires very specific geography to function, so deceptive messaging is often required to convince people of its efficacy.
I'm quite aware of how it works, but I guess it was too much to expect a good faith response. That 200GWh that is 'lost' is dispatchable energy that recharges after a few months, after it is dispatched, about ~240GWh can be cycled and another 100GWh can be dispatched. The 40GWh is only a limit in precisely those cases where the dispatchable energy isn't being utilised
The 240 and 40 are also a lowball because parts of the losses were already accounted for at the beginning. That part is the double count.
When you say you have 350 GWh of storage, people expect to be able to draw 350 GWh and then store 350 GWh without waiting several months for the reservoir to fill back up. There is nothing bad-faith about pointing out how deceptive it is to say a facility has 350 GWh of storage when in reality the practical storage capacity is much smaller than that.
Also, you insist that there's an error in this analysis - "double counting" - yet you neglect to actually explain what was wrong with it. This [1] is the report that arrived at the 40 GWh figure.
> Whilst Talbingo’s level could be reduced to provide ‘space’ for Snowy 2.0 Tantangara water, this
would reduce the energy storage and efficiency of Tumut 3. As Tumut 3 has 60 GWh of storage when Talbingo is full, any reduction in Talbingo water levels would reduce that capacity, which can be delivered at 1,800 MW for up to 33 hours. A reduction would also (marginally) reduce the efficiency of Tumut 3. Another reason to keep Talbingo close to full is that a call on Snowy 2.0 to generate for 7 days would normally be most unlikely. Also, Tumut 3 can very quickly generate and create space in Talbingo for Snowy 2.0 water, though this still means discharging water to Blowering, beyond whatever spare capacity there was in Jounama at the time. So, if the current operational arrangement remains largely intact, the available capacity for Snowy 2.0 before water is lost to Blowering would be approximately 28 GL. This volume equates to a recyclable energy storage capacity for Snowy 2.0 of about 40 GWh (28/239x350) – i.e. 20 hours at 2,000 MW.
If more than 40 GWh of storage were used, Snowy 2 would reduce the capacity of other hydro electric plants. It's the estimate of 350 GWh that relied on double counting, not the 40 GWh figure. If this analysis is wrong, then actually explain what's wrong with it instead of just insisting that it's double counting.
Are you actually going to explain what's wrong with the analysis that points out how cyclic capacity is much lower than 350 GWh? Or are you just going to accuse people of bad faith when asked to defend your claims?
You can cycle 40GWh when it's full. Then you can get 350GWh out of it. Then put 240GWh back into it and cycle it a few times, then get another 350GWh out of it again in a month or two. The last 110 fills itself.
Trying to paint this as 40GWh is the very definition of bad faith.
> You can cycle 40GWh when it's full. Then you can get 350GWh out of it. Then put 240GWh back into it and cycle it a few times, then get another 350GWh out of it again in a month or two. The last 110 fills itself.
But doing so would reduce the usable storage of other facilities using the same body of water. This is explained here:
> At the extreme, the water stored in Talbingo/Jounama could be reduced to 28 GL. This would allow 160 GL of Tantangara water to be accommodated in Talbingo. This equates to a recyclable energy storage capacity for Snowy 2.0 of about 235 GWh (160/239x350). In this case the energy capacity of Tumut 3 is reduced from 60 GWh to 10 GWh, so the net energy storage is 185 GWh (235-50).
How much can Snowy 2 store without adversely impacting other storage facilities? 40 GWh.
Cycling 240 GWh of energy would almost entirely eliminate Tumut 3's storage capacity, and yield a net increase in storage capacity increase of only 185 GWh. 240 GWh is only correct if we ignore the capacity reduction of Tumut 3. And of course, I doubt Tumut 3's operators would agree to this scenario without being bought out because it'd destroy their ability to turn a profit and have a chilling effect on future hydro projects.
Why would Tumut 3 be trying to be full in a scenario where the energy is needed? They'd run their turbines and sell energy. The downstream dams dispatch their dispatchable energy and you leave enough water in the middle two that the maximum can be pumped back upstream. The extra dispatchable energy is an upside. It's like having a battery that can't be charged past 70% but fills itself the rest of the way.
So yeah, bad faith. And now you've had it pointed out twice it's just lying.
> Why would Tumut 3 be trying to be full in a scenario where the energy is needed? They'd run their turbines and sell energy.
The issue is that the maximum cyclical storage capacity is determined by the minimum of both the upper and lower reservoirs. Snowy 2's lower reservoir is Tumut 3's upper reservoir. And Tumut 3's lower reservoir is barely 1/10th the size of Snowy 3's upper reservoir. That's the bottleneck.
If your point is that we should just accept the fact that Tumut 3 can't be run at full capacity if Snow 2 is deployed, then yes that's correct.
> The downstream dams dispatch their dispatchable energy and you leave enough water in the middle two that the maximum can be pumped back upstream
Right: in order for Snowy 2 to avoid losing any water, then Tumut 3's upper reservoir (which, remember is Snowy 2's lower reservoir) has to start empty in order to accommodate the water from Snowy 2. And then Tumut 3 can't drain this water when prices are high because Snowy 2 needs it re-charge its upper reservoir when electricity prices are low. In order to run Snow 2 at maximum cyclic capacity, Tumut 3 has to essentially become totally subservient to it.
Imagine I have 3 cups: 30 Liter cup flows to/from a 15 liter cup, to a 5 liter cup. I only have 20 liters of actual cyclic storage capacity, not 50. The 15 and 5 liter cups have to start empty in order to catch the water flowing down from the 30 liter cup. If the 15 and 5 liter cup started full, they'd overflow and lose water.
So if Snowy 2 is running at max cyclic capacity, Tumut 3 can only store and release the water that can fit in its lower reservoir (the 5 liter cup). That's why running snowy 2 at max cyclic capacity would completely shaft Tumut 3.
> The extra dispatchable energy is an upside. It's like having a battery that can't be charged past 70% but fills itself the rest of the way.
But that metaphorical battery fills itself very slowly. It's not cyclic capacity and thus isn't nearly as useful.
Imagine you have company A that sells a battery that stores 1 GWh and you can charge and discharge it at a rate of 200 MW and charge it at a rate of 200 MW. Company B sells a battery that stores 10 GWh for the same price that can also discharge at a rate of 200 MW, but it's super sensitive to charging and can only be charged at a rate of 1 MW - it'll take a month and a half to get back to 10 GWh.
Which of these batteries is more useful? The first one, by a massive margin.
The system you described has a capacity of 35L (that's how much it can pour through both pipes and still be ready to cycle) and a cyclable capacity of 20L. Only someone deliberately trying to misconstrue the role of seasonal storage would characterise it as 5L. You also carefully ignored the upstream turbines which aren't two way.
> But that metaphorical battery fills itself very slowly. It's not cyclic capacity and thus isn't nearly as useful.
It's seasonal storage. The fastest it can empty or fill is a week. A renewable grid doesn't ever require it to run at max power until it is empty and then fill at max power until it is full. That's a failure mode of a grid with large centralised production that has major unplanned outages like nuclear plants.
Is a load balancing or grid forming battery more useful? Yes. Can snowy 2 form a buffer for 350GWh of energy consumption in any realistic scenario? Also yes.
> You also carefully ignored the upstream turbines which aren't two way.
What about them? Those aren't pumped hydro storage plants, they're just normal dams. There's no pump: you can't supply them with electricity to pump water back into the reservoir.
Cyclable capacity is the only type of capacity anyone cares about. Again imagine I sell someone a battery claiming it has 10 GWh of capacity. they drain 10 KWh, and then they try to charge it back up but it stops at only 3 KWh. They call tech support and I say "well, sir, the battery only has 3 KWh of cyclable capacity." I guarantee you >99% of people would think they were cheated. Saying that the battery has a capacity of 10 KWh is highly misleading; it's only true in a pedantic sense.
The whole point of Australia's storage plans is to even out solar energy's daily output. The plan is to pump the water into the upper reservoir during the day, and release it at night. The requires cyclical storage. The trickle of water that precipitation puts into the upper reservoir is negligible.
> The whole point of Australia's storage plans is to even out solar energy's daily output.
...which it can do by curtailing or releasing the dispatchable energy in tumut 2 if tumut 3 needs to adjust
also the 'trickle' is an entire watershed, not surface precipitation
In all practical senses, over the time scales for which seasonal storage is required, snowy 2 adds 240-350GWh of load shifting. Your sleight of hand doesn't work I already know where the ball is.
A solar heavy grid mostly depends on cyclic storage, not seasonal storage. The non-cyclical storage potential is acceptable for the kind of storage that isn't needed.
Looping back to my battery analogy. The extra 7 Kwh of non-cyclical storage could come in hand if you needed to use it for an extended period of time if the power goes out. But it's not useful if you need to use it every day. Australia, California, and plenty of other energy markets need cyclical storage that is used every day/night cycle to smooth out the duck curve[1].
If you had clarified that most of Snowy 2's storage capacity is not suitable for cyclical storage from the outset, this whole tangent could have been averted. Cyclical storage is the kind of storage that it's in demand, so it's important not to present non-cyclical storage that has a very limited recharge rate as equivalent to a lithium battery.
Nice backpedal, blaming other for your not reading or knowing anything about what you are attacking. What part of 2GW, 240-350GWh says diurnal to you, can you not divide?
The part where I'm responding to a commenter talking about a storage system that "turns non-disparchable [sic] power into dispatchable." Cyclical storage could effectively turn solar power into dispatchable power. If you have enough storage to store half the solar energy you generate and release it at night you've effectively turned solar energy into a dispatchable source. Seasonal storage does not do this. So it's pretty clear that this [1] comment is talking about cyclical power.
Physically they can ramp down to 50% but generation is pretty much a sunk cost at that point so it makes the bad economics even worse. That would mean that you are paying of the order of $240/MWh instead of $120/MWh.
For comparison solar/wind are about $30-40. Levelizing with pumped storage pushes that up to $60-$70.
IIRC France and Germany almost exclusively use gas for load following. Even at current prices it's vastly cheaper than using a NPP to do it.
When capex costs more than other technologies plus storage, and it reduces your neutron economy and thus the life of your fuel it's just curtailment with extra steps.
The NuScale plant incorporates unique features that enhance its ability to load follow, either due to changes in electricity demand or variable generation by renewable sources on the grid. This is accomplished through a combination of the small unit capacity of a NuScale module (50 MWe gross) and a multi-module approach to the plant design. This design strategy provides a uniquely scalable plant and gives the plant owner considerable flexibility in both the build-out of the plant and also its operation, including for load-following. The key power management options of the NuScale plant for load-following operations, designated NuFollow™, include the following:
• Taking one or more modules offline for extended periods of low grid demand or sustained wind output,
• Maneuvering reactor power for one or more modules during intermediate periods to compensate for hourly changes in demand or wind generation, or
• Bypassing the module’s steam turbine directly to the condenser for rapid responses to load or wind generation variations.
One problem is that the US regulatory agency doesn’t like load-following - apparently only one nuclear reactor in the states does it. It is common in European countries to do some load-following on time periods of hours to 2 days (although like all generation technologies, there are limitations and constraints). A section about France on the topic: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
If you're paying $80/MWh for captial and fixed O&M and $20/MWh for fuel and variable O&M, then you're still payiny 80% for the energy you don't produce.
And with wind and solar, you need storage, which costs a lot and similarly is is not used most of the time.
That said, in New Zealand the story is different, because we have some very large battery banks called hydropower lakes. However when our batteries run dry, the country has a bad time.
Currently storage is over 3TWh[1] and in 2020 NZ hydro generated 24TWh[2].
Their point is interesting. If you already have hydro and add solar or wind, can you pump back into the lakes during periods of excess, and use the hydro at night?
Yeah this is a thing. If you have enough hydro you can just turn it off entirely when the renewables are going and have a 50/50 mix.
If not, it's called pumped hydro storage (or most precisely it's blie field on river pumped hydro if it's already dammed and on a river). You need to trap the water somewhere so you don't have to pump it too far. This involves building a lower reservoir and adding pumps or modifying the turbines to be two way.
Not sure if nuscale is wanting to do it in the short term, but many of the SMR concepts include a thermal storage component.
This helps build industry experience with molten salts and would allow it to be actually dispatchable (rather than paying for energy in the form of capex and fixed O&M and then just not producing it)
How would TPMS have helped the Firestone/Ford issue? The tires weren't spontaneously losing pressure; Ford was spec'ing a low tire pressure and the tread was separating. I'm generally supportive of TPMS but struggling to figure out how your comment is responsive to the grandparent comment.
Tires do spontaneously lose tire pressure. 1-3 psi/month.
There was no margin on tire pressure. TPMS would absolutely have saved lives. General public runs consistently low tire pressure. Source: I am a member of general public and consistently forget to top up. Also, paid my way through college in the 1980s in a gas station back when full service was a thing.
Advocating for blindly making things "safer" with no regard for tradeoffs is like littering in the park. If a few people do it it's no big deal. When everyone does it you wind with bloated cars we can't see out of loaded full of tech that drives up cost, or a trashed park. Thanks for doing your part.
And as the other guy mentioned, TPMS doesn't help you when the spec for the pressure is what's wrong.
The attacks on VOIP vendors mostly used UDP amplification, which relies on having a server that can fake its source IP due to an incompetent (or complicit!) network provider, while this is a botnet (that is only about a week old).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorongosa_National_Park