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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Nuclear is expensive and dangerous to life. It should be avoided going forward.
Statistics would disagree. It is very expensive though, so it should be one of many solutions.
In my opinion should be:
Storage could just be reusing batteries from old EVs to store energy. Already saw some cases of companies actually using the EV itself to store the energy produced from renewables (for some reason I can’t remember it was more profitable to use it like that).
The challenge with using EVs or even residential batteries for grid backup is that grid storage would wear out those EV batteries. When I'm looking at the likely life of an EV battery based on miles traveled, ok, it should last a decent number of total miles. If part of grid storage, that could wear out a typical EV battery in 3 years. LFP batteries might get you 8 years under that load. Not great.
Also, the range of the car after being plugged in as grid storage. Either you guarantee a decent range, limiting their usefulness as grid offset, or you are screwed.
EVs could make for awesome home backup power to cover complete grid outages, but only if those are fairly rare. Daily cycling of NMC and LFP will noticeably degrade the lifespan of the battery. Maybe the power company could compensate for the excess wear or something, but it's not a trivial matter.
My guess is that the electricity prices were so pricy that the actually using the EV to store energy from the solar cells actually made sense economically. In a normal functioning economy I highly doubt anyone sane would do it. But, it’s possible to do it, so it seems using recycled EV batteries is a good idea for cheap grid storage. As far as I know recycling a battery is fairly easy and cheap, only issue is current lithium prices makes it not worthy.
The only issue I foresee with using regular batteries as grid wide storage is cost. Many renewable sources are inherently unstable in output, so one would have to plan for potentially multi day deficits in production.
At least in my country some alternative storage solutions are being planned. One company wants to use excess wind power to produce hydrogen. That hydrogen could then be used to offset potential production deficits.
Otherwise I very much agree with your list.
In addition to battery designs that scale better than Li-ion (e.g. redox-flow batteries), I've heard some places are looking at options for "mechanical" storage: When you have energy surplus, pump water back into reservoirs, and generate hydropower when you have a deficit.
The amount of energy that can be stored in existing reservoirs is massive, so this could make hydropower function as the "buffer" for other renewable energy sources. I think the idea sounds promising, the major issue is that it's less viable (or not viable) for places with flat topology.
This is a very promising approach I've heard of also. Places with reservoirs could benefit massively from super cheap energy.
In other places an alternative approach could be what we kinda do already. Nuclear or some other stable production as a foundation that is augmented by renewables. The foundation would guarantee that energy prices wouldn't fluctuate too much, but we could still reap the benefits of cheap renewables when available.
That seems to be a good idea. There are more efficient hydrogen production methods in the works as far as I know so it would help to have more innovation in that field, specially with the production and the storage. If we could find a lightweight solution to store hydrogen safely we could probably replace fossil fuels in planes.
My personal dream scenario is one, where renewables and nuclear become such cheap production methods, that electricity is cheap and abundant.
At that point one could just use that energy to synthesize fuel to avoid the hassle that is hydrogen storage.
We need to go carbon negative, not neutral. So, everywhere we can avoid dump CO2 into the atmosphere is good.
This being said, if we could do it from carbon captured CO2...
Thats the point of having energy abundance. When electricity costs are low enough, it wouldn't matter, if the source of synthetic fuel was not the most energy efficient one.
Still way less deaths compared to what fossil fuels already did to us (not to mention the rest of nature), like cancer, mining related nastiness including transport, etc. Also there is more radioactive pollution from coal than nuclear plants (bcs of the volume & exhausts dumped into the air).
Username checks out.
Could you please explain why you think this is the case?