Due to technological trajectories set in motion by past policy, a global irreversible solar tipping point may have passed where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets, without any further climate policies
Seems too conservative projection for wind energy, but yeah most experts agree solar will be dominant.
I mean I understand this is modeling a pathway with no further climate policy, but still wind being second cheapest option should gain more share.
I think the assumption is that since they are large and but the first most cost efficient, it doesn't make sense to increase its share. Why not just put more solar instead?
I see from this paper that compared with Way et al. (2022), they introduced "learning in operational costs, rather than only in CAPEX", which benefits solar and offshore wind, also "solar power and wind energy see a higher learning rate than previous model versions". So very surprised wind not gaining more.
It is difficult to compare the results of Way et al. (2022) and this paper directly since in the former final and usable energy were reported and here it is electricity that is reported in the text, although from their relative share (both across time and wind vs solar at a given time), the conditions for solar is probably more favorable and wind growth is more constrained in this paper.
(Note: if I recalled correctly, Way et al. were the first to develop this system dynamics model that made learning rates endogenous feedback processes.)
Why won't we build more nuclear plants?
Politics mostly. It would be a solution, but it requires building a ton and building them fast. We can build nuclear power plants in a few years, but it usually takes a decade to work through the legal hassles opponents will put through. When factored in, not worth it anymore. And I am really angry at them because we could already be in a post-fossil fuel without this misguided pseudo-environmentalism.
Take a look at the cost overruns for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 and it'll answer your question.
I like nuclear a lot too, but it does have its drawbacks:
Expensive. Plants are expensive to build and maintain. They also take like 5-10 years to build from scratch.
Water intensive. In the coming century water is going to a really hot commodity as water reserves dwindle. Having a power source that relies on lots of water might not be a good idea.
Fuel sources. Not about what's fueling it but where is coming from. Uranium is only found in certain deposits and if your country either doesn't have a source in house then they need to have political clout and money to obtain it. Everyone likes to point to France as a nuclear powered country but where did they get their uranium? Niger. The same Niger that just had an anti-french coup, cutting off their supply.
Maybe future tech like SMRs will make it more viable but for now the solar/geothermal/wind route will be a much quicker and easier replacement for fossil fuels.
Regarding scarce uranium, if more money was poured into perfecting a thorium based molten salt design, we would have enough readily available fuel to power the world for over a thousand years, as Thorium deposits are quite common.
However I'm not hopeful that Nuclear will become a significant power source in any reasonable timeframe, at least in america, due to the massive amount of red tape making building them slow and costly. Though I hope I'm wrong about that.
Niger supplied 20% of Frances uranium over the last ten years. The coup is not a threat to Frances electricity supply at all as France can buy urnanium ore from others countries with ease. The problem is that Russia has nearly half of the global uranium enrichment capacity and we all have seen that Russia should not be trusted when it comes to energy security.
For 1. grid size matters a lot. It is always sunny and/or windy somewhwere, so if you can transport the electricity with a good enough grid you can cut down on storage. In the EU the lowest share of renewables on a single day was 23% of electricity production of what over the entire year was 37.6%. 8.3% of total production on the worst day was from solar and wind the rest mainly hydro and biomass. Btw that was 06/12/2022.
Point is that seasonal electricty storage for renewables grid is absolutly not needed and for a continetal sized grid you mostly run to about a days worth of storage and some smart grid management. We also already have hydro power reservoirs, which have some truely massive storage capacity, if used not for baseload, but for dispatch.
Hydrostorage is absolutely nothing and can not be significantly increased, just like hydro power. Take a calculator and see how long it lasts. World wide it's 180 GW of power and 1.6 TWh energy, as per wiki. The USA need over 4000 TWh yearly, they empty the whole world capacity of hydro storage from 100 to 0% in 3 hours. Just the USA alone.
That was exactly my point, you do not need a global grid for this to work a continent sized one already does a great job. That was why I used the EU as an example. As for seasonal storage the worst month last year had 42.8% renewables, which was March, the best was February so a month earlier with 60.0%. The average was 49.7%. So we are talking 20% up or down. That is also true when you just look at wind and solar. Average was 47.15GWh and the worst month was 40.97GWh and the best 59.00GWh. So again fairly even distribution over the entire year. So no need for seasonal storage, unless you have something super cheap.
That is real world data and not some crazy stuff. You basicly just have to overbuilt by 50% and add a days worth of storage to the EU grid to work and the ability to move around electricity.
Also I am talking about hydro power, which per wiki only makes up 16% of global generation. That has storage capabilities built in current reservoir power plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#Properties
You need enough storage to get over a Dunkelflaute . How much is that for Europe? How much do we have now?
Right now Sweden and Norway have 118GWh of hydro storage and there is more in other EU countries. That alone is enough to power the EU for two weeks or so. But even that is not entirly needed as Europe is large and diverse enough geographically to have different weather in different countries. So power can still be moved. Even on the worst day of last year wind and solar were still able to produce 8.5% of the EUs electricity production so 37% of average levels.
At 2800 TWh of annual electricity demand/production in Europe, 118 GWh lasts for about 22 minutes. 2 weeks would take 1000x the storage capacity, about 100 TWh.
Sorry, I mean TWh and not GWh. For Norway it is 87TWh as here: https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftproduksjon/
and for Sweden as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228782162_A_Nordic_energy_market_under_stress#pf2
So yes it is a thousand times more, my bad for mixing up units.
Thank you. However, that is the yearly amount of energy. Not the maximum storage capacity at one point. Like (dis)charging a battery once <-> discharging it many times over the year. So over the whole year this massive storage was able to produce the energy needed in 2 weeks.
It is absolutly the storage capacity at one point. . As in the first link:
Norway has more than 1000 hydropower storage reservoirs with a total capacity of more than 87 TWh. The 30 largest reservoirs provide about half the storage capacity. Total reservoir capacity corresponds to 70 % of annual Norwegian electricity consumption.
That is not that crazy. It just means that less then 10% of global hydro reservoir storage is in two European countries, with a lot of water and mountains. Hydro is by far the biggest storage capacity we have. To put it in the words of the iea and globally speaking:
The reservoirs of all existing conventional hydropower plants combined can store a total of 1 500 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electrical energy in one full cycle – the equivalent of almost half of the European Union’s current annual electricity demand. This is about 170 times more energy than the global fleet of pumped storage hydropower plants can hold today – and almost 2 200 times more than all battery capacity, including electric vehicles.
Source: https://www.iea.org/reports/hydropower-special-market-report/executive-summary
So that are the numbers for dams (since pumped storage is extra and much smaller). That is not (electrically) rechargable storage. It is storage, but bound to the influx of water and with many constraints about how much water can be released at what point, how much it has to have at least or at most at which point in year to prevent floods or droughts etc. That is not the kind of storage we need for solar and wind. And while the storage capacity is high, the available power output is not. Since they maximum anyone would install is going to be correlated to the influx of water, not to the fastest possible draining of the reservoir - which nobody would ever want to do.
Also, thank you for the interesting discussion.
Most of that is fine during a dunkelflaute. The only really big issue is not having enough generating capacity, but even that likely works out. The most fuel generation during a single week last year was 24,302GWh so 144GW running throu. Sweden and Norway can generate 49GW in hydro at full power. Even the best weeks still have over 12TWh of fossil fuele generation in the EU, so that certainly goes a long way to solving the problem of dunkelflaute.
But you are right, most of the year smaller storages to cover a night or so, is all you need. So you still want some TWh of battery and pumped hydro storage. That preserves hydro storage and is needed to balance the grid. Biomass is also worth a look for long term storage.
future tech like SMRs
it's not future tech, it's present tech
Cost mostly. It's really expensive, enough so that the first ~80% of the shift off fossil fuels is going to happen using solar + wind + storage.
To make sense for the last 20%, it's going to need to come down in price enough to beat the emerging longer-duration storage technologies. Not at all clear to me that it can do that.
I think you're best suited to answer your own question. Since you're the one who wants to build nuclear, why don't you do it?
If the answer is expertise, no problem, just hire people.
If the answer is money, just band together with others. Online discussions always have tons of people who want the same thing you do -- you can pool your resources.
big oil kneecapped it and enviromentalists still think they're thinly veiled bomb factories. you can tell because you substitute "thorium" for "nuclear" and favorability shoots up way more than you'd expect taking into account non-hysteria reasons
everything about energy production