The real problem is that there are no renewable solutions for base load, nuclear is the best we’ve got. Renewables are good, but they’re spotty, you can’t produce renewable power on demand or scale it on demand, and storing it is also a problem. Because of that you still need something to fill in the gaps for renewables. Now your options there are coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. That’s it, that’s your options. Pick one.
If we can successfully get cold fusion working we’ll finally have a base power generation option that doesn’t have (many) downsides, but until then nuclear power is the least bad option.
So yes, if you tell them “no nuclear”, you’re going to get more coal and gas plants, coal because it’s cheap, and gas because it’s marginally cleaner than coal.
We also shouldn’t just focus on generation, but also on consumption. If we had a smarter grid that could shift demand to fit the dynamic power generation of renewables better, that should reduce the required capacity for backup power generation quite a bit.
Base load is the lowest amount of power that gets used throughout the whole 24 hour period of a day, usually between 02:00 and 05:00. This usually runs hospitals, data centres and other critical infrastructure. The pick-ups during the day, peaking in the mornings, midday, and the biggest one in the evening is consumption by businesses, homes, schools, and basically everyone else.
This increase in demand draws more power from the generation side of the grid and drags the grid frequency down (50 Hz here in the UK & Europe, 60Hz in North America).
So the base load needs to increase output to accommodate these slower pick-ups to balance the frequency and if there is a sudden spike (like everyone boiling the kettle at halftime during a football match) then an quick response power system like hydro storage is used to quickly deliver power.
And when demand lowers, the grid frequency increases so you need to reduce the amount of power being generated else you’ll burn out the equipment being used to transmit and distribute the power.
Now technically it is possible to balance the grid frequency using just renewables if you have enough of them, for example you just apply the breaks on wind turbines you don’t need to generate power.
However, and this is the kicker, peak power generation from renewables like wind and solar won’t align with the demand for the power.
And changing people’s habits based on what power is available would be practically impossible. “Sorry lads, no football today the wind isn’t blowing fast enough”, “Sorry madam, we can’t perform an MRI today, it’s overcast and still and we’ve already used our carbon credits running the emergency coal/gas/diesel generators we have on site and we can’t spare the power” etc.
A smarter grid helps balance the supply by better predicting the demand through data collection and work out which areas are consuming more power than others.
If we have enough energy storage to store excess power from renewables to be used during high points during the day then great, we can do away with base load power stations.
But all of the technologies for grid-scale power stages are still in the research and prototyping stage. And no, Lithium Ion batteries are NOT suitable for grid-scale storage because their capacity is effected too much by temperature variations and they can’t be deep cycled (fully discharged and fully recharged).
So the result is we will need some form of base generation in the near term. This is why a lot of Europe has switched to Gas Generation. Because it produces much less pollutants than coal or oil burning (though only slightly less CO2) and they’re much quicker to build, a year or two, than traditional nuclear power stations which take about a decade.
Oh yeah, I kind of skipped over that, but I actually meant that more flexible consumption helps bring down baseload demand, and in turn the need for backup generation as well once we reach that point where that matters.
Really good explanation of the issue though. Personally, I’m a bit more optimistic about being able to be more flexible demand. Particularly EVs and heat pumps are two areas where a smart grid can help shape demand without even being noticed by the people (apart from cheaper tariffs) as long as the car is fully charged in the morning and the room temperature is maintained.
Yes a smarter grid with dynamic control over high powered devices like heat pumps and EV/Hybrid Car-to-Grid chargers to actively control consumption would be a good idea.
Heck, there’s even been trials for micro-grids with local power generation being distributed out with something called Open Energy Monitor to schedule in things like washing machines and dryers for members of the small community co-operative that run the micro grid.
The biggest cost with EV Car-to-Grid is the cost of the vehicle and then after that, if your house / business premises is older than roughly 30 years, the power cables into the house are not rated for the power delivery and will have to be replaced.
With heat pumps you again have the issue of the cost of the heat pump itself and the installation.
Both are solvable but it will require large amounts of government grant money to do so.
Hydro is good when it’s available but also has some significant problems. The biggest is that it’s an ecological disaster even if the reach of that disaster is far more limited. The areas upstream of the dam flood while the ones downstream are in constant danger of flooding and drought. In the worst case if the dam collapses it can wipe entire towns off the map with little or no warning. It is objectively far more dangerous and damaging to the environment than any nuclear reactor. The only upside it has is that it’s effectively infinitely renewable barring massive shifts in weather patterns or geology.
All of that is of course assuming that hydro is even an option. There’s a very specific set of geological and weather features that must be present, so the locations you can power with hydro power without significant transport problems are limited.
It’s certainly an option, and better than coal, oil, or gas, but still generally worse than nuclear.
Why? It’s an active area of research with several companies and universities trying to solve the problem. There’s also a chance hot fusion succeeds although to my knowledge nobody has actually gotten close to solving that particular problem either. Tokamaks and such are still energy negative when taken as a whole (a couple have claimed energy positive status, but only by excluding the power requirements of certain parts of their operation). I guess maybe I should have just said fusion instead of cold fusion, but either way there are no working energy positive fusion systems currently.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not claiming that anyone has a working cold fusion device, quite the opposite. Nobody has been able to demonstrate a working cold fusion device to date. Anybody claiming they have is either lying or mistaken. But by the same token nobody has been able to show an energy positive hot fusion device either. There’s a couple that have come close but only by doing things like hand waving away the cost to produce the fuel, or part of the energy cost of operating the containment vessel, to say nothing of the significant long term maintenance costs. I’ve not seen evidence of anybody getting even remotely close to a financially viable fusion reactor of any kind.
Yeah the difference is hot fusion works, see: the sun. Cold fusion would require a fundamental change in how we understand physics works. It’s junk science.
Hmm, it’s true that cold fusion would need some kind of physics breakthrough, although I think it might be going too far to call it junk science. To be entirely fair energy positive hot fusion also requires some kind of physics breakthrough though, although potentially a far less extreme one.
The Sun works because of its mass which generates the necessary temperature and pressures to trigger the fusion. Replicating those pressures and temperatures here though is incredibly energy intensive. In theory, on paper the energy released by the fusion reaction should exceed those energy requirements, but when you factor in that doing so requires exceedingly rare and expensive to create fuel most if not all of that energy surplus vanishes. Nobody has been able to prove that they can get more energy out of the reaction than the energy cost of creating the fuel and triggering the reaction, so until that happens hot fusion is far from proved either. There’s a few research projects that look promising, but it’s far from guaranteed that they’ll pan out.
Cold fusion doesn’t work. It’s self contradicting once you learn the very basics of fusion. It was billed as a solution to dealing with the difficulties of material science and the heat generated by hot fusion.
Also, the simplest solution dealing with energy demands is to reduce our demand, but the people in the media demand perpetual growth.
Nuclear is not an option since it can not be scaled up and down fast enough to follow changes in demand (or the changes in very predictable renewable output) , so you’re left with pumped storage, grid interconnectivity , and demand shifting until we can cheaply use the excess in renewables to make synthetic fuels.
What kind of crack are you smoking? The entire point of the nuclear is so that it can take the base load that we rely on Fossil fuels to cover so that we can use renewables and battery storage in combination with nuclear power to meet peak demand.
The entire point of the nuclear is so that it can take the base load
The idea to cover baseload demand with its own baseload power generation is an outdated concept though from a time when demand was inflexible and generation could be controlled to fit. Now that generation is dynamic, having baseload power generation is the opposite of what’s needed. We need flexible backup generation and more flexible demand to bring down baseload demand.
I’m on renewable crack, you should try it sometimes. I promise it is only slightly addictive.
My point is that nuclear is only good for base load unless there is storage and if you want to use renewables to cover peak demand then you also need storage. but if you have storage then there is no reason not to use 100% renewables
You can also chose to use 100% nuclear, either enough to cover peak demand (and throw away the rest when not needed) or in combination with storage. It just going to be so much more expensive…
The real problem is that there are no renewable solutions for base load, nuclear is the best we’ve got. Renewables are good, but they’re spotty, you can’t produce renewable power on demand or scale it on demand, and storing it is also a problem. Because of that you still need something to fill in the gaps for renewables. Now your options there are coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. That’s it, that’s your options. Pick one.
If we can successfully get cold fusion working we’ll finally have a base power generation option that doesn’t have (many) downsides, but until then nuclear power is the least bad option.
So yes, if you tell them “no nuclear”, you’re going to get more coal and gas plants, coal because it’s cheap, and gas because it’s marginally cleaner than coal.
We also shouldn’t just focus on generation, but also on consumption. If we had a smarter grid that could shift demand to fit the dynamic power generation of renewables better, that should reduce the required capacity for backup power generation quite a bit.
Base load is not the same as back up power.
Base load is the lowest amount of power that gets used throughout the whole 24 hour period of a day, usually between 02:00 and 05:00. This usually runs hospitals, data centres and other critical infrastructure. The pick-ups during the day, peaking in the mornings, midday, and the biggest one in the evening is consumption by businesses, homes, schools, and basically everyone else.
This increase in demand draws more power from the generation side of the grid and drags the grid frequency down (50 Hz here in the UK & Europe, 60Hz in North America).
So the base load needs to increase output to accommodate these slower pick-ups to balance the frequency and if there is a sudden spike (like everyone boiling the kettle at halftime during a football match) then an quick response power system like hydro storage is used to quickly deliver power.
And when demand lowers, the grid frequency increases so you need to reduce the amount of power being generated else you’ll burn out the equipment being used to transmit and distribute the power.
Now technically it is possible to balance the grid frequency using just renewables if you have enough of them, for example you just apply the breaks on wind turbines you don’t need to generate power.
However, and this is the kicker, peak power generation from renewables like wind and solar won’t align with the demand for the power.
And changing people’s habits based on what power is available would be practically impossible. “Sorry lads, no football today the wind isn’t blowing fast enough”, “Sorry madam, we can’t perform an MRI today, it’s overcast and still and we’ve already used our carbon credits running the emergency coal/gas/diesel generators we have on site and we can’t spare the power” etc.
A smarter grid helps balance the supply by better predicting the demand through data collection and work out which areas are consuming more power than others.
If we have enough energy storage to store excess power from renewables to be used during high points during the day then great, we can do away with base load power stations.
But all of the technologies for grid-scale power stages are still in the research and prototyping stage. And no, Lithium Ion batteries are NOT suitable for grid-scale storage because their capacity is effected too much by temperature variations and they can’t be deep cycled (fully discharged and fully recharged).
So the result is we will need some form of base generation in the near term. This is why a lot of Europe has switched to Gas Generation. Because it produces much less pollutants than coal or oil burning (though only slightly less CO2) and they’re much quicker to build, a year or two, than traditional nuclear power stations which take about a decade.
Oh yeah, I kind of skipped over that, but I actually meant that more flexible consumption helps bring down baseload demand, and in turn the need for backup generation as well once we reach that point where that matters.
Really good explanation of the issue though. Personally, I’m a bit more optimistic about being able to be more flexible demand. Particularly EVs and heat pumps are two areas where a smart grid can help shape demand without even being noticed by the people (apart from cheaper tariffs) as long as the car is fully charged in the morning and the room temperature is maintained.
Those are both good points.
Yes a smarter grid with dynamic control over high powered devices like heat pumps and EV/Hybrid Car-to-Grid chargers to actively control consumption would be a good idea.
Heck, there’s even been trials for micro-grids with local power generation being distributed out with something called Open Energy Monitor to schedule in things like washing machines and dryers for members of the small community co-operative that run the micro grid.
The biggest cost with EV Car-to-Grid is the cost of the vehicle and then after that, if your house / business premises is older than roughly 30 years, the power cables into the house are not rated for the power delivery and will have to be replaced.
With heat pumps you again have the issue of the cost of the heat pump itself and the installation.
Both are solvable but it will require large amounts of government grant money to do so.
How about… Hydro?
Hydro is good when it’s available but also has some significant problems. The biggest is that it’s an ecological disaster even if the reach of that disaster is far more limited. The areas upstream of the dam flood while the ones downstream are in constant danger of flooding and drought. In the worst case if the dam collapses it can wipe entire towns off the map with little or no warning. It is objectively far more dangerous and damaging to the environment than any nuclear reactor. The only upside it has is that it’s effectively infinitely renewable barring massive shifts in weather patterns or geology.
All of that is of course assuming that hydro is even an option. There’s a very specific set of geological and weather features that must be present, so the locations you can power with hydro power without significant transport problems are limited.
It’s certainly an option, and better than coal, oil, or gas, but still generally worse than nuclear.
Hydro also creates methane releases as the flooded forests rot in the water.
the viability of all your opinions are now immediately called into question
Why? It’s an active area of research with several companies and universities trying to solve the problem. There’s also a chance hot fusion succeeds although to my knowledge nobody has actually gotten close to solving that particular problem either. Tokamaks and such are still energy negative when taken as a whole (a couple have claimed energy positive status, but only by excluding the power requirements of certain parts of their operation). I guess maybe I should have just said fusion instead of cold fusion, but either way there are no working energy positive fusion systems currently.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not claiming that anyone has a working cold fusion device, quite the opposite. Nobody has been able to demonstrate a working cold fusion device to date. Anybody claiming they have is either lying or mistaken. But by the same token nobody has been able to show an energy positive hot fusion device either. There’s a couple that have come close but only by doing things like hand waving away the cost to produce the fuel, or part of the energy cost of operating the containment vessel, to say nothing of the significant long term maintenance costs. I’ve not seen evidence of anybody getting even remotely close to a financially viable fusion reactor of any kind.
Yeah the difference is hot fusion works, see: the sun. Cold fusion would require a fundamental change in how we understand physics works. It’s junk science.
Hmm, it’s true that cold fusion would need some kind of physics breakthrough, although I think it might be going too far to call it junk science. To be entirely fair energy positive hot fusion also requires some kind of physics breakthrough though, although potentially a far less extreme one.
The Sun works because of its mass which generates the necessary temperature and pressures to trigger the fusion. Replicating those pressures and temperatures here though is incredibly energy intensive. In theory, on paper the energy released by the fusion reaction should exceed those energy requirements, but when you factor in that doing so requires exceedingly rare and expensive to create fuel most if not all of that energy surplus vanishes. Nobody has been able to prove that they can get more energy out of the reaction than the energy cost of creating the fuel and triggering the reaction, so until that happens hot fusion is far from proved either. There’s a few research projects that look promising, but it’s far from guaranteed that they’ll pan out.
Cold fusion doesn’t work. It’s self contradicting once you learn the very basics of fusion. It was billed as a solution to dealing with the difficulties of material science and the heat generated by hot fusion.
Also, the simplest solution dealing with energy demands is to reduce our demand, but the people in the media demand perpetual growth.
Nuclear is not an option since it can not be scaled up and down fast enough to follow changes in demand (or the changes in very predictable renewable output) , so you’re left with pumped storage, grid interconnectivity , and demand shifting until we can cheaply use the excess in renewables to make synthetic fuels.
What kind of crack are you smoking? The entire point of the nuclear is so that it can take the base load that we rely on Fossil fuels to cover so that we can use renewables and battery storage in combination with nuclear power to meet peak demand.
The idea to cover baseload demand with its own baseload power generation is an outdated concept though from a time when demand was inflexible and generation could be controlled to fit. Now that generation is dynamic, having baseload power generation is the opposite of what’s needed. We need flexible backup generation and more flexible demand to bring down baseload demand.
I’m on renewable crack, you should try it sometimes. I promise it is only slightly addictive.
My point is that nuclear is only good for base load unless there is storage and if you want to use renewables to cover peak demand then you also need storage. but if you have storage then there is no reason not to use 100% renewables
You can also chose to use 100% nuclear, either enough to cover peak demand (and throw away the rest when not needed) or in combination with storage. It just going to be so much more expensive…