Days before President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office and took actions to stall the transition to clean energy, a disaster unfolded on the other side of the country that may have an outsize effect on the pace of the transition.
A fire broke out last Thursday at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California, one of the largest battery energy storage systems in the world. The fire raged through the weekend, forcing local officials to evacuate nearby homes and close roads.
Battery storage is an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels. It works in tandem with solar and wind power to provide electricity during periods when the renewable resources aren’t available. But lithium-ion batteries, the most common technology used in storage systems, are flammable. And if they catch fire, it can be difficult to extinguish.
Last week’s fire is the latest and largest of several at the Moss Landing site in recent years, and I expect that it will become the main example opponents of carbon-free electricity use to try to stop battery development in other places.
France auditors recently put out a report in which they criticized the high cost of their nuclear program and requested a moratorium for new projects in other countries.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-far-ready-build-six-new-nuclear-reactors-auditor-says-2025-01-14/
well yes at 70% of its energy supply, France probably has too much nuclear now that renewables are cheaper. They are a massive outlier in that regard. This is not about making nuclear the one single energy source everywhere, but to provide a baseline load for stability and to reduce grid infrastructure upgrades like storage and new connections to distributed solar and wind farms. The article also says they hope to export their nuclear expertise to countries who are interested in nuclear, so they clearly do believe in the technology.
Of what I’ve read about French recent problematic projects, the high cost there was due to French bureaucracy, organizational mess and probably corruption, not due to anything about technology itself.
One should factor that in always. Building roads in Russia is so expensive definitely not because of anything unclear with the technology or the climate.
But the technology requires this amount of bureaucracy, else you get big problems. I trust physics, but i don’t trust humans. Especially if they can get money by skimping on security. The risks with renawables (except dams) are way smaller.
No they are not. There is toxic waste, there are environmental risks, everything basically.
Especially hydroelectric energy is a very small version of the Dyson sphere by its impact on the ecosystems involved. Renewable, but sure as hell not green.
While nuclear energy uses, ahem, nuclear fuel, which is not very renewable, and nuclear waste needs some time to calm down, but it’s very green.
Wind energy impacts birds.
Tide energy, well, impacts everything that functions well when it’s not collected.
Anyway, one can just integrate stats of losses from nuclear energy and from the rest and see that they are not.
Yeah, not gonna write a big reply to this.
If your that strict, nothing is green. Its about minimizing the impact. And you forgot to mention the mining of uranium.
Please compare the impact to housecats, cars and agriculture.
Hydroelectric energy is worse than burning coal. It’s not being strict, it’s being adequate.
Housecats are a catastrophe, cars - not so much, agriculture - modern agriculture can have little impact for very good output.
We started with nuclear energy which is greener than solar panels and wind turbines. It still is.
[Citation required]
All are way bigger than windturbines. And the biggest is habit loss, which is mainly driven by agriculture.
But the issue is, it’s too expensive to build. And the small reactor startup project is also not producing power and seems to be built on hype
too expensive compared to what?
SMRs specifically are a new developing technology. I suppose it’s possible they are all hype, but with many big tech firms investing in them to power datacenters, I tend to think there’s a good chance they’ll work out in the end. China’s first SMR will be up and running soon, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
Renewables + Storage + Grid.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s good to sink so much money in this, we could build more renewables instead. But you’re right, we will see
again in France specifically I agree pivoting to more renewables makes sense because they already have an abundance of nuclear. But if we look at the earth as a whole, renewables don’t work everywhere, they take up a lot of space, and will require a TON of storage to provide reliable power during peak and off-peak usage. If you actually factor in all that grid storage and distributed infrastructure needed for renewables the overall cost difference to nuclear is not nearly as bad as the usual LCOE calculations make it seem since 100% of nuclear’s cost is baked in up front.
Where do renewables not work? I’d say they work at even more places, because you don’t need such a developed infrastructure to set it up. Everyone can wire up a small solar farm after a few hours of YouTube, i wouldn’t trust myself with reactor maintenance.
Nuclear also needs storage for peaks. You don’t want to have to build enough nuclear for peak production which then gets shut down all the time, driving up your LCOE. You want your expensive plant to run all the time. Also you need storage if you have an unplanned maintenance, because then you lose a relevant percentage of production with little to no warning.
And storage is getting cheaper and better every year. The bigger issue would be a grid that can shovel power from one end of a continent to the other in case of adverse weather.
We need less space for solar to power the world than we use for golf courses right now, so I’d say landuse is a non issue. Because you can use roofs and such even less.
the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow consistently everywhere. especially in winter the farther you get from the equator.
of course, but even if we put solar on every rooftop in the world that won’t solve our energy demands.
I never said you should. from the beginning I said we need nuclear for the baseline which will help reduce the need for grid storage. yes, some grid storage will be needed.
so would nuclear if we actually did it and improved regulatory inefficiencies.
land use isn’t an issue in rural places, but it absolutely is in more densely populated places near cities and datacenter hubs. The world is not homogenous.
Don’t forget hydro, look at Norway, it’s pretty far away from the equator but has almost 100% renewables. Island as well. There are suboptimal locations, but in the end there is no country which can’t use renewables for all electricity needs.
All rooftops should be enough but parking lots and agrarsolar would be also solutions. So even if we only use solar (which we don’t ) it should be possible.
Renewables create a base load, the problem are demand peaks following overcast days. And there npps don’t help.
Maybe, but not fast enough. We need the power immediately and battery are already in the steep part of their growth phase. We can’t spend several decades learning how to do it right. Then we could also just wait for fusion.
Then we use power lines like we do already. Most power plants right now are also not in cities, so I don’t understand the argument. Would you also want to build the npps in/near cities?