There is only enough uranium to provide half of the world’s power for fifty years.
That’s what people said about oil in the 19th century. We know how to mine Uranium from seawater, so if we have a problem with mining it the traditional way we can just take it from the ocean that has plenty.
Smart grids can solve the base load power problem with renewables.
No. Smart grids do nothing to give you energy in dark winter months.
Renewable energy sources have become cheaper than nuclear power in recent years.
Wind and PV will require grid-scale energy storage. At this rate it looks like batteries will get there first, but there are other possibilities. Any fair accounting for the cost of renewables vs nuclear has to account for this part, since nuclear is a baseload source in its own right and doesn’t need the batteries. The “cheap” renewables right now are wind and photovoltaic.
However, there are many baseload renewable sources, such as hydro, ocean wave, geothermal, solar thermal, and high-altitude wind. Most of the easy geothermal and hydro sources have been tapped already, and more would be damaging to their local environment.
Solar thermal and enhanced hot dry rock geothermal have great potential as renewable baseload sources. They work practically anywhere, although not equally well anywhere.
Wind doesn’t blow everyday either. Waves do have advantages of being constant but we don’t see wave powered strom generations at the price/quantity of the others.
Thanks for your counter-counterpoints. I’ve added them to my notes.
Re. smart grids: Of course they don’t produce energy themselves. We would need the capacity to produce enough during winter. But they address the problem of supply variability. And the energy grid modelers at my friend’s company have found that they can address it sufficiently.
Supply variability happens on different time-spans. Batteries and smart grid technology allow you to handle 24 hour varability.
Unforunately, if you use mainly renewable energy, a solution that just handles the 24 hour variability while not handling the variability over longer timescales doesn’t bring you far.
You likely need to turn the surplus energy in the summer into hydrogen or methane, store that and then burn it when needed with turbines. Those turbines can then not only handle the variability over a year but also that over shorter timeframes.
Failures of handling electricity variation for an hour gives you an outage of a hour which isn’t a big deal. On the other hand failing in handling inter-month variation and having a few days of power outage is very costly.
That’s what people said about oil in the 19th century. We know how to mine Uranium from seawater, so if we have a problem with mining it the traditional way we can just take it from the ocean that has plenty.
No. Smart grids do nothing to give you energy in dark winter months.
Not for 365/7/24 energy needs.
Wind and PV will require grid-scale energy storage. At this rate it looks like batteries will get there first, but there are other possibilities. Any fair accounting for the cost of renewables vs nuclear has to account for this part, since nuclear is a baseload source in its own right and doesn’t need the batteries. The “cheap” renewables right now are wind and photovoltaic.
However, there are many baseload renewable sources, such as hydro, ocean wave, geothermal, solar thermal, and high-altitude wind. Most of the easy geothermal and hydro sources have been tapped already, and more would be damaging to their local environment.
Solar thermal and enhanced hot dry rock geothermal have great potential as renewable baseload sources. They work practically anywhere, although not equally well anywhere.
Wind and wave are renewables.
Wind doesn’t blow everyday either. Waves do have advantages of being constant but we don’t see wave powered strom generations at the price/quantity of the others.
Thanks for your counter-counterpoints. I’ve added them to my notes.
Re. smart grids: Of course they don’t produce energy themselves. We would need the capacity to produce enough during winter. But they address the problem of supply variability. And the energy grid modelers at my friend’s company have found that they can address it sufficiently.
Supply variability happens on different time-spans. Batteries and smart grid technology allow you to handle 24 hour varability.
Unforunately, if you use mainly renewable energy, a solution that just handles the 24 hour variability while not handling the variability over longer timescales doesn’t bring you far.
You likely need to turn the surplus energy in the summer into hydrogen or methane, store that and then burn it when needed with turbines. Those turbines can then not only handle the variability over a year but also that over shorter timeframes.
Failures of handling electricity variation for an hour gives you an outage of a hour which isn’t a big deal. On the other hand failing in handling inter-month variation and having a few days of power outage is very costly.
Yeah, 24 h variability is what I meant. Producing hydrogen or methane for longer-term storage sounds interesting.