Clean energy for Poland

One of my investments is Farmland Properties, a REIT under the ticker symbol FPI. Other than farming they are also into renewable energy. Wind power is one such thing, as they are able to put windmills onto farmland at minimal impact to crop yields of that land. Double win. (they don’t get that benefit with their solar investments of course).

Up in North Texas over the past decade we’ve seen a lot of windmills go up. And they are all in farm lands.

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Okay, but that’s kinda the opposite of what the paper you linked to said. If you are aiming for a zero carbon grid and are using only renewables, you have to plan for the windless, sunless week. That means you need a huge of amount of renewables which are mainly idle except for those times of peak demand and could provide plenty of baseload the rest of the time. If you use nuclear for dispatchable energy then you don’t need all that excess capacity.

Here’s a quote I think sums it up:

This (additional excess renewable capacity requirement) represents an opportunity for nuclear technology, as the installed capacity needed to meet demand using nuclear generation is much less than the build-out required for renewables. Because nuclear plants are dispatchable (they can operate when needed and are not dependent on an intermittent fuel source), their average operating capacity factors are substantially higher than the operating capacity factors for solar and wind generators without battery storage capacity.

To put it another way, wind and solar are already cheaper than nuclear in many places and are much faster to build. But dispatchable nuclear’s advantage is that it reduces the amount of wind and solar needed to meet peak demand by a lot.

The same thinking applies to carbon capture technology. It doesn’t make financial sense at all, unless you included the avoided cost of building excess renewables.

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It matters because the 30% number is an overall average. Some days it might be 5%, other days 40%. The 5% days are generally few but often high overall demand days (mid summer). You can’t save several days of more than average for next week when it will be high demand and low output. Of course, technically, you can with a big enough battery. But it doesn’t make economical sense to do this when it happens just a few times per year. There have been many studies on this over the years.

Mike

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I get what you are saying. Here is a real example:
I have enough solar panels to cover my entire year’s usage with maybe 25% spare (used to charge EVs) But the difference between summer and winter production is great. Ignoring EV charging, I have 3-4 months in the winter where I use 2-3x more than I generate. I also have 4-5 months in the summer where I generate ~1.5 - 2x what I consume. The other months are about even. I would need a month or two capacity (maybe more) to store the summer excess for use in on winter days … and I live in sunny warm CA.
To put this in perspective, I would need to buy and install 30 to 50 Tesla power walls to be totally off the electric grid and I heat with NG.
Admittedly, my panels aren’t tracking the sun and are facing mostly west, so I lose ~10% to 20% from optimum. If I were to double my panel count I could have half the number of batteries and have energy to waste in the summer. I could double again and again to get the battery costs down.
There are plenty of web sites where you can do all these calculations for your own home and location.

But that only addresses residential usage. We also have to take into account things like big factories that don’t have the real estate to just over install summer capacity so they can survive the winter. And then there is the thing you and I don’t worry about – week or two long snow storms.

Mike

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I wasn’t aware of that. It would be nice to have a source for it.

But it just means batteries - and those specific batteries - wouldn’t be good at utility scale. There are other storage options, including the simple water on a hill storage. It also means that the batteries mentioned would not be competing with batteries for automotive use. Those can certainly hold a charge for more than 3 hours.

–Peter

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The MIT study is over 4 years old and does not reflect new wind turbines and solar panels or the history of nuclear reactors. The MIT report makes a big assumption on 80 years for AP1000. Nuclear power plants start to show serious signs of ear after 40 years as evidence by replacement/repair of expensive major components, pumps and piping. You should know that PWRs around the world have needed to replace their steam generators, reactor vessels heads, and piping due to corrosion. Currently half the French reactors for months are shutdown for repairs on these major items. The new wind turbine will be 2X, not 4X.

Capacity factor has no meaning because I was comparing the maximum output for a AP1000 reactor at 90% capacity factor being 9 TWh to a whole bunch of wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and biomass with various capacity factors producing 27 TWh. As I said before 27 TWh of renewables can be built in half the time and half the cost of one AP1000.

I think the world will struggle to keep nuclear power at about 10% of the total electrical generation in the world. The current 30% generation by renewables in the world will eventually grow to 90% in a carbon free world electrical generation.

Jaak

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There are many ways to get dispatchable power produced by having a flexible grid to wheel electricity around, to have dispatchable hydro, geothermal and biomass support wind and solar, and to have long duration energy storage.

Jaak

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Exactly and furthermore there are renewables like hydro, geothermal and biomass that are not intermittent.

Also in areas where the wind is not blowing or sun is not shinning they can import via grid the power they need. This done in the Eastern US and Western US grids. It is also done on the European grids - With so many French reactors shutdown - France is importing electricity from UK, Germany, Belgium, and others. There are electrical grid connections between most European countries and more being built every year.

Jaak

Of course, I failed to recognize that we don’t have significant grid-scale storage yet. But I suspect we probably should. It may be more a matter of technology catching up to what the market would like to have. For now, we are depending on dispatchable generation rather than storage. When storage at grid scale becomes more available, that could replace some portion of dispatchable generation, and will eventually lead to larger base load generation (like the more traditional nuclear).

–Peter

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Just looked the study was four years ago when the improvements in efficiencies had been slowing dramatically. It is now a totally wrong assessment of alternatives.

You are counting chickens before they are hatched. Remember that China forecasts:

"Prior to 2008, the government [China] had planned to increase nuclear generating capacity to 40 GWe by 2020 (out of a total 1000 GWe planned), with a further 18 GWe nuclear being under construction then. Projections for nuclear power then increased to 70-80 GWe by 2020, 200 GWe by 2030 and 400-500 GWe by 2050. "

China has 52 GWe in operation with 19 GWe in construction in 2022. They will not have 200 GWe by 2030. They will not have 400-500 GWe by 2050. Their planned 1000 GWe is totally out the window.

Jaak

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Check out the post I made on the Battery Board about the new Form Energy battery using iron&air process which is in R&D.

Jaak

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It’s just a matter of degree and perspective. Energy will be provided by a mix of continuous nuclear and intermittent renewables and pooled into a single pipeline. Despatchability will occur by a mix of batteries for short term gaps or in times of excess by diverting some of the energy to other uses, one of which I believe will be the production of hydrogen. For emergencies natural gas plants are held in reserve. Under such a system the nuclear reactors would be on all the time at their most efficient output.

Long-term grid-scale energy storage has long been searched for as kind of the holy grail for renewables.

I think the answer will come from hydrogen, with nuclear playing major role, hence my investment in Bloom energy. Thanks for this opportunity to pump the stock.

From what I’ve read I don’t believe the world can achieve net zero emission by 2060 unless global nuclear energy output doubles and reaches 15% of electrical generation.

That is easy for the nuclear energy to say, but please do not make it easy for the industry to sell. It is mostly likely wrong and self serving.

From the article you quotes, it seems that you somewhat misstated the problem. For a refresher, your comment was:

But according to the article,

Lithium-ion batteries have absolutely dominated new storage construction in recent years. But they rarely can deliver their full power capacity for more than four hours — that’s what people mean when they say “discharge duration.” Batteries technically can go for longer, but it generally costs more than it’s worth in today’s market dynamics.

(Bolding mine)

Its not that they lose their charge in 3-4 hours, it’s that they can only deliver their full power for 3-4 hours. So if you want power for 6-8 hours, you need twice as many batteries.

But if you want the power tomorrow, it will still be there.

The article claims that twice as many batteries isn’t worth the costs, but doesn’t really get into the cost problem. I can’t see how any of the hardware is the issue, unless you are bumping up against supply problems. Twice as many lithium-ion cells should cost about twice as much. Twice the supporting hardware (wires and controls and power conversion bits and pieces) should cost twice as much. Twice as much land and buildings should cost twice as much. So I don’t know what the cost problem is. It would have been nice if they got into that a bit rather than just stating it as fact and then dropping it.

–Peter

Well 30+ year projections are often inaccurate. But China in 2008 predicted 40GWe in 2020 and achieved 50 GWe. So their 20 year projections are pretty good. According to a recent study from Tsinghua University believed to be influential in China’s 5-year plan, a low-carbon future for China requires 300 GWe from nuclear by 2050, a 6-fold increase from 2020.

Low carbon will not happen without significant nuclear power. That’s just the reality of it all. And no amount of anti-nuke ideology will change that.

Comprehensive report on China's Long-Term Low-Carbon Development Strategies and Pathways - PMC See Table 7

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Okay, but that’s not what the paper you linked to said. You can’t cite the paper when it suits you and then reject it when it doesn’t.

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You are probably right. I was writing on memory and that is often a mistake. Here is a reference though that suggests long-term storage is an issue, but not as acute as I made it out to be:

“But lithium-ion’s economics and physical properties limit its storage duration to eight hours of discharge. “If you take a lithium-ion system, charge it, and leave it for three months, it will self-discharge,” says Vincent Sprenkle, technical group manager for the Electrochemical Materials and Systems Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).” https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4831

I still find the terminology confusing, but my mistake.

Well, to be fair if you go to my original post, I cited the paper solely for the conclusion that “it would be far more expensive to reach a low emissions world without nuclear energy than it would be with it”, which you will find in noted the paper with respect to Fig 1.5a-e. (I’m afraid this will force you to read beyond the executive summary).

And I don’t reject the paper. I have a different view about dispatchability perhaps but then I never used the paper to support my view. Perhaps you are taking this discussion too seriously?

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Frankly, that’s a bunch of hooey. It all depends on the discharge rate. There’s a maximum rate - how fast they can deliver their power without catching on fire. (That’s probably the 3-4 hours mentioned earlier.) There’s a maximum life rate - the fastest you should discharge to get the longest life out of the cell. But there’s no real minimum rate.

I have a few of those little “lipstick” phone chargers that I occasionally use to charge my phone overnight while also using the phone to monitor my sleep. They will run just fine for 8 hours, taking my phone from 60% to 100%, then keeping it there, and still have 2/3 of their charge available. And this is the same technology - the same lithium-ion cell - that is talked about for electric storage for home scale to grid scale.

And it’s also important to note how they would be used in real life. For grid storage, you’re not going to charge them in September and then let them sit until January when you use the stored power. They’re going to be discharged and recharged on a daily cycle. The sizing constraint would be to make sure they are large enough to keep their state of charge from falling below 20% (or thereabouts) at the lowest drawdown point in an annual cycle. In the summer, perhaps the battery cycles between 100% and 30% most of the time, while in the winter they cycle between 80% and 20%. Something like that. Or maybe the numbers are reversed - I’m not sure of what the annual cycles look like. But I’m pretty sure they exist.

The time shifting in power use is in the average state of charge of the battery. If it’s closer to fully charged on average in one part of the year and closer to discharged in another part of the year, you are shifting that energy from one part of the year (or month or week) to another.

The losses over time are quite real - there is some loss of energy over time. But those losses get replaced every day when the battery is recharged. You’d need to account for them in your annual electricity needs (along with other losses on the grid), but they’d be irrelevant on a daily basis.

Again, back to real world stuff, my little phone charging cells often sit for a couple of months unused. I rarely see them lose more than 1/3 of their charge during that time. So those losses aren’t huge.

–Peter

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But, as we all know, you can’t just put new hydro anywhere you want. Same for pumped hydro storage. Same for geothermal. All these are great and should be fully utilized. But they aren’t going to work everywhere.

Mike