Great to see, hopefully they can end turf burning too. (For those unaware it's basically where you take a wetland habitat that's also an amazing carbon store, cut it in to chunks, dry it out, and burn it for a very dirty heat source)
It will virtually end when it is no longer economically advantageous. In my mother's hometown in Mayo, most home heat was solid fuel, and it's gradually turning to electric heat pumps. The other alternative, heating oil, is very expensive and not renewable, but also used a lot. I think the turf is starting to run out because the use of it has gone way down. Either that or fewer homes have a legacy parcel of bog.
Unfortunately I think that's going to be very, very hard to sell to many people here in rural Ireland (Roscommon in my case). I would really love to see people stop burning turf but it's such a strong cultural thing that in some parts you'd be ostracised for even thinking the thought.
I've personally spoken to people (who are otherwise quite environmentally aware) who suggest they'd never vote for the Green Party because they'd take their turf away. It's a tough sell.
No, we had some antique brass bucket thing that I'd invariably have to drag in, accompanied by complaints that I was doing so, because obviously I'd put way too much in, so I didn't have to go out later to get more...
How much impact does it realistically have on climate change? I would expect it to be relatively small compared to things like owning a car?
In a perfect world we would want to reduce emissions as much as possible in every facet of life, but in the real world I think we should pick battles that have the biggest impact.
Smoke yes, but you're also turning a carbon sink into a carbon source.
At ~16% of the island's surface area, peatland stores an estimated 53% of soil based carbon.
(source: Irish Peatland Conservation Council)
I think the domestic heating use is a drop in the bucket compared to commercial extraction of peat for export, or historical use for electricity generation.
I've only so many shits to give, and people heating their homes doesn't rank.
People heating their homes can be very sigificant. In the UK ~15% of all its territorial GHGs come from heating with gas: actual CO2 from the home boiler flues.
CO2 from small amounts of rural home heating is probably not the big thing to be worried about, especially if local recent biomass, eg wood from forest management. But there are still nasties (PMs, biodiversity losses, etc) to be considered and that should be dealt with in due course.
On cold mornings you can see the wood smoke hanging over the town of Taos New Mexico. It's easy to see even a little bit of haze in the otherwise crystal clear air. Taos is in general a very environmentally conscious place. The KTAO radio station has been solar powered since the early 1990s. It also has a significant population of low wage tourism industry workers.
If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun. So you need some auxiliary source of energy. If you want it at hand, this must be something with fast cold start. So black/brown coal power plan will not help you, similarly nuclear. You need to burn either gas or "biomass", that is wood/turf, etc. Those power plants have about 1h cold start.
Hence, in order to have RES you need to emit CO2. Deal with this. The other option, and UK goes that way, is to purchase electricity when it is lacking, paying spot prices, that's why they have such a big electricity bills, economy is down, people get mad and vote psychos.
The solution is dead simple, as France example shows. Simply use nuclear power plants and does not bother with RES, as it does not make any sense now.
Maybe, when we have technology to store efficiently electricity at scale, we can start using RES. But we just do not have that.
The end result now is that electricity in Europe is the most expensive on the World, so all manufacturing is moved to Asia, who does not bother with climate that much, that's why, despite all Europe efforts, overall CO2 emission keeps growing.
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun
I still find it staggering that people feel like this is something that needs to be said as if it’s surprising or a novel idea. Do you really believe smart people haven’t been working through these challenges for decades?
Yet somehow we don't need a similar reminder for the possibility of fossil fuel power plants running out of fuel after a short time if not regularly restocked. Why is it worth bringing up one, but not the other?
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun
If you have to import fuel, it may happen that no ships can get through. Or the fuel becomes too expensive to buy because of war, natural disasters, or market forces. Ain't nobody turning off the sun or wind.
> Maybe, when we have technology to store efficiently electricity at scale
Battery storage that works at grid-scale is a fairly recent technological innovation. It's good that humanity figured out this technological innovation, and demand for better battery technology from the smartphone and electric car revolutions had a lot to do with it. But battery storage is still expensive and relatively-new physical infrastructure that takes time and expense to deploy at scale, and it's still in the process of happening now.
Pumped storage hydro is extremely cheap and efficient and has been around for more than a century. LiFePo4 batteries are now cheap enough that they're a cost-competitive alternative. Flywheel storage plugs the inertia gap nicely.
The tech exists - it's mostly just a matter of political will. The economics already justify it. People are making considerable money by starting up BESSs (Battery Energy Storage Systems) and doing time arbitrage on energy.
cf. Iberia, who recently learned that effective storage and intertial pick-up is integral to a stable and efficient power network, and are now spending heavily on both.
It's a pipedream. Yes it's cheap and efficient, but it requires the geography and the will to destroy a local ecosystem.
BESS is what will ultimately win. It's pretty energy dense and it can be deployed on pretty much any junk land location. The only fight you'll have is with the neighbors who don't like it.
My power company, Idaho power, is deploying a 200MWh BESS on a slice of land they've owned for decades near one of their substations. The hardest part has been the permitting (which is now done).
To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion (in reality much higher) while greatly damaging ecology in large areas.
This source also offers an option of $1 Trillion USD to do it with battery storage.
All of Europe. $1 Trillion USD. Oh, and that figure has already fallen by 1/3rd in reality and the article claims it should drop by half again.
And that seems to be assuming you only have wind power as input. The long lull periods that drive the high storage requirements are, as that article claims, caused by large high pressure air masses. High pressure systems like that often come with clear skies! Indeed, go look at weather history for that same 2015 period and you see that the skies were calm and clear, and precipitation was about half the "normal" amount for that time of year. While there is perfect correlation between a windless day and a night without sunlight, battery to get you through the night is trivial and solved far more cheaply than this article seems to understand. Enough battery to maintain 24 hour output for a solar farm is cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels. Long term, wind and solar do not correlate, so it's very rare to have long lulls in both at the same time.
So this article is leaving out important details and also is way more pessimistic than even it admits is true.
That also ignores that even in the "lulls", wind never seems to go to zero, so even in lulls, you can always just have more wind. Building 10x as much wind as you need is not as feasible as building 10x as much solar as you need though IMO.
Oh, and a very very very important fact: Renewable generation is almost entirely a one time cost, or one time every 30ish years on average. OPEX per kilowatt hour is dramatically lower than fossil fuels. In fact, today Europe imports 10 million barrels of crude oil a day, and at $100 a barrel (a number which will rise quite a bit in the coming months), Europe spends $1 Trillion every few years.
Europe's current energy spend is to buy an entire continent's worth of energy storage and just turn it into CO2 every few years. Every single day of crude oil import, Europe could instead pay for one of the Coire Glas model plants this article is doing the math with.
Storage is beyond feasible and will reduce energy costs.
Note: This article is about making wind energy constant over month long time scales, not about building enough storage to power Europe durably, so that explains some of it's misses, but also doesn't really explain much. The 2.1 TWh of storage it suggest would be enough to power all of Europe for 8 hours a day.
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun.
Yes, but this rarely happens, so any potential solution should be designed around it being idle 99% of the time.
> Those power plants have about 1h cold start.
Gas turbines can spin up significantly faster. However, the weather is quite predictable, so it is unlikely that this will be needed. Besides, battery storage is the perfect solution as an ultra-fast ramp-up holdover source until the turbines are at 100%.
> Hence, in order to have RES you need to emit CO2.
Or you equip the handful of gas turbines you use to make up for that 1% gap in renewables with carbon capture? It's not ideal, but it is very much doable.
> Simply use nuclear power plants and do not bother with RES
... and have your electricity be even more expensive?
> this must be something with fast cold start. So black/brown coal power plan will not help you, similarly nuclear.
Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production. All modern nuclear plants are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
> The end result now is that electricity in Europe is the most expensive on the World, so all manufacturing is moved to Asia
The production moved to Asia due to extremely cheap labor, not due to electricity costs.
5% per minute is not extremely fast. Simple cycle gas turbine (peaker) plants routinely go 0 to 100% in less than 10 minutes. Nuclear plants can only hit 5% per minute in the 50 to 100% interval (per your own source).
And all of this is confused by the way the nuclear industry uses the term "load following". You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day".[0] There are only three[1] sources of electricity that can be ramped freely enough to exactly match demand: hydro, simple-cycle gas turbines and batteries. All electrical supplies will need some of those three mixed in. Which is why France is still 10% hydro and 10% natural gas in their electricity supply.
0: Some of the most modern Russian plants can move to +-20% of their current target at 10% per minute, but "the number of such very fast
power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.
1: OK, there are some obsolete ways too, like diesel generators. At least obsolete at the scale of the electricity grid.
> You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day"
Which is clearly invalidated by the very source I provided, and which you then somehow quote back at me.
> "the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.
Imagine if you didn't omit the full quote/context:
--- start quote ---
Also, AES-2006 is capable of fast power modulations with ramps of up to 5% Pr per second (in the interval of ±10% Pr), or power drops of 20% Pr per minute in the interval of 50-100% of the rated power. However, the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations.
--- end quote ---
Oh look. What's limited is an actual emergency ramp up of 5% per second or power drops of 20% per minute.
Which is literally an emergency that is not needed in a power grid.
Gas turbines do 16% of nameplate capacity per minute without catching a sweat. 5% per minute isn't particularly extreme.
---
Let me quote page 10 of your source "In brief, most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design) to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of rated power per minute". Your own source defines "load following" as changing the targeted power level once or twice per day.
Again on page 14 (about how the French currently run their nuclear plants): "The nuclear power plants operating in the load following mode follow a variable load programme
with one or two power changes per period of 24 h". Weirdly enough this is contradicted by table 2.1 on page 20 where they do four changes per day.
---
> Oh look. What's limited is an actual emergency ramp up of 5% per second or power drops of 20% per minute.
If you look at table 2.4 on the same page it states that it (the Russian VVER-1200) can do the 5% per second/20% per minute emergency change 20 000 times over the lifetime of the reactor. The 10% per minute change can also only be done 20 000 times over the lifetime of the reactor. Table 2.2 on page 21 helpfully calculates that 15 000 cycles is once per day for 40 years, so the VVER-1200 only can do a bit more than one >5% change per day (outside of emergencies) assuming a similar 40 year lifespan. And that was the point of my footnote: that nuclear plants technically can go faster than 5% but not up and down on a minute-by-minute basis.
> Gas turbines do 16% of nameplate capacity per minute without catching a sweat. 5% per minute isn't particularly extreme.
If you keep jumping around with your arguments, nothing is extreme.
Your original claim started with claiming cold starts (which most power plants including gas turbines don't do, ever) and that coal and nuclear aren't fast.
Nuclear is plenty fast.
I never claimed gas power stations were slow, or that they were slower than nuclear.
> If you look at table 2.4 on the same page it states that it (the Russian VVER-1200) can do the 5% per second/20% per minute emergency change
Let me slowly walk you through that statement:
--- start quote ---
can do the 5% per second/20% per minute emergency change
emergency change
emergency
--- end quote ---
> And that was the point of my footnote: that nuclear plants technically can go faster than 5% but not up and down on a minute-by-minute basis.
No idea what your footnote was about, and how it is relevant.
For the foreseeable future, building enough nuclear for peak capacity is exceedingly expensive.
> None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
Somewhere in each grid you will have “black start” capacity contracts, dunno if nuclear can fills this role (or if grids exclude nukes for one reason or another).
Plenty of peaker plants built with the intention of running double digit hours per year and therefore the tradeoff supports being largely “off” in between those calls. Batteries might fill that gap.
> Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production
The obvious counterexample is Chernobyl, where a big contributor was the fact that they were unable to scale it down & back up as desired. Yes, nuclear reactors can scale down rapidly - but you have to wait several hours until it can scale back up!
Besides, the linked paper only covers load-following in a traditional grid (swinging between 60% and 100% once a day) and barely touches on the economic effects. The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.
> You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
The answer is you don't scale nuclear up or down, it's a silly waste of time and effort to even think about it. The fuel costs are effectively a rounding error, so running at 100% 24x7 is the only way to ever think about how nuclear should operate.
If you are going to curtail, you curtail other sources including solar and wind.
Nuclear fits quite well for the baseload you need. It's more expensive, but if you are going to need X capacity 24x7 and build nuclear, you simply build enough to provide just that plus perhaps a few extra for redundancy when another one goes offline. Then use gas peakers for the "oh shit" days difference between what nuclear is providing and solar was expected to but could not.
I don't understand the fascination folks have about nuclear not being able to following the grid. They don't need to, since they only ever remotely make sense when operated 24x7 at 100%. If you always have 1TW of grid usage every night during your lowest usage period - build that much nuclear as your starting point and figure out the rest from there. Nuclear's share of the total mix should be a straight line on a graph outside of plant shutdowns for maintenance.
That’s not the way the energy market works though. The cheapest sources (like daytime solar) will knock your expensive nuclear off the grid. Or force it to sell at significantly below operating cost, which is suicidal in the long term, since nukes need a guaranteed high price nearly 100% of the time to pencil out (pay back the capex).
Your argument only works in entirely state controlled systems, not in free energy markets of independent suppliers. Which is why nukes don’t get built.
- billions (if not trillions) of subsidies were poured into wind and solar over decades to make them viable while nuclear energy was addled with additional taxes, reactor closures, and very few new reactor licenses
- decades of fear-mongering led to loss of expertise in building new nuclear power plants (and instead South-East Asia has been picking up speed in building new reactors) [1]
In 2015 nuclear was significantly cheaper than most other types of energy across most markets: https://world-nuclear.org/images/articles/REPORT_Economics_R... (Figure 12, in some markets including the then-emerging renewables). And yet renewables were enjoying unprecedented amounts of subsidies and money poured into them while nuclear... Oh we know what was happening to nuclear, just look at Germany.
Renewables: 80-80 billion euro in subsidies a year.
Fossil fuels: 60-140 billion euro in subsidies a year.
Nuclear: good luck finding the thin orange line in the graph. (1% of subsidies)
--- start quote ---
As shown on Figure 4 , solar energy received by far the largest share of subsidies, both historically and in 2023 (EUR 21 bn), followed by biomass (EUR 9 bn) and wind power (EUR 7 bn). Hydropower received marginal financial support (~EUR 1 bn), while subsidies targeting multiple renewable technologies (such as tax reductions on green technology or public aid for investment projects) jumped to EUR 23 bn by 2023.
Subsidies for nuclear energy dropped from EUR 7.9 bn in 2021 to 3.7 bn in 2022 and 4.1 bn in 2023. Of the 14 MS providing nuclear subsidies, France (EUR 2.9 bn) accounted for the biggest share, followed by Germany (EUR 0.8 bn) , Spain and Belgium (EUR 0.1 bn each).
Also corruption. I lived in an area that for some years was trying to build a new nuclear power plant.
It was fraud from the top down and the manufacturer went bankrupt. I paid more for power in SC than I ever did when I lived in “summer all year” Florida. But I guess I got a token check in the mail some years later.
Plant got completely abandoned and I got to help subsidize this failure.
Oh yes. That too. It's one problem after another in quite a few countries: ignore/neglect, make processes, regulations and subsidies opaque, all of this leads to huge construction times and corruption, declare nuclear non-viable.
China: "Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less." [1] Building over 40 reactors since 2005
And still china’s share of energy provided by nuclear is declining y/y, and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. Because their renewables buildout is >10x nuclear.
Even china, a nuclear construction scale/cost/time success story, can’t make them compete with renewables.
Share of the total grid is meaningless comparing solar to nuclear. It’s the wrong metric to optimize for - the metric that actually matters and is the expensive one is reliability.
What matters is “share of the grid when solar literally cannot provide the power at any price”.
In a well designed and functional grid share of nuclear power should be close to 100% of the latter and the lowest percentage of the former you can get away with.
It’s better to think of nuclear as energy storage with a really really long lasting battery that costs the same to run it 24/7 or 1 hour a month.
Ideally it would be replacing close to all baseload/reliable power on the grid outside of hydro - with hydro being your peakers instead of natural gas for topologies amenable to it. The power share graph should look like nuclear at close to 100% at night less wind and battery storage that backs wind unreliability - and that graph remaining flat throughout the peak daytime hours with other energy sources kicking in such as solar, hydro, duck curve sized battery arrays, etc.
No one pays you for that reliability though. In free energy markets they pay you for what you supply, at the clearing price at that moment.
Solar is so cheap it will push nukes off the grid during the day, you don’t get credit just because it’s more reliable. People will just build more and more solar till the nukes share in the day is zero. And at night people are incentivized to build more wind and batteries, because you can still undercut the expensive nuke power and push it off. When the wind doesn’t blow at night there’s gas and hydro peakers. And more and more batteries. There’s increasingly no room left for nukes that have to be sold at 100% for 100% of the time to still be the most expensive form of energy.
The only way nukes have a role at scale today is if you have state intervention in the market to force the grid to buy your nuke power at close to 100% at the baseline share you described, because you have a nation-state goal of reliability that you prioritize higher than cost. Essentially subsidizing the nukes. And I’m sympathetic to that goal, but that’s not mostly not what western markets do, and not what they will do. Making power deliberately more expensive is unpopular, and not neoliberal marketism
You mean the obsolete design that is not used even in old reactors, not to say of modern designs?
Quote:
--- start quote ---
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute.
--- end quote ---
> The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.
