
Weather-Smart Electric Grids Are Needed for Wind and Solar Power to Surge - 0xbxd
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weather-smart-electric-grids-are-needed-for-wind-and-solar-power-to-surge/
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spenrose
OP is hyperbolic framing of a genuine issue. Pacific Northwest is one of the
more extreme cases, due to the confluence of hydropower seasonality with
renewables. In general, we will address the variability of wind and solar by
building more continent-scale grids, with lots of storage, with
overprovisioning of solar PV (which is now so cheap it pencils out even with
occasional curtailment in many cases), with load shifting, and for a decade or
two by running natural gas speakers in extremis.

Read this article and notice what a key role storage plays:

[https://www.vox.com/energy-and-
environment/2018/7/13/1755187...](https://www.vox.com/energy-and-
environment/2018/7/13/17551878/natural-gas-markets-renewable-energy)

Then recall that at least three major automobile companies are making
$1B-scale investments to make solid-state batteries cheaper and higher
performing than the Li-ion technology that is cost-effective at grid scale
today. Articles like OP that cherry-pick atypical cases and ignore cost curves
take a real issue and blow it up into a crisis, which it is not.

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mattygh
Continent-scale grids of the scale we need look very unlikely to happen due to
regulatory / NIMBY concerns - see the decade long delays for Clean Line Energy
to get anything moving. Maybe we'll get a federal administration bold enough
to push it through but I wouldn't count on it. That means we'll have to vastly
overbuild solar + storage as you said. Luckily the current cost trajectory
makes that look possible, but seems worthwhile to have demand side planning in
the mix to balance the overbuilding.

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jMyles
Every article on this topic has the same presumption: that we'll continue to
_have_ a power grid. But the grid kinda sucks.

Having lived for 2-years on a school bus with an off-grid solar system, I
don't see the advantage of investment in the grid.

I question whether, in 2018 and beyond, the advantages of the grid (sending
power where there is none, borrowing power from where there is some) are
better than very small batches of battery storage.

~~~
greglindahl
How does your gridless plan work for dense urban areas? That need more power
than they have rooftops, and the wind blows best elsewhere.

I think it's already the case that not being on the grid is financially best
in areas with very low population and reliable sunshine, like parts of the
Australian outback.

~~~
jMyles
Yeah, I mean dense urban areas will need to have some unification
infrastructure and to be able to get power from areas just outside the city.
But I don't think that this means that we need a single universal grid across
a landmass as huge as North America.

Also, cities (and all people everywhere) need to dramatically reduce power
consumption no matter what the source is.

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DoYouEvenLFTR
That, or we switch to a safer nuclear. Turns out nuclear is the only CLEAN
baseload energy provider. The rest is all intermittent.

Fun fact: Nuclear (in the US) is 50 times safer than hydro-electric (in the
US) and 4400 times safer than rooftop solar (global) as measured by deaths per
watt-hour.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities)

Say what you will about Chernobyl and Fukushima, but if LFTRs can provide a
better and safer nuclear? Then it's about time environmentalists started
pulling their heads from their asses and reconsider nuclear before we
irreversibly fuck up our entire planet and ecosystem.

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spenrose
"Is nuclear power going to help the United States decarbonize its energy
supply and fight climate change?

Probably not.

That is the conclusion of a remarkable new study published in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences in early July — remarkable because it is
not written by opponents of nuclear power, as one might expect given the
conclusion. The authors are in fact extremely supportive of nuclear and view
its loss as a matter of “profound concern”"

[https://www.vox.com/energy-and-
environment/2018/7/11/1755564...](https://www.vox.com/energy-and-
environment/2018/7/11/17555644/nuclear-power-energy-climate-decarbonization-
renewables)

~~~
DennisP
But it's worth noting that the study focused on the U.S., and much of the
problem with advanced nuclear in the U.S. comes from the NRC's blinkered
approach to regulating new designs.

A couple years ago I got to sit in a meeting between a former head of the NRC,
and representatives from over a dozen advanced reactor startups. The main
complaint of the startup people was that the NRC requires them to spend
several hundred million dollars on a detailed design before the NRC will even
look at their proposal. Then the NRC gives a straight yes or no. If "no" then
the project is over; if "yes" then they still have nothing but a paper
reactor.

It's a very difficult environment for investors. The startups said just going
with a more phased approach would be a huge help.

By contrast, Canada has regulators much more friendly to new technology,
without compromising safety. Terrestrial Energy, a molten salt reactor startup
in Canada, has spoken highly of their regulators, and thinks they can have
reactors on the grid by the mid-2020s.

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toomuchtodo
Most of the grid will be hydro, solar, wind, and utility scale battery storage
before Terrestrial Enegry has their first reactor operational.

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korantu
What are your thoughts on mofular factory-produced reactors like NuScale [1] ?
They use proven tecnology, and walkaway safe.

[1] [https://www.nuscalepower.com](https://www.nuscalepower.com)

~~~
toomuchtodo
I think they’re an excellent solution where renewables aren’t feasible (the
arctic circle, for example).

