The Germans have switched from nuclear to coal. Can you cut this "future generations are going to have to carry the cost" when the alternative is literally helping destroy the whole planet's ecosystems? Not to mention they spew up significantly more radioactivity in the air than nuclear powerplants.
A 30x30m pool of radioactive fuel is nothing compared to what their powerplants are doing to the future of young generations. Is cancer caused by coal particulates really something you wish on people around you?
In Germany renewables are at over 42% in 2021, despite a 'conservative' government that for decades has blocked the development of windfarms and solar for the benefit of the coal and nuclear lobby. That kind of lobby-work is the actual problem here. The way forward is renewable energy. The huge difference is that the source of renewable energy is free and basically limitless.
The problem is that only a fraction of power consumption is electric. The rest is burning fossil fuels.
In order to get away from these, we have to increase electricity production significantly. And we have to build a better electricity grid.
It is completely unclear how renewable energy should provide this in the short or medium term (i.e. until 2050). Without nuclear, we’ll just continue burning fossil fuels.
Renewables paired with batteries can improve grid resilience, actually. Distribution of generators means less loss in the wires travelling, batteries paired with renewables to provide overnight power and load-smoothing, these are good things. Renewables also are very predictable, so you can use a little natural gas to supplement at night while you build out batteries and more wind. Solar will take care of our day-time needs no problem, it's the overnight stretches and the wind-less winters where nuclear would really shine.
Batteries are a bit of a red herring. The combination of pumped storage plants, overgeneration, and demand response already has you covered for at least two decades even in Germany. The minimal cost solution calculated for Germany assumes 1.6 GWh of storage for your 1000 MW nuclear equivalent for a 60% RE penetration scenario, only some of which needs to be batteries (Germany is currently at ~45% or so, many other countries are considerably behind). At the expense of extra costs, lower storage could be compensated for by higher overgeneration (= by not consuming all the power you produce).
However, this was all calculated for current grid conditions. Spread of BEVs would likely put dedicated grid storage needs lower, since in Germany, for each of your 1000 MW nuclear equivalents, there's 700k cars which already have ~600 MWh of storage capacity even just in form of lead-acid batteries, and even replacing just 10% of these cars with 40 kWh BEVs would give you a whopping 2.8 GWh of capacity per your 1000 MW nuclear equivalent, necessitating higher overgeneration to provide the vehicles with motive energy and lowering grid storage capacity because of demand response ("smart charging"). For reference, a 100% replacement of ICE cars with BEVs in Germany would require a ~25% increase in average power generation - by around 250 MW of average power per your 1000 MW nuclear equivalent.
Electrolytic hydrogen production would do exactly the same thing to grid storage - require more generators, and with demand response, lower grid storage capacity. Just replacing German ammonia with "green" ammonia using electrolysis would necessitate another 60 MW of average power generation per your 1000 MW equivalent that could be subject to demand response.
This is a bit of a nitpick, but this is a physical impossibility. On a AC electric network, if the power input is higher than the power output, the frequency of the current goes up quite quickly, until the grid collapses (because there are security to avoid frequency deviation). You cannot “not consume all the power you produce”, all you can do is not producing as much as you could.
Btw, I'm interested by the sources of your “1.6 GWh of storage for your 1000 MW nuclear” because it sounds really low to me. I did a simulation[1] a while ago based on French data, for a 100% RE scenario and my calculation arrived at around 250GWh per GW of installed capacity. For sure it's not the same country, and a 60% vs 100% RE is a huge step, but the differences between those two results is a lot more than what I would expect.
A mistake I've frequently seen with people discussing wind power storage, is taking the average capacity factor and calling it a day. The storage need for wind-based power generation is enormous because (at least in France, but given the geography of Germany I'd expect it to be even worse there) you can have severe wind deficit which can last for weeks!!
> This is a bit of a nitpick, but this is a physical impossibility. On a AC electric network, if the power input is higher than the power output, the frequency of the current goes up quite quickly, until the grid collapses (because there are security to avoid frequency deviation). You cannot “not consume all the power you produce”, all you can do is not producing as much as you could.
I probably should have said "all the power you could produce", since for example with photovoltaics you can produce at any moment any amount of power from zero up to the MPPT point on the I/V curve, depending on how much charge you remove from the panel. I hope this clears it up.
> Btw, I'm interested by the sources of your “1.6 GWh of storage for your 1000 MW nuclear” because it sounds really low to me
> I did a simulation[1] a while ago based on French data, for a 100% RE scenario and my calculation arrived at around 250GWh per GW of installed capacity.
Maybe you've just taken Sinn's approach instead of Zerrahn's? That number would seem to fit it.
> Maybe you've just taken Sinn's approach instead of Zerrahn's? That number would seem to fit it.
I wasn't aware of that paper (thanks again!), but from skimming Sinn's paper, our methodology seems to be pretty similar. I'm even more excited to read Zerrahn's paper now!
Ok so I read Zerrahn's paper, and I have to admit I didn't expect to be that shocked by the methodology. Of course I'm a bit biased because my own work is really close to Sinn's which is criticized in this paper, but this paper really makes me think the author didn't even try to understand what Sinn studied in their paper: Zerrahn seems to believe that Sinn's scenario stores all the energy because they don't want to waste electricity, but it doesn't occur to them that Sinn's stores all that electricity because at some point the grid will needs it!. In fact, I think the culprit is just using RLDCs (residual load duration curves) instead of time series, because this way you just erase the temporal dimension of the problem, which is − unfortunately − the most important one.
For instance, in my own data (France, year 2017, for the record the scenario was 100% RE) from the first of January 12am, to the 3rd at 3pm the wind capacity factor barely exceed 10%, three days in a row. For this period only you'd need 3TWh of storage[1]! No reasonable level[2] of curtailment is gonna help here.
[1]: of course it doesn't have to be storage, you just need 50GW of controllable power and any fossil fuel would work (and that's what the Danish do for instance) but this is outside of the scope of this discussion, which is about how storage allows you to avoid pairing RE with fossil sources.
[2]: I assume that nobody would consider something above 90% curtailment to be reasonable.
> but it doesn't occur to them that Sinn's stores all that electricity because at some point the grid will needs it!
I'm pretty sure that they understand that. What they don't understand (and what I don't understand) is why is Sinn making the amount artificially high by ignoring the economics. I immediately understood what Zerrahn was getting at, and even before I knew how different authors approached this problem in literature, I would have myself intuitively gone for an approach like Zerrahn's. MRTS is surely not a difficult concept to grasp.
> For instance, in my own data (France, year 2017, for the record the scenario was 100% RE) from the first of January 12am, to the 3rd at 3pm the wind capacity factor barely exceed 10%, three days in a row. For this period only you'd need 3TWh of storage! No reasonable level[1] of curtailment is gonna help here.
I can't tell you what Zerrahn's approach would tell you for the French grid. You can't really extrapolate that from German results. You'd have to pretty much re-do the whole work, including getting equivalent data for the French grid.
> I'm pretty sure that they understand that. What they don't understand (and what I don't understand) is why is Sinn making the amount artificially high by ignoring the economics. I immediately understood what Zerrahn was getting at, and even before I knew how different authors approached this problem in literature, I would have myself intuitively gone for an approach like Zerrahn's. MRTS is surely not a difficult concept to grasp.
It's not about being difficult to grasp, it's about whether they are the right tool for the job. Which they aren't, because the temporality of the phenomenon disappear, while it is the single most crucial factor when talking about storage: 24 hours without wind in a row have a dramatically different impact from 24 days each without wind for one hour. In the first case you need enough storage for an entire day, while in the second case all you need is one hour of storage! (And that's where the two orders of magnitude come from: «several days» being ~100 times as long as «1 hour». The storage you need is strictly superior the sum of consecutive hours with a positive residual load (minus what can be produced by you non-renewable plants), to calculate this value you must keep the time (and also factor in the availability and economics of your back-up non-renewable power supply if you want to go one step further, which neither I nor Sinn did).
Sinn doesn't take economics in account, because it's not relevant to the discussion here, it's all about physics here. (And Sinn being an economist, he really deserves credit for focusing on the physics aspect).
> I can't tell you what Zerrahn's approach would tell you for the French grid. You can't really extrapolate that from German results. You'd have to pretty much re-do the whole work, including getting equivalent data for the French grid.
It would be easier to just grab the German data used by Zerrahn to reproduce Sinn's findings (because they claim them to be easily accessible). Maybe I'll have some time later in the week to do so.
> It's not about being difficult to grasp, it's about whether they are the right tool for the job. Which they aren't, because the temporality of the phenomenon disappear, while it is the single most crucial factor when talking about storage: 24 hours without wind in a row have a dramatically different impact from 24 days each without wind for one hour.
I don't see how this changes anything. The difference between the two approaches is not the difference between assuming multi-day troughs in wind power vs. not assuming them (both Zerrahn and Sinn assume their existence) -- it's a difference between blindly modeling storage for all generated power so that it never goes to waste vs. modeling a grid with minimum total cost of all components included that still satisfies expected electricity production demands in all parts of a year (= that does not exceed the capabilities of any component of the system in any part of the year).
The latter approach (the feasible set of which is a superset of the feasible set of the former approach) will converge to the former ONLY IF storage costs are disproportionately low. If storage costs are substantial, the optimum will likely lie in the part of the expanded feasible set that lies outside of the original feasible set, with the consequence that the old optimum was very much local, and formed a huge red herring.
> In the first case you need enough storage for an entire day, while in the second case all you need is one hour of storage! (And that's where the two orders of magnitude come from: «several days» being ~100 times as long as «1 hour».
No, that's NOT where the difference is, and I'm dismayed that this is your takeaway from all this even after reading TFA by Zerrahn.
The difference is that Sinn assumes that if there's 1 GWh to be fulfilled in the middle of January and there's a matching 1 GWh of PV overgeneration in the middle of July, then it's perfectly reasonable to say "fine, let's store that 1 GWh for half a year until we need it in the middle of January, regardless of how expensive it is" -- because THAT is what you necessarily end up with if you're going for 0% curtailment like Sinn did.
And it turns out that economically, this is terrible idea, and once you realize it and include economics in your models, they will steer you away from the idea of zero curtailment.
> The storage you need is strictly superior the sum of consecutive hours with a positive residual load
...and Sinn makes that positive residual load artificially high compared to the economic optimum because of striving for 0% curtailment for no good reason.
> Sinn doesn't take economics in account, because it's not relevant to the discussion here, it's all about physics here. (And Sinn being an economist, he really deserves credit for focusing on the physics aspect).
Which makes it all the sadder if he first constructs a straw man and then sets fire to it, especially if it's a straw man from his own department.
> It would be easier to just grab the German data used by Zerrahn to reproduce Sinn's findings (because they claim them to be easily accessible).
But...that's what Zerrahn did? It's mentioned in the paper that they replicated Sinn's findings with their own data as a validation that they're calculating with comparable data.
> it's a difference between blindly modeling storage for all generated power so that it never goes to waste
No, that's Zerrahn's take on Sinn's paper, but you should not take it for granted. And the cheap shot about the «Non-robustness» of Sinn's paper should serve as a warning that Zerrahn is not really giving Sinn's paper a fair treatment.
> But...that's what Zerrahn did? It's mentioned in the paper that they replicated Sinn's findings with their own data as a validation that they're calculating with comparable data.
Yes, and now I want to re-use the same dataset, but with a proper time-based methodology so I can find a specific time period for which Zerrahn's-level of storage would lead to a network collapse (Like I did for the French data above).
> No, that's Zerrahn's take on Sinn's paper, but you should not take it for granted.
So you're saying that Zerrahn lies about Sinn's paper? Are you saying that Sinn actually models wasting a part of energy to minimize costs? (Because if he doesn't, then he commits the immediately obvious mistake that I described.)
> Yes, and now I want to re-use the same dataset, but with a proper time-based methodology so I can find a specific time period for which Zerrahn's-level of storage would lead to a network collapse (Like I did for the French data above).
Why don't you just go for a MILP model? Because this clearly is a case for one. This is not really different from modeling production systems in the industry (with warehouses replaced by batteries and such). Make the total cost your minimization criteria and tell us what storage capacity you ended up with.
I've been intent for some time on applying this to the Czech grid, where it's actually somewhat simplified by the diminished need for transmission, but I have yet to gather all the necessary data.
> So you're saying that Zerrahn lies about Sinn's paper?
Zerrahn presents Sinn's paper in a pretty opinionated (and unfair IMHO) way, but I wouldn't call that lying either.
> Are you saying that Sinn actually models wasting a part of energy to minimize costs? (Because if he doesn't, then he commits the immediately obvious mistake that I described.)
No, but Sinn model the system the way he does not “to avoid wasting energy”, claiming otherwise is just an attempt to ridicule him. He's modelling the system the way he does because it considers a different set of trade-offs.
> Why don't you just go for a MILP model
I'm not familiar with those, do you have a good introduction?
> I've been intent for some time on applying this to the Czech grid, where it's actually somewhat simplified by the diminished need for transmission, but I have yet to gather all the necessary data.
AFAIK the guys making Electritymap[1] have open-sourced all their data sources[2], maybe it can help.
> He's modelling the system the way he does because it considers a different set of trade-offs.
OK, what are the trade-offs that could possibly warrant going for a set of restrictions that massively impact TCO? For example, in a somewhat related area, one thing that seems plausible is unavailability of a resource: induction motors and generators are less efficient than permanent magnet motors and generators but they avoid supply vulnerability for certain chemical elements, so including them for comparison in a sensitivity analysis is reasonable. But for this situation I don't really see an analogical justification -- or at least I don't see one that would be immediately obvious.
> I'm not familiar with those, do you have a good introduction?
That's just mathematical economics 101. You didn't have a linear programming course?
> AFAIK the guys making Electritymap[1] have open-sourced all their data sources[2], maybe it can help.
I don't necessarily mean national grid data -- I have that already. Mostly what I'm missing is transmission data on a sub-national level, and performance and cost estimates of several pumped storage plants that would be binary variables in the model (since each of the proposed sites has different parameters, they're not even integer variables the same way that for example nuclear reactor blocks would be - they have to be a set of binary (built/not-built) options in the solution).
Unfortunatly this project was cancelled since Germany taxes electricity from batteries two times: Once when charging the battery and once when discharging it (since it is then seen as "producing" electricity).
Not completely unclear. Renewable energy can be even more local than nuclear plants. A good grid is a valueable tool, but not the only solution. The zero-energy-house is a working example for self-sufficient development. Large office buildings or small residential houses are already being build this way. It's a matter of where to put the subvention money - to the big old coal companies (and their lobbies) or the innovative smaller engineers.
You don't get points for using Nice Green power, you get points for not releasing more CO2 in the atmosphere. Right now, France's electricity is at 30g CO2 per kW.h (the figure includes the whole lifexyle), while Germany's is at over 400g.
Sure, we have to deal with the waste ourselves, but you're just dumping yours in everyone's air.
Those 42% percent in Germany include Bio-mass. A Bio-mass 'plant' is a wood chip furnace, it is only renewable based on the weak principle that the burned mass and C02 emissions can be captured 'because we can just plant trees'.
The energy needs we have and the land avaialable in Europe for forest makes this impossible without importing 'bio-mass' wood pellets at which point the ecological argument goes out the wind. [0]
And despite 42% of renewables Germany CO2 emissions have increased in the last years, and Germany will obviously miss its 2030 target (which is already not enough). Just look at electricitymap.org to see how that strategy is going. Also nuclear is kind of renewable too so that distinction is not really relevant regarding climate. That view needs to be updated with 2021 reality, we need a baseline production that always work, and choosing fossile for that like Germany (Coal, Gas) is irrational (nuclear issues pale in comparison of climate change for future generations).
> > > The Germans have switched from nuclear to coal.
> > No, they did not.
> There have been several recent stories about the increase in coal usage this year.
But was there any closure of nuclear power plants in Germany this year? If not, you cannot say that this increase was because they have switched from nuclear to coal; they must have switched from something else.
No, if they hadn't reduced nuclear production, the relative changes between coal and renewables would have exactly been the same, only coal would have had the same uptick from a lower 2020 value. "The increase in coal usage" would have been exactly the same regardless of whether they shut down some nuclear power plants or not. That should be obvious to you. Since this inter-annual change would have happened regardless of nuclear generation levels (unless you for some reason assume that the number of nuclear power plants operating in Germany affects German inter-annual weather changes), you can't use the nuclear generation levels to make this argument.
Why would that be the case? Shutting down nuclear plants doesn't increase the production capacity from renewables. For a given renewable production capacity, there's a fixed amount that has to be made up from non-renewable sources; since coal is pretty clearly the worst of those, you use things other than coal -- anything other than coal -- first, and kill off coal as fast as possible.
If you have a way to increase the renewable capacity to make up for a decrease in nuclear production, why not do that anyway, and shut down more coal production instead of nuclear?
Yes, the situation is that whatever you don't source from renewables, you have to source from something else. Assuming that in both alternative scenarios (some nuclear plants shut down vs. all existing plants kept in operation), the nuclear generation levels are approximately constant, this means that any decrease from renewables has to be compensated by an equal increase from non-nuclear sources (since the nuclear contribution is constant from year to year in both scenarios, assuming no Chernobyl/Fukushima like situation where a nuclear source suddenly goes away permanently).
For sake of a simple example, let's say you have nuclear, renewable, and coal power plants, and you have 600 TWh of electricity consumption in a year and you have 200 TWh of nuclear power contribution and 200 TWh of renewable power contribution. You then need to burn coal worth 200 TWh to compensate for the rest. The next year the nuclear power contribution is the same at 200 TWh, since it's weather-independent, but weather variations allow you to generate only 150 TWh of renewable electricity. You now need to burn 250 TWh worth of coal; 50 TWh worth of coal more than the last year.
Let's assume that you shut down 100 TWh/y worth of nuclear plants a few years ago. Your energy needs today are the same. You have 600 TWh of electricity consumption in a year and you have only 100 TWh of nuclear power contribution in this scenario, and 200 TWh of renewable power contribution. You then need to burn coal worth 300 TWh to compensate for the rest. The next year the nuclear power contribution is the same at the decreased level of 100 TWh, since it's weather-independent, but weather variations allow you to generate only 150 TWh of renewable electricity. You now need to burn 350 TWh worth of coal; 50 TWh worth of coal more than the last year.
See how in both scenarios you need 50 TWh worth of coal more in the latter year because of weather variability? The argument was that the nuclear shutdowns changed the coal uptick. The shutdowns clearly didn't cause the uptick, or even affect its size, unless they happened inter-annually (which to my knowledge they didn't).
As for increasing RE contribution, that is happening in Germany regardless. In fact shutting down the most expensive-to-run old nuclear plants might liberate some money for extra renewables expansion, although I'd have to check on the exact numbers.
Could you elaborate, im interested in understanding your perspective but couldn’t follow it.
In my mind , uptick in coal usage was directly caused by a decrease in wind power production. I understand that if Germany had chosen nuclear over wind, that decline would not happen and thus the usage of coal would not increase. Is that not true ?
> I understand that if Germany had chosen nuclear over wind, that decline would not happen
This doesn't make sense unless nuclear power plants blow additional wind. See my other comment for a simple example. Keeping nuclear plants alive vs. not keeping them alive doesn't change the picture of inter-annual generation changes unless those shutdowns happened exactly between those two years.
This is completely irrelevant. The inter-annual variability means nothing in the long run since the climate only cares about long-term averages. You're ignoring the long-term trend on purpose. This doesn't mean in any way that Germany is switching from nuclear to coal. They're switching from nuclear AND coal to renewables.
This graph does not show the failure of renewables to provide sufficient power this year (it ends at 2020).
The renewable power production is down for up to 40% and french nuclear power being in maintenance mode has caused the coal consumption to rise significantly.
It's completely irrelevant. The reason for the transition is climate protection and the climate cares about long term averages - the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is on the order of centuries. Pushing that average baseline lower is what matters, even in the presence of occasional spikes.
Waste is just partially burned fuel. There is only ONE reason why it exists.
We made a political choice that storing partially burned fuel instead of reprocessing is safer than allow people have technology that can also create nuclear weapons.
I agree it would have been better to phase out coal before nuclear, but it's not correct to say that there was a switch from nuclear to coal.
The switch was from nuclear to renewables. Coal was stable for a long time, and is now decreasing. Coal is currently scheduled to be phased out by 2038.
Source: Quick Google image search for the power sources over time plots.
> Coal was stable for a long time, and is now decreasing.
Over which time period?
The stats in the article they link indicate a switch from 21 to 27% for coal, from 52 to 44% for renewables, when comparing the first halves of 2020 and 2021. If there's a downward trend, it's less than obvious.
A time period of one year is too short to draw trend conclusions, it really doesn't tell us anything about the (long term) trend. It's like using the weather from last year and comparing it to this year to say something about the climate. Look at 5 years or 10 years to spot energy trends.
A 30x30m pool of radioactive fuel is nothing compared to what their powerplants are doing to the future of young generations. Is cancer caused by coal particulates really something you wish on people around you?