> You're again asking for simulations about Minnesota specifically which doesn't make sense.
No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.
> Here's the RethinkX simulation of that
Thanks for the link. I focused on the New England scenario, as it's the most similar to Minnesota of the 3 scenarios. It doesn't seem to account for heating. This is the problem I keep coming to in these analyses. See page 25:
> Our model takes as inputs each region’s historical hourly electricity demand ... For the New England region, our analysis applies to the ISO New England (ISO-NE) service area which provides 100% of grid-scale electricity generation for the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Our heating is not supplied by electricity. I definitely believe that our current electricity demand may be met by renewables in a feasible timescale, but that leaves out the massive hole of heating our buildings.
The only reference I could find to New England's heating is this little note at the bottom of page 46:
> If New England chose to invest in an additional 20% in its 100% SWB system, for example, then the super power output could be used to replace most fossil fuel use in the residential and road transportation sectors combined (assuming electrification of vehicles and heating).
But I don't see any actual numerical analysis backing this up. Given their analysis earlier only spoke about electricity usage, I'm not super convinced by this one sentence.
Additionally, the New England scenario suggests they need 1,232 GWh of storage to supply only 89 hours of electricity for the area. Even if we agree that's a sufficient amount of time, the currently largest energy storage facility on the planet is only 3 GWh[1]. We would need 410 such facilities for New England alone. Can we really scale battery tech up that much, especially given resource constraints like Lithium and copper? Maybe! Hopefully! But it's a big question. Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
> No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.
If that's your assumption then this is a non issue. Minnesota is currently less than 2% of total winter electricity demand in the US. Lets be pessimistic and assume that because it needs more heating in winter than average those 2% become 5% with electrification of heating nationwide. Even if 100% of that electricity needed to be imported from other states that's still a very small amount of the total. You could import all that solar and wind energy from other states if you can't produce any at all locally. The scenario is obviously much better than that, you'd only need to cover the shortfall which is what already naturally happens in joint grids all over the world.
> Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
I'm still waiting for a link that shows that nuclear can be built at anything approaching reasonable cost. In all these discussions that's always presented as a given and then all the discussion is on the shortfalls of renewables. Meanwhile the actual reality on the ground is that the renewable roll-out is rising exponentially and nuclear projects are practically non existant.
Please double-check my math here. Minnesota delivers about 70,000 million cubic feet of natural gas to customers in the coldest months[1]. 70,000,000,000 cf of NG is about 72,730,000,000,000 BTUs[2]. That's equivalent to 21,315 GWh[3] of energy created by NG per month. Divide that by 31 days and you're looking at 687 GWh of natural gas per day or 29 GW of continuous generation. Minnesota's current entire electricity generation capacity is 17 GW[4], so we're looking at roughly tripling our current capacity. Nearby states are about on the same order, so we would be sucking down a whole lot of their power during low-generation periods. If we want to prepare for 7 days of no electricity generation, we would need 4,809 GWh of energy storage solely for heating, which is about 1600 instances of the currently largest battery-storage system on the planet, just for heating Minnesota.
Some combination of nuclear and solar/wind feels much more realistic to me to meet this demand, than building out that many batteries.
This is all napkin-math-y, so feel free to fudge it up and down a bit. But I just can't get the numbers to feel reasonable to me.
You've now ignored the simulations others have done, after insisting on those repeatedly, and have started making your own to again conclude solar and wind must not be viable and nuclear necessary. Meanwhile I'm still waiting on any kind of study that says nuclear can be built at anything approaching a viable cost. This is not a reasonable way to discuss something.
Fair enough, agree to disagree. I do want to say thanks for engaging me on this, and for digging up that study link. This was the most productive conversation I've had about the topic on HN.
No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.
> Here's the RethinkX simulation of that
Thanks for the link. I focused on the New England scenario, as it's the most similar to Minnesota of the 3 scenarios. It doesn't seem to account for heating. This is the problem I keep coming to in these analyses. See page 25:
> Our model takes as inputs each region’s historical hourly electricity demand ... For the New England region, our analysis applies to the ISO New England (ISO-NE) service area which provides 100% of grid-scale electricity generation for the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Our heating is not supplied by electricity. I definitely believe that our current electricity demand may be met by renewables in a feasible timescale, but that leaves out the massive hole of heating our buildings.
The only reference I could find to New England's heating is this little note at the bottom of page 46:
> If New England chose to invest in an additional 20% in its 100% SWB system, for example, then the super power output could be used to replace most fossil fuel use in the residential and road transportation sectors combined (assuming electrification of vehicles and heating).
But I don't see any actual numerical analysis backing this up. Given their analysis earlier only spoke about electricity usage, I'm not super convinced by this one sentence.
Additionally, the New England scenario suggests they need 1,232 GWh of storage to supply only 89 hours of electricity for the area. Even if we agree that's a sufficient amount of time, the currently largest energy storage facility on the planet is only 3 GWh[1]. We would need 410 such facilities for New England alone. Can we really scale battery tech up that much, especially given resource constraints like Lithium and copper? Maybe! Hopefully! But it's a big question. Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
[1] https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/worlds-largest-battery-storag...