I think what you are missing from this discussion is that both renewables and nuclear require dispatchable power to fill the gaps. If storage is "impossible" then a nuclear grid is impossible unless you overbuild it leading to costs multiples higher than Ukrainian war gas crisis costs.
The problem is that renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible, like the article goes into depths about. Renewables easily win this battle as the cost for new built renewables are in the same range as operations and maintenance for paid off nuclear plants.
Generally, the research available see no issues building 100% renewable grids, so I do not know why you keep hampering on about it being impossible?
>The result is a holistic vision of the transition towards a net-negative greenhouse gas emissions economy that can limit global warming to 1.5°C
The research in question ignores the fact that we've already passed that level.
>However, a clear deficit and research gap exist, since a detailed description of the industry sector, i.e. separated major industries such as cement, iron and steel, chemicals, aluminum, pulp and paper, etc., is lacking in almost all cases. Therefore, a full defossilization of the non-energy feedstock demand of the industry sector has not been modelled in global 100% RE analysis.
The research in question conveniently says "we don't really know how much industries use, but surely it can't be that bad right ? Anyways, we're not taking it into account"
>The industry sector is described in detail in Pursiheimo et al. [145], though the authors admit that TIMES, the model used, was not capable of applying full power-to-X functionality for the industry sector, thus fossil hydrocarbon inputs to the industry sector were still required by the model. Similarly, Teske et al. [125] and Luderer et al. [146] mention that the chemical industry is still fully based on fossil fuels.
The research in question confirms that the whole industrial sector still requires massive amounts of hydrocarbons.
Overall, all these full renewable grids papers assume one critical thing: a complete change of all of our infrastructure, to add storage, better grid organisation, and overall a complete rework of... everything. While that's a lofty goal, looking at the reality where we can't even phase out simple things makes it quite unbelievable. Everything is possible if you ignore reality.
> I think what you are missing from this discussion is that both renewables and nuclear require dispatchable power to fill the gaps.
Well, obviously. Either you overbuild generation capacity or you use dispatchable generation. This is 101 stuff.
Why would you assume I would be overlooking such an obvious thing?
> If storage is "impossible" then a nuclear grid is impossible unless you overbuild it leading to costs multiples higher than Ukrainian war gas crisis costs.
That’s an interesting comparison. How did you come up with the cost comparison?
A nuclear grid isn’t “impossible”. We already have a nuclear grid. What we don’t have is a 100% nuclear grid.
> The problem is that renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible
Yes, because of the rules imposed on the electrical market.
Begin by changing the rules so that they stop disincentivizing running nuclear at 100% all the time. Variable renewable sources should not be must take. Nuclear should be paid first and then, if there are any takers, variable renewables.
Non-variable renewables should be free to eat nuclear’s lunch.
> Renewables easily win this battle as the cost for new built renewables are in the same range as operations and maintenance for paid off nuclear plants.
Only because must take rules and renewables using other generation to compensate for their variability.
> Generally, the research available see no issues building 100% renewable grids, so I do not know why you keep hampering on about it being impossible?
Please stop putting words in my mouth. I have never said or implied that 100% renewable grids are impossible. Clearly they are from a theoretical perspective and small grids have been built using 100% renewables.
What I am specifically asking is, how are nation size grids going to be decarbonized, i.e. turned into 100% renewable grids in practice and what timescales are required?
As far as I can tell we either need a boatload of new nuclear, storage and/or megaprojects to build out trans/intercontinental transmission networks.
Storage projections don’t look optimistic.
Trans/intercontinental megaprojects are hard and come with fun spices such as geopolitical risks and massive failure modes.
Nukes are expensive and take a long time to build, but at least we know how to do it.
If we don’t have a plan and know how to build TWh grid storage faster than new nukes, then we should start mass producing nukes right now. At least we’ll have the nukes built eventually.
No one has to take power from renewable sources. They want to because it's the cheapest source of power at the time.
Obviously nuclear power is economically viable if you use price-fixing to make it economically viable, but that is a huge divergence from the way our economy normally operates.
> No one has to take power from renewable sources.
The EU disagrees with you. A certain percentage of power generation is mandated to come from renewables and nuclear is specifically excluded. IIRC there are no means for power companies to refuse feed-in of renewables.
> They want to because it's the cheapest source of power at the time.
The cheapness is mainly due to the artificial construction of the pricing mechanism.
Variable renewable generation should be priced differently from non-variable fossile free generation.
> Obviously nuclear power is economically viable if you use price-fixing to make it economically viable, but that is a huge divergence from the way our economy normally operates.
It's not a matter of price fixing, but rather of a more rational cost allocation.
Variable renewables are free riders on other generation methods.
Obviously nuclear power is economically viable if you use price-fixing to make it economically viable, but that is a huge divergence from the way our economy normally operates.
The problem is that renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible, like the article goes into depths about. Renewables easily win this battle as the cost for new built renewables are in the same range as operations and maintenance for paid off nuclear plants.
Generally, the research available see no issues building 100% renewable grids, so I do not know why you keep hampering on about it being impossible?
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910