Re wind being so cheap: it is currently because we have fossil backup. If fossil fuels and nuclear get phased out, we might wake up to a reality where, when the wind blows, energy is basically free, and when it doesn't, it is extortionately expensive.
That might change the economics, for nuclear fission as well as fusion.
Both fission and fusion are awful at peaking. For peaker energy you want low capital investment and higher marginal costs.
Fusion and fission are extremely capital expensive with quite hefty marginal costs through the steam side. They're simply awful at solving the last 20%. Even worse when they're undercut badly enough to never run for the first 80%.
Whether fusion is good at peaking will depend on which fusion technologies end up working. Helion for one would be fantastic at peaking. It's likely to be quite cheap, wouldn't use a turbine, and could run fusion pulses at whatever rate we need.
Helion's approach is I'd guess still dominated by capital cost, not fuel cost, so it's relatively bad at peaking. Granted, if they split the reactors into DD reactors making 3He, and field reactors burning the 3He (with reduced DD), it might make more sense to turn the latter up and down, if they have a relatively larger part of their cost from their fuel.
They can't peak independently, but their reliability and low marginal cost means that they can are well suited to providing peaking capacity in conjunction with storage. Excess power from the reactor can be used to place energy in the storage source, which is then discharged during peak load. Due to the reliability of the nuclear generator, the amount of storage required can be relatively small.
You right, just build high-temperature nuclear and use if for everything, then no peaking is required. And you can also use if for both industrial and residential heat. Solving all your problems at once. If you have electrified transport (electric trains and electric cars) you can have a 100% green economy.
Can it start generating electricity without waiting for steam to reach required temperature? For now we can only assume the worst case scenario and group it with fission in "up to 12h startup time". The report in https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956 compares existing power sources
The way solar prices are trending, energy will also be free when it's sunny out, maybe even partially sunny.
Then the way EVs are trending, each home should have giant batteries in their garage and a good percentage will likely be incentivized to charge their EV when the sun/wind is strong and potentially release it back to the grid when its not.
Indeed. Where I live most people are limited to street parking. It wasn't so bad keeping an EV charged using public chargers, but as more people are getting EVs the public chargers are becoming harder to access.
And supply and demand still have to deal with physical constraints and the current layout of the grid. You can only install so many chargers in a given area before you find blocking issues.
Cities are already energy efficient compared to the suburbs. Most cities have plenty of suburbs around them, and lots (arguably too many) large parking garages that can be used for the same purpose.
You will completely forget that you ever predicted such a thing.
After there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from, storage will be built out, and NG turbines will be used decreasingly often. Many will be converted to burn ammonia instead, which will be fixed at solar farms in the tropics and shipped wherever it is wanted.
If there is dystopia it will be via failure to build out fast enough.
Luckily, between CO2 emissions and climate catastrophe, toxic energy waste of various kinds, air quality issues, and geopolitical instability largely caused by resource wars, our current reality isn't dystopian at all.
Would that be a showstopper? Then we would just produce less stuff when energy is expensive, and more when it is cheap. We'd build houses to keep a pleasant temperature for longer. We'd combine local energy generation with a strong grid to transport energy over longer distances.
Stuff will become more expensive, economic activity might be somewhat dampened, but that might be offset by the cheapness of wind and solar, and by the fact that building the new infrastructure will create a lot of growth. And in the end, it will literally save the planet. I'd choose a bit slower economic activity over accelerating climate change any time.
You're assuming energy companies switch to hourly priced billing.
But nationwide nearly everyone is on a fixed price per kWh deal, and current electricity meters don't usually even support pricing that chances every few minutes, as would need to happen to incentivize people to only use power when the wind blows.
The cost of simply upgrading every electricity meter to a modern one is many years of profits for most energy companies.
Maybe I'm more optimistic because I live in Europe :-P. I'm pretty sure most energy intensive industry is already on flexible pricing. And privately, if you build a new home or change anything about your meter, you're already mandated to install a smart meter. But households' energy use has been slowly going down anyway, due to energy saving appliances and lights, education, and better insulation (the latter doesn't help much with electricity, but with total power consumption).
As the sibling post said, the transition will be difficult. But there is absolutely no way the government will allow widespread brownouts or industrial collapse (in the worst case we'll use just enough fossil as necessary). We are talking about reduced profit margins for a couple of years, and having to wait a bit more longer to buy shiny new gadgets. The real challenge is to orchestrate everything so that it is socially fair and the weakest, or those most dependent on cars, etc. don't get hit too hard.
This seems pretty pessimistic. Weather forecasts exist and things work quite well already today eg for day ahead hourly pricing model, lots of end user energy contracts are like that.
In Finland, time of day electric use meters have existed for something like 20 years. Someone I know who lived north of the arctic circle had a home heating system that would heat up an energy storage box (I forget if it was an oil tank or simply stone) at night and then cycle the heat out to the house during the daytime.
The big thing I see with a ton of arguments about changing the way we produce and consume energy assume that things will change overnight and the whole system will come crashing down because it's not ready.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Things aren't going to happen overnight, there will be a transition period.
Electric vehicle transition is a good example of this.
* OMG, the grid will crash with all the charging.
* OMG, You won't be able to charge it <because reasons>.
* OMG, it doesn't solve <random gas car use case here>.
The transition to electric vehicles is coming, but slowly. It basically started at 0 in 2010 and a decade later it's still only at 2-5% in the US and something like 5-10% in the EU, China, etc. The ball is just getting rolling.
The grid hasn't crashed, charging is getting deployed where there's demand, and not every <random gas car use case here> needs to be solved now, or even in the mid term future.
Depends on whether we improve battery technology, then we could store the excess for less windy days. Also I did a quick search and there are places on Earth that are consistently very windy, so we could maybe even set up massive wind farms there. Commonwealth Bay, Antartica is apparently the windiest place on Earth, where the average annual windspeed is 50mph, according to the Guinness World Record book.
> when the wind blows, energy is basically free, and when it doesn't, it is extortionately expensive.
This is why one must look at the whole spectrum not only on wind and solar. There is hydro, biomass[1] and geothermal as well. The latter is currently not so relevant directly for electricity in most regions, but has a hugh potential to replace other energy sources, including electricity, for heating buildings via heat pumps.
Don't you realise the consequences of phasing out fossil fuels? So much of that is used for, well fuels.. and even when it isn't, like fertilisers, it's still something that's produced in bulk in large quantities and stored. We'll have to produce a HUGE amounts of hydrogen, ammonia, etc. .. and in the absolute worst case scenario we can store some of that hydrogen and use in in existing natural gas power plants (yes, running a turbine on 100% hydrogen has been demonstrated already).
We're already seeing the prices swing more due to renewables, and we're already seeing that it's creating a lot of solutions for shifting energy consumption. Right now I can connect my EV directly to my electricity provider and they'll stop or start charging based on prices. There's an entire parking garage in the Netherlands full of EV rental cars that can deliver power back to grid when prices are higher.
People seem to think nuclear will let us avoid solving the energy storage problems. No. You might be able to run some big ships on nuclear, but not much else. If we solve the problems we need to solve to stop climate change (in a sustainable way.. don't get me started on CCS), then we'll be doing energy storage at just around the same scale needed to balance renewables. BEVs is a pretty good illustration of that, where, if you have one you suddenly have enough energy storage to run your house a day or three. If we're making enough batteries for all cars to be EVs, we're making battery at a scale where a doubling could give most households dedicated battery storage. I'm not sure exactly that will be the solution, maybe it'll be more specialised grid-level batteries like Ambri.. point is, we're moving towards a world where we HAVE to become experts at transforming and storing energy. Cause we're not getting "free" storable/transportable energy from the ground for eternity.
This already kind of happens in places with a lot of solar around noon. Not the extortionate part but the almost free when the system is saturated part.
That might change the economics, for nuclear fission as well as fusion.