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Hugh's avatar

A question on storage. One of the big issues with solar/wind is variability of supply - hence the need for base load generation or storage. I was looking at the eye-watering estimates for the new nuclear stations and wondered how that compared with, say, enough batteries to store a week's worth of energy from a power station. I appreciate there will be loads of practical considerations as well (e.g. how big would it be??) but as a starting point how do the costs compare?

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Just Dean's avatar

Some of the comments have alluded to this. Some in a nice way and some in a not so nice way. I think this adage applies, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

I continue to believe that questions like these are really best left to systems experts that do tradeoff studies, e.g. Net-Zero America Project. Here is a link to their summary, https://netzeroamerica.princeton.edu/img/Princeton%20NZA%20FINAL%20REPORT%20SUMMARY%20(29Oct2021).pdf .

Because of variability both seasonal and daily for renewables, you have to overbuild. This is seen clearly in the graph on pg. 25 where the annual generation for an all renewable system is the largest. This also comes with increased cost. An important point is that this study is already a couple years old and the results would probably be different today. The point being that experts in system studies are continually reassessing the situation. However, as Dr. John Bistline wrote in an NYT op-ed concerning the U.S, we shouldn't worry so much about the final mix of technologies but we should do the things we know we need to do,

"For the coming decade, rapidly reducing coal electricity and building extensive wind, solar and storage systems are low-cost strategies in many places, regardless of how much energy might or might not eventually come from renewables."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/opinion/environment/ipcc-report-climate-change-debates.html .

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