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Comment on Stop renewables and wait for nuclear: Nationals stunning rejection of science and industry

The truth is that baseload power isn’t nearly the problem for renewables that the right would like you to believe it is.

Nuclear is insanely expensive to build. Maybe one day new nuclear tech will eventually deliver the promised reduction in price, but it’s not there yet. Renewables have been the cheaper option in Australia for years, and are only continuing to come down. I was relatively pro-nuclear myself, until I learnt that.

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vividspecter@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Agreed. Australia is pretty much the perfect location for renewable energy. We have an absurd amount of solar and wind resources (both onshore and offshore), and a large install base of rooftop solar to help in the transition. The only real challenge is transmission lines, but we are going to need to replace and upgrade them regardless of what we do, and some of that challenge can be reduced by putting more batteries out there in the right places, and using the existing lines more efficiently during the transition.

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- abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  some of that challenge can be reduced by putting more batteries out there in the right places
  
  “The right place” in my opinion is “in your carport”.
  
  Australia has finally started seriously transitioning to EVs, with the number more than doubling in the last 12 months, and most EVs have a battery large enough to provide overnight power for several households.
  
  Add a simple toggle switch to the charger for your household EV charger - in one position it fully charges the battery as quickly as possible. In the other position it charges quickly until the battery has maybe 200km of range. Above that, it only charges if the grid has excess capacity. And if the grid is short of capacity then it will actually drain your EV battery (paying the EV owner just like you get paid for solar feed in right now) again guaranteeing you’ll still have 200km of range.
  
  If enough people also charge their EV during the day, and we have other power sources (wind, hydro) that provide overnight power, I think that would easily provide baseload power for the entire grid.
  
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  - No1@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Some EVs, eg the Aptera, are putting solar cells on the car too. So you don’t charge them, you move them outside 😀
    
    The Aptera claims it can harvest up to 4kWh/day. In Aptera’s case, it’s more than the average US daily mileage.
    
    Of course, a massive SUV EV could harvest more, but won’t be anywhere as efficient…
    
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  - vividspecter@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I was thinking community batteries as well, but EV batteries will certainly be a big contributor.
    
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SaveComengs@lemmy.federa.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Baseload isn’t the problem right now, but we can make it the problem instead.

If we have a solid foundation of baseload, we can incentivize more use of power in low demand times. This could be through water heaters heating household water at night, insulating more houses and using their internal temperature as energy storage, and with the increasing amount of EVs we could also mandate them to only be charged at night.

These measures would all flatten the curve of electricity consumption and increase the base demand in relation to the peak.

Nuclear is ofc really expensive to build, but it’s also expensive to build a million solar cells. And although we don’t know how expensive it would be because we don’t have nuclear power in Australia, in many countries it’s even cheaper than wind and solar per kwh.

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