Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible
Waryle@jlai.lu 2 weeks agoBut will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?
Will solar with interseasonal storage ever be even feasible?
People like to throw LCOE around, occulting that running countries with solar (and wind) power is plain science-fiction and nowhere close to change, while nuclear (at least fission) is empirically proven to work reliably, even for cheap, costing less than 200 billions of euros in the span of 60 years in France for example.
When you don’t have enough sun (or wind), you either have sufficient backup in hydro or solar, or you burn coal and gas.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
my take is that 1. you don’t need equal supply year-through because big consumers should be able to sleep and reduce their energy intake in the winter. yes i know that is complicated, but sleep is also complicated in nature and evolution still pulled through with it because it does pay off in the long term.
secondly, storage can also be renewable biomass. i have some napkin math sitting around somewhere on my disk that says that about 5% of the yearly energy demand can be covered with basically non-cost “waste” biomass that’s basically being burned to get rid of it today. I actually wanted to write a longer post about it in the !bathtubthoughts@discuss.tchncs.de community, i just couldn’t figure out how to properly present my calculations yet.
Waryle@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
So you’re trying to advocate we should put millions of people on virtual unemployment during winter to save energy? Who will pay for that?
Do you think it’s honest to compare nuclear price all-included LCOE to the solar and wind LCOE* (* = not accounting for the tens or hundred of billions of unemployment subsides each year to account for forced shutdown because of power drought)?
First thing: biomass is about 200-250g of CO²eq per kWh. Burning biomass is polluting, and thus is not a viable alternative to nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, and the other low-carbon power sources we should aiming for.
Even if your calculus are correct, if I take the example of a country like France which has a +30-50% increase in power consumption for 5 months during the coldest months than in the rest of the year. And it’s not because of industry, it’s because we heat up with a lot of electricity, even if we still need to convert a lot of fossil-based heating to low-carbon electricity heating.
But the solar production at the time has a -75% decrease. Wind is basically non-consistent through the year.
So when we need solar the most, to heat up in winter, a phenomena that will get even worse when we decarbonize heating, it just does not follows up. And wind drought during very cold weeks definitely happens regularly.
So we NEED interseasonal power storage to make full-renewable working, at least without huge capacities in hydro-electricity.
And we’re not even close to achieving this kind of gigantic power storage, which is why Germany, the biggest advocate for solar and wind with more than 40% of its electricity coming from it, and has no hydro, is still one of the dirtiest electricity in Europe. Because it still burns gas and coal to compensate for solar and wind lack of reliability.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
I think “biomass” CO2 emission depends on whether it’s renewable biomass (which i meant here) or non-renewable biomass (a.k.a fossil fuels).