Would love to see a source for that claim. How many 9’s uptime do they target? 90%, 99%
Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.
So it’s flexible. If you have 4kw of battery, you can produce 1kw for 4hrs, or 2kw for 2hrs, 4kw for 1hr, etc.
Nuclear is steady state. If the reactor can generate 1gw, it can only generate 1gw, but for 24hrs.
So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and 13gw 2gw of production.
This has come up before. See this comment where I break down the most recent utility scale nuclear and solar deployments in the US. The comentor above is right, and that doesn’t take into account huge strides in solar and battery tech we are currently making.
The 2 most recent reactors built in the US, the Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, took 14 years at 34 billion dollars. They produce 2.4GW of power together.
For comparison, a 1 GW solar/battery plant opened in nevada this year. It took 2 years from funding to finished construction, and cost 2 billion dollars.
So each 1.2GW reactor works out to be 17bil. Time to build still looks like 14 years, as both were started on the same time frame, and only one is fully online now, but we will give it a pass. You could argue it took 18 years, as that’s when the first proposals for the plants were formally submitted, but I only took into account financing/build time, so let’s sick with 14.
For 17bil in nuclear, you get 1.2GW production and 1.2GW “storage” for 24hrs.
So for 17bil in solar/battery, you get 4.8GW production, and 2.85gw storage for 4hrs. Having that huge storage in batteries is more flexible than nuclear, so you can provide that 2.85gw for 4 hr, or 1.425 for 8hrs, or 712MW for 16hrs. If we are kind to solar and say the sun is down for 12hrs out of every 24, that means the storage lines up with nuclear.
The solar also goes up much, much faster. I don’t think a 7.5x larger solar array will take 7.5x longer to build, as it’s mostly parallel action. I would expect maybe 6 years instead of 2.
So, worst case, instead of nuclear, for the same cost you can build solar+ battery farms that produces 4x the power, have the same steady baseline power as nuclear, that will take 1/2 as long to build.
Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.
That’s stored energy. For example: a 5 MWh battery can provide 5 hours of power at 1MW. It can provide 2 hours of power, at 2.5MW. It can provide 1 hour of power, at 5MW.
The max amount of power a battery can deliver (MW), and the max amount of storage (MWh) are independant characteristics. The first is usually limited by cooling and transfo physics. The latter usually by the amount of lithium/zinc/redox of choice.
What uptime refers to is: how many hours a year, does supply match or outperform demand, compared to the number of hours a year.
So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and 13gw of production.
This is incorrect. Under the assumption that nuclear plants are steady state, (which they aren’t).
To match a 1GW nuclear plant, for one day, you need a fully charged 1GW battery, with a capacity of 24GWh.
Are you sure you understand the difference between W and Wh?
This is old news now! Here’s a link from 5 years ago. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fossil-fuels-buries-nuclear/
This is from last year: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
As to uptime, they have the same legal requirements as all utilities.
I was pro nuke until finding out solar plus grid battery was cheaper.
Source (1)
Later this month the LA Board of Water and Power Commissioners is expected to approve a 25-year contract that will serve 7 percent of the city’s electricity demand at 1.997¢/kwh for solar energy and 1.3¢ for power from batteries.
The project is 1 GW of solar, 500MW of storage. They don’t specify storage capacity (MWh). The source provides two contradicting statements towards their ability to provide stable supply: (a)
“The solar is inherently variable, and the battery is able to take a portion of that solar from that facility, the portion that’s variable, which is usually the top tend of it, take all of that, strip that off and then store it into the battery, so the facility can provide a constant output to the grid”
And (b)
The Eland Project will not rid Los Angeles of natural gas, however. The city will still depend on gas and hydro to supply its overnight power.
Source (2) researches “Levelized cost of energy”, a term they define as
Comparative LCOE analysis for various generation technologies on a $/MWh basis, including sensitivities for U.S. federal tax subsidies, fuel prices, carbon pricing and cost of capital
It looks at the cost of power generation. Nowhere does it state the cost of reaching 90% uptime with renewables + battery. Or 99% uptime with renewables + battery. The document doesn’t mention uptime, at all. Only generation, independant of demand.
To the best of my understanding, these sources don’t support the claim that renewables + battery storage are costeffective technologies for a balanced electric grid.
If the demand goes up I have some doubt, also, mining for Lithium is far from being clean, and then batteries are becoming wastes, so I doubt you would replace nuclear power with this solution
I guess in some regions it could work, but you’re still depending on the weather
you know that grid storage does not always mean “a huge battery”, you can also just pump water in a higher basin oder push carts up a hill and release the potential energy when you need it…
Pumped storage is a thing yeah. But might just as well go full hydro, if you’re doing the engineering anyways.
You don’t need lithium. That’s just the story told to have an argument why renewables are allegedly bad for the environment.
Lithium is fine for handhelds or cars (everywhere where you need the maximum energy density). Grid level storage however doesn’t care if the building houising the batteries weighs 15% more. On the contrary there are a lot of other battery materials better suited because lithium batteries also come with a lot of drawback (heat and quicker degradation being the main ones here).
PS: And the materials can also be recycled. Funnily there’s always the pro-nuclear argument coming up then you can recycle waste to create new fuel rod (although it’s never actually done), yet with battery tech the exact same argument is then ignored.
They’re currently bringing sodium batteries to market (as in “the first vendor is selling them right now”). They’re bulky but fairly robust IIRC and they don’t need lithium.
If you’re thinking of the portable battery marketed as ‘solid state’ then that was a scam - a teardown revealed it was just lithium cells
Yeah, lithium mining and processing is extremely toxic and destructive to the environment. On one hand, it’s primarily limited to a smaller area, but on the other hand, is it sustainable long-term unless a highly efficient lithium recycling technology emerges? And yes, I know there are some startups that are trying to solve the recycling problem, some that are promising.
