First few comments have focused on the CO2 compression storage, but that's just one of many technologies the article talks about. It's worth a read. For that matter so is this whole quarterly special section on climate change and energy technology: https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2022-06-25
Pumped hydro is the largest current energy storage system we have deployed. There's a lot of interest in chemical batteries but they're expensive, particularly given how fast the batteries degrade.
Vanadium is too expensive/rare to be used at scale unfortunately. But I believe there are a number of workable chemistries for non-vanadium based flow batteries currently in development.
Pumped hydro is great but there are limited locations where the geography and geology allows it to work. And there are ecological concerns with building more dams.
Developing new pumped hydro definitely has drawbacks. Slightly encouraging: Switzerland just brought 20GWh of pumped storage online that can generate up to 900 MW. The project took 14 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nant_de_Drance_Hydropower_Plan...
It might be part of the solution, but the repeated talk about how we need some magical breakthrough before we can continue with electrification is just wrong.
The most important part, is to burn less fossil fuels, and we have lots of ways to do that, and we should do whichever is cheapest and easiest first.
Long duration storage comes after:
- put a price on carbon and other pollution
- efficiency/insulation
- electrify everything
- build more renewables
- vary existing tech to complement renewables (e.g. hydro, waste to energy)
- vary loads to absorb renewables when they are available
- build short term storage to shift energy (EVs and related battery tech)
- ship green ammonia/hydrogen around the world from places like chile.
And then there's a place for long term storage (which is a direct competitor to green hydrogren production and may never make sense compared with doing more of that)
Yes, it does, if you want to get to a 100% decarbonized grid with renewables most economically, and particularly if you want solar to be a substantial component of energy supply at high latitude. Yes, other things come first, but storage has to be in there. Synthesis of chemical fuels at lower latitude for use at high latitude is effectively long term storage, since once one has paid to cost of making those fuels, storing them is cheap and adds robustness.
That's a pretty big if. Most people would be ecstatic if the grid was 99% decarbonized, and 99% decarbonized is probably an order of magnitude easier than 100% decarbonized. Unless you're some place like British Columbia with massive hydro reserves.
If you add "Dispatchable 1", which is gas, and give it zero cost, but then put a limit on the total CO2 emission, you can get the optimal setup to get X% (X < 100) of a synthetic baseload source from wind/solar/batteries/hydrogen. Then take out hydrogen and look at the cost difference.
> Electricity systems with zero direct CO2 emissions can be built more cheaply by using additional technology options. The examples here are simply a toy model to put an upper bound on the costs for a very simple setup. Additional generation technologies which may reduce costs include using existing hydroelectric generators, biomass from sustainable resources (such as waste and agricultural/forestry residues), offshore wind, concentrating solar thermal, geothermal, ocean energy, nuclear and fossil/biomass plants with CCS. Two additional dispatchable technologies are provided under "advanced assumption settings". Additional storage technologies include redox flow batteries, compressed air energy storage, etc. Other options include allowing demand to adapt to renewable profiles (demand-side management).
> No import or export capacities with other regions are assumed, so each region must meet the baseload profile by itself. Existing and planned transmission grid connections between regions can reduce costs by up to 20% by smoothing wind over a continent-sized area (see e.g. this paper or this one).
> Including energy demand sectors other than electricity, like transport, heating and non-electric industrial demand can offer additional flexibility (e.g. load-shifting by battery electric vehicles and thermal storage for electrified heating), see e.g. this paper or this one.
> Costs here are for completely decarbonised electricity systems. Reaching lower levels of decarbonisation is much cheaper and doesn't necessarily require any storage at all. A non-zero carbon dioxide emission target and options for fossil-fuelled generators can be set under "advanced assumption settings".
The ironic thing here is that if you take that model, and play with it as I suggested, it would validate the earlier claim that long term storage is really just useful for the last percent or so. It's there to cover the "black swan" events when renewables are out for an extended period.
(Well, not quite, because it ignores seasonality of demand, and if that's out of sync with seasonality of supply then more long term storage might be useful.)
Sure, the model is wrong. All models are wrong, but some are useful.
So in the model, long term storage is only required for the last 1% or so. And the model makers mention a list of things, like interconnects and waste to energy that are not included in the model, and that would further reduce that need, so I feel the model supports my claim that long term storage isn't required, but I think you disagree.
One thing they didn't include in the model, but do mention is the electrification of other sectors, which would require a lot of green hydrogen to be produced. This increases the electricity generated, and also introduces a big modulatable load, which means more hydrogen would be 'stored' but less would need to be burned, which then makes it ambigous if that actually counts as storage, particularly as you could choose to burn it if necessary but then use it for other puproses, like fertilizer, if you didn't need it. I see green hydrogen as the main marketplace competitor to long term storage, so this distinction is important in my view.
pfdietz said, long term storage is necessary if you want a 100% renewable grid, replying to me saying it's not necessary (though there's some potential confusion around whether responsive demand to make green hydrogen counts as long term storage or not).
Someone else said, that's a big if, since 99% renewable is probably much cheaper.
When they said you can try it yourself, I thought they were disagreeing with that point, which I, and the people who made the model, agree with.
(As another example, the current US strategy is to get to 95% low carbon electricity and then shift focus to electrifying more things, as that has a bigger impact on carbon at that point, and helps to absorb variability.)
But isn't the point that if you want to electrify more industry while eliminating thermal power generation then you will need massive energy storage to cover the gaps in real time energy supply from renewables..? If you rush and do what you are saying without finding an efficient way to store a surplus of energy then you will have blackouts come winter.
Poe's Law can make it hard to tell, but to me it looks like someone satirizing the extremes of anti-capitalist ideology. Surely there is someone somewhere who agrees that some LGTBTQI+ issue constitutes a real argument against grid-scale energy storage, but if they were the person who is commenting here, probably they would have tried to explain what the relationship is instead of just appending keyword salad.
Innovative technologies need time and capital for R&D.
Without the climate crisis, doing this R&D only once the technology becomes required and therefore economically feasible would be fine. But with the current decarbonization targets, you cannot just build renewables until you hit a threshold, and only then start testing out storage methods while putting the green energy infrastructure industry into hibernation for 20 years. We pretty much need to do everything, right now, at the same time.
This is also why there is a big economic advantage of hydrogen storage. Decarbonizing steel and ammonia production with blue hydrogen (i.e. electrolysis using electricity created with the current fossil fuel heavy generation mix) is already a big potential market which is already kind of feasible, reducing the need for government subsidies to get the tech off the ground.
Once the R&D, production and sales pipelines for blue hydrogen are up-and-running, you just scale up with increasingly mature technology. Then transition the energy input from carbon-intensive to carbon-neutral. This should happen automatically, as green electricity is the cheapest form of energy, and the hydrogen production acts as an energy-sink for any surplus production, mitigating those adverse market pressures acting on renewables after you reach a certain percentage threshold on renewable energy generation. Only then you eventually ramp up the use as energy storage via normal market mechanisms.
Unfortunately the media always seems to put the cart before the horse. Energy storage is not the first step, but should be the last.
I dunno battery battery storage is pretty mature in terms of production, and doesn't depend on a continuous source of CO2 emissions to function.
My house is grid negative from about 11:00 to 19:00 with about 2 months of engineer salary in battery and solar.
It seems like the first and only step available to anyone outside of massive power tycoons, and if I repeat the investment for just a couple more years, it is also the last step.
I think the media reports on anything clickable, but also probably hopium technologies endorsed by energy tycoons to facilitate kicking the can.
Unfortunately, there is not enough (economically extractable) Lithium to go around. Experts estimate a Lithium "hole" of up to 300.000 tons of missing yearly production by 2030.
There is nothing we can do about it, only prospecting for more Lithium, reducing red tape for Lithium mining (with all the negative environmental impacts), or further increasing efficiency of Lithium use in batteries. As you said, Lithium battery technology is mature, so we have hit diminishing returns here.
This is why the feasibility of sodium batteries that was announced a year or so ago was such a big deal. Getting Sodium (e.g. from table salt, mined as excess in potassium mines, with a price of around zero) is easy and cheap.
You are probably thinking of a global surplus in a sense “when renewable energy worldwide exceeds our energy needs”. But right now we have a local time based surplus (i.e. solar works during the bright days, wind farms work when wind blows etc) that does not make sense to export too far, where there is a need. Hence storing some share of this energy is important.
Long term storage is very definitely not required.
If you take a look at the hourly weather data for every continent for the past 30 years, there is not a single hour where there is not wind blowing somewhere on the continent. So you can build a continental grid consisting of just wind turbines that will continuously satisfy the energy needs for the entire continent.
Long term storage is cheaper than a massive continental grid with a massive overbuild of solar, but it's not required.
But it illustrates the point that a lot less long term storage is required than most people expect.
"Requires" is problematic. Do the next N steps of the transition need to block on the availability of storage? No.
But, there's another angle to view this: political feasibility. People are dragging their feet. Why?
Well, what is the value proposition of switching to renewable energy? Right now, it's roughly, "Unfortunately, the reliability may be a downgrade, but saving the planet is definitely worth the sacrifice."
If you made a pie chart of people's reactions, there'd be a big wedge that says "I get it! I'm in!", another big wedge that says "eventually", and another big wedge that says "nope".
If cheap, effective energy storage were a solved problem (commercialized, proven in the field), then the value proposition would be, "Renewable energy will save the planet and also provide everything you're accustomed to right now." The pie chart would look better.
So, because political feasibility is required, decarbonization does sort of indirectly require storage.
Tangent: for this reason, I think we should give storage the same incentives that we give to solar and wind. Possibly even larger ones since solar and wind are pretty good now but storage still needs lots of work.
Thing is, other than mass produced unit technology like li-po and li-ion cells, there’s precious little available storage. I tried to get quotes from a company that sells liquid flow redox batteries, the sort of technology that should scale volumetrically but it’s just not feasible for anyone to deliver beyond small deployments. We can’t order X-kWh storage off the shelves with anything but lithium batteries at the moment and until we can, there will be serious questions asked by people…even enthusiastic people like myself, because I look at the daily cycle count and go “fuck off” I’m not replacing 25% of a lithium battery tech based energy storage every 3 years, grid scale facilities are designed around 25 year cycles and anything with less than a 10 year lifetime feels like flushing money down the drain on razor thin margins, both economically and environmentally once you account for the manufacturing costs of the lithium based energy storage equipment.
The article unfortunately equivocates about the meaning of "long-duration", which could mean "a few hours", "a few days", or "a few months". It mentions "four hours", "an eight-hour buffer", "up to 100 hours," and "seasonal energy storage". The first three of these are indeed required; the last is not, which is fortunate, because it is inherently orders of magnitude more expensive.
Conflating them in this way is profoundly unhelpful: it's like writing an article about a requirement for "high-speed vehicles" including both a Kia Forte (top speed 200 kph) and an SR-71 (top speed 3500 kph). But the ≈40 hours we need is further from being the 4000 hours provided by seasonal thermal storage than the Kia is from being an SR-71, which can, after all, only outrun the Kia by a factor of less than 20, not 100. The reporter can only be hoping to get away with this because of the unfamiliarity of grid-scale energy storage.
Absent cost-competitive geothermal, nuclear, or kite energy (or reliance on intercontinental power transmission), decarbonization of grids definitely requires grid-scale energy storage for a few hours, and it probably requires storage lasting a few days, because even over large geographical areas there are large lulls in wind and solar. The sun doesn't shine all day and the wind doesn't blow all night.
But it almost certainly doesn't require seasonal energy storage, because you can overprovision generation capacity sufficiently to provide enough essential power every week of the year. A consequence of such overprovisioning will be that in the high season (either sunny or windy, depending on your power mix, but probably ultimately sunny) you can generate several times as much energy as the essential minimum, so power-hungry applications will benefit from cheap or free energy in the high season.
This is supported by the article's summary of van Gendt et al.'s report: their "most cost-effective path to a world with net-zero emissions by 2040" has 85–140 TWh of storage at a power of 1.5–2.5 TW. Dividing the numbers, that's 34–94 hours. That's energy storage for a few days, not a few months.
Still, it's interesting to consider the ways we could build a seasonal energy store, even if it isn't essential to decarbonizing the grid.
— ⁂ —
Unfortunately, the Economist's "All charged up" table of energy storage methods doesn't mention thermochemical energy storage (TCES), compressed gas, or even lithium-ion batteries.
Compressed gas, which they do mention at length in the article, is ridiculously inefficient without some kind of thermal energy storage, and the two thermal energy storage technologies they do list are not useful for seasonal storage — latent heat, i.e., phase change materials, and sensible heat, the kind of heat that makes things hot.
So TCES is a crucial enabling technology for possible seasonal compressed-gas storage. As with electrical storage in flow batteries, TCES can provide thermal energy storage for as long as you like if your tanks are big enough, so in theory it's vastly superior for seasonal thermal stores, and you'd need seasonal thermal stores for efficient seasonal energy stores with compressed gas.
TCES has an enormous advantage over currently-available flow batteries in the cost of the necessary materials. We'll see if the Form Energy gadget, which I hadn't heard of, pans out; that would change the equation radically, because only sand is cheaper than iron and salt. But TCES mineral feedstocks like carnallite, muriate of lime, quicklime, and bischofite are nearly so.
Well this is not true because Biden has already started transitioning the US off fossil fuels without any long-duration energy storage and he is doing it in a historically inclusive manner[1].
We will need it later, you can't go 100% 0 carbon without it. Just running peaker generators, figuring out how to heat/cool houses, charge EVs when there is surplus, ... are all cheaper alternatives to storage, but won't cover everything
> We will need it later, you can't go 100% 0 carbon without it.
I think this is just what capitalist is trying to make people believe, the economy will adapt and jobs are already booming as the unemployment in US is at a historic low which shows just how historically strong the economy is [1].
You are insufferably dense. This has nothing to do with economy, inclusivity or any other BS from the POTUS website. Energy production has to be ramped up and down to match utilization in order to keep the grid stable. That is much more difficult to do with renewables. You can't just turn up the wind speed to make turbines spin faster. I know this may be surprising, but when the grid voltage drops too much and fries everybody's electronics, people tend to get very pissed (in a very universally inclusive manner).
They're not arguing it's an economic harm to decarbonize, they're pointing out that it cannot physically be done, at all, without some way of storing energy.
This is needed because otherwise you'd only get energy when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. This is especially true if you do not classify nuclear energy as green energy, but even with nuclear providing baseload generation you would want energy storage to truly take advantage of the energy that renewable sources can provide.
> They're not arguing it's an economic harm to decarbonize, they're pointing out that it cannot physically be done, at all, without some way of storing energy.
If this was true why is the US economy doing so well in the transition off carbon based fuels while being the most inclusive in history[1]?
> This is especially true if you do not classify nuclear energy as green energy
But nuclear is not green [2], and labelling it as such is just green washing.
> If this was true why is the US economy doing so well in the transition off carbon based fuels while being the most inclusive in history[1]?
Because we have not gotten to the point where storage, and particularly long term storage, would make sense to build. I mean, why synthesize a chemical fuel when we're still burning so much natural fuel?
I honestly do not understand this push to have 'inclusive energy policy'. WTF. The point is a net carbon reduction. If poor people need dirty energy while rich people subsidize the technology development WHO CARES.
Bullshit! Compressed gas energy storage has an easy to calculate, and tiny (single digit %) efficiency due to heat losses (gas heats when compresses, then loses that heat, and thus pressure).
Heat can be separated and stored alongside (or used separately, if you happen to have an application for the heat). Modern compressed gas storage installations that don't just dump the heat to the environment are approaching the round trip efficiency of pumped storage (water), and unlike pumped storage they can basically be built wherever you want.
If you're going to store the heat, then you might as well reexpand the cooled compressed gas, recovering some of the energy of compression and cooling it further, and also store that "cold". You can then recover the stored energy by exploiting the hot/cold temperature difference between the two thermal stores. Doing this is functionally equivalent to adiabatic CAS, but doesn't require storage of any compressed gas.
But why would you want to do that? A heat gradient is just about the least useful form of energy known to man. A large fraction of the total engineering effort of humanity went into trying to make energy recovery from heat gradients slightly less bad and the numbers are still terrible. Compressed gas storage gets a better cycle efficiency than that even before adding heat recovery.
You do that because you don't need a large underground compressed air cavity. Instead, you can store energy as heat in materials, which is among the cheapest ways to store it.
But how much cycle inefficiency would you be willing to take for that advantage? I could totally see that storage setup be a huge success at places where you have continuous or forced-schedule intermittent low intensity heating and cooling demands (data center within insulated pipe distance of a spa resort or something like that), and want to make the best out of their opposite heat demands using intermittent electricity, but for general purpose electricity where the recovery would have to go through one of the famous thermal cycles? I really doubt it.
Um, you are aware that CAES also has these inefficiencies. Adiabatic CAES does compression with the heat transferred to a store. The compressed air is a store of "low entropy". Pumped thermal energy storage stores that low entropy as cold rather than as compressed gas. But in both cases, energy is recovered by exploiting a compressed gas (preexisting in one case, manufactured by compression of a cooled gas in the other) heated and reexpanded. I don't understand why you're apparently ok with one and not the other.
Aren't you completely forgetting the non-thermal part of that firm of energy storage? CAES even works completely without heat recovery/reuse. Not particularly well, the adiabatic/store is certainly added for a reason, but a carnot cycle (theoretical best) would take a non-trivial amount of delta to reach even that, even if you had perfectly lossless on the charging side. You'd have to be well within the domain of molten salt to achieve a delta where the theoretical carnot maximum minus real life losses could be interesting. Heat/cold storage can be very useful if you have direct uses for the heat/cold, but if you want to get back to general purpose electricity, it's not good at all.
When a compressed gas expands and does work, its thermal energy is converted to work, and the temperature declines. There is no "energy of compression" in the gas aside from its thermal energy content. The internal energy of an ideal gas is a function only of temperature, not of pressure.
Adiabatic CAES ideally stores ALL the energy invested during the compression into the thermal store. The compressed gas is just there as an entropy sink, so that this stored thermal energy can be converted back to work efficiently. But that's just what the "cold" in a PTES system is, too. Ideally, the efficiency of the two systems is the same.
A compressed piston would allow energy recovery even after allowing the entire heat generated by the compression to dissipate down to ambient levels. The pressure gets slightly lower from the distillation, but it remains considerably above ambient. The fraction of the work that went into the pressure delta post-dissipation can be recovered 1:1 and then you'd still have a temperature delta left to hypothetically salvage, in part, using some carnot approximation. Your purely thermal approach would certainly try to salvage the work that went towards pressure right in the heat pump (decompressing through a piston or turbine mechanically connected to its counterpart on the compression side), but all recovery would still be constrained by carnot, which isn't the case for the "pressure part" of the work if you store that instead of immediately reusing it to gain more temperature delta. Thermal storage is the right tool for the job when all you have to begin with its a temperature gradient (e.g. in a mirror collector spat plant) and you want to time-shift conversion to electricity, or when you have a thermal use case and you want to time-shift electricity use from thermal utilization, but not for round trip electricity/electricity. Some quick googling yields a presentation comparing A-CAES and PTES by Xue Haobai at 2019 Offshore Energy and Storage Summit that puts the low end of round trip efficiencies of A-CAES to where the best of the best in PTES/Carnot batteries would max out.
I can't tell you exactly where your model goes wrong, but I really believe that you must be missing something.
I'm curious what you think about my claim in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32046602 that sensible and latent heat storage are not practical for seasonal energy stores, but TCES might be.
It's plausible. But understand that one can imagine putting heat into underground masses with extremely long time constants, artificial geothermal in essence. It's possible that this wouldn't be practical but I'd want to see details. Geothermal heat pumps already do this.
It's true, there are district heating systems using subterranean seasonal sensible heat storage accessed through heat pumps, like Drake Landing. I wonder if the tighter temperature precision requirements of efficient adiabatic CAES would make it difficult — such a reservoir necessarily has enormous thermal mass, and if its temperature has to remain essentially constant during operation you must store vastly more energy in it than the "tidal volume" of heat during a yearly cycle. But maybe you can avoid such a requirement by clever enough engineering using several such reservoirs or a continuum of them (like packed-bed heat exchange media).
Constant temperature in such thermal stores is achieved by some flavor of counterflow heat exchange. One could, for example, send a fluid through a long bed of some granular material, in one direction for storing heat and in the opposite direction for withdrawing it. The temperature will be hot at the charging input end and cool at the discharging input end.
Yes, that's what I meant about packed-bed heat exchange media—but making the bed long of course gives it more surface area to conduct heat to the surrounding rock. And the moving thermal gradient inside the packed bed still gives rise to some temperature variation over time at the hot end and at the cool end. For district heating this doesn't matter.
Possibly this is less of a problem than I imagine it to be for adiabatic CAES; my knowledge of these systems is obviously pretty sketchy.
Even if you’re right about the efficiency, keep in mind that for long term grid storage it’s more about how cheaply can “enough storage” be built and maintained.
Efficiency would just be one variable in that calculation.
I'm not sure why you would think the quantities of hydrogen that can be stored are a limit in practice. Certainly we can store at least as much hydrogen in the form of methane as we have ever extracted natural gas from natural gas wells, which is decades' worth of consumption, not a mere 40 hours' worth.
Maybe I was not clear: the quantity of green hydrogen we can produce is negligible because the amount of energy needed to extract it is so high, the amount of energy needed to compress it in a tank, respect of the rate of usage in a fuel cell makes the balance ridiculous: you need a hectare of p.v. to produce few grams per day of hydrogen or you need a good sunny day to produce enough for a mile or two in a fuel-cell powered car. At that point the entire "economy" is just marketing.
Oh, that makes sense! You're coming to ridiculously wrong conclusions because you're working from ridiculously wrong data, but not about the storability of hydrogen; rather, about the relevant efficiency figures.
Let's put some concrete numbers on this. Grid-scale PV in California has a capacity factor of 29%, based on a nominal efficiency of typically 21% and a nominal solar constant of 1000 W/m². This gives 61 W/m² of solar cell as a round-the-clock average. A hectare of solar cells would be 10000 m², but because solar cells are more expensive than land they are not placed edge-to-edge without gaps; I'll guess that 30%, 3000 m², is a closer estimate, but I'd appreciate better figures from real utility-scale PV installations. That's 180 kW per hectare, round-the-clock average.
Hydrogen has a LHV of 120 MJ/kg, so with 100% electrolysis efficiency 180 kW would work out to 131 kg per day per hectare, using the 30% fill factor above. Actual electrolysis efficiency is only about 70% in current industrial practice, reducing this to 92 kg per day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficien...
Then we have the question of how much energy is lost in compressing the hydrogen for storage. This is a little tricky to calculate because the answer can be arbitrarily low (isothermal compression is perfectly efficient) and even adiabatic compression depends on the kind of gas you're compressing, but the electrolysis link above says, "Practical electrolysis (using a rotating electrolyser at 15 bar pressure) may consume 50 kW⋅h/kg (180 MJ/kg), and a further 15 kW⋅h (54 MJ) if the hydrogen is compressed for use in hydrogen cars.[37]."
So we're at 234 MJ/kg in, 120 MJ/kg out. This gives 67 kg/day of hydrogen for our hectare. This is an average including the occasional cloudy day that happens in southeastern California; on sunny days the number is higher.
67000 grams is, I think, not accurately described as "a few grams".
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/fcv_sbs.shtml says current fuel-cell cars on sale in the US go 64–72 miles per kg, or, in non-medieval units, 103–116 km/kg. 67 kg (again, an average day, not a sunny day) thus gives you 4300–4800 miles, or, in non-medieval units, 6900–7800 km.
6900–7800 km is, I think, not accurately described as "a mile or two"; even though there are admittedly many different incompatible definitions of a "mile", none of them is close to 1000 km long.
In extremely polar countries like Germany and the Netherlands, PV capacity factors are much lower, sometimes below 10%, so you have to divide all these numbers by a factor of about 3.
So, how did you end up believing figures that were wrong by three or four orders of magnitude, and with such confidence that you were dismissing correct, factual accounts of energy economics as "just marketing"? And how can you avoid getting suckered into such swaggering delusions in the future?
It's interesting that you claim it's easy to calculate, but you haven't copied and pasted the calculation you did, which other people seem to disagree with. Your comment would probably be more convincing if you explained the easy calculation, which should be easy for you.
We do want to electrify the world, don't we? This using nuclear leaves us with three options:
- every country runs it's own
homegrown nuclear power plants
- a few first world companies run power plants in every country, making them dependent and complaint
- nuclear plants are in "safe" countries (which hopefully remain safe) and their electricity gets distributed to dependent "unsafe" countries via a global power grid
It's roughly as safe as renewables, and they're both much safer than fossil fuels, particularly coal, but you have to use obviously out of date stats to suggest anything else regarding renewables vs nuclear and the trend is clearly in renewables favor, even if it wasn't continuing to get cheaper, which it is, which gives you more safety-per-buck too.
Retro-fitted rooftop solar is a small slice, compared with utility scale and commercial and going forward, rooftop solar will mostly be added at the same time as the roof (either original build or roof replacement), removing the extra rooftop visit.
For people still retro-fitting solar (which will grow in absolute terms), the increased efficiency means they get more power per trip to the roof than the past installs, further lowering the deaths per TWH generated (this also impacts mining related deaths as PV efficiency of manufacture has been increasing, getting more TWH per unit of material).
It pretty much totally discounts the insanely large number of thyroid cancer cases in children. Then comes up with a very optimistic scenario of survival rates based on western medical interventions. So maybe they didn’t die per say but had significantly reduced quality of life and mutations.
This is a classic example of taking one vanity metric and making absolute conclusions from it rather than taking a range of data points to paint a more accurate story.
I find Wikipedia shows a range of numbers that are far more likely to give a realistic picture
Note that they don't use 100 as the Chernobyl deaths estimate, they use 433. While I think that is very optimistic, there are very valid concerns with estimates made using the linear no-threshold model (which they discuss). And they used 2314 for Fukushima, which Wikipedia [1] agrees with and ascribes largely to the evacuation efforts.
I'm not claiming it as a 100% accurate source, as it was just what I found with a quick google - I agree using a range of data points for each energy source would be more rigorous. Do you have a better source that uses ranges for the different energy options?
I think the gotcha here is they are saying : safer === less deaths.
If you purely want the safety of power sources at a minimum you have to look at deaths, unnecessary human suffering and also potential for long term deaths & suffering. I think another thing that I find missing from the article is acknowledgement of the long term challenge of safely storing nuclear waste and the potential loss of life/suffering it could cause in the future.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
Seeing how debatable the issue of deaths caused by actual nuclear disasters is (varying from 400 to 60000 for Chernobyl), I can't imagine how little agreement two parties could have on the comparative amounts of human suffering caused by different energy sources. You would have to encompass land use changes, air quality, long term statistical health outcomes, respiratory illness, wildlife impacts, the list goes on ad infinitum..
I don't think that Mayak is relevant, as it is a secretive, poorly regulated nuclear weapons production facility. Similarly, the impacts of Therac-25 [1] patients or the Goiania Incident[2] don't get counted against nuclear energy.
Yes, chernobyl was fairly harmless, just like Fukushima. Wild life in both is thriving despite the fact that the mainstream media said the radiation was so bad nothing would be able to live there. Reality doesn’t back up any of those assertions at all. Villages near fukushima ignored the dire warnings and are just fine.
If this is surprising then you need to diversify your media news consumption.
Rooftop solar is more deadly than nuclear when you count people falling off of roofs during solar installation as “solar deaths”, otherwise it’s safer.
This feels like a variation of the trolly problem where currently we're on one that's killing millions (fossil fuels), and everyone is afraid to pull the lever for one that kills a handful because it has the unreasonable requirement of needing to be perfect (nuclear).
> People often focus on the marginal differences at the bottom of the chart – between nuclear, solar, and wind. This comparison is misguided: the uncertainties around these values mean they are likely to overlap.
> The key insight is that they are all much, much safer than fossil fuels.
> Nuclear energy, for example, results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas. Wind and solar are just as safe.
Right. I didn't mean to focus on it being safer, but rather just the blanket statement "no it's not" that I was replying to. It doesn't really matter to me, we just need to get off fossil fuels now
Pumped hydro is the largest current energy storage system we have deployed. There's a lot of interest in chemical batteries but they're expensive, particularly given how fast the batteries degrade.