2y ago

The momentum of the solar energy transition

www.nature.com

The momentum of the solar energy transition - Nature Communications

Due to technological trajectories set in motion by past policy, a global irreversible solar tipping point may have passed where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets, without any further climate policies

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Seems too conservative projection for wind energy, but yeah most experts agree solar will be dominant.
- I mean I understand this is modeling a pathway with no further climate policy, but still wind being second cheapest option should gain more share.
  
  I think the assumption is that since they are large and but the first most cost efficient, it doesn't make sense to increase its share. Why not just put more solar instead?
Why won't we build more nuclear plants?
- Politics mostly. It would be a solution, but it requires building a ton and building them fast. We can build nuclear power plants in a few years, but it usually takes a decade to work through the legal hassles opponents will put through. When factored in, not worth it anymore. And I am really angry at them because we could already be in a post-fossil fuel without this misguided pseudo-environmentalism.
- Take a look at the cost overruns for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 and it'll answer your question.
- I like nuclear a lot too, but it does have its drawbacks:
  Expensive. Plants are expensive to build and maintain. They also take like 5-10 years to build from scratch.
  Water intensive. In the coming century water is going to a really hot commodity as water reserves dwindle. Having a power source that relies on lots of water might not be a good idea.
  Fuel sources. Not about what's fueling it but where is coming from. Uranium is only found in certain deposits and if your country either doesn't have a source in house then they need to have political clout and money to obtain it. Everyone likes to point to France as a nuclear powered country but where did they get their uranium? Niger. The same Niger that just had an anti-french coup, cutting off their supply.
  Maybe future tech like SMRs will make it more viable but for now the solar/geothermal/wind route will be a much quicker and easier replacement for fossil fuels.
  
  Regarding scarce uranium, if more money was poured into perfecting a thorium based molten salt design, we would have enough readily available fuel to power the world for over a thousand years, as Thorium deposits are quite common.
  However I'm not hopeful that Nuclear will become a significant power source in any reasonable timeframe, at least in america, due to the massive amount of red tape making building them slow and costly. Though I hope I'm wrong about that.
  
  Count per kWh. Countries like France who managed to standardize models get cheap costs.
  Air cooling is a possibility and water availability not a problem. If water becomes scarce or warm to the point where we can't warm a percent of a stream up a few degrees, we will have much more serious problems than electricity.
  France started mining uranium locally. We stopped because Niger was cheaper and with less labor rights. But blockade France and the uranium mines can get reopened.
  
  Niger supplied 20% of Frances uranium over the last ten years. The coup is not a threat to Frances electricity supply at all as France can buy urnanium ore from others countries with ease. The problem is that Russia has nearly half of the global uranium enrichment capacity and we all have seen that Russia should not be trusted when it comes to energy security.
  
  So is solar and wind if you take everything into account. Most importantly storage to make it viable for night time use. Let alone overcast days with no wind. Unless you have that storage, you need to have parallel capacity of some other power plant to make up for that. Which is, the more wind/solar there is, used less and less. But still costs the same. Storage big enough to get over winter is way to expensive. And even with storage you need excess capacity to actually fill that storage.
  There is no inherent need to use water, air cooling is possible too, but costs more. The water is also not "wasted", so unless all the mayor rivers etc. dry up there is no issue.
  The least of all issues. Uranium can be found in lots of places, including Germany and the USA. We can also use thorium, from which we have even more.
  
  future tech like SMRs
  it's not future tech, it's present tech
- Cost mostly. It's really expensive, enough so that the first ~80% of the shift off fossil fuels is going to happen using solar + wind + storage.
  To make sense for the last 20%, it's going to need to come down in price enough to beat the emerging longer-duration storage technologies. Not at all clear to me that it can do that.
- I think you're best suited to answer your own question. Since you're the one who wants to build nuclear, why don't you do it?
  If the answer is expertise, no problem, just hire people.
  If the answer is money, just band together with others. Online discussions always have tons of people who want the same thing you do -- you can pool your resources.
- big oil kneecapped it and enviromentalists still think they're thinly veiled bomb factories. you can tell because you substitute "thorium" for "nuclear" and favorability shoots up way more than you'd expect taking into account non-hysteria reasons

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