Energy infrastructure

I really hope we do complete the widespread commerical deployment of either tidal or wave energy. Though I'm skeptical it will happen.

The commerical strength of wind and solar is so strong that I suspect the majority of renewables will continue to come from those sources. The dominance of wind in Ireland will likely suck up most investment capital from direct competitors like tidal or wave. One of the big benefits for tidal and wave, over wind and solar, is that they could generate electricity when both wind and solar aren't generating to help even out the intermittency problems through diversification.

However, I'm not sure the development pace of tidal or wave is moving fast enough to beat out the competitor that also solves that problem with a different approach: grid-scale battery technology. While grid-scale battery tech is also in the early phases of commerical rollout like tidal, it seems to have far more money and resources behind it. Grid-scale battery tech is benefiting from a lot of the existing massive R&D base that exists for battery technology in other fields like EVs.

I'm very curious who will win that race.

Is this a parody? It's like hearing the views of someone who's woken from a 1980s coma.

To help you catch up, here's what's happened since you were away:

Nuclear has been in the decline for the last 4 decades. It now provides less than half the share of electricity globally as it did at its peak in the mid 1980s. Nearly every nuclear energy company that existed in the 1980s has gone bust.

Solar energy has been growing exponentially for nearly 2 decades. Growth has accelerated in the last decade and now averages between 25% to 35% a year. Prices have dropped 95% in the last 10 years.

In 2021, for the price of one KWh generated by nuclear fission, you can get 5 KWh of solar electricity. The default for all private investment in generation is now renewables. Except for natural gas, all thermal generation (coal, nuclear) is pretty much dead because none can compete on price with renewables.

In 2020, 80% of all new generation capacity globally was renewable - while only 2 nuclear reactors were added globally (in China) while overall nuclear output continued its long term trend by declining by 3% globally.

Renewables now provide 38% of the electricity consumed in Europe and 25% in the USA - up from the single digit percentages when you last studied the electricity generation markets.

Buying off-peak renewable electricity, storing it in batteries and selling it back at peak time is now cheaper than burning natural gas.

PS. Energy density is an attribute of energy storage technologies, not electricity generation. The attributes of generation you might be interested in learning about are capacity factors, LCOE, LACE, fuel costs, etc.

"Nuclear has been on the decline because of Chernobyl."

There are many many reasons for the decline but the primary one is expense. A MWh produced by a nuclear plant on average cost $150 in 2020, a MWh produced by burning coal cost $100, for combined-cycle natural gas the number is about $55, for wind it's around $40 and for modern solar about $35. You'd know all this if you'd googled LCOE like I suggested in my last response because you'd immediately have come across global and national surveys like those done by Lazard's, Bloomberg, the US Energy Information Agency and many others who measure and monitor this stuff.

You might also have learned how the economics of electricity generation has been turned on its head in the last 5 years.

"The energy density from solar energy is 1.5 microjoules per cubic meter."

Like I said, energy density is about storage not generation. Read the first sentence in wikipedia - "energy density is the amount of energy stored in a given system or region of space per unit volume.". Electricity generation doesn't have an "energy density" - it makes no more sense than to talk about the "energy density" of a vacuum cleaner or a TV set.

The minute you open your mouth and say something about "energy density of solar" - you just sound silly. It'd be like someone making bold claims about the top speed of blue cars versus red ones.

If you're actually interested in this subject and not just trolling to waste everyone's time (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here despite strong signals to the contrary), spend a hour when you get a chance to learn something about the metrics everyone uses to compare of electricity generation methods: LCOE, LACE, capacity factors, etc. Then come back and try to make your argument about the superiority of nuclear with real facts and numbers using terminology that makes sense.

Actually I'm curious about one thing - where did you pick up this nonsense "fact" about the energy density of solar generation?

Yeah. Funny case I came across recently where the Australian government is so married to its “environment policy” of going all-in on natural gas, that they wanted to block a private company from building a grid scale li-ion battery because it would completely undermine a natural gas plant they wanted to build:

To be fair, I was bickering with bk a few months ago that natural gas was essential for the decarbonization of electricity generation.

I still believe it is but the rapid advances in grid scale batteries means the current NG generation capacity will probably carry us through.

The final piece of the puzzle is falling into place - carbon-free, cheap, flexible storage in the form of grid-scale batteries are now not only viable but cheaper - without any subsidies - than NG peaking. This year we’ve reached an inflection point - fossil fuel generation is now a legacy technology.

LOL. Literally the biggest battery in the world, and we'd exhaust it within a half hour.

And that's today, not the mythic future when all our transportation and heating is electric.

The cost of guaranteeing supply from renewables is gargantuan. Somehow it's always missing from the calculations, isn't it?