In the German Alternativlos podcast the Wendelstein team (Prof. Dr. Thomas Klinger, Dr. Adrian von Stechow) recently stated that it is already feasible, they estimate a cost of ~€20B and a 5 year construction time for a commercial fusion power plant if we started now.
For less than 15 billion euro you could buy enough solar to power a country the size of the Netherlands. With 5 billion to spend on batteries you might even make it through night time usage.
Or in other words: Fusion is too expensive at this point to be useful.
Then some countries stepped up the subsidies game and booom, prices fell dramatically since suddenly everybody wanted a piece of the cake. And competition drove this all down.
All you need is for somebody to start. Or we just keep telling ourselves that it's too expensive, shrug, and move on.
Also note how the goal posts changed. Until recently, everybody made fun of fusion by basically saying it's too hard, it's too far in the future. Now it's not too hard anymore, it's just too expensive. What's next? Too loud? Too big? Induces headaches with the esoterically minded?
And it was pointed out 40 years ago that DT fusion will be inherently expensive (specifically, more expensive than fission, which itself has demonstrated it cannot compete.)
Solar has the advantage of scaling down. 1000 people can give 1M US dollar which can produce approximately 1GW of power on a thousand of power plant in a year. You can scale down as low as 400W of energy production and distribute the financial cost to many people.
No. Right now there is no reasonable way to have a 100% renewable and reliable grid in Northern Europe, excepting classic hydro.
I specifically studied the German grid, and it needs about a MONTH of storage to compensate for a once-in-a-century Dunkelflaute (a period with little wind, no sun, and cold temperatures).
You're wrong about that. Back up with green hydrogen is quite plausible. Europe has enormous salt formations in which cavities can be solution mined for gas storage (this is one of the chief ways natural gas is stored). Storing hydrogen, the cost of these caverns per unit of storage capacity in these would be about $1/kWh. The total potential capacity there is in the petawatt hours, far more than would be needed.
A combined cycle power plant costs about $1/W of capacity (and for rare events, simple cycle would be even cheaper), so one could back up the entire grid with these at a small capital cost compared to powering the grid with nuclear. For Europe, these would also be useful for seasonal leveling, allowing solar to provide a larger fraction of Europe's energy demand.
Hydrogen is an example of "Power to X" (PtX), where excess power, when available, is used to make some very storable commodity. This review article talks about how important these are to reaching 100% RE.
"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels."
> You're wrong about that. Back up with green hydrogen is quite plausible.
I have not seen any real plan to achieve this. Right now, it's basically a giant asterisk with a footnote saying: "Magic happens here".
One plan I've seen where authors went totally wild and actually tried to compute what's needed, required converting 80% of housing to district heating with molten salt storage, all kinds of energy storage, and 2x price electricity increase.
I've seen estimates that simply building out hydrogen backup will cost on the order of $300B in power line and pipeline upgrades (because hydrogen can't just be piped through natural gas pipes). And it will still require expanding the renewable fleet.
I'm not at all optimistic about that.
FWIW, I think power-to-natural-gas has the biggest chance, because it can re-use the natural gas infrastructure. But it's still going to be too expensive.
Argument-from-ignorance is not an argument. If you haven't seen "any real plan" that just reflects your disinterest in seeing such a plan.
There is nothing preventing this from being applied to Europe. All the technologies are available. It's just a matter of integrating existing capabilities, which is the surest kind of innovation.
No pipeline upgrades are needed for hydrogen for grid storage, since there's no need to move hydrogen away from the storage caverns. It can be created and consumed there. It could be useful to build pipelines, of course, but it isn't necessary. I am NOT suggesting using hydrogen to replace natural gas in distributed applications.
Power-to-natural-gas has the problem of where does the carbon come from. CO2 capture (either from the atmosphere, or from the exhaust of the CC plants) would add to cost, and then the CO2 needs to be stored also. And, the round trip efficiency will be considerably below that of hydrogen. Power-to-liquid fuels would make more sense; it doesn't cost that much more to turn CO2 + H2 into such fuels instead of to methane. Liquid fuels (normally for air or ship transportation, for example) could also serve as a rare event backstop along with hydrogen, for once-in-a-century events, as long as the CC plants can burn both.
> If you haven't seen "any real plan" that just reflects your disinterest in seeing such a plan.
No. I did a full literature search and I read most of the articles in that area.
> There is nothing preventing this from being applied to Europe. All the technologies are available. It's just a matter of integrating existing capabilities, which is the surest kind of innovation.
What is "this"?
> No pipeline upgrades are needed for hydrogen for grid storage, since there's no need to move hydrogen away from the storage caverns. It can be created and consumed there.
The thing is, most of German storage is in the northern part (Rehden, Etzel, Epe, etc) due to geology. That's not where the consumers are, so you need to build a huge amount of power lines.
To give you a perspective, a fairly typical natural gas pipeline can transfer around 1 Bcf of gas per day, which translates to about 12GW of power. This is the same as the largest ultra-high-voltage direct current (UHVDC) line in the world (in Brazil), built at the cost of around $2.5B for 2400 km.
And you'll need many, many such lines to transfer power from the points of generation and consumption to the hydrogen hubs. This is in addition to already expensive hydrogen production and gas turbines.
I don't see this ever becoming cost-competitive with plain old PWRs.
> Right now there is no reasonable way to have a 100% renewable and reliable grid [...] and it needs about a MONTH of storage to compensate for a once-in-a-century Dunkelflaute
If you accept slightly less than 100% renewables, you could use diesel or gas backup for these once-in-a-century events.
That drives up costs because you have to maintain many gigawatts of backup capacity sitting idle most of the year. It's better to have more flexible solutions that provide value the whole year. That's either baseload (fission, fusion) or grid-scale, seasonal storage (unsolved problem).
The backup capacity is cheap (in capital cost) compared to nuclear providing the same output. Like, an order of magnitude cheaper. Combustion turbines are remarkably compact and inexpensive for their power output (this is why they power our aircraft). It's wonderful what happens to machinery when you can reduce the need to transfer heat across fluid-solid boundaries. Rocket engines are an even more extreme example of this.
Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant cost $6 per Watt of installed capacity over the projected 50 years of lifetime. Simple natural gas turbines (not combined cycle) cost around $2 per Watt over 50 years in just capital costs. This doesn't take into account the cost of the fuel, or the magic infrastructure to produce, store, and deliver hydrogen.
I'm taking Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant as the base for comparison because it's an example of what you can do, when you have a "mass produced" design that you can just quickly build.
That's funded by a loan from the Russian government, not from private financial markets, so we can assume the rate is below market. The actual cost when real risk penalties are included (as they must be for an accurate cost) would be higher.
I also doubt anyone is going to be buying Russian nuclear power plants in Europe anytime soon. The strategic risk and associated cost (as seen with importing natural gas from Russia) would be far too high.
> That's funded by a loan from the Russian government, not from private financial markets, so we can assume the rate is below market. The actual cost when real risk penalties are included (as they must be for an accurate cost) would be higher.
Not much higher, though. Russia makes money on these contracts. South Korea has
> I also doubt anyone is going to be buying Russian nuclear power plants in Europe anytime soon. The strategic risk and associated cost (as seen with importing natural gas from Russia) would be far too high.
Of course. I'm not suggesting that Russia should be relied upon for ANYTHING at this point. It should be as isolated economically as possible.
I'm just using this as an example of what you can do with a streamlined construction pipeline for plain old PWRs. No fancy new technology, no breakthroughs, just regular old good project management.
First, backup generation is expensive. Right now Germany needs about 200GW, and this value will go _up_ when Germany switches from natural gas to heat pumps for heating, and expands the EV fleet.
That's a lot. Even cheap gas turbine power plants will cost around $100B to build.
And while the one-month Dunkelflaute is exceptional, the shorter versions lasting a couple of days happen basically every year. As a result, you probably need about 2-3 weeks a year of various levels of backup utilization every year.
Chile is an outlier, the plants are in remote locations in the Atacama desert where you have two compelling reasons to build solar plants: There is a lot of space where nobody lives and the sun is always shining. There are mountains but there are also lots of places which are flat for as far as the eye can see, an example would be the Cerro Dominador plant which probably didn't require any ground preparation.
Chile is cheaper, and in a solar-powered world energy intensive industries will move to such places. If (say) Sweden wants to try to preserve industries by building nuclear power plants, they'll find the expensive power from nukes competing against the dirt cheap power from Chilean (or Namibian, or Australian, or Saudi Arabian) solar.
> in a solar-powered world energy intensive industries will move to such places.
And to windy places. Happening already in Europe, building new industrial plant close to the huge and fast growing offshore North Sea wind power plants
1 euro per kW of capacity isn't that low, residential systems can get below that and it includes installation cost and an inverter which would both scale better for a bigger system.
From listening to the episode I'd say that it isn't much more than a gut feeling derived from their experience building the experimental reactor, coming from the head of W7X I'd give it at least some credibility. Without sufficient political will this isn't feasible at all.
Well, most land is either farmland, forest or desert. Forest is out of the question for any solar installations unless you want to cut down the trees. Desert is not easily accessible for most parts of the world and provides terrible conditions for solar cells that have sharply declining efficiency with heat and don't like dust.
Leaves farmland, if you want to do this kind of thing at any sort of required scale. (Sure you can put solar cells on barn roofs, but the premise was scale magnitudes beyond that.)
Hint: solar on farmland does not interfere with use as farmland. Look up agrivoltaics. Solar on pasture is even easier, and protects livestock from weather extremes.
Farmland is literally converting solar energy into sugars. It's natures solar plants. Sure, you can get a bit of shade for your cattle. But the hundreds of millions of acres used for crops are directly competing for sunlight with your solar cells.
You imagine that is so, but the science says otherwise.
In fact, most plants can only use sunlight for a few hours a day, and must then endure the heat for the rest of the day. A few crops -- wheat, corn -- offer slightly reduced yields when shaded, but many others -- particularly peppers -- yield better with partial shade. Even where yield is reduced, the extra year-round revenue and radically reduced water loss may even the score.
https://alternativlos.org/51/