Not just bigger, but actually tractable problems. The revolutionary fall in the price of solar power and batteries means we can actually displace coal, and have, without really asking much of anyone to do it. That's a massive advantage to have with a big problem!
There's a world coming where automation means electrified heavy equipment stops using diesel entirely, already happening in mine sites in Australia.
Why would you build a very expensive bipedal robot to suicide bomb someone, when as you note, a very cheap flying drone could do the same thing? (and more over: already is, this is literally how drones are used in Ukraine).
Which of course leads to point 2: it's very easy to take a moral stance on weapons when you don't think you're in any danger, nor going to be doing any of the fighting otherwise.
Wait is IPU6 working now? My work laptop has it and the only thing I know is it might work provided I use some user space relay driver and a bunch of other things.
I looked and looked and looked. I don't know why but IPU7 is reported to be pretty good. But IPU6 might still be in perpetual limbo; I don't know. What kernel are you on btw? Sorry for your pain.
Pumped hydro storage only holds about 8-12 hours of power. To be economically viable to build you need to cycle it daily.
It uses enormous amounts of land and capital to build, and is ongoingly dangerous in a unique way. If LiFePO4 can do 4 hours at full output already, and be placed anywhere using volume manufacturing to expand, then batteries are straight up better.
Each way you move the energy costs you 50% in efficiency. Which is why pumped hydro has to have a 4x different in the price of energy in vs energy out to make it economically viable. That's why PG&E almost never uses their pumped storage. Only on days where the mid day price of power is very low does it make sense. And keep in mind that California is the ideal place for pumped storage. I seriously doubt that NZ has a 3x duck curve in its energy demand.
It's nowhere close to 50%. Round-trip (so that's after both ways) efficiency is about 70-80% for a pumped storage scheme. Buy 10MW to pump the water, and get back 7-8MW when you release it. Contrast that with a reality here in the UK where the gas dominated spot price this morning when I woke up was about £180 per MWh, yet yesterday afternoon solar and wind had it down to £25 per MWh, so you could buy 100MWh of energy for £2500 but sell it less than a day later and make 400% on your investment in under 24 hours despite the efficiency loss. Very silly to insist this can't be profitable.
For the cost and expense of building a pumped hydro plant though, you could just deploy batteries which will do the same thing for a much lower capital and management investment and vastly simplified engineering. And a higher round-trip efficiency.
LiFePO4 works to demand shift on a daily cycle just fine and scales better to solar input (where you need much higher power handling so you can charge it on limited sunlight - a pumped hydro system is limited to charging at about half its discharge rate).
I think that's the point about the lake Onslow project - its MASSIVE. So yes, expensive, but months of backup for the whole country would not be cheap even with batteries
Now calculate what it costs running a nuclear plant only at night.
You’ll end up at $400 per MWh excluding transmissions costs, taxes etc.
Your state already has coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned because no one wants their expensive electricity during the daytime. Let alone a horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear plant.
But not economically. And it can’t ramp twice. Once is easy.
For the French to do load following they sync their entire fleet to manage it. Letting plants take turns and spread out where they are in their fuel cycle.
According to the current version of the European
Utility Requirements (EUR) the NPP must be capable
of a minimum daily load cycling operation between
50% and 100% Pr, with a rate of change of electric
output of 3-5% Pr /minute.
The problem with integration of solar and wind with nuclear power is that it doesn't make economical sense to build solar and wind in electric grid based on nuclear power generation. Because the fuel costs of nuclear power plants are so low and the capacity factors can be very high (nuclear power plants need only very short pauses for maintenance) building solar and wind in such electric grid doesn't lower the costs for grid customers.
This is big problem for solar and wind investors and manufacturers.
Nuclear power is a big competition also for coal and gas producers. I think coal producers in Australia are quite scary even of the idea for nuclear power production in Australia.
Meanwhile to achieve load following in France they sync the fuel cycles of the entire fleet and then let the plants take turns across the week.
You have it the other way around. The marginal price for renewables are zero so consumers buy that first. Which means nuclear power, like the coal plant I linked, is forced to load follow. Which craters their earning potential.
Nuclear power is literally the worst combination imaginable for a grid with any amount of renewable penetration. They both compete for the same slice, the cheapest most inflexible, a competition which nucler power loses handily.
Which means, the window of opportunity for new built nuclear power is gone.
> Our analysis finds that even if, reversing the historical trend, overnight construction costs of nuclear half to 4,000 US-$2018 per kW and construction times remain below ten years, the cost-efficient share of nuclear power in European electricity generation is only around 10%. Nuclear plants must operate inflexibly and at capacity factors close to 90% to recover their investment costs, implying that operational flexibility – even if technically possible – is not economically viable.
This is a future you can't escape from. Flexibility is mandatory. It is coming from pure incentives. Lets explore them:
Why should a household or company with solar and storage buy expensive grid based nuclear power when their own installation delivers? They don't.
Why should this household's or company's neighbors buy expensive grid based nuclear powered electricity rather than the zero marginal cost surplus renewables? They don't.
EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
If you are now (in the year 2026) optimizing only for costs of producing electricity then you end with electric grid which has more or less structure of Chinese electric grid - big chunk produced with domestic fueled base-load fossil fuel power plants+nuclear power plants, as much hydro as you can build, little bit variable renewables.
If for example Germany would optimize for costs of producing electricity then they would not shut down already build and running nuclear power plants, would not import LNG, would use much more domestic coal.
If you care for CO2 emissions (which is not the case in China) then the problem of electric grid is much more complicated.
Germany is a nice example of electric grid with significant amount of variable renewable penetration (lot of solar and wind, small amount of hydropower). First they decided to phase-out nuclear power and ban construction of nuclear power plants (beginning in 2000), then they decided to replace domestic coal production with imported fossil fuels and then decide to decarbonize grid (until 2045), which is now much more expensive because nuclear phase-out.
In contrast France has already decarbonized the electric grid.
The economic situation EDF is bad because decade long taxation of EDF, the ARENH mechanism.
Under the so-called Regulated Access to Incumbent Nuclear Electricity (Accès Régulé à l’Electricité Nucléaire Historique, ARENH) mechanism set up to foster competition, rival energy suppliers could buy electricity produced by EDF's nuclear power plants located in France that were commissioned before 8 December 2010. Under such contracts, between July 2011 and December 2025, suppliers could buy up to 100 TWh - or about 25% of EDF's annual nuclear output - at a fixed price of EUR42 per MWh.
So no France didn't actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, it was shielding renewable competition from its aging nuclear fleet.
> Chinese electric grid - big chunk produced with domestic fueled base-load fossil fuel power plants+nuclear power plants, as much hydro as you can build, little bit variable renewables
This is not an accurate representation of China's power generation mix. Yes, they are only about 40% total renewables thus far, but less than 5% of that is nuclear.
Their hydro contribution is double that of nuclear, and both wind and solar are drastically higher still.
I love the framing. "Little bit of renewables" when in China they are literally 5x in size of the nuclear production. Nuclear power in China peaked at 4.7% in 2021 and is now down to 4.3%. Entirely irrelevant.
The problem I am mentioning has nothing to do with ARENH, and the protectionism isn't the ARENH. It is not building more renewables and dragging their feet on interconnects.
All the new EPR builds went terribly bad, long over planned time, over budget.
Some argue thats because European Pressurised Reactor is design that merges German Konvoi reactors with French Framatome N4 design. A design that is trying to please both German and French regulators.
There's also just an absolutely bonkers number of functional second hand devices out there. A lot of them make their way to Africa as phones people use (and the Chinese repair and refurbishmenr business is huge and a volume business).
There are charities which will also give away phones because for a homeless person a usable phone is quite valuable because it makes it possible to do things like apply for jobs, find services etc. (even if you're just surfing cafe wifi).
It was under subsidy, but I got about double what I was going to get about 6 months prior. There are 50kwh units going on AliExpress for about $12k AUD outright so I think there's been another step down in per-cell costs which is tickling through.
I'm waiting for a price cut to make outright purchases a bit more affordable but with a wholesale electricity service plan adding another say 100kWh probably works out.
Yeah, unfortunately shipping anything with Li-Ion to my friend is pretty tough. Especially anything larger than a power bank. Amazon isn't even shipping those.
I have hopes for Sodium-Ion cells, they should be way more shippable and presumably a better fit for residential power.
We don't descend from winners, we descend from whoever survived and it's not an individual competition.
If the only place a particularly beneficial mutation appears is wiped out by chance volcanic eruption, that's just how it is - the survivors who weren't near the volcano go on to reproduce.
There's a world coming where automation means electrified heavy equipment stops using diesel entirely, already happening in mine sites in Australia.
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