I feel like people are looking at renewables the wrong way. a distributed grid makes sense. the same goes for grid-scale storage. when I looked at it last, it wasn’t too much to get around ~week’s storage for myself. Some solar panels on the roof, some storage tucked into a utlity closet, in every house, you have a distributed grid.
Supplement it with other renewables like wind, tidal and hydro; maybe pay people to store stuff, too, like they do with power going into the grid.
But yea, Nuclear is a reliable grid scale system.
when I looked at it last, it wasn’t too much to get around ~week’s storage for myself. Some solar panels on the roof, some storage tucked into a utlity closet, in every house, you have a distributed grid.
In the USA you’re looking at a price tag probably close to $150k+ for one family’s worth for total grid independence unless you’re willing to restrict which geography you live in or make pretty drastic lifestyle reductions. That week’s worth of storage batteries is going to set you back a lot.
You must be talking about more than just energy. Solar panels and a $10k battery don’t cost that much.
You must be talking about more than just energy. Solar panels and a $10k battery don’t cost that much.
I promise you, that isn’t an exaggeration in the USA. I recently had 17KW of solar panels installed and 10KWh of battery in my home.
10KWh fully charge will power a my home’s regular power consumption for less than a day, and that isn’t even charging any EVs. OP was speccing out one week’s worth of batteries and in many parts of the USA (and the world for that matter) you don’t get enough sun all day to even charge your batteries and power your household consumption. Hence my comment on reducing lifestyle consumption, or restricting your living to geographies that get more sun. I can talk full detailed numbers about my first hand experience if your interested.
Huh. Last I looked I was figuring around 15-17KW would be enough to fully power both my home and an EV. (You can actually look at your usage history from your electric provider to get past usage.)
I don’t know what “one week of batteries” means. If he means to power his house for an entire week with no solar production, that’s insane and probably is $150k. But you don’t need that much to be 98% independent.
Putting solar panels and a battery in every house is ok if everyone owns an actual house, has enough space for a battery and gets enough sunlight but it wouldn’t be possible in most cities where hundreds of people share a single roof that doesn’t have the space for all the panels required.
In some countries the houses wouldn’t be big enough to install batteries without taking up valuable living space, most terraced houses in the uk couldn’t fit a power bank inside without filling an entire room’s usable space.
You also have to deal with the fact that many grids aren’t built to deal with the power fluctuation that comes from each house providing power, my university has a solar and wind farm that has to be shut down sometimes because the nearby city can’t handle all the power it produces in the summer and that’s from a centralised source.
All true, but if you slap panels on every rooftop you can- every square foot of rooftop panel is one less square foot of dedicated land needed for solar farms.
Most current homes could easily accommodate something (including a storage shack tucked against the house.)
The grid is an issue that’s going to have to get fixed anyway; we’re going away from mega-plants that produce power for entire states no matter anyhow.
Also we need to be distributed for climate resilience.
Good. We keep shutting down nuclear plants and replacing them with gas. We need to stop shutting them down and go further, build more.
I’m not anti-nuclear, but from my understanding it’s not necessarily cost or resource-effective to build new plants, since other renewables have advanced so rapidly
If you just want the cheapest grid possible (regardless of emissions), renewables paired with gas is the cheapest. There are some exceptions to this, places like cloudy Seattle don’t make for good solar farms, which drives up the effective cost of solar significantly.
If you are shooting for a carbon-free grid, nuclear is notably cheaper than renewables paired with grid-scale storage. Notably, much of the nuclear cost is bureaucracy that keeps the plants in limbo for decades and are quite good at making this carbon-free power source unnaturally expensive. This bureaucracy can be brought to a reasonable level if there is political will.
They’re expensive
