this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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There's an industry in cutting down forests in the southeast US to create wood pellets, which are then shipped to Europe and burned as "green"
That hurts my brain. We made it to the fucking moon, figured out nuclear power, and yet we have people doing that shit? Reality is an amazing inequitable shit show.
I know people who argue that burning wood pellets is grean because it's marketed as "renewable". It's difficult to convince them that the wood their burning is not part of a renewable cycle and neither is it just wood scraps that would be there anyways. Same as growing "biofuel" for consumer cars. It's just not a good use of the limited resources we have
If we want to build a stable 100% renewable energy electrical grid we need backup power station for when there is no sun or wind.
Right now coal and gas power stations are mainly used but renewables option are limited.
Hydro can help to an extent but the locations and power output are limited, battery storage help to smooth production but it's not enough for seasonal variation.
Nuclear could work perfectly but I'm losing hope on trying to convince people that a bit of nuclear would help to each a 100% renewable energy grid.
The last option is biomass, it can be vertuous is the wood resource is well managed or terribly damaging for the environment if not.
Do I think biomass power station are needed of we want to transition.
Would love to see nuclear base load just used for inefficient process when in surplus. Inefficient hydrolysis to make hydrogen for fuel cells, pumping water around for water stored energy generation, and such.
Battery power could entirely satisfy the need with the right quantity, it just hasn't scaled up yet.
The typical coal plant takes up 0.7 acres per megawatt of power generation. 0.7 acres of sodium-ion batteries can store 10-100 MWh of energy.
10MWh of energy is 36 seconds worth of output from a smallish 1GW power plant. Battery storage is a huge way off viable for anything other than smoothing out daily cycles of wind and solar.
A 1GW plant takes up 832 acres, which would be 12 hours of power with 10MW of storage per 0.7 acres, or 120 hours with a high density 100MW configuration.
Smoothing out the daily cycles is exactly what we're discussing: absorbing the excess during peak and using it to power through the troughs.
No the discussion is on making a 100% renewable energy stable grid. There are three levels that need to be managed for this, the daily cycles, (mostly of solar being unavailable at night), the yearly cycle of solar giving more energy in the summer and wind more in the winter (generally) and the meso scale of weather.
The first can be probably sorted with storage with work. The second mostly balances out if you have a mix of solar and wind luckily, but the third does not have a solution at the moment, there isnt a feasilble way of managing a 10 day strech of dull still days in winter without firing up a large amount of gas peaker plants. Even with your proposed 800 acres of high density storage (of a currently not fully proven type in Na batteries) per small powerplant, a vast amount, would give 5 days worth of storage which wouldnt be enough to cover the once a year, once a decade etc poor weather condiditons.
We have gigantic mountains, we could build the biggest and best pumped storage hydropower batteries in the world, and have nearly limitless storage.