LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.

Quote from Fm1

you are kidding right?

https://www.nationalgrid.com/s…%20achieving%20net%20zero.

I hope in the future lenr becomes viable but till that happens wind and solar along with fuel cell, and battery tech are taking us to the future

You said currently commercially viable. Hydrogen will never be competitive to alternative energy sources. LENR will. Hydrogen is an energy storage material not an energy source akin to fossil fuels. You must use highly material intensive technology powered by coal to produce the solar panels and wind turbines, you must then electrolyze water to produce it and then store it then use fuel cells containing expensive precious metals to convert it back to electricity but that’s only for grid apps. If you want to use it for transport you have to compress it, pipe it at extremely high pressures through metals which will become brittle or other materials which are not currently in significant use. The experts reporting to the board of the oil companies I know were completely negative about any potential commercial viability. Yes Toyota has a car which they sold how many? A few fuel busses exist for showboating. Perhaps you know more than the highly paid consultants reporting to the oil companies and if so, more power to you. We see a viable path forward only for nuclear of some form.

Quote from Daniel_G

You said currently commercially viable. Hydrogen will never be competitive to alternative energy sources. LENR will. Hydrogen is an energy storage material not an energy source akin to fossil fuels. You must use highly material intensive technology powered by coal to produce the solar panels and wind turbines, you must then electrolyze water to produce it and then store it then use fuel cells containing expensive precious metals to convert it back to electricity but that’s only for grid apps. If you want to use it for transport you have to compress it, pipe it at extremely high pressures through metals which will become brittle or other materials which are not currently in significant use. The experts reporting to the board of the oil companies I know were completely negative about any potential commercial viability. Yes Toyota has a car which they sold how many? A few fuel busses exist for showboating. Perhaps you know more than the highly paid consultants reporting to the oil companies and if so, more power to you. We see a viable path forward only for nuclear of some form.

unfortunately your highly paid consultants ignore a world wide push to eliminate nuclear power. You have heard of the green movement? Consumers don't want to foot the bill to build the reactors and safety concerns haven't changed. Please explain how 2 watts of excess heat changes present day reality. I hope lenr pans out but I have yet to see the extra energy as scalable. If lenr does take a place in energy production it will be long after Im gone.

Quote from Daniel_G

You must use highly material intensive technology powered by coal to produce the solar panels and wind turbines,

Solar panels do not need technology powered by coal.

Wind turbines do need steel, but 30% of steel is either recycled or made with natural gas rather than coke (coal). For the most part, solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing can be powered by solar panels and wind turbines.The energy payback time for solar panels is 1.1 to 3.6 years.

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf

For wind turbines it is 2 to 3 months. It used to be ~7 months.

Energy Payback Period for Wind Turbines

I do not think wind turbines are highly material intensive compared to other energy generating technologies. The towers take a lot of materials but they will probably last 100 years and the physical space take up on the ground (the footprint) is smaller than other energy generators.

Time to accept that wind farm costs are not falling

There is a widespread belief that wind farm costs are falling and will continue to fall, but as OEM losses mount it's time to re-assess

watt-logic.com

Wind is not profitable and costs are increasing.

Quote from Daniel_G

Wind is not profitable and costs are increasing.

This is just your fantasy!

Wind is not profitable for GE/Siemens due to many issues.

1) Carbon mafia blocks windparks

2) Quality problems due to cash optimized designs.

3) German (FM/R/B) state mafia blocking power lines new wind on shore etc.. Also blocking ABB (in favor of not existing Siemens product) from connecting wind farms. (France:: Nuclear mafia blocks wind same in Japan)

The installed kwh production prize of wind is around 6..7 cents. Nuclear is around 14..25 cents, German lime coal 2 cents Arabian desert Solar < 2 cents. German old solar > 25 cents.....

For suppliers wind is highly profitable and UK west coast wind will be a true cash cow.

Of course once we have LENR it will outplay everything.

Quote from Daniel_G

Wind is not profitable and costs are increasing.

I see no data showing that costs are increasing.

Saying they are not profitable is like saying personal computers are not profitable. That is true. That is why IBM sold out to Lenovo years ago, and why many PC makers went out of business. PCs are not profitable to the manufacturers, but they are tremendously profitable to the customers. Wind turbines may not be profitable to the manufacturers, but power companies love them. You set one up and it is all profit from then on. All gravy. No coal trains; no hoping natural gas will stay cheap. Unlike nuclear power there are no cost overruns or expensive clean up and remediation. Maintenance per kilowatt-hour is lower than other sources. That is why most new capacity in the U.S. is wind or solar.

More than half of new U.S. electric-generating capacity in 2023 will be solar

Power companies are not buying these things as a public service. They are not doing it to collect subsidies. Wind and solar hardly have any subsidies nowadays. They are buying these things to make money. Their main purpose is to make money. I see nothing wrong with that. I am in favor of capitalism.

Cold fusion would be so much cheaper it would put them out of business practically overnight.

The EIA "Today in Energy" pages have many other interesting short reports. Such as:

Proved reserves of natural gas increased 32% in the United States during 2021

Increasing renewables likely to reduce coal and natural gas generation over next two years

Nuclear power plants generated 68% of France’s electricity in 2021

Renewable generation surpassed coal and nuclear in the U.S. electric power sector in 2022

The largest coal-fired power plant in Pennsylvania will close by July 2023

One more viable solution. Thermo solar in Israel:: https://www.timesofisrael.com/…ng-setting-new-low-price/

about 2 cents/kwh produced...

Quote from Wyttenbach

One more viable solution. Thermo solar in Israel:: https://www.timesofisrael.com/…ng-setting-new-low-price/

about 2 cents/kwh produced...

Not to the nuke salesman

Hello Jed. Firstly we do agree on your final conclusion that LENR will be inherently cheaper than all possible alternatives.

So what I hope is a respectful debate on wind and solar should finally become moot if we all achieve our aims here.

You mention that you didn’t see evidence of increasing costs so I have outlined some key points from the papers mentioned in the article I quoted.

If the wind power business is so competitive and has a bright future, one would expect suppliers to maintain healthy profits to continue to invest in future development. As you can see from the following chart this is clearly not the case. There are many reasons given for this but industry analysts are not writing shining outlooks for the future.

Secondly, wind farm operators seem to have underestimated lifecycle maintenance costs. And finally grid operators are starting to force costs of intermittency on to wind operators.

For the record I was a huge supporter of wind and solar for a long time but started to see cracks in the foundation for a while now. Let’s hope the LENR progress goes well so we won’t have to discuss these issues more!

Quote from Daniel_G

If the wind power business is so competitive and has a bright future, one would expect suppliers to maintain healthy profits to continue to invest in future development.

No, I would not expect that. Wind turbines are becoming a commodity. There is a race to the bottom. This is what happened with PC microcomputers in the 1990s. It meant the industry expanded tremendously but profits vanished. As I said, that is why IBM sold their PC business to Lenovo, and many other PC companies went bankrupt. This also happened with hard disks.

Sedan automobiles have become a commodity, which is why Ford no longer makes them. It only makes SUVs.

https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/why-was-ford-fusion-discontinued

In the case of computers performance went up exponentially, prices came down and the overall market increased. For wind, revenue is decreasing, cost per MW is increasing. The market is saturated despite all renewables supplying only 13.5 Etajoules out of 600, if the market is puttering out now, surely this is a harbinger for a dismal future. In sharp contrast if you look at Lenovo’s sales trend, the market continued to increase. There is no analogous improvement in performance in the wind turbine industry. In fact as makers innovated larger and larger turbines both capex and opex have increased. I don’t believe the PC market is in any way comparable. Europe and UK saw negative market prices for wind power. I don’t want to use strong words here but the honeymoon of intermittent power sources is ending. The cost of intermittency will not decrease to anything feasible unless some unforeseen breakthrough is forthcoming. Quite a number of highly competent industry professionals are also singing the same tune.

In any case the market really needs what LENR is promising I think we both agree on this.

Quote from Daniel_G

I don’t want to use strong words here but the honeymoon of intermittent power sources is ending. The cost of intermittency will not decrease to anything feasible unless some unforeseen breakthrough is forthcoming.

Cost effective solutions to intermittency are here already. 17% of new capacity this year will be battery storage, second only to solar. They would not be installing that if it were not cost effective. See:

More than half of new U.S. electric-generating capacity in 2023 will be solar

Wind, solar and other sources are not expanding quickly in the U.S. because we don't need them. Electricity consumption is not increasing. The only new sources being added are replacements for things like retired coal plants. Most coal plants are already retired. Coal is uneconomical, as shown in one of the other articles I referenced above:

The largest coal-fired power plant in Pennsylvania will close by July 2023

The capacity factor fell from 90% at peak, down to 82% where it was no longer cost effective, and finally down to 20% in 2022. That is intermittent! Being turned off 80% of the time is even more intermittent than wind or solar. Wind is not installed unless it produces at least 30% of nameplate capacity.

The coal plant was at 20% of capacity because burning coal to generate electricity is like burning money. It is cheaper to install solar or wind plus batteries. Solar + storage ranges from $46 to $102. Coal ranges from $68 to $166. Gas peaking $115 to $221, so now you don't even want to use gas peaking to cover intermittency. Batteries are cheaper than gas peaking, which is quite a change from years past.

Nuclear in the latest Georgia reactor is off the scale.

Note that gas peaking is done with simple natural gas generators. The cost per MWH is much higher than combined cycle gas generators. The generators are simpler, so the equipment is cheaper. You would not want to use a combined cycle generator for intermittent demand, whereas the peaking generators are intended for that purpose. But, they can no longer compete with batteries.

See Lazard:

2023 Levelized Cost Of Energy+

Lazard's latest LCOE shows the continued cost-competitiveness of certain renewable energy technologies, and the marginal cost of coal, nuclear, and…

www.lazard.com

Quote from JedRothwell

Cost effective solutions to intermittency are here already. 17% of new capacity this year will be battery storage

For south regions between 35+- degrees solar is very cost efficient as you can also use it at winter time. Here at 48 degrees (north) the winter/summer peek difference is a factor 5. Best would be to construct smaller solar farms and combine them with large batteries.

From batteries charging cars can be done very efficiently without current conversion also loading needs no conversion. Small island also allow to greatly reduce the grid dimensions/costs/losses!

But the largest gain comes from insulation/heat pumps (factor 20..25 in the north) and simply painting your roof with brilliant white color (south regions). Also kick out all classic light sources and use LED's with DC please!!!! (they last much, much longer)

In the south you get free hot water all the year from thermal solar panels.

hi Jed. I’m happy you mentioned Lazard and LCOE because this is actually quite a controversial subject. There have been well publicized ongoing debates regarding LCOE wether it’s actually a useful metric and as far as I can tell the experts do agree on one thing: that LCOE is a useful way to compare very similar systems such coal vs natural gas generators.

The LCOE metric had diminished credibility when it compares intermittent renewables vs dispatchable fossil fueled systems because once renewables reach a certain percentage of the mix, more and more costs of intermittency are pushed onto the grid and these are not accounted for.

Secondly, battery storage prices you quoted are for short term storage from 1-4h only. But grids need long term storage to go to fully renewable energy. Prices for long-term storage according to Lazard are from $470-$1000/kWh. To put that in perspective, in depth analyses of a hypothetical fully renewable grid have been done for California.

In this example below, they used the lowest actual figure they could find quoted for California which was $600/kWh. Experts more or less agree that Ca would need around 30,000GWh of grid based long term storage of Ca were to go to fully wind and solar.

The cost of long term storage alone for Ca alone would then become $18T (with a T) dollars. That’s nearly 500% of the total annual GDP of Ca.

Then you might argue that well if regional grids were to connect then the loads could be smoothed out and the cost of storage could be reduced. As it happens these analyses have all been done and the conclusion was that it doesn’t matter how you scale it. It’s always a large multiple of GDP. Flow batteries are also included in the analysis. The basic numbers don’t change.

I hope you could take the time to read the energyforgrowth link below and we can hopefully continue this discussion as for what it’s worth previously worked closely with RMI and Amory Lovins who even wrote several books about a previous company I ran (he coined the term “negawatts” for the efficiency work we did. Amory Lovins was a big promoter of wind and PV and a highly influential person in this field. But after studying this issue very carefully I feel it has become a dead end and will never lead to net zero which absolutely must do as a civilization. They’re more and more industry experts sharing this opinion.

LCOE and its Limitations - Energy for Growth Hub

energyforgrowth.org

For reference this is the analysis I quoted on calculating how much storage would be needed for fully renewable power in California. It shows 25,000GWh but I used 30,000 because the 25,000 was calculated from actual historical data without any safety factors.

Quote from Daniel_G

Secondly, battery storage prices you quoted are for short term storage from 1-4h only. But grids need long term storage to go to fully renewable energy. Prices for long-term storage according to Lazard are from $470-$1000/kWh.

In that case use gas peaking, $105 to $229 per MWH. That is a lot per MWH but you don't need that many megawatt hours. So, not much equipment. Especially with solar in the U.S. southeast and southwest, peak output happens at the same hours as peak demand. You only need gas peaking at night, when demand is much lower. Probably baseline generators such as nukes and combined cycle gas can meet nearly all nighttime demand. A combination of nukes, combined cycle gas, solar and batteries is probably much cheaper than coal or combined cycle for daylight hours. That's my rough analysis based on Lazard and documents at the EIA. Evidentially, power company engineers agree with that analysis because they are building many solar and battery installations, very few gas generators (peak or combined cycle), and zero coal installations.

You seem to disagree with the power company engineers. They probably know more about this than you do. Watch what they do, and where they are spending billions of dollars.

In rural U.S. areas, peak demand is met with 1 MW Diesel generators. The fuel is expensive and the generators are inefficient, so the electricity costs a lot per megawatt hour, but the generators are dirt cheap per kilowatt compared gas turbines, or solar or any other utility scale generator. Diesel generators are only needed occasionally. Note that the most expensive deluxe home generator is half the cost per kilowatt of the cheapest power company peaking gas unit. See Table 2:

https://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJmoreaboutw.pdf

The home generator is designed to be cheap, and to be used only occasionally, which is similar to the Diesel peak generators. I believe the 1 MW Diesel generators are about the same cost per kilowatt of capacity as a home generator.

Quote from Daniel_G

Ca would need around 30,000GWh of grid based long term storage of Ca were to go to fully wind and solar.

California has a population of about 40 mio... This would mean about 1 MWh = 1000kWh / grown up person. Or simply said such figures are obvious bullshit.

Quote from Daniel_G

For reference this is the analysis I quoted on calculating how much storage would be needed for fully renewable power in California.

Why would anyone plan to have fully renewable power? What is the point? Why not use things like peak power gas turbines? With today's technology, we can greatly reduce fossil fuel consumption, but it would be very difficult to make everything fully renewable. Years ago, experts thought wind can only reach about 30% as I recall. Nowadays, Iowa is 60% wind, and their electricity is not expensive. (It is a lot cheaper when you add in the cost of global warming.) I expect Iowa could expand to 80% without difficulty.

The last 20% -- from 80% to 100% renewable -- would be far more expensive and difficult than going from 60% to 80%. So why do it? Even without cold fusion, we are likely to find cost effective solutions 20 years from now. Do what we can do now, with today's technology, with reasonably cost effective methods.

As a practical matter, no one is going to decommission recently built combined cycle gas turbines, or nuclear plants with decades of life left in them. That would be economic insanity.

Let not perfect be the enemy of good.

Record-Breaking Solar Hydrogen Device: Turning Sunlight Into Clean Energy

Record-Breaking Solar Hydrogen Device: Turning Sunlight Into Clean Energy

New standard for green hydrogen technology set by Rice U. engineers. Rice University engineers can turn sunlight into hydrogen with record-breaking efficiency…

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New standard for green hydrogen technology set by Rice U. engineers.

Rice University engineers can turn sunlight into hydrogen with record-breaking efficiency thanks to a device that combines next-generation halide perovskite semiconductors with electrocatalysts in a single, durable, cost-effective and scalable device.