> grid-scale power storage (has never been done so ? on cost to build and upkeep)
This is out of date. Grid scale battery storage has recently become economic in lots of cases and is ramping up quickly.
> grid-scale power storage (has never been done so ? on cost to build and upkeep)
This is out of date. Grid scale battery storage has recently become economic in lots of cases and is ramping up quickly.
> Grid scale battery storage has recently become economic in lots of cases and is ramping up quickly
Being economic and being cheapest are worlds apart.
Solar or wind + utility-scale storage come in at 46 to 102 and 42 to 114 $/MWh, respectively, in terms of LCOE [1]. That does not include grid firming costs [2], which could raise the upper end of those figures to $120 or more, and is based on current storage prices; if everyone tries to build at once, it rises. (On the other hand, there are further economies of scale to be realised.)
Fission clocks in around 141 to 221 $/MWh, which is why we aren’t building it, but $31 at the margin, which is why closing working plants is stupid. SMR focus on lowering capital costs through economies of scale. Fusion by reducing compliance costs. In all likelihood, the solution is fusion SMRs baseloading solar, wind and geothermal energy with peaker industrial processes running during the day. (Hydro can come too.)
[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... slide 2
[2] https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/applications/grid-firmin...
This is "the solution" on what time scale?
This all definitely sounds like a great way to meet all our energy needs without carbon emissions ... in like 30 years? maybe 20?
We haven't invented "fusion SMRs" yet, let alone commercialized and scaled them. We're still in the extremely early stages of commercializing geothermal at scale. I'm curious what "peaker industrial processes" you're thinking of that can be profitable while running only during high power supply periods?
I think if we build a bunch of batteries, and then they turn out to no longer be useful after all this other stuff scales up, that's totally fine, far worse things have happened!
SMRs are based on the wishful thinking that, for the first time in history, making an industrial facility smaller increases economic efficiency. It's just not going to happen.
I'm pretty skeptical of the SMR thesis, but I think there are plenty of examples of modularization and miniaturization being economically advantageous.
For instance, I just the other day came across an article about how in the first wave of electrifying the textile industry, they replaced big centralized steam engines with big centralized motors. But then they realized that motors made it possible to mass produce small machines and put one at each station, and they turned out to be an advantage.
I think there are a number of specific reasons to be skeptical of SMRs, but I don't think the entire concept is per se flawed.
We also haven't had a big disaster with battery storage yet, which is probably inevitable as the facilites are built out.
A 10MWh battery storage facility, if it were to release its energy all at once would be something on the order of the Chernobyl explosion (sans radioactivity) so certainly capable of destroying a building and killing people nearby. I'm not sure what is "normal" for a utility scale storage facility but 100 times[0] that doesn't seem out of the question
(From Wikipedia[1], the explosion "was estimated ... to be at 40 billion joules" and from unitconverters.net, 40 billion Joules is about 11 MWh[2].)
[0] https://www.energystoragejournal.com/worlds-largest-utility-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
[2] https://www.unitconverters.net/energy/joule-to-megawatt-hour...
That's not a useful comparison. The power of the explosion at Chernobyl, while deadly to the one person immediately next to it, was not the problem that made Chernobyl the catastrophe that it was. That was the radionuclide contamination that it spread and the remaining latent power in the fuel that, if released uncontrollably, would have spread it even further.
A grid scale lithium ion battery, even completely burned up and vaporized into the atmosphere, is not dangerous in a comparable way.
not to mention that battery fires don't release all of their stored energy at once, unlike explosives. Granted, they might burn uncontrollably for a long time, and difficult to extinguish.