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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Did you miss this?

    Some numbers. This facility stores 1400MWh, on 2,000 acres or (~8,000,000 sq meters) Much greater then your 40,000sq meter estimate. Plus you said about 33GWh for a day. Well you’d need ~24 of these facilities to cover just Berlin.

    You estimated 40,000sq meters, but that is off by a factor 2000. This is for a facility that actually exists. Theoretically it could be improved, but those theories aren’t being built right now. So based on a grid storage plant that actually exists, berlin would need 48,000 times more square meters dedicated to energy storage then you estimated and in any case, THEY DON’T EXIST and aren’t being built.



  • I dont’ understand the issue here. Is that picture part of some specific VPS’s logo or is it part of the title/theme of the article? I think it’s very poignant, though obviously edgy, if it’s the latter. If your VPS provider isn’t censoring content, then obviously that means Nazism will be able to exist along with militant socialism advocating violence against capitalism. That is kind of the point of the article right? To determine which VPS is actually not going to censor.


  • Your only argument here seems to be space and I don’t see that as a big problem. A few soccer fields worth of land distributed in the vicinity of each bigger city doesn’t seem like a lot to me.

    It’s 1000x “a few soccer fields” for a city like Berlin, and we have zero other working grid level storage facilities in the world at that scale. The handful that do exist are <100MWh, and are meant for specific situations, not for powering 100% renewable cities. No one is building grid-level storage, it’s a pipe dream. But it’s pushed as a solution because the fossil fuel industry knows it will never happen, but what will happen is more fossil fuel plants will be built.


  • You’d be wrong then.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station This is a Nuclear power plant in the middle of a desert so no large bodies of water near by, though obviously the design could be adapted to places where water was more plentiful.

    It takes up 4000 acres (16,000,000 sq meters) Produces (not stores) 4GW (~32,000 GWHrs annually) For comparison, the US Produces 42400000 GWhrs annually. And it cost $14Billion in 2023 dollars

    If I were to replace all of the US’s generating capacity with nuclear, fully shunning renewables. it would cost ~$19Trillion and take up 5.3million acres (which is the minimum amount of land that could be taken up by any currently existing power generation system https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source ). But no one wants to do that (although it would be amazing for the atmosphere). Instead we merely need to supplement renewables with base-load power, and we don’t actually need power storage at all.

    The ideal ratio between renewable power and base-load power I do not know. But during the day in Texas in July it’s about 50% higher then at night. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

    So even if we assume renewables don’t work at night, base-load only needs to account for ~33% of total electric production at the worst case. Much more manageable then the ~6.5hrs/6TWhrs of energy storage required for a 100% renewable grid to function.

    The tl;dr, is that while renewable powered storage is possible, the magnitude of storage required to eliminate base-load generation is VASTLY larger then anti-nuclear advocates realize, and not feasible today (or possibly ever). This belief stems from is fossil fuel propaganda, especially in Germany where the fossil fuel interests understand they have nothing to fear from renewables because a renewable heavye grid is only possible with fossil fuel plants and every year every nation burns more fossil fuels then they did the year before*, Germany included. It will stay that way until mass famine hits and the human population of the earth collapses, unless we stop burning fossil fuels. The only viable non-fossil fuel replacement for our large and growing baseload capacity is nuclear power.

    *note that fossil fuels aren’t only used for energy production, transportation and shipping are huge areas as well.





  • Wind and sun will always supply a base level of energy.

    That is objectively false. The sun doesn’t shine at night, and wind doesn’t blow 100% of the time. So logically there is some amount of time that you do not get a base load provided only by sun and wind. Hence the need for storage at all. And yes it is a gotcha question, because it’s something that anti-nuclear people hand-wave away as if the significant storage infrastructure to support a 100% renewable is just a rounding error, and not worth thinking about.


  • That happens literally every night though and wind also doesn’t blow 100% of the time. There are significant amounts of time where the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The current solution to this issue that is used all around the world are fossil fuels. Renewables make up a trivial* amount of power production compared to fossil fuels, and as we phase out fossil fuels, the requirement for energy storage is going up drastically.

    *<30% by 2030 is the prediction by the EIA


  • I’ll accept your math. So now in-order to solve america’s storage problem to convert to a 100% renewable grid, we just need to build (Population of the US) / (Population of NYC) = 340million / 8million = ~43 Hoover dams. Do you think that is maybe a non-trivial problem to solve?

    Don’t forget that we also need the ~250sq miles of reservoir space for each dam. (technically it’s the volume that is important, but for reservoirs you are often limited by surface area because of the topology required)


  • It’s just an example number. No matter what if you are building a grid that has 0 baseload power generation, you need some amount of storage capacity for each KWh of consumption. We can argue how much you actually need, but the fact remains that when you start storing large amounts of power, which you would need in-order to keep a city running during times of reduced generation, it takes a large amount of space.
    In order to demonstrate that, I chose a pretty straight-forward scenario of a city of 1million for just one day. Let’s assume that this amount of stored energy would be sufficient for a 100% renewable grid for say New York City.

    So how much energy storage would be needed and how much space would such a storage facility take up?