Less than four doublings is not a lot. We’re at the beginning of the storage expansion. The interesting question is not when we‘ll be able to cover a night, but when we’ll be able to cover a month.
> The interesting question is not when we‘ll be able to cover a night, but when we’ll be able to cover a month.
The answer to this one is a pretty straightforward never. You have to realize that such a storage will sit duck most of the time, making it impossible to get any return on investment on it.
There are power plants today that are being paid for standing by idle, so clearly you can make money by just providing emergency backup even when it's never used.
Indeed. We can only have a small amount of solar, but wind keeps blowing at night, Nucular continues, biomas too. The gap we need to bridge most urgently is turning off gas generation. Take a look here, https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical the majority of "turning off gas" is daytime demand that needs to be covered.
But stops during anticyclones, which can last several weeks (that makes it completely unfeasible to use wind power with gas as a backup, because there's no way we can build several weeks worth of storage).
> Nucular continues
The problem is that nuclear plants cost is roughly the same no matter if they produce or not, so nuclear + solar is strictly costlier than just nuclear.
Solar in a country as cloudy and rainy as the UK, and one that is so far north it gets very long nights in winter, doesn't make make any sense whatsoever.
It can theoretically be repurposed, but hydrogen is a much smaller molecule than methane and thus leaks in existing methane installations. Given that it is also much more dangerous when it leaks (it explodes much more easily than methane), that means reworking all the infrastructure around the storage site, which ain't free.
Also, producing hydrogen from electricity requires lots of investments in terms of conversion units, and the economics is already dubious even when they run 100% of the time, so using it just for absorbing excess production a fraction of the year really isn't economical. In addition, what are you going to do with the hydrogen? Burns too hot for existing gas turbines so you'd need new ones. Fuel cells? That's expensive too.
There's a reason why everyone is betting on batteries instead of hydrogen, the economics of hydrogen is just too difficult.
And you know what? Even if you want to go full hydrogen, Nuclear + hydrogen is also more efficient than Wind + hydrogen since the hydrogen production units are going to be used at capacity more often, because wind is intermittent.
Nuclear+Hydrogen makes no sense economically. If you have the extra capacity to run electrolysis, your nuclear fleet is too big. And not everybody is betting (only) on batteries. A mix of storage technologies is most likely the cheapest solution.
When you use an energy source with a 90% capacity factor instead of 40%, you can amortize the CAPEX twice as fast, and there's a lot of CAPEX involved in the business of making green hydrogen (that's most of the cost, actually since it assumes very little OPEX due to using excess (hence free) electricity).
You ignore the cost of overbuilding nuclear vs the cost of renewables. I doubt that you can make a convincing argument that fits in the HN comment box, since it's a rather complex topic.
fyi all current hydrogen plants use either a mix with 50-70% gas or 100% hydrogen but are creating huge NOx as byproduct due to high temp burning. That's just one of the many hydrogen challenges, another one is H2 handling is harder, another one is the more renewables you get, the more your H2 plants would cost since in some periods you use them extensively, in others - very little and to compensate such infra cost&maintenance the plant owners will jack up the prices or seek govt price compensation. That's why many say hydrogen plants/energy is somewhat of a pipedream
