I think it's rather the other way round. People who want to promote solar energy want to make it look as if the high volatility of this energy source can be simply solved with pumped storage, allegedly making it possible to get rid of coal and fission power plants, as well as natural gas power plants and biomass power plants etc. To this end they compare the cost of pumped storage merely to battery storage, which makes anything else look cheap. (Because batteries are so expensive.)
>I think it's rather the other way round. People who want to promote solar energy want to make it look as if the high volatility of this energy source can be simply solved with pumped storage
It can be solved with pumped storage and batteries:
>To this end they compare the cost of pumped storage merely to battery storage, which makes anything else look cheap.
The cost of batteries, pumped storage and windgas do not compare favorably to natural gas.
They compared very favorably to nuclear power though. Nuclear power's costs eclipses the cost of solar and wind even when it is backed by windgas (which is more expensive than either):
Thank you for the link. I noticed a huge pro-nuclear sentiment in several places, Reddit, Lemmy, and sometimes here. It is an interesting energy source, but it has huge drawbacks compared to other energy sources. The price/time to build and operating costs are significant. Most current reactors need to be heavily subsidized with taxes to be competitive. Plus, of course, the waste challenge.
> Nuclear power's costs eclipses the cost of solar and wind even when it is backed by windgas
This article is an edited version of a 'Wind power as an alternative to nuclear power from Hinkley Point C: A cost comparison', a report by Marie-Louise Heddrich, Thorsten Lenck and Carlos Perez Linkenheil, all of Energy Brainpool, commissioned by Greenpeace Energy. The evidence it furnishes is expected to be used as part of the legal case against HPC forthcoming in the European Court of Justice.
Having skimmed the report I am not happy with the arguments within.
Is 60% efficiency for CCGTs in variable generation following mode realistic? 65% peak is possible in new CCGTs, by running continuously to keep the steam generating cycle going, however observed gas plant efficiency in the UK is just shy of 48% per DUKES data. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/electricity-chapter...
Is 71% efficiency of conversion from electricity to gas what is seen in industrial scale windgas installations? Are there many hundreds of MW windgas installations in 2024?
Where is the carbon coming from to turn into methane? Is there some sort of carbon capture going on (and shouldn't this be costed in)?
How much transmission build-out is required to support an additional 11.2GW of wind? How much does this cost given the low utilisation? Even if the electricity to gas plants are located within the wind farm, 11.2GW represents many square kilometers of land.
It is assumed that the methane network and storage are already there. The economics of storing the gas (also whether the gas can be taken out of the system at the same price and priority it is put in) is not addressed.
The study compares the price that will be paid for HPC power (including risk etc) with the cost of the components of the windgas system which is not the same as a company proposing and building the whole system (preparation, financing, risk etc).
Realistically we are comparing several stable energy sources here that can all be combined with highly volatile energy sources like solar and wind: Coal power, nuclear power, natural gas power, pumped-storage hydropower, power-to-gas [1], and batteries.
That is a biased comparison. Solar energy is infinitely expensive during the night (which is hardly "extremely cheap"), so you can only realistically compare it in combination with stable energy sources, like power plants or pumped-storage power. You have not shown that nuclear power and solar power are more expensive than pumped-storage hydropower and solar power.
>Solar energy is infinitely expensive during the night (which is hardly "extremely cheap"), so you can only realistically compare it in combination with stable energy sources, like power plants or pumped-storage power.
Yeah, or another more expensive form of storage windgas, which I did.
Never heard the term windgas before, very catchy. I wonder how cheap renewable electricy must be before it starts making economic sense going from water --> gasoline.
