This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
problem is solar and wind are variable and not feasible everywhere. for places like australia solar is amazing. Winter in canada? not so much. So for a baseline you’d have to store a massive amount of energy in some way.
if you plan on batteries that requires lots of precious metals we will need elsewhere to aid in the transition to electric power.
Hydro energy to the rescue.
if you plan on batteries that requires lots of precious metals we will need elsewhere to aid in the transition to electric power.
Umm, what about sodium-ion that are now getting put into production?
Actual paper (not calling this a study since this appears to be non–peer-reviewed and only self-published): https://microgridai.centrefornetzero.org/ Be advised that this website relies on some Chromium-only trickery.
renewable microgrids [...] compared to nuclear small modular reactors
A 95% renewable microgrid with 5% gas backup - in line with the UK’s Clean Power 2030 target - was modelled at almost a third (31.7%) lower cost than scenario 1 in today’s prices. In this model, the gas is restricted to just under 80MW (2/3rds the size of the data centre) and the model correspondingly chooses a larger battery for storage, and increases the size of wind and solar technologies.
I'm confused; how does 5% equal 2/3 the size of the data center modeled?
(Edit: Someone else suggested this: "I think the gas can supply 2/3 of the power that the data centre requires for situations when there is no sun or wind but only makes up 5% of the total energy used over a year.")
They include a link to the model: https://github.com/ryanjenkinson/data-centre-modelling
Without having read it myself, perhaps they mean 5% of total usage. So the gas generation is built to be able to handle 2/3rds of the power demand, in case of outage as a backup, but in normal operation will only contribute 5% of the energy demand. That way, in the event of a failure of the renewable energy source for whatever reason, or a failure in the batteries, the gas can kick in and keep the servers online while cutting disposal operations that represent 1/3 of the total.
Extreme incompetence in modeling. the github is complete crap. otoh their angelfire site does actually list some costs for the SMR.
They make the SMR side look absurdly cheap. $55/mwh power costs with 30c/watt capital costs is just absurdly low. Conservative SMR power estimates start at $180/mwh, and so actual microgrid costs would be over 80% lower.
More incompetence has their microgrid using off shore wind which is just stupid for HVDC requirement for small scale. Automatically too incompetent to trust their modeling. They don't specify cost assumptions for any of the microgrid components.
wdym the github is complete crap? it has everything you mentioned you wanted to look at. and wouldn't a too-low estimate for nuclear costs give extra validity to the claim that microgrids are much cheaper?
what is .nc file format? their csv data has no cost numbers.
wouldn’t a too-low estimate for nuclear costs give extra validity to the claim that microgrids are much cheaper?
It is much cheaper. Everywhere. But the modeling done in this instance can still be completely incompetent.
interesting, never heard this before
