First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.
The only issue I foresee with using regular batteries as grid wide storage is cost. Many renewable sources are inherently unstable in output, so one would have to plan for potentially multi day deficits in production.
At least in my country some alternative storage solutions are being planned. One company wants to use excess wind power to produce hydrogen. That hydrogen could then be used to offset potential production deficits.
Otherwise I very much agree with your list.
In addition to battery designs that scale better than Li-ion (e.g. redox-flow batteries), I’ve heard some places are looking at options for “mechanical” storage: When you have energy surplus, pump water back into reservoirs, and generate hydropower when you have a deficit.
The amount of energy that can be stored in existing reservoirs is massive, so this could make hydropower function as the “buffer” for other renewable energy sources. I think the idea sounds promising, the major issue is that it’s less viable (or not viable) for places with flat topology.
This is a very promising approach I’ve heard of also. Places with reservoirs could benefit massively from super cheap energy.
In other places an alternative approach could be what we kinda do already. Nuclear or some other stable production as a foundation that is augmented by renewables. The foundation would guarantee that energy prices wouldn’t fluctuate too much, but we could still reap the benefits of cheap renewables when available.
That seems to be a good idea. There are more efficient hydrogen production methods in the works as far as I know so it would help to have more innovation in that field, specially with the production and the storage. If we could find a lightweight solution to store hydrogen safely we could probably replace fossil fuels in planes.
My personal dream scenario is one, where renewables and nuclear become such cheap production methods, that electricity is cheap and abundant.
At that point one could just use that energy to synthesize fuel to avoid the hassle that is hydrogen storage.
We need to go carbon negative, not neutral. So, everywhere we can avoid dump CO2 into the atmosphere is good.
This being said, if we could do it from carbon captured CO2…
Thats the point of having energy abundance. When electricity costs are low enough, it wouldn’t matter, if the source of synthetic fuel was not the most energy efficient one.