When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that’s also very much part of American branding.
Where are my renewable bros at? Tell me this is bad.
If “we” meaning society could “focus our energy” on anything except profit generation, we could build hundreds of nuclear reactors in less then a decade. We could also eliminate cars and domestic flights, and all kinds of other utopian shit. While you want to live in the status quo but with magic batteries. I’d rather “focus our energy” and live in the Star Trek post-scarcity universe.
It doesn’t take 25 years to get a nuclear plant off the ground because people are too busy sitting around counting their capitalism dollars to finish the construction. There are a tremendous number of things that need to happen in addition to planning, approving, building, and commissioning a nuclear facility. I’m fact, is those economic forces that make it happen as fast as possible, because investors want to see a return on their investment. Nuclear plants - and large power plants in general - are not a back deck. They are enormously complex, and given the sensitive nature of their fuel, there are additional things that need to happen on top of what you would expect from, say, a coal or oil generator.
But I’m not sure what you are saying about “magic batteries”. How, exactly, do you plan to make intermittent renewable generation viable without some sort of grid-scale storage?
You don’t just click your heels together there times and find yourself in a star trek utopia. That’s not how things work.
Batteries exist yes. But batteries at the scale required to store the amount of energy that even a small country uses in one day do not exist, and would be by all accounts magic.
Nuclear reactors are not magic, they are real, and they can be built, and should be built both to increase our energy production and replace fossil fuels and of course supplement renewables. Because if nuclear reactors are not built, that supplemental energy won’t come from magic storage, it will come from fossil fuels.
When did I say anything about batteries?
That is a battery. But the type of battery it is describing doesn’t actually exist.
Grid-scale storage doesn’t necessarily mean lithium batteries. It could mean redox flow batteries, it could mean pumped hydro, it could mean gravitational potential storage, it could mean pressurised air in abandoned mineshafts. It could even mean smart grids with dispatched domestic batteries and dispatched EVs reverse charging back to the grid.
Nuclear is a great energy source, but it’s not renewable. If we start rolling out nuclear all over the world on a large scale, we would sooner or later run out of nuclear material. I’ve heard estimates as high as 200 years, and as low as 50 years. The long-term future has to be something renewable, and all the renewable energy sources we currently know of are intermittent. Therefore there needs to be some sort of storage to smooth out the short term discrepancy between generation and consumption.
I do believe nuclear has a role to play. It could have seriously helped us as a stepping stone to get us from fossil fuel-based generation to renewables. It’s my personal opinion that it’s a bit late for that, and wind and especially solar are very competitive now, from an economic perspective. Having said that, I still see value for nuclear in the future, I just think the bulk of our efforts should be elsewhere.
FYI I worked in the energy sector for over a decade, in market modelling, simulation, optimisation, and control theory, and I helped drive policy and governance, especially as it relates renewable generation.