6 ms·

Your first two claims are mostly correct. Your third claim is utterly wrong. And it's 2 trillion, of course, over a period of 20 years, 2011 - 2030, an estimat

Your first two claims are mostly correct. Your third claim is utterly wrong. And it's 2 trillion, of course, over a period of 20 years, 2011 - 2030, an estimate from 2012 that Siemens made. Let's assume for a second that the (widely debunked) 2 trillion the former Siemens CEO/nuclear lobby president literally pulled out of his ass in 2012 is reality. Replacing those 2 trillion in renewable with nuclear for USD 40 billion? Germany is spending roughly EUR 10 billion a year on nuclear currently. If we replaced all nuclear stations with with new fancy "cheaper" ones we'd still be at EUR 7 billion. Let's assume we tripled the capacity to roughly 35% of total production (from now less than 12%), that's 21 billion a year. So EUR 420 billion over 20 years. So the factor would be 4x for renewables (given the worst estimate published by a guy in 2012 who happened to be the president of the main nuclear lobby group at the time) vs nuclear (the cheapest estimate I could come up). You're an order of magnitude off at least and that is when you believe the Siemens numbers. Regarding your 4th claim about negative price: wrong conclusion. Negative prices mean an oversupply of generated power. The eventual solution is not to subsidize producers, but to refine the system not to produce such large oversupply in the first place, while still making sure that a sudden drop in supply (because e.g. as a rather blunt example it starts raining and PV output goes down) can be managed.

roenxi 7y ago
> Replacing those 2 trillion in renewable with nuclear for USD 40 billion? Germany is spending roughly EUR 10 billion a year on nuclear currently. If we replaced all nuclear stations with with new fancy "cheaper" ones we'd still be at EUR 7 billion. Working from the very high level, since Germany started shutting down its nuclear plants in the Energiewende (started ~2011) electricity use has apparently cratered by more than 10% per capita [0]. That is evidence that something is going wrong, something so fungible dropping by 10% doesn't scream 'cheaper than the alternatives'. Especially since there isn't really any in-practice data on how expensive solar/wind farms are to maintain over a 20 year timeframe so we don't know what the costs will look like after the capital expenditure is done (hopefully very cheap, I'm not casting aspersions - just there isn't a lot of data for how grids go when they rely on these technologies). We're still early days, so maybe you are spot on and just didn't feel like including sources, but there is not yet clarity on whether the money spent on renewables has been a true like-for-like replacement for the nuclear it replaced. The trends are big, slow moving and well underway though. The experiment in energy transitioning remains very interesting. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany
- benj111 7y ago
  Electricity use is dropping for a variety of reasons, not least deindustrialisation. Here's a chart for the UK, it shows the same trend. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locations=GB https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...
  - roenxi 7y ago
    And in the UK that also started happening at about the time they deemphasised nuclear (and fossil fuels, wow!) and started to roll out serious wind power [0]. This isn't compelling evidence that renewables are the more cost effective option - we know nuclear was cost effective at some point, it got to 10% of worlds energy largely through market forces. I'm not sure what 'deindustrialising' means to you, but it sounds pretty scary to me. Those numbers are like not having electricity on Sundays. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production_by_source.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production...
    - bayesian_horse 7y ago
      You mean the market forces comprised of massive government subsidies and underestimated decommissioning and accident costs?
    - benj111 7y ago
      "'deindustrialising'" Heavy industry moving abroad, mainly to china. There's another variable in the mix. North sea gas running out. The UK has gone from basically being self sufficient in gas to importing most of it. I think you need to tease that out as well before you can definitively say its renewables pushing up the price. I would also point out that Hinckley point C guaranteed prices are more expensive than the latest wind prices. And I would finally point out that my 100% renewable electricity tariff was cheaper than the none renewable alternatives, and one of the biggest electricity companies has announced its going 100% renewable electricity, with no price increase to customers. Both of which seem to argue against renewable electricity being that much more expensive.
  - 7y ago
pl-94 7y ago
I am not pretending to have exact numbers but we should have some orders of magnitude in our heads. Let's pretend that our electricity is running fully in nuclear wrt. fully in wind turbines/PV: load factor is around 0.7/0.8 (against 0.2) so costs increase by x3-4, life expectancy is 60-80 y against 20-30 years (x2-3), nuclear does not require a new electric grid, whereas renewable energies does (cost ~x1.5), nuclear works better with a low storage (10%) whereas PV/WT want 50-60% of storage (cost x2-4) and cost of building/recycling for a kwh is around 3-5k€ against 1-1.5k€ for WT (idk for PV) (cost %2-4). At the end of the day, the capex/kWh is indeed one order of magnitude higher for WT/PV than for nuclear. I am not pretending those numbers are exact but I think it reflects the order of magnitude. For the 4th claim, the issue is that prices are much lower that what they were supposed to be, and that is why, the field will need to be heavily subsidized for a long term. What I support, it is not to globally spending less money into energy transition. I really hope governments will spend much more than nowadays. But, I just hope we focus on reducing our economical dependency on fuels/coals to preserve a bit of our current comfort while not killing every year several millions of people with fine particles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents). Give me USD 2 trillions, and I will 1) ban coal generated electricity, 2) ban any vehicles that consume more than 2L/100 km, 3) insulate any existing buildings (and not only new buildings as our policy makers do, since old buildings stay for roughly 100 years), 4) subsidy heavily heat pomp. But I will certainly not close any nuclear power plants. I know it is almost impossible to ask such requests to Europeans, but this is the only plausible solutions I have heard of.
- merb 7y ago
  a nuclear site would never be cheaper than solar energy. I mean in the next 20-40 years it might have been cheaper. unfortunatly the site needs to be cleaned up in a process that costs multiple billions of euro and the storage for the factory is still not ready for the next thousands of years and is also really costly in germany. in germany solar energy has two problems: - trash (there is no long term storage and there probably will never be one that can sustain 1000+ years) - cleanup of land (germany is small and has a lot of people we need to use our space without wasting it)
- rndgermandude 7y ago

roenxi 7y ago

> Replacing those 2 trillion in renewable with nuclear for USD 40 billion? Germany is spending roughly EUR 10 billion a year on nuclear currently. If we replaced all nuclear stations with with new fancy "cheaper" ones we'd still be at EUR 7 billion. Working from the very high level, since Germany started shutting down its nuclear plants in the Energiewende (started ~2011) electricity use has apparently cratered by more than 10% per capita [0]. That is evidence that something is going wrong, something so fungible dropping by 10% doesn't scream 'cheaper than the alternatives'. Especially since there isn't really any in-practice data on how expensive solar/wind farms are to maintain over a 20 year timeframe so we don't know what the costs will look like after the capital expenditure is done (hopefully very cheap, I'm not casting aspersions - just there isn't a lot of data for how grids go when they rely on these technologies). We're still early days, so maybe you are spot on and just didn't feel like including sources, but there is not yet clarity on whether the money spent on renewables has been a true like-for-like replacement for the nuclear it replaced. The trends are big, slow moving and well underway though. The experiment in energy transitioning remains very interesting. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany

benj111 7y ago
Electricity use is dropping for a variety of reasons, not least deindustrialisation. Here's a chart for the UK, it shows the same trend. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locations=GB https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...
- roenxi 7y ago
  And in the UK that also started happening at about the time they deemphasised nuclear (and fossil fuels, wow!) and started to roll out serious wind power [0]. This isn't compelling evidence that renewables are the more cost effective option - we know nuclear was cost effective at some point, it got to 10% of worlds energy largely through market forces. I'm not sure what 'deindustrialising' means to you, but it sounds pretty scary to me. Those numbers are like not having electricity on Sundays. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production_by_source.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production...
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    You mean the market forces comprised of massive government subsidies and underestimated decommissioning and accident costs?
  - benj111 7y ago
    "'deindustrialising'" Heavy industry moving abroad, mainly to china. There's another variable in the mix. North sea gas running out. The UK has gone from basically being self sufficient in gas to importing most of it. I think you need to tease that out as well before you can definitively say its renewables pushing up the price. I would also point out that Hinckley point C guaranteed prices are more expensive than the latest wind prices. And I would finally point out that my 100% renewable electricity tariff was cheaper than the none renewable alternatives, and one of the biggest electricity companies has announced its going 100% renewable electricity, with no price increase to customers. Both of which seem to argue against renewable electricity being that much more expensive.
- 7y ago

pl-94 7y ago

I am not pretending to have exact numbers but we should have some orders of magnitude in our heads. Let's pretend that our electricity is running fully in nuclear wrt. fully in wind turbines/PV: load factor is around 0.7/0.8 (against 0.2) so costs increase by x3-4, life expectancy is 60-80 y against 20-30 years (x2-3), nuclear does not require a new electric grid, whereas renewable energies does (cost ~x1.5), nuclear works better with a low storage (10%) whereas PV/WT want 50-60% of storage (cost x2-4) and cost of building/recycling for a kwh is around 3-5k€ against 1-1.5k€ for WT (idk for PV) (cost %2-4). At the end of the day, the capex/kWh is indeed one order of magnitude higher for WT/PV than for nuclear. I am not pretending those numbers are exact but I think it reflects the order of magnitude. For the 4th claim, the issue is that prices are much lower that what they were supposed to be, and that is why, the field will need to be heavily subsidized for a long term. What I support, it is not to globally spending less money into energy transition. I really hope governments will spend much more than nowadays. But, I just hope we focus on reducing our economical dependency on fuels/coals to preserve a bit of our current comfort while not killing every year several millions of people with fine particles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents). Give me USD 2 trillions, and I will 1) ban coal generated electricity, 2) ban any vehicles that consume more than 2L/100 km, 3) insulate any existing buildings (and not only new buildings as our policy makers do, since old buildings stay for roughly 100 years), 4) subsidy heavily heat pomp. But I will certainly not close any nuclear power plants. I know it is almost impossible to ask such requests to Europeans, but this is the only plausible solutions I have heard of.

merb 7y ago
a nuclear site would never be cheaper than solar energy. I mean in the next 20-40 years it might have been cheaper. unfortunatly the site needs to be cleaned up in a process that costs multiple billions of euro and the storage for the factory is still not ready for the next thousands of years and is also really costly in germany. in germany solar energy has two problems: - trash (there is no long term storage and there probably will never be one that can sustain 1000+ years) - cleanup of land (germany is small and has a lot of people we need to use our space without wasting it)
rndgermandude 7y ago