9 ms·

The back of my envelope disagrees. I'm distracted so LMK if there's a major flaw in this analysis. Nuclear power generation costs ~$6k per kW(1) Solar power g

The back of my envelope disagrees. I'm distracted so LMK if there's a major flaw in this analysis. Nuclear power generation costs ~$6k per kW(1) Solar power generation costs ~$1k per kW(2) Solar capacity factor is ~25%, so ~4k/kW to compare with 24 hour baseload power. Storing 3 kW for ~12hrs requires ~36kW-h storage. Li-ion battery packs are getting to ~$100/kW-h (3) 36 kW-h storage is ~$3.6k Nuclear cost: ~6k per kW baseload Solar + battery cost: ~7.6k per kW baseload (~4k/kW generation, ~3.6k/kW storage) (1) https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a... (2) https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72133.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72133.pdf (3) https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-cells-this-year-100-kwh-tesla-battery-packs-in-2020/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-c...

sovnade 7y ago
Don't forget LiIon batteries only get a few hundred recharge cycles. Is that calculated in this kw-h figure?
manfredo 7y ago
> Nuclear cost: ~6k per kW baseload > Solar + battery cost: ~7.6k per kW baseload (~4k/kW generation, ~3.6k/kW storage) So nuclear is cheaper than solar + storage?
- briwang2050 7y ago
  China, South Korea are $2K-2.5K per kilowatt of baseload. A Nuclear kilowatt generates 70-95% of the time. A solar kilowatt generates 10-20% of the time. A Gigawatt of solar generates 1 Terawatt hour per year. A gigawatt of nuclear generates 6 to 8 terawatt hours per year. So nuclear generates an average of 7 times more. Solar lasts 15 years. Nuclear lasts 40-80 years. Solar needs to be rebuilt 3 to 5 times versus nuclear. There is no supply chain for matching battery storage at scale. They are just starting to build batteries for cars at the 200 gigawatt-hour levels. Solar and wind in California and many other places has only 10% of the generation during winter. There is no 90-day power storage and building one would be insanely expensive. You pay for electricity by the kilowatt-hour.
retrac 7y ago
Lithium deposits are already facing depletion and the price has been steadily rising for a decade now with the new demand for li-ion batteries. Building enough battery capacity for the grid would be far more than current world demand for Li-ion cells. I imagine prices would skyrocket, throwing off your calculations.
- audunw 7y ago
  Grid level battery storage is very likely moving to other chemistries. The only reason to use lithium is that it's the chemistry that's the most developed right now, but lithium-ion batteries do not fundamentally speaking have the best properties for grid storage. Lithium-ion is great for energy density, but that's not a critical requirement for the grid. For grid storage I think molten metal makes the most sense. It's a technology that was developed to be ideal for grid storage from the start. Flow cell batteries might also make sense. And then there's other storage technologies like compressed air, pumped hydro, storing kinetic energy, storing thermal energy, etc. http://news.mit.edu/2016/battery-molten-metals-0112 http://news.mit.edu/2016/battery-molten-metals-0112 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiRrvxjrJ1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiRrvxjrJ1U
- cmutel 7y ago
  Lithium prices have gone down almost 60% in the last year. Short-term storage isn't that bad, we have other battery chemistries or even completely different types (e.g. flow batteries). A bigger problem is seasonal storage, for which most batteries are far too expensive.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  The fears of peak lithium are greatly overblown. New mines are coming online now that the element is in higher demand and the price is going down. But that's only one of many energy storage technologies that can be used for batteries. It's popular for mobile/portable uses because it has high energy density, but that's not really necessary for grid-scale energy storage; whatever's cheapest will do (which may well be pumping water uphill).
- keanzu 7y ago
  Lithium deposits? Most of the lithium found today is extracted from brine reservoirs located in regions of southwestern South America and China.
tekstar 7y ago
Utility-scale power storage can use other technologies, such as pumped-storage hydroelectric generation. Basically they pump water uphill as a means of storing energy. https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/mrkt/snpsht/2016/10-03pmpdstrghdr-eng.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/mrkt/snpsht/2016/10-03p...
- erentz 7y ago
  Pumped storage is not realistic. It’s a cute nice to have on the side but cannot ever possibly scale enough to meet even double digit percentage of our need. To be quick about it let’s take some data from [1]. Hydroelectric power generates 6.1% of all US power today. All those huge dams you see everywhere with their giant lakes you can see from space that did massive destruction to ecosystems across this country? Those generate a measly 6.1%. (Blows my mind I didn’t even know it was that low.) Even if you turned every hydro dam in the US today into a pumped storage facility it would be barely a curiosity on our energy needs. And you sure as heck aren’t going to 10-fold increase the number and size of dams and lakes we have in this country. Nobody will stand for that. We all seem to keep doing these wishful mental gymnastics to try avoid nuclear power, but the numbers just never add up. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_U...
  - tekstar 7y ago
    You seem to know what you are talking about based on your comment history, however this statement needs some backup to be accepted at face value: > All those huge dams you see everywhere with their giant lakes you can see from space that did massive destruction to ecosystems across this country? "dams are big" x6
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    What you're not taking into account is that hydroelectric power production facilities are currently sized only for the gravity-driven amount of water that reaches their reservoirs. Without making the reservoirs any larger, or adding any additional dams, you can simply add lots more turbines and pumps to the existing reservoirs and get a lot more power production out of them. Consider that the vast majority of the pumping would be to even out the daily power cycle (the "duck curve"), whereas reservoirs are sized to hold years' worth of water. The amount of water pumped back uphill during the peak solar output of the day would be a negligible amount of water to the overall reservoir, and then you'd run it down through additional turbines in the evening to produce power.
ccffpphh 7y ago
What is the lifecycle on the batteries? What about the externalities of heavy mining to find the materials for batteries? Isn't it really toxic? Is it even feasible to run the whole world immediately on rechargeable batteries? How much more environmental impact would be levied, as opposed to nuclear plants?
readams 7y ago
You also need to consider that solar/wind+battery needs to be massively overbuilt to get reliable power because of the variability, both day to day and seasonal. More sophisticated analysis needs to recognize that as your percentage of power from solar/wind approaches 100%, the amount of overbuilding required rises very rapidly. See e.g. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-reason-we-cant-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-re...
- labawi 7y ago
  Only if you do it as proposed in the battery-centered article.
briwang2050 7y ago
Tesla Powerwall: $14.5K for 27 kwh and $2.5-4.5k installation. $6.8K for each 13.5 kwh of Powerwall. Batteries by themselves not enough. Need inverters etc... You cannot get to the cost of the car by only adding up the cost of gasoline used over its lifetime. China's and south Korea and Russia have nuclear build costs in the $2k-2.5K per KW range. They make 70% of the world's nuclear reactors.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Nobody was talking about Tesla Powerwall. We're talking grid scale energy production and storage, not at the level of individual houses. You can't remotely compare a nuclear reactor to a house-level battery setup.
CydeWeys 7y ago
An important point is that renewable energy and battery storage continue getting significantly cheaper with every passing year, whereas nuclear power is not getting any cheaper. That's why I said we're at the inflection point. It's not accurate to just take today's figures and project them forward; anticipated gains need to be factored in too. That's why nobody's building new nuclear; even if we assume your numbers are correct and say it's slightly cheaper now, it won't be in a few years. Nuclear power plants need to run for decades to recoup their large capital construction costs.

sovnade 7y ago

Don't forget LiIon batteries only get a few hundred recharge cycles. Is that calculated in this kw-h figure?

manfredo 7y ago

> Nuclear cost: ~6k per kW baseload > Solar + battery cost: ~7.6k per kW baseload (~4k/kW generation, ~3.6k/kW storage) So nuclear is cheaper than solar + storage?

briwang2050 7y ago
China, South Korea are $2K-2.5K per kilowatt of baseload. A Nuclear kilowatt generates 70-95% of the time. A solar kilowatt generates 10-20% of the time. A Gigawatt of solar generates 1 Terawatt hour per year. A gigawatt of nuclear generates 6 to 8 terawatt hours per year. So nuclear generates an average of 7 times more. Solar lasts 15 years. Nuclear lasts 40-80 years. Solar needs to be rebuilt 3 to 5 times versus nuclear. There is no supply chain for matching battery storage at scale. They are just starting to build batteries for cars at the 200 gigawatt-hour levels. Solar and wind in California and many other places has only 10% of the generation during winter. There is no 90-day power storage and building one would be insanely expensive. You pay for electricity by the kilowatt-hour.

retrac 7y ago

Lithium deposits are already facing depletion and the price has been steadily rising for a decade now with the new demand for li-ion batteries. Building enough battery capacity for the grid would be far more than current world demand for Li-ion cells. I imagine prices would skyrocket, throwing off your calculations.

audunw 7y ago
Grid level battery storage is very likely moving to other chemistries. The only reason to use lithium is that it's the chemistry that's the most developed right now, but lithium-ion batteries do not fundamentally speaking have the best properties for grid storage. Lithium-ion is great for energy density, but that's not a critical requirement for the grid. For grid storage I think molten metal makes the most sense. It's a technology that was developed to be ideal for grid storage from the start. Flow cell batteries might also make sense. And then there's other storage technologies like compressed air, pumped hydro, storing kinetic energy, storing thermal energy, etc. http://news.mit.edu/2016/battery-molten-metals-0112 http://news.mit.edu/2016/battery-molten-metals-0112 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiRrvxjrJ1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiRrvxjrJ1U
cmutel 7y ago
Lithium prices have gone down almost 60% in the last year. Short-term storage isn't that bad, we have other battery chemistries or even completely different types (e.g. flow batteries). A bigger problem is seasonal storage, for which most batteries are far too expensive.
CydeWeys 7y ago
The fears of peak lithium are greatly overblown. New mines are coming online now that the element is in higher demand and the price is going down. But that's only one of many energy storage technologies that can be used for batteries. It's popular for mobile/portable uses because it has high energy density, but that's not really necessary for grid-scale energy storage; whatever's cheapest will do (which may well be pumping water uphill).
keanzu 7y ago
Lithium deposits? Most of the lithium found today is extracted from brine reservoirs located in regions of southwestern South America and China.

tekstar 7y ago

Utility-scale power storage can use other technologies, such as pumped-storage hydroelectric generation. Basically they pump water uphill as a means of storing energy. https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/mrkt/snpsht/2016/10-03pmpdstrghdr-eng.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/mrkt/snpsht/2016/10-03p...

erentz 7y ago
Pumped storage is not realistic. It’s a cute nice to have on the side but cannot ever possibly scale enough to meet even double digit percentage of our need. To be quick about it let’s take some data from [1]. Hydroelectric power generates 6.1% of all US power today. All those huge dams you see everywhere with their giant lakes you can see from space that did massive destruction to ecosystems across this country? Those generate a measly 6.1%. (Blows my mind I didn’t even know it was that low.) Even if you turned every hydro dam in the US today into a pumped storage facility it would be barely a curiosity on our energy needs. And you sure as heck aren’t going to 10-fold increase the number and size of dams and lakes we have in this country. Nobody will stand for that. We all seem to keep doing these wishful mental gymnastics to try avoid nuclear power, but the numbers just never add up. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_U...
- tekstar 7y ago
  You seem to know what you are talking about based on your comment history, however this statement needs some backup to be accepted at face value: > All those huge dams you see everywhere with their giant lakes you can see from space that did massive destruction to ecosystems across this country? "dams are big" x6
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  What you're not taking into account is that hydroelectric power production facilities are currently sized only for the gravity-driven amount of water that reaches their reservoirs. Without making the reservoirs any larger, or adding any additional dams, you can simply add lots more turbines and pumps to the existing reservoirs and get a lot more power production out of them. Consider that the vast majority of the pumping would be to even out the daily power cycle (the "duck curve"), whereas reservoirs are sized to hold years' worth of water. The amount of water pumped back uphill during the peak solar output of the day would be a negligible amount of water to the overall reservoir, and then you'd run it down through additional turbines in the evening to produce power.

ccffpphh 7y ago

What is the lifecycle on the batteries? What about the externalities of heavy mining to find the materials for batteries? Isn't it really toxic? Is it even feasible to run the whole world immediately on rechargeable batteries? How much more environmental impact would be levied, as opposed to nuclear plants?

readams 7y ago

You also need to consider that solar/wind+battery needs to be massively overbuilt to get reliable power because of the variability, both day to day and seasonal. More sophisticated analysis needs to recognize that as your percentage of power from solar/wind approaches 100%, the amount of overbuilding required rises very rapidly. See e.g. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-reason-we-cant-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-re...

labawi 7y ago
Only if you do it as proposed in the battery-centered article.

briwang2050 7y ago

Tesla Powerwall: $14.5K for 27 kwh and $2.5-4.5k installation. $6.8K for each 13.5 kwh of Powerwall. Batteries by themselves not enough. Need inverters etc... You cannot get to the cost of the car by only adding up the cost of gasoline used over its lifetime. China's and south Korea and Russia have nuclear build costs in the $2k-2.5K per KW range. They make 70% of the world's nuclear reactors.

CydeWeys 7y ago
Nobody was talking about Tesla Powerwall. We're talking grid scale energy production and storage, not at the level of individual houses. You can't remotely compare a nuclear reactor to a house-level battery setup.

CydeWeys 7y ago

An important point is that renewable energy and battery storage continue getting significantly cheaper with every passing year, whereas nuclear power is not getting any cheaper. That's why I said we're at the inflection point. It's not accurate to just take today's figures and project them forward; anticipated gains need to be factored in too. That's why nobody's building new nuclear; even if we assume your numbers are correct and say it's slightly cheaper now, it won't be in a few years. Nuclear power plants need to run for decades to recoup their large capital construction costs.