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This is nuts. I wonder what the effect of spending $1T on nuclear would be in comparison. I bet it's enough money to get to practical nuclear fusion in a decade
by m0zg 7y ago
This is nuts. I wonder what the effect of spending $1T on nuclear would be in comparison. I bet it's enough money to get to practical nuclear fusion in a decade, which would largely obviate the need in most other energy generation methods.
- aqme28 7y agoIt's going to take a lot more than $1T and a decade for fusion to be cost-competitive with wind and solar.
- cbmuser 7y agoHow are wind and solar cost-competitive when they can exist in Germany only with extreme high subsidies? Look at the new windfarm called "Wikinger" that Germany built near the island of Ruegen: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore-Windpark_Wikinger https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore-Windpark_Wikinger Cost: 1.4 billion Euros Lifetime: 20 years Power: 350 MW Max. capacity: 0.4 (40%) Price at the electricity stock exchange Leipzig: 36 Euro/MWh Thus: 3500.42436520*36 = 883 million Euros Result: 517 million Euros loss
- wjnc 7y agoInterest in Germany: ~0-1%, expected inflation: 1-2%, terminal value: X unknown (but not 0). Just adding these parameters would change the conclusion of your valuation model significantly. Secondly losses are not subsidies. Subsidies are what governments dole out, losses are for investors and companies.
- hobofan 7y agoI don't know the specifics, but there are subsidies in place through the EEG[0] to prevent such losses. In general energy also seems to be a low-risk business, where if the energy companies would ever loose money, they are either already covered by the government or can sue the government for losses due to changed regulations with a good chance of winning. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Sources_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
- VyperCard 7y agoEEG Sites are phased out in favor of Direktvermartung though
- Gravityloss 7y agoThe turbines have grown and a lot of recent wind park bids are at a pretty competitive price without subsidies. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/23/uk-offshore-wind-prices-reach-new-record-low-in-latest-cfd-auction/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/23/uk-offshore-wind-prices...
- aurelwu 7y agoWhy do you set a fixed price of 36 Euro / MWh for the next 20 years. At least take the phelix Futures to get a somewhat reasonable picture: https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures/phelix-de-futures https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures/phelix-de-f... (45€ Base / 53€ Peak). With the EU-ETS Certs getting more an more sparse and expensive over time, coal will be phased out more and more which will increase the price.
- m0zg 7y agoGermany already has the highest power prices in Europe. How much higher can this really go?
- black_puppydog 7y agoThen again the German government seems dead set on also subsidizing coal/gas by not internalizing their societal costs. So just removing those "subsidies" would already make wind/solar more attractive. Turns out, energy needs to be more expensive, and we should probably save energy.
- brlewis 7y ago> Lifetime: 20 years Power Is that really the lifetime of the farm, or is it just when turbines need to be replaced?
- TheGallopedHigh 7y agoWhat’s the difference
- brlewis 7y agoThe platforms, towers and undersea cables are already paid for. Replacing one piece of the system isn't starting over. The math presented was of all return on investment ending at 20 years.
- ocschwar 7y ago> Cost: 1.4 billion Euros Lifetime: 20 years Power: 350 MW Max. capacity: 0.4 (40%) Price at the electricity stock exchange Leipzig: 36 Euro/MWh Because wind farms have 0 fuel costs, they will operate at any price above a few eurocents per MWH. Which means once a critical mass of wind farms is operating in an area, the price frequently dives all the way to near 0. Sucks if you operate wind farms. Sucks less if you ALSO operate natural gas generators which you can then idle. And sucks a lot less if you're a consumer with dispatch able loads.
- pathseeker 7y ago> It's going to take a lot more than $1T and a decade for fusion to be cost-competitive with wind and solar. Wind and solar don't even compete in the same category as nuclear until you include storage. Cheap, bursty energy is useless for base-load. Wind/solar are still far more expensive than fossil and nuclear when you take into account the over-provisioning and energy storage requirements to provide reliable base-load.
- WA 7y agoOr a lot cheaper if you continue to ignore the nuclear waste lying around for the next 100,000 years from a price perspective.
- m0zg 7y agoWe can get energy from that now, too. Russia already has a working reactor on the grid.
- jartelt 7y agoThere is no requirement that the grid requires "baseload" sources of power. The grid can operate with flexible sources of power that can ramp (gas, some hydro, etc.) in addition to wind and solar. If anything nuclear and coal, which can only run at 80-100% capacity or 0% capacity are inconvenient and inflexible sources of power. The grid survives fine when nuclear and coal plants go offline for several days for maintenance/turn-arounds!
- bjourne 7y ago> Wind/solar are still far more expensive than fossil and nuclear when you take into account the over-provisioning and energy storage requirements to provide reliable base-load. Do you have a source for that? Cost comparisons I've seen between nuclear and renewable energy doesn't reach that conclusion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21479651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21479651
- skybrian 7y agoLooks like a single fission plant costs around 6 to 9 billion and construction costs tend to go up. There's not a lot of room for iteration and learning from experience; you have to get it right the first time. Compare that with a competitive industry that's manufacturing in bulk and improving every year. Where do the lines cross?
- xyzzyz 7y agoWhen you spend $1T on building nuclear plants, you will be manufacturing in bulk and improving every year. Let's assume that a single fission plant costs $5B (if you're building hundreds of them, you can take advantage of some economies of scale). For $1T, you can build 200 of them. New fission plants have something like 2 GW capacity on average. 2 GW times 200 is 400 GW. Now, US uses 13 quads of BTU worth of electricity annually.[1]. 13 quads a year is 434 GW of power on average. So, we could basically cover our energy needs with $1T worth of nuclear plants, if you average things out and ignore peaking needs. Most certainly, however, if you add $1T worth of nuclear to our current system, as opposed to adding $1T worth of wind energy, we'll pretty much be able to go off fossil fuels in electricity generation altogether, with already existing water and renewable generation. The resulting system will be much better for environment (less land used for nuclear plants than for equivalent $1T worth of wind turbines), safer (wind turbines are more dangerous per kWh produced than nuclear, people die installing those every year), and more stable (the supply will be extremely steady, and will not depend on weather fluctuations). [1] - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained//us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained//us-energy-facts/
- m0zg 7y agoPretty much my thinking as well. It's not a question of not investing in clean energy, it's a question which is a better bang for the buck and which gets us to fully carbon free energy faster and more reliably. Economies of scale would drive the costs of power plants down like you wouldn't believe. And then there's the secondary effect of more investment into nuclear physics research, which, after we figure out fusion will make carbon based energy completely obsolete everywhere, forever.
- 7y ago
- ocschwar 7y agoAccording to the Lazard estimate of levelized cost of energy, spending the same money on nuclear fission would produce one third of the power.
- m0zg 7y agoIs that with or without energy storage you'd need for the wind turbines? Does the estimate account for the fact that building a large number of nuclear plants means dramatically cheaper unit cost?
- ocschwar 7y agoCompletely independent of storage. And that said, if you go offshore, you don't really need a lot of storage.
- nmfisher 7y ago> And that said, if you go offshore, you don't really need a lot of storage. How does that work?
- woodandsteel 7y agoBecause the wind is more steady, around the clock and over longer periods of time.
- gns24 7y agoData? From what I've seen it's a little bit steadier, but not that much.
- 9dl 7y agoGermany vs France Full research http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf Short https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05/if-saving-the-climate-requires-making-energy-so-expensive-why-is-french-electricity-so-cheap/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05... Nuclear safer, cheaper (in short and long term) and produce less carbon emission
- beat 7y agoWhy is spending money on a sure thing, in the face of a global emergency with a ticking clock, "nuts", relative to wasting a decade and a trillion dollars on fantasy tech that may or may not work at all?
- cm2187 7y agoThe problem is that it is more likely 50y than a decade, the time to build multiple generations of expensive experimental reactors and prototypes.
- beat 7y agoYep. Watch what capital does, and don't make excuses about "regulations" or "politics". The capital is flowing into wind/solar, because the capital smells money. People fall in love with the idea of nuclear power. They get offended that it may not be the savior after all.
- erentz 7y agoNuclear fission would obviously be the sure thing. (As opposed to fusion.)
- tokai 7y agoI cannot access this article [0]. But google image search pulled this chart out [1]. It seems to suggest that several trillion dollars have already been spend on fusion over the years. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/19368 https://www.nature.com/articles/19368 [1] https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2F19368/MediaObjects/41586_1999_Article_BF19368_Fig1_HTML.gif https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/...
- cm2187 7y agoI am watching right now a conference [1] on youtube precisely on the comparison of hypothetical 100% wind vs 100% nuclear. Basically it explains that wind has a typical average utilisation of about 20% vs 70% for full nuclear. A turbine lasts about 20-30y vs 60 for a nuclear reactor. In addition, wind is producing the electricity at the edge of the network, and you loose the diversification effect of having a network (the example he gave is that in France the total potential consumption of all usage of electricity is 4-5x the total installed supply, because not all machines are switched on at the same time, but if you produce your electricity locally you must size it to the potential local need). In addition you have to stock more between seasons for wind than nuclear. So even though the cost per kW built of wind is roughly half or a third of nuclear, the overall cost is 10-20x higher than nuclear. [1] (in french) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4teA8ciuRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4teA8ciuRU
- adamsea 7y ago"Bet" is the operative term here. Maybe, maybe not.
- i_am_nomad 7y agoMy semi-educated opinion: there will never, ever be cost-effective fusion power. The unsolvable problem is neutron embrittlement. There just is no reactor wall material that can last long enough to make fusion worth it.