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These comparisions solely account for the production costs and not for the system costs of solar energy and are therefore completely useless. Solar panels will

These comparisions solely account for the production costs and not for the system costs of solar energy and are therefore completely useless. Solar panels will always require a backup power plant as the Sun isn’t shining 24/7 and storing large amounts of electric energy isn’t trivial. I‘m really disappointed that this kind of non-sense gets posted on HN over and over again. I‘m from Germany, we have 50% renewables in our electricity mix and our electricity prices are the highest worldwide. France has 70% nuclear and their consumer electricity prices are half of the German ones. Additionally, France emits only 50 grams of CO2 per kWh while Germany emits 400 grams on average per kWh. I know lots of comments will counter-argue „Yes, but the high taxes in Germany.“ but those aren’t the main price drivers. The main price drivers are the costs for subsidizing solar and wind (the so-called EEG-Umlage) and the costs for keeping backup power plants available which are allowed to produce only when solar and/or wind won’t deliver as both solar and wind have precedence over other electricity providers in the electricity net (the so-called Netzentgelt). Solar might be cheapest when you consider the pure production costs per kWh but it’s not the cheapest when you consider the costs for a conplete system to provide electricity for a population. Even single houses aren’t able to live off just solar while every house can live solely on power from a nuclear power plant which provides electricity 24/7.

kstenerud 6y ago
Actually, prices excluding taxes and levies look pretty similar: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-household-electricity-prices-second-highest-eu https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-household-electr... And in Germany and Denmark, taxes and levies ARE the main price drivers. The maintenance costs are amortized in the per-kwh cost to consumers, same as with nuclear or gas or coal. Single houses can't live off just solar energy because they aren't diversified like a nation can be (in terms of storage, routing, diversity of technologies, etc). Nuclear is nice in theory, but unfortunately they are managed by humans, and humans do stupid things like run them past their decommission date or fail to locate backup generators above flooding level or skimp on maintenance and inspections. And nuclear accidents create no-go zones that last millenia. Only truly "meltdown-proof" reactors would avoid this problem, but R&D into this is terribly slow and seems to be obstructed at every turn by incumbents.
- coddle-hark 6y ago
  I’ve read somewhere that meltdowns are impossible in modern reactor designs, is that not true?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - orwin 6y ago
    It is impossible with Gen3+ (that include a core catcher). However, i have studied Gen3 and Gen3+ designs, i think Gen3 design are really safe enough, even if knowledge decline as much as it did on Trantor: anybody with small training could keep one functionning if they follow the simple rule: if something unexpected happen, Don't touch anything. Gen3+ add a new surface of attack, a digital one, while the main issue in Gen3 is not fixed (for information, the main security issue is the pool). I'm not a fan.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      A core catcher is a thing that mitigates the worst scenario of a meltdown (by catching the melted core before it can melt through the concrete floor), it doesn't prevent a meltdown. If the core catcher comes into play the core has already melted and escaped from the reactor pressure vessel.
      - orwin 6y ago
        Mmm, true, i meant that in Gen3+ the meltdown was manageable for any civilisation, but in any case, if a meltdown happen in a Gen3 or Gen3+, it will be caused by malice and a lot of neglect, and not by accident. Still, Gen3+ and their core catchers are overengineered and i think are not worth the additional cost in GHG.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        Extra safety features are worth it if they allow the overall expensive "nuclear culture" to be relaxed. Otherwise, it's just rearranging deck chairs on an economic Titanic. Having said that: even a contained meltdown is devastating for the utility. The owner of TMI was gravely wounded by the cost of that accident.
adrian_mrd 6y ago
You raise some good points and there are likely many reasons for the total price of electricity production eg retailer margins, transmitters, age/quality of infrastructure, regulation at different tiers (state, federal, local), etc, in addition to the ones you raise. But if you are factoring in total costs for nuclear, you also need to factor in the security risks and costs (eg terrorist threats to nuclear plants), costs to dispose of nuclear waste, inability to provide housing close to reactors, etc, as well.
nix23 6y ago
> France emits only 50 grams of CO2 per kWh while Germany emits 400 grams on average per kWh. Yes because the other 50% is powered by coal. >not the cheapest when you consider the costs for a conplete system Same with nuclear and coal, you dont count the potential health problems (coal) and the 10000y storage prices for the waste (nuclear)
- oblio 6y ago
  I think his point that with renewables + nuclear Germany would have been at much less than 50g of CO2 per kWh.
  - nix23 6y ago
    Well thats true, to stop nuclear and restart coal was an incredible stupid decision...
    - cbmuser 6y ago
      Indeed, it is. Good that we agree on that ;-).
  - cbmuser 6y ago
    Exactly. We have been shutting down nuclear power plants the past 10 years instead of fossile plants. In fact, we’re building 16 new gas-fired and 2 new coal-fired plants.
roenxi 6y ago
Rabid solar advocates have been lying about it being cheaper than the alternatives for so long it is a bit unsettling seeing the claim from credible sources. But this is a significant change - Germany, from what I recall, moved to solar when it was more expensive and less reliable than their existing situation. In future, people moving to solar will get cheaper and less reliable. That is a very different situation. There is incentive to take the less reliable power now. Uses will be found for it. I'm happy to make changes to my lifestyle if it saves me a bunch of money, and industrial consumers will start to adapt over a decade if the incentives line up. It won't be the end of reliable power generation, but if it is economically sensible then the options will be explored deeply.
_Microft 6y ago
Why would people have to go without power if there is no sun at their place? We do not go hungry either when there was a bad harvest in our area. We just transport goods in from where they can be produced. Intermittency is only a problem when one has a medieval image of self-sufficiency in mind. Solutions are either averaging out peaks and dips temporally (by storing energy e.g. in pumped hydro plants, in batteries, ...) or geographically by moving power where it is needed and from where it is currently being produced. You do not even lose gigantic fractions of the power in the process: high-voltage direct current power lines have losses of around 3%/1000km. China, for example, has power lines that move a dozen gigawatt over a distance of over 3000km. It can be done.
- whiddershins 6y ago
  What are the security implications of a total abandonment of regional self-sufficiency?
  - _Microft 6y ago
    What's your concept of regional here? For physical goods, we have ditched self-sufficiency a long time ago. Your government might sustain emergency reserves for grain, food or oil and gas but even that lasts only a few weeks. Here is what Germany has stockpiled for emergencies for example: [0][1][2]. Mutual dependency does not have to be a bad thing either. It keeps both sides from doing stupid things (assuming a balanced level of dependency in both directions). [0] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesreserve_Getreide https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesreserve_Getreide [1] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivile_Notfallreserve https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivile_Notfallreserve [2] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategische_%C3%96lreserve https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategische_%C3%96lreserve
- gridlockd 6y ago
  You'd think that if this was an easily solvable problem, the great engineering nation of Germany would've solved it, instead of just firing up the coal plants. To store just a fraction of the needed power would require millions of large expensive batteries, whereas pumped hydro storage requires geological features that are in limited supply. Once you factor in all these costs, suddenly the "cheapest electricity in history" becomes really expensive.
coddle-hark 6y ago
What you don’t take into account is that destroying the planet with carbon pollution is going to be extremely expensive too.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  I'd be interested, what sort of fantasies do you have about rising CO2 levels and/or temperatures on this planet? What do you believe is actually going to happen?
  - orwin 6y ago
    Well, the thing with GHG-induced climate change (not counting wetbulb temperature that will be reached more than a hundred day a year in some highly populated areas) is that the troposphere become warmer while the stratosphere become colder. I'd be interested if you can guess the fantasies i have knowing that. Also, endogenic species are dieing faster than the forest replace them, forests are dryer, this summer we were 50km close to have the Russian weat fields burn more than they did in 2010 (with effects on the world hunger and politics in 2011 well know). This could be mitigated honestly, and i'm pretty sure that this, we can manage. Katrina every year, maybe not as much.
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      > I'd be interested if you can guess the fantasies i have knowing that. I can't, please elaborate.
audunw 6y ago
Aren’t most of Frances nuclear reactors really old? Of course nuclear is cheap decades after you built them. Most of the costs are during construction. Isn’t it unfair to complain about not counting systems costs for solar, but then doing a comparison that basically if ignores most of the costs with nuclear (if starting from scratch) Seems to me that France has built up a lot of debt in terms of old reactors that need to be decommissioned and replaced. As far as I’ve read, their plan is to replace most of those with renewables (targeting 50% renewables) I feel like I see this all the time - nuclear advocates being extremely nitpicking about cost and challenges with renewables, while ignoring or brushing off those of nuclear power. I’m not against nuclear power, we should put more R&D into it to hedge our bets. But I’ve yet to see a compelling case for a huge bet on nuclear power that’s not ridiculously simplistic. We all know that energy storage and synthetic fuel production is the missing key to going all in on renewables. But we also know that breakthroughs in these areas are absolutely essential to making transportation CO2 neutral. So going nuclear doesn’t avoid solving that problem. I’d argue that going for renewables is a huge benefit in that it channels more money into energy storage, increasing R&D, making it easier to solve the climate crisis across the board. We can return to nuclear power in 2-3 decades and hopefully free up some of the land claimed by solar and wind power plants.
bjelkeman-again 6y ago
As a point of comparison, Sweden had the following distribution of power production for electricity in 2019 [1], at a comparable price to France (a bit higher) [2]. Electric production tWh Nuclear 64.3 39% Hydro 63.6 39% Wind 19.9 12% CHP 8.1 5% Industry 6.6 4% Other 1.5 1% TOTAL 164 Where CHP and Industry was 75% biofuels. Renewables are about 90 tWh. Production has increased over the last years mainly due to new wind power. Installed solar is still small (0.2% of production) but nearly doubled in installed capacity from 2017 to 2018 (231 MW to 411 MW). With gCO2/kWh about 60. [3] [1] https://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Download?ResourceId=168344 https://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Downlo... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [3] https://www.svensksolenergi.se/upload/fakta-om-solenergi/solel%20och%20klimatpaverkan%20SSE%202018.pdf https://www.svensksolenergi.se/upload/fakta-om-solenergi/sol...
- Youden 6y ago
  > Hydro 63.6 39% Switzerland, the country I live in, also has a ton of hydro (60% [0]) but the thing about hydro is that it's entirely dependent on geography. Iceland has 100% renewable electricity [1] but that's due to its geography. Same goes for all renewables. Wind depends on areas where wind is harvestable and solar depends on daylight hours. Not saying this to say that you're wrong or your point is irrelevant or anything, just that the energy solutions applicable to one country don't apply to all. [0]: https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/wirtschaft/energie/energie---fakten-und-zahlen.html https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/wirtschaft... [1]: https://www.government.is/topics/business-and-industry/energy/ https://www.government.is/topics/business-and-industry/energ...
  - cbmuser 6y ago
    Exactly. Hydro will work only if you have a large amount of lakes and mountains per capita which is true for countries like Austria and Norway.
Retric 6y ago
France production is ~70% nuclear but consumption is well below that. They export subsidized Nuclear at a loss and import rentable and fossil fuel generated power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/media/File:Echg_internx_élec_France.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/... Frances issue is the demand curve isn’t a steady state so Nuclear needs on average more supplemental power than solar to make up the difference. Unless you leave plants mostly idle at extreme cost or have vast energy storage you can’t get to even 50%. Consumer rates are heavily subsidized and their close ties with Europe’s grid mostly hides these issues. However power plant utilization still hovers around 80% which means the country pays significantly more for nuclear than countries with better utilization. Things would look much worse for France if surrounding countries increased Nuclear generation as the seasonal, night time, and weekend surplus would increase.
pfdietz 6y ago
The cost of dealing with intermittency of renewables will be tolerable, and a 100% renewable grid will very likely be cheaper than one using nuclear.
- PedroBatista 6y ago
  You’re talking about a cost of a thing that doesn’t exist ( at the demanded scale and universal for everyone within their context).
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Nothing can be done for the first time, right? The prospect of continued decline in costs of renewables and storage is real enough to deter investment in nuclear. The market is rendering its verdict.
  - chefkoch 6y ago
    You're doing the same as we don't know how expensive nee nuclear plants are in first world countries.
blablabla123 6y ago
Maybe it helps installing the chargie app which limits charging during the night - and at the same time enhances battery life. There's a lot of existing stuff just waiting to be re-purposed. Also the Tesla cars are since this year electrically able to provide power for a Smart Grid.
Slartie 6y ago
Your critique would be a lot more valid if you would admit that nuclear power proponents also usually "forget" about the systemic costs of nuclear power, such as the incredible costs of deconstructing old plants, the costs of storing the waste in a safe place for thousands of years, and the costs of insuring against catastrophic failures in plants that might make wide swaths of land around them uninhabitable...oh wait, that insurance is so expensive that effectively nobody provides it at any cost. Nuclear power thus can be regarded to have infinite systemic costs.
- pydry 6y ago
  Also that Germany is front loading investment in green technology and building that into electricity prices while France already built its nuclear power plants decades ago. It's obviously cheaper to use existing infrastructure than to build new infrastructure. One day Germany will be able to coast on the green infrastructure it is building today. Nonetheless, if you take two countries with only coal and one only builds nuclear while the other builds solar and wind I would expect the latter to have far lower electricity prices based on LCOE and variability costs. Even without externalities nuclear is incredibly fucking expensive.
Arnt 6y ago
Coincidentally, I read about a company in Germany yesterday that bases its energy needs largely on solar and wood. The solar panels are expensive, but the sunlight is free. The furnace to burn wood is cheap and can be turned up/down as needed, but of course the wood is expensive, A fine backup.
jnsaff2 6y ago
I see that you are angry but "completely useless" is not really helpful. Anyway I'll bite, I work at a startup that does demand side flexibility with electric hot water heaters (and working on other devices as well). We install our controller at customers homes and steer the water heating according to: electricity spot price, greenness of energy and also participate in frequency stabilisation markets. Customer saves by using cheaper electricity and earning money by allowing their heater to be used in the grid stabilization, in effect they get the money that would have gone to the gas peaker plant for firing up during an imbalance event. A 300L water heater stores about 16kWh of energy as heat and has a heating power of about 3kW. Aggregating thousands of homes together and making sure the water is heated when it's best for the system is one of the ways we're working on the problem of intermittency. The funny thing is that in our key market (Finland) the homeowners have dimensioned their water heaters to only heat at night when the electricity was usually cheaper. This meant that a family of 4 could use water all day without it getting cold and heat it during the day. Now we can flip this around and store energy when it's best. Demand side flexibility is key (along with storage and electrification of transport and heating) to enable green renewable generation to come up to the levels we need. Sure, we don't have solutions for the last 1% of the problem but we're far far away from the last 1%.
VladimirGolovin 6y ago
Could the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) be considered an appropriate metric to account the "costs for a conplete system to provide electricity for a population"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy Here's a Wikipedia page on cost of energy per source (in LCOE) that has a table of sources for Germany. According to it, solar is 37-115 €/MWh, while CCGT (gas) is 78-100 €/MWh: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cost_of_electrici...
ykevinator 6y ago
But since we don't have a nuclear storage waste protocol and costs of rare events like Chernobyl and gum Oshawa are not included, nuclear is ridiculously expensive too. Once you account for waste storage and disaster cost, nuclear is far more expensive than solar. You are correct, we need to work on batteries.
solarkraft 6y ago
> Solar panels will always require a backup power plant as the Sun isn’t shining 24/7 and storing large amounts of electric energy isn’t trivial. Boop, you're wrong about the first claim. Storing large amounts of electricity isn't trivial, but neither is building a backup powerplant (or really anything at that scale). In my region there are multiple grid level battery storage facilities with batteries from decommissioned electric vehicles and as far as I know they're also financed through EEG-money. I haven't yet done the research to see how much of that storage we'll need, but I'm crazy enough to claim that of course we can do it. Though, also certainly, that will increase the systemic cost of solar power. But nothing is free and the transition to renewable energy is inevitable and needs to happen as quickly as possible. It seems rather convenient that the average electricity consumption is also lower when the sun doesn't shine.

kstenerud 6y ago

Actually, prices excluding taxes and levies look pretty similar: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-household-electricity-prices-second-highest-eu https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-household-electr... And in Germany and Denmark, taxes and levies ARE the main price drivers. The maintenance costs are amortized in the per-kwh cost to consumers, same as with nuclear or gas or coal. Single houses can't live off just solar energy because they aren't diversified like a nation can be (in terms of storage, routing, diversity of technologies, etc). Nuclear is nice in theory, but unfortunately they are managed by humans, and humans do stupid things like run them past their decommission date or fail to locate backup generators above flooding level or skimp on maintenance and inspections. And nuclear accidents create no-go zones that last millenia. Only truly "meltdown-proof" reactors would avoid this problem, but R&D into this is terribly slow and seems to be obstructed at every turn by incumbents.

coddle-hark 6y ago
I’ve read somewhere that meltdowns are impossible in modern reactor designs, is that not true?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- orwin 6y ago
  It is impossible with Gen3+ (that include a core catcher). However, i have studied Gen3 and Gen3+ designs, i think Gen3 design are really safe enough, even if knowledge decline as much as it did on Trantor: anybody with small training could keep one functionning if they follow the simple rule: if something unexpected happen, Don't touch anything. Gen3+ add a new surface of attack, a digital one, while the main issue in Gen3 is not fixed (for information, the main security issue is the pool). I'm not a fan.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    A core catcher is a thing that mitigates the worst scenario of a meltdown (by catching the melted core before it can melt through the concrete floor), it doesn't prevent a meltdown. If the core catcher comes into play the core has already melted and escaped from the reactor pressure vessel.
    - orwin 6y ago
      Mmm, true, i meant that in Gen3+ the meltdown was manageable for any civilisation, but in any case, if a meltdown happen in a Gen3 or Gen3+, it will be caused by malice and a lot of neglect, and not by accident. Still, Gen3+ and their core catchers are overengineered and i think are not worth the additional cost in GHG.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        Extra safety features are worth it if they allow the overall expensive "nuclear culture" to be relaxed. Otherwise, it's just rearranging deck chairs on an economic Titanic. Having said that: even a contained meltdown is devastating for the utility. The owner of TMI was gravely wounded by the cost of that accident.

adrian_mrd 6y ago

You raise some good points and there are likely many reasons for the total price of electricity production eg retailer margins, transmitters, age/quality of infrastructure, regulation at different tiers (state, federal, local), etc, in addition to the ones you raise. But if you are factoring in total costs for nuclear, you also need to factor in the security risks and costs (eg terrorist threats to nuclear plants), costs to dispose of nuclear waste, inability to provide housing close to reactors, etc, as well.

nix23 6y ago

> France emits only 50 grams of CO2 per kWh while Germany emits 400 grams on average per kWh. Yes because the other 50% is powered by coal. >not the cheapest when you consider the costs for a conplete system Same with nuclear and coal, you dont count the potential health problems (coal) and the 10000y storage prices for the waste (nuclear)

oblio 6y ago
I think his point that with renewables + nuclear Germany would have been at much less than 50g of CO2 per kWh.
- nix23 6y ago
  Well thats true, to stop nuclear and restart coal was an incredible stupid decision...
  - cbmuser 6y ago
    Indeed, it is. Good that we agree on that ;-).
- cbmuser 6y ago
  Exactly. We have been shutting down nuclear power plants the past 10 years instead of fossile plants. In fact, we’re building 16 new gas-fired and 2 new coal-fired plants.

roenxi 6y ago

Rabid solar advocates have been lying about it being cheaper than the alternatives for so long it is a bit unsettling seeing the claim from credible sources. But this is a significant change - Germany, from what I recall, moved to solar when it was more expensive and less reliable than their existing situation. In future, people moving to solar will get cheaper and less reliable. That is a very different situation. There is incentive to take the less reliable power now. Uses will be found for it. I'm happy to make changes to my lifestyle if it saves me a bunch of money, and industrial consumers will start to adapt over a decade if the incentives line up. It won't be the end of reliable power generation, but if it is economically sensible then the options will be explored deeply.

_Microft 6y ago

Why would people have to go without power if there is no sun at their place? We do not go hungry either when there was a bad harvest in our area. We just transport goods in from where they can be produced. Intermittency is only a problem when one has a medieval image of self-sufficiency in mind. Solutions are either averaging out peaks and dips temporally (by storing energy e.g. in pumped hydro plants, in batteries, ...) or geographically by moving power where it is needed and from where it is currently being produced. You do not even lose gigantic fractions of the power in the process: high-voltage direct current power lines have losses of around 3%/1000km. China, for example, has power lines that move a dozen gigawatt over a distance of over 3000km. It can be done.

whiddershins 6y ago
What are the security implications of a total abandonment of regional self-sufficiency?
- _Microft 6y ago
  What's your concept of regional here? For physical goods, we have ditched self-sufficiency a long time ago. Your government might sustain emergency reserves for grain, food or oil and gas but even that lasts only a few weeks. Here is what Germany has stockpiled for emergencies for example: [0][1][2]. Mutual dependency does not have to be a bad thing either. It keeps both sides from doing stupid things (assuming a balanced level of dependency in both directions). [0] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesreserve_Getreide https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesreserve_Getreide [1] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivile_Notfallreserve https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivile_Notfallreserve [2] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategische_%C3%96lreserve https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategische_%C3%96lreserve
gridlockd 6y ago
You'd think that if this was an easily solvable problem, the great engineering nation of Germany would've solved it, instead of just firing up the coal plants. To store just a fraction of the needed power would require millions of large expensive batteries, whereas pumped hydro storage requires geological features that are in limited supply. Once you factor in all these costs, suddenly the "cheapest electricity in history" becomes really expensive.

coddle-hark 6y ago

What you don’t take into account is that destroying the planet with carbon pollution is going to be extremely expensive too.

gridlockd 6y ago
I'd be interested, what sort of fantasies do you have about rising CO2 levels and/or temperatures on this planet? What do you believe is actually going to happen?
- orwin 6y ago
  Well, the thing with GHG-induced climate change (not counting wetbulb temperature that will be reached more than a hundred day a year in some highly populated areas) is that the troposphere become warmer while the stratosphere become colder. I'd be interested if you can guess the fantasies i have knowing that. Also, endogenic species are dieing faster than the forest replace them, forests are dryer, this summer we were 50km close to have the Russian weat fields burn more than they did in 2010 (with effects on the world hunger and politics in 2011 well know). This could be mitigated honestly, and i'm pretty sure that this, we can manage. Katrina every year, maybe not as much.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    > I'd be interested if you can guess the fantasies i have knowing that. I can't, please elaborate.

audunw 6y ago

Aren’t most of Frances nuclear reactors really old? Of course nuclear is cheap decades after you built them. Most of the costs are during construction. Isn’t it unfair to complain about not counting systems costs for solar, but then doing a comparison that basically if ignores most of the costs with nuclear (if starting from scratch) Seems to me that France has built up a lot of debt in terms of old reactors that need to be decommissioned and replaced. As far as I’ve read, their plan is to replace most of those with renewables (targeting 50% renewables) I feel like I see this all the time - nuclear advocates being extremely nitpicking about cost and challenges with renewables, while ignoring or brushing off those of nuclear power. I’m not against nuclear power, we should put more R&D into it to hedge our bets. But I’ve yet to see a compelling case for a huge bet on nuclear power that’s not ridiculously simplistic. We all know that energy storage and synthetic fuel production is the missing key to going all in on renewables. But we also know that breakthroughs in these areas are absolutely essential to making transportation CO2 neutral. So going nuclear doesn’t avoid solving that problem. I’d argue that going for renewables is a huge benefit in that it channels more money into energy storage, increasing R&D, making it easier to solve the climate crisis across the board. We can return to nuclear power in 2-3 decades and hopefully free up some of the land claimed by solar and wind power plants.

bjelkeman-again 6y ago

As a point of comparison, Sweden had the following distribution of power production for electricity in 2019 [1], at a comparable price to France (a bit higher) [2]. Electric production tWh Nuclear 64.3 39% Hydro 63.6 39% Wind 19.9 12% CHP 8.1 5% Industry 6.6 4% Other 1.5 1% TOTAL 164 Where CHP and Industry was 75% biofuels. Renewables are about 90 tWh. Production has increased over the last years mainly due to new wind power. Installed solar is still small (0.2% of production) but nearly doubled in installed capacity from 2017 to 2018 (231 MW to 411 MW). With gCO2/kWh about 60. [3] [1] https://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Download?ResourceId=168344 https://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Downlo... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [3] https://www.svensksolenergi.se/upload/fakta-om-solenergi/solel%20och%20klimatpaverkan%20SSE%202018.pdf https://www.svensksolenergi.se/upload/fakta-om-solenergi/sol...

Youden 6y ago
> Hydro 63.6 39% Switzerland, the country I live in, also has a ton of hydro (60% [0]) but the thing about hydro is that it's entirely dependent on geography. Iceland has 100% renewable electricity [1] but that's due to its geography. Same goes for all renewables. Wind depends on areas where wind is harvestable and solar depends on daylight hours. Not saying this to say that you're wrong or your point is irrelevant or anything, just that the energy solutions applicable to one country don't apply to all. [0]: https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/wirtschaft/energie/energie---fakten-und-zahlen.html https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/wirtschaft... [1]: https://www.government.is/topics/business-and-industry/energy/ https://www.government.is/topics/business-and-industry/energ...
- cbmuser 6y ago
  Exactly. Hydro will work only if you have a large amount of lakes and mountains per capita which is true for countries like Austria and Norway.

Retric 6y ago

France production is ~70% nuclear but consumption is well below that. They export subsidized Nuclear at a loss and import rentable and fossil fuel generated power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/media/File:Echg_internx_élec_France.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/... Frances issue is the demand curve isn’t a steady state so Nuclear needs on average more supplemental power than solar to make up the difference. Unless you leave plants mostly idle at extreme cost or have vast energy storage you can’t get to even 50%. Consumer rates are heavily subsidized and their close ties with Europe’s grid mostly hides these issues. However power plant utilization still hovers around 80% which means the country pays significantly more for nuclear than countries with better utilization. Things would look much worse for France if surrounding countries increased Nuclear generation as the seasonal, night time, and weekend surplus would increase.

pfdietz 6y ago

The cost of dealing with intermittency of renewables will be tolerable, and a 100% renewable grid will very likely be cheaper than one using nuclear.

PedroBatista 6y ago
You’re talking about a cost of a thing that doesn’t exist ( at the demanded scale and universal for everyone within their context).
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Nothing can be done for the first time, right? The prospect of continued decline in costs of renewables and storage is real enough to deter investment in nuclear. The market is rendering its verdict.
- chefkoch 6y ago
  You're doing the same as we don't know how expensive nee nuclear plants are in first world countries.

blablabla123 6y ago

Maybe it helps installing the chargie app which limits charging during the night - and at the same time enhances battery life. There's a lot of existing stuff just waiting to be re-purposed. Also the Tesla cars are since this year electrically able to provide power for a Smart Grid.

Slartie 6y ago

Your critique would be a lot more valid if you would admit that nuclear power proponents also usually "forget" about the systemic costs of nuclear power, such as the incredible costs of deconstructing old plants, the costs of storing the waste in a safe place for thousands of years, and the costs of insuring against catastrophic failures in plants that might make wide swaths of land around them uninhabitable...oh wait, that insurance is so expensive that effectively nobody provides it at any cost. Nuclear power thus can be regarded to have infinite systemic costs.

pydry 6y ago
Also that Germany is front loading investment in green technology and building that into electricity prices while France already built its nuclear power plants decades ago. It's obviously cheaper to use existing infrastructure than to build new infrastructure. One day Germany will be able to coast on the green infrastructure it is building today. Nonetheless, if you take two countries with only coal and one only builds nuclear while the other builds solar and wind I would expect the latter to have far lower electricity prices based on LCOE and variability costs. Even without externalities nuclear is incredibly fucking expensive.

Arnt 6y ago

Coincidentally, I read about a company in Germany yesterday that bases its energy needs largely on solar and wood. The solar panels are expensive, but the sunlight is free. The furnace to burn wood is cheap and can be turned up/down as needed, but of course the wood is expensive, A fine backup.

jnsaff2 6y ago

I see that you are angry but "completely useless" is not really helpful. Anyway I'll bite, I work at a startup that does demand side flexibility with electric hot water heaters (and working on other devices as well). We install our controller at customers homes and steer the water heating according to: electricity spot price, greenness of energy and also participate in frequency stabilisation markets. Customer saves by using cheaper electricity and earning money by allowing their heater to be used in the grid stabilization, in effect they get the money that would have gone to the gas peaker plant for firing up during an imbalance event. A 300L water heater stores about 16kWh of energy as heat and has a heating power of about 3kW. Aggregating thousands of homes together and making sure the water is heated when it's best for the system is one of the ways we're working on the problem of intermittency. The funny thing is that in our key market (Finland) the homeowners have dimensioned their water heaters to only heat at night when the electricity was usually cheaper. This meant that a family of 4 could use water all day without it getting cold and heat it during the day. Now we can flip this around and store energy when it's best. Demand side flexibility is key (along with storage and electrification of transport and heating) to enable green renewable generation to come up to the levels we need. Sure, we don't have solutions for the last 1% of the problem but we're far far away from the last 1%.

VladimirGolovin 6y ago

Could the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) be considered an appropriate metric to account the "costs for a conplete system to provide electricity for a population"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy Here's a Wikipedia page on cost of energy per source (in LCOE) that has a table of sources for Germany. According to it, solar is 37-115 €/MWh, while CCGT (gas) is 78-100 €/MWh: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cost_of_electrici...

ykevinator 6y ago

But since we don't have a nuclear storage waste protocol and costs of rare events like Chernobyl and gum Oshawa are not included, nuclear is ridiculously expensive too. Once you account for waste storage and disaster cost, nuclear is far more expensive than solar. You are correct, we need to work on batteries.

solarkraft 6y ago

> Solar panels will always require a backup power plant as the Sun isn’t shining 24/7 and storing large amounts of electric energy isn’t trivial. Boop, you're wrong about the first claim. Storing large amounts of electricity isn't trivial, but neither is building a backup powerplant (or really anything at that scale). In my region there are multiple grid level battery storage facilities with batteries from decommissioned electric vehicles and as far as I know they're also financed through EEG-money. I haven't yet done the research to see how much of that storage we'll need, but I'm crazy enough to claim that of course we can do it. Though, also certainly, that will increase the systemic cost of solar power. But nothing is free and the transition to renewable energy is inevitable and needs to happen as quickly as possible. It seems rather convenient that the average electricity consumption is also lower when the sun doesn't shine.