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> The rise of variable renewable sources means that there is an increasing need for electricity grid flexibility, the IEA notes. “Robust electricity networks, d
by travisoneill1 6y ago
> The rise of variable renewable sources means that there is an increasing need for electricity grid flexibility, the IEA notes. “Robust electricity networks, dispatchable power plants, storage technologies and demand response measures all play vital roles in meeting this,” it says.
Which is why it's not really the cheapest. Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.
- alex_g 6y agoMy propane tank doesn’t magically fill itself every other month.
- antr 6y agoI was just going to say this. This is what many people do not understand, it's "the cheapest" technology but the cost of the necessary ancillary services, balancing mechanism, FFR, inertia, etc., to make this happen is not baked into the LCOE models. That's how shortsighted this sort of messages are.
- Jweb_Guru 6y agoWhile that's true, it's also true that the total cost of solar (taking storage into account) is far lower now than it was even 10-15 years ago. The logical thing we should be doing now is building massive amounts of storage, rather than complaining about how solar costs don't take it into account. As an added bonus, large pumped storage or fuel cell batteries can be reused for any renewable source (unlike solutions like concentrated solar), so any improvements in one can be mostly decoupled from improvements in the other, which is why I find the insistence that people add the cost of the batteries to the cost of solar to be pretty wearying. And I don't find arguments that pumped storage takes a long time and has high maintenance costs to build very convincing when the alternative, nuclear, has exactly the same requirement.
- cbmuser 6y agoWe have lots of solar in Germany (50% renewables in our electricity mix) and we’re paying the highest price per kWh in the whole world. Let alone that we’re emitting 400 grams of CO2 per kWh on average while it’s just 50 grams on average in France.
- Jweb_Guru 6y agoGermany counts a bunch of incredibly dumb stuff as "renewables," including wood burning, which is just one of the many reasons Germany's emissions are far higher than France's (another is continued support for coal use for political reasons). It gets only about 10% of its energy from solar.
- xiphias2 6y agoSadly it's not just Germany, the whole EU is transitioning from coal to wood in poor parts of the countries, and governments are helping in it.
- _Microft 6y agoSince you seem to be from Germany, you must be fully aware that the emissions problem we have is one caused by our coal power plants and not by renewables (which also means that the emissions stats that you repeatedly posted here no longer feel like an honest mistake but rather disingenuous) You are also conflating production cost and end user prices.
- antr 6y agoThe price of electricity is not only generation cost, which represent c. 30% of your total energy bill.
- hokkos 6y agoTaxes to pay feed in tarif, contract for difference for renewable being another 30%
- oezi 6y agoThe reason for this is that we bankrolled much of the initial trajectory of cost decline. Unfortunately, we stopped investing heavily when prices dropped due the black/red grand coalition not wanting to risk losing votes over potentially higher power prices. Now we are stuck at high Co2 and high prices.
- throwaway2245 6y agoI understand the contrary: nuclear power is extremely inflexible - not dispatchable, no demand response. You can't turn it off and on.
- antr 6y agoIt's not about being dispatchable or not, it' about the volatility renewable generation and the problem this generates... and how other non-renewables need to be called by the TSO.
- pfdietz 6y agoRenewables look at nuclear's inability to deal with the fluctuations and respond "That's a 'you' problem, not a 'me' problem."
- virmundi 6y agoRight. That makes it ideal for baseload. It can produce more than enough for regular loads. If necessary it can be augmented by solar and other power generation.
- Jweb_Guru 6y agoLet's be honest here--nuclear is not "ideal" for baseload, and it is indeed inflexible w.r.t. power output. What's actually ideal for baseload are fossil fuels. Unfortunately, those aren't going to be an option going forward, so we have to choose between a number of less-than-ideal options. I think it would be better to be realistic about the tradeoffs of those options than to try to argue that we actually aren't giving anything up.
- cbmuser 6y agoWhich is actually not true at all. Modern nuclear plants can be operated in load-following mode and reduce and increase their output by 10% and more within minutes.
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- SubiculumCode 6y agoSure. But let's talk about the true costs of fossil fuels: Climate change is pretty damn expensive. Leaving out the costs of the wars fought for oil.
- cbmuser 6y agoYep, and Germany proves that renewables don’t help to drive down emissions in the energy sector unless you can use abundant amounts of hydro power. Germany has 50% renewables, yet their kWh causes 400 grams of CO2 on average while France with 70% nuclear causes 50 grams of CO2 per kWh on average.
- SubiculumCode 6y agoYes, you've repeated this elsewhere, and as others have noted, your stats and figures do not reflect an accurate assessment the the advantages/disadvantages of renewables.
- roenxi 6y ago"We've tried it and it failed" is a pretty strong argument, too strong to be brushed aside with out an argument or evidence. The Energiewende is recent history, and the major cause of the highest electricity prices in Europe. But that wasn't enough, not even close, to bring Germany into line with France's excellently low CO2 production. Even if the situation has changed to the point where solar is the most cost-effective option, there are a lot of lessons to be learned from Germany about how dangerous it is to take an anti-nuclear stance. They look like fools.
- civilized 6y agoIt might be the cheapest if you factor in the costs of climate change, as responsible economists have insisted for decades & the fossil fuel industry has spent billions fighting
- hartator 6y agoSolar panels productions reject more co2 than nuclear plants.
- cbmuser 6y agoGermany: 350 million tons of CO2 per year in the energy sector France: 50 million tons of CO2 per year in the energy sector Germany: 50% renewables France: 70% nuclear
- papaf 6y agoYour point is interesting enough to think about once but please don't spam multiple threads with the same argument.
- shiftingleft 6y agoGermany uses ~30% Coal in its energy mix, France less than 2%. Your argument is misleading at best, and targeted misinformation at worst. Since you've repeated the same argument at least 5 times by now, even though others have informed you about the wrong conclusion, I must assume it is meant to misinform.
- ZeroGravitas 6y agoDo you have any recent data to back this up? It was kind of a statistical tie the last time I looked at this (wind was possibly slightly in the lead out of the three in terms of CO2 per KWh) but the wind and solar numbers seemed to be trending downwards over time.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago2014 data from an IPCC meta-analysis here roughly supports this [1]. 800 gCO2-eq/kWh for coal, 490 for gas, 48 for solar, 12 for nuclear, 11 for wind. To be clear, any non-carbon energy source can decarbonize almost to zero assuming all the lifecycle activities are converted to the non-carbon energy as well. One exception might be hydro with it's potential biogenic methane emissions. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
- api 6y agoNuclear has a lot of hidden costs too such as waste disposal or reprocessing, insurance (whether private or effectively public and socialized), and remediation. If you look at the whole picture including capacity factor, flexibility, engineering overhead, etc., coal and gas are still very cheap... provided you ignore long term externalities. This is the problem.
- cbmuser 6y agoWaste disposal or reprocessing are neglectible if you keep in mind that a single nuclear reactor produces electricity worth over one million US Dollars per day. See: https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY
- jay_kyburz 6y agoI watched your video and he didn't factor waste at all?
- Jweb_Guru 6y agoYup. Everyone keeps saying "people ignore the cost of batteries!" but what the thing everyone in all these threads ignores is that fossil fuels have absolutely amazing economics and will for much longer than it will take to inflict catastrophic ecological damage on the world. Waiting for them to become more expensive than renewables just means that by the time you finally panic and start building storage and nuclear infrastructure, fossil fuels will be so expensive that the last thing people are interested in is big public works projects.
- api 6y agoThis really is a classic tragedy of the commons issue that requires government intervention of some form. We have to put a price on fossil fuel externalities and push alternatives. Markets are short term optimization engines and can’t price in what they can’t “see.” Market fundamentalism is the doppelgänger of dogmatic Marxism and is no better.
- wnevets 6y ago>Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs. because those cost have been socialized to the rest of us. We are all paying for higher cancer rates, temps, etc but these companies get to keep the difference as profit.
- Joeri 6y agoAre you accounting for the refining and transportation costs of fossil fuels and for the fissionable material mining and refining and for the waste storage costs of nuclear?
- cbmuser 6y agoYes, that’s all accounted for. Can be looked up in one of the IPCC reports. Google for “GHG emissions life cycle IPCC”. I’m currently on mobile so I don’t have the sources at hand.
- tigershark 6y agoNo, stop spreading your disinformation please. You just compared the retail energy costs instead of the production costs in all your nauseating pro-nuclear comments.
- dehrmann 6y ago> Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs They do, but with coal, it's the pile out back, I assume natural gas networks have tanks. Nuclear is interesting because it's almost control rods. But your point stands; storage is a lot simpler for conventional fuels.
- blake1 6y agoThey absolutely do have these associated costs. Robust electricity networks? The US has spent trillions on transmission networks in the era dominated by coal. Dispatchable power plants? We’ve had both base-load and peaker plants for decades. Indeed, base load gas is cost-competitive with solar now. But all base-load gen is so slow to start up and shut down that peakers can charge 2-3 orders of magnitude more per MWh. Storage technologies? Given the exorbitant cost of peaker power, pumped storage has been in use for decades. Demand response has also made sense for decades, but we’ve lacked the technology and market structures to make it a reality until recently. It was introduced before renewables had real market share. In short: yes, renewables require these technologies. So does fossil-fuel generation. The IEA’s bias is showing if they’re implying that this is unique to one technology. Of course, our current system is optimized around the characteristics of huge fossil plants, and a lot of capital will be required to optimize it around a different technology. These investments are worth it if you consider the externalities of carbon emissions. If you do it correctly, and include extreme weather costs, we should try to get to a zero emissions ASAP. But even if you ignore externalities, as you appear to be doing, renewables are now so much cheaper that there is no economic reason to replace obsolete generation with non renewables. Under this approach, we’ll still get to 100% renewable in 40-50 years.
- FabHK 6y agoFWIW, nuclear power does have quite some associated costs (storage, security, etc.) - I'd love to see a sensible estimate. It might still be worth it to cover base loads.