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The International Monetary Fond, not known to be populated by treehugging hippies with naturalistic fallacies as a major character trait, published this beautif

The International Monetary Fond, not known to be populated by treehugging hippies with naturalistic fallacies as a major character trait, published this beautiful graph: https://blogs.imf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/eng-april-4-cotw-solar-1.png https://blogs.imf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/eng-april-4... Nuclear now costs three times as much as solar & wind! And that data ist from 2017. Both technologies are also not showing any slowdown in improvements, while nuclear tends to get more expensive. The trend for batteries happens to be extremely similar. Nuclear is dead. Maybe people arguing against it in the 1980 were wrong. Maybe it’s safe. None of that matters, because it’s simply too expensive. And, increasingly, it’s also just too late: a nuclear power project takes 15 years, which is twice as much as we have. The only energy that still keeps it in the news is this weird tie-in with the culture wars, where, apparently, a certain segment likes nuclear power because it’s big, ugly, dangerous and sciency. They are living the future of the past.

Rebelgecko 5y ago
I think it's misleading to compare peak nuclear generation against peak solar/wind- in order to be comparable with nuclear's baseload, renewables need to be built in conjunction with a boatload of batteries. Otherwise you just end up burning fossil fuels at night time.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  It’s not comparing peak-to-peak. That’s what “levelized” means. It’s price per actual megawatthour produced.
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    At least in my state, a MWh produced at 3pm is much less useless than one produced at 8pm
- natmaka 5y ago
  In order to cope with renewables variability various approaches complement each other but need investments in order to produce the baseload: continent-scale wind generation patterns benefiting from lo-correlation between wind regimes, a mix (wind, solar, biomass...), storage, smartgrid... Money spared because they are more and more cheap will be invested in those ways, letting us benefit from their main characteristics (no major risk, no combustible, very low emissions, no dangerous waste, no risky and expensive decommission...).
- andygates 5y ago
  Variability is smoothed with diverse overbuild and robust inteconnects (sorry, Texas). Batteries are needed for peaker plants, like gas is used now. But they don't need to be everywhere.
corban1 5y ago
So you are comparing two energy sources, one that provides constant power 99.999% of the time and one that provides volatile power ~35% (if best) of the time? These price graphs hide the obvious fact. Normalize solar and power by adding the price to make the source constant(shitload of ESS maybe?) and removing government incentives.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  Yeah, I, too, read slashdot when those arguments were still current. Now, they just aren’t. The stats above are already levelized. The change in output is also smaller than what people believe: with solar and gas as two independent systems, some improvements to interconnects to allow averaging over larger regions, smart devices on the consumer side picking the right times to recharge (and maybe even de-charge when it’s useful), and the improvements in battery tech, the path is all but inevitable. It also wasn’t solar or wind power that lead to blackouts in France last summer, but nuclear plants that ran out of cooling opportunities because the rivers they use were overheating. And in Texas, it was natural gas that failed.
  - corban1 5y ago
    Not a single one of the power source/price studies I've seen has normalized the price in regards to making the source constant or government incentives. Not one. Energy sources have their caveats. Nuclear plants using rivers decrease output when rivers overheat. Solar panel efficiency falls 0.38% per degrees celcius under and over 25. We think failing nuclear and gas is a big deal because it's reliable most of the time. We do not think failing solar panels in night (because they can't produce energy) or hot and cold weather is not a big deal because it's designed to be that way. If that's the case, how is it viable to compare the prices?
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    Comparing the price of unreliable energy with the price of reliable energy is like comparing the yield of a bond without taking default risk into account. It's just terrible. Similarly thinking you can combine a bunch of unreliable energy sources and "tranche" them in order to get a smaller stream of reliable energy is very much like the gaussian copula problem that got us into the financial crisis. Yes, it's possible to do it in theory, but very hard to do so in practice due to the financial incentives involved and lack of knowledge about risk. The level of discourse in our energy markets really needs to be improved, and quickly, otherwise we are going to make a lot of foolish choices.
opo 5y ago
Cost should always be a consideration, but when you see people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid and it isn't clear what they are really trying to accomplish. The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is about as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates and they continue to strongly support subsidizing it. Why is that? https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 The potential costs for renewables + storage is about the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.) Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously at least a direct cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap, simple or easy to protect against terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amigas super station hasn’t been completed yet. The potential costs don't seem to matter to some advocates for some reason. Some advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term. (There are lots of atmospheric losses in the capture and distribution of natural gas.) No one concerned about climate change seriously thinks that burning natural gas is a long term answer.
- Krasnol 5y ago
  I like how you talk about ignoring costs but don't even scratch on that nuclear waste burden which generations will have to carry.
  - opo 5y ago
    In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The US government has been taxing power generated by nuclear power for decades and has collected billions of dollars to cover any costs in the future. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. (To help put it in perspective, do some web searches about the problems with coal waste - it will be a much harder problem to solve than nuclear waste and no money has been collected to cover the costs. The problems with coal waste aren't discussed much since people focus on the air pollution from burning coal as it directly kills so many people.)

Rebelgecko 5y ago

I think it's misleading to compare peak nuclear generation against peak solar/wind- in order to be comparable with nuclear's baseload, renewables need to be built in conjunction with a boatload of batteries. Otherwise you just end up burning fossil fuels at night time.

KarlKemp 5y ago
It’s not comparing peak-to-peak. That’s what “levelized” means. It’s price per actual megawatthour produced.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  At least in my state, a MWh produced at 3pm is much less useless than one produced at 8pm
natmaka 5y ago
In order to cope with renewables variability various approaches complement each other but need investments in order to produce the baseload: continent-scale wind generation patterns benefiting from lo-correlation between wind regimes, a mix (wind, solar, biomass...), storage, smartgrid... Money spared because they are more and more cheap will be invested in those ways, letting us benefit from their main characteristics (no major risk, no combustible, very low emissions, no dangerous waste, no risky and expensive decommission...).
andygates 5y ago
Variability is smoothed with diverse overbuild and robust inteconnects (sorry, Texas). Batteries are needed for peaker plants, like gas is used now. But they don't need to be everywhere.

corban1 5y ago

So you are comparing two energy sources, one that provides constant power 99.999% of the time and one that provides volatile power ~35% (if best) of the time? These price graphs hide the obvious fact. Normalize solar and power by adding the price to make the source constant(shitload of ESS maybe?) and removing government incentives.

KarlKemp 5y ago
Yeah, I, too, read slashdot when those arguments were still current. Now, they just aren’t. The stats above are already levelized. The change in output is also smaller than what people believe: with solar and gas as two independent systems, some improvements to interconnects to allow averaging over larger regions, smart devices on the consumer side picking the right times to recharge (and maybe even de-charge when it’s useful), and the improvements in battery tech, the path is all but inevitable. It also wasn’t solar or wind power that lead to blackouts in France last summer, but nuclear plants that ran out of cooling opportunities because the rivers they use were overheating. And in Texas, it was natural gas that failed.
- corban1 5y ago
  Not a single one of the power source/price studies I've seen has normalized the price in regards to making the source constant or government incentives. Not one. Energy sources have their caveats. Nuclear plants using rivers decrease output when rivers overheat. Solar panel efficiency falls 0.38% per degrees celcius under and over 25. We think failing nuclear and gas is a big deal because it's reliable most of the time. We do not think failing solar panels in night (because they can't produce energy) or hot and cold weather is not a big deal because it's designed to be that way. If that's the case, how is it viable to compare the prices?
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Comparing the price of unreliable energy with the price of reliable energy is like comparing the yield of a bond without taking default risk into account. It's just terrible. Similarly thinking you can combine a bunch of unreliable energy sources and "tranche" them in order to get a smaller stream of reliable energy is very much like the gaussian copula problem that got us into the financial crisis. Yes, it's possible to do it in theory, but very hard to do so in practice due to the financial incentives involved and lack of knowledge about risk. The level of discourse in our energy markets really needs to be improved, and quickly, otherwise we are going to make a lot of foolish choices.

opo 5y ago

Cost should always be a consideration, but when you see people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid and it isn't clear what they are really trying to accomplish. The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is about as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates and they continue to strongly support subsidizing it. Why is that? https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 The potential costs for renewables + storage is about the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.) Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously at least a direct cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap, simple or easy to protect against terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amigas super station hasn’t been completed yet. The potential costs don't seem to matter to some advocates for some reason. Some advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term. (There are lots of atmospheric losses in the capture and distribution of natural gas.) No one concerned about climate change seriously thinks that burning natural gas is a long term answer.

Krasnol 5y ago
I like how you talk about ignoring costs but don't even scratch on that nuclear waste burden which generations will have to carry.
- opo 5y ago
  In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The US government has been taxing power generated by nuclear power for decades and has collected billions of dollars to cover any costs in the future. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. (To help put it in perspective, do some web searches about the problems with coal waste - it will be a much harder problem to solve than nuclear waste and no money has been collected to cover the costs. The problems with coal waste aren't discussed much since people focus on the air pollution from burning coal as it directly kills so many people.)