4 ms·

Solar and wind are not and likely will never be "wholly up to the task" unless you install about 4X as much as you need, which is quite the tall order and certa

Solar and wind are not and likely will never be "wholly up to the task" unless you install about 4X as much as you need, which is quite the tall order and certainly changes the numbers. You might say "solar is cheaper per MW than fission" but someone planning your local grid sees "I need to setup 4X the solar MW that I do fission, and I need a battery solution as well" and the numbers look very different. A great example is Germany over the past year had uncharacteristically low wind for months and months on end, dropping power generation by as much as 30% for the year from that source. The result? They burned A LOT of gas and coal. A LOT. The reality is that power use doesn't necessarily follow the sun or the wind, and so buildouts of those technologies need to be done at extreme multiples of baseline need to account for entire seasons of low output (or just burn hydrocarbons...). You have to build your wind and solar to support a hypothetical 10 or 50 year minimum production, and just overproduce at all times. This is why baseload nuclear generation will remain a fantastic choice for nations for decades to come, even at a higher price. Nuclear runs at night. It runs when the wind is still. It runs and runs and run no matter what, providing consistent and predictable power. For every MW generated by nuclear, you need about 4 produced by solar/wind, to achieve the same up-time and reliability. And that's before we discuss the ecological concerns of one tiny little nuclear facility versus dozens of square kilometers of solar/battery builds out to match it. If our society abandons fission in favor of solar/wind only, it will be to our detriment

Retric 5y ago
Base load isn’t an inherent advantage it’s strictly worse than dispatchable power unless it’s cheap, and Nuclear isn’t that cheap. Which is a problem because excess wind and solar makes Nuclear power economically worthless for much of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation#/media/File:Renewables_need_flexible_backup_not_baseload.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation#/media... Subsides could make up the difference for nuclear as could vastly increased nighttime prices. PS: It’s only when your looking at islands like say Hawaii where you want that kind of massive overproduction. Across larger areas you never see 100% production from everywhere at the same time, but you also don’t see minimum production from everywhere at the same time.
- criley2 5y ago
  The LCOE for utility scale solar is around $68/MWh while new nuclear is $88/MWh. The LCOE for grid storage of power (necessary addition to solar) is $160/MWh. Double solar with grid storage is as much as $300/MWh at the utility scale using globalized averages reported to NEA, BNEF, Lazard, IRENA 2018-2020. Obviously some countries will be a lot more or less on costs depending on their circumstances and location. Interconnect isn't enough, all of the US is in darkness for several hours a day. (And Texas will never connect). You require storage, and I still question if 2X is enough to produce enough power during a 10 year minimum without firing up extensive hydrocarbon peaker plants.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Nuclear is nowhere near that cheap, LCOE even with massive subsides in the US sees 2020 nuclear well past 160$/MWH and rising. Wind and solar are both under 50$/MWH LCOE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy#/media/File:20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE,_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy#/medi...
    - criley2 5y ago
      The number I quoted is from the same Wikipedia article on LCOE that you used, and I used a globalized average as I said in my post. Your $50MWh also does not include storage LCOE, and not including secondary costs for solar when Nuclear has no secondary costs is considered "a trick" to lie about solar costs. Include the costs of gigawatts of Elon's lithium ion batteries, and include the cost of having to 2X-4X solar compared to Nuclear to account for variable solar output due to days and seasons, as I said, and your $50MWh becomes around $300MWh
      - Retric 5y ago
        First demand isn’t flat, so 100% nuclear needs massive amounts of storage to reduce the number of nuclear power plants that would sit idle 90+% of the time. In the end something needs to take up the slack and nuclear doesn’t work by it’s self. If natural gas isn’t an option the only thing left is hydro which is limited or storage. Your also trying to cherry pick numbers the Wikipedia article also lists “$164/MWh” for nuclear. I found the table you got those numbers from which included multiple estimates from 2018 that used data from 2015 and double counting very optimistic nuclear estimates. Frankly utility solar is already being installed at sub 2c/kWh in the US. 68$/MWh would be 6.8c/kWh which shows how far off your umbers are. Anyway, I would be happy to see the power plant actually run that cheaply but your looking at very optimistic estimates for something that isn’t even online yet and is getting some serious subsides. Having said that if you’re data is from “Source: IEA/NEA, 2015.” https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2018/7441-full-costs-2018-es.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2018/7441-full-costs-2018-.... I can understand why you picked those numbers.
merb 5y ago
Germany‘s Problem is different. We can generate way More wind energy but we cant Transfer it, thus we can only use the wind regionally. And our transfer projects are estimated to take longer than planned…

Retric 5y ago

Base load isn’t an inherent advantage it’s strictly worse than dispatchable power unless it’s cheap, and Nuclear isn’t that cheap. Which is a problem because excess wind and solar makes Nuclear power economically worthless for much of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation#/media/File:Renewables_need_flexible_backup_not_baseload.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation#/media... Subsides could make up the difference for nuclear as could vastly increased nighttime prices. PS: It’s only when your looking at islands like say Hawaii where you want that kind of massive overproduction. Across larger areas you never see 100% production from everywhere at the same time, but you also don’t see minimum production from everywhere at the same time.

criley2 5y ago
The LCOE for utility scale solar is around $68/MWh while new nuclear is $88/MWh. The LCOE for grid storage of power (necessary addition to solar) is $160/MWh. Double solar with grid storage is as much as $300/MWh at the utility scale using globalized averages reported to NEA, BNEF, Lazard, IRENA 2018-2020. Obviously some countries will be a lot more or less on costs depending on their circumstances and location. Interconnect isn't enough, all of the US is in darkness for several hours a day. (And Texas will never connect). You require storage, and I still question if 2X is enough to produce enough power during a 10 year minimum without firing up extensive hydrocarbon peaker plants.
- Retric 5y ago
  Nuclear is nowhere near that cheap, LCOE even with massive subsides in the US sees 2020 nuclear well past 160$/MWH and rising. Wind and solar are both under 50$/MWH LCOE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy#/media/File:20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE,_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy#/medi...
  - criley2 5y ago
    The number I quoted is from the same Wikipedia article on LCOE that you used, and I used a globalized average as I said in my post. Your $50MWh also does not include storage LCOE, and not including secondary costs for solar when Nuclear has no secondary costs is considered "a trick" to lie about solar costs. Include the costs of gigawatts of Elon's lithium ion batteries, and include the cost of having to 2X-4X solar compared to Nuclear to account for variable solar output due to days and seasons, as I said, and your $50MWh becomes around $300MWh
    - Retric 5y ago
      First demand isn’t flat, so 100% nuclear needs massive amounts of storage to reduce the number of nuclear power plants that would sit idle 90+% of the time. In the end something needs to take up the slack and nuclear doesn’t work by it’s self. If natural gas isn’t an option the only thing left is hydro which is limited or storage. Your also trying to cherry pick numbers the Wikipedia article also lists “$164/MWh” for nuclear. I found the table you got those numbers from which included multiple estimates from 2018 that used data from 2015 and double counting very optimistic nuclear estimates. Frankly utility solar is already being installed at sub 2c/kWh in the US. 68$/MWh would be 6.8c/kWh which shows how far off your umbers are. Anyway, I would be happy to see the power plant actually run that cheaply but your looking at very optimistic estimates for something that isn’t even online yet and is getting some serious subsides. Having said that if you’re data is from “Source: IEA/NEA, 2015.” https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2018/7441-full-costs-2018-es.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2018/7441-full-costs-2018-.... I can understand why you picked those numbers.

merb 5y ago

Germany‘s Problem is different. We can generate way More wind energy but we cant Transfer it, thus we can only use the wind regionally. And our transfer projects are estimated to take longer than planned…