3 ms·

Wind still needs to be over-provisioned by a factor of 3 or 4 [1] due to seasonal variation. By comparison, nuclear only needs to be over-provisioned by a facto

Wind still needs to be over-provisioned by a factor of 3 or 4 [1] due to seasonal variation. By comparison, nuclear only needs to be over-provisioned by a factor 1.2 or 1.3. > And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy. No, the reason why we don't have storage on the grid is because we have no feasible way of storing energy at grid scale. Hawaii, California, and parts of Germany all produce excesses of electricity during peak solar and wind generation. We were promised that people would take this energy off the grid, store it, and release it later when energy is in greater demand. But these promises have not panned out, because storage remains infeasible. So instead, we keep burning fossil fuels. And we'll continue to keep burning fossil fuels until we either adopt nuclear power or some massive breakthrough in storage is found. It'll still take significant amounts of storage even to drive fossil fuel use down to 20%. Estimates say 12 hours of storage [2]. That's an incredible amount of storage, hundreds of times greater than what we have now. 1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112 2. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Your first link doesn't say what you think it says. Did you link to the wrong thing? Or just make a wild assumption based on capacity factor, which is what that page talks about? The second link also doesnt say what you claim. It says 12 hours of storage or HVDC connections would be required. 12 hours storage being half an EV per American household, which isnt particulalry massive and is explicitly an upper bound, ignoring hydro and nuclear and biomass and demand response etc. Their solar only model suggests 1.5x overprovision. How much cheaper does solar need to be for a purely solar grid to beat nuclear using your number? 1.2/1.5 suggest 20% cheaper is all they need in this extreme solar only model. But in reality solar (and wind) are 20% of the cost of new nuclear (80% cheaper) and predicted to fall further. So even your entirely unsubstantiated claim about needing 3-4x wind overprovision means it would be cheaper than nuclear.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  Look at the chart, the seasonal variation in wind generation can be as large as 4x: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2015.02.25/main.png https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2015.02.25/main.png Overproduction without storage results in diminishing returns, as most of the excess energy is wasted. "New nuclear" is 4-8x more expensive than nuclear power built at scale. When multiple copies of the same plant design built in series, costs in the range of $1-2 billion per GW is typical. And remember, that's a GW of generation with >90% capacitor factor, as compared to 25-35% for most renewables.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    "Wasted" solar and wind power was free. Overprovisioned renewable capacity is cheap. Charging storage, later, from overprovisioned renewable capacity, or connecting to the power grid and selling on the open market, converts overproduction to income. Wasted nuke overcapacity is very, very expensive. To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle.
    - Manuel_D 5y ago
      > Charging storage, later, from overprovisioned renewable capacity, or connecting to the power grid and selling on the open market, converts overproduction to income. Except we have no way of building grid scale storage. Again, we have a few minutes of storage. Until then, wind and solar is really wind, solar, and fossil fuels. We have no plan to get rid of the fossil fuels until a storage breakthrough occurs. > To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle. Like I said: building one power plant of a given design is way more expensive than building repeated copies of the same design. There were dozens of nuclear projects that had a cost to energy production ratio of less than a fifth of Vogtle.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        We have many ways of building grid scale storage. All we lack is certainty about which kind will end up cheapest. It just isn't built out yet. Building out storage will be premature until after there is enough extra renewable generating capacity to charge it from. If lots of projects would have been cheaper than Vogtle, we may reasonably conclude that they didn't want one cheaper than Vogtle: it would have left too little scope for corruption and graft. Corruption is the ever-present companion of all nuke projects. Any nuke project without a ready conduit for graft will not be funded.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Your first link doesn't say what you think it says. Did you link to the wrong thing? Or just make a wild assumption based on capacity factor, which is what that page talks about? The second link also doesnt say what you claim. It says 12 hours of storage or HVDC connections would be required. 12 hours storage being half an EV per American household, which isnt particulalry massive and is explicitly an upper bound, ignoring hydro and nuclear and biomass and demand response etc. Their solar only model suggests 1.5x overprovision. How much cheaper does solar need to be for a purely solar grid to beat nuclear using your number? 1.2/1.5 suggest 20% cheaper is all they need in this extreme solar only model. But in reality solar (and wind) are 20% of the cost of new nuclear (80% cheaper) and predicted to fall further. So even your entirely unsubstantiated claim about needing 3-4x wind overprovision means it would be cheaper than nuclear.

Manuel_D 5y ago
Look at the chart, the seasonal variation in wind generation can be as large as 4x: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2015.02.25/main.png https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2015.02.25/main.png Overproduction without storage results in diminishing returns, as most of the excess energy is wasted. "New nuclear" is 4-8x more expensive than nuclear power built at scale. When multiple copies of the same plant design built in series, costs in the range of $1-2 billion per GW is typical. And remember, that's a GW of generation with >90% capacitor factor, as compared to 25-35% for most renewables.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  "Wasted" solar and wind power was free. Overprovisioned renewable capacity is cheap. Charging storage, later, from overprovisioned renewable capacity, or connecting to the power grid and selling on the open market, converts overproduction to income. Wasted nuke overcapacity is very, very expensive. To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle.
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    > Charging storage, later, from overprovisioned renewable capacity, or connecting to the power grid and selling on the open market, converts overproduction to income. Except we have no way of building grid scale storage. Again, we have a few minutes of storage. Until then, wind and solar is really wind, solar, and fossil fuels. We have no plan to get rid of the fossil fuels until a storage breakthrough occurs. > To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle. Like I said: building one power plant of a given design is way more expensive than building repeated copies of the same design. There were dozens of nuclear projects that had a cost to energy production ratio of less than a fifth of Vogtle.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      We have many ways of building grid scale storage. All we lack is certainty about which kind will end up cheapest. It just isn't built out yet. Building out storage will be premature until after there is enough extra renewable generating capacity to charge it from. If lots of projects would have been cheaper than Vogtle, we may reasonably conclude that they didn't want one cheaper than Vogtle: it would have left too little scope for corruption and graft. Corruption is the ever-present companion of all nuke projects. Any nuke project without a ready conduit for graft will not be funded.