7 ms·

It's now actually cheaper to build wind/solar + some sort of storage than designing/building/operating/decommissioning a nuclear plant.

Mrdarknezz 4y ago
You still need some sort of baseload to support wind/solar. That can come in the form of Hydro/nuclear if you want to decarbonize or do like germany and build massive amounts of gas.
- ggm 4y ago
  No, you don't "need" this. You can overbuild renewable, or build batteries or PH but it's not "baseload" when you do this, for filling supply shortfall. There is no need for a continuous, constant output source of electricity if you have diverse sources, including storage and fast response. There are economic and timeline rationalisations why a baseload supply model will happen. It's about a different use of the word "need" -it benefits some actors in the problem space.
  - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
    So far there is no real life example of what you are suggesting. The only countries that has gone green include either nuclear or hydro in their mix. Storage + Intermittent is not enough to power a modern grid. Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems.
    - audunw 4y ago
      > Storage + Intermittent is not enough to power a modern grid. As a previous comment pointed out, one solution is to just over-construct renewables. You can look through a graph of output of wind+solar for a large area and find the minimum output compared to its rated capacity. The output from wind+solar is never zero, and the minimums are usually short. Last time I looked at the numbers for UK, if I remember correctly, it looked like they had to have 2-3 times the rated capacity to produce enough for the vast majority of days with minimum production. It's more accurate to say that nobody has demonstrated that storage + intermittent can power a large scale modern grid (there are plenty of examples for micro grids and islands). Whether it actually can or not is unknown. And part of the reason is that nobody has really needed to demonstrate it yet. There have so far been other workarounds that have been acceptable. UK and Germany doesn't have their own hydro-power, but has built grid connections to tap into Norway's for instance. > Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems. The other side of this, that is increasingly being taken more seriously, is to have more adaptive loads. There are for instance large parking garages built for EV car ride sharing or rental services that are V2G capable. The cars have quite a lot of flexibility in when they do their charging, and they can even feed energy back into the grid. There have been studies of anything from varying the temperature of freezers and hot water tanks across the country, to varying production rate or temperatures is metal production. To me, if we're serious about solving climate change, this is essentially a problem that solves itself: we absolutely need to make a MASSIVE amount of green hydrogen.. for trucks, ships, planes, e-fuels, fertilizers, steel, etc. That's a HUGE amount of load that can easily be load-balanced to follow the production from renewables. You can even feed some of the stored hydrogen back into the grid in rare cases with extremely low production, probably using existing gas peaker plants. I'm not against nuclear btw, but feels like the most enthusiastic nuclear proponents often have a very myopic view of the problem. That is, they assume in 20-30 years, everything will look exactly the same as before, except all electricity is nuclear+some renewable. Assuming we don't solve the energy storage and load balancing problem is equivalent to assuming we don't solve the climate crisis, because CO2 emissions are about so much more than just electricity production.
      - tomp 4y ago
        > one solution is to just over-construct renewables How is that a solution? No amount of solar/wind farms will make sun shine in Europe at night, or shine sufficiently in winter (when energy needs are the greatest).
        edhelas 4y ago
        THIS Maybe if we have enough solar-panels we can catch the moon-light enough to have a proper baseload, who knows!
        dane-pgp 4y ago
        > No amount of solar/wind farms will make sun shine in Europe at night Wind farms don't need to make the sun shine at night, they just need to make the wind blow at night. So far they have managed to achieve that quite well. More seriously, the amount of solar/wind farms you need is just enough to charge (home/car/grid) batteries during the day with the amount of energy that you will lack during the night. Fortunately energy requirements at night are lower than during the day, and the wind keeps blowing, so you might not even need batteries at all most nights, and could get away with just a 2x factor of wind farm over-construction. > shine sufficiently in winter (when energy needs are the greatest) Yes, this is the real problem. In the winter there are is greater demand and less supply; windless days become much more significant; and batteries can't store summer energy to be used in winter. For this, you do need more like 5x over-construction, perhaps combined with things like biofuels or atmospheric carbon capture using the excess energy during the summer.
    - elihu 4y ago
      Give it a few years; solar and batteries are getting better and cheaper, and the kind of grid interconnections needed for power sharing to even out the intermittency of renewables aren't going to be built in a day. It's an ongoing project. On the battery front, a major patent on lithium iron phosphate expired just a couple weeks ago. I don't know what the long term consequences of that will be, but if it means being able to buy LFP batteries at $100/kwh or less outside of China, that could change the economics of utility-scale battery storage quite a bit. In the long run I hope to see high capacity transcontinental HVDC lines linking continents so we can buy solar power from the other side of the Earth when it's night where we are, and sell our surplus when the sun is shining -- no batteries needed. That's hard and expensive. (Supposedly China is working on a deal with Chile where China can buy solar power that gets sent across a proposed trans-Pacific power line. I think that's the kind of megaproject that every industrialized country should be thinking about.)
      - edhelas 4y ago
        "We'll be there soon" : Germany for 20 years Due to the gas issue with Russia Germany is planning to re-commission 15 coal plants, that's 10GW of capacity. 20 years ago, Germany had roughly... 10GW of nuclear, now decommissioned. Source: https://www.montelnews.com/news/1323149/germany-may-allow-return-of-10-gw-capacity-in-gas-crunch https://www.montelnews.com/news/1323149/germany-may-allow-re... But again, let's repeat all together "lets overbuild renewable capacity, non-proved large scaled battery storage, a lot of smart-grid and some hydrogen storage". The biggest world hydrogen tank, the one used by the NASA, can power-up an average natural-gas station for roughly half a day. But hydrogen is the future for sure! Technosolusionism is actually one of the biggest problem we have. You want to solve this CO2 issue, first reduce your consumption by at least 80% to reach Paris Agreement. But don't worry, if we're not doing it by will, the laws of physics and thermodynamic will do it by force ;)
        imtringued 4y ago
        >But don't worry, if we're not doing it by will, the laws of physics and thermodynamic will do it by force ;) What? Humans are known to kill each other to avoid being the one on the losing side.
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      It's interesting that we are now at the stage were people demand real life examples of economies having completely transitioned to renewables. The are no real-life examples for economies being 100% nuclear and nuclear power plants have been build for 70 years (receiving large subsidies the whole time), so why are you demanding from a technology 20years old what the much older tech has not achieved? It's not like electricity grids can be changed overnight.
      - p_l 4y ago
        The core difference is that Nuclear Power Plants are dispatchable sources - they fit existing models, they do not require drastic changes in the grid to ensure stability like intermittent sources do.
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      Not a country, and quite optimal conditions but South Australia tells what the future will bring globally as renewables and storage continue to scale. Switch hydro from continuous to more of a peaker style of operation and we are very close. > Sometimes the sun does shine and the wind does blow. That’s most of the time in South Australia, apparently. The average share of wind and solar during October was 72%. For 29 out of 31 days, 100% of the power used in South Australia (SA) was renewable. The sky didn’t fall, the grid didn’t collapse, and the apocalypse is not nigh. https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/04/solar-wind-72-of-south-australias-electricity-in-october-world-not-turned-upside-down/ https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/04/solar-wind-72-of-south-... With a 65.7% average of renewables over 2021. https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/record-year-renewables-provided-5x-more-power-than-gas-2021/ https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/record-year-rene...
  - edhelas 4y ago
    Do you have a real-world example ? I'm talking about a country that actively deployed solar-panels and wind turbines, not the few ones that can claim to be "100% renewable" because they have plenty of hydro power.
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      Wind and solar have dropped 70%-90% in price over the last 10 years (and are projected to continue to fall), which made it so that they are _now_ cheaper than other sources. Electricity grid planning is on the order of a few decades and you are asking for a country that already converted their whole grid to electricity? Things don't move that fast, in particular with the strong corruption involved in keeping electricity generation in the hands of a few large monopolistic companies.
      - edhelas 4y ago
        Ok so no real-world example... yet :) #RemindMeIn10Years
        cycomanic 4y ago
        Ok challenge for you, show me a real-world example of a fully commissioned long-term nuclear waste storage or a nuclear power plant that could be build on budget and within 5 years time and produce electricity at prices competitive with renewables when factoring in decommisioning and waste storage.
        pigeonhole123 4y ago
        What are we currently doing with the waste from the hundreds of currently operational reactors? I'm assuming you mean price per kWh, compared with wind/solar and the necessary storage? What is the current price of renewables plus storage?
        cycomanic 4y ago
  - Paradigma11 4y ago
    We do have historical weather data, so there should be no reason to guess if a certain amount of storage and oversupply is sufficient. I would be far more positive on renewables if people could point to simulations that given this grid, storage, energy production and weather data that would have happened during that time period in that area.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Germany electricity is about 15% gas. Ohio electricity is about 50% gas.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  The continued existence of the "baseload myth" is a good example how well nuclear lobbying works. To clarify, lets look at what baseload means. Lets take wikipedia's definition: > The baseload (also base load) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time for example, one week... Electricity demand varies over time (on various time scales). Electricity providers need to make sure that they can supply both the continuous demand (i.e. the lowest point of the noisy curve that is supply) and the fluctuations (using some sort of adjustable supplies). Traditionally it was cheaper to have some power plants run 24/7 at constant output power (e.g. your nuclear power plants), to supply the baseload and use more expensive adjustable sources, e.g. gas peakers to supply varying demand. That is an economic decision, if gas peakers are cheaper than those plants running 24/7 you would never use them, because the variable sources give you much more flexibility. With renewables we are in exactly this situations. Renewables give you varying supply, so essentially a noisy supply curve with some average and a minimum supply, given a sufficiently large grid that supply will not be zero and with enough build out, you will always have enough supply to cover baseload. Because renewables are so much cheaper than nuclear, economically you would always build more renewables to lift up your ability to supply baseload, moreover because (most) renewables are varying, you actually also create capability to supply the varying demand (something you can't do with a nuclear power plant). So in short, intermittent renewables can supply baseload (in fact they are better at that then working as "peakers"). If they are much cheaper than nuclear (which has been the case for many countries) it makes more economic sense to build more renewables than large nuclear plants. incidentally the wikipedia article talks about the fact that you can use intermittent sources for baseload just in the next sentence > This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of low cost, availability and high reliability in any particular market. So in short it is a myth that you require nuclear (or any large 24/7 power plant) for baseload. If renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear, then it makes sense to invest in renewables to supply that baseload.
  - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
    Yet this "myth" is what has lead to countries with heavy amounts of green baseloads being able to decarbonize and those without are still struggling. The failure of the Germany energiewende is a great example, Californias struggle is another.
fenk85 4y ago
"It's now actually cheaper to build wind/solar + some sort of storage" [citation required] looking at last EIA report renewables + storage is still multiples of nuclear
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
MagnumOpus 4y ago
Maybe in California it is. A lot more people live at latitudes where there is about a third as much insolation per year as in California.

Mrdarknezz 4y ago

You still need some sort of baseload to support wind/solar. That can come in the form of Hydro/nuclear if you want to decarbonize or do like germany and build massive amounts of gas.

ggm 4y ago
No, you don't "need" this. You can overbuild renewable, or build batteries or PH but it's not "baseload" when you do this, for filling supply shortfall. There is no need for a continuous, constant output source of electricity if you have diverse sources, including storage and fast response. There are economic and timeline rationalisations why a baseload supply model will happen. It's about a different use of the word "need" -it benefits some actors in the problem space.
- Mrdarknezz 4y ago
  So far there is no real life example of what you are suggesting. The only countries that has gone green include either nuclear or hydro in their mix. Storage + Intermittent is not enough to power a modern grid. Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems.
  - audunw 4y ago
    > Storage + Intermittent is not enough to power a modern grid. As a previous comment pointed out, one solution is to just over-construct renewables. You can look through a graph of output of wind+solar for a large area and find the minimum output compared to its rated capacity. The output from wind+solar is never zero, and the minimums are usually short. Last time I looked at the numbers for UK, if I remember correctly, it looked like they had to have 2-3 times the rated capacity to produce enough for the vast majority of days with minimum production. It's more accurate to say that nobody has demonstrated that storage + intermittent can power a large scale modern grid (there are plenty of examples for micro grids and islands). Whether it actually can or not is unknown. And part of the reason is that nobody has really needed to demonstrate it yet. There have so far been other workarounds that have been acceptable. UK and Germany doesn't have their own hydro-power, but has built grid connections to tap into Norway's for instance. > Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems. The other side of this, that is increasingly being taken more seriously, is to have more adaptive loads. There are for instance large parking garages built for EV car ride sharing or rental services that are V2G capable. The cars have quite a lot of flexibility in when they do their charging, and they can even feed energy back into the grid. There have been studies of anything from varying the temperature of freezers and hot water tanks across the country, to varying production rate or temperatures is metal production. To me, if we're serious about solving climate change, this is essentially a problem that solves itself: we absolutely need to make a MASSIVE amount of green hydrogen.. for trucks, ships, planes, e-fuels, fertilizers, steel, etc. That's a HUGE amount of load that can easily be load-balanced to follow the production from renewables. You can even feed some of the stored hydrogen back into the grid in rare cases with extremely low production, probably using existing gas peaker plants. I'm not against nuclear btw, but feels like the most enthusiastic nuclear proponents often have a very myopic view of the problem. That is, they assume in 20-30 years, everything will look exactly the same as before, except all electricity is nuclear+some renewable. Assuming we don't solve the energy storage and load balancing problem is equivalent to assuming we don't solve the climate crisis, because CO2 emissions are about so much more than just electricity production.
    - tomp 4y ago
      > one solution is to just over-construct renewables How is that a solution? No amount of solar/wind farms will make sun shine in Europe at night, or shine sufficiently in winter (when energy needs are the greatest).
      - edhelas 4y ago
        THIS Maybe if we have enough solar-panels we can catch the moon-light enough to have a proper baseload, who knows!
      - dane-pgp 4y ago
        > No amount of solar/wind farms will make sun shine in Europe at night Wind farms don't need to make the sun shine at night, they just need to make the wind blow at night. So far they have managed to achieve that quite well. More seriously, the amount of solar/wind farms you need is just enough to charge (home/car/grid) batteries during the day with the amount of energy that you will lack during the night. Fortunately energy requirements at night are lower than during the day, and the wind keeps blowing, so you might not even need batteries at all most nights, and could get away with just a 2x factor of wind farm over-construction. > shine sufficiently in winter (when energy needs are the greatest) Yes, this is the real problem. In the winter there are is greater demand and less supply; windless days become much more significant; and batteries can't store summer energy to be used in winter. For this, you do need more like 5x over-construction, perhaps combined with things like biofuels or atmospheric carbon capture using the excess energy during the summer.
  - elihu 4y ago
    Give it a few years; solar and batteries are getting better and cheaper, and the kind of grid interconnections needed for power sharing to even out the intermittency of renewables aren't going to be built in a day. It's an ongoing project. On the battery front, a major patent on lithium iron phosphate expired just a couple weeks ago. I don't know what the long term consequences of that will be, but if it means being able to buy LFP batteries at $100/kwh or less outside of China, that could change the economics of utility-scale battery storage quite a bit. In the long run I hope to see high capacity transcontinental HVDC lines linking continents so we can buy solar power from the other side of the Earth when it's night where we are, and sell our surplus when the sun is shining -- no batteries needed. That's hard and expensive. (Supposedly China is working on a deal with Chile where China can buy solar power that gets sent across a proposed trans-Pacific power line. I think that's the kind of megaproject that every industrialized country should be thinking about.)
    - edhelas 4y ago
      "We'll be there soon" : Germany for 20 years Due to the gas issue with Russia Germany is planning to re-commission 15 coal plants, that's 10GW of capacity. 20 years ago, Germany had roughly... 10GW of nuclear, now decommissioned. Source: https://www.montelnews.com/news/1323149/germany-may-allow-return-of-10-gw-capacity-in-gas-crunch https://www.montelnews.com/news/1323149/germany-may-allow-re... But again, let's repeat all together "lets overbuild renewable capacity, non-proved large scaled battery storage, a lot of smart-grid and some hydrogen storage". The biggest world hydrogen tank, the one used by the NASA, can power-up an average natural-gas station for roughly half a day. But hydrogen is the future for sure! Technosolusionism is actually one of the biggest problem we have. You want to solve this CO2 issue, first reduce your consumption by at least 80% to reach Paris Agreement. But don't worry, if we're not doing it by will, the laws of physics and thermodynamic will do it by force ;)
      - imtringued 4y ago
        >But don't worry, if we're not doing it by will, the laws of physics and thermodynamic will do it by force ;) What? Humans are known to kill each other to avoid being the one on the losing side.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    It's interesting that we are now at the stage were people demand real life examples of economies having completely transitioned to renewables. The are no real-life examples for economies being 100% nuclear and nuclear power plants have been build for 70 years (receiving large subsidies the whole time), so why are you demanding from a technology 20years old what the much older tech has not achieved? It's not like electricity grids can be changed overnight.
    - p_l 4y ago
      The core difference is that Nuclear Power Plants are dispatchable sources - they fit existing models, they do not require drastic changes in the grid to ensure stability like intermittent sources do.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    Not a country, and quite optimal conditions but South Australia tells what the future will bring globally as renewables and storage continue to scale. Switch hydro from continuous to more of a peaker style of operation and we are very close. > Sometimes the sun does shine and the wind does blow. That’s most of the time in South Australia, apparently. The average share of wind and solar during October was 72%. For 29 out of 31 days, 100% of the power used in South Australia (SA) was renewable. The sky didn’t fall, the grid didn’t collapse, and the apocalypse is not nigh. https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/04/solar-wind-72-of-south-australias-electricity-in-october-world-not-turned-upside-down/ https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/04/solar-wind-72-of-south-... With a 65.7% average of renewables over 2021. https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/record-year-renewables-provided-5x-more-power-than-gas-2021/ https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/record-year-rene...
- edhelas 4y ago
  Do you have a real-world example ? I'm talking about a country that actively deployed solar-panels and wind turbines, not the few ones that can claim to be "100% renewable" because they have plenty of hydro power.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    Wind and solar have dropped 70%-90% in price over the last 10 years (and are projected to continue to fall), which made it so that they are _now_ cheaper than other sources. Electricity grid planning is on the order of a few decades and you are asking for a country that already converted their whole grid to electricity? Things don't move that fast, in particular with the strong corruption involved in keeping electricity generation in the hands of a few large monopolistic companies.
    - edhelas 4y ago
      Ok so no real-world example... yet :) #RemindMeIn10Years
      - cycomanic 4y ago
        Ok challenge for you, show me a real-world example of a fully commissioned long-term nuclear waste storage or a nuclear power plant that could be build on budget and within 5 years time and produce electricity at prices competitive with renewables when factoring in decommisioning and waste storage.
        pigeonhole123 4y ago
        What are we currently doing with the waste from the hundreds of currently operational reactors? I'm assuming you mean price per kWh, compared with wind/solar and the necessary storage? What is the current price of renewables plus storage?
        cycomanic 4y ago
- Paradigma11 4y ago
  We do have historical weather data, so there should be no reason to guess if a certain amount of storage and oversupply is sufficient. I would be far more positive on renewables if people could point to simulations that given this grid, storage, energy production and weather data that would have happened during that time period in that area.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Germany electricity is about 15% gas. Ohio electricity is about 50% gas.
cycomanic 4y ago
The continued existence of the "baseload myth" is a good example how well nuclear lobbying works. To clarify, lets look at what baseload means. Lets take wikipedia's definition: > The baseload (also base load) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time for example, one week... Electricity demand varies over time (on various time scales). Electricity providers need to make sure that they can supply both the continuous demand (i.e. the lowest point of the noisy curve that is supply) and the fluctuations (using some sort of adjustable supplies). Traditionally it was cheaper to have some power plants run 24/7 at constant output power (e.g. your nuclear power plants), to supply the baseload and use more expensive adjustable sources, e.g. gas peakers to supply varying demand. That is an economic decision, if gas peakers are cheaper than those plants running 24/7 you would never use them, because the variable sources give you much more flexibility. With renewables we are in exactly this situations. Renewables give you varying supply, so essentially a noisy supply curve with some average and a minimum supply, given a sufficiently large grid that supply will not be zero and with enough build out, you will always have enough supply to cover baseload. Because renewables are so much cheaper than nuclear, economically you would always build more renewables to lift up your ability to supply baseload, moreover because (most) renewables are varying, you actually also create capability to supply the varying demand (something you can't do with a nuclear power plant). So in short, intermittent renewables can supply baseload (in fact they are better at that then working as "peakers"). If they are much cheaper than nuclear (which has been the case for many countries) it makes more economic sense to build more renewables than large nuclear plants. incidentally the wikipedia article talks about the fact that you can use intermittent sources for baseload just in the next sentence > This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of low cost, availability and high reliability in any particular market. So in short it is a myth that you require nuclear (or any large 24/7 power plant) for baseload. If renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear, then it makes sense to invest in renewables to supply that baseload.
- Mrdarknezz 4y ago
  Yet this "myth" is what has lead to countries with heavy amounts of green baseloads being able to decarbonize and those without are still struggling. The failure of the Germany energiewende is a great example, Californias struggle is another.

fenk85 4y ago

"It's now actually cheaper to build wind/solar + some sort of storage" [citation required] looking at last EIA report renewables + storage is still multiples of nuclear

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

MagnumOpus 4y ago

Maybe in California it is. A lot more people live at latitudes where there is about a third as much insolation per year as in California.