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Since it’s coming up a lot, here [0] is a good resource on levelized energy costs (i.e. per kWh). Energy costs are a tricky subject but in general new unsubsid

Since it’s coming up a lot, here [0] is a good resource on levelized energy costs (i.e. per kWh). Energy costs are a tricky subject but in general new unsubsidized solar/wind is about the same cost or cheaper than operating existing nuclear (leaving out the issue that nuclear receives subsidies, which tilts things further in favor of renewables). And existing solar/wind operating costs are small, so their energy can be priced very low on day ahead and hour ahead markets, making it hard for fossil/nuclear to cover their operating costs. But renewables are intermittent, and adding storage pushes the costs of renewable + storage above existing nuclear operating costs and most new build nuclear options. And storage isn’t lossless—I wouldn’t bet on those batteries holding charge affordably for more than a couple days. We’ll probably muddle through with fossil + renewables for a while, which is the cheapest combo. When we get to the point of trying to take the last 20% of the fossil down is when we might regret not trying harder with nuclear, and in the meantime nukes will continue to struggle with selling energy at a competitive price. But hey, we’ve got another ten years until we phase out the last of the fossil (at the earliest) so maybe some storage cost declines will make it easier. Here’s hoping. Nukes are getting more expensive not less, so I don’t have much expectation they’ll be in the generation mix by the end of the century. [0] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

skrtskrt 4y ago
Is it possible that we could have a permanent (small) presence of fossil fuel energy to smooth out capacity?
- adrianN 4y ago
  Not if we want to stop global warming. What we can do instead is store renewable power as methane or hydrogen and burn that when batteries are insufficient to cover. But perhaps advances in grid scale batteries will make even that obsolete.
  - Retric 4y ago
    There is some leeway in global warming as on net the earth sequesters more carbon the higher the atmospheric CO2 levels, it’s just nowhere near fast enough to keep up with current output.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Unfortunately we already emitted enough carbon to force pretty catastrophic warming, so we'll need to become net negative for at least a couple of decades before we can talk about low net positive emissions.
      - Retric 4y ago
        You are far more optimistic than I if you assume net negative is a possibility any time soon. A significant reduction in methane might be possible which would provide similar benefits.
  - maliker 4y ago
    It’ll be interesting to see what role hydrogen plays. Prices for using it to store energy are currently a couple times battery energy storage systems, and the component parts are not getting cheaper very fast (turbines + storage + electrolyzers), whereas battery storage is rapidly falling in price. But as you point out: we know how to use hydrogen/synthetic methane/ammonia as a storage asset if we need it.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      I think it will be difficult to satisfy global storage demands with lithium batteries. But most countries already have infrastructure to store a couple of weeks to a couple of months worth of methane. Perhaps it makes economic sense to just use that infrastructure and pay the 60% conversion loss. Maybe other battery chemistries will be better options.
      - maliker 4y ago
- Panzer04 4y ago
  I think there's certainly a lot of potential for us to drastically reduce fossil fuel usage with renewables while supporting off hours with something like gas turbines in the interim. The ultimate goal is to remove those too, but we could probably cut overall fossil fuel use by 70% or more in the meantime pretty easily, I'd imagine.
- Retric 4y ago
  Hydro can largely fill that gap, it’s currently ~15% of global electricity generation.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    Most of our good hydro projects are already built out. Maybe a few more projects in deep remote Tibet, but the ice packs are quickly disappearing and not building up much over winter, so I don’t expect hydro’s share to rise, and it will probably shrink in the recent future.
    - Retric 4y ago
      My point way you don’t need additional hydro to back up renewables. 15% of 24/7 is 100% of ~7h, 3.5 days a week. We would need some batteries, but nowhere near the kind of excess people calculate for a pure wind/solar grid.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        The nice thing about hydro is that most projects come with their own battery. Wind or nuclear can be used to fill reservoirs back up. If the ice packs are drawn down too much, this might be the main use for hydro in the future, though I’m not sure it would save something like lake mead (though a project is planned).
      - opo 4y ago
        I haven't seen an estimate done for the US, but for Germany one estimate is that to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5950.pdf https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5... If making more grid storage was cheap and easy, we would have built it decades ago.
        Retric 4y ago
        That’s exactly the kind of meaningless and inflated number I was talking about. Notice how they exclude hydroelectric dams. Existing hydroelectric dams currently store vastly more energy than the average pumped hydro facility and they can easily be adapted to add additional turbines for relatively minimal costs. Collectively North American dams are storing at a minimum several days of total grid output and theoretically much more depending on how you do the calculation. Adding turbines doesn’t increase annual production, but it does increase flexibility as it makes minimal difference to discharge 1x water for 24 hours or 5x water for 4 hours and the rest over the other 20. Several dams have already been retrofitted like that as peaking power plants are simply vastly more valuable per kWh. It’s even better for the environment as rivers naturally have significant variability which is normally smoothed out by dams. PS: Rarely mentioned in those kind of analysis is how sensitive the required storage number is to the exact mix and oversupply of wind/solar. A grid with 1.001x average annual demand looks very different than one with say 1.1 or even 2x.
- natmaka 4y ago
  TLDR: yes It helps during the transition, and even afterwards. France, by far a leader when it comes to nuclear (used to produce 90% of its gridpower this way) always used fossil fuel energy to complement it reactor fleet (each year fossil fuel produces 7 to 12% of France's electricity), mainly because maintaining enough reactors in order to cope with peak consumption (thus letting many underused) would be way too expensive, and also because nuclear load-following capacity is insufficient (bar over-provisioning reactors) due to their limited flexibility (at this game a gas turbine is way, way better): for security and burden-of-maintenance -related reasons one just cannot freely pump up/down the power delivered by a nuclear reactor, modulation limits and pauses are to be strictly respected.
- 7952 4y ago
  I wonder if biomass + carbon capture and storage could play a role here. If the biomass was source in a controlled way (and that's a big if) you could have the characteristics of a thermal power station and be carbon negative.
- maliker 4y ago
  I think yes, when combined with carbon capture and storage. The technology has worked for some time (both the capture and storage parts), some of the new direct air methods are hitting $100/MWh when paired with generation, bringing prices of gas + capture around the price of solar + storage. However, siting it is tricky since you need the right geology, and there have been some very expensive failures to deploy. Maybe it will have a niche role until we solve storage + transmission + demand management (as someone else pointed out).
pydry 4y ago
Solar + wind arent the same or cheaper, theyre much cheaper. Solar + wind + pumped storage approaches the cost of nuclear power (minus its free catastrophe insurance). >When we get to the point of trying to take the last 20% of the fossil down is when we might regret not trying harder with nuclear Every kwh of solar and wind produced electricity right now is a kwh not produced by gas and will be for some time almost everywhere. We will probably regret not building the carbon free power generation that take 6 months to build and is half the price than the one that takes 15 years while gorging itself on subsidies.
- breadloaf 4y ago
  > Every kwh of solar and wind produced electricity right now is a kwh not produced by gas and will be for some time almost everywhere. That assumes that fossil plants can be switched off/on as you wish. They can't. Coal needs several days to start up / shut down and gas several hours.
  - natmaka 4y ago
    Betting on coal is now a dangerous game. Gas rules, for now. Recent gas turbines are quite good: low-latency, free modulation, maintaining them in warm-start ready condition is quite cheap and does not emit much greenhouse gases. Moreover they will be retrofitted in order to burn green hydrogen.
    - trashtester 4y ago
      Gas still produces pretty large amounts of greenhouse gases, even if it's a bit under half compared to coal: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20total%20U.S.%20electricity,CO2%20emissions%20per%20kWh https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11#:~:text=In.... Renewables without storage, but backed by gas when the renewables are not available, will perhaps cover 30-50% of the energy consumed in an area, depending on climate, etc. That reduces total greenhouse gases by about 75% compared to using only coal. But lets say we want to move to electric transportation, more and more people expect to have air conditioning and in general, we expect more energy to be consumed, this will mean that greenhouse gas emissions will still be high. Now, some people don't care much about global warming (or only pretend to care). In that case, the above setup is probably fine. (Even though it will be a bit more expensive than the most optimistic numbers from the proponents of this setup, due to extra expenses in the grid and due to the gas plants running below capacity half the time.) If you care enough about global warming to reach carbon neutrality, then obviously, gas plants are not a long term solution. In that case you need to go to fully renewable, or some combination of renewables and nuclear. If you want to go to fully renewable, you will need enough storage to cover ALL the variation in demand. In such a case levelized cost must cover, I would say, anything from 12 hours (for solar in deserts) to 48 hours or more. With current technology (and with the exception of a few places with plenty of hydro that can be pumped back), this will range from expensive (for 12 hours) to extremely expensive (for 48 hours or more). From what I can read from the storage costs, the levelized cost including 12 hours of storage (at the source) starts at about $0.2-$0.4 per kwh of consumption (meaning that it can store 12kwh for each kw of peak capacity). At the other end of the spectrum, standalonge storage of 48kwh for each 1kw of production capacity (like you may need for wind power, if it is quite intermittent), could cost over $3 per kwh of power produced. (48kWh * $643 / 2000kWh for "Industrial Standalone") https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/#:~:text=The%20former%20values%20average%20%2427,for%20combined%20cycle%20gas%20generation https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-.... I don't have number for hydrogen, but I don't think storing energy as hydrogen is cheaper than batteries. In other words, if you want to be fully carbon neutral, Nuclear is still the cheapest as long as the price of Nuclear is less than $0.2/kwh. Most numbers I've seen put the price of nuclear significantly lower than that. And in places that are not desert, the break even is much higher.
natmaka 4y ago
A way to lower most of intermittency-induced variability is well-known: spreading production units out, at continental level. Europe: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... A mix (wind, solar, geothermal...) helps. Next come storage, with green hydrogen (produced thanks to overproduction) and V2G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid Curtailing and backup will tackle the last chunks.
- maliker 4y ago
  More transmission seems like a great option, especially since the lifetime of wires is measured in decades instead of years like storage. Another point in favor of transmission is the potential to apply high temperature superconductors, which are dropping in price similar to renewables and storage and might let us increase throughput in existing rights-of-way. Doing the analysis to figure out the value of transmission is something beyond my abilities as an armchair resource planner, since it relies on calculating network power flows over many years of forecasted demand and renewable production. Not to mention that transmission project costs are all over the place and, at least in the US, they tend to get delayed for decades. There’s some appetite to address transmission here in the Macrogrid initiative, but it’s a huge (ahem continent scale) problem.
  - natmaka 4y ago
    Indeed. A larger grid enhances our ability to tackle any problem (to cope with any broken production unit or powerline) and to select which unit will generate power (thus offering more options, for example from an economic perspective). This is a powerful incentive, and in Europe leads to major efforts since the 2000's.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
The only advantage nuclear will have over renewables is simply the ability to bring a reliable source of power online that doesn’t require too much land. You can deal most of a country’s needs with a few projects on a few hundred acres. Compare that with nuclear indirect (aka solar) which requires a lot of space and a lot of projects to scale.
- MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
  True if You presume new constructions to be done on empty (farm)land. Somewhat less true if You take into account that specifically solar can (and often is) constructed on residential / industrial rooftops.
  - bigfudge 4y ago
    Also onshore wind entirely compatible with most farming. Offshore wind makes land use mostly irrelevant.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    You still have to build it out over a large area, even if you can use it for other things or the land doesn’t have any other productive uses. You’ll never power an aircraft carrier or submarine with it, and even space craft solar collectors pale in power output and longevity to nuclear solutions.
    - MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
      I don't think anyone here says that nuclear should be completely eradicated. Sure, there are valid use cases. What I was trying to touch is the argument about land use. I don't want to stereotype, but oftentimes these things are a product of simple "back of the envelope" calculations where someone takes surface of one panel per Watt and tries to calculate how big of an area would You need to replace N nuclear reactors of given power. Not the first time I saw it. It's a sort of a theme I see in discussions around me with people from STEM over 50 (not saying that's You, it's just where I keep hearing it). Nuclear made a lot of sense in the 60s-70s, sure. But since maybe 20 years or so the alternatives are getting better / cheaper / generally improving way faster than nuclear currently is. And so is the energy grid. Makes sense to update those arguments then.
sanderjd 4y ago
The way I think of storage is that it competes with natural gas peaking plants, not that it is part of the cost of renewables. Even if we had a lot more nuclear deployed, we would need a way to handle short-term variance in load, which is either gas or storage. (An interesting alternative would be scalable sinks for extra power; some people argue that this is why proof-of-work crypto is actually good, just use the extra power to generate hashes, but I would rather see it used for something more useful, like making hydrogen.)
- maliker 4y ago
  I’m optimistic we could find a way to ramp nuclear up and down. We don’t do it now because it’s easier to run it at full capacity for economic and safety reasons. Adding some thermal storage (which the SMR companies are trying) or varying the reaction rate are in the area of research but certainly seem feasible.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    If you can add thermal storage to a nuclear plant, you can add thermal storage to a solar or wind farm and do it cheaper.
    - maliker 4y ago
      Thermal storage is harder to integrate with renewables because you need a recovery mechanism, i.e. a steam turbine. Because nuke plants already have the turbines, it’s cheaper to collocate the storage there. I could see a future where the nuke and fossil plants are converted into thermal storage facilities without the boilers to reuse the existing turbines (and permits to operate, and interconnection agreements).
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        renewables with a recovery mechanism is still simpler engineering than a nuclear plant.
  - 4y ago
opo 4y ago
>...We’ll probably muddle through with fossil + renewables for a while, which is the cheapest combo. Only cheapest since the externalized costs of fossil fuels are not accounted for. >...Nukes are getting more expensive not less, so I don’t have much expectation they’ll be in the generation mix by the end of the century. China is also planning on building about 228 nuclear plants to provide 250 GW of power. It looks like they are very serious about de-carbonizing their grid. They will likely develop a lot of expertise in building nuclear plants. https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-chinas-nuclear-pipeline-as-big-as-the-rest-of-the-worlds-combined https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-china...
credit_guy 4y ago
Renewable are intermittent and seasonal. Intermittency can be solved with batteries, but seasonality can't. The capital cost for batteries is too high to be recouped by charging and discharging only once a year. By a factor of about 1000. So, unless batteries get cheaper by a factor of 1000 (they won't), a different form of storage is needed. Europe is betting on hydrogen. It is betting hundreds of billions of dollars (euros). It's unlikely they are completely stupid. Other solutions sound promising as well (ammonia, iron, syn fuels). But people need to realize batteries are completely useless for seasonal storage. Given that, all comparisons of solar vs nuclear are simply not apples to apples. How about wind? For wind the situation is not as clear-cut but you still have a difficult problem. If you know you can have outages of 3 days about once a year, then you need to build batteries that can provide 3 days of consumption, but they'll be able to sell electricity only once a year. The capital cost of these batteries is going to be very high per kWh. One needs to look at the statistics of power generation with wind to see if batteries can offer the storage solution. My guess is that they still can't, but they are probably off only by a factor of 10 or so. Gas peaker plants may be a good intermediate solution.
- maliker 4y ago
  I expect we'll overbuild renewables to handle the high demand season and then dump excess renewables in the low demand season. I've seen this result in a couple cost optimization models like [0]. Optimistically, we might see demand react to the seasonal price differences and readjust via e.g. weatherization, or running industrial load seasonally. But yeah, seasonal storage makes my head hurt. Getting 1 cycle a year out of technology built to deliver 2,000 or more cycles seems like a huge waste. The idea of financing a project to pay back over 2000 years is bizarre. Of course the hardware would fail for other reasons over that period. Hell, the concrete it's resting on would probably crumble in 100. [0] https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/research/publications/feasibility-of-seasonal-storage-for-a-fully-electrified-economy/ https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/research/publications/feasi...

skrtskrt 4y ago

Is it possible that we could have a permanent (small) presence of fossil fuel energy to smooth out capacity?

adrianN 4y ago
Not if we want to stop global warming. What we can do instead is store renewable power as methane or hydrogen and burn that when batteries are insufficient to cover. But perhaps advances in grid scale batteries will make even that obsolete.
- Retric 4y ago
  There is some leeway in global warming as on net the earth sequesters more carbon the higher the atmospheric CO2 levels, it’s just nowhere near fast enough to keep up with current output.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Unfortunately we already emitted enough carbon to force pretty catastrophic warming, so we'll need to become net negative for at least a couple of decades before we can talk about low net positive emissions.
    - Retric 4y ago
      You are far more optimistic than I if you assume net negative is a possibility any time soon. A significant reduction in methane might be possible which would provide similar benefits.
- maliker 4y ago
  It’ll be interesting to see what role hydrogen plays. Prices for using it to store energy are currently a couple times battery energy storage systems, and the component parts are not getting cheaper very fast (turbines + storage + electrolyzers), whereas battery storage is rapidly falling in price. But as you point out: we know how to use hydrogen/synthetic methane/ammonia as a storage asset if we need it.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    I think it will be difficult to satisfy global storage demands with lithium batteries. But most countries already have infrastructure to store a couple of weeks to a couple of months worth of methane. Perhaps it makes economic sense to just use that infrastructure and pay the 60% conversion loss. Maybe other battery chemistries will be better options.
    - maliker 4y ago
Panzer04 4y ago
I think there's certainly a lot of potential for us to drastically reduce fossil fuel usage with renewables while supporting off hours with something like gas turbines in the interim. The ultimate goal is to remove those too, but we could probably cut overall fossil fuel use by 70% or more in the meantime pretty easily, I'd imagine.
Retric 4y ago
Hydro can largely fill that gap, it’s currently ~15% of global electricity generation.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Most of our good hydro projects are already built out. Maybe a few more projects in deep remote Tibet, but the ice packs are quickly disappearing and not building up much over winter, so I don’t expect hydro’s share to rise, and it will probably shrink in the recent future.
  - Retric 4y ago
    My point way you don’t need additional hydro to back up renewables. 15% of 24/7 is 100% of ~7h, 3.5 days a week. We would need some batteries, but nowhere near the kind of excess people calculate for a pure wind/solar grid.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      The nice thing about hydro is that most projects come with their own battery. Wind or nuclear can be used to fill reservoirs back up. If the ice packs are drawn down too much, this might be the main use for hydro in the future, though I’m not sure it would save something like lake mead (though a project is planned).
    - opo 4y ago
      I haven't seen an estimate done for the US, but for Germany one estimate is that to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5950.pdf https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5... If making more grid storage was cheap and easy, we would have built it decades ago.
      - Retric 4y ago
        That’s exactly the kind of meaningless and inflated number I was talking about. Notice how they exclude hydroelectric dams. Existing hydroelectric dams currently store vastly more energy than the average pumped hydro facility and they can easily be adapted to add additional turbines for relatively minimal costs. Collectively North American dams are storing at a minimum several days of total grid output and theoretically much more depending on how you do the calculation. Adding turbines doesn’t increase annual production, but it does increase flexibility as it makes minimal difference to discharge 1x water for 24 hours or 5x water for 4 hours and the rest over the other 20. Several dams have already been retrofitted like that as peaking power plants are simply vastly more valuable per kWh. It’s even better for the environment as rivers naturally have significant variability which is normally smoothed out by dams. PS: Rarely mentioned in those kind of analysis is how sensitive the required storage number is to the exact mix and oversupply of wind/solar. A grid with 1.001x average annual demand looks very different than one with say 1.1 or even 2x.
natmaka 4y ago
TLDR: yes It helps during the transition, and even afterwards. France, by far a leader when it comes to nuclear (used to produce 90% of its gridpower this way) always used fossil fuel energy to complement it reactor fleet (each year fossil fuel produces 7 to 12% of France's electricity), mainly because maintaining enough reactors in order to cope with peak consumption (thus letting many underused) would be way too expensive, and also because nuclear load-following capacity is insufficient (bar over-provisioning reactors) due to their limited flexibility (at this game a gas turbine is way, way better): for security and burden-of-maintenance -related reasons one just cannot freely pump up/down the power delivered by a nuclear reactor, modulation limits and pauses are to be strictly respected.
7952 4y ago
I wonder if biomass + carbon capture and storage could play a role here. If the biomass was source in a controlled way (and that's a big if) you could have the characteristics of a thermal power station and be carbon negative.
maliker 4y ago
I think yes, when combined with carbon capture and storage. The technology has worked for some time (both the capture and storage parts), some of the new direct air methods are hitting $100/MWh when paired with generation, bringing prices of gas + capture around the price of solar + storage. However, siting it is tricky since you need the right geology, and there have been some very expensive failures to deploy. Maybe it will have a niche role until we solve storage + transmission + demand management (as someone else pointed out).

pydry 4y ago

Solar + wind arent the same or cheaper, theyre much cheaper. Solar + wind + pumped storage approaches the cost of nuclear power (minus its free catastrophe insurance). >When we get to the point of trying to take the last 20% of the fossil down is when we might regret not trying harder with nuclear Every kwh of solar and wind produced electricity right now is a kwh not produced by gas and will be for some time almost everywhere. We will probably regret not building the carbon free power generation that take 6 months to build and is half the price than the one that takes 15 years while gorging itself on subsidies.

breadloaf 4y ago
> Every kwh of solar and wind produced electricity right now is a kwh not produced by gas and will be for some time almost everywhere. That assumes that fossil plants can be switched off/on as you wish. They can't. Coal needs several days to start up / shut down and gas several hours.
- natmaka 4y ago
  Betting on coal is now a dangerous game. Gas rules, for now. Recent gas turbines are quite good: low-latency, free modulation, maintaining them in warm-start ready condition is quite cheap and does not emit much greenhouse gases. Moreover they will be retrofitted in order to burn green hydrogen.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    Gas still produces pretty large amounts of greenhouse gases, even if it's a bit under half compared to coal: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20total%20U.S.%20electricity,CO2%20emissions%20per%20kWh https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11#:~:text=In.... Renewables without storage, but backed by gas when the renewables are not available, will perhaps cover 30-50% of the energy consumed in an area, depending on climate, etc. That reduces total greenhouse gases by about 75% compared to using only coal. But lets say we want to move to electric transportation, more and more people expect to have air conditioning and in general, we expect more energy to be consumed, this will mean that greenhouse gas emissions will still be high. Now, some people don't care much about global warming (or only pretend to care). In that case, the above setup is probably fine. (Even though it will be a bit more expensive than the most optimistic numbers from the proponents of this setup, due to extra expenses in the grid and due to the gas plants running below capacity half the time.) If you care enough about global warming to reach carbon neutrality, then obviously, gas plants are not a long term solution. In that case you need to go to fully renewable, or some combination of renewables and nuclear. If you want to go to fully renewable, you will need enough storage to cover ALL the variation in demand. In such a case levelized cost must cover, I would say, anything from 12 hours (for solar in deserts) to 48 hours or more. With current technology (and with the exception of a few places with plenty of hydro that can be pumped back), this will range from expensive (for 12 hours) to extremely expensive (for 48 hours or more). From what I can read from the storage costs, the levelized cost including 12 hours of storage (at the source) starts at about $0.2-$0.4 per kwh of consumption (meaning that it can store 12kwh for each kw of peak capacity). At the other end of the spectrum, standalonge storage of 48kwh for each 1kw of production capacity (like you may need for wind power, if it is quite intermittent), could cost over $3 per kwh of power produced. (48kWh * $643 / 2000kWh for "Industrial Standalone") https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/#:~:text=The%20former%20values%20average%20%2427,for%20combined%20cycle%20gas%20generation https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-.... I don't have number for hydrogen, but I don't think storing energy as hydrogen is cheaper than batteries. In other words, if you want to be fully carbon neutral, Nuclear is still the cheapest as long as the price of Nuclear is less than $0.2/kwh. Most numbers I've seen put the price of nuclear significantly lower than that. And in places that are not desert, the break even is much higher.

natmaka 4y ago

A way to lower most of intermittency-induced variability is well-known: spreading production units out, at continental level. Europe: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... A mix (wind, solar, geothermal...) helps. Next come storage, with green hydrogen (produced thanks to overproduction) and V2G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid Curtailing and backup will tackle the last chunks.

maliker 4y ago
More transmission seems like a great option, especially since the lifetime of wires is measured in decades instead of years like storage. Another point in favor of transmission is the potential to apply high temperature superconductors, which are dropping in price similar to renewables and storage and might let us increase throughput in existing rights-of-way. Doing the analysis to figure out the value of transmission is something beyond my abilities as an armchair resource planner, since it relies on calculating network power flows over many years of forecasted demand and renewable production. Not to mention that transmission project costs are all over the place and, at least in the US, they tend to get delayed for decades. There’s some appetite to address transmission here in the Macrogrid initiative, but it’s a huge (ahem continent scale) problem.
- natmaka 4y ago
  Indeed. A larger grid enhances our ability to tackle any problem (to cope with any broken production unit or powerline) and to select which unit will generate power (thus offering more options, for example from an economic perspective). This is a powerful incentive, and in Europe leads to major efforts since the 2000's.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

The only advantage nuclear will have over renewables is simply the ability to bring a reliable source of power online that doesn’t require too much land. You can deal most of a country’s needs with a few projects on a few hundred acres. Compare that with nuclear indirect (aka solar) which requires a lot of space and a lot of projects to scale.

MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
True if You presume new constructions to be done on empty (farm)land. Somewhat less true if You take into account that specifically solar can (and often is) constructed on residential / industrial rooftops.
- bigfudge 4y ago
  Also onshore wind entirely compatible with most farming. Offshore wind makes land use mostly irrelevant.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  You still have to build it out over a large area, even if you can use it for other things or the land doesn’t have any other productive uses. You’ll never power an aircraft carrier or submarine with it, and even space craft solar collectors pale in power output and longevity to nuclear solutions.
  - MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
    I don't think anyone here says that nuclear should be completely eradicated. Sure, there are valid use cases. What I was trying to touch is the argument about land use. I don't want to stereotype, but oftentimes these things are a product of simple "back of the envelope" calculations where someone takes surface of one panel per Watt and tries to calculate how big of an area would You need to replace N nuclear reactors of given power. Not the first time I saw it. It's a sort of a theme I see in discussions around me with people from STEM over 50 (not saying that's You, it's just where I keep hearing it). Nuclear made a lot of sense in the 60s-70s, sure. But since maybe 20 years or so the alternatives are getting better / cheaper / generally improving way faster than nuclear currently is. And so is the energy grid. Makes sense to update those arguments then.

sanderjd 4y ago

The way I think of storage is that it competes with natural gas peaking plants, not that it is part of the cost of renewables. Even if we had a lot more nuclear deployed, we would need a way to handle short-term variance in load, which is either gas or storage. (An interesting alternative would be scalable sinks for extra power; some people argue that this is why proof-of-work crypto is actually good, just use the extra power to generate hashes, but I would rather see it used for something more useful, like making hydrogen.)

maliker 4y ago
I’m optimistic we could find a way to ramp nuclear up and down. We don’t do it now because it’s easier to run it at full capacity for economic and safety reasons. Adding some thermal storage (which the SMR companies are trying) or varying the reaction rate are in the area of research but certainly seem feasible.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  If you can add thermal storage to a nuclear plant, you can add thermal storage to a solar or wind farm and do it cheaper.
  - maliker 4y ago
    Thermal storage is harder to integrate with renewables because you need a recovery mechanism, i.e. a steam turbine. Because nuke plants already have the turbines, it’s cheaper to collocate the storage there. I could see a future where the nuke and fossil plants are converted into thermal storage facilities without the boilers to reuse the existing turbines (and permits to operate, and interconnection agreements).
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      renewables with a recovery mechanism is still simpler engineering than a nuclear plant.
- 4y ago

opo 4y ago

>...We’ll probably muddle through with fossil + renewables for a while, which is the cheapest combo. Only cheapest since the externalized costs of fossil fuels are not accounted for. >...Nukes are getting more expensive not less, so I don’t have much expectation they’ll be in the generation mix by the end of the century. China is also planning on building about 228 nuclear plants to provide 250 GW of power. It looks like they are very serious about de-carbonizing their grid. They will likely develop a lot of expertise in building nuclear plants. https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-chinas-nuclear-pipeline-as-big-as-the-rest-of-the-worlds-combined https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-china...

credit_guy 4y ago

Renewable are intermittent and seasonal. Intermittency can be solved with batteries, but seasonality can't. The capital cost for batteries is too high to be recouped by charging and discharging only once a year. By a factor of about 1000. So, unless batteries get cheaper by a factor of 1000 (they won't), a different form of storage is needed. Europe is betting on hydrogen. It is betting hundreds of billions of dollars (euros). It's unlikely they are completely stupid. Other solutions sound promising as well (ammonia, iron, syn fuels). But people need to realize batteries are completely useless for seasonal storage. Given that, all comparisons of solar vs nuclear are simply not apples to apples. How about wind? For wind the situation is not as clear-cut but you still have a difficult problem. If you know you can have outages of 3 days about once a year, then you need to build batteries that can provide 3 days of consumption, but they'll be able to sell electricity only once a year. The capital cost of these batteries is going to be very high per kWh. One needs to look at the statistics of power generation with wind to see if batteries can offer the storage solution. My guess is that they still can't, but they are probably off only by a factor of 10 or so. Gas peaker plants may be a good intermediate solution.

maliker 4y ago
I expect we'll overbuild renewables to handle the high demand season and then dump excess renewables in the low demand season. I've seen this result in a couple cost optimization models like [0]. Optimistically, we might see demand react to the seasonal price differences and readjust via e.g. weatherization, or running industrial load seasonally. But yeah, seasonal storage makes my head hurt. Getting 1 cycle a year out of technology built to deliver 2,000 or more cycles seems like a huge waste. The idea of financing a project to pay back over 2000 years is bizarre. Of course the hardware would fail for other reasons over that period. Hell, the concrete it's resting on would probably crumble in 100. [0] https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/research/publications/feasibility-of-seasonal-storage-for-a-fully-electrified-economy/ https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/research/publications/feasi...