7 ms·

Solar + wind arent the same or cheaper, theyre much cheaper. Solar + wind + pumped storage approaches the cost of nuclear power (minus its free catastrophe ins

by 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.
    - maliker 4y ago
      Great analysis, and I agree that renewable + storage is the right thing to compare against nuclear. I think the area where nuclear has the biggest potential to shine is competing with very long duration storage—e.g. month long underperformance of wind + solar up to seasonal differences in demand/renewable output. Battery self discharge is around 1% a day, so it could be totally impossible to use it to cover seasonal differences. I’ve looked a little at hydrogen [0]. It’s got similar self discharge issues that batteries have (i.e. leaks or cooling energy costs). It’s also currently around 1-2 times as expensive as batteries per kWh cycle, and the technology isn’t getting cheaper as fast as batteries. Plenty of opportunities left for the world to bet on the wrong technology. Leaving aside all the price variability and learning rates, there’s also the issue of how these technologies will perform hour to hour as renewable supply and demand changes (and more end uses like transportation switch away from fossil fuels). A truly hellish optimization problem. [0] https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/Final%20-%20ESGC%20Cost%20Performance%20Report%2012-11-2020.pdf https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/Final%20...
      - trashtester 4y ago
        > I’ve looked a little at hydrogen [0]. It’s got similar self discharge issues that batteries have (i.e. leaks or cooling energy costs). It’s also currently around 1-2 times as expensive as batteries per kWh cycle, and the technology isn’t getting cheaper as fast as batteries. From your number for hydrogen, I suppose batteries make more sense for "typical" variance, while hydrogen makes more sense for unusual periods of downtime (rain in the desert, more than 2-3 days without ANY wind). Also, it would make sense if most of the electrolysis would be performed in areas with high random variance in electricity production (typically wind). As you say, nuclear will have an advantage for longer in areas with highly seasonal variance. One advantage of hydrogen, though, is that it is relatively easy to transport to where it is needed. Still, by combining our numbers, it seems to me like for projects starting today, Nuclear is still competitive to, if not outright cheaper than renewables, if the goal is 100% carbon-free power within 10-20 years. Breakthroughs in battery production (or hydrogen production, but less likely), might change that. But then again, if Nuclear was built with enough volume, minimal corruption and with a rational balancing of cost/risk, the cost of nuclear should also come back down quite a bit. I definitely think it should be possible to reach levelized costs well under $0.1/kwh if contracts are given to international construction/operations companies able to utilize economies of scale.
  - maliker 4y ago
    Gas also has staffing advantages over coal. A handful of people gan operate a bank of gas turbines; coal plants take dozens; nuke plants take hundreds.
cturner 4y ago
Pumped storage depends on geography, and it is not viable in most places. Hence, your claim that it is cheaper than nuclear is unreasonable. > minus its free catastrophe insurance Many more people have died from dam collapses in the last fifty years than nuclear accidents. > 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 don't have a general-purpose solution to storage. As a result there is waste overproduction of solar and wind at some times, and under-production at other times. Those under-production windows need to be covered by base-load forms of energy production such as gas and nuclear.
- natmaka 4y ago
  No, even with low estimations of the amount of nuclear victims (those published by UN's Word Health Organization) solar/wind/hydro are the safest ones and any new major nuclear disaster may further imbalance: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - korantu 4y ago
    Hydro is very terrain-dependent, solar and wind can't do baseload, so for baseload nuclear is still best applicable in most parts of the world. Nuclear saves a lot of lives by displacing other, way more dangerous baseload operations. [0] [0] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#contrary-to-popular-belief-nuclear-power-has-saved-lives-by-displacing-fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#contrary...
    - natmaka 4y ago
      > solar and wind can't do baseload Not really, as we know how, at continental scale, adequately use wind and solar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557422
  - 4y ago
fulafel 4y ago
What solar/wind displaces varies a lot by location. Coal is used much more than gas. According to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by... the top 3 are coal, gas, hydro. For places with hydro it's effectively energy storage for wind/solar.
opo 4y ago
Your post seems to imply that solar and wind have not been heavily subsidized. >Solar + wind arent the same or cheaper, theyre much cheaper. Wind has received many different government subsidies over time. The GAO found 82 different types of subsidies even 9 years ago: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-136.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-136.pdf The largest subsidy was likely the production tax credit of $23 per megawatt-hour through the first ten years of a turbine’s operation. I think starting last year that one is being phased out. But no power source has been as subsidized as roof-top solar. That has never been cheap and won't be cheap in the future. Rooftop solar lives off of huge subsidies from the government. Wealthier home owners are often paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid and are subsidized by higher electricity bills by those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
- pydry 4y ago
  I'm not at all implying that they haven't been subsidized. I'm implying that, unlike the nuclear subsidies, A) those subsidies were good value for money and B) these technologies are viable without subsidies, which nuclear isn't. >But no power source has been as subsidized as roof-top solar. This simply isn't true. Rooftop solar has been slammed with heavy import tariffs ever since Obama and while feed in tariffs have been generous in the past they haven't been generous for some years now.
  - opo 4y ago
    The subsidies for nuclear likely saved more than a million lives that would have been lost to air pollution if the industry did not exist and coal had been used instead. One might argue those subsidies were a good value for money - if you care about human life. >>But no power source has been as subsidized as roof-top solar. >This simply isn't true. Rooftop solar has been slammed with heavy import tariffs ever since Obama and while feed in tariffs have been generous in the past they haven't been generous for some years now. The import tariffs have little impact on the costs of rooftop solar. The big price for rooftop is the large amounts of human labor and the inverters etc that aren't needed for utility grid solar. While feed in tariffs might have been lowered in some jurisdictions, they certainly aren't lower in big markets like CA. There the PUC was going to lower the credit to 5 cents a KW and the uproar from wealthy people was large enough that the plan was put on hold. The 5 cents is still more than the 3 cents it costs PG&E for nuclear power, but if the change was implemented, "The manufacturers of solar systems predicted the death of solar in California,". Rooftop solar was never, is not and will not ever be cheap. https://www.ocregister.com/2022/04/29/ghosted-by-the-puc-folks-await-new-plan-for-rooftop-solar-but-get-silence/ https://www.ocregister.com/2022/04/29/ghosted-by-the-puc-fol...

by pydry 4y ago

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.
  - maliker 4y ago
    Great analysis, and I agree that renewable + storage is the right thing to compare against nuclear. I think the area where nuclear has the biggest potential to shine is competing with very long duration storage—e.g. month long underperformance of wind + solar up to seasonal differences in demand/renewable output. Battery self discharge is around 1% a day, so it could be totally impossible to use it to cover seasonal differences. I’ve looked a little at hydrogen [0]. It’s got similar self discharge issues that batteries have (i.e. leaks or cooling energy costs). It’s also currently around 1-2 times as expensive as batteries per kWh cycle, and the technology isn’t getting cheaper as fast as batteries. Plenty of opportunities left for the world to bet on the wrong technology. Leaving aside all the price variability and learning rates, there’s also the issue of how these technologies will perform hour to hour as renewable supply and demand changes (and more end uses like transportation switch away from fossil fuels). A truly hellish optimization problem. [0] https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/Final%20-%20ESGC%20Cost%20Performance%20Report%2012-11-2020.pdf https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/Final%20...
    - trashtester 4y ago
      > I’ve looked a little at hydrogen [0]. It’s got similar self discharge issues that batteries have (i.e. leaks or cooling energy costs). It’s also currently around 1-2 times as expensive as batteries per kWh cycle, and the technology isn’t getting cheaper as fast as batteries. From your number for hydrogen, I suppose batteries make more sense for "typical" variance, while hydrogen makes more sense for unusual periods of downtime (rain in the desert, more than 2-3 days without ANY wind). Also, it would make sense if most of the electrolysis would be performed in areas with high random variance in electricity production (typically wind). As you say, nuclear will have an advantage for longer in areas with highly seasonal variance. One advantage of hydrogen, though, is that it is relatively easy to transport to where it is needed. Still, by combining our numbers, it seems to me like for projects starting today, Nuclear is still competitive to, if not outright cheaper than renewables, if the goal is 100% carbon-free power within 10-20 years. Breakthroughs in battery production (or hydrogen production, but less likely), might change that. But then again, if Nuclear was built with enough volume, minimal corruption and with a rational balancing of cost/risk, the cost of nuclear should also come back down quite a bit. I definitely think it should be possible to reach levelized costs well under $0.1/kwh if contracts are given to international construction/operations companies able to utilize economies of scale.
- maliker 4y ago
  Gas also has staffing advantages over coal. A handful of people gan operate a bank of gas turbines; coal plants take dozens; nuke plants take hundreds.

cturner 4y ago

Pumped storage depends on geography, and it is not viable in most places. Hence, your claim that it is cheaper than nuclear is unreasonable. > minus its free catastrophe insurance Many more people have died from dam collapses in the last fifty years than nuclear accidents. > 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 don't have a general-purpose solution to storage. As a result there is waste overproduction of solar and wind at some times, and under-production at other times. Those under-production windows need to be covered by base-load forms of energy production such as gas and nuclear.

natmaka 4y ago
No, even with low estimations of the amount of nuclear victims (those published by UN's Word Health Organization) solar/wind/hydro are the safest ones and any new major nuclear disaster may further imbalance: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- korantu 4y ago
  Hydro is very terrain-dependent, solar and wind can't do baseload, so for baseload nuclear is still best applicable in most parts of the world. Nuclear saves a lot of lives by displacing other, way more dangerous baseload operations. [0] [0] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#contrary-to-popular-belief-nuclear-power-has-saved-lives-by-displacing-fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#contrary...
  - natmaka 4y ago
    > solar and wind can't do baseload Not really, as we know how, at continental scale, adequately use wind and solar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557422
- 4y ago

fulafel 4y ago

What solar/wind displaces varies a lot by location. Coal is used much more than gas. According to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by... the top 3 are coal, gas, hydro. For places with hydro it's effectively energy storage for wind/solar.

opo 4y ago

Your post seems to imply that solar and wind have not been heavily subsidized. >Solar + wind arent the same or cheaper, theyre much cheaper. Wind has received many different government subsidies over time. The GAO found 82 different types of subsidies even 9 years ago: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-136.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-136.pdf The largest subsidy was likely the production tax credit of $23 per megawatt-hour through the first ten years of a turbine’s operation. I think starting last year that one is being phased out. But no power source has been as subsidized as roof-top solar. That has never been cheap and won't be cheap in the future. Rooftop solar lives off of huge subsidies from the government. Wealthier home owners are often paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid and are subsidized by higher electricity bills by those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.

pydry 4y ago
I'm not at all implying that they haven't been subsidized. I'm implying that, unlike the nuclear subsidies, A) those subsidies were good value for money and B) these technologies are viable without subsidies, which nuclear isn't. >But no power source has been as subsidized as roof-top solar. This simply isn't true. Rooftop solar has been slammed with heavy import tariffs ever since Obama and while feed in tariffs have been generous in the past they haven't been generous for some years now.
- opo 4y ago
  The subsidies for nuclear likely saved more than a million lives that would have been lost to air pollution if the industry did not exist and coal had been used instead. One might argue those subsidies were a good value for money - if you care about human life. >>But no power source has been as subsidized as roof-top solar. >This simply isn't true. Rooftop solar has been slammed with heavy import tariffs ever since Obama and while feed in tariffs have been generous in the past they haven't been generous for some years now. The import tariffs have little impact on the costs of rooftop solar. The big price for rooftop is the large amounts of human labor and the inverters etc that aren't needed for utility grid solar. While feed in tariffs might have been lowered in some jurisdictions, they certainly aren't lower in big markets like CA. There the PUC was going to lower the credit to 5 cents a KW and the uproar from wealthy people was large enough that the plan was put on hold. The 5 cents is still more than the 3 cents it costs PG&E for nuclear power, but if the change was implemented, "The manufacturers of solar systems predicted the death of solar in California,". Rooftop solar was never, is not and will not ever be cheap. https://www.ocregister.com/2022/04/29/ghosted-by-the-puc-folks-await-new-plan-for-rooftop-solar-but-get-silence/ https://www.ocregister.com/2022/04/29/ghosted-by-the-puc-fol...