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> Nuclear is sometimes praised for having lower fuel costs, but all else being equal (ie: assuming total production cost stays constant), it’s better to have a

by ak217 4y ago

> Nuclear is sometimes praised for having lower fuel costs, but all else being equal (ie: assuming total production cost stays constant), it’s better to have a larger fraction of your electricity costs be variable, so that if demand drops then production cost drops as well. This is not obviously true. I could make an argument that base load generation capacity (nuclear and hydro in particular) should be state-owned or largely state-sponsored, both to avoid economic price shocks/volatility and because it's good for national security (check out what Europe is going through right now).

stingraycharles 4y ago
Yeah this statement makes me think that OP had very little actual knowledge about energy pricing. If there’s ever a complicated market of supply and demand it’s energy. Having a huge chunk of the supply be stable and controllable is absolutely desired, will help simplify operations a lot, make supply more predictable, and as a result deliver more stable prices. It’s not as if the population is suddenly getting cheaper windmills if there’s too much supply; if the energy supplier is losing money due to oversupply, they will need to get their money back another way, so it’s always the consumer that pays anyway.
- logifail 4y ago
  > Having a huge chunk of the supply be stable and controllable Nuclear might be stable, but "controllable"? On the days when it's windy and sunny in your part of the planet, try telling your local nuclear plants they're not required. There's simply no reason to guarantee nuclear generators a fixed electricity price decades in advance, like the UK did with Hinkley Point.[0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
  - dTal 4y ago
    I don't know why you say you can't throttle nuclear up and down. All thermal plants have inertia, but nuclear is if anything easier to throttle than fossil fuels. There's a lot of numbers, and comments from nuclear plant operators, in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/m0rwso/how_fast_can_a_nuclear_power_plant_ramp_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/m0rwso/how_fa...
    - logifail 4y ago
      > I don't know why you say you can't throttle nuclear up and down. All thermal plants have inertia, but nuclear is if anything easier to throttle than fossil fuels. In that case why don't we let the market build nuclear plants without any state guarantees or insurance and they can simply "throttle up" when they're required. No need to fix a strike price for decades before investors are interested. I'm sure it makes financial sense. Honest. /s
      - akvadrako 4y ago
        Nuclear has very low fuel costs, under 1%. So it really doesnt make sense to throttle them unless the price goes negative. Having an upfront guaranteed price is just a way to spread the construction cost over more time.
        stingraycharles 4y ago
        You're forgetting that the energy market requires an absolute balance between supply and demand; if you're supplying energy without anyone using it, you're going to have a very bad time.
        akvadrako 4y ago
        That is covered by the case of negative prices.
      - dTal 4y ago
        That's quite the non-sequitor. An exploration of how broken "the market" is would be an entirely separate discussion. If you wanted to have that discussion, we could start by analyzing the massive subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuels, not to mention the complete lack of accounting for its toxic byproducts which are dumped into the atmosphere (while nuclear power is legally required to track and safely store every molecule). Or we could just keep building gas peaker plants and ignore the mass die-offs, because "the market" can't possibly be wrong, right? /s
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  "all else equal" is in there. He was trying to make a point - that flexibility is valuable. And it is valuable. All else equal you'd take more flexibility than less, especially since demand moves around a good amount.
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    But it isn’t flexibility we can control. It’s either fluctuations in supply which we need to absorb somehow, or it’s scaling down supply. The big differentiator is the flexibility to scale up supply when you need it, and it’s precisely this flexibility that’s missing.
    - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
      It definitely can be controllable. Peakers exist, and are controlled. You say "scale down", someone who runs a peaker thinks "scale up", and they can do it pretty fast (minutes). And the lower the capex the better, it gets closer and closer to a free option. Having a real option on producing electricity (or, almost anything where demand varies) is valuable to society.
logifail 4y ago
> base load generation capacity What's the consensus on the meaning of 'base load generation capacity'? There are those who'd say it's an archaic term often used to defend power sources that can't ramp up and down to meet demand, and nuclear would be top of that list. If - for instance - there are times when it's windy and sunny, why should consumers have to pay more than the market rate to nuclear generators, just because nuclear is inflexible? More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load generation capacity' over the coming decades?
- fallingknife 4y ago
  I tend to disbelieve the people who say it's unnecessary because there are many places where the cheapest power generation has come from renewables for quite some time, and yet all of those places still have base load on the grid.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Baseload has several major ingredients: the required continuous consumption, connectivity of areas that are remote from each other where the one has a surplus and the other a deficit, local overcapacity storage options and installed capacity from 'guaranteed' sources (and no source is 100% guaranteed, typically even the most stable sources are down 20 to 40% of the time for maintenance, refueling, repairs and so on). The required baseload is then further influenced by load variability, and rate-of-change. Not all generation equipment can spin up / down equally fast, and sometimes the effect of for instance a shut-down is that it will take a long time to go back online. Baseload is a function of a whole interconnected grid rather than of some locality, and this is a big difference between how laypeople see this and how people in the power business see it. It's not as if the electrons that are pushed into a wire in say Southern France need to get all the way to Poland to light a bulb there, all that the various generators do is maintain their local grid by making available enough power locally that lightbulbs in France are served by their local power stations and lightbulbs in Poland are served by theirs. This minimizes transmission losses. If you have a surplus and the distance is large then with conventional (AC) transmission lines there is an upper limit to how big an area you can serve before the losses make that no longer economical. HVDC has nicer properties for long distance transmission which has some very interesting consequences for baseload: suddenly wind and solar thousands of KM (multiple timezones) away can be used to provide power to some locality, reducing the need for local generation capacity if the price is right. This revolution is happening right now, the HVDC grid interconnects are shaping up rapidly with more and more of these coming on-line. Especially the longer East-West runs have the possibility to materially affect the amount of fossil/nuclear required for when solar and wind are insufficient, as well as the North-South ones from areas where there is a lot of hydro generation capacity.
jacquesm 4y ago
What Europe is going through right now is mostly caused by those large, state sponsored conglomerates. It's the smaller private operators that are doing just fine.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
The statement is obviously true. The part which makes it so is "all else being equal". He is just saying "flexibility is more valuable than it might seem on the surface, because demand moves around".

by ak217 4y ago

stingraycharles 4y ago

Yeah this statement makes me think that OP had very little actual knowledge about energy pricing. If there’s ever a complicated market of supply and demand it’s energy. Having a huge chunk of the supply be stable and controllable is absolutely desired, will help simplify operations a lot, make supply more predictable, and as a result deliver more stable prices. It’s not as if the population is suddenly getting cheaper windmills if there’s too much supply; if the energy supplier is losing money due to oversupply, they will need to get their money back another way, so it’s always the consumer that pays anyway.

logifail 4y ago
> Having a huge chunk of the supply be stable and controllable Nuclear might be stable, but "controllable"? On the days when it's windy and sunny in your part of the planet, try telling your local nuclear plants they're not required. There's simply no reason to guarantee nuclear generators a fixed electricity price decades in advance, like the UK did with Hinkley Point.[0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
- dTal 4y ago
  I don't know why you say you can't throttle nuclear up and down. All thermal plants have inertia, but nuclear is if anything easier to throttle than fossil fuels. There's a lot of numbers, and comments from nuclear plant operators, in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/m0rwso/how_fast_can_a_nuclear_power_plant_ramp_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/m0rwso/how_fa...
  - logifail 4y ago
    > I don't know why you say you can't throttle nuclear up and down. All thermal plants have inertia, but nuclear is if anything easier to throttle than fossil fuels. In that case why don't we let the market build nuclear plants without any state guarantees or insurance and they can simply "throttle up" when they're required. No need to fix a strike price for decades before investors are interested. I'm sure it makes financial sense. Honest. /s
    - akvadrako 4y ago
      Nuclear has very low fuel costs, under 1%. So it really doesnt make sense to throttle them unless the price goes negative. Having an upfront guaranteed price is just a way to spread the construction cost over more time.
      - stingraycharles 4y ago
        You're forgetting that the energy market requires an absolute balance between supply and demand; if you're supplying energy without anyone using it, you're going to have a very bad time.
        akvadrako 4y ago
        That is covered by the case of negative prices.
    - dTal 4y ago
      That's quite the non-sequitor. An exploration of how broken "the market" is would be an entirely separate discussion. If you wanted to have that discussion, we could start by analyzing the massive subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuels, not to mention the complete lack of accounting for its toxic byproducts which are dumped into the atmosphere (while nuclear power is legally required to track and safely store every molecule). Or we could just keep building gas peaker plants and ignore the mass die-offs, because "the market" can't possibly be wrong, right? /s
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
"all else equal" is in there. He was trying to make a point - that flexibility is valuable. And it is valuable. All else equal you'd take more flexibility than less, especially since demand moves around a good amount.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  But it isn’t flexibility we can control. It’s either fluctuations in supply which we need to absorb somehow, or it’s scaling down supply. The big differentiator is the flexibility to scale up supply when you need it, and it’s precisely this flexibility that’s missing.
  - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    It definitely can be controllable. Peakers exist, and are controlled. You say "scale down", someone who runs a peaker thinks "scale up", and they can do it pretty fast (minutes). And the lower the capex the better, it gets closer and closer to a free option. Having a real option on producing electricity (or, almost anything where demand varies) is valuable to society.

logifail 4y ago

> base load generation capacity What's the consensus on the meaning of 'base load generation capacity'? There are those who'd say it's an archaic term often used to defend power sources that can't ramp up and down to meet demand, and nuclear would be top of that list. If - for instance - there are times when it's windy and sunny, why should consumers have to pay more than the market rate to nuclear generators, just because nuclear is inflexible? More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load generation capacity' over the coming decades?

fallingknife 4y ago
I tend to disbelieve the people who say it's unnecessary because there are many places where the cheapest power generation has come from renewables for quite some time, and yet all of those places still have base load on the grid.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Baseload has several major ingredients: the required continuous consumption, connectivity of areas that are remote from each other where the one has a surplus and the other a deficit, local overcapacity storage options and installed capacity from 'guaranteed' sources (and no source is 100% guaranteed, typically even the most stable sources are down 20 to 40% of the time for maintenance, refueling, repairs and so on). The required baseload is then further influenced by load variability, and rate-of-change. Not all generation equipment can spin up / down equally fast, and sometimes the effect of for instance a shut-down is that it will take a long time to go back online. Baseload is a function of a whole interconnected grid rather than of some locality, and this is a big difference between how laypeople see this and how people in the power business see it. It's not as if the electrons that are pushed into a wire in say Southern France need to get all the way to Poland to light a bulb there, all that the various generators do is maintain their local grid by making available enough power locally that lightbulbs in France are served by their local power stations and lightbulbs in Poland are served by theirs. This minimizes transmission losses. If you have a surplus and the distance is large then with conventional (AC) transmission lines there is an upper limit to how big an area you can serve before the losses make that no longer economical. HVDC has nicer properties for long distance transmission which has some very interesting consequences for baseload: suddenly wind and solar thousands of KM (multiple timezones) away can be used to provide power to some locality, reducing the need for local generation capacity if the price is right. This revolution is happening right now, the HVDC grid interconnects are shaping up rapidly with more and more of these coming on-line. Especially the longer East-West runs have the possibility to materially affect the amount of fossil/nuclear required for when solar and wind are insufficient, as well as the North-South ones from areas where there is a lot of hydro generation capacity.

jacquesm 4y ago

What Europe is going through right now is mostly caused by those large, state sponsored conglomerates. It's the smaller private operators that are doing just fine.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago

The statement is obviously true. The part which makes it so is "all else being equal". He is just saying "flexibility is more valuable than it might seem on the surface, because demand moves around".