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The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage i

The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas peaker plants during heat waves), but this blog post is a lot of complicating noise in what is a fairly simple economics of implementation problem.

poutine 4y ago
So given that it's so cheap you've converted your home to be 100% solar with battery storage and went off grid, right? Probably not. As you'd like to have power for those dark winter days where you don't see the sun for weeks on end and any viable battery storage will only last a day or two. Dont get me wrong, I love solar, I'm building a house with it. But outside of select niches there's no viable storage for solar or wind that deals with seasonal intermittency. Wind even has major long term intermittency issues. This just happened in Europe: https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-winds-mean-for-the-future-energy-grid-170135 https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...
mdavis6890 4y ago
I think you're missing the fact that solar and wind, being quite mature and otherwise unencumbered, have been pretty well optimized to what physics and chemistry will allow. Further gains will be slow and incremental. Nuclear has been around quite a while as well, but is heavily encumbered by public sentiment, sub-optimal regulations, and knowledge atrophy. There is much more room for optimization before running into physical laws.
bradgessler 4y ago
Could somebody smarter than me comment on the feasibility of geothermal energy breakthroughs like gyrotron drilling? https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/why-this-fusion-tech-may-be-a-geothermal-energy-breakthrough https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/why-this-fusion-tech-may-be... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrotron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrotron
macspoofing 4y ago
>The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. So what? Or put another way, if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come? What do they (and every other country) know that you don't? The reality is you're not comparing apples to apples. Natural gas can serve as base load and power a modern economy. Solar/wind can't - doesn't matter if they are free. They can't.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  By the time any new nuclear reactor is designed, built and turned on, we'll certainly have many new/more ways to store energy for longer time (e.g new battery chemistry, hydrogen…). Here in France, half of our nuclear reactors are now off (and we had to turn on some old coal plants because of many unexpected technical issues). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-power-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p... The new EPR (Flamanville) continues to be delayed and the one in Finland that just went live has been shut down last week. Also, we may have to reduce the power of many of our plants that are built along rivers because we won't be able to cool them off during droughts. It's much easier and safer to install renewables now (as we just started with offshore wind) that bet on nuclear. It's also quite difficult to envision relying on Niger and Kazakhstan to supply uranium in the long term…
  - melling 4y ago
    We’ve been BEGGING for more nuclear power for decades. The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/ukraine-war-europe-turns-to-coal-as-russia-squeezes-gas-supplies.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/ukraine-war-europe-turns-to-... Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc? We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050.
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
      > We’ve been BEGGING for more nuclear power for decades. Yes, it really made sense for De Gaulle to launch the French civil nuclear program in 1969 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_programme_nucl%C3%A9aire_civil_de_la_France#Le_tournant_industriel_(1969%E2%80%931983) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_programme_nucl%C3%... But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue. And by the time we hit such limits, we'll have many more long term storage options. I'm not against nuclear (it's fine) but let's not pretend we're still in The Glorious Thirty. >The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine. Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants. >Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc? We're not waiting https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2021/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2021/executive-summar... but we could do much, much more with renewables. >We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050. We're also talking about being carbon neutral and retiring all nuclear power plants in France by 2050, so… https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospectives/bilan-previsionnel-2050-futurs-energetiques https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...
mpweiher 4y ago
The cost or the price? The price of renewable energy is often very low, frequently even negative. This does not reflect renewables advantages, but their disadvantages: being available in abundance when the energy is not needed or wanted. Even the Energy Return on Investment is barely sufficient for solar, for example, so I have a hard time believing that the cost is actually competitive.
- XorNot 4y ago
  This is false[1]. PV produces 10 to 20 times as much energy as it takes to make, dropping all the time with improvements. [1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/busting-the-myth-on-energy-returns-renewables-to-beat-fossil-fuels-79489/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/busting-the-myth-on-energy-retur...
- svnt 4y ago
  No, where the price is negative it reflects the value of storage, which is basically missing from the market, but will not continue to be.
glitchc 4y ago
Solar and wind will always suffer from a storage problem. The key to modern power is not potential but throughput and consistency. Modern infrastructure needs x Watts delivered 24/7, shifting to y Watts during on-peak hours and z Watts during off-peak hours. Because of inconsistency, solar and wind will remain non-viable as a primary source of power.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Making solar and wind consistent with various kinds of storage is likely going to be more economical than producing said energy with nuclear power plants. As for comparison to natural gas and such, CO2 taxes will be increased until those are phased out. Still economical? Taxes will be raised until they aren't. We have to leave most of the carbon in the ground.
  - nightski 4y ago
    Economical is one thing, but what about sustainability? Isn't nuclear more sustainable in that it produces less overall waste?
    - raxxorraxor 4y ago
      Nuclear does create waste and that problem is not solved contrary to popular belief.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      The waste produced by a renewable energy system will be small (and of the same kind) compared to the waste produced by industrial society as a whole. If the renewable energy system isn't sustainable because of waste, then neither will be that industrial society, even if it were nuclear powered. To be fair, waste isn't really the issue with nuclear power either.
      - deleted 4y ago
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      - 4y ago
seibelj 4y ago
If renewable is so radically better then why did the City of Boston automatically increase everyone's electricity bills by 30%, requiring customers to opt-out? https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2021/01/08/eversource-constellation/ https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2021/01/08/eversource-co... I keep hearing its so much cheaper, but renewables keep requiring dark patterns, more money, more subsidies. If it was so much cheaper it would just win automatically because of the market.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  Did you know that electricity prices have exploded in France because EDF (French power company) have lowered their production from 360 to ~300 TWh year over year? That's due to technical problems with the nuclear plants (half of the fleet is still offline). https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/espaces-dedies/journalistes/tous-les-communiques-de-presse/edf-actualise-son-estimation-de-production-nucleaire-en-france-pour-2022 https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/espaces-dedies/journalistes/to...
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Boston doesn’t have a huge amount of renewable energy in our mix, sadly. Most of New England is fossil fuels. More renewables would make it easier to keep prices low.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    But how does the narrative of “this is so impossibly cheaper and better” square with “we can’t build enough here so it’s 30% more expensive”. Either the region simply isn’t cost effective for solar / wind in which case we need nuclear to have any hope of clean energy, or renewables aren’t actually cheaper. If it was actually cheaper then it would just happen automatically.
andruby 4y ago
> Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage That will work for shifting day & night, but I don't see any feasible energy solutions for summer-winter shifting, or even to bridge weeks with limited sunshine (and/or wind). There are large populations living relatively far from the equator, which see huge differences in daylight during summer & winter. We should try to get as much energy from renewables like sun & wind, but I think we'll still need another form of energy generation. Energy storage can help us increase the upper limit of renewables in the total yearly mix though.
- svnt 4y ago
  If we could reduce our energy dependence on burning things to use cases where it actually makes sense to burn things (such as heating in extreme regions), we could basically consider the problem solved.
- telchar 4y ago
  There are different types of storage with different trade-offs. In my opinion we'll eventually see lower-efficiency but low cost-per-kWh storage like CO2->hydrocarbon storage used for longer-term seasonal or disaster-preparedness storage, while higher-efficiency higher cost-per-kWh or limited-capacity means like battery and pumped hydro will be primarily used for short term day/night storage. The cost of inefficiency is a function of energy stored, not storage capacity per se, so effectively its cost scales as (storage capacity) * (# of times charged/discharged). Therefore low efficiency isn't particularly expensive for long-term storage. So maybe we'll see gas turbines continue to provide power that ultimately is sourced from wind and solar via hydrocarbon conversion, but that's perfectly OK since it would be carbon neutral. The upshot is this is all a reason to be sanguine about solar and wind.
- konschubert 4y ago
  Power to Gas is the answer to that.
deleted 4y ago
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ThePhysicist 4y ago
Storage is a big, unsolved problem. As a quantitative resource on that I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" by the great (and unfortunately recently deceased) David MacKay [1], it's available for free. For a large country like the UK or Germany you need to increase electricity production with a slew rate of 6-8 GW/h in the morning, and decrease it with the same rate in the evening. Currently the only feasible storage form (in terms of quantity and regulation speed) for that is hydro, but most countries simply don't have enough mountain areas to make this work. 1: https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  It is certainly an unsolved problem but there are nice ideas floating around. I don't know about feasibility or scalability but some suggest to just elevate land with fluid pressure or they suggested air filled tanks that are drawn to the bottom of seas so that energy is generated from buoyancy. That latter approach allegedly can be scaled to multiple GWh. Sure, you need a deep see and installation is difficult but the latter approach has the advantage of not needing pumps, which are usually maintenance heavy.
  - throwoutway 4y ago
    Where can I read more about the air filled tanks being “scaled to multiple GWh”?
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Does storage matter short term? If my utility runs a gas generator, wind and solar allow it to run at some fraction of its capacity most of the time. Sure, overnight when there’s little wind, the gas might go full throttle. But that’s still a huge reduction in emissions if most of the time the grid is fully wind/solar.
  - snapplebobapple 4y ago
    Yes, storage matters quite a lot because electric grids burn out if supply doesn't equal demand constantly. You need the storage not only for overnight, you need it to store energy when wind and solar are overproducing relative to current demand and you need it to supply that stored energy when wind and solar are underproducing if you expect the grid to get rid of demand resources like coal and especially natural gas. another unmentioned cost of especially wind, but also to some extent solar is the huge transmission upgrade needed to support wind. It is a huge cost and it is never accounted for in the numbers when people are pushing for wind and solar (because it usually ruins the claim that wind and solar are cheaper over their lifecycle vs natural gas). They are also costs the consumer largely gets stuffed with via billing items outside of energy cost so it's kind of insidiously hidden from the consumer.
thepangolino 4y ago
>cost per kWh of solar and wind Are you looking at installed capacity or effective production?
xbar 4y ago
There are fairly simple economics of implementation that have prevented a complete transition over the past 20 years. It's not even close.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

poutine 4y ago

So given that it's so cheap you've converted your home to be 100% solar with battery storage and went off grid, right? Probably not. As you'd like to have power for those dark winter days where you don't see the sun for weeks on end and any viable battery storage will only last a day or two. Dont get me wrong, I love solar, I'm building a house with it. But outside of select niches there's no viable storage for solar or wind that deals with seasonal intermittency. Wind even has major long term intermittency issues. This just happened in Europe: https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-winds-mean-for-the-future-energy-grid-170135 https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

mdavis6890 4y ago

I think you're missing the fact that solar and wind, being quite mature and otherwise unencumbered, have been pretty well optimized to what physics and chemistry will allow. Further gains will be slow and incremental. Nuclear has been around quite a while as well, but is heavily encumbered by public sentiment, sub-optimal regulations, and knowledge atrophy. There is much more room for optimization before running into physical laws.

bradgessler 4y ago

Could somebody smarter than me comment on the feasibility of geothermal energy breakthroughs like gyrotron drilling? https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/why-this-fusion-tech-may-be-a-geothermal-energy-breakthrough https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/why-this-fusion-tech-may-be... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrotron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrotron

macspoofing 4y ago

>The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. So what? Or put another way, if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come? What do they (and every other country) know that you don't? The reality is you're not comparing apples to apples. Natural gas can serve as base load and power a modern economy. Solar/wind can't - doesn't matter if they are free. They can't.

rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
By the time any new nuclear reactor is designed, built and turned on, we'll certainly have many new/more ways to store energy for longer time (e.g new battery chemistry, hydrogen…). Here in France, half of our nuclear reactors are now off (and we had to turn on some old coal plants because of many unexpected technical issues). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-power-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p... The new EPR (Flamanville) continues to be delayed and the one in Finland that just went live has been shut down last week. Also, we may have to reduce the power of many of our plants that are built along rivers because we won't be able to cool them off during droughts. It's much easier and safer to install renewables now (as we just started with offshore wind) that bet on nuclear. It's also quite difficult to envision relying on Niger and Kazakhstan to supply uranium in the long term…
- melling 4y ago
  We’ve been BEGGING for more nuclear power for decades. The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/ukraine-war-europe-turns-to-coal-as-russia-squeezes-gas-supplies.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/ukraine-war-europe-turns-to-... Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc? We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
    > We’ve been BEGGING for more nuclear power for decades. Yes, it really made sense for De Gaulle to launch the French civil nuclear program in 1969 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_programme_nucl%C3%A9aire_civil_de_la_France#Le_tournant_industriel_(1969%E2%80%931983) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_programme_nucl%C3%... But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue. And by the time we hit such limits, we'll have many more long term storage options. I'm not against nuclear (it's fine) but let's not pretend we're still in The Glorious Thirty. >The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine. Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants. >Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc? We're not waiting https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2021/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2021/executive-summar... but we could do much, much more with renewables. >We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050. We're also talking about being carbon neutral and retiring all nuclear power plants in France by 2050, so… https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospectives/bilan-previsionnel-2050-futurs-energetiques https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...

mpweiher 4y ago

The cost or the price? The price of renewable energy is often very low, frequently even negative. This does not reflect renewables advantages, but their disadvantages: being available in abundance when the energy is not needed or wanted. Even the Energy Return on Investment is barely sufficient for solar, for example, so I have a hard time believing that the cost is actually competitive.

XorNot 4y ago
This is false[1]. PV produces 10 to 20 times as much energy as it takes to make, dropping all the time with improvements. [1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/busting-the-myth-on-energy-returns-renewables-to-beat-fossil-fuels-79489/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/busting-the-myth-on-energy-retur...
svnt 4y ago
No, where the price is negative it reflects the value of storage, which is basically missing from the market, but will not continue to be.

glitchc 4y ago

Solar and wind will always suffer from a storage problem. The key to modern power is not potential but throughput and consistency. Modern infrastructure needs x Watts delivered 24/7, shifting to y Watts during on-peak hours and z Watts during off-peak hours. Because of inconsistency, solar and wind will remain non-viable as a primary source of power.

pfdietz 4y ago
Making solar and wind consistent with various kinds of storage is likely going to be more economical than producing said energy with nuclear power plants. As for comparison to natural gas and such, CO2 taxes will be increased until those are phased out. Still economical? Taxes will be raised until they aren't. We have to leave most of the carbon in the ground.
- nightski 4y ago
  Economical is one thing, but what about sustainability? Isn't nuclear more sustainable in that it produces less overall waste?
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    Nuclear does create waste and that problem is not solved contrary to popular belief.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    The waste produced by a renewable energy system will be small (and of the same kind) compared to the waste produced by industrial society as a whole. If the renewable energy system isn't sustainable because of waste, then neither will be that industrial society, even if it were nuclear powered. To be fair, waste isn't really the issue with nuclear power either.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago

seibelj 4y ago

If renewable is so radically better then why did the City of Boston automatically increase everyone's electricity bills by 30%, requiring customers to opt-out? https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2021/01/08/eversource-constellation/ https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2021/01/08/eversource-co... I keep hearing its so much cheaper, but renewables keep requiring dark patterns, more money, more subsidies. If it was so much cheaper it would just win automatically because of the market.

rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
Did you know that electricity prices have exploded in France because EDF (French power company) have lowered their production from 360 to ~300 TWh year over year? That's due to technical problems with the nuclear plants (half of the fleet is still offline). https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/espaces-dedies/journalistes/tous-les-communiques-de-presse/edf-actualise-son-estimation-de-production-nucleaire-en-france-pour-2022 https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/espaces-dedies/journalistes/to...
thehappypm 4y ago
Boston doesn’t have a huge amount of renewable energy in our mix, sadly. Most of New England is fossil fuels. More renewables would make it easier to keep prices low.
- seibelj 4y ago
  But how does the narrative of “this is so impossibly cheaper and better” square with “we can’t build enough here so it’s 30% more expensive”. Either the region simply isn’t cost effective for solar / wind in which case we need nuclear to have any hope of clean energy, or renewables aren’t actually cheaper. If it was actually cheaper then it would just happen automatically.

andruby 4y ago

> Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage That will work for shifting day & night, but I don't see any feasible energy solutions for summer-winter shifting, or even to bridge weeks with limited sunshine (and/or wind). There are large populations living relatively far from the equator, which see huge differences in daylight during summer & winter. We should try to get as much energy from renewables like sun & wind, but I think we'll still need another form of energy generation. Energy storage can help us increase the upper limit of renewables in the total yearly mix though.

svnt 4y ago
If we could reduce our energy dependence on burning things to use cases where it actually makes sense to burn things (such as heating in extreme regions), we could basically consider the problem solved.
telchar 4y ago
There are different types of storage with different trade-offs. In my opinion we'll eventually see lower-efficiency but low cost-per-kWh storage like CO2->hydrocarbon storage used for longer-term seasonal or disaster-preparedness storage, while higher-efficiency higher cost-per-kWh or limited-capacity means like battery and pumped hydro will be primarily used for short term day/night storage. The cost of inefficiency is a function of energy stored, not storage capacity per se, so effectively its cost scales as (storage capacity) * (# of times charged/discharged). Therefore low efficiency isn't particularly expensive for long-term storage. So maybe we'll see gas turbines continue to provide power that ultimately is sourced from wind and solar via hydrocarbon conversion, but that's perfectly OK since it would be carbon neutral. The upshot is this is all a reason to be sanguine about solar and wind.
konschubert 4y ago
Power to Gas is the answer to that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ThePhysicist 4y ago

Storage is a big, unsolved problem. As a quantitative resource on that I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" by the great (and unfortunately recently deceased) David MacKay [1], it's available for free. For a large country like the UK or Germany you need to increase electricity production with a slew rate of 6-8 GW/h in the morning, and decrease it with the same rate in the evening. Currently the only feasible storage form (in terms of quantity and regulation speed) for that is hydro, but most countries simply don't have enough mountain areas to make this work. 1: https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/

raxxorraxor 4y ago
It is certainly an unsolved problem but there are nice ideas floating around. I don't know about feasibility or scalability but some suggest to just elevate land with fluid pressure or they suggested air filled tanks that are drawn to the bottom of seas so that energy is generated from buoyancy. That latter approach allegedly can be scaled to multiple GWh. Sure, you need a deep see and installation is difficult but the latter approach has the advantage of not needing pumps, which are usually maintenance heavy.
- throwoutway 4y ago
  Where can I read more about the air filled tanks being “scaled to multiple GWh”?
thehappypm 4y ago
Does storage matter short term? If my utility runs a gas generator, wind and solar allow it to run at some fraction of its capacity most of the time. Sure, overnight when there’s little wind, the gas might go full throttle. But that’s still a huge reduction in emissions if most of the time the grid is fully wind/solar.
- snapplebobapple 4y ago
  Yes, storage matters quite a lot because electric grids burn out if supply doesn't equal demand constantly. You need the storage not only for overnight, you need it to store energy when wind and solar are overproducing relative to current demand and you need it to supply that stored energy when wind and solar are underproducing if you expect the grid to get rid of demand resources like coal and especially natural gas. another unmentioned cost of especially wind, but also to some extent solar is the huge transmission upgrade needed to support wind. It is a huge cost and it is never accounted for in the numbers when people are pushing for wind and solar (because it usually ruins the claim that wind and solar are cheaper over their lifecycle vs natural gas). They are also costs the consumer largely gets stuffed with via billing items outside of energy cost so it's kind of insidiously hidden from the consumer.

thepangolino 4y ago

>cost per kWh of solar and wind Are you looking at installed capacity or effective production?

xbar 4y ago

There are fairly simple economics of implementation that have prevented a complete transition over the past 20 years. It's not even close.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]