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But solar and wind are no where near sustainable, or efficient. They are extremely fragile and have serious detrimental effects on their local environment. Nucl

But solar and wind are no where near sustainable, or efficient. They are extremely fragile and have serious detrimental effects on their local environment. Nuclear is the best option and gas is a massive improvement. The whole point of this article is that we are chasing a utopian ideal instead of actually fixing the problems. Once again, perfect is being the enemy of improvement.

jakewins 4y ago
The current state of Frances nuclear fleet would disagree with your position.
idiotsecant 4y ago
Solar and wind are just fine as generation sources, provided that you consider solar / wind + storage as the whole generation system and base your arguments and costs on that number. When you consider both together solar and wind are pretty expensive but have nice properties as far as carbon generation. Solar and wind by themselves are somewhere between mildly useful and actively very bad in terms of grid stability.
ZetaZero 4y ago
How are solar and wind not sustainable or efficient? We've just recently hit the 20% mark here in the US. I'm all for a smart blend of nuclear/wind/solar/etc to achieve clean energy https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/us-hits-a-record-20-of-electricity-from-wind-and-solar-in-april/ https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/us-hits-a-record-20-of-electr...
- TheBlight 4y ago
  How does solar work in the winter in northern latitudes?
  - totalview 4y ago
    Alaskan here; it doesn’t work so hot in the winter months. Even if they are kept clear by maintenance workers (not that hard or expensive to hire someone to clear snow from a panel) the sun’s azimuth is so low in the winter that there is hardly any energy produced.
    - fluoridation 4y ago
      Small correction: you mean altitude, not azimuth. Altitude is how far you need to tilt your head vertically to look at an object. Azimuth is the compass direction.
  - edent 4y ago
    Pretty good. You can download several years of data from my domestic panels at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/07/1800-days-of-minute-by-minute-solar-generation-data/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/07/1800-days-of-minute-by-minu... Sure, some days they'll be covered by snow. But in industrial systems that can easily be melted / brushed off. Obviously they don't generate as much in winter as in summer. But cool bright winter days are surprisingly plentiful.
  - Analemma_ 4y ago
    Very well. Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years, and we have the least sunlight and cheapest grid power of almost any place in the continental US.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      > Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years Can you show me the arithmetic for that? I understand rooftop solar to cost $20,000 - $25,000. Is your non-solar electric bill over 7-9 years really more expensive than that? Seems impossible.
      - marssaxman 4y ago
        I'm afraid I don't have the exact numbers anymore, but I determined that the 2700W solar panel array installed on my Seattle house for about $14k in 2013 (including a new breaker panel) had paid for itself before the end of 2019. The system worked really well. People often think that solar won't work well in Seattle because it's cloudy so often, but light still comes in through the overcast, and solar panels don't care which angle the photons hit them from. Meanwhile, lower ambient temperatures mean the panels work more efficiently.
        seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        Solar won’t work on new townhomes in Seattle with rooftop decks (since we don’t have to worry about snow so much?). There is simply no place to put them unless you give up your deck.
        marssaxman 4y ago
        Alas, indeed. I'd have installed solar panels on the townhouse I bought in 2020 if there were anywhere to put them, but there would only be room for 800 watts, at most - not really worth it.
      - jamie_ca 4y ago
        Victoria BC area here (practically next door), it wouldn't work for us. My annual hydro bill was $2400 in 2018 with baseboard heating, and $2050 for 16,500kWh in 2021 after we put in a heat pump. 3 bedroom detached. A recent article suggested a typical 4 kW system around here would cost $10k for 3261 kWh a year, or about $405 in credit at a blended rate. Another suggests an 11 kW system at $27,500, which could maybe hit 9000 kWh - about $1100 in credit. We do have net metering with BC Hydro so it'll just wash through, but that's still a 25 year payback horizon.
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    Most of the planet is not "winter in northern latitudes" Indeed, most of the world is rather sunny and "not" located in "northern latitudes"
    - throwaway5752 4y ago
      Most of the planet, most of the people are not in the Arctic. Brief search indicates 4 million, globally. You could have people in the Arctic powering their homes with peat or lignite and it wouldn't be a huge problem. Happily NG is better for this, and the rest of the world has fewer problems with solar seasonality.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  They're not efficient at turning sunlight into power - somewhere around 20% depending on the technology, which continues to improve albeit slowly. This efficiency goes down about 2.5% in the first year and another [edit](0.5%-1%) in each subsequent year [1]. These numbers are all at 25C, which is significantly lower than a black solar panel is going to be out in the sun - which reduces its efficiency a further 10-25%. [2] So typical 20% efficiency solar panel at 45C in year 2 is already starting at 17.5% efficiency, and by year 10 is down to just [edit](15%) efficiency. And then while lower temperatures do improve efficiency, they tend to happen in higher latitudes which get less sunlight to begin with. 60% of Ontario's power (about half of Canada by population) comes from just 3 nuclear plants (Bruce, Darlington and Pickering). Replacing them with solar panels would cover an area the size of the entire greater Toronto area in silicon and plastic, give or take. [3] And it would need to be replaced every 20 years. Solar and wind play a role, but nuclear does too. Edit: Corrected degradation amount per dpierce9 [1] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Solar_cell_efficiency https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Solar_cell_efficienc... [2] https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-solar-panels https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-sola... [3] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-ontario.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
  - dpierce9 4y ago
    This is some bad reasoning. Solar efficiency is very different from say engine efficiency. A very efficient combustion engine is 35% efficient meaning it wastes 65% of the energy in the input fuel. Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs. Rooftop solar turns 20% of something that would have been 100% wasted into high grade energy. A very efficient coal power plant is 45% efficient before transmission losses. That means more than half the energy in the coal is wasted. Solar wastes nothing. Your numbers on solar panel degradation are also incorrect based on my experience in the industry. They do degrade but not at that at 7+% per year for ten years. Edit: corrected degradation amount
    - arcticbull 4y ago
thomasmg 4y ago
Solar + wind are actually fixing problems. They are not perfect, but as you said, perfect is the enemy of improvement. Solar + wind are cheaper than almost anything else, specially nuclear. They have much less detrimental effects to the local environment than fossile fuels (specially coal). Yes, they are not guaranteed, so you need a grid (which you have), and some batteries (for short-term storage; like batteries of electric cars) + pumped storage (for medium term storage) + maybe some other storage like hydrogen / ammonia. Nuclear is way too expensive, specially if you account for risks of disasters (no insurance company will insure them, so the risk is on the population).
- ouid 4y ago
  >Nuclear is way too expensive, specially if you account for risks of disasters (no insurance company will insure them, so the risk is on the population). This is CATO propaganda. All power generation is subsidized by our incredibly relaxed attitude towards externalities in general. Of the reliable sources of energy, nuclear is safest and the least subsidized.
  - jakewins 4y ago
    > Of the reliable sources of energy, nuclear is safest and the least subsidized. How do you evaluate this? Do you have a summary of estimated subsidies per MWh for different generators? My understanding is the same as the comment you are responding to, that nuclear subsidies are significant, ~6-10USD/MWh on insurance alone. I would be happy to be wrong on this. On a good day we pay ~EUR25/MWh for nuke electricity in EU day-ahead markets, as a scale point; 8EUR/MWh is a significant subsidy.
    - ouid 4y ago
      First, I want to make it clear that my claims are about relative subsidy, rather than absolute subsidy. Second, the nuclear insurance subsidy is not really a subsidy, since the taxpayer is only on the hook in the case of an accident, which is not only extraordinarily unlikely, but also mitigated many times over. The calculation of the implicit subsidy to nuclear power comes from highly motivated speculative accounting by CATO, whom you should generally think of as playing the role of a law firm working for oil and gas and against alternative forms of energy production. There are a range of values which could be assigned to the "implicit subsidy of nuclear insurance", and the opposition lawyer has obviously chosen the absolute highest end of that range. It is difficult enough to calculate the probability of a nuclear reactor meltdown, but we have observational evidence that it is at least many dozens of times less likely than say, a hurricane, and each of those is generally more costly than even the worst nuclear disaster in history. The damage wrought by the tsunami at fukushima, for instance, was many times greater than the damage wrought by the meltdown at fukushima. There is a private component to nuclear insurance, as well, paid by the operators, which totals, across all nuclear plants, approximately 10 times the total damages incurred by the three mile island incident every year. It is extremely unlikely that a nuclear accident will ever exceed these damages. This is in stark contrast to other historical insurance requirements. As a case study, I recommend learning about the early history of oil spills starting with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Torrey_Canyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Torrey_Canyon and the subsequent founding of TOVALOP in 1968. Up until that point, oil transport insurance was implicitly subsidized by the nature of a limited liability corporation. Note that this was not an artefact of the times, since insurance requirements for the nuclear industry were implemented by congress a decade earlier, in 1957. On the other hand, we subsidize coal and natural gas implicitly by not charging them for the use of their exhaust channels and also not structurally supporting torts for worse health outcomes with no easily identified proximate cause. For a concrete example, I think we have a pretty good idea of the number of additional hurricanes per year we can expect as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, but we do not require oil and gas to pay for marginal additional hurricane insurance, despite that doing demonstrably more damage than even very bad nuclear meltdowns. The unsuitability of tort as an avenue of collecting externalities is an enormous implicit subsidy for the fossil fuel industry.
sct202 4y ago
Nuclear is an option but it's not a fast option. The newest reactor designs from Westinghouse and EPR have taken 9 years at the fastest to complete in China and much longer everywhere else. You can say the regulations or NIMBYs are slowing down construction, but those aren't an issue in China.
- ouid 4y ago
  I know that China has a rampant corruption problem, and very poor safety track records, but Westinghouse's reputation is very much on the line here, and not even China can afford to invoke the stigma of a nuclear accident. You can't deny a meltdown the way that you can deny, say, a virus leaked from a lab.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jakewins 4y ago

The current state of Frances nuclear fleet would disagree with your position.

idiotsecant 4y ago

Solar and wind are just fine as generation sources, provided that you consider solar / wind + storage as the whole generation system and base your arguments and costs on that number. When you consider both together solar and wind are pretty expensive but have nice properties as far as carbon generation. Solar and wind by themselves are somewhere between mildly useful and actively very bad in terms of grid stability.

ZetaZero 4y ago

How are solar and wind not sustainable or efficient? We've just recently hit the 20% mark here in the US. I'm all for a smart blend of nuclear/wind/solar/etc to achieve clean energy https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/us-hits-a-record-20-of-electricity-from-wind-and-solar-in-april/ https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/us-hits-a-record-20-of-electr...

TheBlight 4y ago
How does solar work in the winter in northern latitudes?
- totalview 4y ago
  Alaskan here; it doesn’t work so hot in the winter months. Even if they are kept clear by maintenance workers (not that hard or expensive to hire someone to clear snow from a panel) the sun’s azimuth is so low in the winter that there is hardly any energy produced.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    Small correction: you mean altitude, not azimuth. Altitude is how far you need to tilt your head vertically to look at an object. Azimuth is the compass direction.
- edent 4y ago
  Pretty good. You can download several years of data from my domestic panels at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/07/1800-days-of-minute-by-minute-solar-generation-data/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/07/1800-days-of-minute-by-minu... Sure, some days they'll be covered by snow. But in industrial systems that can easily be melted / brushed off. Obviously they don't generate as much in winter as in summer. But cool bright winter days are surprisingly plentiful.
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  Very well. Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years, and we have the least sunlight and cheapest grid power of almost any place in the continental US.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years Can you show me the arithmetic for that? I understand rooftop solar to cost $20,000 - $25,000. Is your non-solar electric bill over 7-9 years really more expensive than that? Seems impossible.
    - marssaxman 4y ago
      I'm afraid I don't have the exact numbers anymore, but I determined that the 2700W solar panel array installed on my Seattle house for about $14k in 2013 (including a new breaker panel) had paid for itself before the end of 2019. The system worked really well. People often think that solar won't work well in Seattle because it's cloudy so often, but light still comes in through the overcast, and solar panels don't care which angle the photons hit them from. Meanwhile, lower ambient temperatures mean the panels work more efficiently.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        Solar won’t work on new townhomes in Seattle with rooftop decks (since we don’t have to worry about snow so much?). There is simply no place to put them unless you give up your deck.
        marssaxman 4y ago
        Alas, indeed. I'd have installed solar panels on the townhouse I bought in 2020 if there were anywhere to put them, but there would only be room for 800 watts, at most - not really worth it.
    - jamie_ca 4y ago
      Victoria BC area here (practically next door), it wouldn't work for us. My annual hydro bill was $2400 in 2018 with baseboard heating, and $2050 for 16,500kWh in 2021 after we put in a heat pump. 3 bedroom detached. A recent article suggested a typical 4 kW system around here would cost $10k for 3261 kWh a year, or about $405 in credit at a blended rate. Another suggests an 11 kW system at $27,500, which could maybe hit 9000 kWh - about $1100 in credit. We do have net metering with BC Hydro so it'll just wash through, but that's still a 25 year payback horizon.
- CyanBird 4y ago
  Most of the planet is not "winter in northern latitudes" Indeed, most of the world is rather sunny and "not" located in "northern latitudes"
  - throwaway5752 4y ago
    Most of the planet, most of the people are not in the Arctic. Brief search indicates 4 million, globally. You could have people in the Arctic powering their homes with peat or lignite and it wouldn't be a huge problem. Happily NG is better for this, and the rest of the world has fewer problems with solar seasonality.
arcticbull 4y ago
They're not efficient at turning sunlight into power - somewhere around 20% depending on the technology, which continues to improve albeit slowly. This efficiency goes down about 2.5% in the first year and another [edit](0.5%-1%) in each subsequent year [1]. These numbers are all at 25C, which is significantly lower than a black solar panel is going to be out in the sun - which reduces its efficiency a further 10-25%. [2] So typical 20% efficiency solar panel at 45C in year 2 is already starting at 17.5% efficiency, and by year 10 is down to just [edit](15%) efficiency. And then while lower temperatures do improve efficiency, they tend to happen in higher latitudes which get less sunlight to begin with. 60% of Ontario's power (about half of Canada by population) comes from just 3 nuclear plants (Bruce, Darlington and Pickering). Replacing them with solar panels would cover an area the size of the entire greater Toronto area in silicon and plastic, give or take. [3] And it would need to be replaced every 20 years. Solar and wind play a role, but nuclear does too. Edit: Corrected degradation amount per dpierce9 [1] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Solar_cell_efficiency https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Solar_cell_efficienc... [2] https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-solar-panels https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-sola... [3] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-ontario.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
- dpierce9 4y ago
  This is some bad reasoning. Solar efficiency is very different from say engine efficiency. A very efficient combustion engine is 35% efficient meaning it wastes 65% of the energy in the input fuel. Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs. Rooftop solar turns 20% of something that would have been 100% wasted into high grade energy. A very efficient coal power plant is 45% efficient before transmission losses. That means more than half the energy in the coal is wasted. Solar wastes nothing. Your numbers on solar panel degradation are also incorrect based on my experience in the industry. They do degrade but not at that at 7+% per year for ten years. Edit: corrected degradation amount
  - arcticbull 4y ago

thomasmg 4y ago

Solar + wind are actually fixing problems. They are not perfect, but as you said, perfect is the enemy of improvement. Solar + wind are cheaper than almost anything else, specially nuclear. They have much less detrimental effects to the local environment than fossile fuels (specially coal). Yes, they are not guaranteed, so you need a grid (which you have), and some batteries (for short-term storage; like batteries of electric cars) + pumped storage (for medium term storage) + maybe some other storage like hydrogen / ammonia. Nuclear is way too expensive, specially if you account for risks of disasters (no insurance company will insure them, so the risk is on the population).

ouid 4y ago
>Nuclear is way too expensive, specially if you account for risks of disasters (no insurance company will insure them, so the risk is on the population). This is CATO propaganda. All power generation is subsidized by our incredibly relaxed attitude towards externalities in general. Of the reliable sources of energy, nuclear is safest and the least subsidized.
- jakewins 4y ago
  > Of the reliable sources of energy, nuclear is safest and the least subsidized. How do you evaluate this? Do you have a summary of estimated subsidies per MWh for different generators? My understanding is the same as the comment you are responding to, that nuclear subsidies are significant, ~6-10USD/MWh on insurance alone. I would be happy to be wrong on this. On a good day we pay ~EUR25/MWh for nuke electricity in EU day-ahead markets, as a scale point; 8EUR/MWh is a significant subsidy.
  - ouid 4y ago
    First, I want to make it clear that my claims are about relative subsidy, rather than absolute subsidy. Second, the nuclear insurance subsidy is not really a subsidy, since the taxpayer is only on the hook in the case of an accident, which is not only extraordinarily unlikely, but also mitigated many times over. The calculation of the implicit subsidy to nuclear power comes from highly motivated speculative accounting by CATO, whom you should generally think of as playing the role of a law firm working for oil and gas and against alternative forms of energy production. There are a range of values which could be assigned to the "implicit subsidy of nuclear insurance", and the opposition lawyer has obviously chosen the absolute highest end of that range. It is difficult enough to calculate the probability of a nuclear reactor meltdown, but we have observational evidence that it is at least many dozens of times less likely than say, a hurricane, and each of those is generally more costly than even the worst nuclear disaster in history. The damage wrought by the tsunami at fukushima, for instance, was many times greater than the damage wrought by the meltdown at fukushima. There is a private component to nuclear insurance, as well, paid by the operators, which totals, across all nuclear plants, approximately 10 times the total damages incurred by the three mile island incident every year. It is extremely unlikely that a nuclear accident will ever exceed these damages. This is in stark contrast to other historical insurance requirements. As a case study, I recommend learning about the early history of oil spills starting with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Torrey_Canyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Torrey_Canyon and the subsequent founding of TOVALOP in 1968. Up until that point, oil transport insurance was implicitly subsidized by the nature of a limited liability corporation. Note that this was not an artefact of the times, since insurance requirements for the nuclear industry were implemented by congress a decade earlier, in 1957. On the other hand, we subsidize coal and natural gas implicitly by not charging them for the use of their exhaust channels and also not structurally supporting torts for worse health outcomes with no easily identified proximate cause. For a concrete example, I think we have a pretty good idea of the number of additional hurricanes per year we can expect as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, but we do not require oil and gas to pay for marginal additional hurricane insurance, despite that doing demonstrably more damage than even very bad nuclear meltdowns. The unsuitability of tort as an avenue of collecting externalities is an enormous implicit subsidy for the fossil fuel industry.

sct202 4y ago

Nuclear is an option but it's not a fast option. The newest reactor designs from Westinghouse and EPR have taken 9 years at the fastest to complete in China and much longer everywhere else. You can say the regulations or NIMBYs are slowing down construction, but those aren't an issue in China.

ouid 4y ago
I know that China has a rampant corruption problem, and very poor safety track records, but Westinghouse's reputation is very much on the line here, and not even China can afford to invoke the stigma of a nuclear accident. You can't deny a meltdown the way that you can deny, say, a virus leaked from a lab.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]