5 ms·

> Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so pity we don't build it better. In what way? For the price that they actually cost after construc

> Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so pity we don't build it better. In what way? For the price that they actually cost after construction you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar, and a CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over. All so you can make your energy infrastructure beholden to one fuel supplier where your country is not allowed to produce any yourself. Then you have to find somewhere to put the waste for millenia. And that only if you're on the short list of countries that the US, China, or France will even sell fuel to.

ztratar 4y ago
Can you show any sources for "same price = double the capacity in <renewable> + CAES storage"? That's a lofty claim and I have heard CAES storage at economic scales is still unsolved, else we'd see a rocketship company in the space. If you do know of a stealthy rocketship here, who is it?
- usrusr 4y ago
  The reason you don't see "rocketship" investment is because the problem isn't hard enough, no matter how well you solve it you wouldn't be anywhere close to virtual monopoly. But despite that, hydrostor.ca got an investment of a quarter billion earlier this year, and they already started projects for A-CAES facilities in the GWh range (comparable to smaller pumped hydro) when their funding was less than a tenth of that (I suppose actual projects wouldn't be included in that funding, I think they see themselves as a project specialist, not as an owner/operator even if some/most/all current projects seem to be subsidiaries, perhaps a bit like spacex/starlink if you like space analogies).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
weberer 4y ago
You know Finland gets like 2 hours of sunlight in the winter. Its not a particularly windy place either.
- Retric 4y ago
  Finland’s low population density means the amount of economically viable wind is more than enough to meet annual power demand. Production increased from 2.3 TWH in 2015 to 7.8 TWH in 2020, and capacity keeps increasing jumping from 2.3GW in 2020 to 3.3GW in 2021. And that recent growth has been without subsides.
  - nixass 4y ago
    It's so low density people can even blow from their mouth to wind turbine to be self sustainable. You can't just install a turbine and call it solved.
    - Retric 4y ago
      The point was the resource is available and cheaper than any alternative, not that they are actually going to say replace everything else. Wind really scales best with hydro as you only get so much rain per year, but you have a great deal of flexibility when you release it. As Finland has a great deal of hydro they can make use of plenty of wind.
- nixass 4y ago
  Heeeeyy, don't make reasonable judgment. This is solar and wind we're talking about, the solution to every climate problem. Even if there's no wind or no sunlight
- PinguTS 4y ago
  And in Finland you can replace sun and wind by hydro.
belorn 4y ago
The price difference between wind energy when the supply is high and nuclear when the supply is low is well over 10 times here in northern Europe. If I can choose the time and place for when to do the trade, I would make a huge profit trading 2 units of energy and getting 1 unit back later at my specified time and place. The top price is around 40cent per kwh when the wind is still and demand is at its peak, compared to ~3c kwh when the wind is at the maximum production and demand is at the lowest. paying 6c worth of wind power and getting 40c when I specific it would be massive profit. Green hydrogen if burned for energy would cost about 3-10 times that of nuclear per kwh. In the future that cost might go down but for now that is a bit (which is why no one are producing green hydrogen in order to produce energy). Again, if you are willing to sell green hydrogen for the price of nuclear, eating the loss, then sign me up. I will happy buy that and sell it for minimum 3x of what I pay for it since there are plenty of industries that want energy when demand is high and supply is low. The cost of energy is not determined by how much it cost to produce. It is determined by the time and place it is delivered. 1 unit of energy produced today is not fungible for 1 unit of energy produced tomorrow. Only energy produced at the same time can be evaluated based on how much they cost to produce.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  The fact that there is a 10x price arbitrage available in the market is proof that storage is not economically possible currently.
  - bshipp 4y ago
    Isn't it the opposite? A 10x variation would be an incentive to invest in storage systems that capture energy at night and release it during the day. Think a high-altitude reservoir where water is pumped up all night and then released all day when it's required.
    - fallingknife 4y ago
      Yes, the fact that such a strong incentive exists, and yet it hasn't been done, shows that cost is so much that even a 10x price difference isn't enough to pay for it.
p_l 4y ago
Using rather bullish on wind+solar+storage https://model.energy https://model.energy, to get stable baseline we need overbuilding of 10x the output power, so 2x + storage gets us nowhere, at least for Polish weather and sunlight data.
throw0101a 4y ago
> you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar And the capacity factor of wind is ~33%, which means you need ~3 times as much wind as nuclear. The capacity factor of solar is ~25%, so you need four times as much: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States
- ezzaf 4y ago
  You've only quoted half of what you're replying to. You can get the solar, and the wind, and the storage, all for less than the cost of building nuclear once accounting for cost overruns. It's also with noting that nuclear has a higher capacity factor, but it's not 100%.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  And that's priced into the LCOE which is a tiny fraction of nuclear -- especially once you factor in the costs of security and infrastructure, and the public being left holding the ball during decomissioning and waste storage, and of being the USA's and the next Kochs' patsy because now your entire energy infrastructure depends on them for fuel. And then LCOE isn't even the right metric, because what matters is the CO2 produced by 2040, not the CO2 produced between 2040 and 2100 as we have to solve this now, or the world will be too unstable to finish a nuc.ear reactor, let alone run one until decomissioning. This makes the LCOE of renewables a little higher, but for nuclear it is between 10x and infinity times the cost per unit carbon.
KptMarchewa 4y ago
>CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over None of this have ever happened beyond "research" projects at extremely small scale. You can't take nuclear "actually cost after construction" - which in some countries like Korea or China is maybe 20% more than original estimations - and apply assumption that anything of this is actually able to scale, not even talking about cost of this.
kennend3 4y ago
> and double the capacity in solar, a you are aware that you are posting on an article about Ontario and Saskatchewan, correct? How about you go review the tables showing how little solar energy these provinces receive in the winter? So when we need energy to heat our homes and power our lights, our solar output is also greatly reduced? Solar may be great further south, where it is sunny all year round, but in the north we need reliable power all year long, including our cold and dark winters. It doesn't get cold and snow here for no reason, it is caused by the reduction in solar energy we receive.
- bshipp 4y ago
  this will be the case when we transition from natural gas for heating. as it currently stands, electrical demand--with the exception of Quebec--generally is dramatically lower in the winter than the summer.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  So the best place in canada for solar and one of the better places. Where capacity factor in mid winter is still above 10% and cost per installed watt of output capacity during mid winter is less than the present value of the sticker cost of this nuclear project (excluding running costs and overruns and associated infrastructure and security costs) which won't even be running during the most important decade for stopping climate change? That Saskatchewan?

ztratar 4y ago

Can you show any sources for "same price = double the capacity in <renewable> + CAES storage"? That's a lofty claim and I have heard CAES storage at economic scales is still unsolved, else we'd see a rocketship company in the space. If you do know of a stealthy rocketship here, who is it?

usrusr 4y ago
The reason you don't see "rocketship" investment is because the problem isn't hard enough, no matter how well you solve it you wouldn't be anywhere close to virtual monopoly. But despite that, hydrostor.ca got an investment of a quarter billion earlier this year, and they already started projects for A-CAES facilities in the GWh range (comparable to smaller pumped hydro) when their funding was less than a tenth of that (I suppose actual projects wouldn't be included in that funding, I think they see themselves as a project specialist, not as an owner/operator even if some/most/all current projects seem to be subsidiaries, perhaps a bit like spacex/starlink if you like space analogies).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

weberer 4y ago

You know Finland gets like 2 hours of sunlight in the winter. Its not a particularly windy place either.

Retric 4y ago
Finland’s low population density means the amount of economically viable wind is more than enough to meet annual power demand. Production increased from 2.3 TWH in 2015 to 7.8 TWH in 2020, and capacity keeps increasing jumping from 2.3GW in 2020 to 3.3GW in 2021. And that recent growth has been without subsides.
- nixass 4y ago
  It's so low density people can even blow from their mouth to wind turbine to be self sustainable. You can't just install a turbine and call it solved.
  - Retric 4y ago
    The point was the resource is available and cheaper than any alternative, not that they are actually going to say replace everything else. Wind really scales best with hydro as you only get so much rain per year, but you have a great deal of flexibility when you release it. As Finland has a great deal of hydro they can make use of plenty of wind.
nixass 4y ago
Heeeeyy, don't make reasonable judgment. This is solar and wind we're talking about, the solution to every climate problem. Even if there's no wind or no sunlight
PinguTS 4y ago
And in Finland you can replace sun and wind by hydro.

belorn 4y ago

The price difference between wind energy when the supply is high and nuclear when the supply is low is well over 10 times here in northern Europe. If I can choose the time and place for when to do the trade, I would make a huge profit trading 2 units of energy and getting 1 unit back later at my specified time and place. The top price is around 40cent per kwh when the wind is still and demand is at its peak, compared to ~3c kwh when the wind is at the maximum production and demand is at the lowest. paying 6c worth of wind power and getting 40c when I specific it would be massive profit. Green hydrogen if burned for energy would cost about 3-10 times that of nuclear per kwh. In the future that cost might go down but for now that is a bit (which is why no one are producing green hydrogen in order to produce energy). Again, if you are willing to sell green hydrogen for the price of nuclear, eating the loss, then sign me up. I will happy buy that and sell it for minimum 3x of what I pay for it since there are plenty of industries that want energy when demand is high and supply is low. The cost of energy is not determined by how much it cost to produce. It is determined by the time and place it is delivered. 1 unit of energy produced today is not fungible for 1 unit of energy produced tomorrow. Only energy produced at the same time can be evaluated based on how much they cost to produce.

fallingknife 4y ago
The fact that there is a 10x price arbitrage available in the market is proof that storage is not economically possible currently.
- bshipp 4y ago
  Isn't it the opposite? A 10x variation would be an incentive to invest in storage systems that capture energy at night and release it during the day. Think a high-altitude reservoir where water is pumped up all night and then released all day when it's required.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    Yes, the fact that such a strong incentive exists, and yet it hasn't been done, shows that cost is so much that even a 10x price difference isn't enough to pay for it.

p_l 4y ago

Using rather bullish on wind+solar+storage https://model.energy https://model.energy, to get stable baseline we need overbuilding of 10x the output power, so 2x + storage gets us nowhere, at least for Polish weather and sunlight data.

throw0101a 4y ago

> you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar And the capacity factor of wind is ~33%, which means you need ~3 times as much wind as nuclear. The capacity factor of solar is ~25%, so you need four times as much: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States

ezzaf 4y ago
You've only quoted half of what you're replying to. You can get the solar, and the wind, and the storage, all for less than the cost of building nuclear once accounting for cost overruns. It's also with noting that nuclear has a higher capacity factor, but it's not 100%.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Schroedingersat 4y ago
And that's priced into the LCOE which is a tiny fraction of nuclear -- especially once you factor in the costs of security and infrastructure, and the public being left holding the ball during decomissioning and waste storage, and of being the USA's and the next Kochs' patsy because now your entire energy infrastructure depends on them for fuel. And then LCOE isn't even the right metric, because what matters is the CO2 produced by 2040, not the CO2 produced between 2040 and 2100 as we have to solve this now, or the world will be too unstable to finish a nuc.ear reactor, let alone run one until decomissioning. This makes the LCOE of renewables a little higher, but for nuclear it is between 10x and infinity times the cost per unit carbon.

KptMarchewa 4y ago

>CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over None of this have ever happened beyond "research" projects at extremely small scale. You can't take nuclear "actually cost after construction" - which in some countries like Korea or China is maybe 20% more than original estimations - and apply assumption that anything of this is actually able to scale, not even talking about cost of this.

kennend3 4y ago

> and double the capacity in solar, a you are aware that you are posting on an article about Ontario and Saskatchewan, correct? How about you go review the tables showing how little solar energy these provinces receive in the winter? So when we need energy to heat our homes and power our lights, our solar output is also greatly reduced? Solar may be great further south, where it is sunny all year round, but in the north we need reliable power all year long, including our cold and dark winters. It doesn't get cold and snow here for no reason, it is caused by the reduction in solar energy we receive.

bshipp 4y ago
this will be the case when we transition from natural gas for heating. as it currently stands, electrical demand--with the exception of Quebec--generally is dramatically lower in the winter than the summer.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
So the best place in canada for solar and one of the better places. Where capacity factor in mid winter is still above 10% and cost per installed watt of output capacity during mid winter is less than the present value of the sticker cost of this nuclear project (excluding running costs and overruns and associated infrastructure and security costs) which won't even be running during the most important decade for stopping climate change? That Saskatchewan?