6 ms·

Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison. Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a coun

Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison. Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a country. In the UK last year for example we had very little wind, so we had to ramp up our gas power output to make up for our shortages in renewables. We burned through much of our gas reserves before the Ukraine war started, because of Renewable power unreliability. Fission is the replacement for that baseline role that hydrocarbons currently fill, not the unpredictable-but-clean role that renewables fill. The ideal future has both, with renewables producing as much power as possible and fission running on low capacity and ready to ramp up when renewables fall short.

cycomanic 4y ago
Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers. Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). Guess who was picking up the shortfall... German renewables and gas. Finally, cost is absolutely the main measure: if the cost of nuclear is 3x wind/solar (and the cost of solar is falling exponentially) and you want to replace fossil fuels as quickly as possible the obvious way is to build renewables, you can overbuild 300% at the same cost. At that point you're close to being able to run your grid if you are sufficiently geographically distributed (even without batteries). Moreover in 10 years when your nuclear plant is finished building the price differential is like >5x due to the cost decreases.
- toxik 4y ago
  Calling it a myth doesn’t make it a myth. Power companies have been saying exactly this for years: they need PLANNABLE power generation. Building 3x solar or wind plants means 3x volatility.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Building 3x renewables in widely distributed places radically reduces volatility. Wind is always blowing somewhere. Sun is always out somewhere. Storage is transportable.
    - ascar 4y ago
      > Building 3x renewables in widely distributed places radically reduces volatility. Is that actually true? Serious question. That sounds like a claim that seems so obvious, but won't hold up to the degree you might think in reality. Just one scenario I'm thinking of are giant storms that have clouds spanning multiple countries. And in that storm scenario even wind power shuts down to prevent damage.
      - cinntaile 4y ago
        https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2015.12.318 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2015.12.318 has tried to analyze this for the EU. I'm not convinced that daily data provides the necessary granularity though, but more detailed data for the mentioned time span probably doesn't exist. I would try to find some more articles and check if there is a consensus.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Such giant storms are rare, and short-lived. A few days' storage outlasts them.
        ascar 4y ago
        A few days of storage is a lot though isn't it?
        ncmncm 4y ago
        How much NG do utilities stockpile? A few days' would be a lot of batteries, but you don't use batteries for that. A few days' pumped hydro, e.g., is not much at all.
- ascar 4y ago
  > So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers. One thing I don't understand here is the problem with overproduction. If we actually have excess electricity (as in not needed as electricity later) can't we dynamically use that for active carbon capturing? The efficiency of that process isn't even that important then as the main goal is to remove carbon from the atmosphere with carbon free energy. Having carbon free overproduction sounds like a good thing to me. It's the occasional underproduction that's hard to handle.
  - tuatoru 4y ago
    See Casey Handmer[1]. We are underproducing solar PV by at least 4.8 TW (nameplate) per year: we're only producing about 4% of what we need. There is no such thing as overproduction, there are only manufacturing bottlenecks in batteries, electrolyzers, and reverse osmosis water plants. 1. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-need-a-lot-of-solar-panels/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...
- tuatoru 4y ago
  > It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. I'd just like to point out that the US Navy has an excellent track record running nuclear reactors that ramp up to full and down to zero rapidly, in submarines. The US Navy does not have quite the same financial constraints as commercial land-based power, but constraints still exist. I fully agree that solar PV and wind, especially PV, are much more atttractive to investors because you can be earning cashflow from your first MW of capacity while you're installing the second (which takes weeks (or days!) instead of years), and you can iterate and scale this all the way to 10 TW or more of capacity, as the demand requires.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). It's important to use the real deal-breaking flaws when pointing these things out. The relevant figure is availability because capacity also includes energy that could be produced but was not due to having nowhere to put it. Availability is 70-80% in France and UK and 80-90% in the US. But due to the long timeline of refuelling cycles you still need a full baseload backup. So nuclear needs long term storage or other uncorrelated backup more than renewables if anything. The upside is it's easy to have two uncorrelated nuclear plants, so overprovisioning by 30% is sufficient. That makes something that is already more expensive than solar with the same overprovisioned net capacity factor, and a green hydrogen plant with capacity sufficient to cover, and full gas backup infrastructure even more expensive though. Probably not enough to cover the costs of hydrogen storage yet or someone would be doing it (ignoring massive nuclear subsidies), but prices of batteries, solar panels, and electrolyzers are dropping rapidly. Hydrogen storage or green methane production only needs to become marginally cheaper to make it start happening even sans subsidies.

cycomanic 4y ago

Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers. Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). Guess who was picking up the shortfall... German renewables and gas. Finally, cost is absolutely the main measure: if the cost of nuclear is 3x wind/solar (and the cost of solar is falling exponentially) and you want to replace fossil fuels as quickly as possible the obvious way is to build renewables, you can overbuild 300% at the same cost. At that point you're close to being able to run your grid if you are sufficiently geographically distributed (even without batteries). Moreover in 10 years when your nuclear plant is finished building the price differential is like >5x due to the cost decreases.

toxik 4y ago
Calling it a myth doesn’t make it a myth. Power companies have been saying exactly this for years: they need PLANNABLE power generation. Building 3x solar or wind plants means 3x volatility.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Building 3x renewables in widely distributed places radically reduces volatility. Wind is always blowing somewhere. Sun is always out somewhere. Storage is transportable.
  - ascar 4y ago
    > Building 3x renewables in widely distributed places radically reduces volatility. Is that actually true? Serious question. That sounds like a claim that seems so obvious, but won't hold up to the degree you might think in reality. Just one scenario I'm thinking of are giant storms that have clouds spanning multiple countries. And in that storm scenario even wind power shuts down to prevent damage.
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2015.12.318 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2015.12.318 has tried to analyze this for the EU. I'm not convinced that daily data provides the necessary granularity though, but more detailed data for the mentioned time span probably doesn't exist. I would try to find some more articles and check if there is a consensus.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Such giant storms are rare, and short-lived. A few days' storage outlasts them.
      - ascar 4y ago
        A few days of storage is a lot though isn't it?
        ncmncm 4y ago
        How much NG do utilities stockpile? A few days' would be a lot of batteries, but you don't use batteries for that. A few days' pumped hydro, e.g., is not much at all.
ascar 4y ago
> So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers. One thing I don't understand here is the problem with overproduction. If we actually have excess electricity (as in not needed as electricity later) can't we dynamically use that for active carbon capturing? The efficiency of that process isn't even that important then as the main goal is to remove carbon from the atmosphere with carbon free energy. Having carbon free overproduction sounds like a good thing to me. It's the occasional underproduction that's hard to handle.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  See Casey Handmer[1]. We are underproducing solar PV by at least 4.8 TW (nameplate) per year: we're only producing about 4% of what we need. There is no such thing as overproduction, there are only manufacturing bottlenecks in batteries, electrolyzers, and reverse osmosis water plants. 1. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-need-a-lot-of-solar-panels/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...
tuatoru 4y ago
> It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. I'd just like to point out that the US Navy has an excellent track record running nuclear reactors that ramp up to full and down to zero rapidly, in submarines. The US Navy does not have quite the same financial constraints as commercial land-based power, but constraints still exist. I fully agree that solar PV and wind, especially PV, are much more atttractive to investors because you can be earning cashflow from your first MW of capacity while you're installing the second (which takes weeks (or days!) instead of years), and you can iterate and scale this all the way to 10 TW or more of capacity, as the demand requires.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). It's important to use the real deal-breaking flaws when pointing these things out. The relevant figure is availability because capacity also includes energy that could be produced but was not due to having nowhere to put it. Availability is 70-80% in France and UK and 80-90% in the US. But due to the long timeline of refuelling cycles you still need a full baseload backup. So nuclear needs long term storage or other uncorrelated backup more than renewables if anything. The upside is it's easy to have two uncorrelated nuclear plants, so overprovisioning by 30% is sufficient. That makes something that is already more expensive than solar with the same overprovisioned net capacity factor, and a green hydrogen plant with capacity sufficient to cover, and full gas backup infrastructure even more expensive though. Probably not enough to cover the costs of hydrogen storage yet or someone would be doing it (ignoring massive nuclear subsidies), but prices of batteries, solar panels, and electrolyzers are dropping rapidly. Hydrogen storage or green methane production only needs to become marginally cheaper to make it start happening even sans subsidies.