4 ms·

Please provide data. I live in TX, I see how much it costs, and I see what happens when the wind is blowing at 8% of nameplate. TX for all the shit ERCOT gets,

Please provide data. I live in TX, I see how much it costs, and I see what happens when the wind is blowing at 8% of nameplate. TX for all the shit ERCOT gets, is very open (a google search will give you a bunch of data dashboards), very unregulated and capitalist driven power grid. The weather is incredibly hard to predict and no one wants to take worse case projections against wind, because they don't look pretty. Instead in the case of ERCOT when the weather isn't cooperative, we get calls to conserve, and when that fails rolling blackouts. And we also get financial destabilization which leads the reliable operators to skip out on maintenance and things like weatherization.

pfdietz 4y ago
Ah, Texas. I have a quote about nuclear there, from Exelon in 2018. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088 > “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies. (current natural gas price at the Henry Hub is $8.67/MMBtu, which is $5.70/MMBtu in 2005 dollars) Note that the current tightness in ERCOT is tailor-made for solar. The recent weeks' daily demand peaks would be squashed by additional PV capacity, and no storage would be required. https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards The modeling I was talking about can be found here. https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ It defaults to using 2030 projections for cost data, but that's ok because any new NPP effort started today likely would not be online before 2030, if then. That's another problem with nuclear: it's competing against the renewables and storage of the next 40 years, not those of today. Going with nuclear (in addition to being optimistic about the cost of new nuclear) is making a bet that those stop decreasing in cost, and soon. What the experts with skin in the game think can be seen by where the markets are allocating investment. It's into renewables, not into nuclear. From the point of view of the hardnosed financiers nuclear is a loser, and losers don't get money, they get shown the door. And yet, there's still this weird tech bro fixation with nuclear, for no reason that's grounded in reality.
- StillBored 4y ago
  Why play with old and extrapolated data. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/regional/REG-TEX https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... Select generation by energy source. Note, that while solar will probably do fine as long as its cutting off that peak 3-5PM time-frame, it falls off faster than the wind picks up (in general) and the NG plants then peak. Move around in the year a bit, then flip to daily average. See that, those are massive swings. One either overbuilds by a large factor, or one comes up with a storage mechanism to de-carbonize that. I'm betting given the political climate in TX the smart money is assuming that will never happen. So, the smart money would bet on just enough renewables to catch those peaks, and then fill in the rest with NG. Should that fail due to rising costs, there are coal plants. PS: Texas has 4 reactors seen in that graph, producing ~4.7GW of power, which before the NG gas boom were regularly producing some of the cheapest power in the state. They are also some of the most recently constructed reactors in the US comming online in the early 1990s after 15 year construction cycles filled with lawsuits, and redesigns and every excuse in the book (STP actually had 3 different general contractors IIRC) to keep them from coming online, largely by environmentalists. If the remaining 4 reactors at the two sites and just two more sites with similar generation capacity were created it would more than wipe out the baseload carbon in the state leaving the NG plants only spinning up when the renewables failed. In the grand scheme of texas energy production, it would be a drop in the bucket of plant costs, even if they were constructed at the costs of the existing plants. If they could be constructed at the costs of reactors in the 1960's (aka less than NG plants) those price equations would flip on their heads. No one in their right mind would be building renewable energy sources, but because of politics and people who get in the way of Nuke plants, no one in their right mind will bet against gas.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    What do you mean, old and extrapolated data? The ERCOT dashboard is giving today's data. The price spikes the last few weeks have been during the day. And the prices have been well above the levelized cost of solar. I understand there is a large amount of solar in the pipeline in Texas. It's a no-brainer at this point. Yes, Texas has reactors. Sunk costs are sunk. It would make no sense to build more, which is what that Exelon quote was saying. Really, it makes no sense to start a new reactor build anywhere in the US. All the AP 1000 efforts aside from Vogtle 3/4 have been terminated.

pfdietz 4y ago

Ah, Texas. I have a quote about nuclear there, from Exelon in 2018. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088 > “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies. (current natural gas price at the Henry Hub is $8.67/MMBtu, which is $5.70/MMBtu in 2005 dollars) Note that the current tightness in ERCOT is tailor-made for solar. The recent weeks' daily demand peaks would be squashed by additional PV capacity, and no storage would be required. https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards The modeling I was talking about can be found here. https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ It defaults to using 2030 projections for cost data, but that's ok because any new NPP effort started today likely would not be online before 2030, if then. That's another problem with nuclear: it's competing against the renewables and storage of the next 40 years, not those of today. Going with nuclear (in addition to being optimistic about the cost of new nuclear) is making a bet that those stop decreasing in cost, and soon. What the experts with skin in the game think can be seen by where the markets are allocating investment. It's into renewables, not into nuclear. From the point of view of the hardnosed financiers nuclear is a loser, and losers don't get money, they get shown the door. And yet, there's still this weird tech bro fixation with nuclear, for no reason that's grounded in reality.

StillBored 4y ago
Why play with old and extrapolated data. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/regional/REG-TEX https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... Select generation by energy source. Note, that while solar will probably do fine as long as its cutting off that peak 3-5PM time-frame, it falls off faster than the wind picks up (in general) and the NG plants then peak. Move around in the year a bit, then flip to daily average. See that, those are massive swings. One either overbuilds by a large factor, or one comes up with a storage mechanism to de-carbonize that. I'm betting given the political climate in TX the smart money is assuming that will never happen. So, the smart money would bet on just enough renewables to catch those peaks, and then fill in the rest with NG. Should that fail due to rising costs, there are coal plants. PS: Texas has 4 reactors seen in that graph, producing ~4.7GW of power, which before the NG gas boom were regularly producing some of the cheapest power in the state. They are also some of the most recently constructed reactors in the US comming online in the early 1990s after 15 year construction cycles filled with lawsuits, and redesigns and every excuse in the book (STP actually had 3 different general contractors IIRC) to keep them from coming online, largely by environmentalists. If the remaining 4 reactors at the two sites and just two more sites with similar generation capacity were created it would more than wipe out the baseload carbon in the state leaving the NG plants only spinning up when the renewables failed. In the grand scheme of texas energy production, it would be a drop in the bucket of plant costs, even if they were constructed at the costs of the existing plants. If they could be constructed at the costs of reactors in the 1960's (aka less than NG plants) those price equations would flip on their heads. No one in their right mind would be building renewable energy sources, but because of politics and people who get in the way of Nuke plants, no one in their right mind will bet against gas.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  What do you mean, old and extrapolated data? The ERCOT dashboard is giving today's data. The price spikes the last few weeks have been during the day. And the prices have been well above the levelized cost of solar. I understand there is a large amount of solar in the pipeline in Texas. It's a no-brainer at this point. Yes, Texas has reactors. Sunk costs are sunk. It would make no sense to build more, which is what that Exelon quote was saying. Really, it makes no sense to start a new reactor build anywhere in the US. All the AP 1000 efforts aside from Vogtle 3/4 have been terminated.