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I hope we get off our asses and replace them with either more nuclear sources or renewables (if practical). I am really disheartened by the trend of politician

I hope we get off our asses and replace them with either more nuclear sources or renewables (if practical). I am really disheartened by the trend of politicians and environmental orgs shutting down nuclear plants with the public justification being to replace them with renewables and then just building natural gas turbines instead (looking at you California).

marcosdumay 4y ago
Any migration into (non-hydro) renewables will bring more water or gas turbines at the short term. At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel). But right now they are the other side of the renewables coin.
- StillBored 4y ago
  "At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel)" AFAIK, that is a huge leap of faith, nevermind the overbuild requirements to supply it. Do you have any actual data/estimates to back up that theory? Bonus points for including the energy required to supply transportation needs, and energy growth estimates over say the next couple decades. Because, I've read a crapton of literature on this stuff (and I have a family connection to the TX energy system) and I simply can't see how any of this is going to actually work if 1: The costs don't balloon over carbon sources, 2: The grid maintains a reasonable level of reliability, 3: we can maintain the rare earth mines/production/etc needed to get us even to 100% over the next couple decades without accounting for demand growth. AFAIK: The only workable solution for providing a couple TW's of power realistically in the next decade is Nukes, everything else depends on some "breakthrough" that hasn't happened yet. Edit: If you take hydro out of the picture, the current status of wind/solar is really poor, and its only going to get worse when you have to build 6-8x as many wind turbines or 3-4x as many solar farms just to provide enough average energy to meet todays demands, and with that will come cost multiplication as well. Its easy to build 30% renewable, but every overbuild multiplier is just going to multiply the cost. Then you have to figure out how to store it. edit: edit: Here look at this: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-energy-system-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener... That is a projection of where the US will be in 30 years, and nothing really suggests to me that they are wrong. The only thing I think that will change that is a 1970's French like pivot which clears the red tape, and has an explicit goal of building the ~150 reactors in the US needs to remove most of that carbon. And then start handing it out like candy to other countries because we have standardized the design enough, and built enough of them to return it to 1960's levels of cost (aka cheaper than natural gas). My actual bet at this point is the Chinese do it, and replace the US as a worldwide leader in energy production.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Nice graph that of renewables production on your link. It's always interesting when you get one of those predictions of "yep, it's have grown exponentially since the beginning, but an inflection will start right now and we will only have the low-growth half of the logistic function at the future". I suggest your source has a bad model. Anyway, you are talking about costs of renewables production compared with gas. There's nothing to discuss on that anymore, renewables are cheaper when they can produce, their costs are falling, and fossil fuel costs are predicted to slowly raise forever. The only costs with any space to compare and discuss nowadays are about storage, not production.
    - janef0421 4y ago
      Reliable storage requires surplus production, and that leads to a significant cost increase that is likely to be non-linear.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        All of electricity production requires surplus, we run our systems at a fraction of full capacity because that's the only sane way to design a system that has zero storage. As storage gets deployed more and more, we will be able to increase the capacity factor of all the more expensive parts, like transmission and distribution. Already, T&D is a huge cost of our electricity, something like 6-8 cents of the average 13 cents/kWh in the US, with the rest being generation costs. As solar and wind plunge below our current costs, to 1-2 cents/kWh, T&D becomes a much larger cost center, and only storage has the potential to undercut that. T&D is sized to peak draw, which is many many many multiples of average draw. Storage close to the meter solves all that, and drastically reduces the cost of T&D. If we are at 5-15 cents/kWh right now for lithium ion storage, it's going to be 2-6 cents in 10-15 years, faster than we could get the first new nuclear reactor online if we started building today. While I agree that underused storage does have higher cost, we will likely have a plethora of cheaper storage options in the future that only work at lower usage rates than daily discharge, and those can fill in the other parts of the cost/discharge frequency need.
epistasis 4y ago
I don't think your assessment is correct on any of the particulars. Building lots of renewables and storage is eminently practical. It's happening every day, getting cheaper every day, and is scaling unbelievably fast. Constructing new nuclear, however, is not practical or economical. And it's not because of politicians or environmentalists. It's because Westinghouse, utilities, and contractors can't do it. And it's exactly the same story in France, with undeniably friendly politics and regulation. There's an important deeper issue here about advanced economies. Construction productivity, when compared to the massive increase in manufacturing productivity, is pretty much constant. So we can either apply our finite and limited construction capacity to building more factories, and exponentially increasing our productivity, or we can apply it to constructing nuclear plants, and get only linear gains in energy out of our construction efforts. The one way around that is SMRs, maybe, but they far less proven tech than lithium ion batteries, which are far more proven and practical. Technologically, we have progressed beyond the big nuclear reactors from half a century ago. They are a monument to the age, like the intricate woodwork on Victorian houses, but never to be created again by advanced economies. The economies that are able to build nuclear are those that are about at the stage of the US in the 70s and 80s: China and Russia. Maaaaaybe South Korea. But the value of their labor force per hour may soon advance beyond the point where it makes sense for them to continue to build nuclear. The future of energy is manufactured: wind, solar, and battery storage.

marcosdumay 4y ago

Any migration into (non-hydro) renewables will bring more water or gas turbines at the short term. At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel). But right now they are the other side of the renewables coin.

StillBored 4y ago
"At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel)" AFAIK, that is a huge leap of faith, nevermind the overbuild requirements to supply it. Do you have any actual data/estimates to back up that theory? Bonus points for including the energy required to supply transportation needs, and energy growth estimates over say the next couple decades. Because, I've read a crapton of literature on this stuff (and I have a family connection to the TX energy system) and I simply can't see how any of this is going to actually work if 1: The costs don't balloon over carbon sources, 2: The grid maintains a reasonable level of reliability, 3: we can maintain the rare earth mines/production/etc needed to get us even to 100% over the next couple decades without accounting for demand growth. AFAIK: The only workable solution for providing a couple TW's of power realistically in the next decade is Nukes, everything else depends on some "breakthrough" that hasn't happened yet. Edit: If you take hydro out of the picture, the current status of wind/solar is really poor, and its only going to get worse when you have to build 6-8x as many wind turbines or 3-4x as many solar farms just to provide enough average energy to meet todays demands, and with that will come cost multiplication as well. Its easy to build 30% renewable, but every overbuild multiplier is just going to multiply the cost. Then you have to figure out how to store it. edit: edit: Here look at this: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-energy-system-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener... That is a projection of where the US will be in 30 years, and nothing really suggests to me that they are wrong. The only thing I think that will change that is a 1970's French like pivot which clears the red tape, and has an explicit goal of building the ~150 reactors in the US needs to remove most of that carbon. And then start handing it out like candy to other countries because we have standardized the design enough, and built enough of them to return it to 1960's levels of cost (aka cheaper than natural gas). My actual bet at this point is the Chinese do it, and replace the US as a worldwide leader in energy production.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Nice graph that of renewables production on your link. It's always interesting when you get one of those predictions of "yep, it's have grown exponentially since the beginning, but an inflection will start right now and we will only have the low-growth half of the logistic function at the future". I suggest your source has a bad model. Anyway, you are talking about costs of renewables production compared with gas. There's nothing to discuss on that anymore, renewables are cheaper when they can produce, their costs are falling, and fossil fuel costs are predicted to slowly raise forever. The only costs with any space to compare and discuss nowadays are about storage, not production.
  - janef0421 4y ago
    Reliable storage requires surplus production, and that leads to a significant cost increase that is likely to be non-linear.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      All of electricity production requires surplus, we run our systems at a fraction of full capacity because that's the only sane way to design a system that has zero storage. As storage gets deployed more and more, we will be able to increase the capacity factor of all the more expensive parts, like transmission and distribution. Already, T&D is a huge cost of our electricity, something like 6-8 cents of the average 13 cents/kWh in the US, with the rest being generation costs. As solar and wind plunge below our current costs, to 1-2 cents/kWh, T&D becomes a much larger cost center, and only storage has the potential to undercut that. T&D is sized to peak draw, which is many many many multiples of average draw. Storage close to the meter solves all that, and drastically reduces the cost of T&D. If we are at 5-15 cents/kWh right now for lithium ion storage, it's going to be 2-6 cents in 10-15 years, faster than we could get the first new nuclear reactor online if we started building today. While I agree that underused storage does have higher cost, we will likely have a plethora of cheaper storage options in the future that only work at lower usage rates than daily discharge, and those can fill in the other parts of the cost/discharge frequency need.

epistasis 4y ago

I don't think your assessment is correct on any of the particulars. Building lots of renewables and storage is eminently practical. It's happening every day, getting cheaper every day, and is scaling unbelievably fast. Constructing new nuclear, however, is not practical or economical. And it's not because of politicians or environmentalists. It's because Westinghouse, utilities, and contractors can't do it. And it's exactly the same story in France, with undeniably friendly politics and regulation. There's an important deeper issue here about advanced economies. Construction productivity, when compared to the massive increase in manufacturing productivity, is pretty much constant. So we can either apply our finite and limited construction capacity to building more factories, and exponentially increasing our productivity, or we can apply it to constructing nuclear plants, and get only linear gains in energy out of our construction efforts. The one way around that is SMRs, maybe, but they far less proven tech than lithium ion batteries, which are far more proven and practical. Technologically, we have progressed beyond the big nuclear reactors from half a century ago. They are a monument to the age, like the intricate woodwork on Victorian houses, but never to be created again by advanced economies. The economies that are able to build nuclear are those that are about at the stage of the US in the 70s and 80s: China and Russia. Maaaaaybe South Korea. But the value of their labor force per hour may soon advance beyond the point where it makes sense for them to continue to build nuclear. The future of energy is manufactured: wind, solar, and battery storage.