7 ms·

> We need more of these. The path to 100% green energy without coercing people and making decisions that could backfire, is to upgrade the energy grid to the po

> We need more of these. The path to 100% green energy without coercing people and making decisions that could backfire, is to upgrade the energy grid to the point that electricity is dirt cheap. These two statements are at odds with each other, however. Every new nuclear plant we build like Vogtle will end up increasing our cost of carbon-free energy rather than decreasing it. Buying a nuclear power plant locks the energy price for 40-60 years, and all the current buildable designs are more expensive than current renewables plus the cost of storage to make the renewables a firm energy source. And the trend for renewables and storage is drastic price decreases, slowed down only by occasional supply shortages that get innovated around, which in turn drive prices even lower. So when we replace the storage in 15-20 years at EoL, the replacement will be vastly cheaper. And we get 2-3 of those price drops during the time that we would be locked into the cost of current nuclear. Our energy future is one of energy abundance, and cheap cheap cheap energy, but it's very unlikely to include nuclear as part of that mix. And any nuclear we do invest in will hinder energy abundance and energy cheapness.

algoatecorn 4y ago
How do you envision energy storage of the future? Where are you going to get the metals? How much fossil fuel is going to burn in order to extract it? Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years. I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear.
- audunw 4y ago
  > How do you envision energy storage of the future? Not the guy you responded to, but: a combination of traditional batteries, molten metal batteries, liquid air or CO2 storage, pumped hydro, gravity storage, stored thermal energy, and more. All of which are around the commercial demonstration plant phase right now. > Where are you going to get the metals? Many of these don't require much metals. Molten metal batteries use metals that are extremely abundant. > How much fossil fuel is going to burn in order to extract it? In a decarbonized world? Zero. What? You think climate change can be solved without making mining zero-emission? If you're wondering how this will be done, it'll be battery/hydrogen/ammonia/e-fuel for mining equipment, trucks, ships, etc. We have to do that no matter what, otherwise we've just postponed climate change, not solved it. > How else do you provide base load requirements? Personally I believe a good share of base load will be provided by nuclear in many countries. I have nothing against nuclear. But I also think the base load problem can be solved without nuclear quite easily, assuming we actually solve CO2-emissions. This is because solving CO2-emissions means we'll produce batteries/hydrogen/ammonia/e-fuels on the same order of magnitude needed to balance renewables to provide baseload. If you want to dive into more detail, look at Marc Z Jacobsens studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148121016499?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601... I think advanced geothermal may become a significant part of renewable base load in the future. It would be a huge hail mary for the climate change cause, because it'd make it SO much easier to get political willpower and investments from the whole oil/gas-sector. Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2P2stuQ_KY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2P2stuQ_KY > It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear. Optimistic, but not naive. There's a clear path. Difficult, but not much more difficult than rebooting the nuclear energy industry. And you have to be optimistic to think we can get to zero CO2-emissions anyway.
  - catiopatio 4y ago
    This is science fiction-thinking. Not just optimistic: absolutely naive. We have the tech for nuclear, today. In fact, we could have switched the entire country over to nuclear 30+ years ago. Instead, we’ve been burning fossil fuels for decades because, for so-called environmental activists, an impossible perfect solution is the only thing they’ll accept.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Run the numbers, time tracking throughout the day, on how you're going to run an entire grid on nuclear. Calculate how much storage you need in order to convert baseload into something that matches demand. Do the same calculation for renewables. Both need storage, and renewables need a bit more storage, but their primary energy is also 5-10x cheaper than nuclear. Calling something "naive" or "fantasy" requires evaluating the current state of the tech, and where the tech is going. From that perspective, especially with the data coming from the nuclear build at Vogtle and Summer, thinking that nuclear GenIII+ reactors have any place on the grid is completely unrealistic. We can not even build four of these nuclear reactors . We started plans to build about a dozen, started on only four, and had to abandon two mid-build. Nuclear is not a good fit for advanced economies, anymore than complex Victorian style wood carving is a fit for advanced economies. Nuclear requires way too much skilled labor, too much construction versus manufacturing. We no longer live in the 80s, we have much better tech, 40 years of advancement, and we need to use the best tech, not the one that was best in 1980.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        > Run the numbers, time tracking throughout the day, on how you're going to run an entire grid on nuclear. Calculate how much storage you need in order to convert baseload into something that matches demand. Very tiny amounts are needed. It's pretty straightforward to make reactors that can ramp along with daily power use.
- Tade0 4y ago
  > I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". China aggressively pushed nuclear over the past 20 years and they still haven't caught up with France in terms of generating capacity. Almost 10 years ago wind power in China overtook nuclear in terms of GWh delivered and things stayed that way. Unless there's some kind of breakthrough, nuclear will remain this safe, stable, clean but really slow to build and expensive energy source.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > How do you envision energy storage of the future? Where are you going to get the metals? How much fossil fuel is going to burn in order to extract it? Where do they come from for electric vehicles? Also where do you get the uranium from? If we significantly increase nuclear energy production we run out of uranium in 40 years or so. > Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years. Maybe you should have a look how contracts for these things are made. Nobody would invest into a nuclear power plant if they don't get a guaranteed price. > I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear. Wind, solar are provide base load, they are not load following, to quote wikipedia: Base load demand... can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > Where are you going to get the metals? Which metals are you talking about? There are energy storage systems that use no rare (or even uncommon) materials.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years. Because of the $30 billion dollar loan and $40/MWh of O&M costs. > How do you envision energy storage of the future? Where are you going to get the metals? Sodium ion is made purely of abundant materials. There are electrolyser chemistries that use nothing less common than Nickel. Current PV tech is made of sand, copper, and silver. Olympic dam is one of the largest Uranium mines in the world. For every joule of uranium fuel for a PWR it produces, it produces enough silver for 0.5 joules of solar at the current 9mg per net watt (as well as enough copper). This is improving by 10-20% per year. So by the time your nuclear reactor opened you could get more energy from that mine from PV than solar. The nuclear reactor will also require most of that silver and a bunch of indium, cadmium, zirconium, chromium, molybdenum, iron, and almost as much copper as the PV (if using 1.5kV strings). > I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear. Base load is a myth. What matters is being able to provide a joule at the time it is required at a given resource, carbon, and labour cost, if you have surplus joules available at other times for the same cost that's an upside, not a downside. France's continued unreliability or any of the recent western nuclear plants show that the nuclear is an absolute joke from both the time and cost perspective. Whenthe >0.04% concentration uranium mines run out it will also be a joke on the carbon front. There's no need to ban it. Just give all installations that hit a low carbon threshold (without loopholes like CCS or 'biofuel') and net availability the same deal with regard to public insurance, guaranteed loans, decomissioning obligations, and guaranteed electricity prices and see if anyone even considers nuclear.
realusername 4y ago
See how this strategy is turning out in Germany right now, turns out this "cheap cheap cheap energy" was not including the diplomatic, environmental and financial costs of the gas backups.
- croes 4y ago
  How was the nuclear nuclear nuclear energy in France going? Germany had to burn more gas to substitute for France's downtime of nuclear power plants. The cost and time for the construction of new one not included and the risk of sabotage not mentioned. I bet russia will at least try to damage them as a revenge for the help of Ukraine.
  - themaninthedark 4y ago
    Well, if Germany had more nuclear power they would not be burning gas to help France during the French downtime now would they? Nor would they be restarting coal power plants, the dirtiest form of energy. It's funny how the Green idea of a large grid that shares power, i.e. it's always windy somewhere, suddenly falls flat when the neighbors wind(nuclear, in this case) is no longer blowing. The only fault of France is trusting Germany to have a sane power production plan when they entered a peering agreement with them.
    - croes 4y ago
      If Germany would have more nuclear power plants it would have more nuclear waste without nuclear repository. More problems like Asse and Brunsbüttel
      - croes 4y ago
        >it's always windy somewhere, suddenly falls flat when the neighbors wind(nuclear, in this case) is no longer blowing. There is a difference between the outage of an nuclear power plant and the outage of wind turbine. One power plant less has a much bigger effect than thousand wind turbines without wind. Nuclear power plants are the equivalent of Cloudflare, one outage has massive effects. Wind turbines are decentralization and that's better especially since Russia return as the bad guy. Didn't hear much fear about Ukrainian wind turbines but lits of worries about nuclear power plants.
proc0 4y ago
I'll have to really look into the price breakdown. I thought the output of nuclear would more than make up for that. Regardless, renewables can also be built. I don't think it should be all nuclear, but it seems like the only way to scale consumption at the moment. Both technologies will get better as well, and I think the biggest innovation right now is on the nuclear side with nuclear fusion.
- epistasis 4y ago
  I'd recommend Lazard for cost info of both generation and storage https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... These are last year's numbers, but I don't expect that we will see much of a drop later this month when the new numbers come out, since demand is still way outpacing supply at the moment. Additionally, we do not expect nuclear to decrease in cost. Throughout its entire history, it has not, and there's no tech on the horizon to expect a change. Nuclear is primarily a construction project, not manufacturing. Construction does not see the massive productivity gains that manufacturing does. In France and the US, one country with favorable regulatory conditions, and one with supposedly bad regulatory conditions, subsequent builds of the same reactor get more expensive, not less. South Korea managed to figure out how to decrease costs with subsequent reactors, but SK also sent many of their suppliers' execs to jail for corruption on certifications. In contrast, solar, wind, and storage see massive innovation year after year, for decades. They are in a true tech curve, and have scaled to hundreds of GW/year of deployment. Scaling nuclear to the point of deploying hundreds of GW/year is pretty difficult to imagine. We don't have the labor force to enable something like that, and couldn't build it in any reasonable time frame. Nuclear simply does not scale as well as the manufactured technologies of solar, wind, and storage.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Bear in mind that generation is only part of the holistic system of energy delivery. Intermittent sources require storage, which is separated out into a separate chart. Even just 4 hours of storage would bring solar's $30/MW to $210 to $350/MW. And 4 hours of storage is pretty thin - most plans call for 12 hours of storage. And storage costs are only projected to increase: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spike-as-raw-material-shortages-drags-on.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik... By comparison nuclear costs $131-$204/MW, so it's still cheaper after storage. The Lazard estimate also didn't include the transmission expansions necessary to support the distributed nature of renewable generation (explained further here: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...)
concordDance 4y ago
The obvious solution is the build more 1960s and 1970s reactors, under a similar regulatory regime. Those are 10x cheaper per kwh.
- epistasis 4y ago
  To do that, we'd also have to pay 1960s and 1970s wages. In the meantime labor productivity has massively increased, so it's harder to find skilled labor at those prices.
remorses 4y ago
Battery prices will increase in the near future, not decrease We should extract 30x times more lithium and rare earths to make your strategy work [1] And 80% of rare earths is extracted in China [0], creating a similar situation Europe has with Russia [0] https://www.mining-technology.com/analysis/china-rare-earths-dominance-mining/ https://www.mining-technology.com/analysis/china-rare-earths... [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...
- epistasis 4y ago
  Even if batteries increase now, they will drop more in the future as production capacity ramps up. Same thing happens again and again for every other tech curve, for example solar. A price drop suddenly makes an entirely new application class cost feasible, and there's a non-linearity in the demand function, and demand explodes. We are currently at one of those non-linear increases in demand. Additionally, we are experiencing massive supply chain bill whip effects across the entire economy. Increasing extraction is happening and will continue to happen. But also take into account that a lot of the price drops come from needing to use fewer input materials. Rare earths are not relevant for current battery technologies. Further, there are plenty of other sources of rare earths that will open up as we need more in the future.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Do try to keep up. Prussian blue sodium ion mass manufacturing is starting up as we speak. They use abundant materials and most of the same manufacturing processes as lithium.
- naasking 4y ago
  > We should extract 30x times more lithium and rare earths to make your strategy work I don't know why everyone focuses on lithium, as if battery tech has reached its pinnacle and will no longer change. Lithium is only the latest element used in batteries, it will not be the last or necessarily even the best. Sodium batteries are already in production, for instance, and sodium is ridiculously abundant and cheap and the power density is comparable to lithium ion. Solid state batteries are also starting production. Lithium and rare earths are not needed for any of these.

algoatecorn 4y ago

How do you envision energy storage of the future? Where are you going to get the metals? How much fossil fuel is going to burn in order to extract it? Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years. I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear.

audunw 4y ago
> How do you envision energy storage of the future? Not the guy you responded to, but: a combination of traditional batteries, molten metal batteries, liquid air or CO2 storage, pumped hydro, gravity storage, stored thermal energy, and more. All of which are around the commercial demonstration plant phase right now. > Where are you going to get the metals? Many of these don't require much metals. Molten metal batteries use metals that are extremely abundant. > How much fossil fuel is going to burn in order to extract it? In a decarbonized world? Zero. What? You think climate change can be solved without making mining zero-emission? If you're wondering how this will be done, it'll be battery/hydrogen/ammonia/e-fuel for mining equipment, trucks, ships, etc. We have to do that no matter what, otherwise we've just postponed climate change, not solved it. > How else do you provide base load requirements? Personally I believe a good share of base load will be provided by nuclear in many countries. I have nothing against nuclear. But I also think the base load problem can be solved without nuclear quite easily, assuming we actually solve CO2-emissions. This is because solving CO2-emissions means we'll produce batteries/hydrogen/ammonia/e-fuels on the same order of magnitude needed to balance renewables to provide baseload. If you want to dive into more detail, look at Marc Z Jacobsens studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148121016499?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601... I think advanced geothermal may become a significant part of renewable base load in the future. It would be a huge hail mary for the climate change cause, because it'd make it SO much easier to get political willpower and investments from the whole oil/gas-sector. Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2P2stuQ_KY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2P2stuQ_KY > It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear. Optimistic, but not naive. There's a clear path. Difficult, but not much more difficult than rebooting the nuclear energy industry. And you have to be optimistic to think we can get to zero CO2-emissions anyway.
- catiopatio 4y ago
  This is science fiction-thinking. Not just optimistic: absolutely naive. We have the tech for nuclear, today. In fact, we could have switched the entire country over to nuclear 30+ years ago. Instead, we’ve been burning fossil fuels for decades because, for so-called environmental activists, an impossible perfect solution is the only thing they’ll accept.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Run the numbers, time tracking throughout the day, on how you're going to run an entire grid on nuclear. Calculate how much storage you need in order to convert baseload into something that matches demand. Do the same calculation for renewables. Both need storage, and renewables need a bit more storage, but their primary energy is also 5-10x cheaper than nuclear. Calling something "naive" or "fantasy" requires evaluating the current state of the tech, and where the tech is going. From that perspective, especially with the data coming from the nuclear build at Vogtle and Summer, thinking that nuclear GenIII+ reactors have any place on the grid is completely unrealistic. We can not even build four of these nuclear reactors . We started plans to build about a dozen, started on only four, and had to abandon two mid-build. Nuclear is not a good fit for advanced economies, anymore than complex Victorian style wood carving is a fit for advanced economies. Nuclear requires way too much skilled labor, too much construction versus manufacturing. We no longer live in the 80s, we have much better tech, 40 years of advancement, and we need to use the best tech, not the one that was best in 1980.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > Run the numbers, time tracking throughout the day, on how you're going to run an entire grid on nuclear. Calculate how much storage you need in order to convert baseload into something that matches demand. Very tiny amounts are needed. It's pretty straightforward to make reactors that can ramp along with daily power use.
Tade0 4y ago
> I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". China aggressively pushed nuclear over the past 20 years and they still haven't caught up with France in terms of generating capacity. Almost 10 years ago wind power in China overtook nuclear in terms of GWh delivered and things stayed that way. Unless there's some kind of breakthrough, nuclear will remain this safe, stable, clean but really slow to build and expensive energy source.
cycomanic 4y ago
> How do you envision energy storage of the future? Where are you going to get the metals? How much fossil fuel is going to burn in order to extract it? Where do they come from for electric vehicles? Also where do you get the uranium from? If we significantly increase nuclear energy production we run out of uranium in 40 years or so. > Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years. Maybe you should have a look how contracts for these things are made. Nobody would invest into a nuclear power plant if they don't get a guaranteed price. > I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear. Wind, solar are provide base load, they are not load following, to quote wikipedia: Base load demand... can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
pfdietz 4y ago
> Where are you going to get the metals? Which metals are you talking about? There are energy storage systems that use no rare (or even uncommon) materials.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years. Because of the $30 billion dollar loan and $40/MWh of O&M costs. > How do you envision energy storage of the future? Where are you going to get the metals? Sodium ion is made purely of abundant materials. There are electrolyser chemistries that use nothing less common than Nickel. Current PV tech is made of sand, copper, and silver. Olympic dam is one of the largest Uranium mines in the world. For every joule of uranium fuel for a PWR it produces, it produces enough silver for 0.5 joules of solar at the current 9mg per net watt (as well as enough copper). This is improving by 10-20% per year. So by the time your nuclear reactor opened you could get more energy from that mine from PV than solar. The nuclear reactor will also require most of that silver and a bunch of indium, cadmium, zirconium, chromium, molybdenum, iron, and almost as much copper as the PV (if using 1.5kV strings). > I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear. Base load is a myth. What matters is being able to provide a joule at the time it is required at a given resource, carbon, and labour cost, if you have surplus joules available at other times for the same cost that's an upside, not a downside. France's continued unreliability or any of the recent western nuclear plants show that the nuclear is an absolute joke from both the time and cost perspective. Whenthe >0.04% concentration uranium mines run out it will also be a joke on the carbon front. There's no need to ban it. Just give all installations that hit a low carbon threshold (without loopholes like CCS or 'biofuel') and net availability the same deal with regard to public insurance, guaranteed loans, decomissioning obligations, and guaranteed electricity prices and see if anyone even considers nuclear.

realusername 4y ago

See how this strategy is turning out in Germany right now, turns out this "cheap cheap cheap energy" was not including the diplomatic, environmental and financial costs of the gas backups.

croes 4y ago
How was the nuclear nuclear nuclear energy in France going? Germany had to burn more gas to substitute for France's downtime of nuclear power plants. The cost and time for the construction of new one not included and the risk of sabotage not mentioned. I bet russia will at least try to damage them as a revenge for the help of Ukraine.
- themaninthedark 4y ago
  Well, if Germany had more nuclear power they would not be burning gas to help France during the French downtime now would they? Nor would they be restarting coal power plants, the dirtiest form of energy. It's funny how the Green idea of a large grid that shares power, i.e. it's always windy somewhere, suddenly falls flat when the neighbors wind(nuclear, in this case) is no longer blowing. The only fault of France is trusting Germany to have a sane power production plan when they entered a peering agreement with them.
  - croes 4y ago
    If Germany would have more nuclear power plants it would have more nuclear waste without nuclear repository. More problems like Asse and Brunsbüttel
    - croes 4y ago
      >it's always windy somewhere, suddenly falls flat when the neighbors wind(nuclear, in this case) is no longer blowing. There is a difference between the outage of an nuclear power plant and the outage of wind turbine. One power plant less has a much bigger effect than thousand wind turbines without wind. Nuclear power plants are the equivalent of Cloudflare, one outage has massive effects. Wind turbines are decentralization and that's better especially since Russia return as the bad guy. Didn't hear much fear about Ukrainian wind turbines but lits of worries about nuclear power plants.

proc0 4y ago

I'll have to really look into the price breakdown. I thought the output of nuclear would more than make up for that. Regardless, renewables can also be built. I don't think it should be all nuclear, but it seems like the only way to scale consumption at the moment. Both technologies will get better as well, and I think the biggest innovation right now is on the nuclear side with nuclear fusion.

epistasis 4y ago
I'd recommend Lazard for cost info of both generation and storage https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... These are last year's numbers, but I don't expect that we will see much of a drop later this month when the new numbers come out, since demand is still way outpacing supply at the moment. Additionally, we do not expect nuclear to decrease in cost. Throughout its entire history, it has not, and there's no tech on the horizon to expect a change. Nuclear is primarily a construction project, not manufacturing. Construction does not see the massive productivity gains that manufacturing does. In France and the US, one country with favorable regulatory conditions, and one with supposedly bad regulatory conditions, subsequent builds of the same reactor get more expensive, not less. South Korea managed to figure out how to decrease costs with subsequent reactors, but SK also sent many of their suppliers' execs to jail for corruption on certifications. In contrast, solar, wind, and storage see massive innovation year after year, for decades. They are in a true tech curve, and have scaled to hundreds of GW/year of deployment. Scaling nuclear to the point of deploying hundreds of GW/year is pretty difficult to imagine. We don't have the labor force to enable something like that, and couldn't build it in any reasonable time frame. Nuclear simply does not scale as well as the manufactured technologies of solar, wind, and storage.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Bear in mind that generation is only part of the holistic system of energy delivery. Intermittent sources require storage, which is separated out into a separate chart. Even just 4 hours of storage would bring solar's $30/MW to $210 to $350/MW. And 4 hours of storage is pretty thin - most plans call for 12 hours of storage. And storage costs are only projected to increase: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spike-as-raw-material-shortages-drags-on.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik... By comparison nuclear costs $131-$204/MW, so it's still cheaper after storage. The Lazard estimate also didn't include the transmission expansions necessary to support the distributed nature of renewable generation (explained further here: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...)

concordDance 4y ago

The obvious solution is the build more 1960s and 1970s reactors, under a similar regulatory regime. Those are 10x cheaper per kwh.

epistasis 4y ago
To do that, we'd also have to pay 1960s and 1970s wages. In the meantime labor productivity has massively increased, so it's harder to find skilled labor at those prices.

remorses 4y ago

Battery prices will increase in the near future, not decrease We should extract 30x times more lithium and rare earths to make your strategy work [1] And 80% of rare earths is extracted in China [0], creating a similar situation Europe has with Russia [0] https://www.mining-technology.com/analysis/china-rare-earths-dominance-mining/ https://www.mining-technology.com/analysis/china-rare-earths... [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...

epistasis 4y ago
Even if batteries increase now, they will drop more in the future as production capacity ramps up. Same thing happens again and again for every other tech curve, for example solar. A price drop suddenly makes an entirely new application class cost feasible, and there's a non-linearity in the demand function, and demand explodes. We are currently at one of those non-linear increases in demand. Additionally, we are experiencing massive supply chain bill whip effects across the entire economy. Increasing extraction is happening and will continue to happen. But also take into account that a lot of the price drops come from needing to use fewer input materials. Rare earths are not relevant for current battery technologies. Further, there are plenty of other sources of rare earths that will open up as we need more in the future.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Do try to keep up. Prussian blue sodium ion mass manufacturing is starting up as we speak. They use abundant materials and most of the same manufacturing processes as lithium.
naasking 4y ago
> We should extract 30x times more lithium and rare earths to make your strategy work I don't know why everyone focuses on lithium, as if battery tech has reached its pinnacle and will no longer change. Lithium is only the latest element used in batteries, it will not be the last or necessarily even the best. Sodium batteries are already in production, for instance, and sodium is ridiculously abundant and cheap and the power density is comparable to lithium ion. Solid state batteries are also starting production. Lithium and rare earths are not needed for any of these.