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If the price is right and medium size communities could get their acts together, something like this could potentially disrupt the entire grid model. In Califor
by amluto 4y ago
If the price is right and medium size communities could get their acts together, something like this could potentially disrupt the entire grid model. In California, regardless of what wholesale electricity costs, the retail cost is something like $200/MWh more than could be considered reasonable. Put another way, the utility (PG&E) is charging an immense premium. Normally, displacing PG&E would be impractical:
a. The actual transmission system is a phenomenally large capital investment developed over many decades. You can’t just VC up a new electric grid in a developed area. And the incumbent mostly owns the existing infrastructure.
b. Regulation, good and bad.
It’s possible to sell power to the utility for a reasonable price per MWh. But one can’t easily sell to the utility’s customers.
But this reactor is small! 5 MW could serve maybe 1000 expensive homes in an expensive area without an enormous transmission system. Anyone trying to disrupt the incumbent utility with something like this has $200/MWh of inefficiency to exploit. $24k per day of operation will offset a decent amount of capital cost and regulatory effort to get the electricity to customers.
Put another way, a wealthy community could buy a few of these, figure out local distribution, and ditch the incumbent utility. This could be fantastic.
- psadri 4y agoI like the idea but not sure if wealthy homeowners would want to a nuclear reactor in the vicinity of their homes. It would have to be proven out over a couple of decades of incident-free operation before it becomes acceptable.
- zbrozek 4y agoLos Altos Hills resident here. Sign me up for one in my yard. There's an empty lower acre begging to do something useful.
- cool_dude85 4y agoWhat you're looking for is just a very small utility company. At 5MW of load you'll be needing distribution, substations, maintenance for all the above, planning, etc. The overhead you'd need at such a small scale of sales would probably surprise you.
- amluto 4y agoAnd yet most of the world, and even most of the US, does this, including generation, for some $200/MWH less than PG&E. I’m not saying it’s cheap. I’m saying that the amount of money on the table is very large. (Distribution cost really ought to scale roughly linearly in the length of the system. I don’t know if it does in practice. As a data point, Palo Alto manages to run their entire system for considerably less money than PG&E, and Palo Alto is not an inexpensive place to do anything.)
- nicwilson 4y agoa. Yes, but you can easily put up solar+batteries such that the cost of retail energy to the consumer is entirely transmission line rental, at which point disruption is worth whatever the cost of line rental is minus the capital cost of grid construction. > It’s possible to sell power to the utility for a reasonable price per MWh. But one can’t easily sell to the utility’s customers. You might not be able to sell energy directly to them, but you can sell/lease energy generation to them which is essentially the same thing. You won't be able to charge the line rental that makes up the majority of the retail cost post installation of solar, but you can start with some fraction of the difference between they save with the solar system, which is probably at a better price point than wholesale cost of electricity.
- nine_k 4y agoGood thing everybody lives in Arizona and Sahara, and nobody lives in Sweden, Canada, or even in Seattle! /s Sadly, sun is not universally abundant.
- Gwypaas 4y agoBut HVDC lines are. The longest one in operation today is ~2200 km.
- nine_k 4y agoI wonder how their upkeep and bulging expense (especially across difficult terrain) compares to that of the small nuclear power plant described here. We could determine the distance when the HVDC line still makes more sense.
- Gwypaas 4y agoFor true "wilderness" your total addressable market is like a million people. Sweden and Norway have abundant hydro power so they actually export power from north to south. So reduce that to tens of thousands. For southern scandinavia it is already connected through HVDC to Central Europe and more are being built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumpolar_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumpolar_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoCould these be viable for shipping containers?? IIUC, 18,000 TEU ships have engines that generate ~60 mW - and use about 66,000 gallons of diesel per day. That's ~$90M in fuel per year, which could be replaced by ~12 of there reactors. That's $7.5M per year. If these can be purchased for less than $20M - with an 8-year life-span and $2M for fuel and operation per year - then maybe it could work??
- bboygravity 4y agoIf you do that the ships would go (dangerously ?) fast. 60 MW output from a combustion engine means rougly 3x the mechanical energy output for the same amount of Joules input with an electric engine.
- ohgodplsno 4y agoOn the plus side, container ship drag races would now be a thing.
- malandrew 4y agoImagine how far they travel when trying to stop. I guess you would have the power to run the engines in reverse at full power too.
- ohgodplsno 4y agoStop ? Just drift with all your cargo.
- porker 4y agoPower isn't the problem; vibration, the stress on the ship's hull, and risk of losing a propellor are the real problems with sustained running in reverse at full power.
- Tuna-Fish 4y agoYou'd get surprisingly little additional speed. An old rule of thumb is that if you double the power of a large ship, you get 4 additional knots of speed. Current average laden container ship speed is ~15 knots, down from about 20 knots from back before they cared about fuel costs and emissions. So you'd only get speeds up to what they were before.
- Someone 4y ago> In California, regardless of what wholesale electricity costs, the retail cost is something like $200/MWh more than could be considered reasonable. $200/MWh is $2/kWh. California electricity prices are around $0,27/kWh (https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/ https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/). I guess you mean $200/GWh? Also, why do you find PG&Ek’s pricing unreasonable, given that it required a “phenomenally large capital investment” (and, I expect, quite a bit of ongoing maintenance) to be able to provide customers with electricity?
- qilo 4y ago> $200/MWh is $2/kWh. $200/MWh is $0.20/kWh.
- Someone 4y agoOops. Thanks
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zbrozek 4y agoPG&E pricing is higher than that, ranging from 37 to 49 cents per kWh on their default residential plan. That's more than three times the national average. It's unclear why the state expects folks to electrify when electricity is outrageously expensive. https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-TOU-C.pdf https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
- quickthrower2 4y agoThere is the small issue of transmission and maintaining that. But surely it is better to also use the grid for when you peak over 5MW at dinner time when people turn on their ovens, lights and other appliances and also to be able to sell back to the grid at other times. Unless you have batteries. But your argument is solid for a factory with constant 24/7 load where a single building might consume all that power.
- amluto 4y agoThe spreads are egregious, though. You can buy from PG&E for several hundred dollars per MWH. You can likely sell to them for a couple dollars per MWH. No, you do not get NEM for your neighborhood nuclear plant. Or you can overprovision, discard unused output (or try to do something useful — even just heating up a big heat reservoir is useful for district heating if you feel like building out a system to deliver the heat), and still potentially win on overall price. Large grids are economical when reasonably run. They are not economical when poorly run.
- quickthrower2 4y agoThat is horrendous. Battery it is! Residential solar plans in Sydney would buy power back for about 5c US / kwh so $50 / mwh Although I think their hand might be forced to encourage solar. They used to pay crazy high amounts.
- voldacar 4y agoexpensive houses require a lot more than 5 kw
- m463 4y agoI recall some California communities without PG&E have somewhat reasonable electric costs. Santa Clara has silicon valley power with rates of .11-.13/kwh which are significantly lower than PG&E at .28-.51/kwh PG&E is expensive.
- brnt 4y ago[Cries in European]