8 ms·

If that's the framing, solar and wind are the clear economic winners right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Global_studies https

If that's the framing, solar and wind are the clear economic winners right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Global_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... There's been rapid progress with those two in particular that's made it shockingly cheap. Solar cost is down about 95% in 10 years. If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a real hard time catching up. I'm still pretty excited about the idea of fusion space travel though. Trips to Mars could be done, depending on what thrust system can be built, in about 1-3 months (compared to about 9 now) and because the fuel is denser, longer high speed trips become feasibly possible, like to Jupiter in 4 months. For a comparison, it took Galileo 74 months to get there when it launched in 1989. The idea of humans, say, landing on Europa in the 2030s might now be on the table.

jules 4y ago
Measuring cost by installed capacity is highly misleading because solar and wind need storage to be reliable sources. The cost of storage dwarfs the other costs, and battery prices have stagnated.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  The reason battery prices are down 97% since 1990 is because of better battery chemistries coming along. Currently there's a few more in the pipeline (including silicon) that lead market forecasters to predict the long-term (think 2030) trend will continue. The downhill road of pricing has had some bumps but it's very assuredly, extremely downhill
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    So Wright's Law applies to batteries but not to nuclear power?
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      Yes, that's what the historical data from the last 50 years supports. There's giant periods without any movement. Batteries have been around for centuries for instance. These model can be a bit imaginative at times and nuclear may start its journey on it any day but so far it doesn't look like it has. I'd love something absurdly cheap like a working Ponz-Fleischman bubble fusion to come around but if I was advising say a $100 million fund I'd say "solar + wind + chemical batteries" is the foreseeable future. It's just the reality.
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        Wait, that has happened with fission too, just not at grid scale because there hasn't been funding for it. If you look at military, academic, and space nuclear reactors, you will see Wright's law playing out. Solar and wind got the chance to ramp investment and scale. Grid-attached nuclear never did. Personally, I see more risks to massive-scale battery production than to modest-scale nuclear fission, both of which solve the same problem.
  - jules 4y ago
    The battery price graph tells a different story. Improvements have been slowing down for a long time, and have been almost zero the past couple of years and we've actually had a price increase this year. Switching to an entirely new technology is speculative at best, not all that dissimilar from putting all hope in fusion. Could work, but betting the future of the planet on it is silly.
Mistletoe 4y ago
That graph just really says it all haha. It’s all we need to look at. Which way are the arrows pointing? No need for millions of words trying to justify and explain a way for nuclear to work.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  And PV is now off the bottom scale of that chart.. Some combination of overbuilding PV and Wind capacity + ever-improving battery tech "won" the energy market. Gas peakers and other stand-by sources will contribute for decades to come but when they're pricing out new nuclear builds at >$0.10/kwh wholesale, no amount of "but capacity factor!" will matter.
- yashap 4y ago
  Solar and wind are fantastic, cheap sources of power, but they have their limits. They generate power when the sun shines and the wind blows, which is not necessarily when humans need it. We still aren’t very good at storing this power for use later, at large scales, in cost effective ways. So for now solar/wind needs to be paired with power sources we have greater control over, which mostly means nuclear, coal, natural gas, hydro, etc.
  - Mistletoe 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    By the time we cover all the daytime load with solar, they will probably have better batteries though.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      By then we'll probably have figured out fusion too.
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
Yup and when there's no sun and no wind, like in winter in most places, you need something else, or batteries, which are ridiculously expensive both in $ and CO2 per kwh. Solar and Wind just can't do base load today, and you can't turn off the natural gas / coal plants that back them when they don't work. This is a classic case of "doing the first 50% is easy, doing the last 50% is 99% of the work".
- themitigating 4y ago
  Why wouldn't there be sun in the winter in most places?
  - prottog 4y ago
    I don't know what GP meant about "most places", but I guess generally places that have a winter (away from the tropics, that is) are cloudier in the winter, as well as by definition having lower solar irradiation. Most of Europe is in the unenviable position of having higher power requirements precisely when solar potential is at the lowest[0]. [0]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-winter-and-summer-day-solar-irradiation-and-European-electricity-load-profiles_fig1_215681334 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-winter-and-summe...
    - fulafel 4y ago
      The power requirements are fixable by better insulated housing (see eg passive houses). Practically free natural gas has kept people from investing in energy efficient housing, just like in warmer places where people use AC wastefully in poorly insulated buildings.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    Ironically during a nuclear winter event which may or may not be a fraudulent science meme concocted during the cold war. And yet we have had points in fairly recent human history where we had years long stretches of problems caused by volcanic activity. All we need then is some way to turn nuclear fuel directly to enriched calories.
yodsanklai 4y ago
It's comparing apple and orange. Solar/wind aren't available on demand. How much would cost a wind power plant that has the same guaranteed power as a nuclear plant, including batteries for storage? what would be the environmental footprint of such a thing?
- kristopolous 4y ago
  The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things. The word "guaranteed" is about lowest variance - most predictable. What is prone to unscheduled maintenance, breakdowns, forced outages, etc. The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%. https://rmi.org/fuel-hand-make-coal-nuclear-power-plants-valuable/ https://rmi.org/fuel-hand-make-coal-nuclear-power-plants-val... In practice, forced nuclear outage is 1-2%. An additional 7% downtime is scheduled outages for refueling. Coal is about 15%. Here's a live report: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/reactor-status/ps.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/... You can see about 7 are offline. Disruptions are normal, daily, common occurrences and in practice, solar is pretty reliable in places like the Southern California desert where the grid-scale installations are built (example: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.7923792,-118.4060493,17707m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@34.7923792,-118.4060493,17707m/...). They are subject to occasional monsoons, but that's why there's more in other places such as down near the mexican border (https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7188416,-115.6454361,19457m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7188416,-115.6454361,19457m/...). That's not farmland being replaced with solar panels btw. Instead it's called agrivoltaics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics) This is still early, scroll down to the map here: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects-list https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects... ... that's the kind of redundancy we're talking about.
  - yodsanklai 4y ago
    > The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things. Except it doesn't. Which is why Germany didn't decrease its gas plant capacity. They're needed when there's no wind. > The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%. The issue with wind/solar isn't forced outage. It's that the wind doesn't blow all the time, so comparing how much cost 1MWh of wind when the wind blows with 1MWh of coal is dishonest. You're comparing apple and oranges.
melling 4y ago
If it’s cheaper than coal then why are we still building so many coal power plants? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/26/too-many-new-coal-fired-plants-planned-for-15c-climate-goal-report-concludes https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/26/too-many... Coal is at record levels. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wireStory/report-worlds-coal-creeps-new-high-2022-95419546 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wireStory/report-worlds-... Removing coal power plants would have made a noticeable difference.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  We're adding a lot more renewable than anything else. 80% of power plant capacity added in 2020 was renewable. https://www.irena.org/news/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-Adds-Record-New-Renewable-Energy-Capacity-in-2020 https://www.irena.org/news/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-Adds...
  - melling 4y ago
    if we only have 8500 coal power plants globally and this is the single largest source of emissions, shouldn’t we be trying to eliminate 20% of global emissions? Furthermore, if renewables are cheaper shouldn’t we immediately stop adding to the coal problem? We need to replace a billion gasoline powered cars, etc. Coal power generation seems like an easy thing to do.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      Electric cars are betweeb 2x and 4x more efficient than gasoline powered cars. Take a look at the MPGe. https://insideevs.com/news/597460/tesla-efficiency-depends-on-driver/ https://insideevs.com/news/597460/tesla-efficiency-depends-o... Of course that varies with temperature and driving style. My question is- What is better for the environment, A gas powered car or an electric car where the electricity comes exclusively from coal? Short and long term.
      - rootusrootus 4y ago
NalNezumi 4y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the reasons we are building MORE coal (and biofuel) plants because the addition of solar and wind have added volatility to the electricity supply? With few exceptions in the world, in a electricity grid the supply and demand of electricity have to be 1:1, and if wind and solar is adding volatility to that supply, another flexible power source suddenly becomes very profitable and useful. Nuclear is costly to turn on/off, but coal, biofuel and natural gas isn't. So turning it on/off based on the shortage caused by sustainable sources is why they're coming back, have been my understanding
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Coal is not flexible. They are massive heat plants, so an on/off cycle takes about a day.
  - NalNezumi 4y ago
    Ah ok thanks for correcting me
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    Perhaps they don't turn off but merely down? Is that a day? Is there even such a thing as different levels of operation? Even if not a day, maybe still not responsive enough. Then again, maybe it gets you close enough that now you only need a smaller more doable version of some otherwise unrealistic gap filler like batteries or thermal mass or gravity mass etc.
  - infamia 4y ago
    That is not correct. Coal and gas fired power plants have turndown capabilities where they can decrease their power genration very quickly by 75%-90% or so depending on the plant. https://www.babcockpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/extension-of-cogeneration-capability-by-increasing-turndown-of-pulverized-coal-fired-boiler.pdf https://www.babcockpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/exte...
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
S201 4y ago
> If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a real hard time catching up. That's the problem though: *IF* that trend holds. Past performance doesn't guarantee future performance. Climate change presents an existential threat to civilization so relying on a single trend holding seems like a fairly risky bet to make if you ask me. In that vein, I'd argue for throwing everything at the problem. Build it all, wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear. If we overshoot and spend billions more than was necessary, great, that's a hell of a lot better than undershooting and losing trillions from entire economies shutting down.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Solar power including storage is already the cheapest form of energy. Any further improvement is just gravy.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - S201 4y ago
    Regardless of how cheap it may be, the storage of solar power is still a big problem. If we're on the topic of cost trends and batteries, the price of lithium is up ~500%.[1] That's making batteries more expensive than in the past and given all of the demand for them I don't really see it going down any time soon, at least not until new lithium mining plants are built mainly in South America, which still isn't likely to drop prices again in the near future.[2] 1. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium 2. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/06/09/will-there-soon-be-a-surplus-of-lithium https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/06/09/...
    - VintageCool 4y ago
      Global production of lithium has doubled since 2015. I think it's reasonable to expect energy storage to become cheaper purely by the mechanisms of capitalism. The market for energy storage scarcely existed 4 years ago -- there were a handful of pumped hydro storage plants and one compressed air energy storage plant and that was it. The US had 1.5 GW of battery capacity in 2020; we added 5.1 GW of capacity this year and currently scheduled projects will bring 30 GW of battery capacity online by 2025 (per the EIA). It's clear from the current buildout and the current price of solar that there will be a large market for energy storage in the next 10-20 years. That means there is a large market opportunity to build grid energy storage and to increase production of the entire supply chain for grid energy storage. I would be surprised if it is not met.
rpep 4y ago
It’s questionable whether the price can stay as low as it currently is though. The three major manufacturers of wind turbines are basically operating at a loss on the turbines themselves. The price can’t go much lower.
kaba0 4y ago
But we really should not make energetic decisions into a free market question. Of course market prices are a fundamental aspect, but going all-in on a single, cheapest source will be a huge liability and the whole thing should be planned for. E.g. it really makes sense to have a base load and a quick to turn on/off load for spikes in energy usage. Nuclear is very useful for the former and I don’t see not using it (besides renewables of course!) a great decision.
marcosdumay 4y ago
As an aside, we don't need fusion to go anywhere on the inner Solar System. Fission is more than sufficient for that. (Fission looks like enough for interstellar travel too, but it's way harder to refuel.)
Manuel_D 4y ago
Comparing intermittent sources with non-intermittent sources is comparing apples to oranges. A realistic comparison would also include the cost of energy storage, as well as transmission line construction to support energy transport [1]. Intermittent sources are shockingly cheap if you naively compare on a watt-hour basis, ignoring the cost of storing and releasing energy. Unfortunately, storage at the scale required remains expensive and unfeasible [2] and are actually rising due to lithium prices rising 10x over the last few years [3]. 1. Wind and solar need to be built in specific places, and thus have to move large amounts of energy over long distances. This frequently requires expansions to the energy grid: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene... 2. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-costs-rise-interconnection-queue-12-gw/621954/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co... 3. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
- cesarb 4y ago
  > Wind and solar need to be built in specific places, and thus have to move large amounts of energy over long distances. That's not exclusive to wind and solar. From the ones I've seen in my country: 1. Hydroelectric power needs particular geographic features, and an abundance of water. Of the 4 long-distance HVDC links in my country, 4 of them are there to move large amounts of energy from large hydroelectric power plants to the region where most of the power demand is. 2. Coal is cheaper when it doesn't need to be transported for long distances. Not coincidentally, most of the few coal power plants in my country seem to have been built close to (or directly next to) coal mines; the exception I've seen was built next to the coast, and receives coal by ship. 3. Gas power plants tend to be built either next to already existent gas pipelines, or next to the coast to receive LNG by ship.
StillBored 4y ago
Ok I'm going to explain the bit that no one wants to accept about those "shockingly cheap" wind/solar W's. Which the cheapest I think I've seen are only about 1/2 the cost of carbon based energy (which swings between NG and coal being the cheapest). Lets talk solar because its initially easier to reason about: So when you see $X per (K/W/G)watt compared to $Y per (K/W/G)watt for coal/ng/oil/nuke/etc your comparing what is basically the nameplate generational capacity of a renewable resource with the nameplate generational capacity of a reliable source. Then everyone gets happy and walks away. But really lets say that you get 12H of solar production a day (which is a bit hand wavy because it won't ever produce peak power in the morning/evening). So now on a given day your actually producing 12Wh of energy, but lets say for a moment you need 24Wh of energy evenly spread over the day. That same 1W NG plant can provide that. So to reach the 24Wh of reliable generation you need 2*SolarW But because 1/2 of it is at night what you need is 1xSolar during the day+1x solar to charge a 12Wh battery+1x battery*12 (which we are going to call a 1x battery from now on) Now what happens if the sun fails to shine 1 day every two weeks? Well now you need 1xSolar during the day+1x solar to charge for the night+1x battery+2x solar to charge the dark day+2x battery 1xSolar * 4+1xbattery * 3 And once every 3 months the sun doesn't shine for two days. 1xsolar*6+1xbattery*5 So, lets assume batteries cost 3x per 12Wh what 1W solar does and they last 1/2 as long (15 years say). Now lets say the battery cost per unit solar is 6x. So to just handle the case of two dark days in a row its: 6*x+(5*x*6)=36x the installed W price of solar. But in reality lets say you want 3 9's generational reliability (which is probably still two more than you get with that 36x above) how much redundancy do you need? The answer in many places where its possible the sun doesn't shine for a week or more at a time is further multiples of the above! Making solar by far the most expensive sources of energy, only comparable with wind, in just how bad it actually is. So, how does it work today? Well generally the wind/solar plants serve to green wash, and depending on the environment and the fuel costs of NG either make it slightly less expensive or significantly more vs the just running NG plants. The equation works out that one installs NG plants equal to the peak load, then installs just enough wind+solar to reduce to 0 NG consumption (usually for month or so in the spring) at peak renewable production. Any installed capacity beyond that just drives up the price. Put another way, the "battery" today is a natural gas combined cycle generator, and you can only install enough renewables until the constant operational costs stop reducing the fuel costs of the NG plant. Beyond that the prices shoot up. Now the really bad news, energy utilization has been steadily increasing, and the carbon savings have generally been going down per W generated, but the total carbon production has been holding steady or going up. In other words 0 progress over the past three decades in reducing carbon footprint. And there is literally nothing changing over the next ten+ years. We might get another order of magnitude or two of battery production but it won't make a dent. That might be enough to electrify the personal vehicle fleet, which is ~15% of carbon emissions, it won't do anything for all the new NG plants required to back up the extra electricity generation requirements for those vehicles. In ten years though, if we started today we could shutdown every coal plant and replace it with nukes while still increasing overall generational capacity to meet the demand created by the electric cars. And at least in the US we wouldn't have to open another mine, if we just took the existing waste and reprocessed it. And if we passed some national laws stopping some of the NIMBYism we could probably build them cheap enough to make the energy price competitive with carbon sources. We can play around with the install vs operational cost model, but that is sorta the summary. So, when I hear people talking about "renewables" (ignoring hydro) I hear people who don't understand energy markets, politics and engineering because even if you manage to get the market+engineering in place to support a lot of wind+solar consumption people are going to be in the streets burning down your house when they get the bill. So, yah, there is really only one replacement for a coal plan, and its a nuke plant, and it can in theory be cheaper (Nuke plants were cheaper than NG in the past) but until the NIMBY's get out of the way its going to cost more, how much more to save the planet is a political question, but even today it should be fairly easy to do without doubling the generational price.

jules 4y ago

Measuring cost by installed capacity is highly misleading because solar and wind need storage to be reliable sources. The cost of storage dwarfs the other costs, and battery prices have stagnated.

kristopolous 4y ago
The reason battery prices are down 97% since 1990 is because of better battery chemistries coming along. Currently there's a few more in the pipeline (including silicon) that lead market forecasters to predict the long-term (think 2030) trend will continue. The downhill road of pricing has had some bumps but it's very assuredly, extremely downhill
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  So Wright's Law applies to batteries but not to nuclear power?
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    Yes, that's what the historical data from the last 50 years supports. There's giant periods without any movement. Batteries have been around for centuries for instance. These model can be a bit imaginative at times and nuclear may start its journey on it any day but so far it doesn't look like it has. I'd love something absurdly cheap like a working Ponz-Fleischman bubble fusion to come around but if I was advising say a $100 million fund I'd say "solar + wind + chemical batteries" is the foreseeable future. It's just the reality.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Wait, that has happened with fission too, just not at grid scale because there hasn't been funding for it. If you look at military, academic, and space nuclear reactors, you will see Wright's law playing out. Solar and wind got the chance to ramp investment and scale. Grid-attached nuclear never did. Personally, I see more risks to massive-scale battery production than to modest-scale nuclear fission, both of which solve the same problem.
- jules 4y ago
  The battery price graph tells a different story. Improvements have been slowing down for a long time, and have been almost zero the past couple of years and we've actually had a price increase this year. Switching to an entirely new technology is speculative at best, not all that dissimilar from putting all hope in fusion. Could work, but betting the future of the planet on it is silly.

Mistletoe 4y ago

That graph just really says it all haha. It’s all we need to look at. Which way are the arrows pointing? No need for millions of words trying to justify and explain a way for nuclear to work.

mikeyouse 4y ago
And PV is now off the bottom scale of that chart.. Some combination of overbuilding PV and Wind capacity + ever-improving battery tech "won" the energy market. Gas peakers and other stand-by sources will contribute for decades to come but when they're pricing out new nuclear builds at >$0.10/kwh wholesale, no amount of "but capacity factor!" will matter.
yashap 4y ago
Solar and wind are fantastic, cheap sources of power, but they have their limits. They generate power when the sun shines and the wind blows, which is not necessarily when humans need it. We still aren’t very good at storing this power for use later, at large scales, in cost effective ways. So for now solar/wind needs to be paired with power sources we have greater control over, which mostly means nuclear, coal, natural gas, hydro, etc.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
- eternityforest 4y ago
  By the time we cover all the daytime load with solar, they will probably have better batteries though.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    By then we'll probably have figured out fusion too.

thatfrenchguy 4y ago

Yup and when there's no sun and no wind, like in winter in most places, you need something else, or batteries, which are ridiculously expensive both in $ and CO2 per kwh. Solar and Wind just can't do base load today, and you can't turn off the natural gas / coal plants that back them when they don't work. This is a classic case of "doing the first 50% is easy, doing the last 50% is 99% of the work".

themitigating 4y ago
Why wouldn't there be sun in the winter in most places?
- prottog 4y ago
  I don't know what GP meant about "most places", but I guess generally places that have a winter (away from the tropics, that is) are cloudier in the winter, as well as by definition having lower solar irradiation. Most of Europe is in the unenviable position of having higher power requirements precisely when solar potential is at the lowest[0]. [0]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-winter-and-summer-day-solar-irradiation-and-European-electricity-load-profiles_fig1_215681334 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-winter-and-summe...
  - fulafel 4y ago
    The power requirements are fixable by better insulated housing (see eg passive houses). Practically free natural gas has kept people from investing in energy efficient housing, just like in warmer places where people use AC wastefully in poorly insulated buildings.
- peteradio 4y ago
  Ironically during a nuclear winter event which may or may not be a fraudulent science meme concocted during the cold war. And yet we have had points in fairly recent human history where we had years long stretches of problems caused by volcanic activity. All we need then is some way to turn nuclear fuel directly to enriched calories.

yodsanklai 4y ago

It's comparing apple and orange. Solar/wind aren't available on demand. How much would cost a wind power plant that has the same guaranteed power as a nuclear plant, including batteries for storage? what would be the environmental footprint of such a thing?

kristopolous 4y ago
The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things. The word "guaranteed" is about lowest variance - most predictable. What is prone to unscheduled maintenance, breakdowns, forced outages, etc. The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%. https://rmi.org/fuel-hand-make-coal-nuclear-power-plants-valuable/ https://rmi.org/fuel-hand-make-coal-nuclear-power-plants-val... In practice, forced nuclear outage is 1-2%. An additional 7% downtime is scheduled outages for refueling. Coal is about 15%. Here's a live report: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/reactor-status/ps.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/... You can see about 7 are offline. Disruptions are normal, daily, common occurrences and in practice, solar is pretty reliable in places like the Southern California desert where the grid-scale installations are built (example: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.7923792,-118.4060493,17707m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@34.7923792,-118.4060493,17707m/...). They are subject to occasional monsoons, but that's why there's more in other places such as down near the mexican border (https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7188416,-115.6454361,19457m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7188416,-115.6454361,19457m/...). That's not farmland being replaced with solar panels btw. Instead it's called agrivoltaics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics) This is still early, scroll down to the map here: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects-list https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects... ... that's the kind of redundancy we're talking about.
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  > The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things. Except it doesn't. Which is why Germany didn't decrease its gas plant capacity. They're needed when there's no wind. > The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%. The issue with wind/solar isn't forced outage. It's that the wind doesn't blow all the time, so comparing how much cost 1MWh of wind when the wind blows with 1MWh of coal is dishonest. You're comparing apple and oranges.

melling 4y ago

If it’s cheaper than coal then why are we still building so many coal power plants? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/26/too-many-new-coal-fired-plants-planned-for-15c-climate-goal-report-concludes https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/26/too-many... Coal is at record levels. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wireStory/report-worlds-coal-creeps-new-high-2022-95419546 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wireStory/report-worlds-... Removing coal power plants would have made a noticeable difference.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
We're adding a lot more renewable than anything else. 80% of power plant capacity added in 2020 was renewable. https://www.irena.org/news/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-Adds-Record-New-Renewable-Energy-Capacity-in-2020 https://www.irena.org/news/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-Adds...
- melling 4y ago
  if we only have 8500 coal power plants globally and this is the single largest source of emissions, shouldn’t we be trying to eliminate 20% of global emissions? Furthermore, if renewables are cheaper shouldn’t we immediately stop adding to the coal problem? We need to replace a billion gasoline powered cars, etc. Coal power generation seems like an easy thing to do.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Electric cars are betweeb 2x and 4x more efficient than gasoline powered cars. Take a look at the MPGe. https://insideevs.com/news/597460/tesla-efficiency-depends-on-driver/ https://insideevs.com/news/597460/tesla-efficiency-depends-o... Of course that varies with temperature and driving style. My question is- What is better for the environment, A gas powered car or an electric car where the electricity comes exclusively from coal? Short and long term.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago

NalNezumi 4y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the reasons we are building MORE coal (and biofuel) plants because the addition of solar and wind have added volatility to the electricity supply? With few exceptions in the world, in a electricity grid the supply and demand of electricity have to be 1:1, and if wind and solar is adding volatility to that supply, another flexible power source suddenly becomes very profitable and useful. Nuclear is costly to turn on/off, but coal, biofuel and natural gas isn't. So turning it on/off based on the shortage caused by sustainable sources is why they're coming back, have been my understanding

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Coal is not flexible. They are massive heat plants, so an on/off cycle takes about a day.
- NalNezumi 4y ago
  Ah ok thanks for correcting me
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  Perhaps they don't turn off but merely down? Is that a day? Is there even such a thing as different levels of operation? Even if not a day, maybe still not responsive enough. Then again, maybe it gets you close enough that now you only need a smaller more doable version of some otherwise unrealistic gap filler like batteries or thermal mass or gravity mass etc.
- infamia 4y ago
  That is not correct. Coal and gas fired power plants have turndown capabilities where they can decrease their power genration very quickly by 75%-90% or so depending on the plant. https://www.babcockpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/extension-of-cogeneration-capability-by-increasing-turndown-of-pulverized-coal-fired-boiler.pdf https://www.babcockpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/exte...
  - marcosdumay 4y ago

S201 4y ago

> If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a real hard time catching up. That's the problem though: *IF* that trend holds. Past performance doesn't guarantee future performance. Climate change presents an existential threat to civilization so relying on a single trend holding seems like a fairly risky bet to make if you ask me. In that vein, I'd argue for throwing everything at the problem. Build it all, wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear. If we overshoot and spend billions more than was necessary, great, that's a hell of a lot better than undershooting and losing trillions from entire economies shutting down.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Solar power including storage is already the cheapest form of energy. Any further improvement is just gravy.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- S201 4y ago
  Regardless of how cheap it may be, the storage of solar power is still a big problem. If we're on the topic of cost trends and batteries, the price of lithium is up ~500%.[1] That's making batteries more expensive than in the past and given all of the demand for them I don't really see it going down any time soon, at least not until new lithium mining plants are built mainly in South America, which still isn't likely to drop prices again in the near future.[2] 1. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium 2. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/06/09/will-there-soon-be-a-surplus-of-lithium https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/06/09/...
  - VintageCool 4y ago
    Global production of lithium has doubled since 2015. I think it's reasonable to expect energy storage to become cheaper purely by the mechanisms of capitalism. The market for energy storage scarcely existed 4 years ago -- there were a handful of pumped hydro storage plants and one compressed air energy storage plant and that was it. The US had 1.5 GW of battery capacity in 2020; we added 5.1 GW of capacity this year and currently scheduled projects will bring 30 GW of battery capacity online by 2025 (per the EIA). It's clear from the current buildout and the current price of solar that there will be a large market for energy storage in the next 10-20 years. That means there is a large market opportunity to build grid energy storage and to increase production of the entire supply chain for grid energy storage. I would be surprised if it is not met.

rpep 4y ago

It’s questionable whether the price can stay as low as it currently is though. The three major manufacturers of wind turbines are basically operating at a loss on the turbines themselves. The price can’t go much lower.

kaba0 4y ago

But we really should not make energetic decisions into a free market question. Of course market prices are a fundamental aspect, but going all-in on a single, cheapest source will be a huge liability and the whole thing should be planned for. E.g. it really makes sense to have a base load and a quick to turn on/off load for spikes in energy usage. Nuclear is very useful for the former and I don’t see not using it (besides renewables of course!) a great decision.

marcosdumay 4y ago

As an aside, we don't need fusion to go anywhere on the inner Solar System. Fission is more than sufficient for that. (Fission looks like enough for interstellar travel too, but it's way harder to refuel.)

Manuel_D 4y ago

Comparing intermittent sources with non-intermittent sources is comparing apples to oranges. A realistic comparison would also include the cost of energy storage, as well as transmission line construction to support energy transport [1]. Intermittent sources are shockingly cheap if you naively compare on a watt-hour basis, ignoring the cost of storing and releasing energy. Unfortunately, storage at the scale required remains expensive and unfeasible [2] and are actually rising due to lithium prices rising 10x over the last few years [3]. 1. Wind and solar need to be built in specific places, and thus have to move large amounts of energy over long distances. This frequently requires expansions to the energy grid: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene... 2. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-costs-rise-interconnection-queue-12-gw/621954/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co... 3. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

cesarb 4y ago
> Wind and solar need to be built in specific places, and thus have to move large amounts of energy over long distances. That's not exclusive to wind and solar. From the ones I've seen in my country: 1. Hydroelectric power needs particular geographic features, and an abundance of water. Of the 4 long-distance HVDC links in my country, 4 of them are there to move large amounts of energy from large hydroelectric power plants to the region where most of the power demand is. 2. Coal is cheaper when it doesn't need to be transported for long distances. Not coincidentally, most of the few coal power plants in my country seem to have been built close to (or directly next to) coal mines; the exception I've seen was built next to the coast, and receives coal by ship. 3. Gas power plants tend to be built either next to already existent gas pipelines, or next to the coast to receive LNG by ship.

StillBored 4y ago

Ok I'm going to explain the bit that no one wants to accept about those "shockingly cheap" wind/solar W's. Which the cheapest I think I've seen are only about 1/2 the cost of carbon based energy (which swings between NG and coal being the cheapest). Lets talk solar because its initially easier to reason about: So when you see $X per (K/W/G)watt compared to $Y per (K/W/G)watt for coal/ng/oil/nuke/etc your comparing what is basically the nameplate generational capacity of a renewable resource with the nameplate generational capacity of a reliable source. Then everyone gets happy and walks away. But really lets say that you get 12H of solar production a day (which is a bit hand wavy because it won't ever produce peak power in the morning/evening). So now on a given day your actually producing 12Wh of energy, but lets say for a moment you need 24Wh of energy evenly spread over the day. That same 1W NG plant can provide that. So to reach the 24Wh of reliable generation you need 2*SolarW But because 1/2 of it is at night what you need is 1xSolar during the day+1x solar to charge a 12Wh battery+1x battery*12 (which we are going to call a 1x battery from now on) Now what happens if the sun fails to shine 1 day every two weeks? Well now you need 1xSolar during the day+1x solar to charge for the night+1x battery+2x solar to charge the dark day+2x battery 1xSolar * 4+1xbattery * 3 And once every 3 months the sun doesn't shine for two days. 1xsolar*6+1xbattery*5 So, lets assume batteries cost 3x per 12Wh what 1W solar does and they last 1/2 as long (15 years say). Now lets say the battery cost per unit solar is 6x. So to just handle the case of two dark days in a row its: 6*x+(5*x*6)=36x the installed W price of solar. But in reality lets say you want 3 9's generational reliability (which is probably still two more than you get with that 36x above) how much redundancy do you need? The answer in many places where its possible the sun doesn't shine for a week or more at a time is further multiples of the above! Making solar by far the most expensive sources of energy, only comparable with wind, in just how bad it actually is. So, how does it work today? Well generally the wind/solar plants serve to green wash, and depending on the environment and the fuel costs of NG either make it slightly less expensive or significantly more vs the just running NG plants. The equation works out that one installs NG plants equal to the peak load, then installs just enough wind+solar to reduce to 0 NG consumption (usually for month or so in the spring) at peak renewable production. Any installed capacity beyond that just drives up the price. Put another way, the "battery" today is a natural gas combined cycle generator, and you can only install enough renewables until the constant operational costs stop reducing the fuel costs of the NG plant. Beyond that the prices shoot up. Now the really bad news, energy utilization has been steadily increasing, and the carbon savings have generally been going down per W generated, but the total carbon production has been holding steady or going up. In other words 0 progress over the past three decades in reducing carbon footprint. And there is literally nothing changing over the next ten+ years. We might get another order of magnitude or two of battery production but it won't make a dent. That might be enough to electrify the personal vehicle fleet, which is ~15% of carbon emissions, it won't do anything for all the new NG plants required to back up the extra electricity generation requirements for those vehicles. In ten years though, if we started today we could shutdown every coal plant and replace it with nukes while still increasing overall generational capacity to meet the demand created by the electric cars. And at least in the US we wouldn't have to open another mine, if we just took the existing waste and reprocessed it. And if we passed some national laws stopping some of the NIMBYism we could probably build them cheap enough to make the energy price competitive with carbon sources. We can play around with the install vs operational cost model, but that is sorta the summary. So, when I hear people talking about "renewables" (ignoring hydro) I hear people who don't understand energy markets, politics and engineering because even if you manage to get the market+engineering in place to support a lot of wind+solar consumption people are going to be in the streets burning down your house when they get the bill. So, yah, there is really only one replacement for a coal plan, and its a nuke plant, and it can in theory be cheaper (Nuke plants were cheaper than NG in the past) but until the NIMBY's get out of the way its going to cost more, how much more to save the planet is a political question, but even today it should be fairly easy to do without doubling the generational price.