7 ms·

Also in the article: "Utility-scale solar-plus-storage costs are about $45/MWh; wind power costs are $30/MWh; and stand-alone utility-scale solar costs are at $

Also in the article: "Utility-scale solar-plus-storage costs are about $45/MWh; wind power costs are $30/MWh; and stand-alone utility-scale solar costs are at $32/MWh" Wikipedia has higher numbers, but still comparable. And "technology proponent says technology can achieve X" is a really bad selling point if another technology already delivers X, especially if the new technology is going to face social hurdles.

PaulHoule 4y ago
i don’t know if i believe the $45/MWh figure for solar+storage just yet. Maybe someday, maybe not far in the future, but grid scale storage isn’t scaled out that far in 2023 so far as i know.
- hedora 4y ago
  Yeah; a home sized battery is about 33kWh. Assuming 3000 cycles, that’s 100MWh, lifetime. If you know anyone selling that (installed, with solar panels) for $4500, I’d like to hear about it.
  - yazaddaruvala 4y ago
    Here is some data from 2019 about cheap solar+storage. Per unit, it is always cheaper to build a factory than do home installation. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commission-says-yes-to-cheapest-solar-plus-storage-in-the-usa/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...
  - r00fus 4y ago
    That's 3000 cycles before it gets to 80% efficient. Also battery studies in EVs have shown the cycle count to vastly underestimate the degradation.
    - hedora 4y ago
      Yeah, but at about a cycle a day, that’s 10 years, which is when the warranty in all the other stuff gets dicey.
  - cagenut 4y ago
    obviously this isn't installed, nor 4500, but in case you weren't aware of how close things are getting already: https://signaturesolar.com/complete-all-in-one-off-grid-solar-kit-kit-e0000 https://signaturesolar.com/complete-all-in-one-off-grid-sola... of course utility scale beats that handily.
DennisP 4y ago
I see a lot of solar+storage quotes that don't bother saying how much storage. Usually it's four hours of storage at most. That's enough to smooth out the duck curve and get your daytime demand covered, but not enough to get through a windless night. Building enough nuclear for baseload demand, and enough solar+storage for the extra daytime demand, seems ideal to me until we get much cheaper scalable storage.
- seiferteric 4y ago
  It's a great point. Even in my spot in northern California this winter, it's been so cloudy this year, I can't imaging an all solar+storage grid would have worked out well this year. In this case having electricity that costs 45% more when it's cloudy is a lot better than none at all. Actually this gave me an idea, it would be really neat to have an comprehensive simulator of power grids that incorporated weather, demand spikes etc. to play around with different energy source mix to get an idea of what actually works and when it fails as well as total cost, environmental impact etc.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    > Even in my spot in northern California this winter, it's been so cloudy this year, I can't imaging an all solar+storage grid would have worked out well this year. The electricity demand in the winter is much lower than the summer demand, especially in California due to residential AC. > Actually this gave me an idea, it would be really neat to have an comprehensive simulator of power grids that incorporated weather, demand spikes etc. to play around with different energy source mix to get an idea of what actually works and when it fails as well as total cost, environmental impact etc. There's a gentleman in Australia who does ~this for their market -- 5 hours of storage is enough to get to a 99% renewable grid there; https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1640959088887730176 https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1640959088887730176
    - seiferteric 4y ago
      With heat pumps coming online and gas being phased out that might not be true for very long. Also is 99% even close to good enough? That would be like 4 days a year without power right?
lucb1e 4y ago
It does seem a lot simpler to plop down a bunch of concrete in roughly the same area as today's fossil fuel plants take, compared to rewiring and repurposing a third of a country to get enough solar panels and wind turbines in place (the latter while keeping residence distance requirements in mind). Not sure if that is factored into the feasibility when people talk about how expensive it is. I agree that it doesn't make economic sense in an ideal world with twice as much space per capita and/or a lot more time to find and purchase ideal nooks and crannies and wire them up, but that would require moving to planet B. Note I'm not talking about nearly-empty USA, Australia, northern Africa, etc. here; rather, take 2-3 random European countries (highest emissions per capita after north america, so you know, the place that needs to get change happening) and you're very unlikely to hit only ones where not most/all of the land already is already allocated to some purpose. I also agree it's likely already too late to get started on new nuclear plants, like, it's nearly so late that we might as well just go solar and wind for the rest of the way. But I don't think it's quite at that point yet, considering for example that regions in southern germany with big-ish distance requirements for wind turbines are placing nearly none (and germany is not even one of the countries that I would count among those that are out of space), it's apparently that full already and they've got like 80% of the way to go in phasing out fossil fuels. Honestly the main hope I have these days is solar panels on crop fields becoming a real thing. That would grant a level of scale (and somewhat protects from crop failure causes like hail and drought) that would make me see this energy transition as feasible without nuclear (pushing the recycling problem onto the next generation, but better to deal with a billion worn panels than a billion displaced people (both figures are figurative)), but so far there's little adoption.
- eldaisfish 4y ago
  We need a combination of the two. A single point of failure is not ideal design. One increasingly common weather event and your power grid loses a massive source of energy. Distributed energy is good because it allows life to continue, in a limited fashion. For western europe at least, off shore wind is a great alternative, as are smaller wind turbines on farms. Much of western europe is in the path of the trade winds and so is a great place for wind power. It is not too late for nuclear. Nuclear is an excellent stop-gap measure while we figure out how to transition to large-scale renewables.
eldaisfish 4y ago
The major caveat with those numbers is that they ignore time and the knock-on costs from ignoring time. Variable and uncertain power generation creates a problem on the electricity grid and the source of the problem does not pay for the solution. Everyone else does. Those energy costs you quote imply that variable generation (wind, solar) do not set the price of energy, which they do not. The problem with computing a solution is that it depends on where you are, which season you are in and what the rest of the power grid looks like.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  Indeed they ignore time; to build a nuclear power plant today means committing to a power generation price for 30 years or not making back your investment. You can see why no one is making that bet against solar + storage.
credit_guy 4y ago
Let's look at cost per kWh. I know it's a trivial division by 1000, but people pay their utility bill by the kWh, not by the MWh. So, in the first 2 months of 2023 the average American paid $0.17 per kWh [1], up from $0.15 one year before. Overall, a lot of people would be happy to pay $0.06/kWh. You are saying solar and wind could come at $0.045 and $0.03. That's great, but 2 cents per kWh is not really something people pay attention too all that much. [1]https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices_selectedareas_table.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Discussions about this topic tend to get a bit hand wavy very quickly and few people seem to be able to apply any rational system thinking to the whole debate. That's true for proponents and opponents. I've been reading through, and occasionally commenting on threads on this topic on hacker news for a while now. So, I've seen all the arguments. From both sides. There are usually a few bright people commenting but a lot of others seem to lose the ability to do math or conveniently reason under some closed world assumptions. Or just dismiss the notion of math entirely. Basically, anyone focusing on a single technology as a holy grail tpye solution is probably barking up the wrong tree. The notion of system thinking is having a mix of everything that's already being done and evolving that in a direction where less of it is going to involve fossil fuels. Let's consider a few technologies that already exist (in addition to wind and solar) and work at scale or can be made to work at scale that can be freely combined with wind and solar. - Pumped hydro. As of yet one of the most widely used energy storage on grids in e.g. the US. There's about 22 GW and about 0.5TWH of it on the grid. A lot of it was, ironically, installed decades ago when nuclear plants started coming online and something had to be done with the massive amounts of energy that they produced. It's relatively expensive and it can't be done everywhere. But it's proven technology and its there already. There are lots of smaller scale trials with all sorts of gravity batteries. Not all of them practical of course. Though using e.g. mine shafts seems like it should work. - Cables. We can use cables to move power around by the GW. It's an old technology. Has been around for as long as we've had electricity. This can be done over thousands of kilometers using modern technology. Examples: cables are already running between Norway, Germany, and the UK and more are being planned between e.g. Morocco and the UK, Australia and Singapore. A single cable can provide roughly the capacity of a largish nuclear reactor. I think the Moroccon cables are going to be 1.8GW each for example. The current plan is to have four of those. Cables aren't cheap. But they are probably comparable to largish nuclear plants in terms of the amount of power they can move and in cost. And they last for a very long time once you have them. Great argument if you hear people make the point that the wind doesn't blow all the time and the sun doesn't come out in the winter. True locally but cables fix the locality problem. Cloudy UK can rely on sunny Morocco. Wind starved central Europe can use off shore wind. - Geothermal. There are lots of places where people are already exploiting geothermal energy. It seems more interesting to use for heating than for electricity but both are a thing. Digging deep for higher temperature gradients is expensive. But there also are a few newer projects involving heat pumps that don't require that. - Grid batteries. These are currently being deployed by the gwh and probably soon twh. This is a rapidly growing market. Mostly this seems to be with relatively expensive batteries that provide hours, not weeks of storage. But interest in much cheaper but more voluminous battery chemistries that might be used for longer term storage is picking up as well. Too early to pick any winners here but there's simply too much of this stuff going on to dismiss it. - Domestic batteries and EV batteries. Love them or hate them, these are being mass produced and installed as well. Tens of millions of EVs are going to require batteries to be produced by the twh per year and that's going to be a reality within a decade. The volume of batteries on the road is soon going to exceed the yearly energy consumption in a lot of places. That would be a problem if those vehicles would be moving 100% of the time. Which of course they don't. Domestic batteries are not far behind this but those too are starting to add up as their cost is going down. So despite there being so much battery on the road, we may not actually have much of a case for vehicle to grid technology to actually tap into that reserve. Because we'll have plenty of other batteries permanently connected to the grid. Either way, hard to dismiss any storage that is going to measured in many twh. None of thesse things of course are free and relying on them exclusively is not a solution. Especially considering that some of these are actually quite expensive. But the reality is we are already doing those at gw scale and soon at tw scale. And it's all happening on the same interconnected grid. Cost is not a constant and there's a trend for mass production to get cost down for a lot of these things. This is true for nuclear as well. At least hypothetically because our current nuclear production capacity is too low to show any signs of a learning effect so far (if anything it seems to have gotten more expensive over time). But hypothetically cost would come down if we did more of it. But the simple fact is that by virtue of people installing solar and wind at break neck speed there's going to be no shortage of vast amounts of excess power peaks that can be moved around and stored. Which does raise the question what the point is of focusing on expensive nuclear projects in a lot of places. System thinking is the notion that we can use all of these solutions, and more, to create a highly resilient and robust, interconnected grid. Nuclear can certainly play a role in that and it looks like it will. But it's probably going to be a much smaller one than some people would like us to think.

PaulHoule 4y ago

i don’t know if i believe the $45/MWh figure for solar+storage just yet. Maybe someday, maybe not far in the future, but grid scale storage isn’t scaled out that far in 2023 so far as i know.

hedora 4y ago
Yeah; a home sized battery is about 33kWh. Assuming 3000 cycles, that’s 100MWh, lifetime. If you know anyone selling that (installed, with solar panels) for $4500, I’d like to hear about it.
- yazaddaruvala 4y ago
  Here is some data from 2019 about cheap solar+storage. Per unit, it is always cheaper to build a factory than do home installation. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commission-says-yes-to-cheapest-solar-plus-storage-in-the-usa/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...
- r00fus 4y ago
  That's 3000 cycles before it gets to 80% efficient. Also battery studies in EVs have shown the cycle count to vastly underestimate the degradation.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Yeah, but at about a cycle a day, that’s 10 years, which is when the warranty in all the other stuff gets dicey.
- cagenut 4y ago
  obviously this isn't installed, nor 4500, but in case you weren't aware of how close things are getting already: https://signaturesolar.com/complete-all-in-one-off-grid-solar-kit-kit-e0000 https://signaturesolar.com/complete-all-in-one-off-grid-sola... of course utility scale beats that handily.

DennisP 4y ago

I see a lot of solar+storage quotes that don't bother saying how much storage. Usually it's four hours of storage at most. That's enough to smooth out the duck curve and get your daytime demand covered, but not enough to get through a windless night. Building enough nuclear for baseload demand, and enough solar+storage for the extra daytime demand, seems ideal to me until we get much cheaper scalable storage.

seiferteric 4y ago
It's a great point. Even in my spot in northern California this winter, it's been so cloudy this year, I can't imaging an all solar+storage grid would have worked out well this year. In this case having electricity that costs 45% more when it's cloudy is a lot better than none at all. Actually this gave me an idea, it would be really neat to have an comprehensive simulator of power grids that incorporated weather, demand spikes etc. to play around with different energy source mix to get an idea of what actually works and when it fails as well as total cost, environmental impact etc.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  > Even in my spot in northern California this winter, it's been so cloudy this year, I can't imaging an all solar+storage grid would have worked out well this year. The electricity demand in the winter is much lower than the summer demand, especially in California due to residential AC. > Actually this gave me an idea, it would be really neat to have an comprehensive simulator of power grids that incorporated weather, demand spikes etc. to play around with different energy source mix to get an idea of what actually works and when it fails as well as total cost, environmental impact etc. There's a gentleman in Australia who does ~this for their market -- 5 hours of storage is enough to get to a 99% renewable grid there; https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1640959088887730176 https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1640959088887730176
  - seiferteric 4y ago
    With heat pumps coming online and gas being phased out that might not be true for very long. Also is 99% even close to good enough? That would be like 4 days a year without power right?

lucb1e 4y ago

It does seem a lot simpler to plop down a bunch of concrete in roughly the same area as today's fossil fuel plants take, compared to rewiring and repurposing a third of a country to get enough solar panels and wind turbines in place (the latter while keeping residence distance requirements in mind). Not sure if that is factored into the feasibility when people talk about how expensive it is. I agree that it doesn't make economic sense in an ideal world with twice as much space per capita and/or a lot more time to find and purchase ideal nooks and crannies and wire them up, but that would require moving to planet B. Note I'm not talking about nearly-empty USA, Australia, northern Africa, etc. here; rather, take 2-3 random European countries (highest emissions per capita after north america, so you know, the place that needs to get change happening) and you're very unlikely to hit only ones where not most/all of the land already is already allocated to some purpose. I also agree it's likely already too late to get started on new nuclear plants, like, it's nearly so late that we might as well just go solar and wind for the rest of the way. But I don't think it's quite at that point yet, considering for example that regions in southern germany with big-ish distance requirements for wind turbines are placing nearly none (and germany is not even one of the countries that I would count among those that are out of space), it's apparently that full already and they've got like 80% of the way to go in phasing out fossil fuels. Honestly the main hope I have these days is solar panels on crop fields becoming a real thing. That would grant a level of scale (and somewhat protects from crop failure causes like hail and drought) that would make me see this energy transition as feasible without nuclear (pushing the recycling problem onto the next generation, but better to deal with a billion worn panels than a billion displaced people (both figures are figurative)), but so far there's little adoption.

eldaisfish 4y ago
We need a combination of the two. A single point of failure is not ideal design. One increasingly common weather event and your power grid loses a massive source of energy. Distributed energy is good because it allows life to continue, in a limited fashion. For western europe at least, off shore wind is a great alternative, as are smaller wind turbines on farms. Much of western europe is in the path of the trade winds and so is a great place for wind power. It is not too late for nuclear. Nuclear is an excellent stop-gap measure while we figure out how to transition to large-scale renewables.

eldaisfish 4y ago

The major caveat with those numbers is that they ignore time and the knock-on costs from ignoring time. Variable and uncertain power generation creates a problem on the electricity grid and the source of the problem does not pay for the solution. Everyone else does. Those energy costs you quote imply that variable generation (wind, solar) do not set the price of energy, which they do not. The problem with computing a solution is that it depends on where you are, which season you are in and what the rest of the power grid looks like.

stefan_ 4y ago
Indeed they ignore time; to build a nuclear power plant today means committing to a power generation price for 30 years or not making back your investment. You can see why no one is making that bet against solar + storage.

credit_guy 4y ago

Let's look at cost per kWh. I know it's a trivial division by 1000, but people pay their utility bill by the kWh, not by the MWh. So, in the first 2 months of 2023 the average American paid $0.17 per kWh [1], up from $0.15 one year before. Overall, a lot of people would be happy to pay $0.06/kWh. You are saying solar and wind could come at $0.045 and $0.03. That's great, but 2 cents per kWh is not really something people pay attention too all that much. [1]https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices_selectedareas_table.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Discussions about this topic tend to get a bit hand wavy very quickly and few people seem to be able to apply any rational system thinking to the whole debate. That's true for proponents and opponents. I've been reading through, and occasionally commenting on threads on this topic on hacker news for a while now. So, I've seen all the arguments. From both sides. There are usually a few bright people commenting but a lot of others seem to lose the ability to do math or conveniently reason under some closed world assumptions. Or just dismiss the notion of math entirely. Basically, anyone focusing on a single technology as a holy grail tpye solution is probably barking up the wrong tree. The notion of system thinking is having a mix of everything that's already being done and evolving that in a direction where less of it is going to involve fossil fuels. Let's consider a few technologies that already exist (in addition to wind and solar) and work at scale or can be made to work at scale that can be freely combined with wind and solar. - Pumped hydro. As of yet one of the most widely used energy storage on grids in e.g. the US. There's about 22 GW and about 0.5TWH of it on the grid. A lot of it was, ironically, installed decades ago when nuclear plants started coming online and something had to be done with the massive amounts of energy that they produced. It's relatively expensive and it can't be done everywhere. But it's proven technology and its there already. There are lots of smaller scale trials with all sorts of gravity batteries. Not all of them practical of course. Though using e.g. mine shafts seems like it should work. - Cables. We can use cables to move power around by the GW. It's an old technology. Has been around for as long as we've had electricity. This can be done over thousands of kilometers using modern technology. Examples: cables are already running between Norway, Germany, and the UK and more are being planned between e.g. Morocco and the UK, Australia and Singapore. A single cable can provide roughly the capacity of a largish nuclear reactor. I think the Moroccon cables are going to be 1.8GW each for example. The current plan is to have four of those. Cables aren't cheap. But they are probably comparable to largish nuclear plants in terms of the amount of power they can move and in cost. And they last for a very long time once you have them. Great argument if you hear people make the point that the wind doesn't blow all the time and the sun doesn't come out in the winter. True locally but cables fix the locality problem. Cloudy UK can rely on sunny Morocco. Wind starved central Europe can use off shore wind. - Geothermal. There are lots of places where people are already exploiting geothermal energy. It seems more interesting to use for heating than for electricity but both are a thing. Digging deep for higher temperature gradients is expensive. But there also are a few newer projects involving heat pumps that don't require that. - Grid batteries. These are currently being deployed by the gwh and probably soon twh. This is a rapidly growing market. Mostly this seems to be with relatively expensive batteries that provide hours, not weeks of storage. But interest in much cheaper but more voluminous battery chemistries that might be used for longer term storage is picking up as well. Too early to pick any winners here but there's simply too much of this stuff going on to dismiss it. - Domestic batteries and EV batteries. Love them or hate them, these are being mass produced and installed as well. Tens of millions of EVs are going to require batteries to be produced by the twh per year and that's going to be a reality within a decade. The volume of batteries on the road is soon going to exceed the yearly energy consumption in a lot of places. That would be a problem if those vehicles would be moving 100% of the time. Which of course they don't. Domestic batteries are not far behind this but those too are starting to add up as their cost is going down. So despite there being so much battery on the road, we may not actually have much of a case for vehicle to grid technology to actually tap into that reserve. Because we'll have plenty of other batteries permanently connected to the grid. Either way, hard to dismiss any storage that is going to measured in many twh. None of thesse things of course are free and relying on them exclusively is not a solution. Especially considering that some of these are actually quite expensive. But the reality is we are already doing those at gw scale and soon at tw scale. And it's all happening on the same interconnected grid. Cost is not a constant and there's a trend for mass production to get cost down for a lot of these things. This is true for nuclear as well. At least hypothetically because our current nuclear production capacity is too low to show any signs of a learning effect so far (if anything it seems to have gotten more expensive over time). But hypothetically cost would come down if we did more of it. But the simple fact is that by virtue of people installing solar and wind at break neck speed there's going to be no shortage of vast amounts of excess power peaks that can be moved around and stored. Which does raise the question what the point is of focusing on expensive nuclear projects in a lot of places. System thinking is the notion that we can use all of these solutions, and more, to create a highly resilient and robust, interconnected grid. Nuclear can certainly play a role in that and it looks like it will. But it's probably going to be a much smaller one than some people would like us to think.