8 ms·

> Nuclear still costs them more than solar and wind ...if you ignore storage. Solar and wind will continue to be the most expensive, difficult to scale method

> Nuclear still costs them more than solar and wind ...if you ignore storage. Solar and wind will continue to be the most expensive, difficult to scale method until the issue of energy storage is resolved. Batteries are getting cheaper, but they're not being produced on the scale necessary to supplant base load power. Until then, you need to calculate the full cost of base load into the cost of solar and wind if you want to consider them a substitute, rather than a compliment.

foxyv 4y ago
I did the math on this myself earlier to understand the problem. Solar is VERY expensive if you include storage, if you can even get it. We will need natural gas and coal until we do. In the future I expect that this will change as battery production gets off the ground at the scale we need. But that will take a lot of time we don't have. Nuclear makes a lot of sense if we want to be off coal and natural gas in the next 5-10 years. If we want to burn fossil fuels until 2060 then solar and wind are okay I guess. There is a reason that fossil fuel companies lobby heavily against nuclear and fund immense campaigns against it. It's a direct competitor. Solar and battery on the other hand are just barely off the ground right now.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Nuclear reactors typically take about 100 months to build--and that's just the construction phase, not the pre-construction design and permitting--so no, they won't help in the next 5 - 10 years. 1. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-time https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...
  - foxyv 4y ago
    The article you posted said 6-8 years. 100 months is in the US due to the legal and political climate that supports fossil fuel generation. In the US there is even backlash against wind power of all things... It's part of the reason why nuclear plants are built so large in the US. This is one problem I have with anti-nuclear propaganda. It uses the fact that it's been so successful at destroying nuclear power, as evidence that it's right in the first place.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
karaokeyoga 4y ago
nit: compliment → complement (in this case)
- zdragnar 4y ago
  sigh I blame my phone's auto-correct feature.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
Sure, but the biggest problem with nuclear is it takes a decade to build the plants, at best. It's impossible to plan on that time scale because you have no idea what the alternatives will look like once the plant is operational. You may have just spent billion on an energy source that is already obsolete.
- defrost 4y ago
  That's a figure with some bounce to it: Nuclear reactors connected to the grid in 2021 had a median construction time of 88 months. (7.3 years) [1] and According to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) study, Tuesday, 15 countries have built a total of 83 nuclear plants over the last 20 years among the 31 countries with nuclear power. It took on average 190 months to build each plant. During that period, Korea has built a total of 13 nuclear power plants. The average construction period for each plant was only 56 months (4.6 years), more than three times faster than other countries building nuclear plants. [2] South Korea insists it meets Nuclear Safety and Security Commission standards, by contrast: In France, [ ... ] taking an average of 126 months to build each plant, nearly three times as long as Japan. [2] The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one. [2] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-construction-time-for-reactors-since-1981/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi... [2] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-second-fastest-nuclear-plant-building-country https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...
  - pyrale 4y ago
    > The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one. Looks like one or two plants never finished.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    You should definitely add the timelines for Japan and China from [2] Japan, which has built a total of eight nuclear power plants since 1996, was the fastest, taking only 46 months to build each plant, while China ranked third, building 28 nuclear power plants during that period and averaging 68 months to complete each one. Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 6 is the world’s fastest-built nuclear power plant, taking only 39 months for completion, while of Korea’s Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant Reactor 3 took 49 months to build.
Turskarama 4y ago
I would bet money that storage is a solved problem by the end of the decade, about the same amount of time it takes to build a nuclear reactor.
- liketochill 4y ago
  What stocks are you buying and how much of your retirement fund are you betting?
  - Turskarama 4y ago
    Most of the companies I'd like to buy aren't public yet. As for retirement, I'd probably put 20% into energy storage, again if I could. It's a false dichotomy anyway, because I wouldn't put _any_ money into nuclear stocks.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - mbgerring 4y ago
    LiCycle and GMET, and also exercising my own company’s stock options. As soon as Form Energy goes public I’ll put a significant amount of money into them as well.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Storage IS a solved problem, it's just not scaled up yet (batteries) or depends on geography (water / hydro).
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Battery storage is still mostly LiIon, simply because it has a lot of preexisting investment in R&D and large-scale production. I expect battery storage to become much more economical once a technology developed for the requirements of grid-scale storage takes off. There are plenty of good candidates, but none of them seem to be quite there yet. I also expect a lot more hydro to be built eventually, it's not as dependent on geography if you just build two ponds at different elevations for pumped hydro, or repurpose old mineshafts to get the elevation difference on flat ground.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wtfmcgrill 4y ago
You are my hero, been telling this at clouds for years after I took a power engineering course. Solar and wind are cheaper until you consider storage and grid reliability. Grid storage battery can be used for peaker/frequency regulation regardless of what you used to charge them full stop.
- rstuart4133 4y ago
  > Solar and wind are cheaper until you consider storage and grid reliability. Counter example. South Australia hit 80% of it's electricity production from renewables in the last two quarters: https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-enjoys-80-1-pct-wind-and-solar-share-in-blackout-free-summer/ Power prices are now cheaper then before renewables were took over: https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_pack.pdf Grid reliability remains about the same as everywhere else: https://reneweconomy.com.au/five-years-after-blackout-south-australia-now-only-state-with-no-supply-shortfalls/
- pydry 4y ago
  They're five times cheaper when you dont take storage into account. Theyre cheaper after you consider storage too. Indeed, if you use solar and wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that for electricity (a process that is ~40% efficient) it's still cheaper. https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-cheaper-and-greener-hinkley-point-c-nuclear-plant https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea... This means that even on the darkest most windless winter days when the grid has to eat into long term seasonal storage, solar and wind energy is currently still cheaper than an MWh of nuclear power is on the sunniest, windiest days.
  - peterfirefly 4y ago
    > Theyre cheaper after you consider storage too. What's the price of the Ukraine war?
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    So you're advocating for a base load of natural gas power plants, with wind and solar supplementing them, which was my original point- that they only work as a supplement, rather than a replacement, for nuclear and fossil fuels. Maybe nuclear isn't a great alternative to natural gas. I'm down with that. I'm not going to ignore the fact that wind and solar are at best complimentary, and that we can talk about pricing them without also talking about pricing in the base load that they're supplementing.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Sodium ion batteries will change this equation. 150 wh/kg, not even lithium is needed.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  The tech for sodium ion batteries have been around since the 1970's or 80's. The problem is capacity fade- the most stable anodes require titanium or molybdenum, and even then they're not a great deal better than lead acid batteries. The cheapest low-end estimate for sodium-ion batteries is $40 per kw/h of capacity. The Texas grid at any point had about 85 gigawatts of available generation capacity in 2021 (100% would be around 115, but solar and wind aren't always producing, plants are sometimes offline for maintenance, etc). So, with no nuclear or fossil fuel production, you're looking at $27 billion just to buy the batteries (not counting installation or maintenance costs) to keep the lights on for 8 hours in Texas on a windless night. That's at the cheapest option, so you can figure that you'll need to pay roughly 1/4 of that a year making up for batteries that have lost capacity. If you double it, that drops to 1/5 to 1/6 the total cost, unless a miracle occurs in anode tech or the weather is wonderful and they don't cycle as frequently. Of course, three days of mild, cloudy weather means brownouts or blackouts, because 8 hours of storage is not very much at all. If it were connected to other grids, they could import excess energy from across the continent, but that means those places won't be recharging their own batteries, and you now need to factor in more HVDC lines, and over-provisioning to cover transmission losses into your base price.
  - mstipetic 4y ago
    Nobody is saying replace ALL energy generation with wind and solar. It’s ok to have a baseline to keep the basics running at least. Also I never understood why is the default that we all have to have as much energy at our disposal as we want, with a bit of preparation on our end we can easily deal with any intermittent power issues. This is such a consumerist, comfort-over-everything view
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      Your baseline has to come from somewhere, which means the cost of that baseline has to be added into solar and wind. It's been my central point all along; intermittent generation can only complement, not replace, nuclear or fossils. At that point, you're better off building nuclear at scale using reproducing designs (or as close to as possible) to bring costs down like South Korea. There's a solar install not too far from the Canadian border that has produced zero energy for months. It had to be shut down because, despite the panels being 16 feet tall, there are 12 feet of snow around them from accumulation and drifting. Over the next two days, they're getting another 6-12 inches of snow and sleet- conditions which cause wind turbines to draw energy from the grid to heat the blades so they don't build up ice and get damaged. Is the answer to everyone not on the coast north of Arkansas to move somewhere else? For the whole of Canada to just get fucked?
mbgerring 4y ago
The investment and energy going into solving energy storage will bear fruit long before any of the many technical and regulatory hurdles in the way of cheap nuclear power are cleared. And I’ve put my money where my mouth is on this.
- fooblaster 4y ago
  how much storage capacity do you think is needed to deal with the worst cases for solar/wind that are encountered during the year? Last time I did a rough calculation on this, I quickly realized there is a fairly low upper limit on how much wind/solar capacity one can install, because the storage required is so immense.
  - mbgerring 4y ago
    Don’t have the number in my head, but my day job is building software to enable (among other things) moving load around to avoid the “worst case,” which is just as good as building the storage.
    - ftth_finland 4y ago
      > Don’t have the number in my head That’s because it’s weeks, if not months, in places that have actual seasons. > moving load around to avoid the “worst case,” There is no such thing with base load in winter. You either provide constant heating or people freeze. There are places where rearranging the chairs works and there are places where it doesn’t.
      - sveme 4y ago
        There hasn‘t been a single day in Germany last year where renewable energy dropped below 30% of consumption. So overbuilt geographically dispersed systems can handle a very wide range of weather conditions, even without battery and hydrogen storage taken into account.
        4y ago
pydry 4y ago
>Batteries are getting cheaper, but they're not being produced on the scale necessary to supplant base load power Snowy 2. Fengning.

foxyv 4y ago

I did the math on this myself earlier to understand the problem. Solar is VERY expensive if you include storage, if you can even get it. We will need natural gas and coal until we do. In the future I expect that this will change as battery production gets off the ground at the scale we need. But that will take a lot of time we don't have. Nuclear makes a lot of sense if we want to be off coal and natural gas in the next 5-10 years. If we want to burn fossil fuels until 2060 then solar and wind are okay I guess. There is a reason that fossil fuel companies lobby heavily against nuclear and fund immense campaigns against it. It's a direct competitor. Solar and battery on the other hand are just barely off the ground right now.

tuatoru 4y ago
Nuclear reactors typically take about 100 months to build--and that's just the construction phase, not the pre-construction design and permitting--so no, they won't help in the next 5 - 10 years. 1. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-time https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...
- foxyv 4y ago
  The article you posted said 6-8 years. 100 months is in the US due to the legal and political climate that supports fossil fuel generation. In the US there is even backlash against wind power of all things... It's part of the reason why nuclear plants are built so large in the US. This is one problem I have with anti-nuclear propaganda. It uses the fact that it's been so successful at destroying nuclear power, as evidence that it's right in the first place.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

karaokeyoga 4y ago

nit: compliment → complement (in this case)

zdragnar 4y ago
sigh I blame my phone's auto-correct feature.

HDThoreaun 4y ago

Sure, but the biggest problem with nuclear is it takes a decade to build the plants, at best. It's impossible to plan on that time scale because you have no idea what the alternatives will look like once the plant is operational. You may have just spent billion on an energy source that is already obsolete.

defrost 4y ago
That's a figure with some bounce to it: Nuclear reactors connected to the grid in 2021 had a median construction time of 88 months. (7.3 years) [1] and According to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) study, Tuesday, 15 countries have built a total of 83 nuclear plants over the last 20 years among the 31 countries with nuclear power. It took on average 190 months to build each plant. During that period, Korea has built a total of 13 nuclear power plants. The average construction period for each plant was only 56 months (4.6 years), more than three times faster than other countries building nuclear plants. [2] South Korea insists it meets Nuclear Safety and Security Commission standards, by contrast: In France, [ ... ] taking an average of 126 months to build each plant, nearly three times as long as Japan. [2] The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one. [2] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-construction-time-for-reactors-since-1981/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi... [2] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-second-fastest-nuclear-plant-building-country https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...
- pyrale 4y ago
  > The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one. Looks like one or two plants never finished.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  You should definitely add the timelines for Japan and China from [2] Japan, which has built a total of eight nuclear power plants since 1996, was the fastest, taking only 46 months to build each plant, while China ranked third, building 28 nuclear power plants during that period and averaging 68 months to complete each one. Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 6 is the world’s fastest-built nuclear power plant, taking only 39 months for completion, while of Korea’s Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant Reactor 3 took 49 months to build.

Turskarama 4y ago

I would bet money that storage is a solved problem by the end of the decade, about the same amount of time it takes to build a nuclear reactor.

liketochill 4y ago
What stocks are you buying and how much of your retirement fund are you betting?
- Turskarama 4y ago
  Most of the companies I'd like to buy aren't public yet. As for retirement, I'd probably put 20% into energy storage, again if I could. It's a false dichotomy anyway, because I wouldn't put _any_ money into nuclear stocks.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mbgerring 4y ago
  LiCycle and GMET, and also exercising my own company’s stock options. As soon as Form Energy goes public I’ll put a significant amount of money into them as well.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Storage IS a solved problem, it's just not scaled up yet (batteries) or depends on geography (water / hydro).
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Battery storage is still mostly LiIon, simply because it has a lot of preexisting investment in R&D and large-scale production. I expect battery storage to become much more economical once a technology developed for the requirements of grid-scale storage takes off. There are plenty of good candidates, but none of them seem to be quite there yet. I also expect a lot more hydro to be built eventually, it's not as dependent on geography if you just build two ponds at different elevations for pumped hydro, or repurpose old mineshafts to get the elevation difference on flat ground.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wtfmcgrill 4y ago

You are my hero, been telling this at clouds for years after I took a power engineering course. Solar and wind are cheaper until you consider storage and grid reliability. Grid storage battery can be used for peaker/frequency regulation regardless of what you used to charge them full stop.

rstuart4133 4y ago
> Solar and wind are cheaper until you consider storage and grid reliability. Counter example. South Australia hit 80% of it's electricity production from renewables in the last two quarters: https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-enjoys-80-1-pct-wind-and-solar-share-in-blackout-free-summer/ Power prices are now cheaper then before renewables were took over: https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_pack.pdf Grid reliability remains about the same as everywhere else: https://reneweconomy.com.au/five-years-after-blackout-south-australia-now-only-state-with-no-supply-shortfalls/
pydry 4y ago
They're five times cheaper when you dont take storage into account. Theyre cheaper after you consider storage too. Indeed, if you use solar and wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that for electricity (a process that is ~40% efficient) it's still cheaper. https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-cheaper-and-greener-hinkley-point-c-nuclear-plant https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea... This means that even on the darkest most windless winter days when the grid has to eat into long term seasonal storage, solar and wind energy is currently still cheaper than an MWh of nuclear power is on the sunniest, windiest days.
- peterfirefly 4y ago
  > Theyre cheaper after you consider storage too. What's the price of the Ukraine war?
- zdragnar 4y ago
  So you're advocating for a base load of natural gas power plants, with wind and solar supplementing them, which was my original point- that they only work as a supplement, rather than a replacement, for nuclear and fossil fuels. Maybe nuclear isn't a great alternative to natural gas. I'm down with that. I'm not going to ignore the fact that wind and solar are at best complimentary, and that we can talk about pricing them without also talking about pricing in the base load that they're supplementing.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Sodium ion batteries will change this equation. 150 wh/kg, not even lithium is needed.

zdragnar 4y ago
The tech for sodium ion batteries have been around since the 1970's or 80's. The problem is capacity fade- the most stable anodes require titanium or molybdenum, and even then they're not a great deal better than lead acid batteries. The cheapest low-end estimate for sodium-ion batteries is $40 per kw/h of capacity. The Texas grid at any point had about 85 gigawatts of available generation capacity in 2021 (100% would be around 115, but solar and wind aren't always producing, plants are sometimes offline for maintenance, etc). So, with no nuclear or fossil fuel production, you're looking at $27 billion just to buy the batteries (not counting installation or maintenance costs) to keep the lights on for 8 hours in Texas on a windless night. That's at the cheapest option, so you can figure that you'll need to pay roughly 1/4 of that a year making up for batteries that have lost capacity. If you double it, that drops to 1/5 to 1/6 the total cost, unless a miracle occurs in anode tech or the weather is wonderful and they don't cycle as frequently. Of course, three days of mild, cloudy weather means brownouts or blackouts, because 8 hours of storage is not very much at all. If it were connected to other grids, they could import excess energy from across the continent, but that means those places won't be recharging their own batteries, and you now need to factor in more HVDC lines, and over-provisioning to cover transmission losses into your base price.
- mstipetic 4y ago
  Nobody is saying replace ALL energy generation with wind and solar. It’s ok to have a baseline to keep the basics running at least. Also I never understood why is the default that we all have to have as much energy at our disposal as we want, with a bit of preparation on our end we can easily deal with any intermittent power issues. This is such a consumerist, comfort-over-everything view
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Your baseline has to come from somewhere, which means the cost of that baseline has to be added into solar and wind. It's been my central point all along; intermittent generation can only complement, not replace, nuclear or fossils. At that point, you're better off building nuclear at scale using reproducing designs (or as close to as possible) to bring costs down like South Korea. There's a solar install not too far from the Canadian border that has produced zero energy for months. It had to be shut down because, despite the panels being 16 feet tall, there are 12 feet of snow around them from accumulation and drifting. Over the next two days, they're getting another 6-12 inches of snow and sleet- conditions which cause wind turbines to draw energy from the grid to heat the blades so they don't build up ice and get damaged. Is the answer to everyone not on the coast north of Arkansas to move somewhere else? For the whole of Canada to just get fucked?

mbgerring 4y ago

The investment and energy going into solving energy storage will bear fruit long before any of the many technical and regulatory hurdles in the way of cheap nuclear power are cleared. And I’ve put my money where my mouth is on this.

fooblaster 4y ago
how much storage capacity do you think is needed to deal with the worst cases for solar/wind that are encountered during the year? Last time I did a rough calculation on this, I quickly realized there is a fairly low upper limit on how much wind/solar capacity one can install, because the storage required is so immense.
- mbgerring 4y ago
  Don’t have the number in my head, but my day job is building software to enable (among other things) moving load around to avoid the “worst case,” which is just as good as building the storage.
  - ftth_finland 4y ago
    > Don’t have the number in my head That’s because it’s weeks, if not months, in places that have actual seasons. > moving load around to avoid the “worst case,” There is no such thing with base load in winter. You either provide constant heating or people freeze. There are places where rearranging the chairs works and there are places where it doesn’t.
    - sveme 4y ago
      There hasn‘t been a single day in Germany last year where renewable energy dropped below 30% of consumption. So overbuilt geographically dispersed systems can handle a very wide range of weather conditions, even without battery and hydrogen storage taken into account.
      - 4y ago

pydry 4y ago

>Batteries are getting cheaper, but they're not being produced on the scale necessary to supplant base load power Snowy 2. Fengning.