4 ms·

The lifecycle cost of nuclear is still higher than solar PV even with storage and we have low-risk, low-tech solar-with-storage options such as molten-salt conc

The lifecycle cost of nuclear is still higher than solar PV even with storage and we have low-risk, low-tech solar-with-storage options such as molten-salt concentrated solar, which, while not as efficient as solar PV, is very simple technology. Solar PV and wind are cheap enough that overbuilding is easy. One might wonder what we can do with surplus power during times of day when we have too much solar (middle of the day) or too much wind (middle of the night) -- we can do desalination with the surplus solar (matches the demand curve of water use across the day and across the year) and convert wind to nitrogen: https://wcroc.cfans.umn.edu/research/renewable-energy/wind-fertilizer https://wcroc.cfans.umn.edu/research/renewable-energy/wind-f...

StillBored 3y ago
Its very tiring that there is always someone here telling us how inexpensive PV and wind are compared to other generation. Which is true per watt, until you try to assure that watt is actually available when its needed. So its comparing the costs of two entirely different things, power which can be predicted and produced at a given level, and power which may or may not produce anything over a given time-frame. And so, i might say its a lie... Particularly because the costs associated with making a watt of wind/PV reliable easily adds an order of magnitude in costs, making wind/PV a much worst cost proposition than just about anything else. And its particularly bad in places that don't have existing hydro and nukes because the only realistic way to back it up with today's technology/economy is fossil fuel sources. (aka grid scale batteries capable of multi day power storage simply don't exist, and you can't "overbuild" your way out of the problem.). So its not even carbon free.
- coyotespike 3y ago
  Let's champion both. Living in Austin, I plan to add solar to my house someday, and I would also love to see us build nuclear power plants. I really cannot understand why people set these things at odds with each other. They are both better than fossil fuels or degrowth.
  - derefr 3y ago
    > I really cannot understand why people set these things at odds with each other. They are both better than fossil fuels or degrowth. Mostly because in many places nuclear power is currently politically blocked from any further build-out, if not outright banned. One of the main rhetorical moves that various "green" (i.e. anti-nuclear) lobbies say to justify not building out nuclear power — which regulators seem to have absorbed and now believe — is "for everything we'd use nuclear for, we can just use PV." This statement has a clear refutation: nuclear is base-load + grid-scale, while PV elastic-load + individual-site-scale; so if you need to e.g. double the electrical capacity of a large city in response to population growth, then PV isn't going to work—you want nuclear (or another base-load grid-scale power technology, like hydropower.) But these arguments don't get heard; rather, the regulators say "but we have PV, what's the point in building nuclear rather than just supporting the build-out of more PV?" as a conversation-ending rhetorical statement. In order to convince regulators to allow the build-out of nuclear, there has to be some equally-powerful rhetorical statement that can be used to "reopen the conversation." Which would, intuitively, come in the form of a clear and effective condemnation of PV as a base-load / grid-scale power technology. But if regulators don't understand terms like "base-load" or "grid-scale", then what you end up having to do to get them to stop packing up and shooing you out of the room, is to condemn PV full-stop.
  - whitemary 3y ago
    Because financialized/late-stage capitalism makes long-term investments like nuclear power generation financially infeasible, while funneling subsidies to "green energy" solar/wind industries is extremely profitable in the short-term. In other words, the thing that actually works is significantly less likely to happen, and therefore requires far more support.
  - pydry 3y ago
    >I really cannot understand why people set these things at odds with each other. Because they compete for investment dollars from the government. Why doesnt the government just fund the cheapest one? Because the nuclear military industrial complex needs a civilian nuclear industry to operate cost effectively.
  - 3y ago
- pydry 3y ago
  >Its very tiring that there is always someone here telling us how inexpensive PV and wind are compared to other generation. Which is true per watt, until you try to assure that watt is actually available when its needed. It's 5x cheaper per watt. That goes up to 1.5-3x cheaper once you add "when needed". OP already mentioned that it is cheaper with storage. You ignored them. >Particularly because the costs associated with making a watt of wind/PV reliable easily adds an order of magnitude in costs An order of magnitude is absurd.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  The comment you replied to explicitly addressed how to make cheap renewables more available. You might disagree, but acting like they never even mentioned it makes it seem more likely that you're just going on outdated info.
  - belorn 3y ago
    The storage in "PV with storage" is most commonly measured in single digit hours of capacity, and is primarily used in locations where the sun is predictable up during the day and has a predictable discharge/charging cycle of 24 hours. One of the biggest upside is that the economics of it is fairly simplistic with 365 cycles each year that produce predictable revenue. There is a second form of storage that is also fairly common, which is storage that exist to balance the grid when different units goes up and down. Those generally have even less capacity and are not intended to operate under long periods. For locations where the first form of PV with storage works, they should really replace everything (with imports handling any exceptional weather events). Storage of this form does however become significant more expensive the further away we get from this optimal weather pattern, and there is a multiple reasons why wind heavy nations can not survive on a few hours of storage. Latitude and seasons can also have a very large impact if a nation where to use this as their only strategy.
- skybrian 3y ago
  I'm wondering what kinds of reliability we actually need. Residential: it seems like we often accept less reliability? It's common for bad weather like thunderstorms to cause power outages, particularly in rural areas. Lots of places in California will get cut off during high winds. If you need reliability, a battery backup protects you from more outages, including those that take out the grid. In some cases a generator makes sense (such as for a data center), but it's higher maintenance.
ren_engineer 3y ago
>solar I love the idea of being completely reliant on something where China controls 80% of the supply chain - https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex... Surely nothing could go wrong there, it's not like Russia pulled the same strategy and funded anti-nuclear activists in Germany to get them dependent on Russian natural gas. >wind I've talked to executives at energy companies who said they only built wind due to the massive subsidies. There's also major issues with what to do with the windmill husks once they are decommissioned and the fact they are a massive eye sore. If the US was serious they'd spin out some of the US Navy's reactor tech and turn all that technology into a profit center. They could even do a "bases for reactors" program where nations get electricity in return for allowing the US to operate the reactors on their land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyers-for-bases_deal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyers-for-bases_deal
- tuukkah 3y ago
  Buying solar panels from China is not the same kind of dependency as buying fossil fuels from Russia: the first is an investment, the latter is consumption. Also, solar panels can be built anywhere, while fossil fuels are a limited natural resource with no deposits in e.g. Germany.
tuukkah 3y ago
Yes, all the cheap surplus wind and solar power will be used for many things, also e.g. low-emission production of steel and hydrogen, running heat pumps and even boiling water for hot water reservoirs etc. Also, this "nuclear breakthrough" concept is likewise complicated by storage: > It also includes an energy storage system that will allow it to control how much electricity it produces at any given time. Why do they have to complicate it? Otherwise, they wouldn't have a chance competing with the cheap price of renewables: > it’s essential for integrating with power grids that use variable sources like solar and wind. Basically, nuclear plants generate losses when it's sunny or windy, and profits from the dark and calm times won't make up for the losses. (The flexible power consumption will switch off rather than pay the higher nuclear power prices.)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
albertopv 3y ago
For solar and wind you need TWh of storage capacity, in Europe many days without solar or wind (just bad weather) is relatively common.
- tuukkah 3y ago
  Existing hydro is able to fill in for some of the storage needs, and pumping water up the dam will be one type of large-scale storage that can be built. See pumped-storage hydroelectricity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    To get an idea of the scale of hydro storage: > European hydropower reservoirs provide a storage capacity of 220 TWh (85 TWh are located in Norway). https://setis.ec.europa.eu/hydropower-and-pumped-hydropower-storage-european-union_en https://setis.ec.europa.eu/hydropower-and-pumped-hydropower-...
  - albertopv 3y ago
    Europe is going through one of the worst drought we know of. There's literally no water to growth crops, let alone hydro, at least in Spain and Italy.
    - tuukkah 3y ago
      Pumped hydro does not need to consume water, it can pump the same water over and over. In some places, it can use saline water from the ocean. The EU report says hydro power can help agriculture e.g. if big reservoirs are built and on dry years the water from them can be used in agriculture.
      - albertopv 3y ago
        I'm italian, I live here, literally lakes in northern Italy have almost no water, it's now a drought almost two year long
hedora 3y ago
What solar storage technologies work in the winter? For instance, it has been rainy in California this year, and between Jan and March, we were at a production deficit of 1MWh for our house. So far, in May (so the last 5 days) we’re at a 275KWh deficit, and every day has seen a deficit so far. I’d love to have a 1MWh battery, but current raw battery cost is $151/KWh, and actual residential systems are closer to $333 to $666 / KWh installed. At the raw battery cost (ignoring space requirements!), we’d have already burned through $41,000 of battery capacity this month, and the weather forecast suggests we’d need double of that to get through till wednesday. That’s $82K for raw batteries, or $275K at the midrange for residential installs (ignoring solar costs). Grid-scale storage is somewhere between those two numbers, and this is May. Winter this year was even more unworkable.
- tuukkah 3y ago
  Small-scale solar installations are not supposed to get you off-grid and like you observe, a small-scale/battery storage isn't going to change that. Instead, the idea is the grid-scale combination of solar, wind and hydro with various storage and adaptive consumption solutions. For example: when water levels are down, pump water up the dam during sunny/windy hours to store energy for the bad months.
  - hedora 3y ago
    Normal hydro is failing due to climate change (at least in the US west), so that’s not a great bet to make. Nuclear is maybe 2-3x more than renewables at this point, but that’s actually a pretty good deal, given its safety record vs literally everything else. Of course, it’s best to produce as much as possible with cheap wind, solar, and battery, but getting from 80% to 100% means over-provisioning to the point where nuclear would be cheaper.
    - tuukkah 3y ago
      That's part of the point: pumped storage (and other solutions) can be used even though the climate changes. Batteries won't have to be the main storage solution. Another part: over-provisioning does not increase the costs much as there will be flexible demand for the additional electricity produced.
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
> > is very simple technology AKA it won't bring about the next industrial revolution. It will maybe secure a world where the Earth is 0.01 C cooler vis-a-vis fossil fuels. Nuclear is exciting because humans can play God, that's where innovation lies, containing the power of the cosmos in a human friendly manner. With all due respect people who love renewables are un-imaginative and they resigned themselves to technological stasis in exchange for a reduction in CO2 emissions. That's a very underwhelming proposition, because in short, it means that there is nothing for us, but only benefits for maybe those who'd be alive in 200 years. That's unacceptable and un-American. This initiative is to be encouraged and Mr. Gates has a history of being the person who had the privilege of signing off huge quality of life improvements for Americans . Which is mostly luck among those who had the right vision, in Windows case the GUI. But still it's something, I believe that other GUI pioneers would be financing the same projects had they been the ones ending up with a 200bn net worth.

StillBored 3y ago

Its very tiring that there is always someone here telling us how inexpensive PV and wind are compared to other generation. Which is true per watt, until you try to assure that watt is actually available when its needed. So its comparing the costs of two entirely different things, power which can be predicted and produced at a given level, and power which may or may not produce anything over a given time-frame. And so, i might say its a lie... Particularly because the costs associated with making a watt of wind/PV reliable easily adds an order of magnitude in costs, making wind/PV a much worst cost proposition than just about anything else. And its particularly bad in places that don't have existing hydro and nukes because the only realistic way to back it up with today's technology/economy is fossil fuel sources. (aka grid scale batteries capable of multi day power storage simply don't exist, and you can't "overbuild" your way out of the problem.). So its not even carbon free.

coyotespike 3y ago
Let's champion both. Living in Austin, I plan to add solar to my house someday, and I would also love to see us build nuclear power plants. I really cannot understand why people set these things at odds with each other. They are both better than fossil fuels or degrowth.
- derefr 3y ago
  > I really cannot understand why people set these things at odds with each other. They are both better than fossil fuels or degrowth. Mostly because in many places nuclear power is currently politically blocked from any further build-out, if not outright banned. One of the main rhetorical moves that various "green" (i.e. anti-nuclear) lobbies say to justify not building out nuclear power — which regulators seem to have absorbed and now believe — is "for everything we'd use nuclear for, we can just use PV." This statement has a clear refutation: nuclear is base-load + grid-scale, while PV elastic-load + individual-site-scale; so if you need to e.g. double the electrical capacity of a large city in response to population growth, then PV isn't going to work—you want nuclear (or another base-load grid-scale power technology, like hydropower.) But these arguments don't get heard; rather, the regulators say "but we have PV, what's the point in building nuclear rather than just supporting the build-out of more PV?" as a conversation-ending rhetorical statement. In order to convince regulators to allow the build-out of nuclear, there has to be some equally-powerful rhetorical statement that can be used to "reopen the conversation." Which would, intuitively, come in the form of a clear and effective condemnation of PV as a base-load / grid-scale power technology. But if regulators don't understand terms like "base-load" or "grid-scale", then what you end up having to do to get them to stop packing up and shooing you out of the room, is to condemn PV full-stop.
- whitemary 3y ago
  Because financialized/late-stage capitalism makes long-term investments like nuclear power generation financially infeasible, while funneling subsidies to "green energy" solar/wind industries is extremely profitable in the short-term. In other words, the thing that actually works is significantly less likely to happen, and therefore requires far more support.
- pydry 3y ago
  >I really cannot understand why people set these things at odds with each other. Because they compete for investment dollars from the government. Why doesnt the government just fund the cheapest one? Because the nuclear military industrial complex needs a civilian nuclear industry to operate cost effectively.
- 3y ago
pydry 3y ago
>Its very tiring that there is always someone here telling us how inexpensive PV and wind are compared to other generation. Which is true per watt, until you try to assure that watt is actually available when its needed. It's 5x cheaper per watt. That goes up to 1.5-3x cheaper once you add "when needed". OP already mentioned that it is cheaper with storage. You ignored them. >Particularly because the costs associated with making a watt of wind/PV reliable easily adds an order of magnitude in costs An order of magnitude is absurd.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
The comment you replied to explicitly addressed how to make cheap renewables more available. You might disagree, but acting like they never even mentioned it makes it seem more likely that you're just going on outdated info.
- belorn 3y ago
  The storage in "PV with storage" is most commonly measured in single digit hours of capacity, and is primarily used in locations where the sun is predictable up during the day and has a predictable discharge/charging cycle of 24 hours. One of the biggest upside is that the economics of it is fairly simplistic with 365 cycles each year that produce predictable revenue. There is a second form of storage that is also fairly common, which is storage that exist to balance the grid when different units goes up and down. Those generally have even less capacity and are not intended to operate under long periods. For locations where the first form of PV with storage works, they should really replace everything (with imports handling any exceptional weather events). Storage of this form does however become significant more expensive the further away we get from this optimal weather pattern, and there is a multiple reasons why wind heavy nations can not survive on a few hours of storage. Latitude and seasons can also have a very large impact if a nation where to use this as their only strategy.
skybrian 3y ago
I'm wondering what kinds of reliability we actually need. Residential: it seems like we often accept less reliability? It's common for bad weather like thunderstorms to cause power outages, particularly in rural areas. Lots of places in California will get cut off during high winds. If you need reliability, a battery backup protects you from more outages, including those that take out the grid. In some cases a generator makes sense (such as for a data center), but it's higher maintenance.

ren_engineer 3y ago

>solar I love the idea of being completely reliant on something where China controls 80% of the supply chain - https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex... Surely nothing could go wrong there, it's not like Russia pulled the same strategy and funded anti-nuclear activists in Germany to get them dependent on Russian natural gas. >wind I've talked to executives at energy companies who said they only built wind due to the massive subsidies. There's also major issues with what to do with the windmill husks once they are decommissioned and the fact they are a massive eye sore. If the US was serious they'd spin out some of the US Navy's reactor tech and turn all that technology into a profit center. They could even do a "bases for reactors" program where nations get electricity in return for allowing the US to operate the reactors on their land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyers-for-bases_deal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyers-for-bases_deal

tuukkah 3y ago
Buying solar panels from China is not the same kind of dependency as buying fossil fuels from Russia: the first is an investment, the latter is consumption. Also, solar panels can be built anywhere, while fossil fuels are a limited natural resource with no deposits in e.g. Germany.

tuukkah 3y ago

Yes, all the cheap surplus wind and solar power will be used for many things, also e.g. low-emission production of steel and hydrogen, running heat pumps and even boiling water for hot water reservoirs etc. Also, this "nuclear breakthrough" concept is likewise complicated by storage: > It also includes an energy storage system that will allow it to control how much electricity it produces at any given time. Why do they have to complicate it? Otherwise, they wouldn't have a chance competing with the cheap price of renewables: > it’s essential for integrating with power grids that use variable sources like solar and wind. Basically, nuclear plants generate losses when it's sunny or windy, and profits from the dark and calm times won't make up for the losses. (The flexible power consumption will switch off rather than pay the higher nuclear power prices.)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

albertopv 3y ago

For solar and wind you need TWh of storage capacity, in Europe many days without solar or wind (just bad weather) is relatively common.

tuukkah 3y ago
Existing hydro is able to fill in for some of the storage needs, and pumping water up the dam will be one type of large-scale storage that can be built. See pumped-storage hydroelectricity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
- tuukkah 3y ago
  To get an idea of the scale of hydro storage: > European hydropower reservoirs provide a storage capacity of 220 TWh (85 TWh are located in Norway). https://setis.ec.europa.eu/hydropower-and-pumped-hydropower-storage-european-union_en https://setis.ec.europa.eu/hydropower-and-pumped-hydropower-...
- albertopv 3y ago
  Europe is going through one of the worst drought we know of. There's literally no water to growth crops, let alone hydro, at least in Spain and Italy.
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    Pumped hydro does not need to consume water, it can pump the same water over and over. In some places, it can use saline water from the ocean. The EU report says hydro power can help agriculture e.g. if big reservoirs are built and on dry years the water from them can be used in agriculture.
    - albertopv 3y ago
      I'm italian, I live here, literally lakes in northern Italy have almost no water, it's now a drought almost two year long

hedora 3y ago

What solar storage technologies work in the winter? For instance, it has been rainy in California this year, and between Jan and March, we were at a production deficit of 1MWh for our house. So far, in May (so the last 5 days) we’re at a 275KWh deficit, and every day has seen a deficit so far. I’d love to have a 1MWh battery, but current raw battery cost is $151/KWh, and actual residential systems are closer to $333 to $666 / KWh installed. At the raw battery cost (ignoring space requirements!), we’d have already burned through $41,000 of battery capacity this month, and the weather forecast suggests we’d need double of that to get through till wednesday. That’s $82K for raw batteries, or $275K at the midrange for residential installs (ignoring solar costs). Grid-scale storage is somewhere between those two numbers, and this is May. Winter this year was even more unworkable.

tuukkah 3y ago
Small-scale solar installations are not supposed to get you off-grid and like you observe, a small-scale/battery storage isn't going to change that. Instead, the idea is the grid-scale combination of solar, wind and hydro with various storage and adaptive consumption solutions. For example: when water levels are down, pump water up the dam during sunny/windy hours to store energy for the bad months.
- hedora 3y ago
  Normal hydro is failing due to climate change (at least in the US west), so that’s not a great bet to make. Nuclear is maybe 2-3x more than renewables at this point, but that’s actually a pretty good deal, given its safety record vs literally everything else. Of course, it’s best to produce as much as possible with cheap wind, solar, and battery, but getting from 80% to 100% means over-provisioning to the point where nuclear would be cheaper.
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    That's part of the point: pumped storage (and other solutions) can be used even though the climate changes. Batteries won't have to be the main storage solution. Another part: over-provisioning does not increase the costs much as there will be flexible demand for the additional electricity produced.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

> > is very simple technology AKA it won't bring about the next industrial revolution. It will maybe secure a world where the Earth is 0.01 C cooler vis-a-vis fossil fuels. Nuclear is exciting because humans can play God, that's where innovation lies, containing the power of the cosmos in a human friendly manner. With all due respect people who love renewables are un-imaginative and they resigned themselves to technological stasis in exchange for a reduction in CO2 emissions. That's a very underwhelming proposition, because in short, it means that there is nothing for us, but only benefits for maybe those who'd be alive in 200 years. That's unacceptable and un-American. This initiative is to be encouraged and Mr. Gates has a history of being the person who had the privilege of signing off huge quality of life improvements for Americans . Which is mostly luck among those who had the right vision, in Windows case the GUI. But still it's something, I believe that other GUI pioneers would be financing the same projects had they been the ones ending up with a 200bn net worth.