3 ms·

Not a friend of nuclear, but I think OP's first point (duck curve) and second point (no place for baseload) contradict each other somewhat. Or more specificall

by xg15 3y ago

Not a friend of nuclear, but I think OP's first point (duck curve) and second point (no place for baseload) contradict each other somewhat. Or more specifically, why couldn't you convert any baseload plant into a "flexible supply" plant by adding storage? You can interpret the post in two ways: Either, solar capacity will grow to such an extent that eventually it will be enough to cover all demand: Meaning, during summer days, there will be enough supply to cover the immediate demand and fill up storage enough to cover all evenings, nights and winter days. If that were the case then there wouldn't be the need for any power sources except solar and storage and we'd have basically solved energy. Hooray! However, that seems pretty unrealistic. The second interpretation of the article is that solar will grow (and will be able to contribute to storage to some extent) but will not be able to fully cover the dark hours - hence the duck curve. For those times, other energy sources are still needed. However, if there is still a need for other energy sources, then why couldn't baseload plants cover that need? Yes, it's only for a few hours per day (in summer), but then the baseload plant is needed the rest of the time to fill up storage - as solar, by initial assumption, would not be sufficient to do that.

Gwypaas 3y ago
> Or more specifically, why couldn't you convert any baseload plant into a "flexible supply" plant by adding storage? Cost. New built nuclear costs $0.12 - 0.2/kWh [1], already completely uncompetitive. Now add storage on top of that. There are ideas with for example salt based heat storage, but they all boil down to added cost on something uncompetitive if it ran at 100% all year around. [1]: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-energyplus/ https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
- xg15 3y ago
  Would that still hold if we got serious about phasing out gas-powered plants as well? (As we will probably have to at some time due to co2 emissions)
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  I could argue that nuclear power isn’t that expensive when I can buy nuclear power at retail for 9 cents per kWh, but that isn’t really an interesting point. I’m more interested in learning where all the storage that’s going to be needed to decarbonize is going to come from. According to Woodmac’s most recent grid storage update, there was only 13.4 GWh of grid storage in the US 2022. Projected growth for the next five years is 10-17 GWh per year with a declining growth trend.
  - Gwypaas 3y ago
    > I could argue that nuclear power isn’t that expensive when I can buy nuclear power at retail for 9 cents per kWh, but that isn’t really an interesting point. Paid-off nuclear plants are in the same range as new built renewables in cost. They don't magically appear out of thin air though, someone has to pay to build them.
    - ftth_finland 3y ago
      A brand new nuclear power plant was just taken into service here in Finland. As a result electricity prices dropped about 5 cents per kWh across the board. However, as noted before, this isn’t really all that interesting. The storage part is the big interesting trillion dollar question.
      - Gwypaas 3y ago
        Of course, if someone puts up the money and eats the loss you get cheap electricity. The problem is, someone has to eat the loss. People proposing nuclear power generally have no answer regarding who this "someone" is rather than generic handwaving about "the grid!" > However, as noted before, this isn’t really all that interesting. The storage part is the big interesting trillion dollar question. For the Nordics this is already solved with the existing hydropower. Sweden as of this week stores 19 TWh in their reservoirs. This is the reason no storage gets built in the Nordics, it is impossible to compete with scheduling the release of water more in line with renewables rather than daily consumption cycles.
- guerby 3y ago
  Since nuclear fuel cost is very low and maintenance/lifetime is time based nuclear kWh price will be scaled by inverse of load factor. So if for example 66% of the time solar+wind+hydro+misc provides enough and nuclear is not needed, nuclear kWh will be triple the price (estimated with historical load factors). Already at play in Finland a few weeks after the nuclear power plant has been turned on it had to scale back its production to "not loose money": https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Finnish-Nuclear-Power-Plant-Cuts-Output-After-Prices-Go-Negative.html https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Finnis... What will happen in a decade with more and more solar and wind?
  - ftth_finland 3y ago
    Hopefully the antiquated must take rules for variable renewables will be replaced with must take rules for non-fossile deterministic power generation.
- dgroshev 3y ago
  It's a cost of selling a kwh on an existing market with relatively low renewables penetration and supported by fossils. It's not a true aggregate cost of an energy system dominated by, say, solar. Imagine we turn of all fossil generators tomorrow, forever. Solar panels will still be cheap, but instantaneous energy price in California will tend towards infinity every night, making solar-based generation an extremely expensive solution. That expense is not captured in Lazard's numbers. Neither do they capture the cost of transmission lines and storage necessary to eliminate blackouts in that scenario. People talk a lot about the time it takes to build nuclear, but transmission lines aren't much faster, and unlike reactors they don't generate on their own.
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Lazard has been tracking the cost of storage for a while now (and cost of hydrogen production). They have a whole section when they compare renewables with battery storage against other "near firm" options.
    - dgroshev 3y ago
      It's still LCOE, which is by definition focused on generating assets. It doesn't track societal costs or costs offloaded to other entities, like grids or households, that can be attributed to a particular generating technology becoming dominant. Things like sky high electricity prices during that blackout in Texas a few years ago don't really reflect in LCOE. That particular firming calculation on page 8 (if that's the one you have in mind) is a bit misleading, they use average capacity instead of historical capacity factors [1], which doesn't make any sense in places with seasonal variability. You need waaay less storage to "firm" an energy source that is active 25% of every day vs one active only during the summer. Time distribution matters, and they do acknowledge it in small print in a footnote, suggesting that they only mean firming the "duck's head" in the duck curve [2]. Which only captures a tiny part of a system that would need to store a whole night (or season's) worth of energy. [1]: "ELCC is an indicator of the reliability contribution of different resources to the electricity grid. The ELCC of a generation resource is based on its contribution to meeting peak electricity demand. For example, a 1 MW wind resource with a 15% ELCC provides 0.15 MW of capacity contribution and would need to be supplemented with 0.85 MW of additional firm capacity in order to represent the addition of 1 MW of firm system capacity." [2] "For PV + Storage cases, the effective ELCC value is represented. CAISO and PJM assess ELCC values separately for the PV and storage components of a system. Storage ELCC value is provided only for the capacity that can be charged directly by the accompanying resource up to the energy required for a 4 hour discharge during peak load. Any capacity available in excess of the 4 hour maximum discharge is attributed to the system at the solar ELCC."

by xg15 3y ago

Gwypaas 3y ago

> Or more specifically, why couldn't you convert any baseload plant into a "flexible supply" plant by adding storage? Cost. New built nuclear costs $0.12 - 0.2/kWh [1], already completely uncompetitive. Now add storage on top of that. There are ideas with for example salt based heat storage, but they all boil down to added cost on something uncompetitive if it ran at 100% all year around. [1]: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-energyplus/ https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

xg15 3y ago
Would that still hold if we got serious about phasing out gas-powered plants as well? (As we will probably have to at some time due to co2 emissions)
ftth_finland 3y ago
I could argue that nuclear power isn’t that expensive when I can buy nuclear power at retail for 9 cents per kWh, but that isn’t really an interesting point. I’m more interested in learning where all the storage that’s going to be needed to decarbonize is going to come from. According to Woodmac’s most recent grid storage update, there was only 13.4 GWh of grid storage in the US 2022. Projected growth for the next five years is 10-17 GWh per year with a declining growth trend.
- Gwypaas 3y ago
  > I could argue that nuclear power isn’t that expensive when I can buy nuclear power at retail for 9 cents per kWh, but that isn’t really an interesting point. Paid-off nuclear plants are in the same range as new built renewables in cost. They don't magically appear out of thin air though, someone has to pay to build them.
  - ftth_finland 3y ago
    A brand new nuclear power plant was just taken into service here in Finland. As a result electricity prices dropped about 5 cents per kWh across the board. However, as noted before, this isn’t really all that interesting. The storage part is the big interesting trillion dollar question.
    - Gwypaas 3y ago
      Of course, if someone puts up the money and eats the loss you get cheap electricity. The problem is, someone has to eat the loss. People proposing nuclear power generally have no answer regarding who this "someone" is rather than generic handwaving about "the grid!" > However, as noted before, this isn’t really all that interesting. The storage part is the big interesting trillion dollar question. For the Nordics this is already solved with the existing hydropower. Sweden as of this week stores 19 TWh in their reservoirs. This is the reason no storage gets built in the Nordics, it is impossible to compete with scheduling the release of water more in line with renewables rather than daily consumption cycles.
guerby 3y ago
Since nuclear fuel cost is very low and maintenance/lifetime is time based nuclear kWh price will be scaled by inverse of load factor. So if for example 66% of the time solar+wind+hydro+misc provides enough and nuclear is not needed, nuclear kWh will be triple the price (estimated with historical load factors). Already at play in Finland a few weeks after the nuclear power plant has been turned on it had to scale back its production to "not loose money": https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Finnish-Nuclear-Power-Plant-Cuts-Output-After-Prices-Go-Negative.html https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Finnis... What will happen in a decade with more and more solar and wind?
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  Hopefully the antiquated must take rules for variable renewables will be replaced with must take rules for non-fossile deterministic power generation.
dgroshev 3y ago
It's a cost of selling a kwh on an existing market with relatively low renewables penetration and supported by fossils. It's not a true aggregate cost of an energy system dominated by, say, solar. Imagine we turn of all fossil generators tomorrow, forever. Solar panels will still be cheap, but instantaneous energy price in California will tend towards infinity every night, making solar-based generation an extremely expensive solution. That expense is not captured in Lazard's numbers. Neither do they capture the cost of transmission lines and storage necessary to eliminate blackouts in that scenario. People talk a lot about the time it takes to build nuclear, but transmission lines aren't much faster, and unlike reactors they don't generate on their own.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  Lazard has been tracking the cost of storage for a while now (and cost of hydrogen production). They have a whole section when they compare renewables with battery storage against other "near firm" options.
  - dgroshev 3y ago
    It's still LCOE, which is by definition focused on generating assets. It doesn't track societal costs or costs offloaded to other entities, like grids or households, that can be attributed to a particular generating technology becoming dominant. Things like sky high electricity prices during that blackout in Texas a few years ago don't really reflect in LCOE. That particular firming calculation on page 8 (if that's the one you have in mind) is a bit misleading, they use average capacity instead of historical capacity factors [1], which doesn't make any sense in places with seasonal variability. You need waaay less storage to "firm" an energy source that is active 25% of every day vs one active only during the summer. Time distribution matters, and they do acknowledge it in small print in a footnote, suggesting that they only mean firming the "duck's head" in the duck curve [2]. Which only captures a tiny part of a system that would need to store a whole night (or season's) worth of energy. [1]: "ELCC is an indicator of the reliability contribution of different resources to the electricity grid. The ELCC of a generation resource is based on its contribution to meeting peak electricity demand. For example, a 1 MW wind resource with a 15% ELCC provides 0.15 MW of capacity contribution and would need to be supplemented with 0.85 MW of additional firm capacity in order to represent the addition of 1 MW of firm system capacity." [2] "For PV + Storage cases, the effective ELCC value is represented. CAISO and PJM assess ELCC values separately for the PV and storage components of a system. Storage ELCC value is provided only for the capacity that can be charged directly by the accompanying resource up to the energy required for a 4 hour discharge during peak load. Any capacity available in excess of the 4 hour maximum discharge is attributed to the system at the solar ELCC."