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Even if we don’t think global warming ends civilization, keeping existing plants running requires a lot of mental gymnastics to oppose. I think it’s perfectly

Even if we don’t think global warming ends civilization, keeping existing plants running requires a lot of mental gymnastics to oppose. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to oppose new nuclear on cost grounds; solar/wind are really cheap now. But lots of people seem to oversimplify to “nuclear bad”.

nradov 3y ago
I don't understand why people keep claiming that solar and wind are "cheap". That is only true at limited times on the spot market. The cost goes way up once you include enough storage and long-range transmission to maintain grid stability. It's like claiming that owning a car is cheap, without counting the cost of auto insurance.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  It's also ignoring that we have chosen to make nuclear expensive. There are a variety of points on the cost-safety tradeoff curve. We have continuously chosen to push ourselves as far along that curve as we know how to reach, with us moving farther each time a new technology allows it. We have never stopped to ask "how does this amount of safety compare to other forms of power generation" or "how much additional safety are we getting for the cost to implement that safety".
- cesarb 3y ago
  > I don't understand why people keep claiming that solar and wind are "cheap". It's simple: they're looking at the incremental cost of adding one more solar panel string or one more wind turbine, compared to generating that same amount of power with the already existing power plant mix. > The cost goes way up once you include enough storage and long-range transmission to maintain grid stability. That cost exists only if you for some reason insist on 100% solar and wind. If you keep already existing power plants (including gas and hydro), the cost to maintain grid stability is much lower. This can easily be shown to be the case in practice: a large portion of the solar and wind power in the world was added to the grid without adding any extra storage or long-range transmission, reducing the fuel costs (or water usage) of existing power plants but not replacing them. Having a 100% pure solar or 100% pure wind grid is an interesting thought experiment, to probe the limits of what's possible, but it's not very relevant in the real world except on remote areas where delivering fuel is expensive, connecting to a wider grid is not viable, and there's no hydraulic or geothermal alternative.
  - nradov 3y ago
    I don't think you've actually done the math on that one. Keeping gas power plants online but unused except when renewables are unavailable is extremely expensive. We've been able to kind of ignore that up until now because of the limited scale of renewables generation but eventually the economics become untenable. Who is going to pay the large fixed costs to keep those gas plants on standby?
    - theptip 3y ago
      > I don't think you've actually done the math on that one. Since you are implying that you _have_ done the math on this one, would you care to share links to analysis/modeling that backs up your position? I'm always open to being persuaded. Recently I have been citing https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar/ https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar/ for the claim "solar is cheap on the margin", and modeling like https://theconversation.com/up-to-90-of-electricity-from-solar-and-wind-the-cheapest-option-by-2030-csiro-analysis-151831 https://theconversation.com/up-to-90-of-electricity-from-sol..., https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... for "storage isn't going to be too expensive for some time". To be clear I'm not making any particular case for how we cover the last 10% or so of demand, though I'd note that gas peakers are already a thing that are required to solve this problem, and yes they are expensive, but not unfeasibly so. My claim was it's cheap on the margin, right now. In a decade when we're closer to 100% it might start to get more expensive to replace the marginal % of generation with solar/wind. Nuclear doesn't help at all with the intra-day variable portion of the demand curve, it's just lower-variance so you don't need to worry about inter-day fluctuations. It seems that most of the time, a diverse blend of renewables averages out the inter-day variability so it's not clear to me exactly how much we need in storage to guard against "no wind / no sun" days. (Is this the mirror problem that we currently have, where a heat wave in TX means the mostly-not-renewable grid can't keep up? Sometimes we see outlier weather-related demand-supply mismatches, and spot pricing / demand shedding are typically how we respond to those outliers.) Over-provisioning wind and solar might still be cheaper than building nuclear and/or storage, or perhaps green hydrogen might be a better option. Or perhaps we keep some gas peakers around. For the intra-day variability we're already seeing lots of mixed-solar/battery being built (see the LBL report I linked above) which tends to be in the ballpark of load-shifting the generation 4 hours, which is most of what we need for intra-day gap between demand and solar peak production. This is still affordable vs running coal plants, and only going to get cheaper over time. Anyway, this isn't my field and I'm open to being persuaded, if you want to share some modeling that you think is better.
- coding123 3y ago
  It's super cheap because no consortium is controlling it. It's just being created by... Everyone. Solar is probably the most beautiful thing to happen to humanity.
  - nradov 3y ago
    You're not making any sense. Solar without sufficient grid-scale storage to provide for the base load has little value. Who is going to build that storage? It's certainly not going to be cheap. You guys need to look beyond ideology and actually do the math.

nradov 3y ago

I don't understand why people keep claiming that solar and wind are "cheap". That is only true at limited times on the spot market. The cost goes way up once you include enough storage and long-range transmission to maintain grid stability. It's like claiming that owning a car is cheap, without counting the cost of auto insurance.

MostlyStable 3y ago
It's also ignoring that we have chosen to make nuclear expensive. There are a variety of points on the cost-safety tradeoff curve. We have continuously chosen to push ourselves as far along that curve as we know how to reach, with us moving farther each time a new technology allows it. We have never stopped to ask "how does this amount of safety compare to other forms of power generation" or "how much additional safety are we getting for the cost to implement that safety".
cesarb 3y ago
> I don't understand why people keep claiming that solar and wind are "cheap". It's simple: they're looking at the incremental cost of adding one more solar panel string or one more wind turbine, compared to generating that same amount of power with the already existing power plant mix. > The cost goes way up once you include enough storage and long-range transmission to maintain grid stability. That cost exists only if you for some reason insist on 100% solar and wind. If you keep already existing power plants (including gas and hydro), the cost to maintain grid stability is much lower. This can easily be shown to be the case in practice: a large portion of the solar and wind power in the world was added to the grid without adding any extra storage or long-range transmission, reducing the fuel costs (or water usage) of existing power plants but not replacing them. Having a 100% pure solar or 100% pure wind grid is an interesting thought experiment, to probe the limits of what's possible, but it's not very relevant in the real world except on remote areas where delivering fuel is expensive, connecting to a wider grid is not viable, and there's no hydraulic or geothermal alternative.
- nradov 3y ago
  I don't think you've actually done the math on that one. Keeping gas power plants online but unused except when renewables are unavailable is extremely expensive. We've been able to kind of ignore that up until now because of the limited scale of renewables generation but eventually the economics become untenable. Who is going to pay the large fixed costs to keep those gas plants on standby?
  - theptip 3y ago
    > I don't think you've actually done the math on that one. Since you are implying that you _have_ done the math on this one, would you care to share links to analysis/modeling that backs up your position? I'm always open to being persuaded. Recently I have been citing https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar/ https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar/ for the claim "solar is cheap on the margin", and modeling like https://theconversation.com/up-to-90-of-electricity-from-solar-and-wind-the-cheapest-option-by-2030-csiro-analysis-151831 https://theconversation.com/up-to-90-of-electricity-from-sol..., https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... for "storage isn't going to be too expensive for some time". To be clear I'm not making any particular case for how we cover the last 10% or so of demand, though I'd note that gas peakers are already a thing that are required to solve this problem, and yes they are expensive, but not unfeasibly so. My claim was it's cheap on the margin, right now. In a decade when we're closer to 100% it might start to get more expensive to replace the marginal % of generation with solar/wind. Nuclear doesn't help at all with the intra-day variable portion of the demand curve, it's just lower-variance so you don't need to worry about inter-day fluctuations. It seems that most of the time, a diverse blend of renewables averages out the inter-day variability so it's not clear to me exactly how much we need in storage to guard against "no wind / no sun" days. (Is this the mirror problem that we currently have, where a heat wave in TX means the mostly-not-renewable grid can't keep up? Sometimes we see outlier weather-related demand-supply mismatches, and spot pricing / demand shedding are typically how we respond to those outliers.) Over-provisioning wind and solar might still be cheaper than building nuclear and/or storage, or perhaps green hydrogen might be a better option. Or perhaps we keep some gas peakers around. For the intra-day variability we're already seeing lots of mixed-solar/battery being built (see the LBL report I linked above) which tends to be in the ballpark of load-shifting the generation 4 hours, which is most of what we need for intra-day gap between demand and solar peak production. This is still affordable vs running coal plants, and only going to get cheaper over time. Anyway, this isn't my field and I'm open to being persuaded, if you want to share some modeling that you think is better.
coding123 3y ago
It's super cheap because no consortium is controlling it. It's just being created by... Everyone. Solar is probably the most beautiful thing to happen to humanity.
- nradov 3y ago
  You're not making any sense. Solar without sufficient grid-scale storage to provide for the base load has little value. Who is going to build that storage? It's certainly not going to be cheap. You guys need to look beyond ideology and actually do the math.