9 ms·

The overnight cost of building nuclear is about $7000 / kW. Wind and solar are closer to $1500 / kW before taking storage into account. That's plenty of margin

by crote 3y ago

The overnight cost of building nuclear is about $7000 / kW. Wind and solar are closer to $1500 / kW before taking storage into account. That's plenty of margin for a wide variety of storage solutions - including simply building a huge overcapacity and letting it idle, or doing carbon capture on a peaker gas plant.

XorNot 3y ago
But there isn't, is the thing. Nuclear might cost $7000/kW but it has a capacity factor of 80%[1]. Solar has a capacity factor of 25%. So while nuclear is closer to $8750/kW after capacity factor, solar is $6000/kW after capacity factor...before storage. And storage doesn't have a simple analysis: you can only charge pumped hydro at a certain rate, so on any given day if you don't have excess solar, you might not fully recharge at all (and that's before the problems of storing exactly 1 day's worth of excess energy when you don't have a large, dispatchable fossil fuel grid to fall back on). And how much is pumped hydro per kW, naively? Varies - an optimistic assessment is $1500 per kW, potentially as high as $5,505 per kW (in capex)[2]. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2205429119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2205429119 [2] https://www.hydroreview.com/business-finance/business/nrel-includes-pumped-storage-in-2022-electricity-technology-baseline-report/ https://www.hydroreview.com/business-finance/business/nrel-i...
- epistasis 3y ago
  Capacity factor is an energy 101 concept, and evaluating energy based on overnight capital costs plus capacity factor misses out on the an exceptional number of crucial factors: lifetime of capital, O&M, cost of capital, and these days, dispatchability and time of delivery. The levelized cost of energy takes most of these into account (except dispatch), and shows that nuclear is >4x as expensive, when it gets built and not abandoned halfway through construction. This risk is significant for large projects, and why in 2008, utilities used lobbyists in state legislatures in Georgia and South Carolina to stick customers with the bill for failed construction projects, without which neither Vogtle nor VC Summer would have started. No sane investor would risk billions on new nuclear construction without placing the risk on others. Real life deployments in free market systems like Texas' ERCOT shows that investors who put their own money on the line to generate electricity cheaply contrast heavily with regulated utilities which profit by rate-basing and therefor want electricity as expensive as possible. And when investors are putting their own money on the line to generate cheap electricity, they don't want to build nuclear or coal or hydro, they are massively investing in wind, solar, and battery storage.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    > Capacity factor is an energy 101 concept, and evaluating energy based on overnight capital costs plus capacity factor misses out on the an exceptional number of crucial factors: lifetime of capital, O&M, cost of capital, and these days, dispatchability and time of delivery. Oh, so like maybe throwing a quote about the cost of solar around without considering storage, capacity factor etc. you know - the $/kW numbers being cited above unsourced...might not be an honest way to talk about costs? > dispatchability and time of delivery. Seriously? You're going to argue that these aren't being fairly considered when I express skepticism that solar is "cheaper"?
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    Solar/wind is cheap as long as you still have something else to back it up when it fails. Battery is cheap and profitable as long as you're only building a couple minutes of capacity to play grid stabilizer/arbitrage games. It's similar to the problem in privatized health insurance. It's very cheap and profitable to insure young healthy people. Especially when you can dump the responsibility of all the old and sick people on the government. Of course investors invest in these things - they give quick, high returns on investment. That doesn't mean they're good for long-term stability.

by crote 3y ago

XorNot 3y ago

But there isn't, is the thing. Nuclear might cost $7000/kW but it has a capacity factor of 80%[1]. Solar has a capacity factor of 25%. So while nuclear is closer to $8750/kW after capacity factor, solar is $6000/kW after capacity factor...before storage. And storage doesn't have a simple analysis: you can only charge pumped hydro at a certain rate, so on any given day if you don't have excess solar, you might not fully recharge at all (and that's before the problems of storing exactly 1 day's worth of excess energy when you don't have a large, dispatchable fossil fuel grid to fall back on). And how much is pumped hydro per kW, naively? Varies - an optimistic assessment is $1500 per kW, potentially as high as $5,505 per kW (in capex)[2]. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2205429119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2205429119 [2] https://www.hydroreview.com/business-finance/business/nrel-includes-pumped-storage-in-2022-electricity-technology-baseline-report/ https://www.hydroreview.com/business-finance/business/nrel-i...

epistasis 3y ago
Capacity factor is an energy 101 concept, and evaluating energy based on overnight capital costs plus capacity factor misses out on the an exceptional number of crucial factors: lifetime of capital, O&M, cost of capital, and these days, dispatchability and time of delivery. The levelized cost of energy takes most of these into account (except dispatch), and shows that nuclear is >4x as expensive, when it gets built and not abandoned halfway through construction. This risk is significant for large projects, and why in 2008, utilities used lobbyists in state legislatures in Georgia and South Carolina to stick customers with the bill for failed construction projects, without which neither Vogtle nor VC Summer would have started. No sane investor would risk billions on new nuclear construction without placing the risk on others. Real life deployments in free market systems like Texas' ERCOT shows that investors who put their own money on the line to generate electricity cheaply contrast heavily with regulated utilities which profit by rate-basing and therefor want electricity as expensive as possible. And when investors are putting their own money on the line to generate cheap electricity, they don't want to build nuclear or coal or hydro, they are massively investing in wind, solar, and battery storage.
- XorNot 3y ago
  > Capacity factor is an energy 101 concept, and evaluating energy based on overnight capital costs plus capacity factor misses out on the an exceptional number of crucial factors: lifetime of capital, O&M, cost of capital, and these days, dispatchability and time of delivery. Oh, so like maybe throwing a quote about the cost of solar around without considering storage, capacity factor etc. you know - the $/kW numbers being cited above unsourced...might not be an honest way to talk about costs? > dispatchability and time of delivery. Seriously? You're going to argue that these aren't being fairly considered when I express skepticism that solar is "cheaper"?
- kalleboo 3y ago
  Solar/wind is cheap as long as you still have something else to back it up when it fails. Battery is cheap and profitable as long as you're only building a couple minutes of capacity to play grid stabilizer/arbitrage games. It's similar to the problem in privatized health insurance. It's very cheap and profitable to insure young healthy people. Especially when you can dump the responsibility of all the old and sick people on the government. Of course investors invest in these things - they give quick, high returns on investment. That doesn't mean they're good for long-term stability.