4 ms·

It seems like a really dumb idea to use the most expensive form of electricity generation by some margin for a very predictable work load.

by tsss 3y ago

jupp0r 3y ago
China and India are building nuclear power plants pretty cheaply.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  China's nuclear plans are consistently not being met. India's nuclear output is quite small, and is already exceeded by a factor of 2 by their PV output.
  - jupp0r 3y ago
    My point was that both are finishing several plants per year, with reasonable cost ($3k per kW compared to $8-12k per kW in the US) and within reasonable time frames of 5-10 years of construction. This is competitive with renewables if you take the cost of storage into account.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      They are not competitive with renewables, which is why China and India are building so much more renewable capacity than they are nuclear capacity. Ultimately, storage will be needed. But at that point, nuclear becomes even less desirable in those countries, because renewables are creating long periods where there's no demand to soak up the nuclear plants' output. You might object that this is a renewable problem, but I'd retort it's a nuclear problem -- they can't save much money by curtailing output, and this inflexibility is a blemish on nuclear. With reasonable projections of the cost of storage, PV will end up much cheaper than nuclear in India, btw. India's a great place for PV; they could go full renewable with just PV and batteries, not needing wind or hydrogen.
      - megaman821 3y ago
        Even with nuclear, ultimately storage will be needed. Throttling production of such an expensive piece of capital with low operational costs doesn't make much sense, it better to build to the average power needed and smooth out the peaks and valleys with a battery.
        pfdietz 3y ago
        But if you have a battery, it makes more sense to fill it with low LCOE renewables rather than nuclear. So adding a battery cannot provide much revenue to the nuclear plant.
        megaman821 3y ago
        I agree, I just think it is funny when you have a large majority of your power coming from renewables or nuclear, you face similar looking problems. You are faced with the choice of artificially lowering a nuclear plants capacity factor by throttling down, or using batteries to keep the capacity factor high. The price of grid batteries in the future will basically fully determine what power generation technologies we use.
    - philipkglass 3y ago
      China completes multiple reactors per year, but India does not. Here are the power reactor statistics for both countries from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System (sort by date of first grid connection): India has connected 3 reactors to the grid since 2013-01-01: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=IN https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.... China has connected 39 in the same time period: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
- ViewTrick1002 3y ago
  China is barely building nuclear anymore. China added more wind and solar the past nine months than all of its nuclear reactors under construction will provide. Yes, that includes capacity factor. https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718 https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718
sofixa 3y ago
Most expensive if you discount reliability, longevity and persistence in energy generation. A predictable energy generation source for a predictable work load makes sense.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Nuclear fans grossly overstate the cost of dealing with renewable intermittency, especially if the load has dispatchability. Servers don't necessarily have to run 24/7.
  - tnel77 3y ago
    No, but surely Microsoft could work out a deal with local utility companies to sell any excess electricity they generate?
  - hn8305823 3y ago
    > Servers don't necessarily have to run 24/7. I'm curious, do you actually run servers for a living? I'm wondering what a typical use case is (aside from crypto mining) where powering off and on physical servers due to demand, cost, or availability of power is a thing.
    - NineStarPoint 3y ago
      In fairness, training machine learning models is definitely one of areas where only running when it’s cheap to run makes some amount of sense. It’s something you want done eventually, not something that is responding to an immediate need. In practice…yeah. The machine’s your running your models on are expensive, the people working on the model waiting extra time to check the new model are expensive, and not keeping up with your competitors because you only work half the time is not generally a wise choice for someone like Microsoft. I have worked for a smaller company that trained a model on AWS when spot instances were cheap…until they got large enough to purchase some hardware best suited to their use case that could run almost constantly, then doing everything except training their model in the cloud. So yeah I also doubt this makes sense in practice.
coldpie 3y ago
Fossil fuel plants are far and away the most expensive form of electricity generation, we just allow them export a big chunk of the costs onto other people so we can pretend it's cheap.
- thehappypm 3y ago
  Citation needed
  - coldpie 3y ago
    Okay. Per [1] the cost of 1 ton of CO2 emitted is about $3,000. Per [2] fossil fuel plants emit about 1-2.3 pounds of CO2 per kWh, or about 0.0005 to 0.0012 tons per kWh. Multiplying that out (0.0005 * 3000) yields about $1.50 to $3.60 per kWh, accounting only for the cost of emissions. Per [3] nuclear is about $0.07 per kWh. That's about 20-50 times cheaper than fossil fuel plants. It would be fair to round that up a bit for construction and fuel extraction and refinement emissions, but don't forget to do that for fossil fuel plants, too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_greenhouse_gas_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_greenhouse_gas_... [2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 [3] https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear-energy-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...
    - thehappypm 3y ago
      Source [1] shows $300 not $3000, which changes the math quite a bit.

It seems like a really dumb idea to use the most expensive form of electricity generation by some margin for a very predictable work load.

by tsss 3y ago

It seems like a really dumb idea to use the most expensive form of electricity generation by some margin for a very predictable work load.

jupp0r 3y ago

China and India are building nuclear power plants pretty cheaply.

pfdietz 3y ago
China's nuclear plans are consistently not being met. India's nuclear output is quite small, and is already exceeded by a factor of 2 by their PV output.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  My point was that both are finishing several plants per year, with reasonable cost ($3k per kW compared to $8-12k per kW in the US) and within reasonable time frames of 5-10 years of construction. This is competitive with renewables if you take the cost of storage into account.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    They are not competitive with renewables, which is why China and India are building so much more renewable capacity than they are nuclear capacity. Ultimately, storage will be needed. But at that point, nuclear becomes even less desirable in those countries, because renewables are creating long periods where there's no demand to soak up the nuclear plants' output. You might object that this is a renewable problem, but I'd retort it's a nuclear problem -- they can't save much money by curtailing output, and this inflexibility is a blemish on nuclear. With reasonable projections of the cost of storage, PV will end up much cheaper than nuclear in India, btw. India's a great place for PV; they could go full renewable with just PV and batteries, not needing wind or hydrogen.
    - megaman821 3y ago
      Even with nuclear, ultimately storage will be needed. Throttling production of such an expensive piece of capital with low operational costs doesn't make much sense, it better to build to the average power needed and smooth out the peaks and valleys with a battery.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        But if you have a battery, it makes more sense to fill it with low LCOE renewables rather than nuclear. So adding a battery cannot provide much revenue to the nuclear plant.
        megaman821 3y ago
        I agree, I just think it is funny when you have a large majority of your power coming from renewables or nuclear, you face similar looking problems. You are faced with the choice of artificially lowering a nuclear plants capacity factor by throttling down, or using batteries to keep the capacity factor high. The price of grid batteries in the future will basically fully determine what power generation technologies we use.
  - philipkglass 3y ago
    China completes multiple reactors per year, but India does not. Here are the power reactor statistics for both countries from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System (sort by date of first grid connection): India has connected 3 reactors to the grid since 2013-01-01: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=IN https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.... China has connected 39 in the same time period: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
ViewTrick1002 3y ago
China is barely building nuclear anymore. China added more wind and solar the past nine months than all of its nuclear reactors under construction will provide. Yes, that includes capacity factor. https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718 https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718

sofixa 3y ago

Most expensive if you discount reliability, longevity and persistence in energy generation. A predictable energy generation source for a predictable work load makes sense.

pfdietz 3y ago
Nuclear fans grossly overstate the cost of dealing with renewable intermittency, especially if the load has dispatchability. Servers don't necessarily have to run 24/7.
- tnel77 3y ago
  No, but surely Microsoft could work out a deal with local utility companies to sell any excess electricity they generate?
- hn8305823 3y ago
  > Servers don't necessarily have to run 24/7. I'm curious, do you actually run servers for a living? I'm wondering what a typical use case is (aside from crypto mining) where powering off and on physical servers due to demand, cost, or availability of power is a thing.
  - NineStarPoint 3y ago
    In fairness, training machine learning models is definitely one of areas where only running when it’s cheap to run makes some amount of sense. It’s something you want done eventually, not something that is responding to an immediate need. In practice…yeah. The machine’s your running your models on are expensive, the people working on the model waiting extra time to check the new model are expensive, and not keeping up with your competitors because you only work half the time is not generally a wise choice for someone like Microsoft. I have worked for a smaller company that trained a model on AWS when spot instances were cheap…until they got large enough to purchase some hardware best suited to their use case that could run almost constantly, then doing everything except training their model in the cloud. So yeah I also doubt this makes sense in practice.

coldpie 3y ago

Fossil fuel plants are far and away the most expensive form of electricity generation, we just allow them export a big chunk of the costs onto other people so we can pretend it's cheap.

thehappypm 3y ago
Citation needed
- coldpie 3y ago
  Okay. Per [1] the cost of 1 ton of CO2 emitted is about $3,000. Per [2] fossil fuel plants emit about 1-2.3 pounds of CO2 per kWh, or about 0.0005 to 0.0012 tons per kWh. Multiplying that out (0.0005 * 3000) yields about $1.50 to $3.60 per kWh, accounting only for the cost of emissions. Per [3] nuclear is about $0.07 per kWh. That's about 20-50 times cheaper than fossil fuel plants. It would be fair to round that up a bit for construction and fuel extraction and refinement emissions, but don't forget to do that for fossil fuel plants, too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_greenhouse_gas_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_greenhouse_gas_... [2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 [3] https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear-energy-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...
  - thehappypm 3y ago
    Source [1] shows $300 not $3000, which changes the math quite a bit.