4 ms·

It’s been accelerating exponentially for a long time, but generally seems to have taken over secondary energy sources like biofuel more than displacing fossil f

It’s been accelerating exponentially for a long time, but generally seems to have taken over secondary energy sources like biofuel more than displacing fossil fuels. Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still expensive. Costs continue to drop & solar bulls contend that it will be cheaper in the long run although I’m skeptical that nuclear couldn’t compete (e.g. MSR or thorium reactors would be much safer & thus cheaper to build reducing nuclear costs too). Additionally, solar bulls conveniently ignore the costs of batteries which complicate the economics by a lot & even fission built today (where costs have been going up rather than down because we don’t build a lot of it) is much cheaper than solar (even without batteries & blows battery-based solutions out of the water). The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors which would require a major social shift to make people comfortable with it (& of course there are always risks but for some reason spilling radioactive material into the ocean scares people a lot but then they conveniently ignore how much fossil fuels we spill into the ocean which creates waaaay more ecological devastation). Finally, it’s the only tech we have right now that’s energy dense enough that we can divert excess capacity into efforts to sequester excess carbon - we’ve already unlocked runaway processes on Earth and sequestration, while insanely expensive, is likely the only mechanism we have to try to undo the runaway processes.

hgomersall 3y ago
You make a lot of assertions here. Certainly your claims about the cost of solar are not supported by IRENA: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2022 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-...
pydry 3y ago
>Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still expensive. Its LCOE is roughly 5x lower than nuclear power: https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-solar-and-wind-power-drives-the-energy-transition/94355 https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-sol... >The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors The cost of nuclear power as shown above is *enormous*. The only reason it gets built at all is because it provides economic support to the military for maintaining and building nuclear arms: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-consumers-to-fund-nuclear-weapons-through-hinkley-point-c https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-... Or, in non-nuclear powers (like Sweden or Iran), to provide the skills and industry to quickly ramp up a fully fledged nuclear program while still adhering to the NPT. It's a shame because the money would be far more efficiently spent on solar and wind capacity and also because nuclear weapons are, well, bad.
- hedora 3y ago
  Safe and affordable nuclear reactors have been available for 40+ years. France has been operating an existence proof with “obsolete” reactor designs for a long time. The cost overruns are a political problem. Having said that, the cost of nuclear is lower-bounded by the cost of the turbines and generators. Those exceeded the cost of solar 5-10 years ago. (i.e., if I give you a perpetual motion machine that ~turns a crank~ (edit: generates heat; turning a crank would eliminate the turbine) at a wattage of your choosing, you still can’t use it to provide cheaper power than solar). However, off peak generation still isn’t cheaper than everything else. Once you plan for “a cloudy weather front parks over our region”, the cost of energy storage is still prohibitive-ish. In the long term, I think we’ll move to nuclear plants that can rapidly respond to demand (this is a solved problem), since that’s cheaper and cleaner than batteries, and much safer and cleaner than coal. Edit: Nuclear is probably cheaper than provisioning region-scale batteries for a week of supply during depressed generation and higher than average demand.
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    It depends. Mainly on the cost of electrolysis plant, and partly on how close to free "excess" PV power becomes. Natural gas infrastructure can be maintained and used to store and distribute hydrogen to hydrogen peakers if required. Or electrolyzed hydrogen could be used to make methane, which simplifies re-use of existing infrastructure at the cost of some efficiency loss. That's not an insurmountable problem if sufficient surplus PV capacity is available. That's one of the competitors to rapid-response nuclear. The main current one is pumped hydro, but expanding that quickly takes more time and money than re-using existing NG plant would. And of course there are all the "revolutionary battery technology of the week" ideas. One of them might be super cheap, super reliable, and super scalable--it could happen.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    + you have to recharge the batteries when the energy source reestablishes. This is particularly bad for solar because it means the batteries have to be discharged nightly to support nighttime generation & then daytime capacity is reduced to recharge for the next night. The bull story for solar as baseload power is really nonsensical.

hgomersall 3y ago

You make a lot of assertions here. Certainly your claims about the cost of solar are not supported by IRENA: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2022 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-...

pydry 3y ago

>Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still expensive. Its LCOE is roughly 5x lower than nuclear power: https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-solar-and-wind-power-drives-the-energy-transition/94355 https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-sol... >The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors The cost of nuclear power as shown above is *enormous*. The only reason it gets built at all is because it provides economic support to the military for maintaining and building nuclear arms: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-consumers-to-fund-nuclear-weapons-through-hinkley-point-c https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-... Or, in non-nuclear powers (like Sweden or Iran), to provide the skills and industry to quickly ramp up a fully fledged nuclear program while still adhering to the NPT. It's a shame because the money would be far more efficiently spent on solar and wind capacity and also because nuclear weapons are, well, bad.

hedora 3y ago
Safe and affordable nuclear reactors have been available for 40+ years. France has been operating an existence proof with “obsolete” reactor designs for a long time. The cost overruns are a political problem. Having said that, the cost of nuclear is lower-bounded by the cost of the turbines and generators. Those exceeded the cost of solar 5-10 years ago. (i.e., if I give you a perpetual motion machine that ~turns a crank~ (edit: generates heat; turning a crank would eliminate the turbine) at a wattage of your choosing, you still can’t use it to provide cheaper power than solar). However, off peak generation still isn’t cheaper than everything else. Once you plan for “a cloudy weather front parks over our region”, the cost of energy storage is still prohibitive-ish. In the long term, I think we’ll move to nuclear plants that can rapidly respond to demand (this is a solved problem), since that’s cheaper and cleaner than batteries, and much safer and cleaner than coal. Edit: Nuclear is probably cheaper than provisioning region-scale batteries for a week of supply during depressed generation and higher than average demand.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  It depends. Mainly on the cost of electrolysis plant, and partly on how close to free "excess" PV power becomes. Natural gas infrastructure can be maintained and used to store and distribute hydrogen to hydrogen peakers if required. Or electrolyzed hydrogen could be used to make methane, which simplifies re-use of existing infrastructure at the cost of some efficiency loss. That's not an insurmountable problem if sufficient surplus PV capacity is available. That's one of the competitors to rapid-response nuclear. The main current one is pumped hydro, but expanding that quickly takes more time and money than re-using existing NG plant would. And of course there are all the "revolutionary battery technology of the week" ideas. One of them might be super cheap, super reliable, and super scalable--it could happen.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  + you have to recharge the batteries when the energy source reestablishes. This is particularly bad for solar because it means the batteries have to be discharged nightly to support nighttime generation & then daytime capacity is reduced to recharge for the next night. The bull story for solar as baseload power is really nonsensical.