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>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

by 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.
  - pydry 3y ago
    >This is particularly bad for solar because it means the batteries have to be discharged nightly Solar and wind production anticorrelate and electricity usage declines at night. If you have a grid with paired wind and solar you are unlikely to be discharging every night. The wind doesnt stop blowing at night. >solar as baseload This a strawman. Nobody says solar can be baseload. They say that you can combine solar + wind + different forms of storage (pumped, hydrogen, battery) with demand shaping to eliminate the need for baseload. Ironically the carbon lobby used to say "let the market decide" back when solar and wind were expensive. They stopped doing that a while back when the economics flipped in favor of green energy. The nuclear lobby and its associated propaganda tries to avoid mentioning costs at all and always did - unless theyre promoting nuclear vaporware. They're gunning for manufacturing consent for subsidies since its the only way theyll survive.
- pydry 3y ago
vlovich123 3y ago
Here’s one critique of why the LCOE number is dangerous to use when comparing tech that’s as different as nuclear & solar: https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-cost-of-nuclear-energy-is-misunderstood https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-co... For instance, LCOE frequently ignores imposed costs for using solar and wind since they’re intermittent sources. When you factor in those requirements it gets more expensive. The US is also fairly unique in terms of making nuclear more expensive. If we actually started building plants at scale to replace fossil fuel plants, the costs would decrease rapidly over time, especially as we switch to modern designs. No, the reason it gets built is not because of economic support for the military. It’s because it and hydro are the only non fossil fuel energy source that can provide base load power & run the entire grid 24/7 just like fossil fuels can. In fact, regulations are constantly trying to strangle nuclear and given it’s the only energy source that has repeatedly demonstrated to reduce fossil fuel demand, it’s interesting to consider why that might be (fossil fuel companies don’t care about solar and wind because it lets them greenwash the destruction they’re doing to the environment precisely because fossil fuel demand keeps growing in their presence and at best slightly decreases that curve but never creates a persistent downward trend) It’s also generally better than hydro because it’s much less destructive to the environment.
- pydry 3y ago
  >For instance, LCOE frequently ignores imposed costs for using solar and wind since they’re intermittent sources. Not frequently, always. But, note that it is not just cheaper it is 5x cheaper. If you pair solar + wind with pumped storage it is roughly 2x more expensive. Now it's a lot cheaper than 5x. If you pair solar + wind with batteries it roughly 3-4x more expensive. Still cheaper than 5x. If you pair solar + wind with hydrogen it is roughly 4x more expensive. Even if all solar and wind energy were stored as hydrogen and months later burned to produce electricity it would still be cheaper than nuclear power as well as being able to do load following. Note that nuclear power can't do load following at anything resembling a reasonable price. An all nuclear zero carbon grid would either need storage too or it would need to overproduce massively. >In fact, regulations are constantly trying to strangle nuclear and given it’s the only energy source that has repeatedly demonstrated to reduce fossil fuel demand If Congress wanted to really strangle nuclear power they wouldn't regulate it more they'd just repeal the indemnity act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... Insurance for a $1 trillion clean up event like Fukushima would normally be the responsibility of the parties that caused it but the nuclear industry gets to offload the cost of insuring that $1 trillion catastrophe event to joe taxpayer. This helps reduce the costs a lot but they still need lots of other subsidies (which they get).

by pydry 3y ago

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.
- pydry 3y ago
  >This is particularly bad for solar because it means the batteries have to be discharged nightly Solar and wind production anticorrelate and electricity usage declines at night. If you have a grid with paired wind and solar you are unlikely to be discharging every night. The wind doesnt stop blowing at night. >solar as baseload This a strawman. Nobody says solar can be baseload. They say that you can combine solar + wind + different forms of storage (pumped, hydrogen, battery) with demand shaping to eliminate the need for baseload. Ironically the carbon lobby used to say "let the market decide" back when solar and wind were expensive. They stopped doing that a while back when the economics flipped in favor of green energy. The nuclear lobby and its associated propaganda tries to avoid mentioning costs at all and always did - unless theyre promoting nuclear vaporware. They're gunning for manufacturing consent for subsidies since its the only way theyll survive.
pydry 3y ago

vlovich123 3y ago

Here’s one critique of why the LCOE number is dangerous to use when comparing tech that’s as different as nuclear & solar: https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-cost-of-nuclear-energy-is-misunderstood https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-co... For instance, LCOE frequently ignores imposed costs for using solar and wind since they’re intermittent sources. When you factor in those requirements it gets more expensive. The US is also fairly unique in terms of making nuclear more expensive. If we actually started building plants at scale to replace fossil fuel plants, the costs would decrease rapidly over time, especially as we switch to modern designs. No, the reason it gets built is not because of economic support for the military. It’s because it and hydro are the only non fossil fuel energy source that can provide base load power & run the entire grid 24/7 just like fossil fuels can. In fact, regulations are constantly trying to strangle nuclear and given it’s the only energy source that has repeatedly demonstrated to reduce fossil fuel demand, it’s interesting to consider why that might be (fossil fuel companies don’t care about solar and wind because it lets them greenwash the destruction they’re doing to the environment precisely because fossil fuel demand keeps growing in their presence and at best slightly decreases that curve but never creates a persistent downward trend) It’s also generally better than hydro because it’s much less destructive to the environment.

pydry 3y ago
>For instance, LCOE frequently ignores imposed costs for using solar and wind since they’re intermittent sources. Not frequently, always. But, note that it is not just cheaper it is 5x cheaper. If you pair solar + wind with pumped storage it is roughly 2x more expensive. Now it's a lot cheaper than 5x. If you pair solar + wind with batteries it roughly 3-4x more expensive. Still cheaper than 5x. If you pair solar + wind with hydrogen it is roughly 4x more expensive. Even if all solar and wind energy were stored as hydrogen and months later burned to produce electricity it would still be cheaper than nuclear power as well as being able to do load following. Note that nuclear power can't do load following at anything resembling a reasonable price. An all nuclear zero carbon grid would either need storage too or it would need to overproduce massively. >In fact, regulations are constantly trying to strangle nuclear and given it’s the only energy source that has repeatedly demonstrated to reduce fossil fuel demand If Congress wanted to really strangle nuclear power they wouldn't regulate it more they'd just repeal the indemnity act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... Insurance for a $1 trillion clean up event like Fukushima would normally be the responsibility of the parties that caused it but the nuclear industry gets to offload the cost of insuring that $1 trillion catastrophe event to joe taxpayer. This helps reduce the costs a lot but they still need lots of other subsidies (which they get).