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> the cost to maintain the plant an additional five years could reach $6 billion. This does not appear to be a serious attempt to help the environment with car

> the cost to maintain the plant an additional five years could reach $6 billion. This does not appear to be a serious attempt to help the environment with carbon-free electricity. It looks more to be a PR move to satisfy people who have been boosting nuclear, without regard to costs. $6B for a mere five years is highway robbery. Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity, and far far far more of it. Those who have been boosting nuclear without a hard nosed look at the costs of technologies have a lot to answer for here. This is just a PR game.

koolba 3y ago
> $6B for a mere five years is highway robbery. Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity, and far far far more of it. How would you install $6B overnight? That alone would take years. And where do you buy it from? China?
- epistasis 3y ago
  $6B is not a ton of money when it comes to solar and batteries, these are technologies on massive scales. Using round numbers of roughly $1/W for solar and $500/kWh, my off-the-cuff split buys 4GW of solar and 4GWh of batteries. For comparison, 6.5GW of solar was installed Q3 2023 in the US, and this is a tiny tiny fraction of the global market. The challenge with large installs is the interconnection queue and permitting, not any industrial capacity limitation. And these could be solved by CPUC with a snap of their fingers, like they snapped their fingers to extend Diablo Canyon.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    As someone who has worked closely with those running the Interconnection studies, this sounds overly rosey. The ISO (in this case CAISO) runs those studies for a reason to maintain grid reliability. The reason they're slow is that it involves a crazy amount of simulations to determine grid upgrades and it is difficult when things must be done recursively and when the renewables developers speculate so much. If the state regulator could snap their fingers, they would have done so in California, New York, the Midwest... everywhere. They made some changes to speed things up in Texas, but honestly they're kicking the can down the road.
  - coderintherye 3y ago
    Costs have shrunk dramatically just in the last 12 months. Solar is down to around 0.25 / watt at bulk. Battery, LiFePo4 is $200/kWh. Those are retail bulk prices. Commercial/Industrial prices are similar or sometimes better on commercial-sized equipment. Granted, as you noted interconnection and permitting costs are high and going up and labor costs have risen and those are the main costs now.
    - thelastgallon 3y ago
      Solar prices are way down: $0.07 - 0.08/W[1]. For a large order in billions, it can be negotiated further down. [1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/13/solar-wafer-prices-hit-record-lows/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/13/solar-wafer-prices-hi...
  - black6 3y ago
    Is $1/W purchase or installed cost? Installation usually inflates the cost 3x.
- brandensilva 3y ago
  China has the solar panel market cornered, so probably. Of course they might decide to cut us off given all the trade drama so I'm not sure even that is a sure thing.
throwitaway222 3y ago
And we're losing. We need to fight back
panick21_ 3y ago
Good then they should run it for even longer if they are gone do so much maintenance.
fuckyah 3y ago
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> $6B for a mere five years is highway robbery. Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity, and far far far more of it. Do batteries and solar panels have lifetimes of 20-40 years?
- epistasis 3y ago
  Yes, batteries are around 20 and solar panels around 40 years these days.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Is that how long they’re actually kept for at grid scale?
PopAlongKid 3y ago
>. Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity, and far far far more of it. Beginning when? Diablo Canyon is already on line today, and just as importantly, tonight. Where is the land going to come from to support $4B of solar panels? How many times will those batteries need to be replaced over 20-40 years? What are the ongoing maintenance costs? How will all that solar be connected to the grid? Alleging "PR move" and "PR game" without similarly considering the motivation for your comments weakens your position.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > Where is the land going to come from to support $4B of solar panels? The desert. https://www.kqed.org/news/11935070/solar-energy-farms-are-booming-in-californias-deserts-heres-why-environmentalists-are-concerned https://www.kqed.org/news/11935070/solar-energy-farms-are-bo... Doesn't take as much as you'd think. https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/5535 https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/5535 > The land area required to supply 100% of projected U.S. electricity demand in 2050 with PV installations is roughly half the area of cropland currently devoted to growing corn for ethanol production, an important consideration given the neutral or negative energy payback of corn ethanol and other complications associated with this fuel source. That same land area - i.e., 33,000 km2 to supply 100% of U.S. electricity demand with PV -is less than the land area occupied by major roads. The currently existing rooftop area within the United States provides enough surface area to supply roughly 60% of the nation’s projected 2050 electricity needs with PV... You could power California off a solar field roughly the size of Andrews Air Force Base.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Sure, but I think the GP's point is that this doesn't just happen overnight. Let's say the same people who planned out keeping this nuclear plant open another 5 years today said "ok, let's plan out a same-price solar build and get it started". How long would you expect the planning process to go, buying up the land, permitting, the construction process, connecting it to the grid, testing, and then finally energizing it? A couple years? More? (Also remember that this is California, where people will put up stupid roadblocks even for construction out in the desert, away from anyone's home.) Now, they absolutely should be doing that in parallel! It's dumb that they aren't. But this nuclear plant is running today, and will continue to provide much-needed electricity, and that'd still be needed if we got this (unfortunately only hypothetical) solar project going right now.
_2d30 3y ago
Maybe what you're saying is true but it's pretty unclear to me. According to the article, it supplies 10% of the state's electricity needs. $6B over 5 yrs => $1.2B/yr => total cost of state's electricity at $12B/yr. With a population of 40M this would mean yearly cost of electricity per capita in CA would be $300. That sounds extremely cheap. Doesn't sound like highway robbery to me but maybe you can make that clearer rather than just tossing out "install $4B solar and $2B batteries which is obviously better, idiots!".
cinntaile 3y ago
That's very dependent on how much the plant contributes to grid stability and what it costs to produce electricity.
Ankaios 3y ago
Wikipedia claims the plant generated 16 TW h of energy in 2019. At $6 billion for five years of generation, that corresponds to about 8 cents per kilowatt hour. That's not great, but it doesn't seem like highway robbery to me. Seems reasonable to keep using the plant while building up solar and storage capacity.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Wikipedia also claims that PG&E pays more per kwh for solar, without storage. If diablo Canyon is cheaper than the next best alternative, then it obviously makes economic sense to keep it. It doesnt matter how scary the big number is if the alternative is higher
philipkglass 3y ago
Diablo Canyon delivered 17,593 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2022 [1]. If California had continued to install solar power at the same rate it did 10 years ago, that much solar output would have been added in the last 3 years alone. Coupled with battery storage like you suggest, that would also cover the early evening demand peak in California. However, California's rate of solar addition slowed down considerably since 2014. It went from 3,813 GWh of utility scale solar generation in 2013 to 9,932 GWh in 2014 for an annual growth of 6,119 GWh. But from 2017 to 2022 it grew by an average of only 2,994 GWh annually [2]. This happened at the same time that solar hardware costs continued to decline rapidly. California was more aggressive about building large scale solar projects when it was more expensive, and has oddly slowed down compared to other states in recent years. That's a reason that Diablo Canyon is still needed. If California picks up the pace again on decarbonization with renewables, then Diablo Canyon can shut down. It shouldn't shut down while natural gas is still California's top electricity source [3]. [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/6099?freq=A&start=1982&end=2023&ctype=linechart&ltype=pin&columnchart=ELEC.PLANT.GEN.6099-ALL-ALL.A&linechart=ELEC.PLANT.GEN.6099-ALL-ALL.A&maptype=0 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/6099?fr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_California#Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_California#Gene... [3] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2022-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Solar often produces much less power than the sticker because it doesn’t some at night (among other reasons). Someone else in the thread noted that solar efficiency is 20-30% of the installed capacity compared with 92% for nuclear (and solar costs always ignore storage which is a massive cost that would make the numbers waaay worse and is otherwise borne by installing nuclear/fossil fuels/hydro).
  - philipkglass 3y ago
    The numbers I posted already accounted for capacity factor differences, because they were generated energy output (gigawatt hours) rather than peak capacity (gigawatts).
gustavus 3y ago
I'm so tired of all these people that seem to be firmly convinced that we can't do nuclear and any other option. Why can't we do both? We run nuclear for the base load that will always be there and then supplement it with wind and solar and what not. We know nuclear works we know it is stable. My understanding is that a lot of the battery and solar technology needs to be replace every few decades or so and generally involves mining operations that are highly toxic and produce many emissions. Not too mention that we have to construct elaborate massive sprawling battery infrastructure to supplement a grid that depends heavily on wind and solar in order to answer the simple questions of "what about when it is nighttime or cloudy, or the wind isn't blowing?" I don't get why so many people are fighting against nuclear. Either we need to do everything possible to reduce carbon emissions or not. Nuclear does not rely on some battery technology that is "almost there", and that is "showing promise". It is a proven technology that works and has a reliable answer. So in short nuclear for the base, solar and wind for the supplement. There is no reason we can't do both. P.S. Given the massive amount of government money being handed out for "green technologies" there's part of me that wonders about how honest this objection to nuclear and pushing of solar and wind is.
- Aloha 3y ago
  I dont know why you're being downvoted, you're correct. We need base load capacity to replace thermal fossil fuel generation, it's not negotiable if you want the lights to work reliably 24 hours a day, no matter the weather conditions. Be it nuclear or more hydro - or we reconfigure to only run hydro when we need base load - either way it must be there. I dont think we can reach zero fossil fuels, because of the need for peaking generation - but we can get pretty close though. Having to fire up a dozen gas turbines during severe weather conditions seems like a small price to pay if the other 99% of the time we could go without any fossil fuels at all.
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    There's another issue with firing up dozens of gas turbines: they don't spin up instantly. Hawaii (and California) are already starting to run into this issue, where peak use follows sunset. So even if you don't need it, you have to keep some generators going so they can ramp up fast enough when solar drops off and peak use starts. Otherwise you get outages. They've named this issue the duck curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
stickfigure 3y ago
Diablo Canyon produces ~2 gigawatts of power rain or shine. Let's say you need 12 hours of battery capacity, so 24 gWh. A casual google search says grid-scale storage is $300-600 per kWh. Even generously assuming $300/kWh, that's $7.2 billion just for the batteries. How long do the batteries last?
- beders 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - kelnos 3y ago
    I wouldn't call 8.5% insignificant. It's certainly not a majority, or even a plurality, but "insignificant" is surely downplaying its importance. And if we shut down Diablo Canyon today, what do you think would replace that 8.5% in the years before a replacement solar+battery field could come online? Probably gonna be more natural gas.
    - anonporridge 3y ago
      8.5% out of one plant for the entire state of California is fucking enormously significant.
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        I know right? Like install 3-5 more and California would be net 0 for the electricity grid making all those EVs finally meaningfully beneficial to the environment.
  - Tuna-Fish 3y ago
    Not with the $6B. The math just doesn't work, even if the solar was free, you could not purchase enough batteries with $6B to replace Diablo Canyon.
  - Fauntleroy 3y ago
    Are you going to provide a logical argument or just point to a pie chart and say "hey look nuclear is the smallest!"?
credit_guy 3y ago
> $6B for a mere five years is highway robbery The average price of electricity in California is 27 cents/kWh, or $270/MWh [1]. Some of this go to middlemen, but some to producers. I don't know the split, but let's say it's half and half. Diablo produces about 16000 GWh of electricity per year [2]. At $135 per MWh it comes to $2.2 BN/year, or $11 BN for 5 years. So $6 BN is not quite highway robbery. [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Wholesale electricity prices are usually around 10% of retail.
  - amluto 3y ago
    Which makes one wonder why PG&E is permitted to charge so much for “generation”.
    - undersuit 3y ago
      You can move to Texas and sign up for retail rates from one of their lesser regulated providers, and when the temperatures drop and your energy markets spike in value you too can pay market rates to heat your home.
      - matthewdgreen 3y ago
        In fairness, there are many other states with lower generation prices than CA and that don’t have weird grid failures like TX. Those two states both seem nuts to me, especially given how many natural energy resources they’ve been gifted with.
        undersuit 3y ago
        In fairness I was answering the question of where you can get market rates. Very little of TX's grid failures in February 2021 directly affected the infrastructure to the homes, many Texas providers cut power because they could not afford the wholesale rates while offering the customers a protected monthly rate. There was a very good chance that if your provider was one of the TX providers that allowed you access to Texas's energy market, you maintained power during the freeze and paid massively for that.
cheald 3y ago
"Could reach" is a fairly hedged phrasing, there. The plant generated 16,477 GWh in 2021 [1]. Over 5 years, it'd generate 82,385,000,000 kWh. At the LAX average retail rate of $0.287/kWh [2], that generation would return $23,644,495,000 in revenue. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53899 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53899 [2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyprices_losangeles.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyp...
- epistasis 3y ago
  That retail rate of electricity is mostly T&D; generators of electricity get far less than $0.10/kWh. Somebody else in this thread estimates that the $6B would result in $0.8/kWh, which is 50%-100% more expensive than new solar.
  - cheald 3y ago
    New solar has the same T&D costs (plus batteries!), doesn't it?
    - epistasis 3y ago
      Yes, but it is still cheaper than nuclear, and has the benefit of increasing the productive capacity for installing even more solar and batteries. The one-off work for nuclear here will do little to nothing to enable new nuclear builds. It's short-term dead money. If we are truly at the limit of what we can deploy with solar and batteries right now, and we have spare money to spend, then perhaps this short extension is worth it, but it must be evaluated versus the alternatives such as floating offshore wind, enhanced geothermal, long-duration storage (100h), etc. People are so excited about nuclear that they don't evaluate it rationally, on its own merits, versus alternatives. That is not a healthy way to help the climate. We must be very hard nosed about not only the short term impacts but also the long term effects of investing in industries.
dylan604 3y ago
You so almost have a point I'd agree, but then go off the rails with your nonsensical solar retort. I agree the expense sounds extraordinarily high to the point of not being profitable at all, but I'm not an expert in the energy sector so maybe the industry numbers really are that high. however, my arm chair quarterback position in solar would immediately recognize you're numbers being touted for a solar solution in $ and years are just made up
Manuel_D 3y ago
> $6B for a mere five years is highway robbery. Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity, and far far far more of it. Because the goal isn't generating arbitrary amounts of carbon-free energy. The goal is displacing fossil fuel use with carbon-free energy. California is already hitting daytime saturation of energy demand for about a month of the year. $2B in batteries isn't actually going very far. The US manages to build battery storage at ~500/KWh. So 2 Billion is only about 4 GWh. The Diablo canyon plant puts out 2.5 GW of electricity, so this is less than 2 hours worth of battery storage relative to the plant its replacing.
mat_epice 3y ago
Citation required. You cannot replace Diablo Canyon with $6B of solar and batteries. Installing your proposed $4B of solar will get you 4GW at peak, which will produce about 5840 GWh per year due to variations in sunlight over the days and seasons. Diablo Canyon produces 18,000 GWh per year. Replacing Diablo Canyon with solar will cost $12B plus batteries, maintenance, and operations staff. Figures/Sources: - $1m buys 1MW of solar panels that provides 1,460 MWh per year. https://coldwellsolar.com/commercial-solar-blog/how-much-investment-do-you-need-for-a-solar-farm/ https://coldwellsolar.com/commercial-solar-blog/how-much-inv... - Diablo Canyon produces 18,000 GWh per year. https://diablocanyonpanel.org/history-of-dcpp/ https://diablocanyonpanel.org/history-of-dcpp/
- epistasis 3y ago
  The solar panels last far longer than five years...
  - Mtinie 3y ago
    The panels do but that just means the far more efficient, next gen panels that come on the market five years from now will be purchased and used to replace the original set. So in reality, the often cited “20-40 years of utilization” they offer is nice to say but has minimal practical impact on future costs.
  - mat_epice 3y ago
    That is of course true, but not the argument I was refuting.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
That’s a worst case cost estimate, I doubt it will be anywhere near $6B spent on plant maintenance and operation 5 years from now.
jupp0r 3y ago
Let's do the math. I'm leaving out capital costs for Diablo Canyon because I'm guessing it's paid off at this point. Diablo Canyon is producing 2 GW. $6B / (5 years * 2 GW) is approximately $0.069/kWh. That sounds extremely competitive to me and not "just a PR game". You won't get solar and batteries installed and connected to the grid cheaper than that (especially not at current interest rates), sorry. There's also the fact that Diablo Canyon is running right now, while getting large amounts of solar and batteries connected to the grid is a years long process at this point due to grid operator connection planning backlog.
kelnos 3y ago
Sibling posters seem to think that $6B isn't unreasonable (and that $6B spent on solar+batteries won't come close to replacing this plant), but I won't address that. Take a look at today's CA electricity source mix[0]. Regardless of cost, why would you shut down a nuclear plant (prematurely, when there's no renewable capacity right now available to replace it) when we still burn so much natural gas? Shutting down that nuclear plant now would require that 2.2GW supply to come from somewhere else. And I bet you it would end up coming from fossil-fuel burning. Even if the plan was to spend that $6B on building out solar and batteries, that would take, what... two or three years to come online? Now, we should be doing both! Keep this nuclear plant online, and accelerate building out solar fields and battery storage. We shouldn't be building more nuclear plants, but things that work today... work today. Shutting this plant down right now would seem like a net negative, carbon-emissions-wise. [0] https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I disagree about not building new nuclear. I think we should be installing way more new nuclear capacity. Existing solar installation plans only handle peak growth during the day. However baseload power will increase (eg EVs charging overnight) and batteries are just way too uneconomical and won’t be for the foreseeable future (and they reduce the efficacy of those plants because you have to overbuild peak capacity even more to recharge the batteries during the day). Nuclear remains the cheapest and we should be installing next gen designs like MSR which are even simpler, completely safe (can’t meltdown), and generate even less waste which also means they’re cheaper projects. We get more out of every nuclear dollar we spend than we do for solar and we’ve spent a metric fuckton for solar already (it’s fine- we need solar and wind, but nuclear is well past the time to have been kickstarted into high gear but it’s never too late to start)
yongjik 3y ago
So build those cheap, affordable, clean $6B solar plants in addition to nuclear plants and let's use them. California spent $100B on high speed rails that aren't even working yet, it can certainly fund two $6B energy projects. 47% of CA's power generation is still coming from fossil fuels as of 2022 [1], and that's before we consider non-electricity energy uses. It's ridiculous to watch people demanding we choose exactly one of nuclear or renewables while we're spewing CO2 to the atmosphere every single day. [1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2022-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
jefftk 3y ago
> Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity This doesn't mean anything without specifying the amount of generation. Would that give you 18TWh [1] over the year? [1] https://www.pge.com/en/about/pge-systems/nuclear-power.html https://www.pge.com/en/about/pge-systems/nuclear-power.html

koolba 3y ago

> $6B for a mere five years is highway robbery. Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity, and far far far more of it. How would you install $6B overnight? That alone would take years. And where do you buy it from? China?

epistasis 3y ago
$6B is not a ton of money when it comes to solar and batteries, these are technologies on massive scales. Using round numbers of roughly $1/W for solar and $500/kWh, my off-the-cuff split buys 4GW of solar and 4GWh of batteries. For comparison, 6.5GW of solar was installed Q3 2023 in the US, and this is a tiny tiny fraction of the global market. The challenge with large installs is the interconnection queue and permitting, not any industrial capacity limitation. And these could be solved by CPUC with a snap of their fingers, like they snapped their fingers to extend Diablo Canyon.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  As someone who has worked closely with those running the Interconnection studies, this sounds overly rosey. The ISO (in this case CAISO) runs those studies for a reason to maintain grid reliability. The reason they're slow is that it involves a crazy amount of simulations to determine grid upgrades and it is difficult when things must be done recursively and when the renewables developers speculate so much. If the state regulator could snap their fingers, they would have done so in California, New York, the Midwest... everywhere. They made some changes to speed things up in Texas, but honestly they're kicking the can down the road.
- coderintherye 3y ago
  Costs have shrunk dramatically just in the last 12 months. Solar is down to around 0.25 / watt at bulk. Battery, LiFePo4 is $200/kWh. Those are retail bulk prices. Commercial/Industrial prices are similar or sometimes better on commercial-sized equipment. Granted, as you noted interconnection and permitting costs are high and going up and labor costs have risen and those are the main costs now.
  - thelastgallon 3y ago
    Solar prices are way down: $0.07 - 0.08/W[1]. For a large order in billions, it can be negotiated further down. [1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/13/solar-wafer-prices-hit-record-lows/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/13/solar-wafer-prices-hi...
- black6 3y ago
  Is $1/W purchase or installed cost? Installation usually inflates the cost 3x.
brandensilva 3y ago
China has the solar panel market cornered, so probably. Of course they might decide to cut us off given all the trade drama so I'm not sure even that is a sure thing.

throwitaway222 3y ago

And we're losing. We need to fight back

panick21_ 3y ago

Good then they should run it for even longer if they are gone do so much maintenance.

fuckyah 3y ago

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RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> $6B for a mere five years is highway robbery. Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity, and far far far more of it. Do batteries and solar panels have lifetimes of 20-40 years?

epistasis 3y ago
Yes, batteries are around 20 and solar panels around 40 years these days.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Is that how long they’re actually kept for at grid scale?

PopAlongKid 3y ago

>. Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity, and far far far more of it. Beginning when? Diablo Canyon is already on line today, and just as importantly, tonight. Where is the land going to come from to support $4B of solar panels? How many times will those batteries need to be replaced over 20-40 years? What are the ongoing maintenance costs? How will all that solar be connected to the grid? Alleging "PR move" and "PR game" without similarly considering the motivation for your comments weakens your position.

ceejayoz 3y ago
> Where is the land going to come from to support $4B of solar panels? The desert. https://www.kqed.org/news/11935070/solar-energy-farms-are-booming-in-californias-deserts-heres-why-environmentalists-are-concerned https://www.kqed.org/news/11935070/solar-energy-farms-are-bo... Doesn't take as much as you'd think. https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/5535 https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/5535 > The land area required to supply 100% of projected U.S. electricity demand in 2050 with PV installations is roughly half the area of cropland currently devoted to growing corn for ethanol production, an important consideration given the neutral or negative energy payback of corn ethanol and other complications associated with this fuel source. That same land area - i.e., 33,000 km2 to supply 100% of U.S. electricity demand with PV -is less than the land area occupied by major roads. The currently existing rooftop area within the United States provides enough surface area to supply roughly 60% of the nation’s projected 2050 electricity needs with PV... You could power California off a solar field roughly the size of Andrews Air Force Base.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Sure, but I think the GP's point is that this doesn't just happen overnight. Let's say the same people who planned out keeping this nuclear plant open another 5 years today said "ok, let's plan out a same-price solar build and get it started". How long would you expect the planning process to go, buying up the land, permitting, the construction process, connecting it to the grid, testing, and then finally energizing it? A couple years? More? (Also remember that this is California, where people will put up stupid roadblocks even for construction out in the desert, away from anyone's home.) Now, they absolutely should be doing that in parallel! It's dumb that they aren't. But this nuclear plant is running today, and will continue to provide much-needed electricity, and that'd still be needed if we got this (unfortunately only hypothetical) solar project going right now.

_2d30 3y ago

Maybe what you're saying is true but it's pretty unclear to me. According to the article, it supplies 10% of the state's electricity needs. $6B over 5 yrs => $1.2B/yr => total cost of state's electricity at $12B/yr. With a population of 40M this would mean yearly cost of electricity per capita in CA would be $300. That sounds extremely cheap. Doesn't sound like highway robbery to me but maybe you can make that clearer rather than just tossing out "install $4B solar and $2B batteries which is obviously better, idiots!".

cinntaile 3y ago

That's very dependent on how much the plant contributes to grid stability and what it costs to produce electricity.

Ankaios 3y ago

Wikipedia claims the plant generated 16 TW h of energy in 2019. At $6 billion for five years of generation, that corresponds to about 8 cents per kilowatt hour. That's not great, but it doesn't seem like highway robbery to me. Seems reasonable to keep using the plant while building up solar and storage capacity.

s1artibartfast 3y ago
Wikipedia also claims that PG&E pays more per kwh for solar, without storage. If diablo Canyon is cheaper than the next best alternative, then it obviously makes economic sense to keep it. It doesnt matter how scary the big number is if the alternative is higher

philipkglass 3y ago

Diablo Canyon delivered 17,593 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2022 [1]. If California had continued to install solar power at the same rate it did 10 years ago, that much solar output would have been added in the last 3 years alone. Coupled with battery storage like you suggest, that would also cover the early evening demand peak in California. However, California's rate of solar addition slowed down considerably since 2014. It went from 3,813 GWh of utility scale solar generation in 2013 to 9,932 GWh in 2014 for an annual growth of 6,119 GWh. But from 2017 to 2022 it grew by an average of only 2,994 GWh annually [2]. This happened at the same time that solar hardware costs continued to decline rapidly. California was more aggressive about building large scale solar projects when it was more expensive, and has oddly slowed down compared to other states in recent years. That's a reason that Diablo Canyon is still needed. If California picks up the pace again on decarbonization with renewables, then Diablo Canyon can shut down. It shouldn't shut down while natural gas is still California's top electricity source [3]. [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/6099?freq=A&start=1982&end=2023&ctype=linechart&ltype=pin&columnchart=ELEC.PLANT.GEN.6099-ALL-ALL.A&linechart=ELEC.PLANT.GEN.6099-ALL-ALL.A&maptype=0 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/6099?fr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_California#Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_California#Gene... [3] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2022-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

vlovich123 3y ago
Solar often produces much less power than the sticker because it doesn’t some at night (among other reasons). Someone else in the thread noted that solar efficiency is 20-30% of the installed capacity compared with 92% for nuclear (and solar costs always ignore storage which is a massive cost that would make the numbers waaay worse and is otherwise borne by installing nuclear/fossil fuels/hydro).
- philipkglass 3y ago
  The numbers I posted already accounted for capacity factor differences, because they were generated energy output (gigawatt hours) rather than peak capacity (gigawatts).

gustavus 3y ago

I'm so tired of all these people that seem to be firmly convinced that we can't do nuclear and any other option. Why can't we do both? We run nuclear for the base load that will always be there and then supplement it with wind and solar and what not. We know nuclear works we know it is stable. My understanding is that a lot of the battery and solar technology needs to be replace every few decades or so and generally involves mining operations that are highly toxic and produce many emissions. Not too mention that we have to construct elaborate massive sprawling battery infrastructure to supplement a grid that depends heavily on wind and solar in order to answer the simple questions of "what about when it is nighttime or cloudy, or the wind isn't blowing?" I don't get why so many people are fighting against nuclear. Either we need to do everything possible to reduce carbon emissions or not. Nuclear does not rely on some battery technology that is "almost there", and that is "showing promise". It is a proven technology that works and has a reliable answer. So in short nuclear for the base, solar and wind for the supplement. There is no reason we can't do both. P.S. Given the massive amount of government money being handed out for "green technologies" there's part of me that wonders about how honest this objection to nuclear and pushing of solar and wind is.

Aloha 3y ago
I dont know why you're being downvoted, you're correct. We need base load capacity to replace thermal fossil fuel generation, it's not negotiable if you want the lights to work reliably 24 hours a day, no matter the weather conditions. Be it nuclear or more hydro - or we reconfigure to only run hydro when we need base load - either way it must be there. I dont think we can reach zero fossil fuels, because of the need for peaking generation - but we can get pretty close though. Having to fire up a dozen gas turbines during severe weather conditions seems like a small price to pay if the other 99% of the time we could go without any fossil fuels at all.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  There's another issue with firing up dozens of gas turbines: they don't spin up instantly. Hawaii (and California) are already starting to run into this issue, where peak use follows sunset. So even if you don't need it, you have to keep some generators going so they can ramp up fast enough when solar drops off and peak use starts. Otherwise you get outages. They've named this issue the duck curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

stickfigure 3y ago

Diablo Canyon produces ~2 gigawatts of power rain or shine. Let's say you need 12 hours of battery capacity, so 24 gWh. A casual google search says grid-scale storage is $300-600 per kWh. Even generously assuming $300/kWh, that's $7.2 billion just for the batteries. How long do the batteries last?

beders 3y ago
[flagged]
- kelnos 3y ago
  I wouldn't call 8.5% insignificant. It's certainly not a majority, or even a plurality, but "insignificant" is surely downplaying its importance. And if we shut down Diablo Canyon today, what do you think would replace that 8.5% in the years before a replacement solar+battery field could come online? Probably gonna be more natural gas.
  - anonporridge 3y ago
    8.5% out of one plant for the entire state of California is fucking enormously significant.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      I know right? Like install 3-5 more and California would be net 0 for the electricity grid making all those EVs finally meaningfully beneficial to the environment.
- Tuna-Fish 3y ago
  Not with the $6B. The math just doesn't work, even if the solar was free, you could not purchase enough batteries with $6B to replace Diablo Canyon.
- Fauntleroy 3y ago
  Are you going to provide a logical argument or just point to a pie chart and say "hey look nuclear is the smallest!"?

credit_guy 3y ago

> $6B for a mere five years is highway robbery The average price of electricity in California is 27 cents/kWh, or $270/MWh [1]. Some of this go to middlemen, but some to producers. I don't know the split, but let's say it's half and half. Diablo produces about 16000 GWh of electricity per year [2]. At $135 per MWh it comes to $2.2 BN/year, or $11 BN for 5 years. So $6 BN is not quite highway robbery. [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Wholesale electricity prices are usually around 10% of retail.
- amluto 3y ago
  Which makes one wonder why PG&E is permitted to charge so much for “generation”.
  - undersuit 3y ago
    You can move to Texas and sign up for retail rates from one of their lesser regulated providers, and when the temperatures drop and your energy markets spike in value you too can pay market rates to heat your home.
    - matthewdgreen 3y ago
      In fairness, there are many other states with lower generation prices than CA and that don’t have weird grid failures like TX. Those two states both seem nuts to me, especially given how many natural energy resources they’ve been gifted with.
      - undersuit 3y ago
        In fairness I was answering the question of where you can get market rates. Very little of TX's grid failures in February 2021 directly affected the infrastructure to the homes, many Texas providers cut power because they could not afford the wholesale rates while offering the customers a protected monthly rate. There was a very good chance that if your provider was one of the TX providers that allowed you access to Texas's energy market, you maintained power during the freeze and paid massively for that.

cheald 3y ago

"Could reach" is a fairly hedged phrasing, there. The plant generated 16,477 GWh in 2021 [1]. Over 5 years, it'd generate 82,385,000,000 kWh. At the LAX average retail rate of $0.287/kWh [2], that generation would return $23,644,495,000 in revenue. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53899 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53899 [2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyprices_losangeles.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyp...

epistasis 3y ago
That retail rate of electricity is mostly T&D; generators of electricity get far less than $0.10/kWh. Somebody else in this thread estimates that the $6B would result in $0.8/kWh, which is 50%-100% more expensive than new solar.
- cheald 3y ago
  New solar has the same T&D costs (plus batteries!), doesn't it?
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Yes, but it is still cheaper than nuclear, and has the benefit of increasing the productive capacity for installing even more solar and batteries. The one-off work for nuclear here will do little to nothing to enable new nuclear builds. It's short-term dead money. If we are truly at the limit of what we can deploy with solar and batteries right now, and we have spare money to spend, then perhaps this short extension is worth it, but it must be evaluated versus the alternatives such as floating offshore wind, enhanced geothermal, long-duration storage (100h), etc. People are so excited about nuclear that they don't evaluate it rationally, on its own merits, versus alternatives. That is not a healthy way to help the climate. We must be very hard nosed about not only the short term impacts but also the long term effects of investing in industries.

dylan604 3y ago

You so almost have a point I'd agree, but then go off the rails with your nonsensical solar retort. I agree the expense sounds extraordinarily high to the point of not being profitable at all, but I'm not an expert in the energy sector so maybe the industry numbers really are that high. however, my arm chair quarterback position in solar would immediately recognize you're numbers being touted for a solar solution in $ and years are just made up

Manuel_D 3y ago

> $6B for a mere five years is highway robbery. Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity, and far far far more of it. Because the goal isn't generating arbitrary amounts of carbon-free energy. The goal is displacing fossil fuel use with carbon-free energy. California is already hitting daytime saturation of energy demand for about a month of the year. $2B in batteries isn't actually going very far. The US manages to build battery storage at ~500/KWh. So 2 Billion is only about 4 GWh. The Diablo canyon plant puts out 2.5 GW of electricity, so this is less than 2 hours worth of battery storage relative to the plant its replacing.

mat_epice 3y ago

Citation required. You cannot replace Diablo Canyon with $6B of solar and batteries. Installing your proposed $4B of solar will get you 4GW at peak, which will produce about 5840 GWh per year due to variations in sunlight over the days and seasons. Diablo Canyon produces 18,000 GWh per year. Replacing Diablo Canyon with solar will cost $12B plus batteries, maintenance, and operations staff. Figures/Sources: - $1m buys 1MW of solar panels that provides 1,460 MWh per year. https://coldwellsolar.com/commercial-solar-blog/how-much-investment-do-you-need-for-a-solar-farm/ https://coldwellsolar.com/commercial-solar-blog/how-much-inv... - Diablo Canyon produces 18,000 GWh per year. https://diablocanyonpanel.org/history-of-dcpp/ https://diablocanyonpanel.org/history-of-dcpp/

epistasis 3y ago
The solar panels last far longer than five years...
- Mtinie 3y ago
  The panels do but that just means the far more efficient, next gen panels that come on the market five years from now will be purchased and used to replace the original set. So in reality, the often cited “20-40 years of utilization” they offer is nice to say but has minimal practical impact on future costs.
- mat_epice 3y ago
  That is of course true, but not the argument I was refuting.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

That’s a worst case cost estimate, I doubt it will be anywhere near $6B spent on plant maintenance and operation 5 years from now.

jupp0r 3y ago

Let's do the math. I'm leaving out capital costs for Diablo Canyon because I'm guessing it's paid off at this point. Diablo Canyon is producing 2 GW. $6B / (5 years * 2 GW) is approximately $0.069/kWh. That sounds extremely competitive to me and not "just a PR game". You won't get solar and batteries installed and connected to the grid cheaper than that (especially not at current interest rates), sorry. There's also the fact that Diablo Canyon is running right now, while getting large amounts of solar and batteries connected to the grid is a years long process at this point due to grid operator connection planning backlog.

kelnos 3y ago

Sibling posters seem to think that $6B isn't unreasonable (and that $6B spent on solar+batteries won't come close to replacing this plant), but I won't address that. Take a look at today's CA electricity source mix[0]. Regardless of cost, why would you shut down a nuclear plant (prematurely, when there's no renewable capacity right now available to replace it) when we still burn so much natural gas? Shutting down that nuclear plant now would require that 2.2GW supply to come from somewhere else. And I bet you it would end up coming from fossil-fuel burning. Even if the plan was to spend that $6B on building out solar and batteries, that would take, what... two or three years to come online? Now, we should be doing both! Keep this nuclear plant online, and accelerate building out solar fields and battery storage. We shouldn't be building more nuclear plants, but things that work today... work today. Shutting this plant down right now would seem like a net negative, carbon-emissions-wise. [0] https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

vlovich123 3y ago
I disagree about not building new nuclear. I think we should be installing way more new nuclear capacity. Existing solar installation plans only handle peak growth during the day. However baseload power will increase (eg EVs charging overnight) and batteries are just way too uneconomical and won’t be for the foreseeable future (and they reduce the efficacy of those plants because you have to overbuild peak capacity even more to recharge the batteries during the day). Nuclear remains the cheapest and we should be installing next gen designs like MSR which are even simpler, completely safe (can’t meltdown), and generate even less waste which also means they’re cheaper projects. We get more out of every nuclear dollar we spend than we do for solar and we’ve spent a metric fuckton for solar already (it’s fine- we need solar and wind, but nuclear is well past the time to have been kickstarted into high gear but it’s never too late to start)

yongjik 3y ago

So build those cheap, affordable, clean $6B solar plants in addition to nuclear plants and let's use them. California spent $100B on high speed rails that aren't even working yet, it can certainly fund two $6B energy projects. 47% of CA's power generation is still coming from fossil fuels as of 2022 [1], and that's before we consider non-electricity energy uses. It's ridiculous to watch people demanding we choose exactly one of nuclear or renewables while we're spewing CO2 to the atmosphere every single day. [1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2022-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

jefftk 3y ago

> Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity This doesn't mean anything without specifying the amount of generation. Would that give you 18TWh [1] over the year? [1] https://www.pge.com/en/about/pge-systems/nuclear-power.html https://www.pge.com/en/about/pge-systems/nuclear-power.html