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Renewables are cheaper if you only compare cost of generation. The issue is they need storage. Add in that cost and the price becomes super murky, and depends h

Renewables are cheaper if you only compare cost of generation. The issue is they need storage. Add in that cost and the price becomes super murky, and depends heavily on geography; access to good clean water (electrolysis), viable valleys to dam (hydro) etc.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
The parent poster’s got a valid point, though. Solar PV and wind used to be expensive but have seen massive cost declines that seem set to continue. Battery storage is currently expensive but is also following a similar pattern of cost declines as the industry ramps up mass production. The current state of the art in large nuclear plants can’t be mass produced, and so we haven’t seen any durable price declines at all. I suppose it’s possible that over the next 20 years we’ll hit some kind of technological wall in grid storage tech that prevents further price declines, but that seems like an incredibly low-odds bet to make.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  > The current state of the art in large nuclear plants can’t be mass produced That just false. > any durable price declines at all. If we stopped building wind turbines for decades the price declines wouldn't be durable either. The simply reality is that when nuclear was built at scale, even with current PWR the prices are pretty damn good. India cost in their heavy water reactors are really good. South Koreas reactor prices in UEA are incredibly reasonable. I actually did a bunch of calculations on this. Starting in around 2000, what if Germany had gone nuclear instead of solar/wind/storage and so on. I took very pessimistic price assumptions for the nuclear plants based on the South Korean reactors in UAE. And I assumed a scaling rate far lower then what France did in the 70/80s. And even then the price for a complete transition of the whole grid to 95%+ nuclear was both cheaper and faster then what Germany actually achieved. And that would have come at a cost that amounts to about 4-5% of extra debt per GDP with resulting low electricity prices. Germany as society is paying, far, far more then that. Just their recent emergency measures to subsidize prices are about as much as a whole nuclear fleet. Germany had decades of high energy prices that one had to account for and then they had a huge investment in wind and solar. Plus costly deals with Russia both politically and in cost terms. Frankly, there is simply no evidence that Germany did better by Solar/Wind/Coal/Gas route then if they had done nuclear. And that is before we are even considering that without storage the system Germany building is very brittle and its not at all clear when they will actually achieve consistent 95%+ green energy.

matthewdgreen 3y ago

The parent poster’s got a valid point, though. Solar PV and wind used to be expensive but have seen massive cost declines that seem set to continue. Battery storage is currently expensive but is also following a similar pattern of cost declines as the industry ramps up mass production. The current state of the art in large nuclear plants can’t be mass produced, and so we haven’t seen any durable price declines at all. I suppose it’s possible that over the next 20 years we’ll hit some kind of technological wall in grid storage tech that prevents further price declines, but that seems like an incredibly low-odds bet to make.

panick21_ 3y ago
> The current state of the art in large nuclear plants can’t be mass produced That just false. > any durable price declines at all. If we stopped building wind turbines for decades the price declines wouldn't be durable either. The simply reality is that when nuclear was built at scale, even with current PWR the prices are pretty damn good. India cost in their heavy water reactors are really good. South Koreas reactor prices in UEA are incredibly reasonable. I actually did a bunch of calculations on this. Starting in around 2000, what if Germany had gone nuclear instead of solar/wind/storage and so on. I took very pessimistic price assumptions for the nuclear plants based on the South Korean reactors in UAE. And I assumed a scaling rate far lower then what France did in the 70/80s. And even then the price for a complete transition of the whole grid to 95%+ nuclear was both cheaper and faster then what Germany actually achieved. And that would have come at a cost that amounts to about 4-5% of extra debt per GDP with resulting low electricity prices. Germany as society is paying, far, far more then that. Just their recent emergency measures to subsidize prices are about as much as a whole nuclear fleet. Germany had decades of high energy prices that one had to account for and then they had a huge investment in wind and solar. Plus costly deals with Russia both politically and in cost terms. Frankly, there is simply no evidence that Germany did better by Solar/Wind/Coal/Gas route then if they had done nuclear. And that is before we are even considering that without storage the system Germany building is very brittle and its not at all clear when they will actually achieve consistent 95%+ green energy.