10 ms·

Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks. I didn’t run the math but I’m guessing

Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks. I didn’t run the math but I’m guessing it’s not feasible to build a battery pack large enough to ride out winter in some areas. The SF Bay Area, sure, but I suspect blackouts will be common in solar+battery only areas. A preferred solution would be a mix of both with nuclear handling disruptions due to weather. One technology for power generation should not “win”. Employing a variety of power generation methods will give you the most stable power grid.

slashdev 3y ago
Batteries are not for riding out winter, they're for evening out the daily load. You have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation, as well as make long-distance interconnects. Pumped hydro is also extremely interesting for obvious reasons. Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation. Can we solve that without sacrificing safety? Can we even solve it at all? Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation At which point it ceases to be as cheap.
  - loandbehold 3y ago
    Not necessarily.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    That sounds like a kneejerk response. Got a source for it? It's not like we didn't know about it all the time, yet the large solar systems were built.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > sounds like a kneejerk response. Got a source for it If you have 120% solar capacity in the summer so you have 100% in the winter, that’s obviously going to be more expensive than just building 100%. This is basic utilisation. Also, diminishing returns: the most-productive spots for solar will be built out first.
      - viraptor 3y ago
        That wasn't your claim. You said it stops being cheap - does it? Compared to alternatives?
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > You said it stops being cheap - does it? Compared to alternatives? “As cheap.” Solar will keep getting cheaper until saturation, then overshoot while it gets a bit more expensive. The equilibrium will shift from time to time as technology advances. But there are fundamental limits, and power demand is only going to grow.
      - wolfram74 3y ago
        As the seasonality of power becomes more and more pronounced, it'll make more and more sense to make seasonal loads. Cheap to build but electrically expensive to operate manufacturing processes that take advantage of borderline free power in the summer months that don't have much capex to amortize in the winters.
        pfdietz 3y ago
        Or, it makes sense for industry to move to those darker skinned places without seasonality. PV, the anti-colonial energy source. Poetic justice for Europe, don't you think?
    - Wytwwww 3y ago
      Depends on the latitude and weather patterns. For instance you might need 25 (or much more) higher capacity to generate as much power in December as you would in May in most of Northern Europe (that should be pretty obvious though).
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Unlike nuclear, which is too expensive when you don't overbuild it, and becomes simply stupidly expensive if you contemplate overbuilding it. Overbuilding nuclear is so preposterous that nuclear fans just pretend you magically don't need to, to prevent their fragile dream from being crushed by reality, and let them continue to steer at renewables and all the problems they face as every nation on earth builds then out at massive scale.
    - kragen 3y ago
      you don't need to overbuild nuclear; nuclear plants commonly have a capacity factor of over 80%
      - ViewTrick1002 3y ago
        The grid has wild differences between day and night. Who cares if you can run at 100% when no one wants the power because everyone is asleep?
        kragen 3y ago
        negative lmps have long been a result of baseload plants exceeding demand at night; widespread deployment of pv has turned that on its head, because now it's midafternoon when prices go negative, but also in a sense exacerbated it. consequently, expect rapid development of grid-scale storage: pumped hydro and massive li-ion, of course, but also maybe centrifugal trompe isothermal air compression, sodium-ion batteries, or high-temperature liquid-metal batteries
      - Kon5ole 3y ago
        Finland recently lost 14% of it's national electricity generation for days due to a turbine failure. This is of course a huge problem. Having 14% of the nations electricity transported from just 1 location is another problem all by itself even when it works. Last year half the reactors in France were offline at one point: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-france.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr... I don't think nuclear should be overprovisioned, but it illustrates that nuclear also needs a plan B just like wind and solar does. IMO Plan B should be synthesized gas that has been generated when electricity was cheap due to overproduction or directly from cheap sources such as Solar.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    That’s not automatically true. As the price continues to drop even over building renewables can be cheaper than other options. Nuclear is very expensive so there’s a lot of wiggle room.
    - Wytwwww 3y ago
      I find it hard to imagine solar could ever be cheaper than nuclear during winter in Northern Europe.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        No need to imagine, because it is. At least if you believe electricity market prices reflect reality.
        Wytwwww 3y ago
        What is? > At least if you believe electricity market prices reflect reality I don't see how is this relevant if we're talking specifically about solar. Above ~53° solar production during December is ~20 (to way more than that farther you go north) lower than in December.
        hef19898 3y ago
        And still, PV generated electricity during these periods is priced cheaper on the spot market than nuclear. Funny, right? It is almost as if the parties investing billions and making billions selling and buying electricity figured out the financials behind all that.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        Yeah, PV and gas are the cheapest new power to build today.
        Wytwwww 3y ago
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Yeah, of course. If you take the first answer to the GP, that is a bit outdated, it's as expensive as 1/4 of the nuclear costs.
- jdewerd 3y ago
  When nuclear takes off in China but not the USA, we'll figure it out. But not until then.
  - MyFirstSass 3y ago
    Why hasn't nuclear taken off in China? I keep hearing that it's not cost effective anymore, to slow etc. but if it's actually mostly regulation that's hindering the built out (regardless of the risks) shouldn't China with their impressive portfolio of warpspeed megaprojects have been an ideal example of scaling the next generation of this tech?
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      China is building nuclear reactors faster than any other country. At the moment, they have 21 new reactors under construction.
      - MyFirstSass 3y ago
        Interesting. 21 doesn't seem like much compared to the 300+ there's been in US, 330 in China, 170 in EU etc, until you see theres zero retired units in china compared to large amounts in the rest of the world. Still though. 21 seems to indicate they are actually betting on something else. https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-nuclear-power-tracker/tracker-map/ https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-nuclear-powe...
        resolutebat 3y ago
        China is betting on all the things at once: they're the world leader in building out new solar, new wind, new nuclear and new coal power simultaneously.
        tzs 3y ago
        They also say they are going to approve 6 to 8 more per year indefinitely.
      - 3y ago
- hackyhacky 3y ago
  If there's any area to not skimp on safety regulations, I'd say nuclear is it. I think the alleged blight of "overregulation" has become a conservative mantra but without much basis in fact. Or maybe I'm wrong. You seem to know a lot about nuclear regulation. Can you tell us a specific, unnecessary burdensome regulatory rule that you feel is holding back progress?
  - slashdev 3y ago
    What world do you live in that you don't see the burdensome regulation everywhere. Don't know anyone with a business? Never investigated how zoning works? Never filed taxes? Never used the healthcare system?
    - hackyhacky 3y ago
      I've used all of these services and they all have problems. I can't say that those problems are due to "excessive regulation." In the case of healthcare, for example, most of the problems come from insurance companies who allegedly operate in the free market. I am strongly in favor of business, zoning, and environmental regulations because they provide valuable function. Moreover, none of that is relevant to nuclear regulation. I asked for a specific example of an overly burdensome and unnecessary regulatory rule.
      - zizee 3y ago
        Using services is not the same as operating those services. I think if you could see the true costs that all the regulations bring, you might change your mind. And if you're happy to pay these costs you're most likely wealthy enough to be able to bear them. Healthcare companies operate in an environment that is very much not a free market. For these companies, the regulatory burden is welcome as it is a high barrier to entry for new players. Read up on regulatory capture. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
        hackyhacky 3y ago
- konschubert 3y ago
  You can also use hydrogen (or Ammonia) for long term storage. It's one of the few use cases where hydrogen makes sense.
  - kragen 3y ago
    for long-term storage it might be better to convert the hydrogen to something more easily storable, such as propane or octane, or to make a different electrolytic product such as aluminum
    - jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
      Ammonia is another interesting storage fuel option.
      - kragen 3y ago
        yes, that's mentioned in the comment i was replying to, but while it's appealing in some ways, i feel that it is not as appealing as the options i mentioned for reasons of accident hazard, noxious combustion products, lower density, and risk of corrosion
        pfdietz 3y ago
        There's also a possibility of using methanol, which is not as dangerous as ammonia. This would involve some complexity: 1) Have CO2 storage. 2) Make hydrogen by electrolysis. Store the oxygen. 3) The hydrogen is reacted with CO2 to make methanol, which is easily stored. 4) When power is needed, use the oxygen from 2) and the methanol from 3) in an Allam-cycle turbine. The CO2 of combustion is easily separated and put back into CO2 storage. One ends up needed long term storage of CO2, oxygen, and methanol, but this could be easier than storing hydrogen, especially if the CO2 and oxygen can be liquefied and there are no salt formations to make H2 storage easy.
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  > You have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation Not at all feasible with solar throughout much of Europe. Of course wind is a much better option there.
- belorn 3y ago
  Pumped hydro used to exist here in Sweden during the 1970s. They were phased out because they are not cost competitive. They built nuclear power plants instead because those were cost competitive at that time. It would be funny if the cost has switched between pumped hydro and nuclear, but I suspect they haven't. What really pushed out both were cheap natural gas and oil. Even now, new gas powered plants are being planned to be built within the next 5 years. I don't see a solutions to this without new regulation putting a clamp on the fossil fuels. The one hope I have for pumped hydro is that our current hydropower fleet are outdated and far outside of minimum environmental standards. Combined they have managed to drive species to the brink of extinction, basically being large meat grinders for migrating fish. The solution of catching the offspring and fly them to Sweden to be implanted back into lakes is a terrible solution that have little to no scientific support. With the required investments into modernization, reverse hydro might not be too expensive to include, assuming again that the economics of the concept start to make sense.
  - kragen 3y ago
    grid-scale storage becomes more profitable when your primary energy production is more intermittent. current pv is something like 10× cheaper than nuclear before you factor in intermittency, and that opens up a huge market for grid-scale storage that didn't exist in the 01970s. pumped hydro was replaced by dispatchable gas, but gas is more expensive now, and batteries are cheaper
    - jakeinspace 3y ago
      If, as seems likely, solar and wind come to totally dominate all new energy construction, then it seems like state/provincial and federal governments will need to either legally mandate / highly incentivize the construction of new baseload by utilities, or build those plants themselves. We have the TVA but as much as I hope, I don't think we're getting a bunch more federally owned and operated power companies in the US.
      - kragen 3y ago
        the us may not be very relevant here what are you going to construct the new baseload from? nothing comes close to the cheapness of pv and wind. grid-scale energy storage, in the form of batteries, is already too cheap for coal and nuclear to compete with it on that basis, and it's just going to get cheaper as we climb down the learning curve
- cplusplusfellow 3y ago
  > Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. At the risk of stating the obvious, this notion entirely depends upon your definition of costs, and the definition of what is competitive. It's vastly more costly to society to have unreliable power (e.g., blackouts, brownouts, or weeks on end of lowered usage restrictions) than it is to have slightly more expensive electricity. There is no rich country in the world with expensive energy.
  - avidphantasm 3y ago
    Yes, I always want to scream “what about the quality of the power?” when people make claims about cost-competitiveness. Electricity is a commodity on the surface, but, as with many technologies, depending on the use case, differences in the qualities of the underlying source matter a great deal. Reduction of all costs to currency can be a damaging abstraction to impose on systems that inherently involve trade-offs between qualities.
- alex_young 3y ago
  One benefit of building excess capacity of renewables - free electricity to power your automobile. If we actually priced excess energy smartly people would charge their cars in the daytime and spend ~ 0 to drive most of the year.
  - saltminer 3y ago
    Electricity demand isn't that simple, it's not like Sheetz dropping the price of gas to $1.776/gallon on the 4th of July and having to bag the pumps within the hour [0]. Electricity is quite interesting as a market because it's truly the logical endpoint of just-in-time manufacturing: the time between generation and consumption is measured not on the order of months, weeks, days, or even hours, but in milliseconds. It travels at 300,000 km per second/186,000 miles per second [1], which is incomprehensibly fast (it's fast enough to cross the widest span of the continental US, 4,799 km/2,892 miles, over 60 times in a single second). As such, in order to maintain 50/60 Hz at nominal voltages and amperages (and that frequency is very important - in a 60 Hz system, 59.4 Hz is "we have 5 minutes before the entire grid blows up and plunges us into a 3+ month blackout" level bad [2]), utility companies aren't in the power generation business so much as they are in the predictions business. They have to take everything into account, from the weather to consumer purchasing habits, to determine exactly how much power needs to be generated at any given moment or the whole grid will collapse. That wide area synchronous grids like the UCTE (continental Europe) and Eastern Interconnection (eastern US) are able to operate is a testament to human ingenuity, as these really are quite fragile machines. All this to say that you can't just "make power free when there's excess and people will magically use it up". Even if we can reliably predict excesses, people won't really be able to take advantage of it unless their schedule lends itself to it (e.g. being able to plug their car into a charger at work that only turns on when there's an excess), but even then, when done on a large scale, this only makes the predictions even harder for utility companies to plan around (think: thundering herd problem but on a national scale). At a macro level, it just doesn't work. [0]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/business/sheetz-july-fourth-gas/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/business/sheetz-july-fourth-g... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity?useskin=vector#Electromagnetic_waves_in_circuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity?useskin=v... [2]: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-environment/2021/02/24/392290/texas-power-grid-was-4-minutes-and-37-seconds-away-from-collapsing-heres-how-it-happened/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > an artificial problem caused by regulation Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water. > Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight. It's often repeated, including by a certain political grouping, but never established IME. Unregulated markets, such as cryptocurrency, privacy, etc. seem to cause most of the problems. The FAA, etc. do well IME. They fail when undermined by a political class that benefits from fraud (the same trying to prevent the IRS from collecting legitimate taxes.)
  - theLiminator 3y ago
    > Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water. That's just plain wrong. I don't know whether regulations in this case are bloat or not, but you're basically saying that regulations are never bloated, which is abjectly false.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      Perhaps respond to the actual claim and not a strawperson.
  - aftbit 3y ago
    >Unregulated markets, such as cryptocurrency, privacy, etc. seem to cause most of the problems. Can you expand on this a bit? This feels a bit like a cause and effect confusion to me. Perhaps the unregulated markets are just where the "problematic" behavior moves, as it has been excluded from the regulated markets? Also, what does privacy have to do with this?
- cm2187 3y ago
  You can't solve the variability of wind by overbuilding. Output can go down to <5% for more than a week several times a year. So the only way is storage. On a massive scale. Or having another source that makes sense to modulate. LNG is one (though carbon based).
- Symmetry 3y ago
  It's not that the agencies regulating nuclear are bloated but that they're given a mandate that nuclear must be as safe as possible rather than being held to some finite standard of safety.
- CivBase 3y ago
  > Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation. Is it regulation or a lack of scale? The US has launched 2 reactors in the last 2.5 decades. I'm guessing there was a lot of stuff - materials, processes, documentation, etc - developed from scratch specifically for those plants. It might get cheaper if we can start re-using that stuff.
hedora 3y ago
Even in the SF Bay Area, there were widespread power outages coupled with extended storms/clouds last spring. Lots of solar + battery systems got propane generator upgrades this year.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
The people saying that might live far from the equator, where wind power helps balance solar in winter but people in general live fairly near it and energy intensive industry will migrate in that direction to follow the cheap power.
chockablock 3y ago
You don't need to 'ride out winter'; there's a sweet spot around 100-hour storage where you can unlock a huge amount of grid resiliency and decarbonization (you can keep as many dispatchable gas plants sitting nearly-always-idle to address risk of any freak long-tail events.) https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/ https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pfdietz 3y ago
  And then eventually switch over those gas plants to burn hydrogen. If they are nearly-always-idle, the amount of hydrogen needed isn't much.
malfist 3y ago
Power is easily transmitted and losses are minimal. There's no reason to think you need local solar power generation in a cloudy region.
- sanxiyn 3y ago
  Grid connection is a real problem. Solar power in US waits years for grid connection. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/06/outdated-us-energy-grid-tons-of-clean-energy-stuck-waiting-in-line.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/06/outdated-us-energy-grid-tons...
- mpweiher 3y ago
  Running long-distance power lines is one of the few things that is more difficult and takes longer to build (currently) than a nuclear power station.
conjecTech 3y ago
Nuclear is already about 20% of US electricity generation. I don't think many people are suggesting taking that offline. When people are talking about being all solar, wind and storage they are talking about _new_ generation. So the eventual solution would still be a mix of all of those.
hutzlibu 3y ago
"the people saying solar and battery only future" I think I never, ever heard or read anyone saying this, and I think I follow/participate in the debates, before it was cool and everywhere. Renewable people rather sound like this: "Employing a variety of power generation methods will give you the most stable power grid." Where of course quite many "green" people don't want nuclear at all in the mix. Rather more of long distance energy transport (HVDC). And otherwise any option that works and does not pollute, or pollutes less. (And personally I am not antinuclear as long as the alternative are fossil fuels, so they should be used as a transition technology and long term rather reserved for other application, like powering things in space and remote important sites)
- LargeTomato 3y ago
  I'd love to know what you're reading and who you're talking to. I regularly and often speak to and read comments by people who insist on a solar+battery only future. I'd like to be a part of the communities you're describing.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    Can you show me one example of someone who insist on that? And I mean literal and globally, not people who say this in the context of being in a sunny desert.
hackerlight 3y ago
> Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks. This isn't a big problem. Wind is negatively correlated with solar, and electricity can be sent across long distances (intra- or inter-country) with minimal loss, and overbuilding eliminates a lot of the variability issues. Variability across geographies and across modes cancels out. Nuclear is pretty good, but solar and wind is simply better. Way cheaper and quicker to implement, less resistance from NIMBYs who have an irrational fear of leaks, less valid concerns of enabling nuclear weapons proliferation, less technical know-how requirement. It's the most brain-dead obvious calculus if you know the actual facts, costs and trade-offs. And time is of the essence. Eliminating 80-90% of emissions in 4 years (with only solar and wind and without batteries, yes this is possible whilst being cheaper than nuclear) means less emissions than eliminating 100% of emissions in 20 years with nuclear.
- WillPostForFood 3y ago
  Wind is negatively correlated with solar Yes, but not strongly. It is definitely a problem, as seen in Texas on cold mornings where solar isn't getting much light, winds are still, and people need heat.
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    Right, and that's why it's infeasible to get 100% from renewables without storage, but we're not going for 100%, we're going for 80-90%. The objective is to address climate change, and to do that we need to minimize the area under the curve of emissions from now onwards. Renewables in my view is more effective at achieving this objective (with the added bonus of being cheaper).
    - _ph_ 3y ago
      While in the long term we do have to achieve net 100%, the mid-term goal which is absolutely achievable with the current state of the marked is indeed 90%. While working towards that we can start to see which technology emerges to cover the last 10%. And probably there isn't a miracle technology needed, just plain improvements in the storage sector and a good mix of several approaches.
jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
> Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks. Or we've researched it and understand the basics of solar technology. In sunny California solar has a capacity factor of around 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter. In terms of capital costs solar is around $1 per watt while nuclear is around $10. Combined cycle gas plants are roughly the same as solar. It takes a bit more than a year to build a solar farm, while a new nuclear plant you're looking at a decade. ROI on solar is on the scale of 1 to 2 years. Nuclear will be shockingly lucky to have even started construction in that period. When we look at the levelized, unsubsidized cost of energy (https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...) we get a range of $24 to $96 per MWh for utility scale solar, while nuclear is $141 to $221 and combined cycle gas plants at $39 to $101. And the trend lines strongly favor solar + storage. Is it any wonder investors are reluctant to fund nuclear projects? For the same amount financed I can build 10x the capacity, have half the marginal cost of production, and see nothing but upside in 2 years. Places like Singapore that lack land suitable for utility scale solar will need to look to other solutions including nuclear. For the rest of us the decision is not difficult. Seems to me you are unaware of basic facts of the matter while you make naive criticisms of solar investment due to a personal affinity for nuclear technology.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  I think you might want to fix that link address. :)
  - jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
    Thanks. The way pdf downloads changed in recent versions of Chrome keeps tripping me up. So annoying.
- Gare 3y ago
  You both raise good points. Yes solar is getting cheaper but economical and environmentally friendly long term storage (order of several days or even a month worth of energy for a hundred million people) is far from a solved problem. > In sunny California solar has as capacity factor of around 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter. In Croatia yearly capacity factor is around 15%, but the problem is it varies wildly throughout the year. In summer we get up to 300 hours of sunlight per month, in winter less than 50. So yes, on paper the capacity might be enough, but one needs to have the ability to store the massive amount of energy inter-seasonally.
cm2187 3y ago
It doesn't make any sense to use nuclear as a standby source of power. Nuclear costs pretty much the same whether you use it or not, so it doesn't make any sense to build it and leave it off. So if you build a nuclear power plant, save yourself the cost of whatever else you wanted to use as a primary source.
credit_guy 3y ago
Nuclear power plants are currently too expensive to not be used at 100% all the time (except when you need to perform maintenance). Some nuclear power plants are designed to be able to load follow, but in practice they don't do it. Batteries will never be cheap enough to allow for seasonal storage. They are good for day-to-night storage. For seasonal fluctuations, the best you can do is natural gas. If we convert all our energy to solar, wind, hydro, and natural gas for peaker plants, we'd be comfortably net negative. In fact, right now in the US the CO2 absorption by forests is equal to all the emissions produced by the natural gas power plants (which are mostly used full time, not in peaker mode). Of course, the US produces a lot of emissions from transportation and industry. But they can be electrified in time, and the coal power plants can be eliminated, and the natural gas plants kept as peaker plants only. The path to net zero, or net negative, does not strictly speaking need nuclear energy. I personally am a huge fan of nuclear, but I acknowledge that it is not really needed to fight climate change.
- kragen 3y ago
  i agree with almost everything in your cogent and well-informed comment, with only two exceptions: - forests can only increase in biomass up to some relatively low limit; you may be correct that in the usa they currently absorb more than gas plants emit, but that is not a sustainable situation, unless you start cutting them down and sequestering the carbon - you can get pretty far covering seasonal fluctuations with simple overprovisioning also i think you're not taking into account the likely advent of mass production of synfuel
  - credit_guy 3y ago
    > unless you start cutting them down and sequestering the carbon We actually do that all the time: we cut down trees and make houses. Here's a number from the US Forest Service [1] that as of 2009 the US was using 187 million m3 of solid wood products. > you can get pretty far covering seasonal fluctuations with simple overprovisioning Fully agree. > likely advent of mass production of synfuel I'm extremely pessimistic about that. The best hope is for hydrogen, but even that looks all but hopeless to me, if you don't count "blue hydrogen". [1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/33882 https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/33882
beders 3y ago
There are whole countries who have built stable grids with wind, water, solar and battery alone. Financially building nuclear power plants make absolutely no sense.
lkbm 3y ago
I think solar+battery usually also involves overbuilding the solar capacity by a lot and running some HVDC lines. A mix with nuclear and wind seems smart to me, but I wouldn't be shocked if some cloudy places successfully manage solar+batteries in combination with HVDC and/or having some easily-curtailed industries in the area.
sunshinesnacks 3y ago
The good news is that it’s very possible to “run the math,” and people run power generation capacity expansion models and production cost/dispatch models to look at these things. And then 15-25 years of solar irradiance and other weather data, at hourly resolution or shorter intervals, is available for most of the world. Maybe the general public extrapolates from their own experience, but grid planners and researchers do much more than that.
samstave 3y ago
There should be a "roof-tile" mandated on every single structure built which captures weather information for every single structure. And that structure should be able to be read by any device which states in a standard format the sunlight avg per N, rainfall avg per N and temp. (air quality adds cost, but should also be there (staring at Purple's horrific pricing) Edit to add: "Whether Information" Big Brother: "was @dang there?" Smart-Tile (as played by Marissa Tomai: "Look, my coverage is limited. I can tell you weather... weather... but I can't whether this or whether that. you'll have ta pay"
_ph_ 3y ago
Solar+battery isn't sufficient in all places indeed. But those places are usually great for wind. With solar+battery+wind+other renewables+grid, the solution becomes rather easy. Toss in some gas until the battery capacities have grown enough. But nuclear is the worst thing to put into this mix due to its nature.
tills13 3y ago
Yeah and solar and wind are perfect for baseline load but you need something that can react to demand changes like how NG or Coal production can by simply burning more / less fuel. There are clever ways to store / "shed" excess capacity for the inverse but it'd still be better to be able to adjust capacity in real time.
aftbit 3y ago
Dunkelflaute (dark and calm) is indeed a real problem for a renewable-only future. If you want to maintain current reliability statistics with solar/wind only, you need to overbuild both storage and generation to such an extreme level that it might not be cost competitive in the end. You'll end up building your entire grid for the 100 year dunkelflaute event even though 90%+ of it will be idle most of the time, or you'll keep a bunch of gas plants idling to pick up the load in that case. Really we need to crack better storage. Improvements in hydrogen electrolysis or direct air to fuel could do it, but there are non-trivial technology hurdles there as well. I'm holding out hope for deep sea geothermal ala Peter Watts' Behemoth. Perhaps we can exploit the temperature difference between geothermal vents and the surrounding water to get stable and green base-load power.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The "extreme storage" hand-wringing comes from the implicit assumption that batteries are used to cover the Dunkelflauten. This is bad engineering.
pfdietz 3y ago
Dunkelflauten can be dealt with by burning an e-fuel like hydrogen. A simple combustion turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the cost per W of Vogtle 3/4. So one could completely back up the grid with hydrogen burning turbines at a small fraction of the capital cost of powering that grid with nukes. Using nuclear to handle rare disruptions is ridiculous, as the cost per kWh would be astronomical, far higher than the cost per kWh from nukes used for baseload.

slashdev 3y ago

Batteries are not for riding out winter, they're for evening out the daily load. You have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation, as well as make long-distance interconnects. Pumped hydro is also extremely interesting for obvious reasons. Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation. Can we solve that without sacrificing safety? Can we even solve it at all? Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation At which point it ceases to be as cheap.
- loandbehold 3y ago
  Not necessarily.
- viraptor 3y ago
  That sounds like a kneejerk response. Got a source for it? It's not like we didn't know about it all the time, yet the large solar systems were built.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > sounds like a kneejerk response. Got a source for it If you have 120% solar capacity in the summer so you have 100% in the winter, that’s obviously going to be more expensive than just building 100%. This is basic utilisation. Also, diminishing returns: the most-productive spots for solar will be built out first.
    - viraptor 3y ago
      That wasn't your claim. You said it stops being cheap - does it? Compared to alternatives?
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > You said it stops being cheap - does it? Compared to alternatives? “As cheap.” Solar will keep getting cheaper until saturation, then overshoot while it gets a bit more expensive. The equilibrium will shift from time to time as technology advances. But there are fundamental limits, and power demand is only going to grow.
    - wolfram74 3y ago
      As the seasonality of power becomes more and more pronounced, it'll make more and more sense to make seasonal loads. Cheap to build but electrically expensive to operate manufacturing processes that take advantage of borderline free power in the summer months that don't have much capex to amortize in the winters.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Or, it makes sense for industry to move to those darker skinned places without seasonality. PV, the anti-colonial energy source. Poetic justice for Europe, don't you think?
  - Wytwwww 3y ago
    Depends on the latitude and weather patterns. For instance you might need 25 (or much more) higher capacity to generate as much power in December as you would in May in most of Northern Europe (that should be pretty obvious though).
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  Unlike nuclear, which is too expensive when you don't overbuild it, and becomes simply stupidly expensive if you contemplate overbuilding it. Overbuilding nuclear is so preposterous that nuclear fans just pretend you magically don't need to, to prevent their fragile dream from being crushed by reality, and let them continue to steer at renewables and all the problems they face as every nation on earth builds then out at massive scale.
  - kragen 3y ago
    you don't need to overbuild nuclear; nuclear plants commonly have a capacity factor of over 80%
    - ViewTrick1002 3y ago
      The grid has wild differences between day and night. Who cares if you can run at 100% when no one wants the power because everyone is asleep?
      - kragen 3y ago
        negative lmps have long been a result of baseload plants exceeding demand at night; widespread deployment of pv has turned that on its head, because now it's midafternoon when prices go negative, but also in a sense exacerbated it. consequently, expect rapid development of grid-scale storage: pumped hydro and massive li-ion, of course, but also maybe centrifugal trompe isothermal air compression, sodium-ion batteries, or high-temperature liquid-metal batteries
    - Kon5ole 3y ago
      Finland recently lost 14% of it's national electricity generation for days due to a turbine failure. This is of course a huge problem. Having 14% of the nations electricity transported from just 1 location is another problem all by itself even when it works. Last year half the reactors in France were offline at one point: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-france.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr... I don't think nuclear should be overprovisioned, but it illustrates that nuclear also needs a plan B just like wind and solar does. IMO Plan B should be synthesized gas that has been generated when electricity was cheap due to overproduction or directly from cheap sources such as Solar.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  That’s not automatically true. As the price continues to drop even over building renewables can be cheaper than other options. Nuclear is very expensive so there’s a lot of wiggle room.
  - Wytwwww 3y ago
    I find it hard to imagine solar could ever be cheaper than nuclear during winter in Northern Europe.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      No need to imagine, because it is. At least if you believe electricity market prices reflect reality.
      - Wytwwww 3y ago
        What is? > At least if you believe electricity market prices reflect reality I don't see how is this relevant if we're talking specifically about solar. Above ~53° solar production during December is ~20 (to way more than that farther you go north) lower than in December.
        hef19898 3y ago
        And still, PV generated electricity during these periods is priced cheaper on the spot market than nuclear. Funny, right? It is almost as if the parties investing billions and making billions selling and buying electricity figured out the financials behind all that.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        Yeah, PV and gas are the cheapest new power to build today.
        Wytwwww 3y ago
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Yeah, of course. If you take the first answer to the GP, that is a bit outdated, it's as expensive as 1/4 of the nuclear costs.
jdewerd 3y ago
When nuclear takes off in China but not the USA, we'll figure it out. But not until then.
- MyFirstSass 3y ago
  Why hasn't nuclear taken off in China? I keep hearing that it's not cost effective anymore, to slow etc. but if it's actually mostly regulation that's hindering the built out (regardless of the risks) shouldn't China with their impressive portfolio of warpspeed megaprojects have been an ideal example of scaling the next generation of this tech?
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    China is building nuclear reactors faster than any other country. At the moment, they have 21 new reactors under construction.
    - MyFirstSass 3y ago
      Interesting. 21 doesn't seem like much compared to the 300+ there's been in US, 330 in China, 170 in EU etc, until you see theres zero retired units in china compared to large amounts in the rest of the world. Still though. 21 seems to indicate they are actually betting on something else. https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-nuclear-power-tracker/tracker-map/ https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-nuclear-powe...
      - resolutebat 3y ago
        China is betting on all the things at once: they're the world leader in building out new solar, new wind, new nuclear and new coal power simultaneously.
      - tzs 3y ago
        They also say they are going to approve 6 to 8 more per year indefinitely.
    - 3y ago
hackyhacky 3y ago
If there's any area to not skimp on safety regulations, I'd say nuclear is it. I think the alleged blight of "overregulation" has become a conservative mantra but without much basis in fact. Or maybe I'm wrong. You seem to know a lot about nuclear regulation. Can you tell us a specific, unnecessary burdensome regulatory rule that you feel is holding back progress?
- slashdev 3y ago
  What world do you live in that you don't see the burdensome regulation everywhere. Don't know anyone with a business? Never investigated how zoning works? Never filed taxes? Never used the healthcare system?
  - hackyhacky 3y ago
    I've used all of these services and they all have problems. I can't say that those problems are due to "excessive regulation." In the case of healthcare, for example, most of the problems come from insurance companies who allegedly operate in the free market. I am strongly in favor of business, zoning, and environmental regulations because they provide valuable function. Moreover, none of that is relevant to nuclear regulation. I asked for a specific example of an overly burdensome and unnecessary regulatory rule.
    - zizee 3y ago
      Using services is not the same as operating those services. I think if you could see the true costs that all the regulations bring, you might change your mind. And if you're happy to pay these costs you're most likely wealthy enough to be able to bear them. Healthcare companies operate in an environment that is very much not a free market. For these companies, the regulatory burden is welcome as it is a high barrier to entry for new players. Read up on regulatory capture. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
      - hackyhacky 3y ago
konschubert 3y ago
You can also use hydrogen (or Ammonia) for long term storage. It's one of the few use cases where hydrogen makes sense.
- kragen 3y ago
  for long-term storage it might be better to convert the hydrogen to something more easily storable, such as propane or octane, or to make a different electrolytic product such as aluminum
  - jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
    Ammonia is another interesting storage fuel option.
    - kragen 3y ago
      yes, that's mentioned in the comment i was replying to, but while it's appealing in some ways, i feel that it is not as appealing as the options i mentioned for reasons of accident hazard, noxious combustion products, lower density, and risk of corrosion
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        There's also a possibility of using methanol, which is not as dangerous as ammonia. This would involve some complexity: 1) Have CO2 storage. 2) Make hydrogen by electrolysis. Store the oxygen. 3) The hydrogen is reacted with CO2 to make methanol, which is easily stored. 4) When power is needed, use the oxygen from 2) and the methanol from 3) in an Allam-cycle turbine. The CO2 of combustion is easily separated and put back into CO2 storage. One ends up needed long term storage of CO2, oxygen, and methanol, but this could be easier than storing hydrogen, especially if the CO2 and oxygen can be liquefied and there are no salt formations to make H2 storage easy.
Wytwwww 3y ago
> You have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation Not at all feasible with solar throughout much of Europe. Of course wind is a much better option there.
belorn 3y ago
Pumped hydro used to exist here in Sweden during the 1970s. They were phased out because they are not cost competitive. They built nuclear power plants instead because those were cost competitive at that time. It would be funny if the cost has switched between pumped hydro and nuclear, but I suspect they haven't. What really pushed out both were cheap natural gas and oil. Even now, new gas powered plants are being planned to be built within the next 5 years. I don't see a solutions to this without new regulation putting a clamp on the fossil fuels. The one hope I have for pumped hydro is that our current hydropower fleet are outdated and far outside of minimum environmental standards. Combined they have managed to drive species to the brink of extinction, basically being large meat grinders for migrating fish. The solution of catching the offspring and fly them to Sweden to be implanted back into lakes is a terrible solution that have little to no scientific support. With the required investments into modernization, reverse hydro might not be too expensive to include, assuming again that the economics of the concept start to make sense.
- kragen 3y ago
  grid-scale storage becomes more profitable when your primary energy production is more intermittent. current pv is something like 10× cheaper than nuclear before you factor in intermittency, and that opens up a huge market for grid-scale storage that didn't exist in the 01970s. pumped hydro was replaced by dispatchable gas, but gas is more expensive now, and batteries are cheaper
  - jakeinspace 3y ago
    If, as seems likely, solar and wind come to totally dominate all new energy construction, then it seems like state/provincial and federal governments will need to either legally mandate / highly incentivize the construction of new baseload by utilities, or build those plants themselves. We have the TVA but as much as I hope, I don't think we're getting a bunch more federally owned and operated power companies in the US.
    - kragen 3y ago
      the us may not be very relevant here what are you going to construct the new baseload from? nothing comes close to the cheapness of pv and wind. grid-scale energy storage, in the form of batteries, is already too cheap for coal and nuclear to compete with it on that basis, and it's just going to get cheaper as we climb down the learning curve
cplusplusfellow 3y ago
> Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. At the risk of stating the obvious, this notion entirely depends upon your definition of costs, and the definition of what is competitive. It's vastly more costly to society to have unreliable power (e.g., blackouts, brownouts, or weeks on end of lowered usage restrictions) than it is to have slightly more expensive electricity. There is no rich country in the world with expensive energy.
- avidphantasm 3y ago
  Yes, I always want to scream “what about the quality of the power?” when people make claims about cost-competitiveness. Electricity is a commodity on the surface, but, as with many technologies, depending on the use case, differences in the qualities of the underlying source matter a great deal. Reduction of all costs to currency can be a damaging abstraction to impose on systems that inherently involve trade-offs between qualities.
alex_young 3y ago
One benefit of building excess capacity of renewables - free electricity to power your automobile. If we actually priced excess energy smartly people would charge their cars in the daytime and spend ~ 0 to drive most of the year.
- saltminer 3y ago
  Electricity demand isn't that simple, it's not like Sheetz dropping the price of gas to $1.776/gallon on the 4th of July and having to bag the pumps within the hour [0]. Electricity is quite interesting as a market because it's truly the logical endpoint of just-in-time manufacturing: the time between generation and consumption is measured not on the order of months, weeks, days, or even hours, but in milliseconds. It travels at 300,000 km per second/186,000 miles per second [1], which is incomprehensibly fast (it's fast enough to cross the widest span of the continental US, 4,799 km/2,892 miles, over 60 times in a single second). As such, in order to maintain 50/60 Hz at nominal voltages and amperages (and that frequency is very important - in a 60 Hz system, 59.4 Hz is "we have 5 minutes before the entire grid blows up and plunges us into a 3+ month blackout" level bad [2]), utility companies aren't in the power generation business so much as they are in the predictions business. They have to take everything into account, from the weather to consumer purchasing habits, to determine exactly how much power needs to be generated at any given moment or the whole grid will collapse. That wide area synchronous grids like the UCTE (continental Europe) and Eastern Interconnection (eastern US) are able to operate is a testament to human ingenuity, as these really are quite fragile machines. All this to say that you can't just "make power free when there's excess and people will magically use it up". Even if we can reliably predict excesses, people won't really be able to take advantage of it unless their schedule lends itself to it (e.g. being able to plug their car into a charger at work that only turns on when there's an excess), but even then, when done on a large scale, this only makes the predictions even harder for utility companies to plan around (think: thundering herd problem but on a national scale). At a macro level, it just doesn't work. [0]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/business/sheetz-july-fourth-gas/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/business/sheetz-july-fourth-g... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity?useskin=vector#Electromagnetic_waves_in_circuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity?useskin=v... [2]: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-environment/2021/02/24/392290/texas-power-grid-was-4-minutes-and-37-seconds-away-from-collapsing-heres-how-it-happened/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...
wolverine876 3y ago
> an artificial problem caused by regulation Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water. > Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight. It's often repeated, including by a certain political grouping, but never established IME. Unregulated markets, such as cryptocurrency, privacy, etc. seem to cause most of the problems. The FAA, etc. do well IME. They fail when undermined by a political class that benefits from fraud (the same trying to prevent the IRS from collecting legitimate taxes.)
- theLiminator 3y ago
  > Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water. That's just plain wrong. I don't know whether regulations in this case are bloat or not, but you're basically saying that regulations are never bloated, which is abjectly false.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Perhaps respond to the actual claim and not a strawperson.
- aftbit 3y ago
  >Unregulated markets, such as cryptocurrency, privacy, etc. seem to cause most of the problems. Can you expand on this a bit? This feels a bit like a cause and effect confusion to me. Perhaps the unregulated markets are just where the "problematic" behavior moves, as it has been excluded from the regulated markets? Also, what does privacy have to do with this?
cm2187 3y ago
You can't solve the variability of wind by overbuilding. Output can go down to <5% for more than a week several times a year. So the only way is storage. On a massive scale. Or having another source that makes sense to modulate. LNG is one (though carbon based).
Symmetry 3y ago
It's not that the agencies regulating nuclear are bloated but that they're given a mandate that nuclear must be as safe as possible rather than being held to some finite standard of safety.
CivBase 3y ago
> Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation. Is it regulation or a lack of scale? The US has launched 2 reactors in the last 2.5 decades. I'm guessing there was a lot of stuff - materials, processes, documentation, etc - developed from scratch specifically for those plants. It might get cheaper if we can start re-using that stuff.

hedora 3y ago

Even in the SF Bay Area, there were widespread power outages coupled with extended storms/clouds last spring. Lots of solar + battery systems got propane generator upgrades this year.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

The people saying that might live far from the equator, where wind power helps balance solar in winter but people in general live fairly near it and energy intensive industry will migrate in that direction to follow the cheap power.

chockablock 3y ago

You don't need to 'ride out winter'; there's a sweet spot around 100-hour storage where you can unlock a huge amount of grid resiliency and decarbonization (you can keep as many dispatchable gas plants sitting nearly-always-idle to address risk of any freak long-tail events.) https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/ https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/

deleted 3y ago
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pfdietz 3y ago
And then eventually switch over those gas plants to burn hydrogen. If they are nearly-always-idle, the amount of hydrogen needed isn't much.

malfist 3y ago

Power is easily transmitted and losses are minimal. There's no reason to think you need local solar power generation in a cloudy region.

sanxiyn 3y ago
Grid connection is a real problem. Solar power in US waits years for grid connection. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/06/outdated-us-energy-grid-tons-of-clean-energy-stuck-waiting-in-line.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/06/outdated-us-energy-grid-tons...
mpweiher 3y ago
Running long-distance power lines is one of the few things that is more difficult and takes longer to build (currently) than a nuclear power station.

conjecTech 3y ago

Nuclear is already about 20% of US electricity generation. I don't think many people are suggesting taking that offline. When people are talking about being all solar, wind and storage they are talking about _new_ generation. So the eventual solution would still be a mix of all of those.

hutzlibu 3y ago

"the people saying solar and battery only future" I think I never, ever heard or read anyone saying this, and I think I follow/participate in the debates, before it was cool and everywhere. Renewable people rather sound like this: "Employing a variety of power generation methods will give you the most stable power grid." Where of course quite many "green" people don't want nuclear at all in the mix. Rather more of long distance energy transport (HVDC). And otherwise any option that works and does not pollute, or pollutes less. (And personally I am not antinuclear as long as the alternative are fossil fuels, so they should be used as a transition technology and long term rather reserved for other application, like powering things in space and remote important sites)

LargeTomato 3y ago
I'd love to know what you're reading and who you're talking to. I regularly and often speak to and read comments by people who insist on a solar+battery only future. I'd like to be a part of the communities you're describing.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Can you show me one example of someone who insist on that? And I mean literal and globally, not people who say this in the context of being in a sunny desert.

hackerlight 3y ago

> Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks. This isn't a big problem. Wind is negatively correlated with solar, and electricity can be sent across long distances (intra- or inter-country) with minimal loss, and overbuilding eliminates a lot of the variability issues. Variability across geographies and across modes cancels out. Nuclear is pretty good, but solar and wind is simply better. Way cheaper and quicker to implement, less resistance from NIMBYs who have an irrational fear of leaks, less valid concerns of enabling nuclear weapons proliferation, less technical know-how requirement. It's the most brain-dead obvious calculus if you know the actual facts, costs and trade-offs. And time is of the essence. Eliminating 80-90% of emissions in 4 years (with only solar and wind and without batteries, yes this is possible whilst being cheaper than nuclear) means less emissions than eliminating 100% of emissions in 20 years with nuclear.

WillPostForFood 3y ago
Wind is negatively correlated with solar Yes, but not strongly. It is definitely a problem, as seen in Texas on cold mornings where solar isn't getting much light, winds are still, and people need heat.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  Right, and that's why it's infeasible to get 100% from renewables without storage, but we're not going for 100%, we're going for 80-90%. The objective is to address climate change, and to do that we need to minimize the area under the curve of emissions from now onwards. Renewables in my view is more effective at achieving this objective (with the added bonus of being cheaper).
  - _ph_ 3y ago
    While in the long term we do have to achieve net 100%, the mid-term goal which is absolutely achievable with the current state of the marked is indeed 90%. While working towards that we can start to see which technology emerges to cover the last 10%. And probably there isn't a miracle technology needed, just plain improvements in the storage sector and a good mix of several approaches.

jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago

> Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks. Or we've researched it and understand the basics of solar technology. In sunny California solar has a capacity factor of around 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter. In terms of capital costs solar is around $1 per watt while nuclear is around $10. Combined cycle gas plants are roughly the same as solar. It takes a bit more than a year to build a solar farm, while a new nuclear plant you're looking at a decade. ROI on solar is on the scale of 1 to 2 years. Nuclear will be shockingly lucky to have even started construction in that period. When we look at the levelized, unsubsidized cost of energy (https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...) we get a range of $24 to $96 per MWh for utility scale solar, while nuclear is $141 to $221 and combined cycle gas plants at $39 to $101. And the trend lines strongly favor solar + storage. Is it any wonder investors are reluctant to fund nuclear projects? For the same amount financed I can build 10x the capacity, have half the marginal cost of production, and see nothing but upside in 2 years. Places like Singapore that lack land suitable for utility scale solar will need to look to other solutions including nuclear. For the rest of us the decision is not difficult. Seems to me you are unaware of basic facts of the matter while you make naive criticisms of solar investment due to a personal affinity for nuclear technology.

wolverine876 3y ago
I think you might want to fix that link address. :)
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
  Thanks. The way pdf downloads changed in recent versions of Chrome keeps tripping me up. So annoying.
Gare 3y ago
You both raise good points. Yes solar is getting cheaper but economical and environmentally friendly long term storage (order of several days or even a month worth of energy for a hundred million people) is far from a solved problem. > In sunny California solar has as capacity factor of around 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter. In Croatia yearly capacity factor is around 15%, but the problem is it varies wildly throughout the year. In summer we get up to 300 hours of sunlight per month, in winter less than 50. So yes, on paper the capacity might be enough, but one needs to have the ability to store the massive amount of energy inter-seasonally.

cm2187 3y ago

It doesn't make any sense to use nuclear as a standby source of power. Nuclear costs pretty much the same whether you use it or not, so it doesn't make any sense to build it and leave it off. So if you build a nuclear power plant, save yourself the cost of whatever else you wanted to use as a primary source.

credit_guy 3y ago

Nuclear power plants are currently too expensive to not be used at 100% all the time (except when you need to perform maintenance). Some nuclear power plants are designed to be able to load follow, but in practice they don't do it. Batteries will never be cheap enough to allow for seasonal storage. They are good for day-to-night storage. For seasonal fluctuations, the best you can do is natural gas. If we convert all our energy to solar, wind, hydro, and natural gas for peaker plants, we'd be comfortably net negative. In fact, right now in the US the CO2 absorption by forests is equal to all the emissions produced by the natural gas power plants (which are mostly used full time, not in peaker mode). Of course, the US produces a lot of emissions from transportation and industry. But they can be electrified in time, and the coal power plants can be eliminated, and the natural gas plants kept as peaker plants only. The path to net zero, or net negative, does not strictly speaking need nuclear energy. I personally am a huge fan of nuclear, but I acknowledge that it is not really needed to fight climate change.

kragen 3y ago
i agree with almost everything in your cogent and well-informed comment, with only two exceptions: - forests can only increase in biomass up to some relatively low limit; you may be correct that in the usa they currently absorb more than gas plants emit, but that is not a sustainable situation, unless you start cutting them down and sequestering the carbon - you can get pretty far covering seasonal fluctuations with simple overprovisioning also i think you're not taking into account the likely advent of mass production of synfuel
- credit_guy 3y ago
  > unless you start cutting them down and sequestering the carbon We actually do that all the time: we cut down trees and make houses. Here's a number from the US Forest Service [1] that as of 2009 the US was using 187 million m3 of solid wood products. > you can get pretty far covering seasonal fluctuations with simple overprovisioning Fully agree. > likely advent of mass production of synfuel I'm extremely pessimistic about that. The best hope is for hydrogen, but even that looks all but hopeless to me, if you don't count "blue hydrogen". [1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/33882 https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/33882

beders 3y ago

There are whole countries who have built stable grids with wind, water, solar and battery alone. Financially building nuclear power plants make absolutely no sense.

lkbm 3y ago

I think solar+battery usually also involves overbuilding the solar capacity by a lot and running some HVDC lines. A mix with nuclear and wind seems smart to me, but I wouldn't be shocked if some cloudy places successfully manage solar+batteries in combination with HVDC and/or having some easily-curtailed industries in the area.

sunshinesnacks 3y ago

The good news is that it’s very possible to “run the math,” and people run power generation capacity expansion models and production cost/dispatch models to look at these things. And then 15-25 years of solar irradiance and other weather data, at hourly resolution or shorter intervals, is available for most of the world. Maybe the general public extrapolates from their own experience, but grid planners and researchers do much more than that.

samstave 3y ago

There should be a "roof-tile" mandated on every single structure built which captures weather information for every single structure. And that structure should be able to be read by any device which states in a standard format the sunlight avg per N, rainfall avg per N and temp. (air quality adds cost, but should also be there (staring at Purple's horrific pricing) Edit to add: "Whether Information" Big Brother: "was @dang there?" Smart-Tile (as played by Marissa Tomai: "Look, my coverage is limited. I can tell you weather... weather... but I can't whether this or whether that. you'll have ta pay"

_ph_ 3y ago

Solar+battery isn't sufficient in all places indeed. But those places are usually great for wind. With solar+battery+wind+other renewables+grid, the solution becomes rather easy. Toss in some gas until the battery capacities have grown enough. But nuclear is the worst thing to put into this mix due to its nature.

tills13 3y ago

Yeah and solar and wind are perfect for baseline load but you need something that can react to demand changes like how NG or Coal production can by simply burning more / less fuel. There are clever ways to store / "shed" excess capacity for the inverse but it'd still be better to be able to adjust capacity in real time.

aftbit 3y ago

Dunkelflaute (dark and calm) is indeed a real problem for a renewable-only future. If you want to maintain current reliability statistics with solar/wind only, you need to overbuild both storage and generation to such an extreme level that it might not be cost competitive in the end. You'll end up building your entire grid for the 100 year dunkelflaute event even though 90%+ of it will be idle most of the time, or you'll keep a bunch of gas plants idling to pick up the load in that case. Really we need to crack better storage. Improvements in hydrogen electrolysis or direct air to fuel could do it, but there are non-trivial technology hurdles there as well. I'm holding out hope for deep sea geothermal ala Peter Watts' Behemoth. Perhaps we can exploit the temperature difference between geothermal vents and the surrounding water to get stable and green base-load power.

pfdietz 3y ago
The "extreme storage" hand-wringing comes from the implicit assumption that batteries are used to cover the Dunkelflauten. This is bad engineering.

pfdietz 3y ago

Dunkelflauten can be dealt with by burning an e-fuel like hydrogen. A simple combustion turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the cost per W of Vogtle 3/4. So one could completely back up the grid with hydrogen burning turbines at a small fraction of the capital cost of powering that grid with nukes. Using nuclear to handle rare disruptions is ridiculous, as the cost per kWh would be astronomical, far higher than the cost per kWh from nukes used for baseload.