8 ms·

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

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.

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.