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Lots of disfavorable comparisons being made here between nuke and solar. Let's do some math. There is a total of around 10 GWh of deployed grid storage in the

by mlsu 3y ago

Lots of disfavorable comparisons being made here between nuke and solar. Let's do some math. There is a total of around 10 GWh of deployed grid storage in the US. The US consumed about 4,000 TWh of electricity in 2022. (10GWh/ 4000TWh) * (31,536,000 seconds) == 78 seconds. So, net, there is about a minute and a half of energy storage across the entire grid. (Most, about 90%, is pumped hydro, not battery). Of course, not really. Most regional areas have roughly 10-30 seconds until the gas peakers absolutely unequivocally must be turned on before brownouts occur. Hours? Minutes? We are not talking about hours and minutes. We are talking about seconds. Look at the price of a powerwall. That's for the energy needs of a residential home. What happens to your AWS bill if us-east-1 was to buy a powerwall? Let alone steel, chemical, paper, mineral processing industries. What would happen to our economy if capacity for every one of those was cut by 1/3rd (or more depending on local climate)? Never mind your power bill. This is the problem that I have with these solar capacity discussions. The number on the tin misrepresents things in just such a fundamental way that these cost discussions don't make sense. The reason, of course, is because fossil fuels are the big batteries we turn on at night when solar is not working. If you actually care about making the grid green, you must solve this problem. Either with transmission, with battery manufacturing (the cost and environment friendliness curve on that is a bit less rosy compared to solar power...), or with nuclear. There is simply no other way.

flgb 3y ago
Every power generation technology needs ‘backup capacity’ and energy storage. If your transmission line to your nuclear power station trips, you need reserve capacity elsewhere to serve the load. Gas and coal generation all need storage to run reliably. If you are going to be an armchair power system designer and you want to ‘gross up’ the cost of capacity and storage into the cost of renewable generation, then be consistent.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  [dead]
- mlsu 3y ago
  Solar is unique in that it reliably "trips" for extensive periods every day and seasonally. It is also unique in that it does not take fuel that can be stored. Solar cannot act as the backup to a nuclear power plant. Whereas a nuclear power plant can (and does) act as the backup to solar. I'm grossing up to make the point that after about 60-70% solar penetration, the circle cannot be squared without massive investment either in batteries or in distribution, a fact which seems to never quite fully make it into cost comparisons between nuclear and solar such as those being made in this thread.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > Whereas a nuclear power plant can (and does) act as the backup But AFAIK you can't just turn nuclear plants on and off again based on demand like you can do with gas. So it's not really a backup.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    The usual dishonest argument nuclear advocates make is to assume batteries are used to get renewables to 100% of the grid. You are doing it there. But batteries are not the ideal storage technology for all storage use cases. It turns out that e-fuels like hydrogen are much, MUCH better for some cases, like seasonal leveling, even though the round trip efficiency isn't great. It will likely be the case that a 100% RE grid ends up being considerably cheaper than a nuclear powered grid. Nuclear backing up solar is a completely stupid idea, btw. The economics don't work at all.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
The nice thing about solar is it's very cheap, and as a grid provider you can just charge more for energy at night to disincentivize use when the sun is not shining. We do not actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night and solar can cover a great deal of energy needs for very cheap. You can also deploy solar even on a large scale in very short time scales. Want to build nuclear? You start applying for permits today and by the time the earth has surpassed 2.0 degrees C of warming maybe you start generating electricity. Even though I don't like natural gas for energy generation, let's say an area is currently being served by a natural gas plant. But now everyone wants electric cars and more power is needed. You can deploy a whole boatload of solar and use rate structuring to incentivize consumption in the day time (you charge your car at work). Now the gas plant spins up at night but it is only running half the time, and all day long people are using emission-free solar energy. And they aren't burning gasoline for their cars anymore. Plus if there is a power outage they can use their car as a home battery backup. So yeah, I don't think it really makes any sense to say "we have 78 seconds of battery backup so solar is pointless". You can make a HUGE dent in people's energy-related carbon emissions if you install solar tomorrow. Or you can pay much more and install nuclear in 15 years. Maybe we should start building out nuclear now but it would absolutely not be to the exclusion of solar! Even if we built 1000 new nuclear power plants in the US we would still need lots of solar and wind energy.
- internetter 3y ago
  I don't think they were saying solar is useless, but you underestimate how difficult it is to change peak load. Well a good start is actually smart systems within homes, for instance to avoid heating said home when nobody is present, or timing loads like car charging and dishwashers to be on that beat. That's great, but it's been proven these smart systems are very hard to roll out, no matter how much you try to say it's cheaper in the end. Well you can ignore all this and roll out significant pricing changes to coincide with peek production anyway, and quickly be met with two problems. The first are the people who say "fossils were better my energy was cheaper", good luck there. And you will also hear a large number of people say "well this is just a further tax against the poor who can't afford these systems, nice work, joe.", and honestly, they'd be right. A big thing we need if we want this energy transition to go well is a more local view, but also we could have solutions that don't depend on daylight to ease that transition. Anyway, don't know where I was going with this but those are my two cents.
c0llision 3y ago
I think the idea that renewables have to be paired with large amounts of energy storage is not correct. In Ireland dispatchable power is used when wind is low. Natural gas, hydroelectric, HVDC, pumped storage. Lithium ion batteries are generally only used briefly while the gas power plant gets up to temperature because of their high cost. There are also HVDC interconnectors that allow excess wind to be exported to the UK and electricity to be imported from there when it is cheaper. They expect to be able to achieve 70-80% renewables using this system by 2030, and are currently at around 45%. From 2030 onwards the focus will be on decarbonising the remaining ~20% of electricity generation that is gas. How that will be done will depend mostly on how the technology matures in the meantime, but it will likely be replacing natural gas with hydrogen and biogas. Another option could be carbon capture. Or batteries if there is some technological breakthrough and the price of stored energy drops way below it's current 200euro/MWh price. I also think that electricity grids are very complex and powering any large grid with 100% of any one source is impossible. As each energy source has different pros and cons, you'll generally always have a mix of different sources.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Solar and Wind vary on both a diurnal and seasonal basis. It is one thing for the grid to have enough storage. I was looking at this paper https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/ https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... where solar is quoted at $1300/kwh and adding a battery that can store a little more than an hour of output brings that to around $1800/kwh. I see people quoting that one like it is gospel but that doesn’t seem to be enough storage. If you assume the system needs 12 hours of storage to get through the night you need 10 of those batteries and the cost is getting into the $3500/kwh range. They quote the AP-1000 and NuScale around $6000. Solar looks cheaper now and maybe it is in the tropics but in the Northeast you are going to get a lot less power in the winter than summer so to keep the lights on all year you might need two of those solar installations (though I think the battery stays the same) and now you are getting around $5000/kwh so that gap with nuclear is getting smaller. That estimate may be a bit pessimistic, but renewable advocates right now sound like the people who were saying nuclear would be “too cheap to meter.” Now if you have excess capacity in the summer you could in principle use it for something but that is not trivial. If you use something half he year you basically double the capital cost. Do you hire workers to do nothing in the winter or do you lay them off? “Free” excess solar energy might be “free as in puppy” not “free as in beer.”
grecy 3y ago
Let's do some more math From the article, this new reactor is "estimated to cost more than $30 Billion." (Let's call it 30) & It generates 1,114 Mega Watts. This article [1] says solar panels cost between $0.90 and $1.50 per watt. Let's go with $1/watt to keep the math easy, though I bet it's much cheaper by now, and especially at the scale we'll be buying them at. So for $30 billion dollars, we can have 30 billion watts of solar, which is 30,000 mega watts, or 27x the amount of power of the new nuke. Obviously solar doesn't produce at night and it's seasonal. So let's make it more useful. I saw elsewhere in this thread to get an actual output number from solar you have to divide by 6 to account for night and seasonality. So that means to equal the 1,114 mega watts from the nuke, we need 6,6684 mega watts of solar. call it 7mW to keep the math easy. So we use 7 billion dollars buying 7mW of solar. We have a tidy $23 billion dollars left over to spend on storage. This site [2] says grid scale storage costs something like $300/kWh. (I bet it's cheaper now, and cheaper at massive scale, but we'll go with that.) So with our $23 billion left over dollars we go and buy 76.6 million kWh of storage (which is 76,666 MWh). So even when there is no sun coming in, our storage can maintain the 1,114 mega watts of output for something around 68 hours. That sounds like overkill, so it probably makes sense to spend more of the money on solar and less on storage, but you get the idea. Also note for the same $30 billion dollars our solar + storage setup now has no running costs, no refuelling costs, no downtime due to refuelling and maintenance and no radioactive waste disposal problem. Also note the $30 billion nuke plant is a single point of failure, and needs big lossy power transmission lines coming in/out to go useful places. I would be interested to see the numbers on how much of that 1,114 mW of nuke power winds up lost in transmission. The solar setup can be distributed all over, and can generate and store the power right where it's needed - on factories, houses, schools and where ever else needs power. Transmission loss of close to zero. Nukes are awesome, but they're not even in the realm of making sense financially. Year after year the price of solar and storage will go down again, then again, then again. This is not a fair fight. [1] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-panels/ https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-... [2] https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/battery-storage-costs-the-economics/ https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/battery-storage-cost... (Please point out any holes / problems in my math) EDIT: as pointed out below the cost for grid scale storage is more like $500/kWh. So for our $23 billion we can buy 46 million kWh of storage (46,000 mWh). So we can equal the nukes 1,114 mW output for about 41 hours. Still plenty
chris222 3y ago
Curious what you think of this recently completed project: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/28/scatecs-540mw-pv-1140mwh-battery-storage-project-in-south-africa-begins-supplying-electricity-to-national-grid/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/28/scatecs-540mw-pv-1140mw... With enough storage and onsite renewables you can mimic the stable baseload that Nuclear provides.
- defrost 3y ago
  There are better examples, but given you asked; With an installed solar capacity of 540 MW of PV, and a battery storage capacity of 225MW/1,140MWh (BYD ESS), the plant is designed to deliver 150 MW of dispatchable power from 5 am to 9.30 pm year-round to the national grid under a 20-year power purchase agreement with South Africa’s national power utility company, Eskom. It's in MegaWatts not GigaWatts and delivers no power for seven and half hours every 24 hours. That is not mimicing the stable baseload that nuclear (or a hydro electric pupmped storage dam) provides. I'm not anti solar but a project such as your example has a long way to go to met the demands of a European country. It's worth looking into how much of a dent it makes in South African energy demands.
  - chris222 3y ago
    Presumably all they would need to do here is change the ratios of solar and battery to achieve 24x7 dispatch. I presume the current arrangement is just more cost effective currently based on their needs but it does demonstrate there already are baseload style power purchase agreements occuring with combined renewables+storage facilities. We’re likely to see another halving of battery costs within the next decade which will shift the economics further.
    - JoachimS 3y ago
      Still MW not GW.
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    10 of these solar power stations cost less than this new nuclear reactor. It certainly looks like a worthy competitor. It only took 18 months to build!
ETH_start 3y ago
You hit the nail on the head. "True cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh [pdf]" source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.americanexperiment.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-High-Cost-of-100-Percent-Carbon-Free-Electricity-by-2040-in-Minnesota.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...
- pfdietz 3y ago
  This is utter bullshit. It probably used obsolete cost numbers and assumed batteries are the only storage mode used.
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    On what basis do you assume it's bullshit? This is a very emotional/irrational reaction to a study.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      It's in gross disagreement with figures and modeling I've seen elsewhere.
      - ETH_start 3y ago
        Can I see the other figures/models?
mgoetzke 3y ago
Nuclear is also quite a lot more expensive than people sometimes calculate here. It cost about 35 billion USD (total cost during build, no maintenance, no fuel) At current potential earning rates of eg. max 10ct/kWh (Georgia) and 1100 MW peak continuous operation it will take 36 years to make the money back. That is without just investing that 35 billion into something else or even adding maintenance and fuel cost which makes the entire project never return a profit. Now in general I like machines, and nuclear reactors are fantastic engineering feats. I dislike the potential for a meltdown of course no matter how 'unlikely'
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  But you will make the money back. This isn’t private industry. This is government. Many programs are ran at a loss, this however nets a sure profit in some time. Bonds can always be sold to take care of upfront costs.
  - sunshinesnacks 3y ago
    There are federal loans involved, but this is not a government project. Georgia Power is part of an investor owned utility.
- qwebfdzsh 3y ago
  > I dislike the potential for a meltdown of course no matter how 'unlikely' Why? A meltdown is really not a big deal at all. If we're fine with burning coal we should be perfectly with a having a meltdown or two every few years (even if we 100% ignored climate change the degree of damage caused by either of those is not that different)
  - hylaride 3y ago
    People think "meltdown" means Chernobyl. For those who don't know, a nuclear meltdown means the fuel inside the reactor overheated, (possibly permanently) damaging the reactor. It's essentially happened at some level three times in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#Core_damage_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#Core_damage_e... A meltdown essentially means an expensive remediation. A Chernobyl style event in the west is extremely unlikely due to reactor design as well as the containment buildings. The closest western equivalent, Fukushima, did have a core meltdown. But the spread of radiation was actually caused by the spent fuel no longer able to be cooled, causing the rods to be exposed to air, which generated hydrogen, that then exploded. While a disaster, it wasn't Chernobyl style where the open reactor pumped out radiation continuously until it could be contained.
Retric 3y ago
Multiple solar farms have already been built that store 1/2 their daily output, the economics is already compelling. Nobody is saying we have grid sufficient storage right now, but in terms of energy storage we’re a well over 30 minutes when you look at just existing capacity (25GWh not 10Gwh) + existing EV’s and that number is growing rapidly ~50% year over year. So, manufacturing several hours of electricity storage over the next ~15 years is a completely reasonable goal. Further that’s all that’s required, we have carbon free dams supplying 7% of total electricity demand and days worth of total grid demand in energy storage, just time shifting that covers ~16% of nighttime demand. Similarly Solar can be shifted east/west to cover more of the duck curve.
- spiderfarmer 3y ago
  People who underestimated the solar boom will underestimate the upcoming storage boom as well.
  - OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
    And so, we should keep burning coal until that hopefully later happens!
    - Retric 3y ago
      Coal is already dead. We where at 51% coal in 2001 and hit 19.5% in 2022. Existing power plants keep aging and not being replaced. People will bring storage online when it’s needed, but we don’t need it thus we don’t build it. So keep building Solar/Wind and soon enough storage will come online.
      - tjoff 3y ago
        We have needed solar for decades. And thus solar has been coming for decades. How long after we have an abundance of solar can we wait for good storage? How many decades can we wait for that to ramp up? (we didn't exactly start our solar journey yesterday). I feel storage is of immediate urgency, as of yesterday. We don't have a plan and scaling will be a huge challenge. Using EVs is really tempting though.
niemandhier 3y ago
My car has 100kWh energy storage and spends most of the day plugged in. Discharging 20 kWh around the optimal storage point will not hurt the battery. If we reach 20 000 000 cars like that we have 400 000 000 kWh or 400 GWh at our disposable most of the time . Cars alone could handle about an hour of the national grid, assuming that Energie intensive industries would not shut down temporary whenever the price of electricity is high/ predicted to be high.
nicoburns 3y ago
If you looked at installed solar generation capacity 30 years ago then the situation would have looked hopeless too. But there has since been an exponential increase, driven by increases in both rate installation, and in our capacity to manufacture and install panels. And there is every reason to think that we at the start of similar curve with battery storage right now (batteries are currently manufactured at a relatively small scale, with no major technological barriers to scaling up). Seasonal storage is another matter, but hourly/daily is well within reach.
- firesteelrain 3y ago
  We can’t wait 30 years. So we build for now
mlindner 3y ago
> Look at the price of a powerwall. That's for the energy needs of a residential home. What happens to your AWS bill if us-east-1 was to buy a powerwall? Let alone steel, chemical, paper, mineral processing industries. What would happen to our economy if capacity for every one of those was cut by 1/3rd (or more depending on local climate)? Never mind your power bill. Using powerwall as the price of stationary battery storage is like using the running cost of gas/petrol household generators as the cost of generating power at fossil fueled power plants. Powerwalls is not how industrial battery storage is done anywhere on the planet.
- pydry 3y ago
  If they used snowy 2 instead of a powerwall the comparison would look way too favorable and it would invert the point. Powerwalls are expensive even by battery standards.
  - mlindner 3y ago
    > Powerwalls are expensive even by battery standards. Well of course. Look at the cost of a home generator unit versus how much power it generates. The more apt battery comparison would be something like megapacks, and megapacks bought in bulk.

by mlsu 3y ago

flgb 3y ago

Every power generation technology needs ‘backup capacity’ and energy storage. If your transmission line to your nuclear power station trips, you need reserve capacity elsewhere to serve the load. Gas and coal generation all need storage to run reliably. If you are going to be an armchair power system designer and you want to ‘gross up’ the cost of capacity and storage into the cost of renewable generation, then be consistent.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
mlsu 3y ago
Solar is unique in that it reliably "trips" for extensive periods every day and seasonally. It is also unique in that it does not take fuel that can be stored. Solar cannot act as the backup to a nuclear power plant. Whereas a nuclear power plant can (and does) act as the backup to solar. I'm grossing up to make the point that after about 60-70% solar penetration, the circle cannot be squared without massive investment either in batteries or in distribution, a fact which seems to never quite fully make it into cost comparisons between nuclear and solar such as those being made in this thread.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > Whereas a nuclear power plant can (and does) act as the backup But AFAIK you can't just turn nuclear plants on and off again based on demand like you can do with gas. So it's not really a backup.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The usual dishonest argument nuclear advocates make is to assume batteries are used to get renewables to 100% of the grid. You are doing it there. But batteries are not the ideal storage technology for all storage use cases. It turns out that e-fuels like hydrogen are much, MUCH better for some cases, like seasonal leveling, even though the round trip efficiency isn't great. It will likely be the case that a 100% RE grid ends up being considerably cheaper than a nuclear powered grid. Nuclear backing up solar is a completely stupid idea, btw. The economics don't work at all.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

The nice thing about solar is it's very cheap, and as a grid provider you can just charge more for energy at night to disincentivize use when the sun is not shining. We do not actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night and solar can cover a great deal of energy needs for very cheap. You can also deploy solar even on a large scale in very short time scales. Want to build nuclear? You start applying for permits today and by the time the earth has surpassed 2.0 degrees C of warming maybe you start generating electricity. Even though I don't like natural gas for energy generation, let's say an area is currently being served by a natural gas plant. But now everyone wants electric cars and more power is needed. You can deploy a whole boatload of solar and use rate structuring to incentivize consumption in the day time (you charge your car at work). Now the gas plant spins up at night but it is only running half the time, and all day long people are using emission-free solar energy. And they aren't burning gasoline for their cars anymore. Plus if there is a power outage they can use their car as a home battery backup. So yeah, I don't think it really makes any sense to say "we have 78 seconds of battery backup so solar is pointless". You can make a HUGE dent in people's energy-related carbon emissions if you install solar tomorrow. Or you can pay much more and install nuclear in 15 years. Maybe we should start building out nuclear now but it would absolutely not be to the exclusion of solar! Even if we built 1000 new nuclear power plants in the US we would still need lots of solar and wind energy.

internetter 3y ago
I don't think they were saying solar is useless, but you underestimate how difficult it is to change peak load. Well a good start is actually smart systems within homes, for instance to avoid heating said home when nobody is present, or timing loads like car charging and dishwashers to be on that beat. That's great, but it's been proven these smart systems are very hard to roll out, no matter how much you try to say it's cheaper in the end. Well you can ignore all this and roll out significant pricing changes to coincide with peek production anyway, and quickly be met with two problems. The first are the people who say "fossils were better my energy was cheaper", good luck there. And you will also hear a large number of people say "well this is just a further tax against the poor who can't afford these systems, nice work, joe.", and honestly, they'd be right. A big thing we need if we want this energy transition to go well is a more local view, but also we could have solutions that don't depend on daylight to ease that transition. Anyway, don't know where I was going with this but those are my two cents.

c0llision 3y ago

I think the idea that renewables have to be paired with large amounts of energy storage is not correct. In Ireland dispatchable power is used when wind is low. Natural gas, hydroelectric, HVDC, pumped storage. Lithium ion batteries are generally only used briefly while the gas power plant gets up to temperature because of their high cost. There are also HVDC interconnectors that allow excess wind to be exported to the UK and electricity to be imported from there when it is cheaper. They expect to be able to achieve 70-80% renewables using this system by 2030, and are currently at around 45%. From 2030 onwards the focus will be on decarbonising the remaining ~20% of electricity generation that is gas. How that will be done will depend mostly on how the technology matures in the meantime, but it will likely be replacing natural gas with hydrogen and biogas. Another option could be carbon capture. Or batteries if there is some technological breakthrough and the price of stored energy drops way below it's current 200euro/MWh price. I also think that electricity grids are very complex and powering any large grid with 100% of any one source is impossible. As each energy source has different pros and cons, you'll generally always have a mix of different sources.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Solar and Wind vary on both a diurnal and seasonal basis. It is one thing for the grid to have enough storage. I was looking at this paper https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/ https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... where solar is quoted at $1300/kwh and adding a battery that can store a little more than an hour of output brings that to around $1800/kwh. I see people quoting that one like it is gospel but that doesn’t seem to be enough storage. If you assume the system needs 12 hours of storage to get through the night you need 10 of those batteries and the cost is getting into the $3500/kwh range. They quote the AP-1000 and NuScale around $6000. Solar looks cheaper now and maybe it is in the tropics but in the Northeast you are going to get a lot less power in the winter than summer so to keep the lights on all year you might need two of those solar installations (though I think the battery stays the same) and now you are getting around $5000/kwh so that gap with nuclear is getting smaller. That estimate may be a bit pessimistic, but renewable advocates right now sound like the people who were saying nuclear would be “too cheap to meter.” Now if you have excess capacity in the summer you could in principle use it for something but that is not trivial. If you use something half he year you basically double the capital cost. Do you hire workers to do nothing in the winter or do you lay them off? “Free” excess solar energy might be “free as in puppy” not “free as in beer.”

grecy 3y ago

Let's do some more math From the article, this new reactor is "estimated to cost more than $30 Billion." (Let's call it 30) & It generates 1,114 Mega Watts. This article [1] says solar panels cost between $0.90 and $1.50 per watt. Let's go with $1/watt to keep the math easy, though I bet it's much cheaper by now, and especially at the scale we'll be buying them at. So for $30 billion dollars, we can have 30 billion watts of solar, which is 30,000 mega watts, or 27x the amount of power of the new nuke. Obviously solar doesn't produce at night and it's seasonal. So let's make it more useful. I saw elsewhere in this thread to get an actual output number from solar you have to divide by 6 to account for night and seasonality. So that means to equal the 1,114 mega watts from the nuke, we need 6,6684 mega watts of solar. call it 7mW to keep the math easy. So we use 7 billion dollars buying 7mW of solar. We have a tidy $23 billion dollars left over to spend on storage. This site [2] says grid scale storage costs something like $300/kWh. (I bet it's cheaper now, and cheaper at massive scale, but we'll go with that.) So with our $23 billion left over dollars we go and buy 76.6 million kWh of storage (which is 76,666 MWh). So even when there is no sun coming in, our storage can maintain the 1,114 mega watts of output for something around 68 hours. That sounds like overkill, so it probably makes sense to spend more of the money on solar and less on storage, but you get the idea. Also note for the same $30 billion dollars our solar + storage setup now has no running costs, no refuelling costs, no downtime due to refuelling and maintenance and no radioactive waste disposal problem. Also note the $30 billion nuke plant is a single point of failure, and needs big lossy power transmission lines coming in/out to go useful places. I would be interested to see the numbers on how much of that 1,114 mW of nuke power winds up lost in transmission. The solar setup can be distributed all over, and can generate and store the power right where it's needed - on factories, houses, schools and where ever else needs power. Transmission loss of close to zero. Nukes are awesome, but they're not even in the realm of making sense financially. Year after year the price of solar and storage will go down again, then again, then again. This is not a fair fight. [1] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-panels/ https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-... [2] https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/battery-storage-costs-the-economics/ https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/battery-storage-cost... (Please point out any holes / problems in my math) EDIT: as pointed out below the cost for grid scale storage is more like $500/kWh. So for our $23 billion we can buy 46 million kWh of storage (46,000 mWh). So we can equal the nukes 1,114 mW output for about 41 hours. Still plenty

chris222 3y ago

Curious what you think of this recently completed project: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/28/scatecs-540mw-pv-1140mwh-battery-storage-project-in-south-africa-begins-supplying-electricity-to-national-grid/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/28/scatecs-540mw-pv-1140mw... With enough storage and onsite renewables you can mimic the stable baseload that Nuclear provides.

defrost 3y ago
There are better examples, but given you asked; With an installed solar capacity of 540 MW of PV, and a battery storage capacity of 225MW/1,140MWh (BYD ESS), the plant is designed to deliver 150 MW of dispatchable power from 5 am to 9.30 pm year-round to the national grid under a 20-year power purchase agreement with South Africa’s national power utility company, Eskom. It's in MegaWatts not GigaWatts and delivers no power for seven and half hours every 24 hours. That is not mimicing the stable baseload that nuclear (or a hydro electric pupmped storage dam) provides. I'm not anti solar but a project such as your example has a long way to go to met the demands of a European country. It's worth looking into how much of a dent it makes in South African energy demands.
- chris222 3y ago
  Presumably all they would need to do here is change the ratios of solar and battery to achieve 24x7 dispatch. I presume the current arrangement is just more cost effective currently based on their needs but it does demonstrate there already are baseload style power purchase agreements occuring with combined renewables+storage facilities. We’re likely to see another halving of battery costs within the next decade which will shift the economics further.
  - JoachimS 3y ago
    Still MW not GW.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  10 of these solar power stations cost less than this new nuclear reactor. It certainly looks like a worthy competitor. It only took 18 months to build!

ETH_start 3y ago

You hit the nail on the head. "True cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh [pdf]" source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.americanexperiment.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-High-Cost-of-100-Percent-Carbon-Free-Electricity-by-2040-in-Minnesota.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...

pfdietz 3y ago
This is utter bullshit. It probably used obsolete cost numbers and assumed batteries are the only storage mode used.
- ETH_start 3y ago
  On what basis do you assume it's bullshit? This is a very emotional/irrational reaction to a study.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    It's in gross disagreement with figures and modeling I've seen elsewhere.
    - ETH_start 3y ago
      Can I see the other figures/models?

mgoetzke 3y ago

Nuclear is also quite a lot more expensive than people sometimes calculate here. It cost about 35 billion USD (total cost during build, no maintenance, no fuel) At current potential earning rates of eg. max 10ct/kWh (Georgia) and 1100 MW peak continuous operation it will take 36 years to make the money back. That is without just investing that 35 billion into something else or even adding maintenance and fuel cost which makes the entire project never return a profit. Now in general I like machines, and nuclear reactors are fantastic engineering feats. I dislike the potential for a meltdown of course no matter how 'unlikely'

kjkjadksj 3y ago
But you will make the money back. This isn’t private industry. This is government. Many programs are ran at a loss, this however nets a sure profit in some time. Bonds can always be sold to take care of upfront costs.
- sunshinesnacks 3y ago
  There are federal loans involved, but this is not a government project. Georgia Power is part of an investor owned utility.
qwebfdzsh 3y ago
> I dislike the potential for a meltdown of course no matter how 'unlikely' Why? A meltdown is really not a big deal at all. If we're fine with burning coal we should be perfectly with a having a meltdown or two every few years (even if we 100% ignored climate change the degree of damage caused by either of those is not that different)
- hylaride 3y ago
  People think "meltdown" means Chernobyl. For those who don't know, a nuclear meltdown means the fuel inside the reactor overheated, (possibly permanently) damaging the reactor. It's essentially happened at some level three times in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#Core_damage_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#Core_damage_e... A meltdown essentially means an expensive remediation. A Chernobyl style event in the west is extremely unlikely due to reactor design as well as the containment buildings. The closest western equivalent, Fukushima, did have a core meltdown. But the spread of radiation was actually caused by the spent fuel no longer able to be cooled, causing the rods to be exposed to air, which generated hydrogen, that then exploded. While a disaster, it wasn't Chernobyl style where the open reactor pumped out radiation continuously until it could be contained.

Retric 3y ago

Multiple solar farms have already been built that store 1/2 their daily output, the economics is already compelling. Nobody is saying we have grid sufficient storage right now, but in terms of energy storage we’re a well over 30 minutes when you look at just existing capacity (25GWh not 10Gwh) + existing EV’s and that number is growing rapidly ~50% year over year. So, manufacturing several hours of electricity storage over the next ~15 years is a completely reasonable goal. Further that’s all that’s required, we have carbon free dams supplying 7% of total electricity demand and days worth of total grid demand in energy storage, just time shifting that covers ~16% of nighttime demand. Similarly Solar can be shifted east/west to cover more of the duck curve.

spiderfarmer 3y ago
People who underestimated the solar boom will underestimate the upcoming storage boom as well.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
  And so, we should keep burning coal until that hopefully later happens!
  - Retric 3y ago
    Coal is already dead. We where at 51% coal in 2001 and hit 19.5% in 2022. Existing power plants keep aging and not being replaced. People will bring storage online when it’s needed, but we don’t need it thus we don’t build it. So keep building Solar/Wind and soon enough storage will come online.
    - tjoff 3y ago
      We have needed solar for decades. And thus solar has been coming for decades. How long after we have an abundance of solar can we wait for good storage? How many decades can we wait for that to ramp up? (we didn't exactly start our solar journey yesterday). I feel storage is of immediate urgency, as of yesterday. We don't have a plan and scaling will be a huge challenge. Using EVs is really tempting though.

niemandhier 3y ago

My car has 100kWh energy storage and spends most of the day plugged in. Discharging 20 kWh around the optimal storage point will not hurt the battery. If we reach 20 000 000 cars like that we have 400 000 000 kWh or 400 GWh at our disposable most of the time . Cars alone could handle about an hour of the national grid, assuming that Energie intensive industries would not shut down temporary whenever the price of electricity is high/ predicted to be high.

nicoburns 3y ago

If you looked at installed solar generation capacity 30 years ago then the situation would have looked hopeless too. But there has since been an exponential increase, driven by increases in both rate installation, and in our capacity to manufacture and install panels. And there is every reason to think that we at the start of similar curve with battery storage right now (batteries are currently manufactured at a relatively small scale, with no major technological barriers to scaling up). Seasonal storage is another matter, but hourly/daily is well within reach.

firesteelrain 3y ago
We can’t wait 30 years. So we build for now

mlindner 3y ago

> Look at the price of a powerwall. That's for the energy needs of a residential home. What happens to your AWS bill if us-east-1 was to buy a powerwall? Let alone steel, chemical, paper, mineral processing industries. What would happen to our economy if capacity for every one of those was cut by 1/3rd (or more depending on local climate)? Never mind your power bill. Using powerwall as the price of stationary battery storage is like using the running cost of gas/petrol household generators as the cost of generating power at fossil fueled power plants. Powerwalls is not how industrial battery storage is done anywhere on the planet.

pydry 3y ago
If they used snowy 2 instead of a powerwall the comparison would look way too favorable and it would invert the point. Powerwalls are expensive even by battery standards.
- mlindner 3y ago
  > Powerwalls are expensive even by battery standards. Well of course. Look at the cost of a home generator unit versus how much power it generates. The more apt battery comparison would be something like megapacks, and megapacks bought in bulk.