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Nuclear power, despite its larger costs, is the only form of non-intermittent green energy production other than geographically limited options like dams and ge

Nuclear power, despite its larger costs, is the only form of non-intermittent green energy production other than geographically limited options like dams and geothermal. Once wind and solar start saturating energy markets during peak hours of production, each new wind and solar plant has diminishing returns. While the plants themselves are expensive, producing wind and solar power at large scale and offsetting intermittency incurs costs in the form of increased transmission capacity and storage requirements. People really often don't comprehend just how titanic the storage requirements are just to provision half a day's worth of energy to offset daily solar fluctuations. The globe currently uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. That's 30,000 GWh for 12 hours of storage. Keep in mind, electricity is only about half our total energy use, heating and transportation also need to be electrified which will drive this number up. And lastly, diurnal storage isn't the only storage we'll need. We'll also need seasonal storage to offset weather fluctuations. When we stop asking "what's the most cost-efficient way to reduce CO2 emissions by a percent or two?" and start asking "how will we build a 100% carbon-free grid?" nuclear becomes a much more attractive option.

fineIllregister 3y ago
> While the plants themselves are expensive, producing wind and solar power at large scale and offsetting intermittency incurs costs in the form of increased transmission capacity and storage requirements. My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear even when accounting for storage. That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning.
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  > My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear even when accounting for storage. This understanding is either based on geographically limited storage options (hydroelectric storage), or is incorrect. The amount of batteries required to even out intermittent sources is many times more than the amount of batteries produced. The cost of a 1 GWh facility is very different from a 1 TWh facility. The latter is 2x the amount of batteries produced worldwide each year. But it's only 2 hours of the USA's electricity consumption. That's how big of a mismatch there exists between battery supply and the demands of grid storage. > That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning. Waste disposal and decommissioning are already factored into nuclear power's cost. They have to pre-pay the cost of disposal and decommissioning.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    You need to update your talking points. Vogtle is $170-$180/MWh. https://www.powermag.com/blog/plant-vogtle-not-a-star-but-a-tragedy-for-the-people-of-georgia/ https://www.powermag.com/blog/plant-vogtle-not-a-star-but-a-... New solar is on average $40/MWh: https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/utility_scale_solar_2023_edition_slides.pdf https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/utility_scale_solar_... Back in 2022 when prices were higher, NREL put batteries at $482/kWh: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf That's $87/MWh for storage, backing out the battery lifetime and round trip efficiency from the same report. So depending on the time usage of electricity, the average solar+battery installation will have an averaging of $40/MWh and $127/Mwh electricity. That's using old prices. It's cheaper today, and will get cheaper in the future.
    - Manuel_D 3y ago
      The cost estimates are for a 4 hour storage system - not enough for diurnal let alone seasonal storage. Furthermore, actually attempting to build storage systems at grid scale would cause battery prices to skyrocket. Even just 4 hours of electricity supply for the world works out to 10,000 GWh of batteries (global electricity demand is ~60 TWh per day). In 2023, 680 GWh of batteries were produced [1]. If you were to try and build 10,000 GWh worth of battery storage you'd buy up all the batteries on the market, causing the price to skyrocket. And even if you literally bought every single battery produced in 2023 you still wouldn't have 1/10th the batteries required to provision just four hours of storage (and not to mention you'd kill 100% of EV production in the process). The scale between the batteries produced and the amount of batteries required to deliver even small amounts of storage are vast. And we're not even talking about electrifying other fossil fuels uses like heating, transportation, etc. That's going to make electricity demand even larger. 1. https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufacturer-supplied-the-largest-volume-ev-batteries-in-2023-podcast/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20data,for%20passenger%20cars%20and%20vans https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufactur...
- throw0101d 3y ago
  > My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear even when accounting for storage. In Ontario nuclear costs 10¢/kWh while wind costs 15¢ and solar 50¢ (Table 2): * https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20221021.pdf https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2022... And when wind goes to zero at night, then (natural/methane) gas generators are often spun up. > That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning. Which wind and solar also have. You may be able to extract some metals from solar panels, but turbine blades are not (AFAICT) recyclable.
epistasis 3y ago
> is the only form of non-intermittent green energy production other than geographically limited options like dams and geothermal That "is" should be a "was". > The globe currently uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. That's 30,000 GWh for 12 hours of storage. Bloomberg New Energy Finance tracks battery production capacity announcements, and has a total world capacity of 7.9 TWh/year by the end of 2025 [0]. With a warrantied life of 12-20 years, that 2025 manufacturing capacity would support 95-158 TWh of ongoing storage. Keep in mind that the talking points you are drawing from are several years of out date and assume an audience that knows little about the world of energy. HN is not the right place to pull out the standard bag of tricks from the electronic information toolkit. For example, you claim a need for "seasonal" storage out of nowhere, but do not consider the obvious (to the HN audince at least) idea of overcapacity such that there's enough generation at the seasonal minimum to cover needs, and oversupply the rest of the year. Already, many countries in Europe have seen single-digit /MWh average prices this month [1]. That's going to become far more common during most of the year. [0] https://twitter.com/colinmckerrache/status/1775880888162656258 https://twitter.com/colinmckerrache/status/17758808881626562... [1] https://x.com/LionHirth/status/1777309657804992969 https://x.com/LionHirth/status/1777309657804992969
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  > For example, you claim a need for "seasonal" storage out of nowhere, but do not consider the obvious (to the HN audince at least) idea of overcapacity such that there's enough generation at the seasonal minimum to cover needs, and oversupply the rest of the year. No amount of overcapacity will make solar panels produce electricity at night. You'll at least need diurnal storage, no amount of overproduction will help solar power offset the day and night cycle. Overproduction is also not a silver bullet: solar production during cloudy days and wind production during still winds are often under 10% of average output. You'd need a massive amount of overproduction in order to avoid building large amounts of storage. As for your battery production predictions, these seem very far-fetched given the history of lithium ion battery production. Bear in mind that production capacity is a different figure than actual production. Production capacity is what factories theoretically could make if given unlimited input materials. But that's not what matters, what matters is actual production figures - how much battery capacity was actually built. 2023 saw 680 GWh of lithium ion batteries produced worldwide: https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufacturer-supplied-the-largest-volume-ev-batteries-in-2023-podcast/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20data,for%20passenger%20cars%20and%20vans https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufactur.... 2021 this figure was 476 GWh: https://interactanalysis.com/insight/lithium-ion-battery-market-is-moving-into-surge-mode/#:~:text=The%20global%20Li%2Dion%20battery,that%20wasn't%20a%20blip https://interactanalysis.com/insight/lithium-ion-battery-mar.... Will we actually see 7.9 TWh of batteries produced annually by the end of 2025? The growth over the last two years was only about 200 GWh of capacity, so seeing over 7,000 GWh of production increase over the next two years seems a bit far fetched.

fineIllregister 3y ago

> While the plants themselves are expensive, producing wind and solar power at large scale and offsetting intermittency incurs costs in the form of increased transmission capacity and storage requirements. My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear even when accounting for storage. That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning.

Manuel_D 3y ago
> My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear even when accounting for storage. This understanding is either based on geographically limited storage options (hydroelectric storage), or is incorrect. The amount of batteries required to even out intermittent sources is many times more than the amount of batteries produced. The cost of a 1 GWh facility is very different from a 1 TWh facility. The latter is 2x the amount of batteries produced worldwide each year. But it's only 2 hours of the USA's electricity consumption. That's how big of a mismatch there exists between battery supply and the demands of grid storage. > That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning. Waste disposal and decommissioning are already factored into nuclear power's cost. They have to pre-pay the cost of disposal and decommissioning.
- epistasis 3y ago
  You need to update your talking points. Vogtle is $170-$180/MWh. https://www.powermag.com/blog/plant-vogtle-not-a-star-but-a-tragedy-for-the-people-of-georgia/ https://www.powermag.com/blog/plant-vogtle-not-a-star-but-a-... New solar is on average $40/MWh: https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/utility_scale_solar_2023_edition_slides.pdf https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/utility_scale_solar_... Back in 2022 when prices were higher, NREL put batteries at $482/kWh: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf That's $87/MWh for storage, backing out the battery lifetime and round trip efficiency from the same report. So depending on the time usage of electricity, the average solar+battery installation will have an averaging of $40/MWh and $127/Mwh electricity. That's using old prices. It's cheaper today, and will get cheaper in the future.
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    The cost estimates are for a 4 hour storage system - not enough for diurnal let alone seasonal storage. Furthermore, actually attempting to build storage systems at grid scale would cause battery prices to skyrocket. Even just 4 hours of electricity supply for the world works out to 10,000 GWh of batteries (global electricity demand is ~60 TWh per day). In 2023, 680 GWh of batteries were produced [1]. If you were to try and build 10,000 GWh worth of battery storage you'd buy up all the batteries on the market, causing the price to skyrocket. And even if you literally bought every single battery produced in 2023 you still wouldn't have 1/10th the batteries required to provision just four hours of storage (and not to mention you'd kill 100% of EV production in the process). The scale between the batteries produced and the amount of batteries required to deliver even small amounts of storage are vast. And we're not even talking about electrifying other fossil fuels uses like heating, transportation, etc. That's going to make electricity demand even larger. 1. https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufacturer-supplied-the-largest-volume-ev-batteries-in-2023-podcast/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20data,for%20passenger%20cars%20and%20vans https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufactur...
throw0101d 3y ago
> My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear even when accounting for storage. In Ontario nuclear costs 10¢/kWh while wind costs 15¢ and solar 50¢ (Table 2): * https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20221021.pdf https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2022... And when wind goes to zero at night, then (natural/methane) gas generators are often spun up. > That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning. Which wind and solar also have. You may be able to extract some metals from solar panels, but turbine blades are not (AFAICT) recyclable.

epistasis 3y ago

> is the only form of non-intermittent green energy production other than geographically limited options like dams and geothermal That "is" should be a "was". > The globe currently uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. That's 30,000 GWh for 12 hours of storage. Bloomberg New Energy Finance tracks battery production capacity announcements, and has a total world capacity of 7.9 TWh/year by the end of 2025 [0]. With a warrantied life of 12-20 years, that 2025 manufacturing capacity would support 95-158 TWh of ongoing storage. Keep in mind that the talking points you are drawing from are several years of out date and assume an audience that knows little about the world of energy. HN is not the right place to pull out the standard bag of tricks from the electronic information toolkit. For example, you claim a need for "seasonal" storage out of nowhere, but do not consider the obvious (to the HN audince at least) idea of overcapacity such that there's enough generation at the seasonal minimum to cover needs, and oversupply the rest of the year. Already, many countries in Europe have seen single-digit /MWh average prices this month [1]. That's going to become far more common during most of the year. [0] https://twitter.com/colinmckerrache/status/1775880888162656258 https://twitter.com/colinmckerrache/status/17758808881626562... [1] https://x.com/LionHirth/status/1777309657804992969 https://x.com/LionHirth/status/1777309657804992969

Manuel_D 3y ago
> For example, you claim a need for "seasonal" storage out of nowhere, but do not consider the obvious (to the HN audince at least) idea of overcapacity such that there's enough generation at the seasonal minimum to cover needs, and oversupply the rest of the year. No amount of overcapacity will make solar panels produce electricity at night. You'll at least need diurnal storage, no amount of overproduction will help solar power offset the day and night cycle. Overproduction is also not a silver bullet: solar production during cloudy days and wind production during still winds are often under 10% of average output. You'd need a massive amount of overproduction in order to avoid building large amounts of storage. As for your battery production predictions, these seem very far-fetched given the history of lithium ion battery production. Bear in mind that production capacity is a different figure than actual production. Production capacity is what factories theoretically could make if given unlimited input materials. But that's not what matters, what matters is actual production figures - how much battery capacity was actually built. 2023 saw 680 GWh of lithium ion batteries produced worldwide: https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufacturer-supplied-the-largest-volume-ev-batteries-in-2023-podcast/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20data,for%20passenger%20cars%20and%20vans https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufactur.... 2021 this figure was 476 GWh: https://interactanalysis.com/insight/lithium-ion-battery-market-is-moving-into-surge-mode/#:~:text=The%20global%20Li%2Dion%20battery,that%20wasn't%20a%20blip https://interactanalysis.com/insight/lithium-ion-battery-mar.... Will we actually see 7.9 TWh of batteries produced annually by the end of 2025? The growth over the last two years was only about 200 GWh of capacity, so seeing over 7,000 GWh of production increase over the next two years seems a bit far fetched.