4 ms·
> It's quite amusing to see someone talk about a 10-100x reduction in the cost of intermittent sources so confidently, yet discounting the possibility of cheape
by epistasis 3y ago
> It's quite amusing to see someone talk about a 10-100x reduction in the cost of intermittent sources so confidently, yet discounting the possibility of cheaper nuclear power despite the historical precedence.
Sure, find it amusing, but your own sources demonstrate a 5x difference in the past "cheap" era of nuclear to its more expensive current era. Even if we could somehow go back to knowing less about nuclear, or get to an era of cheaper labor, then we are only looking at a 5x decrease. And the trend is for higher costs, now lower costs with nuclear.
TMI is a completely irrelevant event in the ordering of new nuclear, the real problem was that too many reactors had been ordered, too many of them got behind schedule, and there was a massive oversupply of electricity, and not enough demand. In 1985, a Forbes cover story by James Cook called this misprediction of demand "the largest managerial disaster in business history.”
https://rmi.org/insight/nuclear-follies/ https://rmi.org/insight/nuclear-follies/
>Unfortunately, renewable costs have largely flatlined and started to increase
In order to make such a claim you have to really cherry pick, which is why you are using an out-of-date image during a global supply crunch. There have been several points in history where solar power had a year or two of stalled or even increased prices, only to drop precipitously soon after the supply-chain crunch had been solved.
So are you predicting both a reversal of nuclear cost increases, and even decreases to the point of a 10x drop? And that the trend of the past decades for renewables will stop? To predict two such very large reversals, without evidence, is not atypical in the nuclear fan crowd, but I do not operate with such faith, and prefer data.
- Manuel_D 3y ago> but I do not operate with such faith, and prefer data. And what data is telling you that wind power is going to see a 100x drop? The reality is that only one of us has backed up our claims about the feasibly of lower costs with data. I pointed to the historical precedence of cheaper nuclear power. Your claim of 10-100x drop in costs is not.
- bryanlarsen 3y agohttps://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
- Manuel_D 3y agoWind power dropped by only a factor of 3 over the last decade. Furthermore, these reductions in cost have largely stopped. Your linked chart misleadingly just picks the 2009 and 2019 years, and doesn't show the year by year progression. https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80,format=auto/content-assets/images/20231209_WBC618.png https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80... The slope has largely flatlined, solar panels aren't getting much cheaper and neither is wind.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoSolar panels have dropped 42% in the last 12 months https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/solar-panel-prices-remain-low-up-two-years-says-industry-exec-2024-03-19/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/solar-panel-prices-r...
- Manuel_D 3y agoExcept panel prices aren't the only component of solar power cost. There's also installation, maintenance, and energy conversion.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoWhen panels are cheap enough, it becomes cheaper to lay them out inefficiently to massively reduce installation and maintenance and land cost: https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-ground/ https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-...
- Manuel_D 3y agoYour article did not mention any reduction in labor. The motivation behind flat mounting was less land use and stabilizing temperature. There's still no serious proposal to reduce costs by 10x let alone 100x. This is just a totally baseless claim