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Investment Risk Is Highest for Nuclear Power Plants, Lowest for Solar

• orson2077 1y ago
  For anyone interested in the economics of fission reactors, Illinois Energy Prof did a GREAT video a while back: https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY?feature=shared https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY?feature=shared
  • eqvinox 1y ago
    For context, nuclear and peaker natural gas are the two most expensive sources of electricity in overall lifetime cost per energy output nowadays. It's not clear what exactly he's comparing there on the natural gas side. Also, his data is from 2013. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity (warning: the graph on that wikipedia page has a really poorly cut Y-axis.)
    • earthnail 1y ago
      LCOE assumes that electricity generation is comparable. However, renewables have a high variability, which puts a much higher load on the grid. The grid investments are sizeable. You not only need to add a lot of batteries, you also have to make other investments, for example to add moment to the grid, because unlike big turbines like nuclear, water or gas, solar or small wind turbines have almost no moment of inertia, which was one of the problems behind Spain's power outage. This isn't new stuff, it's all solvable and countries already do this; the power outage of Spain would've been impossible in Germany for example. It's just important to highlight that with old-school power plants, you don't need a lot of that stuff to stabilise the grid. You need to include the grid costs when calculating the true LCOE, which most of these charts, including the Wikipedia one, don't do. Wikipedia isn't lying about that; they outline this very fact as one of the key weaknesses of the LCOE metric.
      • Calwestjobs 1y ago
        99.9999% of people do not understand that point about inertia, you are one of them. and no it was not problem with spain, problem with spain was badly selected and configured inverters. if someone says otherwise he is liar. " with old-school power plants, you don't need a lot of that stuff to stabilise the grid." you just need proper sizing of renewables inverters + firmware update...... so no you do not need to have inertia of huge mass in turbines. also 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of all problems stem of peoples need to regulate grid to flat line for nonsensical reasons, IF you have slight artificially made "fluctuations in grid" which are generated by all inverter synchronized and planned ahead, there is no problem. grid has to have "pulse". THAT is decentralized / new grid. what you are describing is Stanley/Westinghouse grid. so mixing is resulting in nonsense.
        • ViewTrick1002 1y ago
          This is wrong. It has since been confirmed that the Iberian blackout had nothing to do with inertia. It was an over voltage issue coming from reactive power causing trips. https://minener.com/spains-power-crisis-deepens-renewables-cleared-but-tensions-rise/ https://minener.com/spains-power-crisis-deepens-renewables-c...
      • ZeroGravitas 1y ago
        When grids set up markets to let people compete to provide those grid balancing services batteries totally dominate. Which suggests that is just another area that modern renewables win and reduce costs. On the other hand Nuclear LCOE generally assume they can sell a high proportion of their power for the next 40 years. So really the big hidden assumption is that solar won't eat half their market in that timeframe. And then solar plus batteries eats into it further. Which would drive up their cost, letting solar plus batteries win more business in a vicious cycle. With the recent Iberian power situation half their nuclear was offline because they were already in a huff because they weren't being paid enough money.
        • Calwestjobs 1y ago
    • Calwestjobs 1y ago
      but LCOE is price only for WATTS, not for watts at specified time!!! you need watts at night too. so be careful about that, this mistake can make shareholders loose interest in your point... but yes, LCOE of PV+12hour battery was lower then nuclear, even before 2020/2019 saga...
      • energy123 1y ago
        Nuclear is still more expensive even when you account for the cost of storage and transmission. So your point is a good one but it doesn't alter the conclusion.
        • Calwestjobs 1y ago
          read it again
    • pfdietz 1y ago
      > Also, his data is from 2013. I see this sort of thing so much. Renewable and storage costs have changed so fast that using numbers from even a few years ago gives misleading results. Going back 12 years you might as well be using numbers from another world.
• oezi 1y ago
  > The researchers compiled data on 662 energy infrastructure projects covering a diverse spectrum of technology classes and capacities, built between 1936 and 2024 across 83 countries, representing $1.358 trillion in investment. This is quite a lot if we consider that net zero expenditures until 2050 only are expected to amount to 100 trillion. World GDP was 105 trillion USD in 2024.
  • XorNot 1y ago
    And over the next 25 years assuming absolutely no growth, that would be repeated 25 times for a total of 2625 trillion USD total. Which would make the year over year investment about 3.8%.
    • oezi 1y ago
      Yes, 100 trillion is not a lot over 25 years.
  • Calwestjobs 1y ago
    GDP is PER year metric. so world generates 105T every year... so you're saying that 4% of gdp every year until 2050... it is peanuts. so for example if every household ! ! ! !ONLY IN USA ! ! ! lives in passive house, that alone will save more on utility bills, insurance, then your net zero expenditure requires to add. so im not sure if that net zero expenditure is world wide or just USAs, but USA can pay it by themselves, if they were not scammed by building bad buildings for last 20 years.... just for comparison. also previous powerplants price has to be converted to today's dollars, and inflation metric basket is flawed because it does not consist of building materials, which powerplants are build from. but it contains bread, clothing etc. so 1.358 T is not todays money that means comparation / ratio is better then you/them suggest. also NET zero expenditures means, less inputs afterwards, i.e. no/less money sent to canada, mexico, venezuela, africa, persian gulf for oil...... so more money for homeland. which most people forget about to even calculate impact of... positive for usa. so yes we can do this, but every smartass in TV is saying we can not....
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
• JackSlateur 1y ago
  "By contrast, solar energy and electricity grid transmission projects have the best construction track record and are often completed ahead of schedule or below expected cost" "For Sovacool, the evidence is clear: “Low-carbon sources of energy such as wind and solar not only have huge climatic and energy security benefits, but also financial advantages related to less construction risk and less chance of delays,” he says" Of course, when you compare electric transportation with nuclear plant, the results are not the same .. This paper is green washing;
  • fuzzy2 1y ago
    No need to green-wash what is already green. You could label it "hippie propaganda" or something the like though. I think TFA just reiterates that we can no longer build complex stuff within a reasonable timeframe and budget. Nuclear reactors just happen to be super complex. Nothing nefarious going on.
    • blablabla123 1y ago
      Yeah I mean Solar itself seems to be generally considered low tech by now. Also the failure modes of Nuclear involve some sort of "real time response". In a classic reactor when the power goes off unexpectedly, one needs to make sure that it receives cooling to not risk a meltdown. The only open problem is storage but I guess there are also reasonably low complexity options like hydrogen or water pumps.
  • ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
    > Of course, when you compare electric transportation with nuclear plant, the results are not the same You're comparing a nuclear plant to e.g. an electric car? Why? Aren't we comparing power generation methods?
    • JackSlateur 1y ago
      Transportation of electricity, not transportation of things The article spoke of the grid;
• chronid 1y ago
  Isn't this intuitively true? Building a nuclear power plant incurs in a massive set up stage with a lot of unknowns unknowns and requiring impressive material engineering and QC. Solar is much more "incremental", you can almost start producing electricity and recouping costs immediately. But a nuclear reactor is an extremely dense power generator compared to a solar panel plant by orders of magnitude. I'm not really sure why are they compared this way.
• gosolar1 1y ago
  The article equated "investment risk" to cost overruns, not ROI. It's like a forgone conclusion. If you have to build something, you have to pay construction costs and those can vary. If you can buy most of the stuff you need on Amazon (ok, supplier X), you can predict the cost better. If you look at ROI, which looks at the demand side risk as well (perhaps transient demand, need for quick build out), and assume utilities are in the business of profit maximization, natural gas wins.
  • earthnail 1y ago
    This is why carbon tax is so important. The moment you tax carbon emissions, natural gas no longer wins. Assessing the right amount of tax is non-trivial, but approximations for the costs of carbon emissions exist, and even conservative estimates push natural gas out of the profitability zone.
    • delusional 1y ago
      > Assessing the right amount of tax is non-trivia I disagree. The "right amount" is pretty trivial. Structuring it such that it's politically favorable, precise, and robust is the actual issue. There's a general tension between precision and robustness in law, and finding that tradeoff is often the difficult part once public opinion is secured.
    • pfdietz 1y ago
      The right amount is the amount that drives net emissions to zero.
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > right amount is the amount that drives net emissions to zero On what timeframe? Put it too soon and you risk social upheaval crashing the whole project. Put it too late and you cause unnecessary damage to the climate.
      • djrj477dhsnv 1y ago
        That's debatable. I haven't looked at the numbers, but surely there's some amount of net co2 emissions that doesn't have a significant impact on the climate.
• UltraSane 1y ago
  A huge reason nuclear is so risky of an investment in the US is it is wildly over-regulated.
  • XorNot 1y ago
    I don't love the narrative that it's "over-regulated". It's a dangerous technology when it's not heavily regulated - but that's not the problem. The problem is the regulatory burden is opaque: it's very hard to get into the process in a manner where one can predict both how much it will cost, and what is necessary to meet the regulatory requirements. Plenty of industries operate in highly regulated spaces all the time - but there's a difference between regulation and unpredictability.
    • pfdietz 1y ago
      Those other industries are such that accidents can be tolerated and experience with them used to guide the regulation. Nuclear isn't like that: meltdowns have such large scale impact that they simply cannot be allowed to happen. Financially, this is reflected in the government assuming the accident risk, unlike with (say) chemical plants or airliners. Having assumed the risk, the government in return demands compliance with risk-reducing regulation. Those proposing to reduce the regulatory burden on nuclear are in fact proposing moving nuclear to this regime where we learn from meltdowns.
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > meltdowns have such large scale impact that they simply cannot be allowed to happen The evidence of actual meltdowns doesn’t support this hypothesis. (Also, modern designs don’t melt down.)
        • pfdietz 1y ago
          You mean, all the meltdowns of commercial power plants that have been shrugged off as inconsequential? Isn't that the empty set? Note that I'm not talking only about objective damage or loss of life. Economic or political fallout is also a real constraint.
• constantcrying 1y ago
  The German government had (has?) a program where operators of powerplants have a guaranteed kilowatt price for their electricity, completely independent of the market price. Apparently these were some absolutely great investments, of course financed by tax payers.
  • leftbit 1y ago
    Had. Now we have the "Merit Order Principle". Cheap energy (i.e. renewables) are used first but the price is determined by the most expensive energy source running. (See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit-Order https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit-Order) So if you're running a solar park you have production costs of about 5ct/kWh. But if there's also a gas plant running you get maybe 20ct/kWh. Instaprofit. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromgestehungskosten https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromgestehungskosten
    • loehnsberg 1y ago
      Uniform pricing creates huge windfall profits for those cheap generators too, which incentivizes more investment. I‘m not saying there‘s collusion but the incentive to keep a gas turbine in the stack is clearly given.
  • uecker 1y ago
    Indeed, and it was highly successful creating an economy of scale for PV and driving prices down (which is the main difference to nuclear, where - despite subsidies - cost always increased). Guaranteed feed-in-tariff was also reduced accordingly and is now much lower than it used to be and does not apply to all systems anymore.
    • constantcrying 1y ago
      Totally agree, that is why Germany now has some of the lowest energy prices in the developed world, which greatly helps in keeping its industry competitive and maintain the viability of energy intensive manufacturing inside of Germany.
• wtcactus 1y ago
  This article reads like green propaganda. Very few people are falling for this stuff anymore. You can only go so far destroying the landscape in southern Europe replacing thousands of olive trees by “green” solar panels, before the population calls out the insanity and vote for parties that are against it, no matter how bad are some of their other policies.
  • mousethatroared 1y ago
    Arguments by aesthetics fare poorly in forums where a large portion of the folks would replace humans with AI. We're the end stage of utilitarianism: getting rid of centuries old C3 energy producers of alkanes because the grove is "inefficient" and loudly extolling the beauty of pieces of black glass. The solutions to the energy problems are largely solved and have been since the 70s, conservation. Meanwhile, guys like Gates have been bemoaning cow's rectal emissions while AI (ie Microsoft, of which he is a major shareholder) is becoming the larger consumer of energy to train AI.
  • pfdietz 1y ago
    Right, nuclear is obviously superior, so no need to subsidize it, right? It will win on its obvious merits! That was the argument you were going to make, right? I mean, why subsidize the winner? /s
    • wtcactus 1y ago
      Well, it’s interesting how your sense of sarcasms didn’t detect the obvious need for it when talking about all the subsides solar farms have compared to all the extra taxes gas/oil/coal get. Isn’t it? The thing is, you will be one of the first complaining about how undemocratic our governments are, when the Western world turns completely right. Now, that is be good sarcasm. People like you explaining that the the will of the majority is undemocratic.
      • uecker 1y ago
        The will of the majority can very well be undemocratic has history shows which makes certain fascist movements dangerous. But I do not think the western world will turn completely to the right.
• UltraSane 1y ago
  Funding for nuclear rectors should come from the federal government as the initial cost is so high but they are usually VERY profitable over a 60 year lifespan. A fully paid for nuclear reactor is a money printer since fuel cost of uranium is only 5% to 6% of the cost of electricity.
  • dist-epoch 1y ago
    How much does dealing with waste fuel cost? It's convenient to only count the input.
    • UltraSane 1y ago
      Sigh. Storing nuclear waste is actually pretty cheap. After being removed from the reactor it is put into a pool for a while until it isn't so radioactive and then it is put into dry cask storage. Long term it can and should be stored in a deep geological repository like Finland is doing. A surcharge of 0.1 cent per KWh is applied to all nuclear power to pay for the decommissioning of reactors.
      • pfdietz 1y ago
        Storing LWR waste is pretty cheap, but I suspect dealing with TRISO spent fuel is not going to be nearly as cheap, if those reactors ever get built.
        • UltraSane 1y ago
          Why would it be more expensive to store?
          • pfdietz 1y ago
            Unless the burnup is quite high the volume will be larger. I don't think there will not be large fuel rod bundles to handle as units. The carbon binder of the fuel compacts is subject to abrasion and will be contaminated with carbon-14. Worse, it comes along with this moderator, so one has to be concerned with criticality even after the cooled waste has been transferred to dry storage.
• trollied 1y ago
  Building a solar-only grid is hard. People don't realise that it's a huge challenge kepping the whole grid synced at 50/60Hz when there's a large amount of solar being exported, never mind the entire grid.
  • eqvinox 1y ago
    Why would anyone build a solar-only grid?
    • pydry 1y ago
      Nobody would, but the nuclear and carbon lobbies like to use straw men models - combining things like laptop batteries with solar to "prove that you cant live without them" and these models leak into public discourse. A fully green energy grid would most cost effectively comprise of: * Solar (generally strongest when wind is low, ~5x cheaper per kwh than nuclear power) * Wind (generally strongest when sun is low, ~5x cheaper than nuclear power) * Large scale interconnected grids to offset intermittency. * Batteries and pumped storage for short term storage (~90% roundtrip efficiency but expensive to store long term) * Syngas for seasonal storage (~50% roundtrip efficiency but cheap to store long term).
  • delusional 1y ago
    My understanding is that this is mostly a technology problem. Current solar does a lot of grid-following. If solar instead did some sort of "grid driving" with an external synchronizer I would expect this to be a fairly solvable problem.
    • mousethatroared 1y ago
      Put a motor-generator pair next the solar or wind farm and the problem of frequency stabilization is largely solved. Adds a big flywheel for more initial mass. But now you've changed the economics by adding a big, inefficient (0.95*0.95%), and expensive piece of equipment.
      • 1y ago
• helsinkiandrew 1y ago
  One of the reasons for this is that every new nuclear power plant is a little bit different from all the previous ones - 'better', safer, more efficient etc., but different with more risk and expense. A Solar plant is (very crudely) just purchasing panels from a factory that's already produced millions of them and installing them in a frame so they're pointing at the sun.
  • rich_sasha 1y ago
    I suppose, as a nuclear fan, if someone messes up solar panels really badly, the societal impact is low. If you mess up a nuclear power plant, it's pretty bad.
  • UltraSane 1y ago
    Not really, but each new reactor is treated like a completely new design which makes regulations incredibly expensive. It is actually very stupid.
    • sMarsIntruder 1y ago
      Stupid the regulations or the design process?
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • UltraSane 1y ago
        Treating every reactor like it is a brand new design is very stupid, clearly.
    • chongli 1y ago
      Small, modular reactors [1] have been the dream of nuclear energy for a long time. The technology was proven a long time ago with nuclear submarines which have an outstanding safety track record. What’s stopping them from entering full scale production is a horrible mix of regulatory red tape and political opposition. Chief among the issues is a regulatory framework which is not designed to certify mass-produced reactors. No one wants to invest the capital to get a manufacturing plant up and running if regulators aren’t willing to allow completed reactors to be commissioned and begin producing energy at a rate that matches the manufacturing rate. The insistence on treating every nuclear site as a unique project subject to years of environmental surveys and extensive, bespoke planning makes modular reactor designs moot as a technology. This is why every reactor gets a new design: they have to go through the process anyway so they might as well try to max out the production they can achieve at that site. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
• msgodel 1y ago
  Off grid solar is really amazing. I lived on a boat for a year with a homebrew solar set up and have another one on the land I bought last year. Nuclear makes sense for grid power, solar makes sense for distributed/point power.
  • rhdunn 1y ago
    In Wales I've seen things like speed warning signs have a combined small solar panel and wind turbine -- I'm assuming they also have a small battery as well. This makes sense as it is expensive running power to remote areas, whereas these are self-contained.
  • IshKebab 1y ago
    What about the winter? I have solar on my house in the UK and it generates enough power to be off-grid from about March to October, but November - February it would be impossible. There are way too many cloudy days. There was a whole week in February where it didn't generate more than 2 kWh on any day. At more equatorial latitudes you could definitely rely on it more. And it's not really an issue for grid solar yet because we're far from the point where there's more solar power than we need, even in the middle of summer. But eventually winter will be an issue.
    • msgodel 1y ago
      Yeah up north like that winter is hard and I'd imagine it wouldn't work well. It's a little funny to hear places like Canada and the UK talking about solar. Even here (I'm at the same latitude as Syria) you have to avoid some things in the winter to keep everything on line. Having to ration power like that is part of the reason I don't think grid solar makes sense anywhere. To get the behavior you need You'd have expose consumers to the fluctuating prices and most people find that extremely unpleasant (many probably more than just maintaining their own array and infrastructure.)
    • KaiserPro 1y ago
      > What about the winter? London here, energy independent march-october, with peak grid dependecy in january of about 50ish percent. If I doubled the array from 5 to 10 kwhr, I _probably_ could remain independent most of the year.
• Simulacra 1y ago
  What about solar updraft towers?
  • Calwestjobs 1y ago
    you can generate multiple times more with PV, also you have to build it from glass and aluminium anyway, so why not have few grams of silicon wafer under that glass?
• martini333 1y ago
  Is anyone surprised by this?
• JohnCClarke 1y ago
  The book "How big things get done" [1] has tables listing the historical cost overruns of construction projects. It's worth keeping in mind that solar and wind farms start generating revenue as soon as the first panel or turbine is connected. This make financing much easier and derisks the whole project. Nuclear has to wait the whole ~10 years for the entire station to be finished before the investors get anything back. [1] https://biblio.co.uk/9780593239513:1681820911 https://biblio.co.uk/9780593239513:1681820911
  • energy123 1y ago
    Social licensing risk is a big one that gets swept under the rug. While both solar and nuclear has to face off NIMBYs, once those NIMBYs are defeated then the solar project is in the clear basically forever. But nuclear has no such assurances that there won't be an irrational fear-based anti-nuclear craze like what happened in Germany which leads to early plant closures.
    • metalman 1y ago
      irrational eh?, three mile Island, Chernoble, Fukeshema, litteral mountains of the most toxic and poisionous waste generated by all of the operational nukes, spead out, semi abandoned everywhere, go ahead rationalise it then
      • energy123 1y ago
        Well let's highlight one flaw in what you're saying which is the attempt to rhetorically package up Chernobyl with safer modern plants. Zero people are advocating for a Chernobyl replica to be built in 2025.
        • metalman 1y ago
          would those zero people, be the same ones detailing a viable nuclear waste disposal system that cleans up every last bit of nuclear waste sitting around, before the generation of more gets "splained" away into the future? and Chernoble is real, a real example that bad stuff happens, forever, when a nuke plant blows up,and applys to any large nuke plant proposed or in existance.....and that is a fact, there are failure modes that will cause meltdowns, we have incontrevertable evidence of mega, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, meteoer strikes, and human caused disasters in the forms of war,dam failures, sabotage, and just everyday stupidity.
• hagbard_c 1y ago
  Non-continuous power sources like solar and wind are viable as long as there is a backup supply for those times when it is dark and quiet. That backup can be some form of power storage in regions where the quiet/dark periods are reliably predictable and predictable short, e.g. between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. This is not the case for where I live (Sweden) as it reliably gets dark and quiet for several months on a stretch. Fortunately we have hydropower as a reliable backup but that is only a solution because we happen to have mountains which allowed for the construction of dams to catch the run-off from spring snow melt. Elsewhere in the more northern and southern regions as well as the more foggy/cloudy places another form of backup power is needed: nuclear, gas and other hydrocarbon sources, coal. At protests against the use of fossil hydrocarbons for transport an often heard claim is that the true costs of this practice are not paid for by the taxes put on fuel and vehicles. The claim is that there are many other costs which are paid for by society, from costs related to pollution and related health problems to costs related to international conflicts which stem from the presence of hydrocarbon sources in conflict-ridden regions. The same claims can be made for non-continuous power sources like solar and wind: these power sources are only viable just as long as there is a backup power supply with the same capacity while the costs for those backup power supplies are not factored in the claims for investment risks. Just like cars and trucks depend on an infrastructure which is only partly paid for by their users non-continuous power sources depend on an infrastructure which is paid for by others, in this case those who invest in reliable base load power generation capacity like nuclear power. I have a 14 kW solar array on the barn roof feeding a 10 kW 3-phase inverter which currently provides enough power to feed our farm and our neighbours - we export about 8 MWh yearly. There's a big cloud getting close to the sun, once it moves over it power output will drop to 2 kW or lower in an instant. The slack is taken up by 'the grid', the costs of which were not factored in when I bought the panels + mounting hardware, inverter, cables, over-current protection, switches and other bits and bobs I used when I installed the array. Of course I did pay for the grid in other ways, mostly through decades of taxation. An investor in a solar farm will not pay for that grid though, he'll only see the costs for the hardware and the grid hookup which leads to the claim made in this article: 'investment risk lowest for solar'. This may be true but it is not the whole story and using only investment risk as a guideline for building a power grid will lead to dark power-less winter nights because investing in base load generation capacity was deemed to be too risky.
• rich_sasha 1y ago
  I think looking at power purely from the perspective of RoI in a highly gamified environment is misleading. For one, the immediate economic profit does not reflect long term economic utility. There's factors such as availability, sovereignty, security etc. which are not reflected in hourly electricity prices. Similarly, we don't look at immediate RoI of other key infrastructure investments: roads, hospitals, military. You sort of can of course, but the calculation isn't as simple as immediate economic benefit. You may finance some expensive preventative treatments which aren't strictly necessary (thus "loss making") but which prevent more expensive treatments down the line. Finally, the environment is, effectively, gamified. Wholesale prices, retail prices, base load, storage... And it's all interacting with each other. A sceptical take would be that solar compete for a relatively fixed-sized pie of power generation (what they can displace from dispatchable power). But if battery storage doesn't become cheap enough, this will get saturated, and more solar will simply compete for the same finite demand, whereas a dispatchable or base load power plant, like nuclear, will continue to have marketable "goods". Maybe. Maybe not. But my point is, immediate RoI of solar tells you nothing about it. You may of course arrive at the same conclusion with a better metric (I'm not sure) but that's a separate question. I'm saying the metric is flawed instead.
  • fuzzfactor 1y ago
    Roger. Can't access the article without some other browser, however keep in mind that business risk is in essence a completely different factor than potential return on investment, or what turns out to be actual return. Three fundamentally different things each composed of way different variables. Regardless, they go hand-in-hand when investment is involved, the attitude at one extreme is to avoid risk as much as possible, while the other extreme will tolerate or even seek out the riskiest of ventures when they feel they will have good fortune in pursuit of unpredictably better returns which sometimes can not be achieved any other way. One thing that influences relative cost that doesn't seem to be well-represented by those using equations, is what is the source of the energy to begin with? It's too obvious. In one respect, nuclear and solar are at the same end of the spectrum where the "fuel" is so long-lasting that it virtually drops out of the equations compared to so many other things. But virtually zero may not be close enough to true zero when you consider the cost of the fuel itself plus costs to get that fuel ready for harvesting the energy it has to offer. Once everything else is in place except for actually getting the fuel into a state of readiness from how it is found in nature, few other options compare to the zero cost that solar, wind and a few others will always have in their equations. This number for solar will never go up regardless of scale, and fuel is such a major consideration it is completely tied to production as strongly as anything can be. IIRC, zero is quite a number. In a simplified way there are a lot of businesses that don't actually make money until after the initial capital expenditure has been recovered, a point of zero debt is achieved, and until another capital expenditure occurs, performance results from profits in excess of ongoing expenses. Surely the most convincing financial structures would be dependent on the most dis-similar accounting tactics, since diverse fuel sources can be nothing like each other even though they will always be tied to production, so it must not become possible to do anything but compare apples to oranges :\
• mnbvcxz123 1y ago
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• amai 1y ago
  "I’m particularly struck by our findings on the diseconomies of scale, with projects exceeding 1,561 megawatts in capacity demonstrating significantly higher risk of cost escalation,” says Hanee Ryu, second and corresponding author and a visiting researcher at IGS... What this could mean, Ryu explains, is that smaller, modular renewable projects might not only bring environmental benefits, but also potentially reduce financial risk and offer better budget predictability." The diseconomy of scale is something I don't read very often. Interesting!
  • johnea 1y ago
    I agree that smaller is better. I would take it even further, and say that storage, as well as generation, should be down-scaled as much as possible. On-building scale generation, and per building storage, being the ultimate embodiment. This also minimizes large scale distribution infrastructure needs. Like with other comments regarding why nuclear is still built in spite of its extreme cost and schedule overruns: utilities want the infrastructure to be organized in a way that can only be operated and maintained by large utilities. We should put our subsidies into individual building storage, and the technology to distribute the energy in that storage onto the local grid. What we're seeing is the exact opposite, very large scale solar and storage projects that are specifically architected to produce profit, not power.
• more_corn 1y ago
  Would you rather invest in a project with min price $2B, that takes ten years to build, experiences extensive regulatory oversight and pays off 20 years later? Or min project cost $20k, takes a day to build and pays off in ten years? The biggest payoff I’ve seen in solar is that it basically locks in the price of power for the ten years it takes to pay off so it’s inflation proof.