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Yes I wonder if with the current trend, solar might become the real alternative, less expensive, less risky. But to be fair, you have to consider your « aside
by iTokio 1y ago
Yes I wonder if with the current trend, solar might become the real alternative, less expensive, less risky.
But to be fair, you have to consider your « aside », because nuclear has the tremendous advantage of working when it’s cloudy, dark and you need the energy the most in the winter.
I do not think that we can just compare the prices, or maybe we should also add the cost of storage (that is going down too) for solar.
But currently a mix is probably the pragmatic approach.
- kristopolous 1y agoIt's going to be solar + wind + battery. That's where the economics are at. Sodium batteries are just coming online now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery - lithium is getting phased out. Nuclear can't compete. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricit... Maybe in some far off future nuclear will have a role... But the global energy investment markets paint a very clear picture: solar + wind + battery is the way.
- ekianjo 1y agoWind + solar is just adding another failure mode for when there is no wind. There are many places without adequate wind speed. Nuclear does not care about either, and has the highest energy density on top of that.
- masklinn 1y ago> when there is no wind. Or when there’s too much and you’re melting your grid.
- thomasmg 1y agoNo, you just turn off some windmills.
- masklinn 1y agoThat's genuinely not how it works. You can see it every spring as Germany wholesale prices go negative to try and offload as much electricity as fast as possible to keep their grid from falling over.
- thomasmg 1y agoWind turbines can, and are, turned off (by turning, feathering the blades, and braking). There are two main cases: high wind / storm, and too much electricity in the grid. Photovoltaics can also be turned off. The main reason for negative electricity prices are inflexible generators, eg. nuclear and coal, because they can't easily (cheaply) ramp down or shut off. Sometimes it is cheaper to let prices go negative than to use emergency mechanisms (that do exist). Negative prices are not all bad: they are an incentive for storage / flexible demand to step in. Specially, a negative price does not mean the grid is melting.
- jacquesm 1y ago'Too much electricity in the grid' is a wrong way of expressing it, just like you can't have 'too much fluid in a pipe'. What happens is that the line voltage creeps up because loads are lagging further behind compared to generation. And like you wrote, that's controlled. Agreed with the rest of your comment, especially the bit that pricing is mostly controlled by the worst parties, not by the best. What we are simply finding out is that a grid designed mostly for baseline loads needs fast response generation (for instance: half of the UK putting their kettle on during half time requires so much extra power that pumped storage becomes a good alternative). And conversely, that if you change the mix considerably that you're going to have to have more control over the cumulative effect of many smaller generators. But there are already standards for dealing with that even absent remote control of resources: as soon as the local grid voltage that the inverters in modern wind and solar plants see exceeds a very specific maximum for a proscribed period of time they fully autonomously back off their capacity until they are well below those maximums again, and then slowly ramp up to avoid causing grid instability due to oscillation. What grid balancing is all about is to make this all financially optimal, it has relatively little to do with the safety of the grid, it is simply a way to extract maximum capacity without affecting that safety. A coarser mechanism would simply incur some more waste, but given the amounts of money involved it pays off to tune this.
- kristopolous 1y ago10 countries do 100%, 20 do over 90, and this data is 2 years old https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab... I'm an empiricist. FUD about "what about where renewables aren't available " is just rhetorical handwaving. The answer, which already exists at nation-level scale is storage and infrastructure.
- masklinn 1y agoNow you're just empirically lying, by equating the behaviour of solar and wind with that of hydro. That table also doesn't say what you apparently think it does: it lists Luxembourg as 89% renewable, which is true, but does not include that Luxembourg only covers about 28% of the electricity it uses, and imports the rest. Thus Luxembourg's production being 89% renewable is worthless information as to the viability and reliability of wind and solar for baseload: Luxembourg relies on its neighbours for reliable electricity supply.
- kristopolous 1y agoright, there's a vibrant international real time energy market with thousands of km of energy travel on the GW scale which also invalidates the "what if it's cloudy right where I am" argument.
- taneq 1y agoThe increase in renewable generation is great, but some of these are kind of cheating by importing energy to cover shortfalls. You need some kind of baseload generation that’s not dependent on weather, and borrowing this from a neighbour while pretending you don’t need it is like those ‘tiny house’ guys.
- thomasmg 1y agoWind + solar + batteries. Nuclear has its own failure modes. In Switzerland, one of the nuclear plants will be offline for winter (!) due to "unplanned repairs". This will cost the owners of the plant millions.
- realusername 1y agoRenewables also have those, it's just that you have weather failures on top of the technical failures.
- thomasmg 1y agoNuclear also have weather failures: low water levels, and high river temperature. In both cases the power plant needs to reduce output or be turned off.
- realusername 1y agoThose aren't weather failures but environmental regulations, there's nothing preventing the plant to work of you really want to, it's just not needed, especially in summer.
- thomasmg 1y agoIf you remove environmental regulations, then (pumped) hydro, wind, and photovoltaics would also be much cheaper, and much faster to build. For windmills, it's birds and whatnot, for photovoltaics (specially large-scale in the mounts) it's wildlife and other environmental impact.
- realusername 1y agoYes, but those are still different from weather failures. When there's no sun and no wind, you can do whatever you want with regulations, you can't bring it back. Weather failure is something unique to renewables on top of everything else.
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- naasking 1y agoNuclear costs are largely due to regulatory burdens created for reactor designs that are not safe. That is no longer the case. Also, attempts to exploit economies of scale could also improve baseline costs, although these attempts haven't been funded enough yet to actually scale.
- thomasmg 1y agoNuclear costs would be way higher if the plant operators would need to have insurance for catastrophic failures. Right now, they don't need that. The state (the population) just takes this risk.
- kristopolous 1y agoEven ignoring all of that, there's "time to first watt" - essentially if you break ground now, how quickly can you start producing power? Nuclear has years scale, wind and solar has weeks, if not days. And also when better tech comes along, you can partially transition a farm to newer panels and resell the old ones after market. Plus you don't have to build Onkalo Repository like systems to store waste for 100,000 years after you've produced your electricity. It's wildly more feasible.
- karmakurtisaani 1y agoI have this same issue with fusion. Who cares if the fuel is practically free, when building and operating the plant is extremely expensive and prone to failures due to the sheer complexity. Of course the tech and science is cool, possibly useful in space or other niche environments, but whenever I see fusion proposed as some general energy solution, I just roll my eyes and move on.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoWe'll have direct antimatter annihilation at scale before we have fusion. It's basically a physics research project, with zero potential for commercial use. There's already a convenient fusion reactor fairly close by, and it's unlikely to stop operating any time soon.
- Paradigma11 1y agoBut now you have a probabilistic system. Your battery part is designed for n numbers of low/no solar/wind input. So you are paying for a system that would be sufficient for x% of typical/historical years. Which has to factor in the design and cost calculation.
- guerby 1y agonuclear is also probabilistic: in 2022 half of France nuclear reactor capacity was offline because of premature aging of some components in a design used in many reactors. Note in case SMR become part of our grid: what if something similar happens to your hundreds of produced and deployed SMR?
- Paradigma11 1y agoThere are always unknown unknowns that might be correlated, like that flaw in the component. Weather systems like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute are known facts. The good thing is that we do have excellent weather data for the last 75 years, so it is totally feasible for proponents of renewables to run their models through that historical data and say: Look, if we have that amount of renewables and that amount of batteries that would have been enough for the last 3 quarters of a century. That would be go a very long way to convince me.