5 ms·

First, "providing baseload" is a privilege you enjoy if you are the unconditionally cheapest provider of electricity at all times, not something that anyone eve

First, "providing baseload" is a privilege you enjoy if you are the unconditionally cheapest provider of electricity at all times, not something that anyone ever needs you to do. If you only need power for short periods of time when renewables are unavailable, then "constant output" plants like coal or nuclear are the last thing you want to build-- they are simply not worth it for the the short periods of time when renewables are down. You want simple, cheap powerplants instead that trade off higher fuel costs for low capex, and that is currently gas. You want cheap MW (max power) from those plants instead of cheap MWh (energy), basically.

zozbot234 1y ago
It's easy to be "unconditionally cheapest" when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. "Simple, cheap" power plants that burn a lot of expensive natural gas (or even worse, coal) are the current approach to that problem, which is not working very well. The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.
- myrmidon 1y ago
  Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already at highest possible capacity factors (running 90% of the time). If they get undercut by renewables most of the time, there is simply no way they can stay competitive. Nuclear peaker plants are not ever gonna be a thing, because that makes no sense economically: High capex is the last thing you want for that usecase, and it implies that the economics for your plant have to stay decent for the next 30 years. Meanwhile batteries, solar and wind are still getting cheaper every year right now. This is the worst bet you could ever make as an investor. > nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers. This argument does not help nuclear power if the equivalent number of gas plants is still cheaper than a single nuclear reactor (and built much faster).
  - weregiraffe 1y ago
    >Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already Because they are over-regulated. Why? Because of nucleophobia, which is fueled by fossil fuel producers.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      They are also built and run by public or quasi-public utilities. I don't think we have a lot of examples of the private sector building nuclear generating plants. Maybe they can do it better, when it's their own money on the line, and they don't have a legally granted monopoly protecting them.
      - two_handfuls 1y ago
        Privatizing electricity in California resulted in massive underinvestment and forest fires as a result of poor maintenance. Privatization only saves money if you ignore the price paid by surrounding communities. I would not like to see a fully private nuclear plant.
        AtlasBarfed 1y ago
        Privatization of electricity hands a company a monopoly
        ViewTrick1002 1y ago
        Depends on how you do it. The electrical supply and demand markets can be privatized and that works quite well with few ancillary services needed. Privatizing the grid is a shit show since it is a natural monopoly.
    - epistasis 1y ago
      That's simply untrue and focusing on it will continue to result in nuclear failure after nuclear failure. Nobody has some sort of proposal of a different regulatory scheme that is somehow cheaper. Even France, which built a ton decades ago, has completely failed for more than a decade at building. South Korea has been somewhat successful at building, but also sends execs to jail for faking parts approvals. But perhaps that would be cheap to fix. What has changed since the mid 20th century is that construction labor is far more expensive in comparison to other things that can be done with that labor. Construction productivity has remained roughly constant over time, as manufacturing and other productivity has gone through the roof. Nuclear is fundamentally a big construction project. SMRs weresypposed to be an attempt to make nuclear power a manufacturing project, not a construction project. But it turns out that construction projects like the BWRX300 are the only real SMRs that can be produced, after a decade of hype. Manufacturing SMRs like 747s is not any more real today than it was when the nuclear PR machine turned to it in the wake of the financial and construction disaster of the AP1000s at Summer and Vogtle. The real story of nuclear is the need for super cheap labor, and excellent high-tech construction capacity. These two requirements are at odds with each other, because in societies with high tech construction skills, labor quickly becomes expensive. Even places like China with lots of successful nuclear projects is only building a tiny tiny amount of nuclear when compared to their wind, solar, and batteries. China does everything, and they won't abandon nuclear completely because a nuclear workforce is essential for a country with superpower ambitions, but the nuclear power is there for the superpower ambitions, not the electricity generation.
- Tade0 1y ago
  > which is not working very well It's actually working great. Gas peakers are expensive to run, but not nearly as expensive and time consuming to deploy as nuclear - you could deploy a solar installation with matching gas capacity and still spend less and have it years earlier than the least expensive, fastest deploying nuclear power plant. On top of that storage has been undercutting gas lately in terms of cost - especially now that it scaled up. That is all affecting the economics of nuclear.
  - AtlasBarfed 1y ago
    Combined storage and solar/wind will probably drop under combined cycle gas in a couple years, certainly it will for China.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  > The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers. This does not align with reality. Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production. What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed. Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
  - seec 1y ago
    You should check your sources. Very often the reverse is actually true. The recent years are not really representative because a lot of reactors were put on hold waiting for repairs and improvement. There is also the fact that France added millions of people while not building new nuclear capacities, so of course at some point there is going to be overload without renewed investment. Bug people like seems to want to put more money on renewable so that we can import even more electricity from Germany's coal plants (that makes up to 40% of their electricity generation in the winter when the wind is nowhere to be found). I'm very curious where you find your data, because it's not at all what I have been able to get. If there is some source that clearly shows renewable superiority in the winter, I would really like to see it. To be self-sufficient without coal, Germany needs to install 150GW of wind power still, and at current rate it will take at least 10 years. But I'm very curious what is their solution for when they get no wind for weeks on end, like it has happened recently. So far it seems to be, fire up the coal plant and take the cheap nuclear from your neighbor while posturing and virtue signaling about your superiority of not using nuclear.
- ethagknight 1y ago
  Seems like people confuse the old school "gas peakers" which are basically just simple generators burning gasoline or diesel designed to be used intermittently, and advanced combined cycle natural gas, which are incredibly efficient. Natural Gas is super cheap in many markets, and it appears to be common theory that markets with limited natural gas simply haven't been explored sufficiently due to other fuels being cheaper (coal). ACC Natural Gas + Solar/Wind + Batteries + actively priced load shedding market seems like a tremendous quartet.
  - AtlasBarfed 1y ago
    Yes it's super cheap because there isn't carbon taxes. In the US it is also super cheap because it is a byproduct of our fracking in The Dakotas.
    - ethagknight 1y ago
      It's a byproduct of a lot of oil production while also having its own reserves. My office used to look at an oil refinery that was miles away, and they were just burning the natural gas off in a huge plume, not worth trying to capture and combust for production. The fracking is also in Arkansas and Texas and many other states. An amazing amount of gas continues to be discovered. I am not a geologist but assume that Australia could dedicate resources to explore fracking gas reserves and would come up with quite bit. sidebar, but I just realized that Australia doesnt really have mountains to speak of. Tallest mountain is around the elevation of the typical Colorado Rockies valley towns. Australia may not have the 'cap traps' required to retain large amounts of gas in the various layers going down under ground.
PaulHoule 1y ago
We're not seeing a lot of realistic numbers published for the cost of a 100% renewables + storage grid because there is the X factor of "How many outages can you tolerate?" Storage over a 24 hour period is one thing, the economics don't look difficult at all. In places like Upstate NY, however, usable insolation can vary by a factor of 3x between summer and winter. You can overbuild solar panels by 3x or you can add a few months of storage which costs a lot more than a few hours or days worth of storage. There is also the issue of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute It would be great to have a backup energy source which is fully and economically dispatchable and environmentally benign but it's not there. I suspect there is some point of required reliability where adding nuclear baseload makes the grid more reliable economically compared to building months worth of storage. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032123010158 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212... also nuclear power plants are capable of load-following https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-load-following-e.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo... it's just not an optimal use of the capital. The Gates foundation has been researching LMFBRs that use thermal batteries to improve load following abilities. You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios. The real criticism of nuclear at this point in time is that any new plants are a decade out. It's a reason to start early, but no matter how you slice when the next NPP goes online in the US the amount of solar and wind added to the grid between here and now will dwarf it.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  > You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios. I think you are missing far simpler solutions for what is in terms of TWh needed a tiny problem. Why not just use biofuels, synfuels or hydrogen? Whatever the aviation and the maritime shipping industries settles on since they are unable to in the foreseeable future decarbonize with batteries. The US today produces enough ethanol for gas blending to run the entire grid for 16 days without help. As we switch to BEVs it is trivial to repurpose that for the grid, while also ensuring that the inputs decarbonize as well.

zozbot234 1y ago

It's easy to be "unconditionally cheapest" when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. "Simple, cheap" power plants that burn a lot of expensive natural gas (or even worse, coal) are the current approach to that problem, which is not working very well. The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.

myrmidon 1y ago
Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already at highest possible capacity factors (running 90% of the time). If they get undercut by renewables most of the time, there is simply no way they can stay competitive. Nuclear peaker plants are not ever gonna be a thing, because that makes no sense economically: High capex is the last thing you want for that usecase, and it implies that the economics for your plant have to stay decent for the next 30 years. Meanwhile batteries, solar and wind are still getting cheaper every year right now. This is the worst bet you could ever make as an investor. > nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers. This argument does not help nuclear power if the equivalent number of gas plants is still cheaper than a single nuclear reactor (and built much faster).
- weregiraffe 1y ago
  >Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already Because they are over-regulated. Why? Because of nucleophobia, which is fueled by fossil fuel producers.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    They are also built and run by public or quasi-public utilities. I don't think we have a lot of examples of the private sector building nuclear generating plants. Maybe they can do it better, when it's their own money on the line, and they don't have a legally granted monopoly protecting them.
    - two_handfuls 1y ago
      Privatizing electricity in California resulted in massive underinvestment and forest fires as a result of poor maintenance. Privatization only saves money if you ignore the price paid by surrounding communities. I would not like to see a fully private nuclear plant.
      - AtlasBarfed 1y ago
        Privatization of electricity hands a company a monopoly
      - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
        Depends on how you do it. The electrical supply and demand markets can be privatized and that works quite well with few ancillary services needed. Privatizing the grid is a shit show since it is a natural monopoly.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    That's simply untrue and focusing on it will continue to result in nuclear failure after nuclear failure. Nobody has some sort of proposal of a different regulatory scheme that is somehow cheaper. Even France, which built a ton decades ago, has completely failed for more than a decade at building. South Korea has been somewhat successful at building, but also sends execs to jail for faking parts approvals. But perhaps that would be cheap to fix. What has changed since the mid 20th century is that construction labor is far more expensive in comparison to other things that can be done with that labor. Construction productivity has remained roughly constant over time, as manufacturing and other productivity has gone through the roof. Nuclear is fundamentally a big construction project. SMRs weresypposed to be an attempt to make nuclear power a manufacturing project, not a construction project. But it turns out that construction projects like the BWRX300 are the only real SMRs that can be produced, after a decade of hype. Manufacturing SMRs like 747s is not any more real today than it was when the nuclear PR machine turned to it in the wake of the financial and construction disaster of the AP1000s at Summer and Vogtle. The real story of nuclear is the need for super cheap labor, and excellent high-tech construction capacity. These two requirements are at odds with each other, because in societies with high tech construction skills, labor quickly becomes expensive. Even places like China with lots of successful nuclear projects is only building a tiny tiny amount of nuclear when compared to their wind, solar, and batteries. China does everything, and they won't abandon nuclear completely because a nuclear workforce is essential for a country with superpower ambitions, but the nuclear power is there for the superpower ambitions, not the electricity generation.
Tade0 1y ago
> which is not working very well It's actually working great. Gas peakers are expensive to run, but not nearly as expensive and time consuming to deploy as nuclear - you could deploy a solar installation with matching gas capacity and still spend less and have it years earlier than the least expensive, fastest deploying nuclear power plant. On top of that storage has been undercutting gas lately in terms of cost - especially now that it scaled up. That is all affecting the economics of nuclear.
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Combined storage and solar/wind will probably drop under combined cycle gas in a couple years, certainly it will for China.
ViewTrick1002 1y ago
> The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers. This does not align with reality. Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production. What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed. Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
- seec 1y ago
  You should check your sources. Very often the reverse is actually true. The recent years are not really representative because a lot of reactors were put on hold waiting for repairs and improvement. There is also the fact that France added millions of people while not building new nuclear capacities, so of course at some point there is going to be overload without renewed investment. Bug people like seems to want to put more money on renewable so that we can import even more electricity from Germany's coal plants (that makes up to 40% of their electricity generation in the winter when the wind is nowhere to be found). I'm very curious where you find your data, because it's not at all what I have been able to get. If there is some source that clearly shows renewable superiority in the winter, I would really like to see it. To be self-sufficient without coal, Germany needs to install 150GW of wind power still, and at current rate it will take at least 10 years. But I'm very curious what is their solution for when they get no wind for weeks on end, like it has happened recently. So far it seems to be, fire up the coal plant and take the cheap nuclear from your neighbor while posturing and virtue signaling about your superiority of not using nuclear.
ethagknight 1y ago
Seems like people confuse the old school "gas peakers" which are basically just simple generators burning gasoline or diesel designed to be used intermittently, and advanced combined cycle natural gas, which are incredibly efficient. Natural Gas is super cheap in many markets, and it appears to be common theory that markets with limited natural gas simply haven't been explored sufficiently due to other fuels being cheaper (coal). ACC Natural Gas + Solar/Wind + Batteries + actively priced load shedding market seems like a tremendous quartet.
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Yes it's super cheap because there isn't carbon taxes. In the US it is also super cheap because it is a byproduct of our fracking in The Dakotas.
  - ethagknight 1y ago
    It's a byproduct of a lot of oil production while also having its own reserves. My office used to look at an oil refinery that was miles away, and they were just burning the natural gas off in a huge plume, not worth trying to capture and combust for production. The fracking is also in Arkansas and Texas and many other states. An amazing amount of gas continues to be discovered. I am not a geologist but assume that Australia could dedicate resources to explore fracking gas reserves and would come up with quite bit. sidebar, but I just realized that Australia doesnt really have mountains to speak of. Tallest mountain is around the elevation of the typical Colorado Rockies valley towns. Australia may not have the 'cap traps' required to retain large amounts of gas in the various layers going down under ground.

PaulHoule 1y ago

We're not seeing a lot of realistic numbers published for the cost of a 100% renewables + storage grid because there is the X factor of "How many outages can you tolerate?" Storage over a 24 hour period is one thing, the economics don't look difficult at all. In places like Upstate NY, however, usable insolation can vary by a factor of 3x between summer and winter. You can overbuild solar panels by 3x or you can add a few months of storage which costs a lot more than a few hours or days worth of storage. There is also the issue of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute It would be great to have a backup energy source which is fully and economically dispatchable and environmentally benign but it's not there. I suspect there is some point of required reliability where adding nuclear baseload makes the grid more reliable economically compared to building months worth of storage. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032123010158 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212... also nuclear power plants are capable of load-following https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-load-following-e.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo... it's just not an optimal use of the capital. The Gates foundation has been researching LMFBRs that use thermal batteries to improve load following abilities. You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios. The real criticism of nuclear at this point in time is that any new plants are a decade out. It's a reason to start early, but no matter how you slice when the next NPP goes online in the US the amount of solar and wind added to the grid between here and now will dwarf it.

ViewTrick1002 1y ago
> You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios. I think you are missing far simpler solutions for what is in terms of TWh needed a tiny problem. Why not just use biofuels, synfuels or hydrogen? Whatever the aviation and the maritime shipping industries settles on since they are unable to in the foreseeable future decarbonize with batteries. The US today produces enough ethanol for gas blending to run the entire grid for 16 days without help. As we switch to BEVs it is trivial to repurpose that for the grid, while also ensuring that the inputs decarbonize as well.