5 ms·

So far it was either the cheapest or the safest. Also, solar is now both cheaper and safer.

pzo 1y ago
but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany). And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
- kubav027 1y ago
  During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
  - Luc 1y ago
    Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.
  - ukblewis 1y ago
    I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me
- ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  60% of that energy is lost as waste heat and doesn't need replaced as we decarbonise and electrify. For already developed nations predictions are for electricity to double but energy use to halve at the same time as they electrify end uses.
  - pzo 1y ago
    Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste. I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail
    - Heliosmaster 1y ago
      Apart from cities with crazy density, you underestimate how much solar we could put in the city outskirts, and it would be fine. We have already the power lines anyway to bring electricity from power plants that are far from those apartments you mention.
      - pzo 1y ago
        You would have to either cut forrest and trees or remove farm fields. I'm looking at my home town and I really don't see any barren land around many cities in Poland. I would rather they use those city outskirts land for new real estate that is lacking to deflate the bubble.
        biaachmonkie 1y ago
        Building roofs, parking lots, streets, rail tracks, etc.. are all spaces that could have a canopy installed overhead and solar panels providing power and shading. As solar panels continue to lower in cost the sides of buildings, fences, etc.. There are lots of opportunities to install solar panels in a crowded city.
- badgersnake 1y ago
  Existing nuclear, fine but new nuclear isn’t going to work, it takes way too long to build. Solar is just plug in and go.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Yes, but all that can be taken into account in the analysis, and renewables and storage have become so cheap they're now the superior option. Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. I wonder if some of the reactionary takes trying to promote nuclear are a consequence of that. I think you're average far right type is not going to be comfortable living in a relative energy ghetto.
  - pzo 1y ago
    > Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      I was talking about the situation once fossil fuels are no longer used ("in a renewable powered world" was the relevant phrase). We are not yet in that situation, so your observation there is beside the point.
    - ZeroGravitas 1y ago
      Global solar potential atlas: https://globalsolaratlas.info/ https://globalsolaratlas.info/ Solar is the current cheapest and will be the biggest source of electricity in 2033 and continue to accelerate away from others for the rest of the century. Offshore wind helps their situation somewhat.
- sdfssdf 1y ago
  A look at destatis tells me something else for Germany (in 2024): Solar has a share of 15 %, and wind 28 %. In total 57 % of the produced energy comes from renewable sources. (https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energie/_Grafik/_Interaktiv/bruttostromerzeugung-energietraeger.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...)
  - tomatocracy 1y ago
    I think you're looking at electricity here, not energy. Energy is much more than electricity.
  - ZeroGravitas 1y ago
    They are trying to switch the conversation from electricity where renewables are making unmistakably swift progress, to all energy (e.g. gas for heat in homes and factories and oil for cars and trucks). They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage. In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation. An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.
    - newyankee 1y ago
      I really want to see a heat pump being used to make a real world high temperature process more efficient and cut natural gas use by 40% or so, this might destroy the latest talking point
      - pzo 1y ago
        the problem with heat pump is require quite well isolated building to make it efficient. Also after talking with a friend he had to change all radiators in his parents home since it didn't work well with previous old one he had. I'm also not sure if heat pump is a solution for multifamily apartments.
- zekrioca 1y ago
  Have you ever heard of batteries?
  - ackfoobar 1y ago
    Have you done the math of how insufficient battery tech is, if we are to go 100% renewable? I'm so tired of renewable proponents just use the thought terminating cliche "BATTERIES!" when intermittency is brought up.
    - zekrioca 1y ago
      https://www.tesla.com/megapack https://www.tesla.com/megapack
      - ackfoobar 1y ago
        Asked for numbers, got a link. Let's see. They can manufacture 80 GWh a year. To get through dunkelflaute with moderate renewable percentage we need tens of TWh. Not to belittle Tesla, but that's 3 orders of magnitude difference. Are you changing your mind or can you give me numbers to change mine?
    - latentsea 1y ago
      Even if you can't get to 100%, it would still make sense to strive for as large a % of renewables as you could achieve. So, that's going to involve batteries necessarily. For context I work at a company in Japan working on this problem. The entire reason the company exists is Japan's energy policy in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Batteries are severely underutilized in Japan at this point in time, so we can at least vastly improve on where we are.
      - ackfoobar 1y ago
        My question is a few math operations away from "how much batteries capacity can we deploy to support how much % of renewables in the short-medium term, while still having a stable grid". My "100%" phrasing was sloppy, no need to index too much on it. Since you're in the industry, maybe you can answer this question and change my mind.
yodsanklai 1y ago
> solar is now both cheaper and safer. apples and oranges
nilslindemann 1y ago
Yep, the data suggests that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
- tomatocracy 1y ago
  This doesn't measure the cost of providing dispatchable electricity though. If I want 1MWh of electricity at night provided by solar, it's going to cost more than solar's LCoE because I will also need to pay for a way to store and dispatch it.
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    Which again does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target. And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state. Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh. Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants. Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant-in-extraordinary-survival-experiment/104461504 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant... You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market. Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
    - tomatocracy 1y ago
      Solar has this problem to a much greater extent though. If you have a market where solar is >100% of demand during the day then it will be dispatching at or below $0/MWh for almost all of its life. But of course the marginal market is not the whole story. In reality solar largely receives effectively fixed prices in most markets (via CfDs or PPAs). Nuclear does the same and can also take capacity payments and sell into flexibility markets where those exist.
quentindemetz 1y ago
Not at night
UltraSane 1y ago
Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.

pzo 1y ago

but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany). And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

kubav027 1y ago
During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
- Luc 1y ago
  Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.
- ukblewis 1y ago
  I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me
ZeroGravitas 1y ago
60% of that energy is lost as waste heat and doesn't need replaced as we decarbonise and electrify. For already developed nations predictions are for electricity to double but energy use to halve at the same time as they electrify end uses.
- pzo 1y ago
  Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste. I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail
  - Heliosmaster 1y ago
    Apart from cities with crazy density, you underestimate how much solar we could put in the city outskirts, and it would be fine. We have already the power lines anyway to bring electricity from power plants that are far from those apartments you mention.
    - pzo 1y ago
      You would have to either cut forrest and trees or remove farm fields. I'm looking at my home town and I really don't see any barren land around many cities in Poland. I would rather they use those city outskirts land for new real estate that is lacking to deflate the bubble.
      - biaachmonkie 1y ago
        Building roofs, parking lots, streets, rail tracks, etc.. are all spaces that could have a canopy installed overhead and solar panels providing power and shading. As solar panels continue to lower in cost the sides of buildings, fences, etc.. There are lots of opportunities to install solar panels in a crowded city.
badgersnake 1y ago
Existing nuclear, fine but new nuclear isn’t going to work, it takes way too long to build. Solar is just plug in and go.
pfdietz 1y ago
Yes, but all that can be taken into account in the analysis, and renewables and storage have become so cheap they're now the superior option. Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. I wonder if some of the reactionary takes trying to promote nuclear are a consequence of that. I think you're average far right type is not going to be comfortable living in a relative energy ghetto.
- pzo 1y ago
  > Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    I was talking about the situation once fossil fuels are no longer used ("in a renewable powered world" was the relevant phrase). We are not yet in that situation, so your observation there is beside the point.
  - ZeroGravitas 1y ago
    Global solar potential atlas: https://globalsolaratlas.info/ https://globalsolaratlas.info/ Solar is the current cheapest and will be the biggest source of electricity in 2033 and continue to accelerate away from others for the rest of the century. Offshore wind helps their situation somewhat.
sdfssdf 1y ago
A look at destatis tells me something else for Germany (in 2024): Solar has a share of 15 %, and wind 28 %. In total 57 % of the produced energy comes from renewable sources. (https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energie/_Grafik/_Interaktiv/bruttostromerzeugung-energietraeger.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...)
- tomatocracy 1y ago
  I think you're looking at electricity here, not energy. Energy is much more than electricity.
- ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  They are trying to switch the conversation from electricity where renewables are making unmistakably swift progress, to all energy (e.g. gas for heat in homes and factories and oil for cars and trucks). They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage. In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation. An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.
  - newyankee 1y ago
    I really want to see a heat pump being used to make a real world high temperature process more efficient and cut natural gas use by 40% or so, this might destroy the latest talking point
    - pzo 1y ago
      the problem with heat pump is require quite well isolated building to make it efficient. Also after talking with a friend he had to change all radiators in his parents home since it didn't work well with previous old one he had. I'm also not sure if heat pump is a solution for multifamily apartments.
zekrioca 1y ago
Have you ever heard of batteries?
- ackfoobar 1y ago
  Have you done the math of how insufficient battery tech is, if we are to go 100% renewable? I'm so tired of renewable proponents just use the thought terminating cliche "BATTERIES!" when intermittency is brought up.
  - zekrioca 1y ago
    https://www.tesla.com/megapack https://www.tesla.com/megapack
    - ackfoobar 1y ago
      Asked for numbers, got a link. Let's see. They can manufacture 80 GWh a year. To get through dunkelflaute with moderate renewable percentage we need tens of TWh. Not to belittle Tesla, but that's 3 orders of magnitude difference. Are you changing your mind or can you give me numbers to change mine?
  - latentsea 1y ago
    Even if you can't get to 100%, it would still make sense to strive for as large a % of renewables as you could achieve. So, that's going to involve batteries necessarily. For context I work at a company in Japan working on this problem. The entire reason the company exists is Japan's energy policy in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Batteries are severely underutilized in Japan at this point in time, so we can at least vastly improve on where we are.
    - ackfoobar 1y ago
      My question is a few math operations away from "how much batteries capacity can we deploy to support how much % of renewables in the short-medium term, while still having a stable grid". My "100%" phrasing was sloppy, no need to index too much on it. Since you're in the industry, maybe you can answer this question and change my mind.

yodsanklai 1y ago

> solar is now both cheaper and safer. apples and oranges

nilslindemann 1y ago

Yep, the data suggests that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

tomatocracy 1y ago
This doesn't measure the cost of providing dispatchable electricity though. If I want 1MWh of electricity at night provided by solar, it's going to cost more than solar's LCoE because I will also need to pay for a way to store and dispatch it.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  Which again does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target. And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state. Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh. Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants. Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant-in-extraordinary-survival-experiment/104461504 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant... You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market. Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
  - tomatocracy 1y ago
    Solar has this problem to a much greater extent though. If you have a market where solar is >100% of demand during the day then it will be dispatching at or below $0/MWh for almost all of its life. But of course the marginal market is not the whole story. In reality solar largely receives effectively fixed prices in most markets (via CfDs or PPAs). Nuclear does the same and can also take capacity payments and sell into flexibility markets where those exist.

quentindemetz 1y ago

Not at night

UltraSane 1y ago

Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.