5 ms·

Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. In the case of Spain, it is cheaper to build more energy lines with Morocco and battery s

by Chyzwar 7mo ago

Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. In the case of Spain, it is cheaper to build more energy lines with Morocco and battery storage than to use nuclear. Spain already has some of the cheapest energy in Europe thanks to renewables. In the case of Germany, nuclear makes sense, but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there.

samuel 7mo ago
It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments. Without them, closing power plants (of any kind) is, IMO, nonsensical. Ironically, Spain has plenty of Uranium, but there is an environmental law that doesn't allow its mining. https://alpoma.medium.com/uranium-in-spain-8ef975763257 https://alpoma.medium.com/uranium-in-spain-8ef975763257 This country is crazy.
- kuerbel 7mo ago
  No it's not. Nuclear plants are not compatible with climate change. Spain and it's rivers will be too warm to cool them down: https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-shut-down-nuclear-power-plants-amid-scorching-heatwave https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
  - Ekaros 7mo ago
    Well only to certain point. When the rivers will naturally be too hot. You can start making them even hotter and it does not matter anymore.
  - surfaceofthesun 7mo ago
    That may require retrofitting the plants to use open loop cooling instead of closed loop. That would increase water consumption.
- tfourb 7mo ago
  But doesn't nuclear power present a complication when designing a power grid for renewable energy? It is basically very expensive caseload energy that needs permanent demand, when the entire proposition of a renewable-focused grid is that you manage a non-certain production with dynamic demand (via batteries and price-sensitive usage).
  - modo_mario 7mo ago
    Nuclear production doesn't react in seconds but it doesn't need permanent demand as far as I know? What makes you think that?
    - tfourb 7mo ago
      A nuclear reactor can load-follow (increase or decrease their output) by up to 5% of their rated capacity per minute in normal operation: https://snetp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SNETP-Factsheet-7-Load-following-capabilities-of-nuclear-power-plants.pdf https://snetp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SNETP-Factsheet-... For power plants, this is glacial. A power grid has to balanced perfectly on a sub-second level. Also, you can only do this down to about 50% of rated capacity. Below that you have to switch it off completely. If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart. A cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop generation much faster than nuclear plants will ever be able to follow (by increasing generation). So if you want to have a substantial share of renewable generation (which, remember, is the cheap stuff), you can't have more than a token nuclear capacity, because you need to invest the money you might want to spend on nuclear on battery and hydro storage. The other aspect is the economics of nuclear itself. Nuclear power plants are the most capital intensive generation capacity you can build. Even when driving them at the maximum of their rated capacity, the have a levelized cost of electricity several times that of PV and Wind per kwh. Requiring routine load following for nuclear would basically guarantee that no one ever builds a nuclear reactor again. There are reasons to build new nuclear, but it's not cheap/reliable power generation. You build it to have access to a nuclear industrial base, as well as the research and professional community to run a military nuclear program. Or you actually succeed in creating a Small Modular Reactor, which might be suitable for niche applications (i.e. power isolated communities in extreme remote locations). Or you are simply fascinated by the technology and want to invest a ton of money on the off chance that it will produce some unforeseen technological breakthrough (though arguably you'd do better with investing in nuclear fusion from my limited understanding of the research).
- yayachiken 7mo ago
  > It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments. The outage in spain had multiple complex causes. While the grid had a rather routine instability/oscillation on-going during time of the incident, the actual point-of-no-return was completely non-technical: Prices crossed into the negatives, which caused generation to drop by hundreds of megawatts and load to increase likewise within a minute (!) because the price acted as a non-technical synchronized drop-off signal for the grid. In grids where the price action is not forwarded directly to the generators and consumers there would be no incentive to suddenly drop off decentralized generation. So for example in Germany a black-out would not happen like this. You can download the full ENTSO-E report here: https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-iberian-blackout/#Publications_&_Documents https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-ib... (See page 10 for a broad incident timeline) Unfortunately, to have an informed opinion, you pretty much have to read all these pages, because the situation is just so complex. Otherwise, you just fall for agenda pushing from all sides.
  - phatfish 7mo ago
    Yup, its interesting that a community supposedly of "engineers" are happy to claim expert knowledge of domains in which they have no experience.
    - yayachiken 7mo ago
      That being said, I was apparently also under the impression of outdated or just plain wrong information. While the report I listed mentions the sudden loss of decentralized generation as starting point of the blackout, and also specifically mentions small-scale rooftop PV, it says that the cause for that sudden synchronized drop-off is actually unknown.
      - robocat 7mo ago
        You can't get an "informed opinion" by reading crap like that report. The Spanish systems have systematic design failures for stability and electricity market design. Working out the political failures that led to the design failures is much harder. Consultancies like https://www.nera.com/capabilities/power--utilities--and-renewables-.html https://www.nera.com/capabilities/power--utilities--and-rene... specialize in advising about electricity networks and market design. Only those working closely in that profession have any knowledge of the underlying causes. Most everyone else (including this comment) is different levels of ignorance and cluelessness. Edit E.g. Crap quote from the report "but no significant oscillations with amplitudes above 20 mHz". The rest of it is about that level from what I could tell.
- ViewTrick1002 7mo ago
  Please tell me how renewables cause a lack of reactive power. Which was the source of the Iberian blackout. All reasonable grids already force renewables to handle reactive power if they want to connect, like they do for all electricity generation. It is a trivial expense, but still an expense so no one does it unless forced.
  - adrian_b 7mo ago
    In another thread that comments the report it was said that most inverters used in Spain for the renewable energy sources do not implement a control policy to generate an adequate reactive power to compensate the phase fluctuations of the grid, like a synchronous electromechanical generator would do. The inverters only disconnected from the grid when the frequency went outside the permitted range. Ensuring that the inverters produce compensating reactive power would have been easy to do, but it was not done simply because there were no regulations that requested this. Obviously, as a consequence of the report, this is likely to change.
    - ViewTrick1002 7mo ago
      Yeah, been trivial forever. In the US it became a requirement for new all utility scale non-synchronous generators a decade ago. And then a bunch of statewide rules for rooftop solar as well. https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-moves-implement-fast-act-provisions-critical-infrastructure-information https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-moves-implement-f...
ViewTrick1002 7mo ago
Existing nuclear power is acceptably cheap. For France the longterm LCOE for running their fleet to EOL is €60 per MWh. The problem is new built nuclear power which costs €180-240 per MWh excluding insurance, backup, final waste disposal etc. It also won't be online until the 2040s meaning it is entirely irrelevant as as solution to anything on a time scope not on the level of decades.
- schnitzelstoat 7mo ago
  Yeah, but that reminds me of Nick Clegg in the UK in 2010 saying: > By the most optimistic scenarios... there's no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022. So it's just not even an answer Well, now we are in 2026, and we still have the same problem.
  - ViewTrick1002 7mo ago
    The UK has had complete political unity on building new nuclear power since 2006. That tells you the timelines. For Hinkley Point C with the latest estimate being the first reactor online (not commercially operational) in 2030 that gives a "planning to operation" time of 24 years. For Sizewell C EDF are refusing to take on any semblence of a fixed price contract and they are instead going with a guaranteed profit pay as you go model. Where ratepayers handout enormous sums today to hopefully get something in return in the 2040s.
elil17 7mo ago
Even if it didn't make sense to build new nuclear, that doesn't mean it makes sense to shut of existing nuclear.
yodelshady 7mo ago
Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today. It is NOT cheap, it is cheap for sellers, because they account on the basis of a MWh being equally useful all the time. It isn't. There are TWh-scale shortfalls in winter because, and a medieval peasant understood this, a shortage of ambient energy is what winter is, and it's worth paying energy penny you have to avoid its worst effects. Business is not better. I've worked in the chemicals industry, and conferences in Europe have been like a wake for the last decade. I've overseen large orders go to China because, I could not give a shit how much it cost, the European green alternative - for delivery within Europe - could not guarantee timeframes, due to reliance on renewables. The Chinese shipped product could. That is your "cheap". You can buy uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mali, Canada, US, Australia, or the sea if you really want to, all of those have large reserves, and store multiple years' worth more or less by accident, modern industrial processes actually struggle to make sense at the low volumes nuclear requires. Bringing that up as a problem is just not honest.
- mrks_hy 7mo ago
  Can you please source and explain your claims? They don't match my understanding. For example: > Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today. Do you mean cost per country (not levelized?)? Even then, UK energy is not the most expensive.
  - flir 7mo ago
    They can't (because LCoE is a per-project or per-technology measure, not a grid-wide measure, for a start). UK energy is expensive because we have gas-linked wholesale pricing. That's nothing to do with the true cost of renewables. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're being disingenuous. (Gas-linked pricing was implemented for sensible reasons, but I don't see how it continues to be tenable today).
    - mrks_hy 7mo ago
modo_mario 7mo ago
>Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. With the storage for shitty winter weeks? What's the source on that one? Mind you I love solar since i'd like to go relatively off grid one day but i've heard too much bullshit around this. >but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there. There's a lot of locations from my understanding and a lot more that don't produce anything simply because Russia and Kazakhstan and such don't make it worthwile. It's a tiny share of the cost of production in the end.
- Leherenn 7mo ago
  I believe the standard is 4h of storage.
- Chyzwar 7mo ago
  Russia and Kazakhstan control almost 50% of global production and enrichment of uranium. Even today 17% EU supply come from Russia. Uranium mining is not pretty, read about "in situ leaching" mining.
  - leonidasrup 7mo ago
    Kazakhstan does uranium mining but doesn't do uranium enrichment. Other big uranium mining countries, which don't do uranium enrichment, are: Namibia, Canada, Australia, Uzbekistan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Uranium_Mining_Production_2021.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Uranium_Mining_Prod... "The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Global_enrichment_facilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Global_enrich... Uranium enrichment is military and therefor politically very sensitive process.
remarkEon 7mo ago
The Americans can give Germany all the fuel they’d ever need. If you go solar, you are trading one supply chain dependency for another. France’s strategy is, once again, completely and totally vindicated.
UltraSane 7mo ago
LCOE for 24/7 reliable solar electricity is a LOT higher than $60
NoLinkToMe 7mo ago
> Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. In the case of Spain, it is cheaper to build more energy lines with Morocco and battery storage than to use nuclear. But keeping nuclear open is an entirely different thing than building out more nuclear. OP was talking about the former, you about the latter. Otherwise agreed on your point.

by Chyzwar 7mo ago

samuel 7mo ago

It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments. Without them, closing power plants (of any kind) is, IMO, nonsensical. Ironically, Spain has plenty of Uranium, but there is an environmental law that doesn't allow its mining. https://alpoma.medium.com/uranium-in-spain-8ef975763257 https://alpoma.medium.com/uranium-in-spain-8ef975763257 This country is crazy.

kuerbel 7mo ago
No it's not. Nuclear plants are not compatible with climate change. Spain and it's rivers will be too warm to cool them down: https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-shut-down-nuclear-power-plants-amid-scorching-heatwave https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
- Ekaros 7mo ago
  Well only to certain point. When the rivers will naturally be too hot. You can start making them even hotter and it does not matter anymore.
- surfaceofthesun 7mo ago
  That may require retrofitting the plants to use open loop cooling instead of closed loop. That would increase water consumption.
tfourb 7mo ago
But doesn't nuclear power present a complication when designing a power grid for renewable energy? It is basically very expensive caseload energy that needs permanent demand, when the entire proposition of a renewable-focused grid is that you manage a non-certain production with dynamic demand (via batteries and price-sensitive usage).
- modo_mario 7mo ago
  Nuclear production doesn't react in seconds but it doesn't need permanent demand as far as I know? What makes you think that?
  - tfourb 7mo ago
    A nuclear reactor can load-follow (increase or decrease their output) by up to 5% of their rated capacity per minute in normal operation: https://snetp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SNETP-Factsheet-7-Load-following-capabilities-of-nuclear-power-plants.pdf https://snetp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SNETP-Factsheet-... For power plants, this is glacial. A power grid has to balanced perfectly on a sub-second level. Also, you can only do this down to about 50% of rated capacity. Below that you have to switch it off completely. If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart. A cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop generation much faster than nuclear plants will ever be able to follow (by increasing generation). So if you want to have a substantial share of renewable generation (which, remember, is the cheap stuff), you can't have more than a token nuclear capacity, because you need to invest the money you might want to spend on nuclear on battery and hydro storage. The other aspect is the economics of nuclear itself. Nuclear power plants are the most capital intensive generation capacity you can build. Even when driving them at the maximum of their rated capacity, the have a levelized cost of electricity several times that of PV and Wind per kwh. Requiring routine load following for nuclear would basically guarantee that no one ever builds a nuclear reactor again. There are reasons to build new nuclear, but it's not cheap/reliable power generation. You build it to have access to a nuclear industrial base, as well as the research and professional community to run a military nuclear program. Or you actually succeed in creating a Small Modular Reactor, which might be suitable for niche applications (i.e. power isolated communities in extreme remote locations). Or you are simply fascinated by the technology and want to invest a ton of money on the off chance that it will produce some unforeseen technological breakthrough (though arguably you'd do better with investing in nuclear fusion from my limited understanding of the research).
yayachiken 7mo ago
> It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments. The outage in spain had multiple complex causes. While the grid had a rather routine instability/oscillation on-going during time of the incident, the actual point-of-no-return was completely non-technical: Prices crossed into the negatives, which caused generation to drop by hundreds of megawatts and load to increase likewise within a minute (!) because the price acted as a non-technical synchronized drop-off signal for the grid. In grids where the price action is not forwarded directly to the generators and consumers there would be no incentive to suddenly drop off decentralized generation. So for example in Germany a black-out would not happen like this. You can download the full ENTSO-E report here: https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-iberian-blackout/#Publications_&_Documents https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-ib... (See page 10 for a broad incident timeline) Unfortunately, to have an informed opinion, you pretty much have to read all these pages, because the situation is just so complex. Otherwise, you just fall for agenda pushing from all sides.
- phatfish 7mo ago
  Yup, its interesting that a community supposedly of "engineers" are happy to claim expert knowledge of domains in which they have no experience.
  - yayachiken 7mo ago
    That being said, I was apparently also under the impression of outdated or just plain wrong information. While the report I listed mentions the sudden loss of decentralized generation as starting point of the blackout, and also specifically mentions small-scale rooftop PV, it says that the cause for that sudden synchronized drop-off is actually unknown.
    - robocat 7mo ago
      You can't get an "informed opinion" by reading crap like that report. The Spanish systems have systematic design failures for stability and electricity market design. Working out the political failures that led to the design failures is much harder. Consultancies like https://www.nera.com/capabilities/power--utilities--and-renewables-.html https://www.nera.com/capabilities/power--utilities--and-rene... specialize in advising about electricity networks and market design. Only those working closely in that profession have any knowledge of the underlying causes. Most everyone else (including this comment) is different levels of ignorance and cluelessness. Edit E.g. Crap quote from the report "but no significant oscillations with amplitudes above 20 mHz". The rest of it is about that level from what I could tell.
ViewTrick1002 7mo ago
Please tell me how renewables cause a lack of reactive power. Which was the source of the Iberian blackout. All reasonable grids already force renewables to handle reactive power if they want to connect, like they do for all electricity generation. It is a trivial expense, but still an expense so no one does it unless forced.
- adrian_b 7mo ago
  In another thread that comments the report it was said that most inverters used in Spain for the renewable energy sources do not implement a control policy to generate an adequate reactive power to compensate the phase fluctuations of the grid, like a synchronous electromechanical generator would do. The inverters only disconnected from the grid when the frequency went outside the permitted range. Ensuring that the inverters produce compensating reactive power would have been easy to do, but it was not done simply because there were no regulations that requested this. Obviously, as a consequence of the report, this is likely to change.
  - ViewTrick1002 7mo ago
    Yeah, been trivial forever. In the US it became a requirement for new all utility scale non-synchronous generators a decade ago. And then a bunch of statewide rules for rooftop solar as well. https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-moves-implement-fast-act-provisions-critical-infrastructure-information https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-moves-implement-f...

ViewTrick1002 7mo ago

Existing nuclear power is acceptably cheap. For France the longterm LCOE for running their fleet to EOL is €60 per MWh. The problem is new built nuclear power which costs €180-240 per MWh excluding insurance, backup, final waste disposal etc. It also won't be online until the 2040s meaning it is entirely irrelevant as as solution to anything on a time scope not on the level of decades.

schnitzelstoat 7mo ago
Yeah, but that reminds me of Nick Clegg in the UK in 2010 saying: > By the most optimistic scenarios... there's no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022. So it's just not even an answer Well, now we are in 2026, and we still have the same problem.
- ViewTrick1002 7mo ago
  The UK has had complete political unity on building new nuclear power since 2006. That tells you the timelines. For Hinkley Point C with the latest estimate being the first reactor online (not commercially operational) in 2030 that gives a "planning to operation" time of 24 years. For Sizewell C EDF are refusing to take on any semblence of a fixed price contract and they are instead going with a guaranteed profit pay as you go model. Where ratepayers handout enormous sums today to hopefully get something in return in the 2040s.

elil17 7mo ago

Even if it didn't make sense to build new nuclear, that doesn't mean it makes sense to shut of existing nuclear.

yodelshady 7mo ago

Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today. It is NOT cheap, it is cheap for sellers, because they account on the basis of a MWh being equally useful all the time. It isn't. There are TWh-scale shortfalls in winter because, and a medieval peasant understood this, a shortage of ambient energy is what winter is, and it's worth paying energy penny you have to avoid its worst effects. Business is not better. I've worked in the chemicals industry, and conferences in Europe have been like a wake for the last decade. I've overseen large orders go to China because, I could not give a shit how much it cost, the European green alternative - for delivery within Europe - could not guarantee timeframes, due to reliance on renewables. The Chinese shipped product could. That is your "cheap". You can buy uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mali, Canada, US, Australia, or the sea if you really want to, all of those have large reserves, and store multiple years' worth more or less by accident, modern industrial processes actually struggle to make sense at the low volumes nuclear requires. Bringing that up as a problem is just not honest.

mrks_hy 7mo ago
Can you please source and explain your claims? They don't match my understanding. For example: > Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today. Do you mean cost per country (not levelized?)? Even then, UK energy is not the most expensive.
- flir 7mo ago
  They can't (because LCoE is a per-project or per-technology measure, not a grid-wide measure, for a start). UK energy is expensive because we have gas-linked wholesale pricing. That's nothing to do with the true cost of renewables. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're being disingenuous. (Gas-linked pricing was implemented for sensible reasons, but I don't see how it continues to be tenable today).
  - mrks_hy 7mo ago

modo_mario 7mo ago

>Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. With the storage for shitty winter weeks? What's the source on that one? Mind you I love solar since i'd like to go relatively off grid one day but i've heard too much bullshit around this. >but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there. There's a lot of locations from my understanding and a lot more that don't produce anything simply because Russia and Kazakhstan and such don't make it worthwile. It's a tiny share of the cost of production in the end.

Leherenn 7mo ago
I believe the standard is 4h of storage.
Chyzwar 7mo ago
Russia and Kazakhstan control almost 50% of global production and enrichment of uranium. Even today 17% EU supply come from Russia. Uranium mining is not pretty, read about "in situ leaching" mining.
- leonidasrup 7mo ago
  Kazakhstan does uranium mining but doesn't do uranium enrichment. Other big uranium mining countries, which don't do uranium enrichment, are: Namibia, Canada, Australia, Uzbekistan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Uranium_Mining_Production_2021.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Uranium_Mining_Prod... "The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Global_enrichment_facilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Global_enrich... Uranium enrichment is military and therefor politically very sensitive process.

remarkEon 7mo ago

The Americans can give Germany all the fuel they’d ever need. If you go solar, you are trading one supply chain dependency for another. France’s strategy is, once again, completely and totally vindicated.

UltraSane 7mo ago

LCOE for 24/7 reliable solar electricity is a LOT higher than $60

NoLinkToMe 7mo ago

> Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. In the case of Spain, it is cheaper to build more energy lines with Morocco and battery storage than to use nuclear. But keeping nuclear open is an entirely different thing than building out more nuclear. OP was talking about the former, you about the latter. Otherwise agreed on your point.