Comment by rndgermandude | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rndgermandude | Hacker News Reader

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Your first two claims are mostly correct.

Your third claim is utterly wrong. And it's 2 trillion, of course, over a period of 20 years, 2011 - 2030, an estimate from 2012 that Siemens made. Let's assume for a second that the (widely debunked) 2 trillion the former Siemens CEO/nuclear lobby president literally pulled out of his ass in 2012 is reality. Replacing those 2 trillion in renewable with nuclear for USD 40 billion? Germany is spending roughly EUR 10 billion a year on nuclear currently. If we replaced all nuclear stations with with new fancy "cheaper" ones we'd still be at EUR 7 billion. Let's assume we tripled the capacity to roughly 35% of total production (from now less than 12%), that's 21 billion a year. So EUR 420 billion over 20 years. So the factor would be 4x for renewables (given the worst estimate published by a guy in 2012 who happened to be the president of the main nuclear lobby group at the time) vs nuclear (the cheapest estimate I could come up). You're an order of magnitude off at least and that is when you believe the Siemens numbers.

Regarding your 4th claim about negative price: wrong conclusion. Negative prices mean an oversupply of generated power. The eventual solution is not to subsidize producers, but to refine the system not to produce such large oversupply in the first place, while still making sure that a sudden drop in supply (because e.g. as a rather blunt example it starts raining and PV output goes down) can be managed.

I am not pretending to have exact numbers but we should have some orders of magnitude in our heads.

Let's pretend that our electricity is running fully in nuclear wrt. fully in wind turbines/PV: load factor is around 0.7/0.8 (against 0.2) so costs increase by x3-4, life expectancy is 60-80 y against 20-30 years (x2-3), nuclear does not require a new electric grid, whereas renewable energies does (cost ~x1.5), nuclear works better with a low storage (10%) whereas PV/WT want 50-60% of storage (cost x2-4) and cost of building/recycling for a kwh is around 3-5k€ against 1-1.5k€ for WT (idk for PV) (cost %2-4). At the end of the day, the capex/kWh is indeed one order of magnitude higher for WT/PV than for nuclear. I am not pretending those numbers are exact but I think it reflects the order of magnitude.

For the 4th claim, the issue is that prices are much lower that what they were supposed to be, and that is why, the field will need to be heavily subsidized for a long term.

What I support, it is not to globally spending less money into energy transition. I really hope governments will spend much more than nowadays. But, I just hope we focus on reducing our economical dependency on fuels/coals to preserve a bit of our current comfort while not killing every year several millions of people with fine particles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents).

Give me USD 2 trillions, and I will 1) ban coal generated electricity, 2) ban any vehicles that consume more than 2L/100 km, 3) insulate any existing buildings (and not only new buildings as our policy makers do, since old buildings stay for roughly 100 years), 4) subsidy heavily heat pomp. But I will certainly not close any nuclear power plants.

I know it is almost impossible to ask such requests to Europeans, but this is the only plausible solutions I have heard of.

a nuclear site would never be cheaper than solar energy. I mean in the next 20-40 years it might have been cheaper. unfortunatly the site needs to be cleaned up in a process that costs multiple billions of euro and the storage for the factory is still not ready for the next thousands of years and is also really costly in germany.

in germany solar energy has two problems:

- trash (there is no long term storage and there probably will never be one that can sustain 1000+ years)

- cleanup of land (germany is small and has a lot of people we need to use our space without wasting it)

>load factor is around 0.7/0.8 (against 0.2) so costs increase by x3-4

This is a double-red herring. First load factors do not correlate with cost, and second comparing the load factor of a nuclear power plant to a PV system is comparing apples with... not even oranges... more like comparing apples with seahorses. The interesting number would be: how much money did I have to put into that thing divided by how much MWh can I get out of a thing.

>life expectancy is 60-80 y against 20-30 years (x2-3)

Next red herring. If I buy a pair of shoes that last me 10 years but costs 200 bucks, that's 20 bucks/year. If I buy a pair of shoes that costs me 10 bucks and lasts one year, well, 10 bucks/year. Recycling/trashing a pair of shoes adds another 5 EUR/pair, so the cheap pair is 15/year and the expensive one is 20.5 EUR/year. The 10x higher life expectancy by itself does not mean shit to the annual cost.

The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for nuclear in France (who are supposed to be doing nuclear really well) was 50 EUR/MWh in 2017, but that's with the state covering the insurance costs already, which are huge, so a massive hidden-in-plain-sight subsidy. (France EDF and IEA calculations). The Hinkley Point C project in the UK is about 100 EUR/MWh, which the state had to guarantee the operators, or else the operators would have dropped the entire project, probably because their analysts told them that the chances that their plant will be competitive on price over it's lifetime are slim to none.

On top of that, a longer life expectancy means a longer commitment, which can work in your favor, or against you.

The LCOE in 2018 for large-scale PV in Germany was 37-63 EUR/MWh. Onshore Wind 40-82, Offshore 75-138 (Fraunhofer). Prices are still dropping rapidly as both the technology and construction/maintenance requirements and processes improve, actually dropping, not just "estimated" drops. Prices for nuclear are said to drop too with new fancy technology, maybe... the nuclear lobby said... but so far that's pure speculation and e.g. the fancy EPR-type nuclear plants in France/UK for now actually do not show lower costs.

The US has PV at roughly 75 USD/MWh, and nuclear at roughly 96 USD/MWh.

I'd call the PV/Wind LCOE at the very least "competitive" to the LCOE of nuclear, sometimes already cheaper, and otherwise estimated to be cheaper soon.

Now, you got a point that switching to renewables requires additional and/or refined infrastructure, like changes to the power grid, energy storage/backup power plants, etc. which requires quite a bit of additional research and investment.

I think there is a misunderstanding in my calculation. If one pair of shoes last 3 times longer, then you investment is divided by 3. The same for load factor. If you use your shoes one every 2 days, you need to buy 2 times more shoes.

You are not comparing the load factor of shoe A against the load factor of shoe B. We are comparing the load factor of shoe A against the load factor of teaspoon B... which doesn't make much sense.

And even if you compared shoe A against shoe B, you'd still have to factor in load initial and maintenance cost (and a bunch of other things). Sure, shoe A might have have a 3x better load factor, but the manufacturer of shoe A also wants 10x the money compared to shoe B.

That's why I referred to the LCOE because it is a good estimation of what a MWh of actual (not nameplate) output will cost you. It already includes all the tricky bits like initial investment, operation and maintenance cost incl fuel where needed, load factors, disposal, life expectancy and even stuff like carbon taxes (where applicable).

So here is an amended (increasingly silly) shoe example, now with load factors:

If I buy a pair of shoes that I can wear every day (factor 1.0) that last me 10 years but costs 400 bucks, that's 40 bucks/year. If I buy a pair of shoes that costs me 10 bucks, but that I can only wear every other day (factor 0.5) and lasts one year, well, 20 bucks/year because I need two pairs to have something to wear every day. Recycling/trashing a pair of shoes adds another 5 EUR/pair, so the cheap pairs are 30/year and the expensive one is 40 EUR/year. The 10x higher life expectancy by itself does not mean shit to the annual cost, and the higher "load factor" I can get from the more expensive shoe model by itself doesn't mean shit either.

> Replacing those 2 trillion in renewable with nuclear for USD 40 billion? Germany is spending roughly EUR 10 billion a year on nuclear currently. If we replaced all nuclear stations with with new fancy "cheaper" ones we'd still be at EUR 7 billion.

Working from the very high level, since Germany started shutting down its nuclear plants in the Energiewende (started ~2011) electricity use has apparently cratered by more than 10% per capita [0]. That is evidence that something is going wrong, something so fungible dropping by 10% doesn't scream 'cheaper than the alternatives'. Especially since there isn't really any in-practice data on how expensive solar/wind farms are to maintain over a 20 year timeframe so we don't know what the costs will look like after the capital expenditure is done (hopefully very cheap, I'm not casting aspersions - just there isn't a lot of data for how grids go when they rely on these technologies).

We're still early days, so maybe you are spot on and just didn't feel like including sources, but there is not yet clarity on whether the money spent on renewables has been a true like-for-like replacement for the nuclear it replaced. The trends are big, slow moving and well underway though. The experiment in energy transitioning remains very interesting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany

Electricity use is dropping for a variety of reasons, not least deindustrialisation.

Here's a chart for the UK, it shows the same trend. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...

And in the UK that also started happening at about the time they deemphasised nuclear (and fossil fuels, wow!) and started to roll out serious wind power [0]. This isn't compelling evidence that renewables are the more cost effective option - we know nuclear was cost effective at some point, it got to 10% of worlds energy largely through market forces.

I'm not sure what 'deindustrialising' means to you, but it sounds pretty scary to me. Those numbers are like not having electricity on Sundays.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production...

You mean the market forces comprised of massive government subsidies and underestimated decommissioning and accident costs?

"'deindustrialising'"

Heavy industry moving abroad, mainly to china.

There's another variable in the mix. North sea gas running out. The UK has gone from basically being self sufficient in gas to importing most of it. I think you need to tease that out as well before you can definitively say its renewables pushing up the price.

I would also point out that Hinckley point C guaranteed prices are more expensive than the latest wind prices.

And I would finally point out that my 100% renewable electricity tariff was cheaper than the none renewable alternatives, and one of the biggest electricity companies has announced its going 100% renewable electricity, with no price increase to customers. Both of which seem to argue against renewable electricity being that much more expensive.

A good reason for the drop of electricity use is the increasing price of electricity due to fuel increasing prices for extractions + investments in renewable energies

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