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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone notice how cheap this is? Ten gigawatts at AUD $16B is roughly the same as 1 GW per USD $1B. Compare that to, say, a nuclear power plant, where a single 1 GW plant might cost five to ten billion after all of the approvals and the interest on the loan.

If the price estimate is correct, Singapore would be crazy not to do it. The only issue I see is the risk of cable cuts and future geopolitical changes.

Unfortunately, within Australia, coal is currently so cheap that even low-cost solar can't really compete.

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> Unfortunately, within Australia, coal is currently so cheap that even low-cost solar can't really compete.

That's only true for existing power stations. For new coal stations there is no way to make them competitive with large scale solar or wind.

The levelized cost of power from new coal plants is calculated to be between $76 per megawatt hour and $205.60 per megawatt hour depending on black vs brown coal, if you include a risk premium on financing and whose estimates you believe.

In 2017 the Victorian government signed a 12 year deal for $50 to $60 per megawatt hour for a wind farm, and the new Golden Plains wind farm will be under $50/MWh.

Adding storage costs a bit more: between $83.40 and $129.30 per MW/h for pumped hydro storage, or $138/MWh for batteries.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-12/is-renewable-power-ch...

That is a 10GW solar array, at 22% capacity factor, so comparable to 2 VVER-1200 with a $12B contract like Rooppur, also the solar panels/batteries will last 20-25 years and the VVER 60.

> also the solar panels/batteries will last 20-25 years and the VVER 60

The solar array and battery storage (all of which can be recycled today with existing recycling techniques) will be built on time, begin generating on time, and will generate no nuclear waste nor require fuel (besides sunlight) during its operating lifetime. It takes over 10 years to build a VVER-1200 reactor [1] (any fission reactor, really), if you can even get the reactor to the finish line.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-First-VVER-1200-reacto...

> will generate no nuclear waste

Very important point, especially when we're considering costs.

What are the lifetime costs associated with storing the spent fuel? In practice, the only way to get reactors built, is for the public to 100% subsidize the long term consequences.

Or recycle the fuel.

Sure, that would be an option. Thus far even the US government is not exploring this option, mostly due to very high costs, but also due to weapons grade byproducts of most existing reprocessing methods.

> The solar array and battery storage (all of which can be recycled today with existing recycling techniques) will be built on time, begin generating on time...

Steady on, that is a prediction for a project where data is light. The most comparable experience Australia has to this stuff is the Basslink which broke in 2015-16 and triggered a major energy crisis in Tasmania. And I think technically means that 50% of Australia's major undersea cables have been involved in an energy crisis.

This is a major project. It is not yet clear it will be delivered on time and on budget. It is very a very exciting project nonetheless.

Maintenance and redundancy of HVDC transmission capacity is a more tractable problem than cost efficient storage & reprocessing of nuclear waste and nuclear generator decommissioning at end of service life. Basslink was mismanaged, and that's a tractable problem as well.

Could this project be late? Of course. "Nuclear generator late and over budget"? No.

This cable is 3,700 km; the current longest undersea cable is ~600 km [0]. This is nearly an order of magnitude longer than any undersea cable previously run.

You've got no data this one. It has never been done before and even the people directly involved in the project can't be sure what surprises may or may not be in store as they push the boundaries of engineering practice.

> Could this project be late? Of course. "Nuclear generator late and over budget"? No.

This is bald-faced fabrication. I've never been confronted with quite so blatant a guess presented as a confident fact.

Even arguing that "nuclear projects can't be completed to plan" is in itself a bit much - planning standards can change. Bad planning isn't a property of nuclear electricity and good planning isn't a property of undersea cables.

This could easily be $50 billion down the drain and the project is still never completed. The risk is there.

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

You're correct I might be overly optimistic (although I believe my reasoning is sound based on the historical track record of nuclear vs transmission construction).

I've reached out to an academic with numerous papers authored on the topic of HVDC submarine cables, and inquired as to the feasibility and challenges a 3700km HVDC submarine link might face (to provide a comparison to those faced by the construction of nuclear generators). I'll report back with my findings.

Also, this is the first idea of its kind. Once it gets more popular, prices will drop, as they have been doing so for solar for about 2 decades now.

Nuclear, on the other hand, has a negative pricing curve. It gets increasingly more expensive with the passing of time. The only solution are completely new ideas, that to be fair are being researched and a lot of money is invested in them, but nothing has made it to scalable production yet.

sorry, could you dumb this down a little? how does this affect the price/GW? (I'm not questioning it does, I'm saying I don't understand the rest of what you said)

I think the idea is that 10GW of solar only produces on average as much power as a 2.2GW "normal" power plant. So during the best parts of the day you're getting all 10GW. At night you're getting 0GW. On cloudy days you're getting less than 10GW. If you average it all out over a year you get about the same amount of total energy output from the 10GW solar plant as you would a 2.2GW traditional power plant.

So once you do that it goes from $1/watt to more like $4.50/watt. And it starts to look about the same as nuclear if in fact you can spend $5b and you get 1GW.

One nice thing about nuclear is that it's super steady 1GW 24/7 vs the solar needs to have battery storage too, and those batteries aren't free.

This project has battery included as well though.

Given that solar's cost trend has been going ever cheaper and nuclear's has done pretty much the opposite, solar will probably win out long term.

Oh that's my mistake then! I read the article looking for that but I didn't see it. I guess I didn't read it thoroughly enough.

I do agree that over the course of the next 10-50 years renewables + storage is likely to be cheaper.

What I'm not sure about is if "the grid" will be cheaper or if we'll end up seeing the renewables self-ownership spiral that causes folks to disconnect from the grid, driving prices up for everyone else on the grid, thus causing more people to disconnect, etc. When renewables are cheap and your house's usage is fairly well known (see years of smart meter historical data) then at some point it becomes economically feasible to be your own grid.

This isn't the worst outcome for consumers, but it is pretty bad for established utilities.

One interesting case study is Puerto Rico, which now has a lot of microgrids post-Maria because PREPA is not trusted and suffering from mismanagement.

With today's low interest rates is nuclear actually getting more expensive? Traditionally all the interest on the loans that builds up between when the approval process starts and when construction finishes was the big driver of nuclear costs but since 2009 commercial loan rates are a lot lower than they were beforehand.

In general extending project lead times is going to cost more money because you still need to pay some people to be working for that longer duration.

The Capacity Factor (essentially a plant's uptime) is important to consider, but isn't 100% for the other plant types either, though. Nuclear has 93% in the US, coal has 54%, and Solar PV 26%[0]. The 22% quoted by hokkos is probably specifically for PV plants in Australia.

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

Plus the point about lifespan, the nuclear plant doesn’t need to be replaced in 25 years. You get twice the lifespan for the same cost.

Nuke decommission costs and impacts aren't neglectable, and may be underestimated (the UK case showed it clearly).

Would I be right in thinking that replacing parts of a solar plant could be done without a huge impact on production? Eg replacing a reactor means it’s offline. Replacing all the panels means a percentage of the plant is offline at a given time.

Yes, and panels are getting cheaper continually.

Once the tax effectiveness of being able to depreciate the panels gets taken into account it's a pretty nice investment.

From Japan, I wish the old plant was replaced after 30 years...

That said, there's large portions of Australia that are very lucky to get a cloudy day...

thank you for the explanation!

If you mean coal based power is currently cheap within Australia, it's absolutely the opposite, electricity prices in Australia are some of the highest in the world: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/

Household power prices are not the same as the wholesale rate. Indeed sometimes the wholesale rate is negative. South Australia is $73.25/MWh

I believe South Australia has the most wind, solar and battery storage though.

It's US$16B, and 10 gigawatts is nameplate. 25% capacity factors are typical for solar PV, whereas nuclear would be more like 90%. So it would compare more accurately to a ~2.8 GW nuclear power plant.

> the risk of cable cuts and future geopolitical changes

The two risks are intertwined: A hostile state in the region with modern submarines (gee, I wonder who that could be?) is likely to be perfectly capable of cutting the cable — which would give the hostile state the ability to hold Singapore hostage, perhaps in support of exerting power in the Strait of Malacca maritime choke point and/or in the South China Sea. If I were Singapore's leaders, I'd want at least one Plan B.

Sufficient gas peaker capacity? The solar might be cheaper, but if it got cut you could fire them up.

Singapore is one of Australia's links to the Internet so additional cables for power would possibly follow the same route.

Just pointing out the article had already converted AUD$22B into US$16B. (Not sure if that was updated since you posted)

Still using your other numbers, seems like a bargain, even at US$1.6B/GW

1 GW per billion dollars is dirt-cheap compared to solar power in America, too. Thinking of two of the largest PV installations in California. One was $2.4 billion for 550 MW and another was $1 billion for 130 MW.

Solar went negative last summer. So that's not totally accurate.

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