Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA
weforum.org
weforum.org
https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/866313289306963969
In short, solar production had increased steeply between 2000 and 2015, but each and every year, the IEA predicted that production would plateau. Each and every year, they were wrong. And yet they did it again the following year.
[0]https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-132-the-future-of...
I want to see a spreadsheet to help me plan out energy use, peak need, whether batteries are worth buying, amount I could sell back, number of panels needed, amortized cost against savings etc. Extra points for thinking tax benefits and estimating the depreciating cost of panels vs the increasing cost of electricity and where the intersection is (or was, if passed) to pull the trigger on a capital expenditure, etc
My initial foray so far has been vendors see this as a qualitative decision rather than a quantitative decision with little support for this approach. For me it's purely a numbers game.
Anyway, I'm sure HN'ers are most likely to be thinking similarly - any pointers or resources to help others?
The more I think about it, there's probably a startup here...
The other side of it is how big your roof and if it faces south without much occlusion. If your roof doesn't face south or is occluded but trees then it makes it much less attractive.
I just got my first utility bill with a community solar monetary credit. I wrote the following piece attempting to figure out the energy flows -- as opposed to the dollar flows.
-- cut here --
OK. I have a(n energetic) head scratcher with my latest unbundled electricity bill. It's the first one that includes a community solar subscription. For geeks, this is almost a thermodynamics question about systems and surroundings -- but it's camouflaged as a monetary problem in disguise...
1) My utility company (NYSEG) charges me a per kW-hr fee for "transmitting" electricity and servicing their infrastructure. Fine and dandy. I understand that perfectly.
2) There is a separate per kW-hr fee from a different supplier of electricity with whom I have contracted for power. Again, I understand that perfectly.
3) Now the head scratcher. My "community solar" account just started contributing PV energy to the grid from a recently completed solar farm. My fraction of energy generated from their deployment just showed up as a monetary credit to my total bill. They will invoice me of 90% of that credit, and claim that I "saved 10%" on my electricity cost. There is no statement whatsoever of the amount of electrical energy corresponding to that monetary credit.
That's the monetary accounting. Now let's examine the energy accounting.
Let's call the amount of energy from 2) above "N" for my "normal" source of electrical power. Similarly, let us call the (unknown) amount of energy from 3) above "S" for my solar PV power. (In principle, once I knew the fee per kW-hr I was being charged for the PV energy, I could convert the monetary charge to the numerical value for S. Let's leave that as an exercise to be dealt with later after I receive an invoice from the community solar provider -- which hopefully will tell me their cost-per-unit of energy.)
Clearly, I paid my normal provider for producing N units of energy. However, I actually consumed (N-S) units of their energy, because I (notionally) also received S units of solar energy. I understand perfectly that electricity on a transmission line is fungible, hence I don't actually receive "electrons" (so to speak) from either of them. The community solar project will also get paid (at their claimed "discounted" rate) for producing S units of energy and delivering it to me via NYSEG.
My conundrum: It seems to me that (N+S) units of electrical energy have been produced and paid for, but only N units have been consumed. Hence there are (N+S) - N = S units of electrical energy "somewhere" that are generated but not consumed via this accounting system.
Where are those S units? Who owns them? Are they simply going towards heating up the transmission lines, or is somebody benefiting from them?
Is it simply the case that NYSEG no longer has to pay for the energy consumed in heating up their transmission lines, but are still charging me the same transmission fees???
I don't know the answer to this problem.
Discuss.
I still argue that (N+S) units of energy are actually generated. The original generator of N units has no knowledge of the community solar arrangement, and is producing the N units of energy. Unless the community solar is lying about producing S units of energy -- remember, they are never disclosing S, only the associated monetary amount -- they too are selling S units to somebody else at a wholesale rate but getting their cash flow augmented by invoicing me. What a tangled web of cashflows!
I think that a PV array on the roof is preferable in situations where a purchaser is able to do that. Less financial engineering, and more physics! YMMV.
If the net metering rules are favorable, skip the battery, forget entirely about your own consumption patterns, and just install as much as you can. The job is almost half fixed costs, so a bigger array pays back much faster.
The feed-in tariffs here in my state are effectively nothing.
I'd like to wait for battery prices to come down so I can go completely off grid. (though this may not happen with cars gobbling up all the batteries for a long time to come)
I think as electricity gets cheaper and cheaper, connection costs will get more and more expensive, so being able to disconnect will be a significant saving.
Right now we are working to remove all gas appliances here at home so we can disconnect from the Gas entirely.
If it didn't cost over 30K to pull power to the house, it'd be impossible to make the math work for solar. If you don't count the climate externalities I doubt there's one city on Earth where the payback period (before incentives) is less than 10 years.
So there's no point in making a spreadsheet at this point, really. You're either buying solar out of need, a desire to "green" your life further, or you're being paid by the government to do it, or buying at a loss.
Obviously you sell the entire house and all improvements are reflected in increased value of the house.
So no, the value of solar is not zero at the end of 10 years.
Don't bet or estimate, we have mountains of data on this: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf
It also ignores the possibility that energy costs will go up over those 10 years. Essentially you are fixing your energy costs indefinitely.
Of course I'm not-quite normal kind of guy regardless. I paid too much for a very efficient house. I own my house. I own my cars. To me, the idea of turning unknown future costs into known present costs is fantastic. Not a lot of people agree with that concept.
Also worth it to add in this context that the 5 or 6 solar-dependent/off-grid homes I've seen built and lived in have been anything but reliable. It seems to take a while to fine tune the system to the point of not having a blackout every 3 months.
When you are talking about a purchase which you live with day to day for 10+ years, "Return on Investment" is never going to be a straight financial calculation.
People don't buy a house based on straight ROI, nor are most home improvements based purely on ROI. I don't see why solar should be the exception.
In real terms, the S&P 500 price return was about 3.2% p.a. since the peak in 1968, 5.2% since 1988, and less than 3% since 2000.
Real total (ie with dividends) return p.a. over a decade has been between -4% and 17%, with an average of around 7%.
As things stand currently, I'd not plan on more than 6% total return in real terms over the next two decades.
Solar panels generate cashflow in the form of electricity but they depreciate over time. So the payback period (in the form of cashflow) has to be much shorter than for an apartment or home.
Moreover, people should not buy a house with the expectation that it will inevitably be worth more in 20 years than it is today. Appreciation of land values is far from a universal law of nature.
We have birthrates of 1.6 in most of Europe, and the global population is about to peak in every contry except in African countries*
There is a massive assumption in there that you can have a non-risky investment with a 10% rate of return idefinately.
Given that we can barely go 10 years from crisis to crisis (2008 and covid) this assumption cannot possibly be justified.
Then you need to store the excess power to use throughout the rest of the day. If you're off grid, this means a lot of battery. If you're on grid (grid tie) you can generally put your excess power on the grid, then draw it back out throughout the day and your utility company will "net meter" periodically so you only pay for the difference you used, or they pay you for the excess you didn't use.
What utility companies pay for excess residential has evolved and is evolving. A few years ago you could get the full domestic rate (~ $.12 per kw/h) and that is a fantastic rate. Now utilities are pushing for a lower rate to take into account for delivery costs solar does not require [1].
[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11062019/rooftop-solar-ne...
Here's a more detail approach.
1. Compute your electricity usage. Look at 12 months of electric bill. E.g 800kWh per month (9600kWh per year).
2. Get quotes from the solar vendors. They usually quote in term of 5kW system, 6kW system, or 10kW system. The kW number is the instantaneous electricity the panels generated. Multiply that by hours to get the kWh number. The number of panels doesn't matter because some panels generate more some less. You want the total system output number in kW.
3. Figure out how many hours of useful sunlight a day your house can have. Google Sunroof and other calculators on the web would do it for you. E.g. 5 hours of useful sunlight per day.
4. E.g. with a 6kW system, 6kW x 5 hours/day = 30kWh per day = 900kWh per month = 10800kWh per year. Remember you need 9600kWh/year from 1? This just about covers it, accounting for some loss of efficiency.
5. A 6kW system costs about $14,460–$19,260 in CA. See [1]. Let's say it costs $18,000. Let's say your electric bill is $250/month or $3000/year. $18,000/$3,000 = 6 years to recoup (very simplistic view).
Battery is an additional cost, $6000~$10000.
[1] https://news.energysage.com/6kw-solar-system-compare-prices-...
You need to know if your local utility will even pay you for the power you generate that you don't use.
If you are out of the house for most of the day, you probably don't use much power then. When you get home at night you turn all your devices on and start cooking and cleaning.
Now I wonder how to compute the best time for investing if you consider both the diminishing rate of panel prices, and the electricity you'll need to pay while you don't have those. Is it always worth it to invest ASAP, or is there a panel improvement rate at which it is worth waiting a bit?
So while I can get 100% renewable from the grid, I'll stick with that, at least until an installation can pay for itself in just a few years.
There is nothing wrong with it, but i dont see how your expectation of a 98%?safe investment paying for itself in 5 years is justified.
Once that happens, it’s also safe to buy it regardless of whether it takes 15 years or more so I sell the house. The buyer will pay more for my house.
That’s not the case yet. Solar doesn’t add a value equivalent to the investment to the house, so unless I plan on staying until it’s paid off - it’s not worth it. But I think this will change.
Which is why it's not really the cheapest. Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.
Let alone that we’re emitting 400 grams of CO2 per kWh on average while it’s just 50 grams on average in France.
You are also conflating production cost and end user prices.
Based on this nuclear is an uniquely bad pairing together with renewables, and it will only get worse. Say you can make massive profits on average one hour per day, but that means all other methods of energy generation or storage can make the same, and still undercut you.
This isn't even factoring in that it is impossible to get insurance for a nuclear power plant.
Subsidy can make sense, but not because shuffling euros around under walnut shells makes the cost disappear. The argument for subsidies is generally that it helps technologies move down experience curves. This improvement is a positive externality that a pure market would not necessarily reward. Unfortunately, nuclear (and nuclear in France) has been showing NEGATIVE experience effects.
Yes, that's the first thing a terrorist would think of.
Seriously, dirty bombs are a red herring. It's the "bomb" part you should be worried about, not the "dirty" part.
To make solar demand-responsive, you just build more of it. It's really that simple.
[Edit: And, as usual, downvotes rolling in for pointing out a verifiable fact. HN being HN, I guess.]
Germany has 50% renewables, yet their kWh causes 400 grams of CO2 on average while France with 70% nuclear causes 50 grams of CO2 per kWh on average.
The Energiewende is recent history, and the major cause of the highest electricity prices in Europe. But that wasn't enough, not even close, to bring Germany into line with France's excellently low CO2 production.
Even if the situation has changed to the point where solar is the most cost-effective option, there are a lot of lessons to be learned from Germany about how dangerous it is to take an anti-nuclear stance. They look like fools.
France: 50 million tons of CO2 per year in the energy sector
Germany: 50% renewables
France: 70% nuclear
Since you've repeated the same argument at least 5 times by now, even though others have informed you about the wrong conclusion, I must assume it is meant to misinform.
It was kind of a statistical tie the last time I looked at this (wind was possibly slightly in the lead out of the three in terms of CO2 per KWh) but the wind and solar numbers seemed to be trending downwards over time.
To be clear, any non-carbon energy source can decarbonize almost to zero assuming all the lifecycle activities are converted to the non-carbon energy as well. One exception might be hydro with it's potential biogenic methane emissions.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
This tells us that France has a cleaner energy mix than Germany, but I don't think this cherry-picked example contributes much to the discussion otherwise, no matter how many times you repeat it.
There is of course a limit to this effect, for nuclear there's site specific engineering/design that has to happen which you don't have for ships.
But the savings in workforce cost can absolutely be realized in nuclear if a large enough pipeline of projects is developed which it looks like the French power company EDF is doing.
If you look at the whole picture including capacity factor, flexibility, engineering overhead, etc., coal and gas are still very cheap... provided you ignore long term externalities. This is the problem.
Market fundamentalism is the doppelgänger of dogmatic Marxism and is no better.
because those cost have been socialized to the rest of us. We are all paying for higher cancer rates, temps, etc but these companies get to keep the difference as profit.
Google for “GHG emissions life cycle IPCC”. I’m currently on mobile so I don’t have the sources at hand.
They do, but with coal, it's the pile out back, I assume natural gas networks have tanks. Nuclear is interesting because it's almost control rods.
But your point stands; storage is a lot simpler for conventional fuels.
Robust electricity networks? The US has spent trillions on transmission networks in the era dominated by coal.
Dispatchable power plants? We’ve had both base-load and peaker plants for decades. Indeed, base load gas is cost-competitive with solar now. But all base-load gen is so slow to start up and shut down that peakers can charge 2-3 orders of magnitude more per MWh.
Storage technologies? Given the exorbitant cost of peaker power, pumped storage has been in use for decades.
Demand response has also made sense for decades, but we’ve lacked the technology and market structures to make it a reality until recently. It was introduced before renewables had real market share.
In short: yes, renewables require these technologies. So does fossil-fuel generation. The IEA’s bias is showing if they’re implying that this is unique to one technology.
Of course, our current system is optimized around the characteristics of huge fossil plants, and a lot of capital will be required to optimize it around a different technology. These investments are worth it if you consider the externalities of carbon emissions. If you do it correctly, and include extreme weather costs, we should try to get to a zero emissions ASAP.
But even if you ignore externalities, as you appear to be doing, renewables are now so much cheaper that there is no economic reason to replace obsolete generation with non renewables. Under this approach, we’ll still get to 100% renewable in 40-50 years.
You cannot compare the cost of an electricity generation system solely based on the cost of the plant technology itself, you always have to take the whole system costs into account.
Solar panels might be cheap, but they are unable to provide a reliable electricity source without backup or storage systems which is what drives the actual costs.
France has 70% nuclear and their kWh costs around 17 Euro cents and causes greenhouse gas emissions of 50 grams of CO2 on average.
Germany has 50% renewables with the kWh at over 31 Euro cents and 400 grams of CO2 on average.
The French energy sector is responsible for 50 million tons of CO2 each year while Germany’s energy sector causes over 350 million tons of CO2 each year.
So, no, large scale solar power is neither cheap nor clean.
As cool as PV is, there is a big difference between always-on, modular power source and one that has a variable and intermittent production.
It would be like saying one doesn't need heating in the winter since heat is cheap in the summer.
These are not the same !
The cost you're comparing (0.17€/kWh) includes transmission costs (Enedis + EDF), taxes (CSPE, ...) AND the energy cost (~0.06€/kwh, market rate).
You cannot compare costs between countries like that, because taxes are different and transmission costs too.
You must compare market rate costs (from eex for example).
It is however not that hard to do since the energy market basically operate already on this principle. Energy companies bid on supplying a specific demand in the future, and the bid that is lowest win. That bid also include if I understand it right the cost of transmission. The practical end result is that different companies win the bid depending on all the variations that makes energy production commercial viable. A solar plant that is not producing enough energy because of weather conditions is not going to put in a bid, and thus the fossil fueled power plant wins the bid and the outcome is pollution. The more times fossil fueled power plants win, the more economical incentives there are to build more fossil fueled power plants, and the more pollution we get in the air.
The only way to have a non-polluting power grid is to either outlaw fossil fueled plants from bidding, or make sure that there is always an pollution free alternative that has an economical reason to make a lower bid. Nuclear, renewables, batteries, solar, wind, carbon taxes or what have you, as long as fossil fueled power plants can manage to make the lowest bid we have a problem.
Total price: 30.43 ct/kWh*
Supplier’s cost (23%)
Grid charges (24%)
Renewable energy surcharge (21%)
Sales (value-added) tax (16 %)
Electricity tax (7 %)
Concession levy (5%)
Offshore liability levy (1.3%)
You also need to factor in that Germany is exporting more power than it imports within a year, primarily to Austria and Switzerland but also a bit to France.
If we do end up building a few thousand large reactors, we will want to switch to waste recycling.
The whole 'no idea what to do with it' is what the antinuclear movement chose to say after stonewalling the permanent disposal work in the USA for years. Very cynical in my opinion especially if you consider existing waste to be imminently hazardous to the biosphere.
I have to challenge you on this statement. Certainly the 1940s Hanford reactor designs were for weapons production, and yes dual use (weapons & commercial power) was briefly considered in the early 1950s, but as early as 1953 it was rejected as an option by the US government, who had enough weapons material production coming from Hanford and projections from Savannah River that there was no justification for more.
Further, the Atomic Energy Commission actually worried that if nuclear power plants became very popular, they didn't want to be stuck with a fixed price contract requirement to buy any excess plutonium.
The Power Demonstration Reactor Program of 1958-1965 was run to find the best reactor for making economical power. It was very open and public. By 1965, light water reactors were offered at cost parity with coal plants and the fleets of today were kicked off.
So, brief mention of dual use was ended in the early 1950s, whereas the designs of today were commercialized in the 1960s.
https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/NReactor
But as you say it was not the norm in the US.
And on the topic, I can also promise you that they do in fact know about the concept of capacity factor and that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow.
And on the topic of France, their reactors oveheat the river they use for cooling and have to shutdown. And just as you claim you can't soley consider the cost of a plant, you can't solely consider the smokestack emissions of a plant without consider the mining, enrichment, handling, and disposal of nuclear.
Germany has a large CO2 output because they have a large manufacturing industry, and for policy reasons technically decoupled from their investment in solar, they also maintain production capacity of a dirty type of coal as power source because they have it in abundance within their own borders, its a security interest.
If you think your armchair analysis has outsmarted the energy industry then go ahead and invest in fossil and nuclear i guess.
They fought Clinton, Illinois’ nuclear plant for decades. The locals were uneasy because it’s on a recreational lake. The lobby for it dismissed the concerns of the uneducated rabble and built it anyway.
An amoeba that causes encephalitis grew in the heat from the cooling plant. Nobody was allowed to swim there anymore. There’s not a lot to do in the middle of the Plains States if you aren’t in a metropolitan area. Swimming and boating are two of your options.
Fusion, fission, geothermal all dump between one and two units of heat at the source for every two units they push down a power line (which is mostly turned into heat at the destination and a little along the way). In the big picture, all of them are bad pairings with global warming.
And hydro reservoirs boost methane emissions.
Apparently they started building this based on nuclear power plants as well in Russia (Woronesch, Nischni Nowgorod), but gave it up. That would've been a bit creepy, to have a pipe straight from the local reactor to your home...
A lake somewhere being unswimmable is a small price to pay for a livable world.
And if lakes are or aren’t really local, rivers sure as hell are not.
Comparing tradeoffs is what we should be doing, but it's really frustrating when people just pretend that their favorite technology doesn't have the tradeoffs.
I can't find any references to cases of amebic encephalitis from that lake either, only a study stating that the amoeba was found in the lake both before and after the plant became operational. Their own website touts its swimming opportunities. Can you cite sources for any of your claims?
https://www2.illinois.gov/dnr/Parks/Activity/Pages/ClintonLa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Lake_(Illinois)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Power_Station
https://www2.illinois.gov/dnr/Parks/About/Pages/ClintonLake....
I got it from regional news, at the time. If building a lake is how you bribe people into doing something they don't want to do, and then you take the lake away, then from their perspective you've lied.
There are other ways to build a cooling plant for a nuclear power station, btw. Lots of places make them do that now, because dumping the heat back into the environment instead of into the sky causes far more mundane problems than this. And occasionally weirder ones. And since the thesis was about heat pollution, not regional nuclear politics, I'll thank you not to nitpick.
No, it's not like Gell-Mann amnesia at all.
It really feels like you're pushing a particular narrative, facts be damned.
Of course they know, but I don't care about what they know, I care about what they say and if it's true or not!
Are the headline figures fudged by neglecting storage or including subsidies? Or is the headline legitimate, and solar can actually stand on its own now?
It seems to me that if a group of people who were once so vehemently against nuclear for decades (few people were more vocal in opposition to it) finally realized that their fight against climate change simply isn't practical without nuclear, then why are some people still so against it?
You couldn't ask for a more powerful endorsement than the one from nuclear's (former) greatest critic.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/08/23/after-48...
When the Swedish government shut down a nuclear reaction the political promise were a greener power grid that polluted less. What we instead got was a oil power plant in the southern part of Sweden that previous only operated as a backup in case of harsh cold winters. Now it is operating all year because it suddenly became commercial viable to do so.
For long I have advocated that the solution to this disconnect between what is being said and what actually happens is laws. No new fossil fueled power plants, and no extended capacity by fossil fueled power plants. One do not need to be pro-nuclear, nor pro-solar or pro-wind. All that is needed is an expanding energy demand, a aging nuclear power plants, and a law that forbid people to use the easy but environmentally damaging alternative. Smart people in the energy industry can figure out what is the cheapest alternative that does not warm up the planet, and politician can stop trying to sell an untruth.
Well, con-men also know that they sell BS, and what exactly is in the snake oil that they sell, but they still push it...
Some nuclear reactor were shutdown to protect fish in the river in a summer during a heatwave because they had no cooling tower.
Nuclear reactor with cooling tower were fine. And current solar panels are less efficient when it's hot.
You dismiss CO2 per kWh because you say the whole lifecycle of the nuclear plant and it's fuel should be taken in account. Well it is already.
Yea I don't understand these non-sense which doesn't includes whole system costs.
The way you word this it sounds like renewables == bad, when in reality Germany is burning a boat load of coal which is causing the extra emissions, while France’s emissions are offset because they have lots of Nuclear power.
Nuclear power takes 20-50 years to come online- it’s too late to rely on it and burn fossil fuels in the mean time. That ship sailed long ago.
That ship was sunk.
Germany had a lot of nuclear power, and decided shut it down. That is why Germany is producing so much CO₂.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...
Edit: „Deal with it“ might have been a snarky way to say it but on a serious note - nothing good comes from regretting missed opportunities forever. Get over them and make the best of the situation.
No, they really didn't. At its height it accounted for barely 20%. It was dwarfed by coal, lignite and natural gas. It was never anything like France that went all in with nuclear.
Since then, German consumption has exploded, yet the non-renewables have stayed about static while virtually all new demand is met with renewables.
The point is that unfortunately renewables == good is not often true either despite the common perception. It all depends on how they integrate with the rest of the grid which is something rarely considered when I hear speeches about having more and more renewables in the future
Once you decided to stop nuclear and go wind/solar, what do you do when it's 8pm in winter and there is no wind? => You fire up your coal/gas plants
The answer could be "storage" but right now, as you can see from the stats, this option is not favored and I believe there are good reasons. As you can imagine, if storage was an easy solution today, Germany's emissions would be much smaller.
Hopefully it becomes a more viable solution in the near future but at the moment we're still far from it
South Korea builds nuclear plants in less than 5 years on average.
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...
Solar will only ever be a part of the picture, not the whole thing.
So what if you can find one ideal area in North America with enough sunlight to theoretically power the whole world, it's not the point. Can you find a large enough spot of space with consistent enough sunlight in, say, Maine, to power even a single city there?
In a recent 400 MW solar farm installed in Texas, I looked at the cost of land in that area, vs. the cost of the solar field. Land was about 1% of the cost. Land is cheap. We have lots of land. We have so much land, we use it for low value things like farming. And land that isn't suitable for farming is even cheaper than that.
Nuclear certainly has a place in baseload generation but new greenfield development is rare and costs skyrocket upon decommissioning. On the other hand Germany is well positioned to take advantage of cost declines in battery storage to solve the intermittency problem. It’s not clear what France does when all of their reactors age out.
Within 10 years, Germany will already have to replace a good half of their renewable capacity so I doubt that assessment will change. That's the next issue which is not often taken into account, those renewables have a very low lifespan.
I guess those costs are for future generations and not our problem. (Kind of like CO2)
Could you please provide a concrete example of a problem of security or maintenance on such facility and with such scenario, what makes you think that it is more likely to happen than any other threats with similar impact our societies face?
They need to be security because they can be stolen and the waste within can be used as a weapon.
When I think about the future and its risks I never think about nuclear waste. I think primarily about global warming and all its consequences: massive migrations, droughts, fires etc.
To me these are way more important because
1) the likelihood is MUCH higher 2) the impact is MUCH higher
"And so we are basically guaranteed to ruin the area where waste is stored at some point in the future"
As long as fossil fuels are used however the risk of runaway climate change is a much bigger issue than nuclear waste. The risk of runaway nuclear waste is unlikely.
Most home solar panels have a 10 year warranty so you want to make sure your payback period is less than 10 years.
I believe we should be doing a better job of calculating how much it costs to dispose of those panels once they are no longer working.
That logic makes a lot of cheap things cost an effectively infinite amount, like shopping centre security.
A waste storage facility doesn't need armed guards if it isn't being used any more than a shopping centre would. If the facility isn't being used then it can be sealed with a big plug of concrete or something else that has a cost that is small vs. infinity.
Plus there is a decent chance that the dangerous stuff will be a valuable fuel source in 100 years.
As far as I'm aware we are not currently sealing dry casks in concrete and forgetting about them. They need to be maintained and managed.
Then the facilities are probably still in use.
If the waste were sealed underground by a 100m long concrete plug in any access tunnel there isn't going to be a lot of call for guards.
(I guess what you're saying is that rates are effectively zero, and they are, and then the cost is infinite indeed...)
Nuclear is the only way fwd, sooner we come to realization better it will be for us.
Solar and wind do lot of eco damage due to low density output.
(For the record I am very pro-nuclear, but it feels disingenuous to mention solar requires storage but totally ignore nuclear disposal)
And you seem to be attributing the CO2 emissions to the renewables, but that's in no way fair. Even if we had the solution to energy storage, you'd expect a country switching from coal to renewables to have high emissions even at the half-way point.
> So, no, large scale solar power is neither cheap nor clean.
It's more complex than headlines would lead you to believe. But that's ALWAYS the case. This conclusion is just as dumb as the headlines, if not even dumber.
You're right that storage and backup is a big factor, but it's a problem that's rapidly being solved.
Have you read articles with scenarios about % electricity stored compared to daily consumption for instance? Are we going to reach any significant number in the next decade?
From this IEA article [1] it is not clear that we're getting close to it fast enough
Because journalists are not engineers: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
“He holds a PhD in biochemistry from Bristol University and previously studied chemistry at Oxford University.”
From the Carbon Brief “about” page. (Click his byline on the linked article and you’ll see he works for Carbon Brief.) https://www.carbonbrief.org/about-us
So he’s a scientist.
Given that you disagree strongly with a well credentialed chemist, are you sure the profession of journalism or the credentials of its practitioners are the issue here?
Also, it’s interesting you linked an article that leans heavily on the authority of Michael Crichton, himself a noted climate change denialist — and a former physician.
It would seem to me poor information and sloppy work crosses many fields. I think anyone who has, say, used very much software in their life would probably agree.
Yes, not an engineer.
To counter the calculations of the IEA (who are a world more informed than cbmuser, I'm fairly sure), this guy conflates the entire historic mix of two very different countries, one with a long history of coal, natural gas and lignite (those decreasing as renewables enter the mix).
Can you point me to a grid that runs mainly on solar and wind that’s les than 150gCO2eq/kWh?
France is around 50-60.
If solar power were the cheapest energy source, it would be unilaterally adopted until it's no longer the cheapest option--it's trivial to hook up to the grid, private individuals do it today. Unless of course there is a global conspiracy with the entire energy utility, semiconductor, and financial industry; private individuals; and municipalities to avoid profit seeking behavior.
Profit seeking behavior from the fossil fuel industry is to resist change at all costs. Profit seeking behavior from our politicians here in Australia is to not upset the fossil fuel industry as they are a large source of donations.
However, what most don't know is that the big money (in terms of EBITDA) in the fossil fuel industry is in downstream services, plastics and other carbon products derived from oil. This accounts for around 80.1% of Exxon's Revenue[1] and even more in profit. The goal for Exxon is to reduce reliance of energy from oil to reduce the cost of crude oil and maintain the sticky margins of plastics.
It's for this reason that Exxon has always been in the forefront in carbon economies and taxes [2].
Energy is instead one of the worst businesses to be in, a low-margin commodity, with ever-decreasing margins.
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/04/16/how-exxonmobil-str... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/09/exxon-mobil-pledges-1-millio...
It's also strange to talk about energy cleanliness in the context of nuclear energy yet only bring in C02 when the environmental factors with nuclear extend much beyond C02
Not for long sadly :( Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035.
For the record, the whole of France’s nuclear fuel waste since the 50’s is a 15mx15mx15m cube.
Also, that 40 years numbers is a financial one, not a technical or design one. Some reactors based on the same designs have been validated for 60 years in the US.
That’s the problem with spent fuel: you either toss it, but it’s still recyclable and burnable again or you recycle it, and you’re inevitably left with some bomb grade material that flies in the face of all international agreements of non-proliferation.
Anyhow, CIGEO build still needs to start and how many years of future capacity does it allow for?
Many reactors were designed to run 40-50 years and they’ve been lengthened to procrastinate costly dismantling and maintain production without new builds (which are, at this point, highly uneconomical)
And the BN-800 reactor that’s online and in commercial service.
Also, SuperPhénix.
Here is the IEA web page for their 120 euro 'World Energy Outlook 2020' publication.
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2020 Solar https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/solar
I couldn't find the assertion about 'cheapest electricity in history' has anyone else seen the actual report?
The International Energy Agency is a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organisation established in the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1974 in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. ~ Wikipedia
It must be stated that these numbers imply 'when the sun is shining'. The cost of the systems producing nighttime power is not accounted for in these.
For nuclear to survive, not only do its costs have to come down a lot, but the ongoing crash in costs of renewables and storage have to come to a sudden halt. Nuclear proponents are basically betting that all the many storage technologies fail to get cheaper. This is quite the bet.
I don't think its fair to draw a line in the sand and declare that those costs are for future generations and don't need to be considered now.
I found this article in Scientific American on spent fuel interesting. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-let...
I think dry casks are dangerous "forever" and therefore the costs of securing and managing them is effectively infinite.
But the facility still needs armed guards "forever" so that terrorists or rogue states can't go and get some radioactive magma and use it as a weapon.
I agree, but we should balance those costs with the costs of our current actions and the costs of other possible options. Future generations will have to live with the costs of our action or inaction, whichever forms they take.
Humanity is hopefully progressing toward a Dyson sphere... which is just maxed out solar.
Yeah nuclear has advantages and disadvantage, same apply for solar, wind, geothermal.
But all these technologies have a role to play to solve climate change. Can we stop having these stupid religious debates?
Does anyone has a link explaining one realistic way to solve climate change without going into ideological debates?
It's sad because my place (in Brazil) is blessed by the sun 12 months a year and I feel sorry fot not being able to use that energy.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.0016...
Have you a reference?
I had a friend working on industrial UPS systems that used large flywheels. Was years ago so I do not know the details.
I think they could supply a lot of energy quickly (no start up time) but maybe not for long?
(you need surface to get it)
All we have to do is to harness the sun energy in the most efficiency and harmless way.
Almost all the energy used on earth comes from the sun. The nuclear*, geothermal and tidal power are more or less exceptions.
* (I'm not against nuclear power and research, as we need that technology to be able to travel in space in smaller spaceships rather than this large one (some may call it earth) we use now. Right now we travel where our sun goes, not where we like to explore.)
In every energy usage the key is the efficiency of the conversion.
Fossil fuel's efficiency is less then 1-2% from the sun due to the efficiency of the photosynthesis [2]. All of the fossil fuels are nothing but stored solar energy with less then 1-2% efficiency. And we don't calculate with waste from the mining refining transportation etc. energy cost. And for useful energy (work) you have to burn it in a power plant or a car or whatever with maximum 10-50% efficiency [3]. So the overall efficiency is less than 1%.
On the other hand solar cells with 20%+ efficiency are commercial available, wind farms are better and hydro power can be even better. (wind and hydro power are also comes indirect from the sun)
(BTW the low efficiency of the photosynthesis is why the corn based fuels are waste of the solar energy, and land. You could generate the same amount of energy with solar power on less than 1/20th of the land with corn. If you need fossil fuel, algae is a much better alternative, as it's photosynthesis efficiency is higher than corn [4], also does not require valuable land, which can be used for other agriculture purpose (food) )
But, far the largest pro for the solar energy is that it will not run out in the near future (at least 5 billion years, even earth will be destroyed way before the sun run out of fuel), fossil fuels will run out, it does not matter if it's 50, 100 or 1000 years from now, but it will run out. Period. (that's the same problem with current nuclear power technology beside other factors)
So you have an energy that practically will not run out, have better total efficiency about 20-100+ times than fossil fuel (and side effect it's cleaner), * and someone still surprised that this is the future...
** yes, we need to work on energy storage
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuelor something.