2014 was a long time ago. It’s possible both technologies have improved since then. I wonder why we don’t hear about this comparison more.
Solar is NOT a replacement for nuclear. It absolutely can augment power generation, but it - especially solar cells - is not a reliable base load provider.
No amount of hand waving by solar cell proponents will change that. If we ever discover a way to reasonably store electrical power that’s far more reliable and cost effective than chemical batteries then that equation will change - but we aren’t there today. Nuclear is here now and there are more than enough designs that are inherently safe and cost effective that never get discussed because everyone emotionally freaks out as soon as the word “nuclear” is uttered :p
It’s conparable in place to nuclear if I’m not mistaken, and it’s fault scenarios are less severe.
Especially in US, with vast amounts of deserts, it seems like a no-brainer.
(having said that, climate change is so urgent that I’d say do whatever it takes to get to zero emmissions - be it nuclear or solar)
We do nuclear at scale today. The vast majority of blockers from doing more nuclear at scale today are political; not technical.
That’s the other facet of this that always seems to get overlooked.
Or is your argument just "We're not doing it yet, therefore it can never be done"?
You don’t need one huge plant to manage the baseload when we’re talking about renewables.
You can just as well have the same wattage distributed across multiple places in the country, removing a single point of failure and lowering transmission costs (although requiring a redesign of the energy grid).
No hand waving required. It’s fine for other sources (even nuclear) to fill in the gaps. Also no need for accusations of emotional freak outs. I think the nuclear side has its fair share of deluded people who for some reason pretend that both solar and batteries are not improving year by year. And who pretend that solar advocates demand solar-only solutions. It’s just not the case.
There are a few new flywheel plants that have popped up in the US in recent years, and it'll be interesting to compare the material costs and benefits over the coming decades.
If batteries were viable Elon wouldn’t just be talking about them.
Batteries are no where near the cost efficiency of, say, pumped hydro. Nor can batteries touch the overall capacity of pumped hydro. And pumped hydro can’t happen just anywhere - you need the right physical environment for it to be effective.
So yeah, unless you have something more concrete than “batteries, obviously” it is hand waving.
Just talking? He’s making them at scale.
There is also somewhat of a use case for renewables for powering things that can make do with highly unreliable power. Consider, for example, a desalination plant. The heart of the plant is pumping water through membranes--but do you really need to do that? Lets build our plant differently, build a storage system high enough up that gravity provides the pressure. When you have power you run the pumps to fill the storage system, when you don't have power you don't run the pumps. You need bigger pumps and you need a big storage tank but it can be done.
Or flip the scenario--don't pump the seawater in the first place. Place your desalination plant on the ocean floor and use your pumps to extract the fresh water. In this case you need fresh water storage underwater rather than salt water storage up high.
In the 2030 cost model they use, batteries are 142 euro/kWh of capacity and 160 euro/kW of power. This (using 2011 weather data, along with various other assumptions, and also includes use of hydrogen) gives "synthetic baseload" in the US for 53.7 euro/MWh, cheaper than nuclear. The LCOS in batteries and (even more so) in hydrogen is higher than the cost of electricity, but that's ok.
(If you look at other countries, or specific states in the US, the results vary but remain broadly similar. The mix of solar vs. wind can change a lot though. Places like Poland are the worst for renewables in this model.)
[1] https://cdn.britannica.com/s:800x1000/00/196800-050-E30A2B4A...
It's likely to remain the only one with an exclusion zone that big given what we have learned about how low the lethality of Chernobyl was.
Real-life non-vaporware solar + battery combo installations are improving and spreading all the time.
By the time vaporware small nuclear materializes outside of demonstration projects (10 years? 20?) there’s no telling how efficient and ubiquitous solar + batteries will be.
If Elon is a willing to start selling power walls at 100$ / kwh retail at scale then we’ll talk.