To answer your question: the sun doesn’t shine at night, that’s why we can’t do solar only (without enough energy storage to get us through the night).
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
That overlaps with Lazard's range for conventional nuclear. And there are lots of reasons to think molten salt reactors in general would be significantly cheaper. Thorcon thinks it can get their cost down to $30/MWh.
Lazard is the source that most renewables advocates point me to, to prove how uncompetitive nuclear is. If your counterargument is that future costs will be lower than today's costs, then I think it's fair to also consider the costs Thorcon and others estimate for molten salt reactors.
Personally I think deferring electric vehicle charging and feeding power back into the grid could help a lot here and make this make economic sense, but that doesn't give you enough energy storage to go 100% solar and wind. Right now intermittent power sources are being subsidized heavily with being able to lean on cheap natural gas. Nuclear doesn't depend on any resources that would be strained even if relying on Nuclear power for 100% of demand. Nuclear is also power dense and other than NIMBY concerns is easier to site closer to where the energy is needed than large scale wind farms. Before you say "rooftop solar!" I'll admit, a PV panel is great for being able to scale down to tiny amounts of power instead of just "hundreds of MWe". That still doesn't address the fact that massive swaths of the globe do not get enough sunlight during the winter months to make 100% solar every week of the year worth it. You could currently overproduce enough in the summer to be net zero, but that doesn't change the fact that you're still relying on massive overproduction in sunnier climates and transporting energy large distances or fossil fuels to make up the difference. No chance energy storage bridges the gaps for seasonal changes instead of just a few days.
Renewables true costs are just unknown.
Ammonia electro-synthesis and air liquification are both mature tech, and just need to be built out. Hydrogen, similarly. Tankage for all of these is cheap, and power can be released via existing gas furnaces. Building out takes time.
Chemical storage has the massive advantage that it may be shipped from the tropics to anywhere it is needed, anytime it is needed, just like oil and LNG is today. That is where the majority of energy will be banked, because there is always demand for the same chemicals as industrial feedstock, so an always ready market to sell excess production into.
Batteries are the most expensive storage. You won't make much progress understanding power by thinking only about batteries. But anyway batteries are not dependent on lithium; iron-air batteries are cheap and iron is plentiful.
Nukes have no place in this future. Their power costs way too much to win a bid, almost all the time, but they need to win all the time to service their crushing debt load. And, it takes many years before any power at all comes out. So, they will predictably default on their debts; and thus not be built at all.
A renewable dollar is still better spent today on generating capacity, and will be for several more years, most places. Waiting, you get more storage for your money, and you then already have overcapacity to charge it from.
Until the share of renewables approaches enough to destabilize the power grid, building out renewable generating capacity displaces more carbon from entering the atmosphere, and so is a better use of capital.
At the same time, decreasing load factor of nukes and fossil plants, as they become too expensive to win bids, will drive them offline in favor of much cheaper storage methods as fast as that comes online.
The enormous industrial and export value of synthetic hydrogen and ammonia production, after local tankage is full, make them the compelling choice for long-term storage. Initially, those will be burned in gas turbines as they edge out natural gas, both locally and abroad, but improving fuel cells will finally displace turbines.
About batteries, that's no longer true - lithium, nickel and cobalt prices have exploded in recent months. Furthermore they're impractical ( you need massive space, and then you have a giant fire hazard) and most importantly, needed elsewhere. EV adoption is already stifled by lack of sufficient supply of batteries, and heavy duty vehicles are let to be electrified. Replacing all cars, buses, trucks, etc. ( and apparently trains in the US because they can't be bothered to electrify like normal countries) with EV versions will require a lot of batteries. And of course they have a limited lifecycle, and need to be replaced. And speaking of lifecycle, a nuclear reactor has 2-3 times ( at least) the life of a solar panel or wind turbine.
About hydrogen, green hydrogen in any quantities is only theoretical at the moment.
IMHO the best way forward is to hedge bets and do everything - build nuclear power plants ( and ffs don't close existing ones that can continue to operate to replace them with gas "temporarily" like the dimwits in Belgium are doing), expand renewables, invest in different potential solutions for storage. Fuel cells will probably have a part to play in transportation too, e.g. in aviation. However getting rid of the only low-CO2 baseload power source we have is shortsighted.
Actually, Belgium has decided to keep open the two plants that are easy to continue to operate (easy is relative, they will still require a billion euro in maintenance work). They’re still closing the five that would require extensive multi-year downtime and costly renovation (like pouring new concrete) and replacing them with gas plants, but there’s not any real alternative anyway as they would have to shut down for multiple years so new gas plants are unavoidable.
An interesting fact is that a few years ago there was a constitutional court decision that prevented keeping the plants open on anything less than a five year timeline from the moment of deciding, unless there is a risk of blackouts. The only reason the plants will be able to stay open in 2025 is therefore because of Putin.
Of course there were alternatives. One would have had to anticipate this crisis a few years ago and could have built up renewables or new nuclear plants. Instead somebody made the decision to go with fossil fuels from Russia and here we are.
Just like it's a complete coincidence that the head of the government responsible for shutting down German nuclear power, Gerhard Schröder, now is the chairman of Nord Stream, Gazprom as well as having been nominated to a director position at Rosneft.
A GW-scale electric ammonia synthesis plant is under construction in Norway. Hint, you don't built a GW-scale operation on unproven tech.
We will need hundreds more of them.
Every cent diverted to building nukes from building out renewables brings climate catastrophe nearer.
This isn't even close to true. A lithium-ion battery can store roughly 1 megajoule per liter, which I'm going to use because it makes the math easier. (Other batteries are slightly less dense, but the correction factor is small). Total global energy consumption is around 1 exajoule per day. That's a trillion liters to store a day's worth of energy, or one billion cubic meters. Assuming you can stack batteries ten meters high -- which seems doable -- a battery farm to store a day's worth of energy for the whole world would take up about 100 million square meters, or 100 square kilometers, slightly smaller than San Francisco. That's less than the amount of space currently taken up by solar or wind farms.
Using zinc-bromine or other technologies will take up more space, but as you can see, a small reduction in energy density won't be that big of a deal.
Last figure I saw was 1/4 the cost of Li batteries. (I guess lithium cells have got cheaper since they made that page.)
Congratulations on suggesting the most impractical, stupidly dangerous (mmmmh battery fires), impossible to make, single point of failure. At least it won't be attacked because it only lasts a single day anyways.
Stick to philosophy and let actual engineers build a grid, thank you.
San Francisco does not occupy much of the Earth's surface, or even of the continental US. This battery farm, spread out between all the towns in the US, would not even be noticed.
It lasts for a single day. A project using up pretty much all of Earth's currently usable lithium resources, for a single day of storage. It's worthless.
You are really reaching. It wears badly.
I've seen the investment pitches. Nobody is seriously considering it for a reason, it's a terrible, terrible, idea.
Covering intermittent sources is pretty much 100% public sector's responsibility, everywhere.
And, for resources in place, whether so impractical as lithium batteries, or as practical as pumped hydro, iron-air batteries, banked hydrogen, or transmission lines reaching operating generation elsewhere, the space required is in no way prohibitive.
Which was the point.
It's ultimately inevitable.
Lazard puts the wholesale cost of solar PV plus four hours storage at $165 to $296/MWh:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
It is generally a mistake to assume people controlling billion-dollar budgets have no idea what they are doing.
Can you point out where in the Lazard report it describes its methodology in a way that makes clear it doesn't reflect the cost of new renewable projects today? And reference a thorough study that shows lower-than-Lazard average costs for solar+storage today, not in some estimated future, and not with cherry-picked projects in ideal locations?
And if that cost includes sufficient collection and storage to get through a windless night, like nuclear can do, that would be nice too.
Storage is not already built out because it is still obviously better to spend the money building out generating capacity, and will be until its share is much larger. In particular, before storage can be useful, you need enough spare generating capacity to top up your storage while also driving customer load.
Negative prices are a very, very temporary phenomenon. Very soon, all surplus generating capacity will be absorbed producing hydrogen and ammonia for sale into an unlimited market.
The levelized cost of solar + storage according to Lazards is even less: $85-158/MWh.
Energy sources that work when they want to will never replace energy sources that work when you tell them to. Lobbying against nuclear is just lobbying for coal and gas.
Porting electricity over HVDC from half a continent away (with several metro areas in-between soaking up supply) just seems impractical when we could have small reactors distributed around in smaller, more resilient grids.
But you are not limited to porting in power from far off, you can draw down local, banked storage. If that runs low, you can bring in liquified ammonia synthesized in the tropics. All of this will be chosen according to what costs least. All of it costs less than the nukes would have set you back.
That being said, there is great potential in batteries becoming much denser and cheaper.
[Citation required]
Grid-scale battery systems have fallen more than 70% since 2015.
> nuclear would be quite competitively priced
Nuclear is one of the most expensive and keeps getting more expensive; it's not competing against natural gas. It's competing against wind and solar, the two cheapest forms of generation. Solar is dropping ~10% per year...
Then why are there checks notes 0 deployments ? Battery costs are exploding currently due to the hikes in prices of lithium, nickel and cobalt. Battery demand outstrips supply by far, and batteries are needed elsewhere.
> It's competing against wind and solar, the two cheapest forms of generation.
They're complimentary, not competition. Solar+wind alone
Grid-scale batteries are still tiny. Lithium batteries will not solve the grid problem anytime soon. Lithium (and co) will be strained to the max already.
Every other technology has barley been deployed at all. And there is already a whole litter of energy storage startups that have died.
> Nuclear is one of the most expensive and keeps getting more expensive
In order to get more expensive we would actually have to build plant.
But literally any series engineering analysis of modern GenIV plants show gigantic potential of cost improvement. And if we could actually build them in series production there is another order of magnitude of potential cost improvement.
There is little need, thus far, for storage, so little has been built. Right now, generating capacity is a better place to spend the money. Next year, the same storage will be much cheaper.
By the time any nuke started could be finished, even if it would have been competitive today, it would not when finished. So, it would be abandoned before completion. They would not return any of the money spent.
We have squirmed in the grip of petroleum and coal megacorps for decades, and will finally be free of them.