Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Funny article in that it doesn't discuss lifecycle costs. A side-by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear power plant relative to those powered by wind/solar/storage is what I'd expect to see from a 'paper of record' like the NYTimes.

Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.

Much of the discussion of energy in the American media is pretty poor these days. For example, the solar tariff issue on China sourced PV - there are simply no US companies making panels of comparable quality (monocrystalline Si lasts longer and is more efficient). Concepts like requiring Chinese manufacturers to open factories in the USA if they want to sell in US markets would make sense but probably would violate some trade provision or other.

Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply chain. Costs vary significantly based on the purity of the ore (18% is the top, 0.1% is the economically viable limit) and like oil, uranium ore is not globally distributed (unlike sunlight and wind).

As far as Russia/Ukraine, the real agenda the US government seems to be pushing there is using that conflict to rapidly increase LNG exports to Europe from the US West/South coast, even though energy prices are spiking due to inflation (and plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA, allowed under that 2015 bill lifting that restriction). A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party. Yes, that's technologically possible, but would require massive economic investment.

View on HN

> ... I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.

Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years.

> Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply chain.

Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern, as is using breeder reactors to reprocess spent fuel. And the exact same issues apply to storage.

How is energy storage at scale unsolved when we can synthesize Methane quite easily? Grid scale storage is just a matter of cost. It's unclear which technology will be the most cost effective, but if we wanted to we could just store energy as Methane and pay the 50% efficiency cost.

If this is so simple, why don't we do it? Or is that the question you're asking?

Of course, that 50% efficiency cost seems like a bit of a bear in itself. If you lose half of the stored power, that would seem to significantly drive up the total lifecycle cost of a Watt of wind power. (Recognizing, of course, that not all of it must be stored.)

The cost and inefficiency (==cost) of storage seems like an unfortunate thing to handwave away in a conversation about relative costs.

No, it's obvious why we don't do it: it's fairly expensive and we currently don't have enough renewable supply to fill tanks with Methane. Grids can easily be 70+% renewable without any storage at all. Money is currently better spent increasing supply than building storage.

We do it already on a grand scale.

It's just that since we live in a world where we burn lots of gas, we don't need to do the "generate synthetic methane" step, we can just burn less of it.

Sure, we could spend billions on generating synthetic methane from renewables while at the same time burning natural methane, but that would be stupid.

That is all capex. Renewable capex is still in free fall. Storage too.

The more you use it, the less it costs, per kWh.

> the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage

What are these problems, exactly? I see videos and news stories about grid batteries being successfully deployed for short term management and how pumped hydro is basically a big cheap gravity battery, but I'm not a civil/electrical engineer, so I accept there could easily be elephants in the room here.

It’s just scale. Those batteries and pumped hydro stories seem big. Relative to your house, they are. Relative to the grid as a whole, they are small.

That doesn't answer the question. What exactly is the problem that needs to be solved?

Scaling up capacity of the storage. There aren't that many sites that are geologically feasible for pumped storage (and it destroys a local ecosystem by flooding and draining it repeatedly) and batteries need rare earth metals (not actually that rare but environmentally toxic to produce).

We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of cobalt that have to be mined.

Globally the potential pumped storage resource is far larger than would be needed. You might be confused by assuming the pumped hydro has to be on existing rivers.

http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

Cobalt already eliminated from half of new Tesla batteries: https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-cobalt-free-lfp-b...

False. You have been corrected on this point before. Please stop posting what you know are falsehoods.

Can't say I remember ever interacting with you before, but either way this doesn't meet the HN standards of civility/graciousness.

> batteries need rare earth metals

"Rare earths" are a column (edit: ha ha see below) in the periodic table, and are not used in batteries.

Some types of electric motors use rare earths, others do not.

Here's a primer: https://blog.ucsusa.org/josh-goldman/electric-vehicles-batte...

"Rare earths" are actually the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium [1], not one column of the periodic table. Good information otherwise!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanthanide#Etymology

Ha ha busted! Thanks. As an astronomer I think everything beyond He is a metal.

I don't understand why people don't talk about the water usage involved in pumped hydro when the vast majority of the Western United States is dealing with record low water levels + sinking due to groundwater usage.

Pumped hydro doesn't use up the water. It goes back and forth between the lower and the upper reservoirs. Some evaporates, for sure, but that's a tiny fraction of the water that would be evaporated cooling a NPP of the same power output.

Furthermore, putting floating solar on the reservoirs would eliminate much of the evaporation.

And, when it is used for storage, it is at higher altitude, so evaporates less.

Sure it doesn't use water, but it's still taking water out of the ecosystem. Why is that not considered when we have record low water levels.

PV can be used to desalinate sea water as well as pumping it up to the top of the reservoirs. It's also possible to extract energy from fresh water as it mixes with sea water to improve the system efficiency, but I don't want to even guess if that's better or worse overall than just cleaning the water and reusing it.

'handwave the unsolved-at-scale' ? All you have to do is look at Australia:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f...

> Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South Wale’s Liddell coal plant and Victoria’s Loy Yang facility. In January, AGL Energy revealed that it had secured both Wärtsilä and Fluence under non-exclusive framework agreements to supply up to 1 GW of large-scale battery storage."

So, would it make more economic sense for this 1GW battery-storage system to be replaced by a nuclear power plant? Australia after all is one of the places with the most high-grade uranium ore, being among the top three exporters.

Here's an example of more reliable analysis:

> "To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year. That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of electricity per year. This number is enough to power only 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power. For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant."

https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/...

Your final comparison there is an excellent example of hand-waving away the problem of intermittency. This is something that advocates of renewables regularly want to dismiss because the discussion is a difficult one.

Wind and solar are cheap now because their fuel cost is zero and the cost of grid reliability is borne by us - consumers. In a better world, the cost of balancing the grid at night should be borne by a solar PV generator because it caused the problem.

Even if you match the energy output of a solar and nuclear plant, the component of time is ignored. On a grid powered by solar, where will energy come from at night? How many batteries will you construct? The scale of these batteries is again something that’s dismissed by claims of continental-scale grids but has that been achieved anywhere? All the batteries in the world combined can power à giga watt scale grid for hours. That’s right, hours.

Nuclear is a solution in the here and now. It buys us time to sort through these problems while we work towards a better future.

Nuclear has the same issue of intermittency. You have to either overprovisioning if you use nuclear or use battery storage. Nuclear is much more expensive than wind/solar so if you follow an overprovisioning strategy the best is to build wind/solar capacity, because it buys you more. Moreover, the larger and more integrated grids become (this is happening already for economic reasons in Europe) the less this is an issue.

Also why do you only mention solar and not wind? Maybe because eit would make your argument less convincing? The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night.

Why are the same simplistic arguments being brought forward again and again. They have all been debunked.

> The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night.

Is it enough wind to meet all the demand at night? And what happens when it stops blowing as much as expected for a long period of time[0]? You still need baseline power generation for quite some time to come until those questions that, well, keep getting hand waved away are solved.

0: https://fortune.com/2021/09/16/the-u-k-went-all-in-on-wind-p...

There are many studies which showed how much overprovisioning you need to go to 100% renewable with different size grids. None of these are outrageous, but it's also nothing we currently need to think about. We can easily scale up renewable capacity to 70% without significant overprovisioning. So we really just need to build lots more renewables at the moment.

If you don't have renewables for a while, and transmission line availability flags, you import anhydrous ammonia from the tropics. So, you need only minimal over-provisioning and local storage.

But then you presumably need to build these extra power plants that can use that fuel?

We have combined-cycle turbines already. More will be built wherever they will be needed.

A combined cycle powerplant is about 10% of the cost, per unit power output, of a nuclear power plant. So we could completely back up a renewable grid with CC plants and nuclear could still be much more expensive.

And, steam turbines cost more to keep working than CC turbines. But both are very mature, meaning costs won't change.

> The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night.

The wind doesn't blow as strongly at night. It's much calmer.

Yes and demand is also much lower what is your point? Apart from the fact that your statement is highly dependent on location (it is much less true for sea installations for example).

> You have to either overprovisioning if you use nuclear or use battery storage.

Whereas with solar and wind, you need to do both, because you need the overprovisioned capacity to recharge the batteries.

No with a reasonably large grid you only need to overprovison no need for battery.

But this is really a question of economics, the mix of how much storage you want to include is really a question of cost and the specific grid. One should also say that pretty much every grid already has some level of overprovisioning, because otherwise you run into problems when some exceptional events hit.

In the end why would you pay for more expensive nuclear if you can get more capacity for the same price with wind/solar. So it is cheaper to build the overprovisioning with that. Moreover if the current trends for storage prices continue then things become cheaper still.

French electrical power is 70% nuclear and has an installed capacity of 135 GW of power today. That comes out to 94.5 GW of nuclear power in France alone. Is there any country in the world that can supply hundreds of gigawatts to the grid from batteries today? If not, then the problem of grid power storage is unsolved at scale compared to nuclear.

I don't think that's a common use of "unsolved at scale". We know how to do it, it just doesn't make economic sense right now. I mean, suppose you have hundreds of GW of storage of some form installed. You could just claim it's still not "solved at scale" because the global energy consumption is even higher.

The global supply chains for lithium batteries are already struggling to keep up just with current demand. Where are we going to get enough cobalt? Hopefully not DR Congo.

Who says Lithium batteries are the best technology for grid scale storage? (Besides Elon, I guess?)

There are multiple kinds of grid storage. Australia, for example, wants these batteries to provide fast-acting frequency stabilization... in addition to stabilizing the output of various wind and solar facilities.

>Where are we going to get enough cobalt?

Nobody would use this kind of lithium ion battery for grid storage. Instead use Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePo4) batteries- no cobalt needed. LiFePo4 batteries are absolutely good enough right now for grid storage.

And any sort of lithium battery is the most expensive storage.

Utilities are not generally in a habit of reflexively choosing the most expensive alternative, even if some have plumped for nukes in places where ratepayers have no say.

Batteries will be a negligible fraction of utility storage, so that is moot.

Why? What will the rest be?

Kinetic (water gravity, flywheel) or thermal (molten salt baths which can be supplemented with solar thermal).

None of these things exist at a large scale except for pumped hydro / water gravity, and that requires very convenient topography and geology to work. Generally, any non-chemical storage system is overpriced (too inefficient) or a maintenance disaster.

Do you think those technologies will be scaled such that batteries are a "negligible fraction" of utility storage, or are you just giving examples of possibilities?

Numerous technologies will be scaled. Those mentioned adjacent are just very easily understood examples. Utilities will have criteria other than "easily understood", cost chief among them.

Flywheels and molten salt both have pretty gnarly failure modes too. Not Chernobyl bad, but still no fun.

Underground flywheels are perfectly safe, and more easily kept evacuated. But they won't be used much at utility scale, because they are expensive per Wh stored. Maximum storage is dictated by tensile strength of the wheel material, and each wheel needs its own motor / generator.

A negligible fraction of storage will be in flywheels.

Pumped hydro is not kinetic.

Not much storage exists because it has not been built yet. It has not been built yet because we haven't the renewable generating capacity to charge it from yet. Thus, we are spending on renewable generating capacity first, and lately factories that will build storage systems.

Battery storage is the most expensive variety. Round-trip efficiency is not very important anymore. I.e., other concerns dominate now. Anyway, gravity storage efficiency has always been fine.

I know there are options like pumped water, compressed air, spinning disc. No idea how feasible they are at scale, but I can imagine a world where physical storage like that could be lower maintenance & cost in the long-term compared to chemical batteries.

Even if less efficient, you can get enormous potential storage from pumped water with relatively simple machines compared to massive battery farms.

I'm interested in those alternative technologies, but I suspect they won't scale as well as batteries. Pumped hydro has been around a long time but it hasn't scaled because it is just very geographically specific.

Pumped hydro is far, far less geographically specific than always assumed.

This is partly because it needs no watershed, and partly because transmission lines mean it need not be local.

Anyway pumped hydro is only one of many equally viable alternatives. All will be used. Eventually which ones are cheapest will become clear.

I think my assumption with pumped hydro is that there must be something holding it back because it's been mature for a long time, so if it were as useful and scalable as you say, I think it would have been scaled a lot more by now.

The overwhelming majority of utility-scale storage today is pumped hydro. It stores and releases many GWh every day. You don't hear much about it because it just works.

Yes but is still a small amount of energy relative to total demand and there don't seem to be serious efforts to scale it up massively. I don't claim to know why there aren't. Maybe there should be. It just makes me suspicious when I see a mature technology that still sees limited deployment, that there is a good reason for that.

Batteries have the very large disadvantage that cost is per Wh stored. Flow batteries can reduce this, as capacity becomes a matter of tankage and electrolyte.

The sweet spot for storage is near-zero opex, very low per-Wh stored capex, and cheap capex per-W in and, particularly, out. Thus, weight for watt-hours, and simple motor / generator for watts in and out.

Synthetic fuel has the appeal that the stored energy is readily tanked and transported, and very saleable; enough so to overcome low round-trip efficiency, expensive electrolysers for W-in, and complicated combined-cycle turbines for W-out.

I know a fellow who is running a startup that moves a (very) heavy weight up a hill, and going back down it provides power. He says it is something like 90% efficient at energy recovery, whereas pumped water is far less due to friction in the pipes.

He also said the inertia of a falling weight is enormous, and would help stabilize the grid.

Okay, but if his startup isn't named Sisyphus Energy, I don't know what he's doing with his life.

This is a genius idea, especially because it could be done anywhere with a hill, which makes it a lot more geographically accessible (since most places have hills)

It’s actually not a good idea at all. When you do the math ( or rather the physics) gravity batteries need so much mass and height to compete with other technologies that it’s just not worth it.

Except if water, pipes and pumps are used, as water is heavy, and pipes and pumps can transport a lot of it very efficiently and cheaply. That’s called pumped hydro storage and is currently the #1 grid scale storage in the world.

Trying to do the same with solid materials can sound like a genius idea but it’s really not.

Well, his company is building a pilot plant in Brazil. I suppose we'll find out if he's a genius or not.

> efficiently

Are you sure about that? He said the losses due to pipe friction were considerable.

Losses turn out not to matter much when opex is near zero and generation capex is very low. You just build a little more top-line generating capacity.

70% round trop efficiency. And it’s from actual operational data, not from an optimistic spreadsheet calculation.

70% is plenty, nowadays.

If the railroad is already built, and disused, that drives down cost.

Cost is what matters most.

You need a very, very large mass, and then rails and rolling stock to carry it.

That is why vertical motion in a disused mineshaft is attractive. A single 10,000t weight hanging from a winch has just one moving part, the winch, and cable all in tension, with no preparation of the shaft sides; everything is concentrated at the top. The mineshaft provides isolation from environmental disruption.

You get much the same effect with a float attached to a cable down to a pulley augered into the sea floor; thence to an onshore winch. The cable and pulley are exposed to sea (or lake) water, but you get the advantage that the winch may be shared among as many cable reels as you like, with only simple clutches. A 20m diameter float displaces 4000 tons of water, and the sea floor may be much more than a km deep.

(In principle you could share a winch drive among lots of mineshafts, but they are rarely close enough together. You could bore more, but that drives up cost. The world is absolutely perforated with disused mineshafts.)

I hadn't heard this sea float / winch idea before! Any links you could dig up for me? Anyone operationalizing this yet?

There was an "Undecided with Matt Ferrell" on YT some weeks back that mentioned a dumb version of it somebody at a university promoted.

That one had the winch and motor / generator at the sea floor, and a big rack of floats. It was, of course, too expensive. This is a common feature of energy storage ideas: people seem to love to promote the most stupidly expensive version of a good idea, and then give up when it is shot down for that.

Certainly, any scheme where you put complicated electromechanical stuff on the sea floor, it will be expensive. And likewise, where the expensive part is only usable with one "unit" of storage. Or anyway it just costs too much or needs perfect weather or something. (E.g., Energy Vault (NRGV) is stupid and their investors will lose their shirts.)

But there is usually a simple variation that lacks these problems.

10,000t weight? If it’s made up of rock with a density of 3000kg/m3, it’s 3333 cubic meters, so about 15x15x15 m3. Basically a large building. I’m not sure what kind of shaft can handle it. And even if you can pull it of, 10000t over 1000 meters is only 27 MWh of storage. 1 pumped hydro plant can store hundred of GWh!

(1) Rock is not very dense; pig iron density is 3x rock's. (2) A cube is not the only shape, for a weight. (3) Total capacity is not the only parameter of interest, for utility storage. (4) There is not only one mineshaft. (5) No utility is restricted to using only one kind of storage; different kinds favor different parameters, and we may expect utilities to use different kinds at the same time to maximize value and minimize cost.

Assuming utilities will do the stupid, expensive thing leads to failed analyses.

Rock is cheap. The shape is irrelevant. For grid scale, total capacity is what makes it grid scale. No amount of parameter tuning can change the fact that stored energy is at best mass * g * height. Adding more huge mineshafts is irrelevant. You can always add more units, it doesn’t make it more efficient.

Sounds like an Elon Musk solution. Make it bigger, taller, make more of it, and somehow it’ll bend basic physics facts to become the ground breaking disruptor technology of the next century.

Efficiency doesn't matter nearly so much as is usually assumed. What matters is cost. Exactly, cost per Wh stored, and per W in and per W out.

Mineshaft storage is very, very efficient, but has an upper limit on energy per mineshaft determined by its depth and how much weight fits in it. The cost of the winch apparatus is amortized over that amount. More mineshafts means more total storage.

Pumped hydro has very, very low cost per Wh stored, but kinda high per W in and out. But thousands of pumped hydro systems were already built, almost, so seem free; they just needed pumps added.

Synthetic H2 and NH3 are very, very cheap per Wh stored. W out uses existing turbines, so seems cheap. W in depends on your electrolysers, which are improving fast.

In batteries, cost per Wh stored has been large, but is different in different chemistries. In a better chemistry it is lower. Flow batteries have lower cost per Wh stored, for any liquid chemistry, but higher per W in or out; and need plumbing and pumps.

Details matter. Numbers matter. Dumb choices make dumb designs. Dumb designs can be improved on.

Drawing conclusions based on dumb choices is just dumb.

Musk is dumb, but just barely smart enough to hire smart people and, sometimes, let them be smart. So, Hyperloop was just dumb, no matter who works on it. Starship is kinda smart, depending on what you can think of to do with it. Mars colonization is dumb. Starlink could possibly be smart, depending on a lot of details.

A wholly new capability, like radically cheaper mass to orbit, can often enable smart ideas. Super-expensive mass to orbit was good enough for weather satellites, planetary probes, and geosynch COMSATs.

The downside of pumped water, of course, is you need a hydroelectric dam and there are not many sites suitable for that. Those dams also come with significant environmental disruption.

The weight system only requires part of a hillside, has a pretty small environmental footprint, and there are lots and lots of hills.

Not true. You can pump water to an existing hydroelectric dam, but you can also just pump it to a pond on a hilltop. No environmental disruption. There are lots of hills.

The rail system needs maintained rolling stock and maintained rails. The mineshaft method is overwhelmingly cheaper and more reliable, because all that must be kept working is an electric winch. There are lots and lots of disused mineshafts.

Sorry, you can't make hydropower without constructing a dam, turbines, and completely disrupting the stream. This is environmentally destructive, and due to the scale needed, there are few suitable sites.

There are indeed many unused mineshafts, but a shaft would be only suitable for a small weight, maybe enough for a single house. This does not scale.

Pumped hydro doesn't require a stream, since it isn't harvesting energy from a preexisting flow of water.

How are you going to create a large enough pond?

Maybe read up? When you just make shit up as you go along, you say dumb things.

Asking a question is not making things up.

This involves moving earth in places with suitable topography. The economics depends on both the vertical offset between the two reservoirs, and how much earth has to be moved per unit of reservoir volume.

Algorithms have been created to use GIS data to automatically find potential PHES sites. There are lots of candidates. Australia, for example, has 300x more potential that it would need for a 100% renewable grid.

http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

Often there is already a depression you can use as is. Or deepen, and use the excavation for a dike.

If not, maybe there is a box canyon you can close the end of with a dam.

In places, they have flattened a convex hilltop and used the material to make a dike.

Usually you don't need anywhere near as much storage volume as a typical hydroelectric dam reservoir holds.

It’s actually not a good idea at all. When you do the math ( or rather the physics) gravity batteries need so much mass and height to compete with other technologies that it’s just not worth it.

Now if you use water, pipes and pumps, instead of solid materials, now we’re talking. It’s called pumped hydro storage and is the number one grid scale storage in the world.

Hint: pumped hydro is, exactly, a gravity battery. A gravity "flow battery", if you like.

It is #1, just now, because a lot already existed. They cost a great deal to build, back when. New ones would cost as much, but a small variation is much cheaper, not needing a dam or a watershed.

A small variation on a bad idea can be a very good idea.

There is a number of battery chemistries more cheap and even efficient than Lithium-based, but with lower energy density. High energy density is important for handheld devices, for flying devices, even for cars. But stationary energy storage can be much heavier and bulkier per kWh stored, as long as it's cheaper, and can sustain more than a few thousand recharge cycles.

Lithium batteries have the momentum and are dropping in price because of the EV cars revolution happening right now. When solar revolution will happen i utility scale, the utility-type batteries that will emerge may be seriously different.

Since you are 100% certain that such technology will emerge in an economical viable state to solve the storage problem for Europe, could you please provide a date so we can draft a EU law that forbids burning of fossil fuel in the European market by that date.

If you can do it by this winter it would solve inflation, enable a complete sanction packet against Russian oil and gas, solve several political conflicts within EU in regard to the Ukraine war, eliminate the food shortage problem and significant reduce the cost of farming, make a large dent in reducing global warming, improve GDP, and boost prosperity in general.

Alternative chemisitries are many, and are actively developed; here's a 2021 overview: https://www.mining.com/non-lithium-battery-chemistries-to-gr...

What I can't predict is when some of them will become competitive enough to matter, and thus used in some large infrastructure projects.

If we had completely free, 100% efficient grid scale storage of unlimited capacity today we couldn't stop burning fossil fuels because we don't have enough renewable generation capacity installed to fill any form of storage.

If the storage solution is close to free then the capacity doesn't matter since any new investment would be guarantied profit. Wind, when the weather is optimal, is several time cheaper than fossil fuels. Everyone would rush to just install new renewable capacity.

Just this week in Europe, during the summer vacations and when energy usage is at the lowest point during the year, the energy market price still jumps by 3000% when the wind go from high to low.

The advantage of lithium batteries is energy/weight and energy/volume. With grid storage, neither weight nor volume is much of an issue.

A couple years back, "60 Minutes" ran a segment of somebody developing grid batteries with seawater and dirt. They didn't store much energy per weight and volume, but who cares for grid batteries. I wonder what happened to this technology.

At scale means with mining requirements as well.

With current and projected reserves we can manage intra-day requirements for the whole world. This is the we mine it all option.

But we need intra-year storage capacity.

Nuclear is clearly the easier and only option (and the most environment-friendly to me, considering the mining requirements)

Mining of what? Hydrogen as storage medium for example doesn't require all that much mining. Are you assuming storage will be in the form of Lithium batteries?

I'm assuming currently proven tech of batteries. And we need to act now for climate change, with current tech.

Electricity to H2 to electricity has horrendous efficiency (about 20% at most IIRC). We'd be much better off CO2-speaking using it to replace coal in steel production, and replace gas in fertilizer production. Both of which are proven tech (but not globally deployed, as coal and gas are cheap)

Power2Gas2Power has low round trip efficiency (say 40%), but as only a fairly small fraction of the energy flow goes through it that doesn't matter that much at the end of the day. If it did, that just means heavy industries would migrate to less seasonally variable places.

Inefficiency just requires extra capex, not opex. And the capex is capex is still falling at an exponential rate. So, no.

Where are you getting that 20% number from?

https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/round-trip-...

The round trip efficiency is 30% or more and rising with better electrolysis and reverse electrolysis being developed.

Personally, I expect something made with iron or sodium to take over.

For hydrogen, we have to solve the horrible cycle efficiency of its storage. It's not so bad for use as a fuel (e.g. for airplanes), but as static storage hydrogen is currently a very bad choice.

Cycle efficiency is trivially resolved by feeding in more zero-opex power.

But hydrogen efficiency is improving as fast as all renewable tech.

I agree that hydrogen efficiency doesn't matter here, but the capital expenditure to build a giant electrolyzer with 5% utilization doesn't really make sense. The cost of the electrolyzer is the things that needs to greatly fall if hydrogen is going to be used for long-term storage.

Electrolyzers driven by otherwise curtailed renewables would have a capacity factor much higher than 10%. If I go to https://model.energy/ and solve for the optimal solution for the US for 2011 weather and 2030 cost assumptions, the capacity factor of the electrolyzers is 43%.

That is more of a what-if. If there was more wind and solar built out there would be enough curtailed energy to run electrolyzers at 43% capacity factor. I am saying today it doesn't make sense because there isn't a lot of over-provisioning taking place. There should be but what investors are going to jump first with a curtailed energy electrolyzer when curtailed energy is low.

It's a demolition of your nonsensical 5% number (which is also what-if).

In the state with the most solar built out in the US the curtailment is 5% https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49276.

Which is of course meaningless, since curtailment increases with the amount of installed wind/solar. What matters is how much curtailment there would be in an optimal all-renewable energy system.

I tell you what: show me a cost optimized renewable energy system in which the electrolyzers have a capacity factor of 5%.

Demand for hydrogen for all uses will drive elecrolyser use to as close to 100% as available energy permits. Ultimately, other cheap storage will be used to drive them.

Hydrogen has important industrial uses. Currently we get it from natural gas. That has to change in the future.

Hydrogen produced using NG will be deeply undercut by electrolysed hydrogen. Extracting NG will become unsustainably expensive as zero-opex synthesis surges.

Well nuclear proponents handwave away the massively higher costs, the still unsolved long term storage problem (it's been >70 years of nuclear power and there still does not exist a long term storage facility in the world), and insurance for the case of a disaster.

> it's been >70 years of nuclear power and there still does not exist a long term storage facility in the world

It's bizarre how anti-nuclear activists point at problems caused by anti-nuclear activism and ask, like Eric Andre, "how could nuclear power do this?"

Nukes' problems are not caused by activists. They have nowhere near that much influence. Nukes' problems are inherent.

Biggest, by a large margin, is capex which simply prices it completely out of the market.

Even a superficial glance would tell you that this doesn't make sense. We have had >70 years of peaceful nuclear power. A significant anti nuclear movement has existed for maybe 40 years and it has clearly not been influencial until maybe the last 20 years. So why has the nuclear power industry not solved the issues in the first 30 years? Moreover, why has France which hasn't had a significant antinuclear movement ever solved any of the issues?

The storage problem has yet to be solved for the same reason why any nation has yet to solve the issue of pollution from fossil fuels. It cost money and any increase in energy costs is detrimental to growth.

The insurance issue is similar identical to other energy sources. Why isn't hydro power insured in the case of accidental flooding? If they were it wouldn't be possible to run them at current energy prices. We don't see fossil fuel plants being insured against increased air pollution, nor do they have to pay if people around them get sick. If a hydrodam causes a flood, then there will be a flood. Hopefully those people downstream has their own insurance.

No.

The storage problem has not been solved because we do not have the technology. There is no evidence that the technology os possible.

The long term waste (not much in quantity, but it does mount up. A few million litres at the moment I believe ??) has to be stored for periods of time on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.

There is no way we can write a warning sign that we know can be read for that long.

We cannot build a structure that will last that long.

There are no places on this planet that we can be sure are stable for that long.

It is making future generations pay for our current consumption.

>It is making future generations pay for our current consumption.

Okay, then in places where wind/solar/storage aren't up to snuff we'll just keep burning coal.

The US had a solution at Yucca Mountain, except the solution has been legally and politically sabotaged by activists.

A significant anti nuclear movement has existed for maybe 40 years and it has clearly not been influencial until maybe the last 20 years.

That anti-nuclear movement was huge in the 1970s, and was successful in many states and countries at creating major roadblocks to new power plants. Their success in California back then is big reason why the last plants are going offline now, and there haven't been any new plants since Diablo Canyon, which was started in the 1960s. To say that anti-nuclear groups weren't influential until the 21st century is absurd.

> So why has the nuclear power industry not solved the issues

The technical issues are solved.

The political issue is that the "green lobby" will not accept any nuclear waste storage solution.

> A significant anti nuclear movement has existed for maybe 40 years and it has clearly not been influencial until maybe the last 20 years.

O_o There's been a significant and influential anti-nuclear movement for the last 60 years...

I think the only one very valid criticism for nuclear is long term storage problem. But also I think it's sunk cost. It's a big problem to have 10000t of nuclear waste from zero, but adding another 15000t from 10000t can be ignored, isn't it?

>the still unsolved long term storage problem (it's been >70 years of nuclear power and there still does not exist a long term storage facility in the world)

Storage has /been solved/ for decades.

High Level Waste is only a tiny fraction of total waste. As it stands, all of the HLW created by all the nuclear plants in the world could be kept in a football field sized area. The vast majority of the rest of the generated waste will decay to to harmlessness during the lifetime of a plant.

HLW regulations around transport are so high in most countries that the standards for transport casks has made them practically indestructible. They can literally be hit by trains and no be breached. Solutions like those developed by Deep Isolation also effectively solve any long term storage problem for the HLW.

Here [1] is a picture of the temporary storage at the Yankee nuclear power plant temporary storage (sorry I could not find better pictures from above to give more accurate size). There are ~90 commercial nuclear reactor in the US. I can immediately see that this would not fit into a football field sized area. And this is for a single country and ignores waste that was already transported away. And no things will not decay to harmlessness during the lifetime of a plant. They decay to a level where the containers are not very warm anymore so they can be more easily transported. Also low level waste is not harmless either, and there's going to be a lot of it when decommissioning a plant.

Sorry here's the link: https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Aerial-from-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

Operation will start next year.

Not just hundreds of Gigawatts, but also tens of thousands of Gigawatt-hours. Unless you're willing to accept regular black-outs, you need to build enough capacity to account for the occasional long, sustained period of cloudy days with low wind. The cost of that extra necessary-but-rarely-used capacity needs to be factored in to any comparison of wind/solar vs other energy sources.

It might make more sense to have either fossil-fuels as backups for such times, or for HVDC lines to connect geographically disparate regions (it's always sunny or windy somewhere).

As we're seeing from Russia and Europe, depending on someone else means you can find yourself being threatened or actually being cut off.

There will be plenty of tropical suppliers of synthetic anhydrous ammonia competing, if transmission capacity or availability falls short.

People might even keep a stock on hand.

Why would you need 100% storage supply. Also note if France would go 100% nuclear they would need either significant overprovisioning or storage as well. Nuclear is not an load following source. Even less so if you want to operate economically.

> Why would you need 100% storage supply.

So you don't have power outages on windless nights.

You generally use peaker plants or backup fossil fuel or hydro for that use case, at this point in time batteries are used to supply power for a couple of hours at best. You need that backup power anyway for when the nuclear plant is out of commission for some reason.

Regardless of how you're generating your power, you're going to need to overprovision your generation capacity slightly to account for downtime. You only need storage if all of your generation capacity is offline at the same time, which is inevitable with solar power (nighttime), possible with gas (pipeline failure?), but less inherently likely with nuclear.

> backup fossil fuel

In practice this means fossil fuels become the baseload power source.

I sincerely believe that HVDC is a game changer here, it allows you to move energy around at a fraction of the losses that were considered normal before allowing for overcapacity in one place to be used elsewhere eliminating a major requirement for storage, on that scale there is no lack of combined sun/wind availability.

Anyway transmission losses are immaterial when top-line generating capacity is so cheap.

China is building solar in Chile, at their antipodes, and a transmission line back to China with only 50% loss, for solar energy through the night.

> In practice this means fossil fuels become the baseload power source.

False. In the immediate future, synthetic anhydrous ammonia will displace it. Extracting NG will be too expensive to compete, because the only cost of ammonia will be capex. The more you make, the less it costs.

Your argument does not follow at all. I have the impression that you don't know what baseload is. Baseload is the minimum amount of demand over a given time (it is not a measure of supply at all).

The previous poster talked about using fossil (or any other means) to supply the mismatch between the supply and demand at the times where such a mismatch might exist. This is completely unrelated to baseload, it could in fact be larger than baseload. Note that such a mismatch would also exist for nuclear (dependent on overprovisioning). However it would in general be only needed of short periods of time.

It could be larger than baseload, but it's unlikely to be any less than baseload.

They are completely unrelated and yes in general they would be much smaller than baseload. Why wouldn't it? What the GP described is essentially what gas peakers do.

> yes in general they would be much smaller than baseload. Why wouldn't it?

Because if your baseload is your minimum power consumption (which generally occurs at night) and you have a windless night (therefore your renewables are generating 0 power), your "gas peakers" will have to provide the entire baseload amount of power.

> In practice this means fossil fuels become the baseload power source.

As the name baseload power implies, it would have to be providing power all the time and that's not what is needed.

That is correct. The term I see by my government is "reserve energy". In practice this mean a country subsidize a fossil fuel plant to keep engines running when demand is low, and then the plant get paid a second time if and when the plant is running.

It is one of the main reason why investing in fossil fuel energy when countries turn to wind power is fairly good choice. The plant has lower costs in terms of fuels, when it burn fuel it does so when the market price is at the highest possible, and it get paid regardless from the government. The government are also locked into continuing this scheme as the alternative is to not have the reserve energy when needed which makes voters very angry.

Burning fossil fuels when the price is lowest and without any government subsidies is just something people with too much fossil fuel can afford to do.

> Nuclear is not an load following source

In France it is, and has been successfully for more than 33 years [1]

[1] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/

Thank you for providing a trustable source.

Ok I didn't know that they implemented load following in France. However, note thatbbecause nuclear power cost is almost completely capex dominated so doing this essentially increases your power cost by the factor that you use for load balancing. So out of economic reasons you hardly ever want to not run a nuclear plant at 100%.

Seems like grid scale storage could "solve" this, in precisely the way it does for renewables (ie. Treat nuclear as a sun that shines 24/7 and build storage to allow you to generate a bit above the average and follow the actual usage curve with storage).

That is, assuming that grid scale storage is in fact viable.

Yup, but didn't we already say that renewables are cheaper per kWh? So then with any storage renewables should still be the cheap bulk generation.

You said that, that doesn't mean it is true. And it probably isn't true north of 50 degrees of latitute where lots of the people who need energy live.

France's nuclear fleet has an all-in cost of 7c/kWh, which is roughly the same as the cost of solar or wind power in France, but without the need for storage or smart grids that doubles the cost of solar/wind. (For all this remember that France has about a third of the insolation of California or Arizona per year, or maybe half at best in some places.)

For all this remember that France has about a third of the insolation of California or Arizona per year, or maybe half at best in some places.

I don't think that is correct. This is a table of average insolation for different cities around the world derived from NASA's Surface meteorology and Solar Energy data set: http://stalix.com/isolation.pdf

Los Angeles gets 5.4 kWh/m^2/day. San Francisco gets 4.9. Lyon, Paris, and Toulouse get 3.7, 3.3, and 3.7 respectively.

I dunno if this is what gp meant to say but didn't convey properly, but the average per year is pretty irrelevant once you leave the subtropics. You need enough power for the lowest level of light part of the year, which is also the highest total energy use part of the year (much of that is achieved through individual home heating with burning fuel, but electrification is necessary to have any hope of even stalling climate trends).

France installed nuclear capacity is 61370 MWe, I suspect you looked at MWth (thermal output, not electrical output). Source:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrie_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fr...

Currently the capacity factor for french nuclear reactors is less than 50% because of various technical issues and maintenance schedule slippage.

It will go further down because of a very hot summer and regulations on maximum released water temperatures.

At a minimum, the EV demand will solve this. 150 wh/kg Sodium Ion (good enough for likely 300 mile cars) is coming next year, and 230 wh/kg LFP is coming later this year (350-450 mile cars). Grid storage should be a core use case of Sodium Ion.

Lithium Sulfur looks VERY PROMISING, and other schemes and grid-specific chemistries will be developed.

Within the timeframe of any new nuclear construction, you cannot predict the cost targets with respect to any of these industries/technologies: they all are in prime economies of scale and technological improvement curves. I don't think they will improve as well as the last decade where solar dropped double-digits per year, but we'll see.

Nuclear keeps trying to say the scale isn't solvable with wind/solar/battery. That is a completely unproven/unsubstantiated claim. It's basically FUD. The materials being targeted for near-term alt energy will be massively scalable.

> So, would it make more economic sense for this 1GW battery-storage system to be replaced by a nuclear power plant? Australia after all is one of the places with the most high-grade uranium ore, being among the top three exporters.

As much as I detest the pro nuclear shilling, this isn't a valid comparison. 250MWh of storage is only useful for very short term energy arbitrage and isn't a replacement for always-on power.

The real answer is a mix of solar, solar-thermal, wind, storage, and combined cycle plants for the holes (ideally eventually powered by plant-based and solar-cracked hydrogen/methane/etc.). This mix costs a bit more than nuclear does now, but doesn't have the huge massive downsides of total dependency on and subservience to a handful of companies operating out of the five or so countries that are allowed to produce fuel (as well as all the existential risk stuff, concentration of risk to mistakes/attacks, horrible un-accounted externalities and supply chain fragility). It will also likely cost less to build it at a time such that it would still be completed before a nuclear plant which was comissioned now.

Of course that's all moot because the balance *right now* is running existing fossil fuel infrastructure more vs. building solar and not storing the energy. And in this equation, the cost of solar is a tiny fraction of nuclear.

> the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant.

Yes this is generally my argument. If you take the money you would spend on nuclear and spend it instead on solar, wind, gridscale storage, as well as EV and home battery rebates, you end up with a much more robust distributed energy production grid with very low maintenance costs. I think the idea of including rebates for home batteries and EVs is an important one, because it means that when major parts of the power line system are knocked out for some reason, you still have a lot of distributed storage.

You can also begin energy production with a solar and battery roll out MUCH sooner than new nuclear construction. From a climate change perspective, producing clean energy sooner is a big deal.

And we should not overlook that nuclear energy is a single target for terrorist attack and requires a powerful state to manage security for the plant and its supply chain, while batteries and renewables require no such thing. From a libertarian/anarchist perspective, we can have a weaker state and still have good energy production with renewables.

EDIT: I am also realizing that handing out a bunch of rebates to the voters for new stuff (rooftop solar, home batteries, new EVs) would be WAY more politically popular than "lets pay now for a big monolithic nuclear power plant that takes 20 years to build." If you want a plan that actually works, keeping the voters happy seems like an important component.

But if you just price in the cost of the rebates, aren’t you overlooking a large chunk of the cost, which is borne by homeowners? That’s still a cost, even if it’s not being directly paid by the government.

So you see a doubled cost for nuclear.

But you need to add that Renewable solution only last 20 years vs 60 for nuclear. That can be seen like triple the cost you factored in already.

And also, your renewable energy source won’t work 100% of time and not at 100% of the capacity. Which also implies that you need to build multiple time what you planned to really get that planned capacity.

I'm not sure what the service life of a wind turbine is, but 20 years is about right for a photovoltaic solar panel. The power output begins to fall off drastically at that point.

It's about 15-20 years for wind turbines, depending on the circumstances.

LCOE is usually used to more easily compare the investment cost. While this leads to more resource usage... Because of economies of scale, wind turbines from 20 years into the future will be less expensive, more efficient and overall better.

> So you see a doubled cost for nuclear.

I don’t know what you mean. I proposed spending the same total amount.

> And also, your renewable energy source won’t work 100% of time and not at 100% of the capacity. Which also implies that you need to build multiple time what you planned to really get that planned capacity.

This was already factored in to the calculation I was agreeing with. They said that to get sufficient capacity in renewables considering reduced availability, it still costs 1/2 what nuclear costs.

I will copy and paste the relevant section from that comment for clarity:

>> "To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year. That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of electricity per year. This number is enough to power only 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power. For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant."

> https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/...

850MW doesn't tell you how much energy it can store -- if you need 850MW to power your grid and your battery can supply 850MWh, where do you get power for the other 11 hours until the sun comes out?

For some reason, these journalists tend to drop the "h" portion of the rated capacity of energy projects. The battery capacity (I believe this will actually be a group of stand-alone installations) will be 850MWh, which is about 2.6% of that Australian state's daily consumption.

Grid scale storage need two things to be viable. Capacity and duration. The battery solutions being rolled right now are those that operate on the scale of hours, being charged each day and then discharge each night. When you can reliable assert that you can fully charge the storage each day, and reliable know you can sell the full charge each night at the price point when the market peaks, it becomes fairly trivial to determine when revenue will exceed that of investments.

Solar + battery is great in those locations, and basically no one is aruging using nuclear when solar and battery is viable for 365 days of the year. Australia has a fairly large desert where such assumption would be true. Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, UK and most of Europe do not have reliable 365 days of sun each year. There aren't many investors spending their money to build solar + storage in northern Finland.

>The battery solutions being rolled right now are those that operate on the scale of hours

The state where the mega batteries are installed uses about ~32 GWh total a day. An 850 MWh doesn't even come close to covering their needs. Covering ~2.6% of their load is equivalent to keeping power on for about 40 minutes.

>Solar + battery is great in those locations, and basically no one is aruging using nuclear when solar and battery is viable for 365 days of the year. Australia has a fairly large desert where such assumption would be true.

Deserts actually make for the worst place to install solar. Dust / sand covering panels substantially lowers their efficiency (to near zero), and keeping them clean involves a lot of water (Can you guess where it's hardest to get water? Yep, a desert). And lastly, because the deserts are so far away from everyone else, there is significant transmission loss.

Batteries are not a feasable seasonal storage. They can store for a couple of hours, no more.

For seasonal storage you need a hydrogen economy. H2 is very very expensive and has never been rolled out at scale. Not a single large gas turbine to burn pure H2 has ever been build.

In the middle of a crisis it's better to go for proven and economic technologies than trying to invent something completely new and untestet.

Complains about renewables handwaving at scale, then suggests seawater uranium extraction and breeder reactors.

They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.

> They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.

Don't worry, they're lobbying to lower those standards in order to be more cost-competitive with renewables.

We've had breeder reactors for decades, what are you talking about?

We've had demo reactors with various issues, none of which demonstrated they could compete even with burner reactors.

I remind you the double standard involved criticizing renewables "at scale", so a few problematic breeder reactors won't dispel the hypocrisy.

For what it's worth, I'm not suggesting using breeder reactors as a primary source of electrical power, but as an option for reprocessing transuranic waste and spent fuel. So totally different levels of scale.

Also, the main reason we haven't invested in breeder reactors is that it turns out uranium isn't actually scarce enough to justify it.

Oh but you have to use breeders (or perhaps sea water uranium extraction) for a global nuclear-powered economy. Burner reactors run out of sufficiently cheap uranium in less than a decade at that scale. That pesky "scale" thing again.

That doesn't mean every single reactor needs to be a breeder reactor; it means you have a small number of breeder reactors, which we've done over half a century ago.

Also, reprocessing "nuclear waste" from nuclear power stations yields a lot of pretty good fuel for "fast breeder" reactors [1]. This also mostly solves the problem of storing the highly active nuclear waste: you may need like 5% of the current storage capacity if you burn the current "nuclear waste" stockpiles.

Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. But for the US, or France, or UK, or India, or China (and a bunch of others) this should not be a concern, since they officially have nuclear weapons.

It's mostly the political will, and the public opinion (which are interlinked) that limit a nuclear renaissance. If you talk about subsidies, please remember how huge were the subsidies that kickstarted the current solar and wind booms; early panels and wind towers were completely uneconomical by today's standards, and R&D costs were colossal. But now, with the technology streamlined and the economies of scale kicking in, solar is competitive even without subsidies.

The same could happen to a new crop of nuclear technology, much cleaner and more efficient than the kind we've inherited from 1970s.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

> Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns.

Not if you use Thorium breeder reactors.

I'm interested in nuclear energy but it appears that I don't know enough. Thorium breeder, processes generating pu-239... Is there a relatively accessible book I can read to understand all of this better?

The LFTR presentations (lots of youtubes) showed how their isotope chains were proliferation resistant.

If you didn't include 238U in your thorium breeder, the 233U that comes out will be usable in weapons (at least until enough of the 232U decays to present a gamma hazard.) And if you DO include 238U, you get plutonium.

> Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years.

Nuclear's position at this point is "we had a meh run, but next generation will be better, pinky promise".

On a global scale for the past fifty years we had 2 meltdowns, a country attacking another's nuclear facilities as a threat, and no clear replacement plan for the aging reactors in most countries even as they are way past the set date for decommission ing, and se still don't see how to cheaply deal with the waste.

People tend to brush the "political problems" under the rug, but they are real issues either way, so not taking them into account when doing comparisons wouldn't be fair.

In the same 50 years we’ve had the largest period of economic expansion in history, with virtually the entire economy directly dependent on cheap and plentiful energy.

There is an argument to say that on balance the pros outweigh the cons.

> Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems....

> Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern

Hmmm.... Hand waving unsolved at scale technical problems

> Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology

Grid storage technology is already there with pumped hydro storage(PHS). As 90% of built and newly building grid storage is already PHS. It is political problems and inertia that's holding it back. To be clear, I'm referring to off the river closed-loop PHS, which doesn't need a huge river check dam, flood zone, huge population relocation or ecological issues. All it needs is two places with area of 1sqkm each some hundred meter elevation apart. There is ANU study that claims we have enough of such sites for needed storage. Look at how fast China is building PHS recently. I think PHS approvals, even for closed-loop, in US are as hard to get as nuclear, which is holding it back.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hy...

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/10/05/aussie-scie...

.... and by the time any reactor design I'd be interested in seeing built (aka not old solid fuel rod plants susceptible to meltdowns), it would be ... 10 years? 20 years?

wind/solar/storage are on actively improving cost curves that even gas turbine is losing to. No one knows the price target of wind/solar/battery in 10-20 years, but I'd guess it is at least half the cost in real dollars of today.

Nuclear proponents are pushing all the media outlets because they are in the same boat as coal: LCOE is so much lower for wind/solar that electric companies lose money on them relative to alt energy. Only base load is a viable role onthe grid, and gas turbines beat them at that handily (although with a carbon tax who knows).

I'm not opposed to keeping existing nuclear plants online with some subsidies, but new nuclear plants? Come on. And I am a huge fan of those LFTR presentations and strongly believe next gen nuclear will be viable once a stable price point can be targeted.

The primary cost of nuclear is politically driven. I don't know if that matters in a world of actual energy scarcity, I guess we'll be finding out.

If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in an imagined future where there is massive investment into new nuclear infrastructure.

By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be the most expensive power source known to man if you were to build one today. Just the land costs would make the entire project nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.

Those are just artificial constructs though. In a world where there is actual human suffering (in the west) due to physical energy shortages the politics (and thus cost models) may shift rapidly.

When you say 'primary cost' do you mean construction cost? Again, utility managers will be looking at lifecycle costs, from the cradle (construction) through use (fueling, security, cooling water, maintenance) to the grave (decomissioning).

The reason costs are high is not political, it's that the systems involved need to be over-engineered relative to say, a coal-fired power plant, where a breakdown or fire will create a big mess, but not a 100-year exclusion zone. Water pumps for nuclear reactor cooling systems, for example, are the most robustly engineered (and expensive) pumps ever built, as far as I know.

For example, California's decision to close the San Onofre reactor was mostly related to maintenance costs, as their steam generator system was shaking itself to pieces and had to be shut down due to the radioactive loop leaking into the non-radioactive steam generation system. The rational conclusion is that long-term maintenance of nuclear reactors is an expensive proposition, due to catastrophic failure modes:

https://www.fairewinds.org/nuclear-energy-education/san-onof...

> Water pumps for nuclear reactor cooling systems, for example, are the most robustly engineered (and expensive) pumps ever built, as far as I know.

Which is not an issue with newer reactor designs, which are no less proven than grid storage.

New reactor designs, even with closely regulated designs, are very unproven. The next gen French EDF design recently had some units come online, but they had to figure out some unexpected buildup in some byproducts. You are also validating more than the design, you are validating a manufacturing materials control in a very long term feedback cycle - which is generally terribly difficult for making improvements.

In comparison to something like grid storage where one can site, build and operate, in less time than the make a minor nuclear design correction. Grid storage can correct mistakes at very low cost and on a very rapid cycle compared to nuclear.

Grid storage is proven through dozens of working installations earning decent money for their operators, pushing gas peaker plants out of the market.

Newer reactor designs are well simulated but have zero real world implementation.

Grid storage is as simple as E = mgh. We do that industrially, billions of times a day, worldwide, and have for centuries.

To cite uncertainty about storage is only to admit you have no argument.

A relevant piece of information that could be attached to the San Onofre reactor argument is that we are talking about a 1st generation reactor, from the late 60’s.

Proponents of new nuclear solutions would argue that reactor design, which is today at 4th generation, has greatly evolved and improved in too many ways to count since the late 60’s.

> The primary cost of nuclear is politically driven. I don't know if that matters in a world of actual energy scarcity, I guess we'll be finding out.

> If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in an imagined future where there is massive investment into new nuclear infrastructure.

You are misinformed. Nuclear power operators do not have to covee liability costs (no insurance is willing to cover nuclear disaster, so this is a massive subsidy). Also the cost of long term storage is typically not included in cost calculations for nuclear power either. Despite of this nuclear is more expensive than renewables.

> By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be the most expensive power source known to man if you were to build one today. Just the land costs would make the entire project nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.

Just because you say it doesn't make it true. In fact hydro projects have to typically compensate land owners when building a dam.

> A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party. Yes, that's technologically possible, but would require massive economic investment.

I agree, but: It's 100% impossible to replace the need for gas in the short timespan of five months until the next winter, no matter how much money or resources we throw at the problem. The absolute majority of heating is done with gas and major parts of the electrical grid depend on it. We cannot replace it with renewables in time. We need gas or people will freeze to death in the worst case, there are no alternatives to the LNG imports in the short-term, IMO.

And the countries that can export LNG, including the US, are aware of their strong negotiating position and want long-term contracts.

Europe may not have a choice. :/

> A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party.

“asap” LOL

Here in the real world, we have Germany, which has the strongest pro-green anti-nuclear agenda in Europe, but is (1) building coal plants, (2) financing Russian war and (3) blocking sanctions on Russia to save its economy (along with Hungary who are doing it for political reasons).

The green agenda is a massive failure in the real world. Maybe it will work in 50 years (when “possible technological development” in batteries catches up) but not right now.

> Germany ... is (1) building coal plants

That claim may be a little out of date, especially as the new government plans to phase out coal by 2030. It's true that a new coal power plant was opened in 2020, but it was "expected to be the last"[0]. Admittedly, it's also true that the country is temporarily reactivating old coal power plants to reduce Russian gas imports.[1]

[0] https://ifrf.net/combustion-industry-news/new-coal-power-pla...

[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-reactiv...

Germany is not building more coal plants it it shutting them down.

What are they going to do then? Go back to candles?

I assume theyll continue to source power from the wind and the sun.

Let's not argue semantics. Building new plants, extending existing ones, digging more coal or importing it from abroad.

It's all the same. "Green" energy failed, even for one of its biggest proponents.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...

> In the first half of 2021, coal shot up as the biggest contributor to Germany's electric grid, while wind power dropped to its lowest level since 2018.

Your definition of failure is a funny one. So renewables are now consistently supplying 20-30% of Germanys electricity despite decades of efforts by the fossil and nuclear lobby, which essentially destroyed Germanys wind and solar industry (which was world leading).

Nuclear on the other hand which, if you read what proponents said in the 50s, 60s and 70s, was going to give us unlimited free energy, is somehow deemed a success?

Now that renewables are essentially eating fossils and nuclears lunch we are supposed to believe that some sort of nuclear technological revolution is just around the corner and all the high costs are due to the "bad government regulations" anyway?

It's not semantics. Germany built its last ever coal plant several years ago and has been slowly turning them off for a while now.

Renewables are not dependent upon any battery development. Batteries work now, are getting cheaper at exponential rate, and are the most expensive form of storage.

Sanctions blocked specifically by Germany and Hungary (and noone else)? The oil ban, FWIW, was blocked or watered down by Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic (and supported by Germany):

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/05/09/hungary-slovak...

https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-russian-oil-ban-stalls-a...

> Funny article in that it doesn't discuss lifecycle costs. A side-by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear power plant relative to those powered by wind/solar/storage is what I'd expect to see from a 'paper of record' like the NYTimes.

If you eliminate gas and coal powered plants then the costs of nuclear plant lifecycle is incidental compared to economic losses that a country would encounter if they relied on solar and wind.

The dirty secret about "clean energy" is that it isn't actually very clean. When you eliminate big coal plants and try to use solar or wind, what you are actually doing is moving your dependence from coal to natural gas.

Those wind farms and solar farms require significant investment in numerous smaller style natural gas plants in order to function correctly.

So, right now, when people think they are moving away from fossil fuels they are really just moving to natural gas that is supplanted by solar and wind when conditions are ideal for them to work properly.

If you want to eliminate your dependence on natural gas, then, the only feasible option is nuclear.

False.

> If you want to eliminate your dependence on natural gas, then, the only feasible option is nuclear.

no. you need gas for nuclear AND renewables. it really does not matter. it's bullshit to argue against it unless you show the world a way to have an on/off button for a nuclear plant. (if you do, you might be very very very rich)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant

> Load-following plants are typically in between base load and peaking power plants in efficiency, speed of start-up and shut-down, construction cost, cost of electricity and capacity factor.

as said, they don't remove gas and it's stupid to assume since your article specially talks about france which is heavy on gas for peaks.

>Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.

Why the progress is possible only for Solar and storage and in your opinion not possible for nuclear? Nuclear could be cheaper if people would not be paranoid about it. What I think could happen is this new smaller reactors could be deployed in countries more rational, irrational countries will have to buy energy from the others.

Small reactors are not expected to be any cheaper than traditional reactors. They are a better bet right now because the traditional reactors keep getting mothballed in developed nations, and they have some clever technical innovations, but these are not complete game changers.

Each decade, nuclear builds also trend towards getting more expensive. Like it or not, it at least partially Fukushima Daiichi that killed the nuclear expansion US. The AP1000 had new missile shield requirements that was slowing it down before that happened, and then the Japan accident added even more regulation. There was an anti-nuclear chair of the regulatory commission at the time, and yes, this is fundamentally political, but it's hard to push back on these specifics.

Countries will rational regulation will enjoy the nuclear progress, the others will buy from them or throw a lot of money on expensive batteries that will also cause problems with extraction, recycling, fires etc. My bet is US will use fosil fuel for a few decades still since is cheap.

Only a negligible fraction of storage will be batteries. They cost more. Only lithium, the most expensive, is fire-prone, among battery tech.

The alternatives are cheaper and cause no such problems.

> >Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.

> Why the progress is possible only for Solar and storage and in your opinion not possible for nuclear?

Nuclear had more than triple the amount of time and significantly more subsidies for showing this technological scaling.

> Nuclear could be cheaper if people would not be paranoid about it.

People were super enthusiastic about nuclear for the first 40 years. Even after Tschernobyl nuclear opponents were largely portrait as unrealistic hippies in most countries and policies were certainly driven by people very favourable to nuclear. Even Germany one of the most nuclear sceptic countries only decided after fukushima to stop nuclear.

What is the technological breakthrough that we already know about that would suddenly change the progress massively?

>What I think could happen is this new smaller reactors could be deployed in countries more rational, irrational countries will have to buy energy from the others.

What people tend to forget is that about 40-50% of a nuclear power plant is the same as any other thermal power plant. We generally don't build small coal plants either, the scales don't work well.

The reason why wind and solar have very different scaling is because their principle of electricity generation is very different.

If you have two stocks one in exponential just starting and the other being slowly growing linearly for a long time, which one would you invest in? In particular if indications are that both stocks will continue on the same curves. That's the situation we have with nuclear vs renewables.

Nuclear plants are much more complex, take much longer to build, and are much less forgiving of error in construction or operation. As a result, they iterate and improve much more slowly than solar and storage, which have the property of being composed of large numbers of copies of loosely coupled elements.

> I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage.

Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency.

South Korea has been constantly building nuclear for decades. The price has come down marginally, renewables are still far cheaper. Yes, the problem is largely political, I don't see a solution to that though.

This is like saying that the solution to climate change is largely political and you don't see that changing, so you don't think you need to be part of solving that.

In fact, it's quite exactly like saying that, because nuclear is the fastest path to solving climate change.

No, nukes are the slowest, and worst performing.

Starting a nuke, we get no power out for a decade or more, and get much less power at the end than building renewables with the same money, which furthermore start displacing carbon immediately.

You are missing the point. With continued investment and improvements to technology nuclear will be much cheaper and faster to deploy. Compare wind/solar prices from the year 2000, and imagine we've spent the last 22 years giving nuclear the same level of attention and promotion as them.

Investment and improvement in nukes are falling, not rising. For reasons.

There is no reasonable expectation for substantially better costs for nukes. Anywhere they have to compete with $0 opex renewables, they will run at well under 50% capacity, thus more than doubling their per-kWh cost, making them even less competitive.

Renewables are far from $0 opex, and your statement about 'no reasonable expectation' are somewhat unbased.

Nukes are concrete, steel, pumps, steam turbines, liability subsidy, decommissioning subsidy. None of those get cheaper.

Concrete and steel costs are negligible in the full costs of the nuclear plant. Complex machinery like turbines, reactors, etc have huge costs that fall of rapidly when you start mass producing them. If you make 2 plants/year the cost per item is X, if you make 100 plants/year the cost per item is X/10 or X/20. Huge part of costs goes into machinery that allows to build the thing. Once you have it, producing more parts becomes way easier.

Steam turbines are mature tech whose capex and opex are large and will not change. Likewise, high-pressure plumbing.

Thus, costs are not falling, and new starts are negligible. Even China, which asserts they will build 220 of them, has only started 10. The rest will be cancelled as their price is undercut, unless politics forces the matter. China is not cost- or value- driven. (Cf. "Ghost cities".)

Renewables are far cheaper on the margins but not necessarily if you want them to provide all your power needs.

Nuclear cost in South Korea, Japan, and India is generally under $3000/kW, according to this peer-reviewed study. See Figure 12: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

Now let's model overall grid costs, here: https://model.energy/

Pick a country and "fetch wind and solar." By default the modeler doesn't include nuclear, so click "show advanced assumption settings." Check "dispatchable technology 2."

This defaults to a nuclear cost of $6000/kW. Leave it there or try $3000. It assumes a nuclear plant lifespan of only 25 years; the average plant age in the US is 40 years and expected lifespan for many plants is 60 years, so set it to whatever you think is more realistic. The default also sets the discount rate for nuclear to twice what it has for everything else, so fix that.

Run the model. With any reasonable assumptions, many countries end up with at least some nuclear on their grid, and some get their lowest grid cost with all nuclear. The US has some of the best wind and solar resources and relatively high nuclear costs (for now anyway), but the US situation doesn't generalize to the whole world.

That's overnight cost, not included in model.energy. You also have to add in the financing cost during construction.

If we are talking about Korean export NPPs, the Barakh NPP has four reactors for a total of 24.4B$, producing 5.6GW(e). THis is about $4B/GW. If I plug in 4000 per MW (its euros, not $, but they're not too different right now) for the capital cost of nuclear in model.energy, increase the NPP lifetime to 40 years, and use US 2011 weather data, nuclear optimizes to zero.

I'll add that model.energy is looking at the best case for nuclear: providing baseload. Handling variability will incentivize storage, which means renewables will be at an increased advantage. Dispatchable demand of any kind, even slightly dispatchable (allowed to be off 10% of the time, say) also tilts the game toward renewables.

The 25 year lifespan for nuclear there may reflect economic obsolescence rather than technical lifespan. Energy technology is evolving quickly now, so investors may simply refuse to credit the promise of such long lifespans. Even in the US, there have been existing NPPs that shut down because they could not recoup their operating costs (granted, much of that was due to gas and also renewable subsidies, but with solar having dropped in cost by nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade it's a bold move to assume it won't keep falling.)

Do the same and use German data, and nuclear optimizes to 100%. The US has especially abundant wind and solar.

I would very much like to see a similar model that includes a demand curve. Preferably, customizable demand curves, to allow for modeling of e.g. flatter curves due to electric vehicle charging at night.

Yes, Europe (and particularly eastern Europe) are better places for nuclear, because of higher latitude and (away from coasts) lower winds.

This is all just delaying the crossing point though. Nuclear fans are betting nuclear's costs fall while renewables and storage run into brick walls and stop getting cheaper. It's not clear why one should assume this, or why an investor should bet on that outcome. And it is just a financial bet; in the worst case for renewables they just come in a bit more expensive than nuclear, so it's not like the economy explodes.

Ok, but "I think renewables will get cheaper faster than nuclear" is a very different claim than "renewables are way cheaper than nuclear right now."

It's a different claim. It's looking at trends rather than at a specific point.

Solar historically declines in cost by 24% for each cumulative doubling of production (of the solar hardware). Solar is about 4% of global electricity production now, so scaling it to saturation (just for current electricity demand, which will grow as the world becomes richer and more electrification replaces fossil heat) would drop the cost by another factor of 3.

> Solar historically declines in cost by 24% for each cumulative doubling of production

This only worked while panels were the lion's share of the cost of a solar installation. These days, costs of real estate, installation and grid connection far exceed the cost of panels -- and those costs go up every year with labour costs rather than coming down.

Costs of installation only go up? There has been steady improvement there, particularly at utility scale. No more expensive poured concrete foundations, just screw earth anchors into the ground.

Or are you talking labor-intensive installation onto residential rooftops? Well, stop doing that, it's kind of stupid.

Real estate costs are a tiny fraction of the cost of installed solar in much of the US, and in much of the world. A solar powered global economy will not be putting many panels on the small fraction of the world's surface that's unusually expensive, but will focus those panels on places where it's cheaper. It's the same reason we don't grow wheat in Manhattan.

model.energy assumes a flat, constant energy demand.

Which isn't a ridiculous assumption, given their caveats and default options, unless you're trying to argue for 100% nuclear, in which case it renders any conclusion totally nonsensical.

I would really like to see a model that includes demand curves. Or an academic study that includes nuclear as a possibility, instead of just looking at wind/solar/storage. So far I haven't come across either.

(But if we start charging a lot of electric vehicles at night, the demand curves will flatten out anyway.)

The new Korean plants are designed for a lifespan of 60 years.

If governments provide guarantees for the loans, a discount rate of 3% is not unreasonable.

Set it like that, and it spits out a price of €32.6/MWh.

Now, to make it even more reasonable to emerging economies, assume that through mass production and a relaxation of security requirements to less paranoid levels, the overnight cost can be reduced to €1500, you get $21.3/MWh.

This is what the price of electricity SHOULD be, if we want the world to stop depending on hydrocarbons. (Not just a few rich countries.)

When your argument depends on all existing trends reversing, that tells us all we need to know about your conclusion.

You seem to ignore the fact that existing trends were artificially manipulated to suppress the nuclear energy use.

"The fact". I think not.

There is an abundance of data, if one is willing to look. Just first links from DDG:

"Has Russia Been Financing Western Environmentalism?" (2022) [1]

"Putin Is Funding Green Groups to Discredit Natural Gas Fracking" (2017) [2]

"German green group branded a Russian ‘puppet’ over Nord Stream II gas pipeline" (2021) [3]

[1]: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18330/russia-funding-envi...

[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...

[3]: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/german-green-group-brande...

This is a load of conspiracy theoretic BS, starting from the nonsense position that environmental groups are the source of nuclear's failure.

Yeah right, "Independent fact-checkers said the information is false".

The greens in Germany have consistently worked on destroying Germany's nuclear energy generation, and now it is completely dependent on gas import from Russia, funding Putin's war with Ukraine.

I can fully agree that green groups have opposed nuclear.

I call bullshit on the absurd idea that the global failure of nuclear is due to these groups.

I can hardly call nuclear energy to be a 'global failure'. True, 'green' groups had some success with scaremongering people to be afraid of nuclear energy, but it is generating 10% of energy globally (projected to rise to 15% by 2030 [1] ), with much higher shares in developed countries. If anything, the Fukushima effect has finally weared out, and we'll see new plants constructed which were halted because of that scaremongering.

[1]: https://www.world-energy.org/article/16596.html

Well, it obviously is a global failure. It exists in places where people can be forced to pay for it. There is not a single competitive energy market where merchant nuclear reactors have been built to compete in that market. That's because it's just too expensive. Sure, reactors have been built to exploit monopolies, and where political considerations trump economic ones. That's nothing to be proud of.

Just because you repeat it again and again, and use the word "obvious", nuclear power does not become a 'global failure'. I fail to see any arguments in your posts, just NUCLEAR BAD slogans.

See, this is why nobody trusts nuke advocates.

Trends and fashions come and go. My daughter is wearing pants that look that the ones my mother wore some years before I was born. At that time, nuclear power was still popular. And now, perhaps, it is becoming so again.

Indeed, the NYT article in the topic is discussing this very question.

Nukes get less competitive with each passing day. But that does not keep shills out of the NYT's pages. Fortunately actual investment does not follow shills.

Tell that to France, those losers still generate 70% of energy with nuclear plants, instead of following the lead of their German colleagues in denuclearizing their energy grid.

Yet, France has no plans to build replacements for the large majority of plants soon to age out. What they will build is purely politically motivated. Those probably will not be completed, as they would be uncompetitive, but ratepayers might be forced to make them profitable by paying way more for power than their neighbors.

Germany elected to build out a great deal of wind generation capacity rather than refurbish a much smaller capacity of aged, ramshackle nukes. That has worked out extremely well, and they continue.

> Germany elected to build out a great deal of wind generation capacity rather than refurbish a much smaller capacity of aged, ramshackle nukes. That has worked out extremely well, and they continue.

Really? It has worked really well?? Thanks to these really well policies, Germany has an unbreakable dependence on Russian has [1] and has paid billions of euros to Putin's murderous regime since the start of the war with Ukraine [2].

If this is 'really well', I'd rather pass.

In conclusion, I suggest you start looking more rationally on energy generation, I sense a lot of anger and unexplained hatred towards nuclear power ('aged, ramshackle nukes' is not a rational sensible argumentation).

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/world/europe/germany-gas-...

[2]: https://crea.shinyapps.io/russia_counter/

Germany was dependent on fossil imports all along. What has changed is they import less, now, than when they ran the nukes. They will import decreasing amounts as they build out more renewables.

It is a fact that the nukes shut down would have needed a great deal of expensive work to continue operating. Germany elected to spend the money on wind, instead, and it bought them more actually delivered wattage than the shut-down nukes had provided.

If nukes were not the most expensive power source going, I would be all for it.

Are you really arguing that they'd import more gas now if they hadn't shut down the nuclear plants?

Everyone including Germans have understood by now that phasing out nuclear was a mistake, but you still repeat that no, gas dependency good, nuclear power independence bad.

Yes. They would be importing more fossil fuels now if they had not built out wind, and had instead spent the money on their reactors.

If they hadn't destroyed their nuclear generation AND created wind&solar, etc, they wouldn't have to import anything from Russia.

For some reason, you (incorrectly) presume that maintaining nuclear energy prevents building wind generators. Also, the money 'spent' on reactors is kinda paid off by customers who pay for the generated electricity.

Money is fungible. Each euro spent on one thing is a euro not spent on a different thing.

Electrical power is also fungible. A kWh delivered is a kWh, whether generated on a nuke or in a wind turbine.

Renewables are only cheaper if you ignore the challenges of using an intermittent energy source. There's no real cost estimate for storing and re-distributing electricity, because there's no feasible plan to build an energy storage system at relevant scales.

Attempting to build just one hour of storage via lithium ion batteries would case the cost of batteries to skyrocket because 1 hour of global electricity use equates to 2,500 GWh. And annual battery output is only around 300 GWh. Supply shock would immediately drive up the cost of batteries.

Annual battery production for EVs is estimated to grow from 160 gigawatt-hours (GWh) today to 6 600 GWh in 2030 – the equivalent of adding almost 20 gigafactories each year for the next ten years.

So we're building those batteries anyway, because EVs are cheaper and better than ICE. It's just a bonus that they'll help roll out renewables too.

Estimates are not the same thing as real production figures. People estimated we'd have 10Ghz single threaded cpu performance by now back in the 90s. Batteries are already approaching supply shortages for input materials: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev...

And as you correctly point out, most of these batteries are going to go to EVs rather than grid storage.

Yes, no-one can predict the future, maybe we'll all be riding horses.

But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the electricity back to the grid, which incurs another efficiency loss).

Sure, if we have all our electricity produced through non intermittent sources we don't need grid storage. EVs charge from the grid and drive around just fine. Nobody doubts that.

But if we are going to predominantly use intermittent energy sources we'd need massive amounts of grid storage. Delivering this through batteries is not feasible. We need to conserve battery supply for things that cannot be directly powered from the grid, like vehicles. It's too precious to be squandered on grid storage

Grid storage cost is falling even faster than renewables cost. Which you already knew.

The costs are falling on white papers, not in actual storage projects. Unfortunately, we can't hook a white paper up to the grid :(

You may pretend all you like, but I will always correct you.

Correct me how?

By insisting that storage is a trivial problem to solve, yet neglecting to actually share what your supposed solution is?

By insisting that storage costs are falling yet neglecting to specify the cost and for what technology?

By all means "correct" me all you like.

Other readers only need to know that you habitually promote falsehoods.

For me, this is the biggest part of the debate. It's not whether solar is up to the task or not, it's whether supply chains can support solar. From what we've seen, no, they cannot. You can provision the solar plant and the storage array, but there likely just won't be enough panels or batteries being produced to build it. Pumped hydro storage is only viable in some places, and from what it seems to me all the other ideas for energy storage are theoretical at best.

I'm not opposed to investing heavily in solar...it's the best long-term energy source we can hope for until we crack the fusion nut. However, until we have the resources in place to make it happen, fission is our best bet. This shouldn't be an either-or: we should be building both, as fast as we can. And once we have enough solar to power our collective needs consistently, we can decommission our nuclear plants and put this behind us.

The supply chain for solar is in a much healthier state than the supply chain for nuclear.

Yes, at the current scale. Can it scale up to the task of entirely replacing fossil fuels before we can build the nuclear plants that can give the same output?

Yes. Scaling up solar and wind is much easier. Nuclear reactors require very heavy industry (look at what's needed to forge the reactor pressure vessel of a PWR). Nuclear also requires much higher quality manufacturing. A 1% failure rate on PV modules is acceptable. A 1% failure rate on reactor components is not.

Installing wind and solar is also much easier than installing NPPs. Solar installation does not require expensive highly trained labor, again because the installations are robust to installation mistakes.

> Solar installation does not require expensive highly trained labor

That's why the number of solar power related deaths (Mainly, falling from roofs) far exceeds the single fatality from nuclear related incidents we had this century.

A solar powered world will mostly use large scale ground mounted solar, which is much cheaper than putting it awkwardly on roofs.

> > I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage.

> Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency.

And your sources are? Nuclear power has received significantly more subsidies than solar and wind combined [1] (note you can find similar numbers for Europe) . The myth that somehow solar and wind received more subsidies is just propaganda.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-Energy-S...

GP refers to "last decades" but that source is from 2011 with data ending at 2009. Do you have data for the last decade?

There is no way that any renewable subsidies in the past decade could match the many decades prior. And, those subsidies are still running.

Why would we not look at the total subsidies over time? Here's the spending for Europe until 2007 [1], how much subsidies would have to be given to renewables to make up that difference? Here is some more data on hidden subsidies for later dates going to fossils and nuclear [2], but is not a comprehensive comparison of subsidies.

[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much... [2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/greenpeace...

> Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage.

On what basis do you make this assertion?

Because when it comes to renewables, I very rarely see any inclusion of the costs of additional large scale energy storage (probably because it still remains an unsolved issue) and I never see any inclusion of the cost of new transmission lines from any new renewables site.

The Germans have invested billions upon billions in becoming wholly renewable, with miles of new grid infrastructure (but next to no energy storage) and they are still at the mercy of Russian gas supplies... and dependant upon French nuclear power.

It's time to face reality and start investing in fission again, at least until fusion becomes a viable alternative.

Controversial opinión: we should invest heavily into nuclear and renewables as they seem to synergize quite well

I agree we should invest in both.

The issue comes when people think that renewables are a panacea, and we should start building renewables capacity where it doesn't even make sense. For example; wind power is great in and around the North Sea, but makes little sense in central and eastern Europe. Solar power is great in Spain, Portugal and Italy, but the ROI is very poor anywhere north of the Alps.

It's not a controversial opinion, it's an incorrect opinion. Nuclear and renewables (except for hydro) synergize poorly in most cases.

As far as life-cycle costs go: what about end of life? That's the big elephant in the room.

Over the past decades, a couple of hundreds of plants have been build globally. Doing nuclear fission safely is a massively complex technological undertaking. While the basic principles are by and large the same, the concrete designs of each of those plants aren't similar. Therefor, decommissioning a nuclear plant is equally complex and expensive, and requires a per-case approach. And currently, there is a growing number of plants which are pretty much EOL, where upkeep costs outstrip revenue.

Sure, there's an argument to be made about the operational costs per kWh between solar / wind / nuclear relative to the revenue they generate over their lifespan. But compared to solar / wind, the perceived economical benefits of those solutions are also offset by their initial cost of construction and their decommissioning.

If consumers / voters / taxpayers assume that they get to enjoy cheap power while the costs of those won't ever land on their doorstep, they are in for a surprise.

Nuclear plants pay a fraction of their revenue through their life into special decommissioning funds that have so far been more than enough to perform full greenfield decommissioning.

For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund in the US (and other nuclear-operating countries) that has a current balance of $55B.

False. They are collecting from the fund, instead.

> Doing nuclear fission safely is a massively complex technological undertaking.

Finland has proven this to be false.

...and frankly, so did the US even in the 1980s. The roadblock to storage misguided activism, not science or tachnology.

Reopen the Yucca storage facility. It has the space for literally ALL the US's spent fuel storage.

False.

It took them more than a decade beyond schedule, and 5 billion euros beyond quoted cost.

The finally delivered only because it was clear the money would dry up either way. If they could have strung it out further, they would have

The problem with comparing the cost of different energy production means is that most of these have huge externalities. After all, this is why we're still burning hydrocarbons, because they seem cheap compared to anything else, except that we have massed up a huge debt by accelerating climate change. Something that may turn out to be nearly infinitely expensive.

Now the problem with solar and wind is that those also have pretty large energy investment needs at the beginning and given that we still mostly run on hydrocarbons these will also look cheap (include a sizeable amount of externalities).

Other than that, you're right that these articles rarely mention the problem of the fissile uranium supply. From what I've read and heard, without breeder reactors, the known U235 reserves won't last long if we plan to switch the world over. (Not that it's a viable plan to build so many reactors in time.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

> A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap,

How is this possible, technologically or economically? It sounds like absolute fantasy in anything less than a decade.

> plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA

Our refineries are at max capacity. How is hoarding crude going to help anything? Exporting crude allows foreign refineries to assist with relieving the global shortage of refined products.

I also don't think that Europe will and can go 100% renewable within a decade, though the current development of breeder reactors seem promising. When the technology will be ready, it can scale (relatively) fast and help get us off coal and gas way faster than wind and energy could.

https://you.com/search?q=Thorium%20breeder%20reactors

edit: wind and solar of course

How are they pushing this and you claim it's "the real agenda", what are they claiming instead? Are you claiming the US got involved with the Ukrainian conflict in order to sell LPG to other countries?

The problem with storage is that it needs to be planned for the worst case. Imagine three weeks without sun nor wind, even if that happens only once every 5 years it should be planned. And the cost of having batteries that can produce energy during 3 weeks is unlikely to be cheaper than nuclear

No. You need only enough storage to last until an order of fuel arrives. Which is what everybody does literally all the time, now.

There is little storage, yet, because it would be stupid to build out storage there is not enough renewable generating capacity, yet, to charge up. When there is, then storage will be built. All without you lifting a finger.

Everybody always says that solar + storage is cheaper. And sometimes there are even studies to support it. But if that's true where is it?

China mostly:

2021 figures:

> China was the biggest contributor, adding 121 GW to the continent’s new capacity. Europe and North America—led by the USA—took second and third places respectively, with the former adding 39 GW, and the latter 38 GW.

81% of new electricity generaton build globally was renewables last year.

I don't dispute the economics of renewable generation on the existing grid. I'm talking about storage as replacement for baseload, which is purely hypothetical at this point. Right now we have very small scale storage as peaker capacity, but not as a baseload replacement.

Storage doesn't replace baseload.

Did the pumped hydro dams they built alongside nuclear power plants replace the baseload? No, they took the cheap energy that was produced at times when it wasn't needed and provided it back at peak times. They literally increased the base load by propping it up when it would otherwise droop at night (mostly).

Storage does, in fact, supply base load. That is its purpose.

Today, storage runs (i.e. supplies) when electricity prices peak, which broadly matches high demand.

It charges, when electricity prices are low, which generally means off peak overnight.

In a future renewable grid, with zero dispatchable power it might be used on occaision to help meet the baseload, but it's almost certainly going to be used more during demand peaks, because that's when most electricity is used. Maybe in equatorial regions with a lot of solar, not much wind and no other energy sources it'll share baseload duties with the solar that charges it during the day, but unless the term baseload has lost all meaning (which I fear it has) storage is not ever providing baseload, since that would imply supplying that amount constantly and storage needs to absorb more energy than it returns.

I can't see a definition of 'baseload' provider that storage meets that solar doesn't for example.

That does not discuss storage AT ALL.

True solar with storage is not economical.

PV + storage is cheaper than nuclear:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

(you have to compare cost of nuclear on first page with wholesale PV+storage energy on subsequent pages).

Storage cost is falling even faster than solar. Renewables + storage beats everything, hands down.

They are building massive pumped hydro storage too. A lot of closed-loop PHS is being built by China. Closed loop PHS doesn't have same ecological issues as traditional dams, but is not as trendy as batteries and has almost same political issues as traditional dams in west. So, it is generally ignored.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...

Top five countries with the highest wind energy capacity in 2020

    China – 288.32 GW. ...
    United States – 122.32 GW. ...
    Germany – 62.85 GW. ...
    India – 38.63 GW. ...
    Spain – 27.24 GW.

This means nothing if you don't factor in storage, or at least measure the CONSISTENT power output.

These are just PEAK numbers that are totally useless when planning a grid.

So, factor in storage. And, those are not peak.

In fact, there are NO studies that demonstrate that solar or wind AND STORAGE, are able to produce CONSISTENT power for a full year anywhere.

The only studies you'll see are that they proved to be economical on a certain day, or maaaybe overnight. ...but there are zero studies that any solar and/or wind (even combined), can provide consistent power for a full year. ...because that is not currently possible with economical tech.

It’s worse than that. Storage can, at best, provide for some interval of backup while wind/solar aren’t providing enough power.

The problem is that “100 year”, “1,000 year” or worse events will require more than currently stored. Then, potentially millions of people will be at risk of injury or death from cold or heat.

Reliable generation of at least enough to cover survival seems necessary.

That's what hydrogen (stored underground at a storage capacity cost of $1/kWh) is for.

> “100 year”, “1,000 year” or worse events

Okay, then we can keep gas power stations around for another 100 years and only turn them on for the few days they are needed. Probably, though, after 50 years we will have solved climate change and energy storage (or wiped ourselves out) anyway.

Anytime local storage runs low and transmission line capacity is exceeded, you order a shipment of synthetic ammonia or hydrogen from the tropics. There will be plenty competing for your business.

Waiting for the CO2 taxes to rise high enough to drive off fossil fuels.

Many people support CO2 taxes to raise the price of fossil fuels when gas prices are low. When gas prices are high I see very few people cheering it on or attempting to claim credit for all their great work to raise the price.

It's tough to really get that ball rolling if that's your goal due to this marketing issue.

Without CO2 taxes, we're globally screwed. I expect they will be forced through, and confiscatory tariffs on trade with countries that refuse to impose them.

It's hard to say how it will go. It's entirely possible carbon capture will become cheap enough that a couple of rich countries can just capture all the necessary carbon for the whole globe and it will be a rounding error in their budget. Then other countries can burn all the oil/coal they want and it will only be a local pollution problem rather than an existential risk to the globe.

Overview of the economics of a nuclear reactor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY

Duration: 23 min

Speaker: David Ruzic, Prof of Nuclear Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Sunlight and wind distribution is quite uneven.

Uranium ore distribution is also quite uneven. Fossil fuel distribution is also quite uneven.

Thorium is an abundant alternative to uranium, and the technology to use it has existed since the 1960s.

Thorium reactors never worked very well unfortunately.

What? They worked reliably and efficiently, and cost very little.

Maybe I'm misinformed. Which Thorium reactors worked reliably and cheaply?

You're not misinformed. Commercial thorium doesn't exist and prototypes have issues with proliferation risks and the lifecycle of the materials used to build the primary containment. It is promising and there are several groups working on these problems but it's a hard sell given that recent gen uranium reactors aren't gated by fuel costs and have established supply chains.

Indian Point tried thorium. They abandoned it, for reasons.

I'm a layman so I'm trusting the smarty sounding guy on Reddit and his elaborate arguments, but it seems like Thorium reactors, while delivering on the promise of not being able to physically explode, involve materials so nightmarish to work with that it's been impossible to create one that's safe to operate by nuclear worksers

https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9unimr/dutch_satiric...

Good thing you can pick it up and move it to other places.

Good thing electricity is cheap to transmit.

How does one transmit electricity across an ocean?

Undersea cables. There are plenty between Norway and Germany for example.

In case anyone is curious, I found this interesting background reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable

That said, there is only one submarine power cable connecting Norway and Germany, and it's been operational for one year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe.svg

Lots and lots are under construction. UK just committed to a 10 GW cable from Africa, that will be expanded later.

This is the future and it will eventually create a global connected grid. DC allows the coupling of 60 Hz and 50 Hz grids without a problem too.

Comment was about undersea transmission, but I recently learned about DC transmission in the US West. Interesting advantages and trade-offs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie

It's not though; that's one of the reasons all of the grids aren't interconnected yet.

"Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes" also applies here. The amount of energy you can deliver by transporting fuel rods by truck/train/ship is immense.

Transmission costs only capital. Opex for transmission is practically free.

And capital isn't free. With physical goods, there is already a number of existing roads, train tracks, and ports.

Capital costs is why Hawaii has traditionally imported oil versus having an undersea power connection to the continental US.

Hawaii has abundant sun and wind, and deep ocean hard by for cheap storage.

When costs are all capex, the more you use, the less it costs. (And, as with nukes, the less you use, the more it costs.)

Transmitting power over long distances has its own problems and infrastructure costs. It isn't trivial.

Building pipelines for oil and gas isn't trivial either but we managed to do it.

Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak. Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.

They do in fact leak a bit.

Power losses are measured in single digit percents per 1000km. That's not nothing of course, but it's sufficiently low to transmit power from windy places to less windy places and from sunny places to less sunny places.

When opex is free, and capex is falling exponentially, you just put in a little more power upstream.

> Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak.

????

> Currently, the most complete bottom-up inventory of natural gas system emissions is the 2012 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Inventory (GHGI). (2) It estimates an overall system-wide methane loss rate of 6.2 Tg/yr of methane, or 1.3% of methane transported (Supporting Information (SI), Section 16) and that the transmission and storage sector (T&S) is the largest emitting segment of the natural gas industry, (2) accounting for about one-third of methane emissions.

> For T&S stations that are required to report to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), this study estimates total emissions to be 260% [215% to 330%] of the reportable emissions for these stations, primarily due to the inclusion of emission sources that are not reported under the GHGRP rules, updated emission factors, and super-emitter emissions.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b01669

Gas will literally bleed right through the seals at a certain rate, especially with the compressor motors, which is no different to the electrical losses from stepping voltage up/down.

And this is actually a huge problem with natural gas specifically because methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas... around 30x as potent as CO2 over 100 years. Losing a couple percent of your methane is a big deal. That is actually what is driving the push for electric-driven heat pumps for home use... it's better to lose a little bit of electricity than to have thousands of miles of poorly-maintained residential gas distribution that even in the best case are leaking highly potent methane through seals.

Not only they leak, but, unlike electricity, leaked gas is terrible for the environment.

> Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak.

But they do. Normally. A fraction of the fuel transmitted through the pipe will be lost, seals, punctures, breaks, medium changes, over-pressure release through venting and so on.

> Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.

Not all that significant in short range transmission, and until we figured out HVDC a major factor in long range transmission but the number of HVDC links that are coming online is increasing rapidly making this much less of a problem. The gear used for this is very impressive stuff, it is a different level of semiconductor engineering than what you normally have kicking around the yard but it works and is deployed at scale already with very good results.

I don't see what that has to do with nuclear plants or solar farms. My original point was that complaining that uranium isn't evenly distributed is a red herring because you don't build power plants on top of the mines. Whereas you do have to build solar farms where the sunny days are plentiful.

Most places where people live have enough sun and/or wind to meet demand.

And you can deliver that renewable power wherever it is needed, for a one-time up-front cost, free thereafter.

No you can't. Transmission lines have upkeep.

You have to clear brush periodically, and repair them when they break.

Heavy industry is going to tend to move away from places with inadequate renewable energy. Why should they stay where energy is more expensive?

...and yet you'll find that there are very few people living in places with insufficient sun, insufficient wind and no geothermal/tidal sources.

Those comparisons have been done and they always end up with an energy mix between hydro, nuclear, solar and wind - not 100% wind/solar.

It isn't enough to build solar and wind, you also have to build backup. This is currently done by coal and gas but in the future it has to switch to climate friendly sources of energy. A hydrogen economy is very very expensive.

Here's an example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

The problem with a cost comparison is that currently renewables account for less than ten percent of global energy generation. What do you think will happen to the cost there as available resources dwindle, and demand for equipment increases?

Also, I’m not sure those comparisons take into account the ~20 year lifespan of solar panels and windmills, versus the ~40-50 year lifespan of nuclear plants.

Finally, another factor that may drastically reduce the cost of nuclear is the fabrication of small modular reactors which eliminate custom construction/permitting and simplify installation.

They'll build more factories to make the renewable equipment. What, you think there's some inherent limit on the number of factories that can be built?

> What, you think there's some inherent limit on the number of factories that can be built?

No, but there are limits on the amount of raw materials that said factories can use to produce equipment.

Which raw material are you talking about? Be specific.

I believe a global renewable energy system can be constructed using only elements available in essentially unlimited amounts, and using those elements at a modest scale compared to industrial society as a whole.

> Which raw material are you talking about? Be specific.

Uh Lithium?

It's as if you think Li-ion batteries are the only kind that can exist.

This is a generic problem with anti-renewable arguments: they argue against specific technologies rather than the entire class of possible technologies.

(And then they go and posit all sorts of as-yet unbuilt reactor types, blithely ignoring the irony.)

Batteries will be only a negligible fraction of utility storage, and a negligible fraction of those will be lithium. Lithium is the most expensive storage.

Utilities will choose the cheaper among many alternatives, not the most expensive; the which is why they are not building nukes.

The lithium is there, it just needs capital investment.

Ironically ESG has guided capital away from extractive industries like this.

It's not a physical limitation, it's a timing of scaling limitation, and we haven't hit it in a hard way yet. Plenty of new lithium resources, and more being discovered all the time.

The estimated life of solar panels is much greater than 20 years. There are 38 year old panels still in operation.

The 40-50 year lifespan of a nuclear plant is also somewhat illusory, as planning on achieving that is a bet that competing technologies don't keep getting better.

SMRs are talked about as being cheaper, but they have inherent diseconomies of scale. They need more materials and components per unit power output than large NPPs, and have inherently worse neutronics (this is why NPPs got large). The putative economies of scale of manufacturing are first consumed clawing back this loss, and it's not clear they can even do that.

Is the environmentalist lobby ready to allow the amount of mining required to produce the copper, nickel, cobalt, and aluminum needed to support going "100% renewable asap"?

They are happy to support it when it is done outside their own country (speaking as an American)

By the number of downvotes, I'm going to take away the idea that, no, the environmentalist lobby does not approve of the increases in mining required to support going 100% renewable ASAP.

You would have concluded that regardless. And, regardless of any other facts.

It's an honest question, but I would challenge you to examine your response critically.

The environmentalist lobby doesn't allow or forbid. It has overwhelmingly less power than is projected on it by nuke advocates. Nukes are losing wholly on their own.

Aluminum is the most abundant metallic element on earth. Cobalt demand is already peaking. Copper and nickel have been produced in the millions of tons annually for a century, and will not slow down.

Cobalt is used in certain vehicle batteries. Are you assuming nuclear isn't going to do this, say by putting a nuclear reactor in each car?

I think the thing I never hear people talk about however is redundancy and consistency. Wind and Solar are great and likely should be a huge huge portion of our power production. Something like Nuclear though we can project huge consistency (assuming the plant does not get destroyed by a giant natural disaster) long term and day to day.

Personally though I really have always liked Geothermal!

Nukes and geothermal both depend on steam turbines, which are down for very expensive maintenance 10-20% of the time. That is why those can't compete with 0% opex renewables + storage.

Nukes, of course, have lots of other opex on top of the turbines, and also crippling capex.

Geothermal might be able to compete at very high latitudes where the alternative is shipping in synthetic ammonia from the tropics when wind flags and transmission lines don't deliver.

But steam turbine s are absolutely not getting any cheaper or more reliable.

You’re completely ignoring infrastructure. No serious debate of a green future precludes nuclear in the next 30–50 years.

But conversely, no serious debate about nuclear would include new nuclear within 20 years. There's no way that nuclear can scale and contribute in any meaningful way before then.

What I'd expect to see from wind/solar/storage proponents is studies/simulations how much of each you would need based on actual historical weather data.

It should be possible to say, given that power grid and this amount of solar, wind..... this would have happened in this region during that year.

The gasoline prices in US have little to do with price of oil. In 2008 oil was 140 USD while gasoline was much cheaper. The real problem is underutilization of refineries . Some of them reduced output during Covid and was not able to restore production. Some where closed due to environmental regulations.

To add to your comment:

"U.S. oil refiners’ margins smash records, but few plan to build more plants"

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/05/23/u-s-oil-refiners-marg...

> A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap,

Something I've been thinking about for a while: the best course of action to secure a nation is to build out renewables until the need for external fossil fuels is zero. Even if that means using renewables to make fossil fuels via a process like Fischer–Tropsch as a stop gap.

I also think it would be advantageous to start thinking about how to drive the cost of generation and distribution down until electricity is free or nearly free. This might sound utopian but imagine how secure and prosperous a society could be if energy was super cheap or free? We are moving towards an electrified future and at some point we will have to heat homes and charge cars with electric that will place significant demand on an ageing grid.

It will be cheaper to synthesize and burn ammonia or hydrogen. Which is, therefore, what will happen, anywhere it works at all. Freight shipping, first.

Probably the last big holdout for hydrocarbons will be aviation, but anywhere LH2 airframes start to move in, the old stuff will be wholly unable to compete. Transitioning the whole fleet will take a long time, though.

I don't think you understand the cost of implementing such a solution.

"Free" (as in, your taxes) energy for all is very likely to entirely wreck the economy.

Not to mention there are costs involved with maintenance which make that energy not free. Even ignoring the huge debt incurred by implementing such a solution, who will pay for the maintenance? Our taxes again?

What are the benefits of not paying energy? What innovation is not happening because the pesky electricity has a cost?

Most likely it would just become the country of choice to run computations (whether meaningful research or pointless crypto mining) - if we ignore the gargantuan tax rate this country will have.

Being independent is valuable, that's why I think everybody should source their electricity independently (eg. solar)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com