I'm all for a smart blend of nuclear/wind/solar/etc to achieve clean energy
https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/us-hits-a-record-20-of-electr...
Sure, some days they'll be covered by snow. But in industrial systems that can easily be melted / brushed off. Obviously they don't generate as much in winter as in summer. But cool bright winter days are surprisingly plentiful.
Can you show me the arithmetic for that? I understand rooftop solar to cost $20,000 - $25,000. Is your non-solar electric bill over 7-9 years really more expensive than that? Seems impossible.
My annual hydro bill was $2400 in 2018 with baseboard heating, and $2050 for 16,500kWh in 2021 after we put in a heat pump. 3 bedroom detached.
A recent article suggested a typical 4 kW system around here would cost $10k for 3261 kWh a year, or about $405 in credit at a blended rate. Another suggests an 11 kW system at $27,500, which could maybe hit 9000 kWh - about $1100 in credit. We do have net metering with BC Hydro so it'll just wash through, but that's still a 25 year payback horizon.
It doesn't take more than a couple trees in the wrong place to make you a lousy candidate for solar.
What does seem to be true though is that it's getting better/closer. As the panels get both more efficient and cheaper, it becomes less of a waste of motion.
People often think that solar won't work well in Seattle because it's cloudy so often, but light still comes in through the overcast, and solar panels don't care which angle the photons hit them from. Meanwhile, lower ambient temperatures mean the panels work more efficiently.
$230/month is about 1700kWh/month at Seattle electricity price of .13/kWh.
That usage could easily be the amount of electricity used for an average efficiency 3000sqft house with 4 occupants and a couple EVs driving the median American commute. Add an electric hot tub, and $230/month isnt so crazy.
Yes, it's very high, but not crazy high considering the typical upper middle class American home and lifestyle.
In contrast, my home and lifestyle transplanted to Seattle would be 1/4 the usage and cost, but different preferences and all.
In the example above the PV array would provide about 50% of usage, so about $115/month in bill reduction. The 25k is 18,500 after the Federal tax credit, which puts the payback at 13 years.
Always shocked by the labor component of PV arrays. I did my own 6.6kW array (split into two physical arrays, thus increasing the parts costs a bit), and it came out to around $13k. I don't mean I don't want to pay people a living wage, just always hard to remember (when you're used to doing stuff yourself) what fraction of the total cost that will be when you do pay them.
Indeed, most of the world is rather sunny and "not" located in "northern latitudes"
So typical 20% efficiency solar panel at 45C in year 2 is already starting at 17.5% efficiency, and by year 10 is down to just [edit](15%) efficiency.
And then while lower temperatures do improve efficiency, they tend to happen in higher latitudes which get less sunlight to begin with.
60% of Ontario's power (about half of Canada by population) comes from just 3 nuclear plants (Bruce, Darlington and Pickering). Replacing them with solar panels would cover an area the size of the entire greater Toronto area in silicon and plastic, give or take. [3] And it would need to be replaced every 20 years.
Solar and wind play a role, but nuclear does too.
Edit: Corrected degradation amount per dpierce9
[1] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Solar_cell_efficienc...
[2] https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-sola...
[3] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
Your numbers on solar panel degradation are also incorrect based on my experience in the industry. They do degrade but not at that at 7+% per year for ten years.
Edit: corrected degradation amount
Not exactly, the point is that building and installing solar panels consumes resources and physical space. A solar plant with 100% efficient panels is 1/10th the size of today's solar plant, and as I mentioned, to generate comparable amounts of power to conventional sources requires huge amounts of landmass. Plus input materials. And it has to be replaced every 20 years.
> Rooftop solar turns 20% of something that would have been 100% wasted into high grade energy.
Not 20%, right, closer to 15%. Rooftop solar also kills about 10X as many people per generated TWh (0.44-0.83 people per TWh) as compared to nuclear power (0.04 people per TWh) - due to installation. [1]
I'm not advocating for coal of course, but it's wrong to say solar wastes nothing. There's input materials, plastics, silicon - all sorts of toxic chemicals - and generates tons and tons of e-waste that we don't really have a plan for right now. [2]
> Your numbers on solar panel degradation are also incorrect based on my experience in the industry. They do degrade but not at that at 2% per year for ten years.
As I mentioned, the degradation rate is highest in the first year, I said 2.5%, but then it drops off to about 0.5% in subsequent years. The data comes from an NREL analytical review. [3]
NOTE: I edited the number to more generously assume the 0.5%-1% degradation was not in percent efficiency but rather in percent capacity - which is 1/5th as much, to your point.
[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...
To your point re: land use, this is why I said rooftop solar. The roof is already there, the structure is already there, there is zero additional land use and very little opportunity cost for the space. Further, the land use for coal is much broader than the plant area because of mining, transit, and waste heat management. There was a recent post on HN comparing total land usage by prime mover.
Solar is only deadlier per unit than coal if you ignore substantial local health effects that aren’t priced in.[0]
Your implied rate of degradation to go from 20-10 is more than 7%. Even 15-10 is more than 2.5% and again that is an absurd number that contradicts observed performance. You misunderstand what degradation means in this context, to your point.
[0] https://surgery.duke.edu/news/despite-studies-health-effects...
Further, the derates are not additive, they are multiplicative. (A a 20% panel which has degraded in lab efficiency by 10% operating at 90% thermal efficiency is running at 16.2% efficient compared to 18% for a non-degraded panel).
Nothing you have said, however, addresses my first and principal point which is that operational efficiency has a different meaning for solar when compared to anything that has non-free inputs. Efficiency is outputs/inputs. One way to look at it is [energy out]/[energy hitting panel]. That is 20% for a solar plant, 45% for an nuclear analogue. Another, financial way is [value of output]/[cost of inputs]. This is infinity for solar setting aside fixed/financing costs and quite finite for nuclear using the same assumptions.
Total efficiency here is the sum of all inputs over outputs. For solar panels that's land use, that's glass, silicon, plastic, PCBs, etc - in addition to the sun.
Otherwise, in your model, a panel that's 100% efficient is inherently the same as one 15% efficient.
In your model, a battery is infinitely efficient - after all it has no inputs, only outputs! Once you get to that point your model needs to be adjusted.
You are confusing operating/marginal efficiency with lifetime efficiency. Think about a power plant as a series of payments. You have one big up front payment to build the thing and a series of smaller payments to buy fuel and run it.
For solar, those smaller payments are zero. There is still the fixed upfront payment and that is why you would prefer 40% efficient panels to 20% efficient panels everything else being equal.
The marginal cost of rooftop solar is zero. Nothing is wasted. Really! No fuel is bought, the roof underneath is cooler and lasts longer, there are systemic benefits, etc. There is virtually no maintenance. No land is used (Solar land use is complicated but most places you can put solar wouldn’t support a nuclear plant). Light which would have bounced back into space or turned into infrared is instead made into usable, high grade energy. Land/build area that would otherwise do nothing is made useful. It is literally close to economic and physical magic. It is true that panels break, inverters die, upgrading is compelling, etc. However, most components are silicon, glass, copper, and aluminum. These are some of the most recyclable materials on earth. There are plenty of analyses of lifecycle energy and material costs and it is generally pretty favorable (1-2 year operating recovery time). The panels are warrantied in many cases for 25 years so idk where your 20 year then scrap lifespan comes from. Inverters tend to be the weaker link.
Finally batteries have marginal round trip efficiency because what you put in doesn’t come back out 1-1 so I am not sure I follow your point.
No, it isn't. There's literally materials consumed to build the solar panels, and a 0.4-0.8 deaths per TWh generated. To your own point a 1-2 year recovery period on panels that last 20 is 5-10% loss in energy off the mark. We don't really have a recycling plan, but we better get one, because solar generates a ton of waste materials. To power the entire United States, we'd need 20,000 square miles of solar panel - the entire landmass of West Virginia. Replaced every 20 years, we'd need almost 100,000 square miles of solar panel in my lifetime. That's the entire surface area of Colorado.
But that's ok because I'm not arguing against rooftop solar lol. I never was. That doesn't change the fact they're not particularly efficient, and there's a lot of room to improve. I was arguing in favor of nuclear, which, with seawater extraction, can be completely renewable.
There isn’t a lot of demand for panel recycling because most panels have been installed in the last 10-15 years are not end of life. When there is demand there will be recyclers, you don’t need to centrally plan it.
There actually is NOT a lot of room to improve with monocrystalline silicon and other single band panels. The theoretical max efficiency on them is 40% so they are currently more than 50% of their max, room but not a lot. The technical efficiency (how much of the energy hitting the panel is turned in to electricity) is subsumed by the economics. For ROOFTOP, small systems can offset residential load 100%. I am not sure what is inefficient about that on any definition.
It would take about 0.01% of the US land area to generate all the electricity we need. Meanwhile we use 30% (over 1000x) to grow food. And if we prioritize solar on rooftops and deserts, we really are not using any useful land.
They're exactly the same kinds of waste. A 35% efficient IC engine wastes 65% of the energy in the fuel heating itself up. A 20% efficient photovoltaic cell wastes 80% of the energy in the light heating itself up.
You have to consider /all/ inputs and outputs for any honest assessment of efficiency.
Yes, I am aware solar cells need to be manufactured, producing waste in the process. Still, the same applies for all alternatives, neither fossil nor nuclear plants grow on trees.
My point is if you have to dig and burn 2.5 rocks to get 1 rocks worth of energy you are really concerned with that ratio for a whole host of reasons and affects everything you do (it is one reason why coal plants are huge for instance).
Now say you can get a rocks worth of energy with no rocks to dig and burn. Of course you still want to get the most amount of energy and there is an upper limit to how much you can collect but you no longer think about it in terms of the number of rocks you have to dig out and burn. That is a huge difference.
Edit: you are also wrong about what happens to the energy that hits the panel. Some light is reflected, a lot of light passes right through the panel. Further, panels are designed for particular wavelengths which is why multi gap panels have theoretical efficiencies higher than any thermal plant. And some is turned into heat. All of this would have happened had the panel not been there too except no usable electricity would be created.
I don't know about deaths, but the point about land use is related to theoretical efficiency. If an existing solar plant that is 20% was 100% efficient it could generate five times as much power in the same space, or generate the same power in a fifth of the land it currently uses. The land used by solar power plants is very relevant when considering its practical utility.
> 20% of something free that would have been entirely wasted is different than 40% of something you have to find, dig out, transport, crush, then filter.
It's not free, though, because those rooftop panels will lose efficiency over time. Eventually they will need to be replaced or they will generate so little power that they may as well not be there. Since they need to be replaced over time then harvesting that 20% of sunlight is no longer free, but carries an ongoing resource cost. Is that more or less than the cost of getting the same total energy from a nuclear power plant?
> I am broadly saying this point doesn’t support his conclusion.
The conclusion is that solar and wind can at best only complement nuclear, and this is supported by various points about the inefficiency of solar panels. Setting wind aside for the moment, why do you think the fact that solar panels are inefficient and degrade over time doesn't affect their viability as an alternative to nuclear power?
Response to edit: I don't know whether the 20% figure counts in the theoretical 100% light that is reflected or unabsorbed. It seems to me that it shouldn't be counted, since if you're going to count light that couldn't have interacted with the cells anyway, then you may as well count light that hits the ground next to the panel, which would mean the panel is 0% efficient.
Land use isn’t relevant for rooftop solar. There is basically no opportunity cost.
Everything becomes less efficient over time. Sunpower warranties their panels for a 20% decline in performance over 25 years. That means a 20% efficient panel is warrantied to be 16% efficient after 25 years in the field. To put that in perspective, panels made 15 years ago were around 16% efficient. There isn’t a cliff and they are still useful.
Suppose you abandon the system for whatever reason. You go back to the steady state of not producing power on that site. There is again no cost.
I am not saying nuclear is bad. I am outright rejecting the claim that solar panels are inefficient on any dimension that counts. I think this argument about degradation is beyond silly. I also think you are an astroturfing troll.
Yeah, is it more or less? I don't know either. But finally we're getting to the core of the question instead of debating about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
So at the end of its lifetime, be that 50 or 100 years in, a nuclear plant will have to be replaced, too. Basically a sudden 100% degradation. What is the resource cost for that, why are we not talking about that in this context? Because it's not "ongoing"? What's the resource cost for cooling with increasingly sparse water bodies that due to climate change will be less and less suited for it over the lifespan of the plant, BTW degrading its efficiency? What's the resource cost of plant dismantling and disposal, which goes on for decades after a plant has ceased to produce power? Would you like to include nuclear waste disposal as an ongoing resource cost in the consideration? Where do you draw the line? Are there any reliable estimates about these externalities that don't range wildly depending on which faction informed them? Do we want go down that rabbit hole?
If not, then what's the point of fixating on this single aspect with regards to solar and solar only? Just because this one is a figure that's easy to quote out of context and sounds kinda bad? Can I make you realize that in this light it's hard to not think of this as deliberately cherry-picking an argument for argument's sake?
These are all retorical questions, of course. FWIW, I don't claim to have any definite answers on the topic, and actually I do think that nuclear and renewables will have to complement each other to varying degrees around the globe, depending on many factors. I'm just trying to get across why the specific point your're clinging to seems so extremely moot to me.
>Setting wind aside for the moment, why do you think the fact that solar panels are inefficient and degrade over time doesn't affect their viability as an alternative to nuclear power?
Because it's already correctly priced into the running costs, just as - I suppose its proponents will claim - the corresponding facts above are for nuclear. Also, as has been pointed out, the ever repeated claim of solar inefficiency is baseless in the most literal sense, due to the lack of a comparable reference point for nuclear. 20% is an entirely meaningless number as long as the system boundaries are drawn so arbitrarily that it's impossible to benchmark. To put it bluntly, what would be sufficiently efficient for your taste? 30%? 60? 90? Can you explain why? It's just apples and pears on this level, the only reasonable comparison could come from a much broader view that you're explicitly not interested in.
Anyway this discussion is going in circles. I'm not assuming bad faith on your side, but I don't think we'll come to an agreement either.
Presumably because nobody knows it. Personally, I'm not aware of any nuclear power plant that has been replaced. I also don't know why one would need to replace the entire plant and not just the core and possibly surrounding structures.
>Would you like to include nuclear waste disposal as an ongoing resource cost in the consideration? Where do you draw the line?
I don't think a line should be drawn anywhere. If we're talking about sustainability and total impact, we should look at all the facts, otherwise we're drawing conclusions off incomplete data. It should be possible to reduce the entire situation down to a single "impact per Joule" value that's comparable between any two power production systems, and every impact that's caused in order to produce that Joule (mining, land use, pollution, etc.).
>If not, then what's the point of fixating on this single aspect with regards to solar and solar only? Just because this one is a figure that's easy to quote out of context and sounds kinda bad? Can I make you realize that in this light it's hard to not think of this as deliberately cherry-picking an argument for argument's sake?
The point is that treating rooftop solar as "free" because it's supposedly a one-time cost is at best naive, at worst disingenuous. I have no interest in making nuclear look good or solar look bad, but let's call a spade a spade. Neither of them has zero impact on the environment. Pretending that they do means we're not making rational decisions.
>Also, as has been pointed out, the ever repeated claim of solar inefficiency is baseless in the most literal sense, due to the lack of a comparable reference point for nuclear.
I wouldn't say it's baseless. The figures on efficiency by themselves are measurable and true. It is true, though, that nothing can be said to be (in)efficient in an absolute sense, for the reasons you say. That's why I never said "solar panels are inefficient". All I said on the matter was that efficiency in this sense is exactly the same kind of efficiency that an IC engine has, because, as I said, dpierce9 was trying to reframe the discussion for no reason. Well, I don't think it was for no reason.
>Because it's already correctly priced into the running costs, just as - I suppose its proponents will claim - the corresponding facts above are for nuclear.
I'm not sure either are. Is the pollution caused by semiconductor production, or as you mentioned the warming of natural waters used as coolant, priced into the corresponding products?
>the only reasonable comparison could come from a much broader view that you're explicitly not interested in.
Yes, I agree, that's the only reasonable comparison. I would be interested in that if anyone came forward with an actual analysis from which we could derive a figure like the one I mentioned above.
Nuclear is way too expensive, specially if you account for risks of disasters (no insurance company will insure them, so the risk is on the population).
This is CATO propaganda. All power generation is subsidized by our incredibly relaxed attitude towards externalities in general. Of the reliable sources of energy, nuclear is safest and the least subsidized.
How do you evaluate this? Do you have a summary of estimated subsidies per MWh for different generators?
My understanding is the same as the comment you are responding to, that nuclear subsidies are significant, ~6-10USD/MWh on insurance alone. I would be happy to be wrong on this. On a good day we pay ~EUR25/MWh for nuke electricity in EU day-ahead markets, as a scale point; 8EUR/MWh is a significant subsidy.
Second, the nuclear insurance subsidy is not really a subsidy, since the taxpayer is only on the hook in the case of an accident, which is not only extraordinarily unlikely, but also mitigated many times over. The calculation of the implicit subsidy to nuclear power comes from highly motivated speculative accounting by CATO, whom you should generally think of as playing the role of a law firm working for oil and gas and against alternative forms of energy production. There are a range of values which could be assigned to the "implicit subsidy of nuclear insurance", and the opposition lawyer has obviously chosen the absolute highest end of that range.
It is difficult enough to calculate the probability of a nuclear reactor meltdown, but we have observational evidence that it is at least many dozens of times less likely than say, a hurricane, and each of those is generally more costly than even the worst nuclear disaster in history. The damage wrought by the tsunami at fukushima, for instance, was many times greater than the damage wrought by the meltdown at fukushima.
There is a private component to nuclear insurance, as well, paid by the operators, which totals, across all nuclear plants, approximately 10 times the total damages incurred by the three mile island incident every year. It is extremely unlikely that a nuclear accident will ever exceed these damages.
This is in stark contrast to other historical insurance requirements. As a case study, I recommend learning about the early history of oil spills starting with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Torrey_Canyon and the subsequent founding of TOVALOP in 1968. Up until that point, oil transport insurance was implicitly subsidized by the nature of a limited liability corporation. Note that this was not an artefact of the times, since insurance requirements for the nuclear industry were implemented by congress a decade earlier, in 1957.
On the other hand, we subsidize coal and natural gas implicitly by not charging them for the use of their exhaust channels and also not structurally supporting torts for worse health outcomes with no easily identified proximate cause. For a concrete example, I think we have a pretty good idea of the number of additional hurricanes per year we can expect as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, but we do not require oil and gas to pay for marginal additional hurricane insurance, despite that doing demonstrably more damage than even very bad nuclear meltdowns. The unsuitability of tort as an avenue of collecting externalities is an enormous implicit subsidy for the fossil fuel industry.
My question was about your claim that nuclear has the lowest subsidy of any generator.
> It is extremely unlikely that a nuclear accident will ever exceed these damages.
I mean, the Fukushima cleanup (~$500B) is costing about three orders of magnitude above the liability ceiling ($450M) of the private insurance component of US nuke liability.
Second, I said for reliable power. That was sneaky of me, but gas, coal, nuclear, and to some extent hydro, are the only reliable power sources I am aware of. Wind is not completely random, but cannot be relied upon, and solar cannot be run at night. Hydro is reliable, but represents a much bigger population risk than nuclear, with no real possibility of safe failure. I like hydroelectric power, I think it's neat, but it's definitely a sleeping dragon.
"Reliable power" is well.. this keeps coming up, and it's always this black-and-white thing; sometimes the wind doesn't blow, so you can't rely on it.
And then the other side will counter that the downtime of wind is predictable, unlike that of nuclear (see the need to raise the price ceiling in EU day-ahead markets to deal with the unplanned nuke outages in France going on right now). This side will say the predictable 45% capacity factor of wind is preferable to the unpredictable 90% capacity factor of nukes.
In reality, a stable energy system is built by combining energy sources of different strengths. Wind and solar provides bulk cheap power most of the time, with hydro and nukes ramping to match production changes. This is identical to how the grid is already ramping to match demand changes every day.
We see this dynamic every day in EU markets, with wind+hydro slotting together, hydro flexing up and down as wind ebbs and flows. You can see this live in the "Origin of Electricity" charts on electricitymap: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/SE
My point is, the combination of wind, solar, storage is orders of magnitude less subsidized. If you account for risks (nuclear) and externalities (fossil fuel). This is not propaganda. But your claims about nuclear are.