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Comment by Schroedingersat | Hacker News Reader

> Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so pity we don't build it better.

In what way? For the price that they actually cost after construction you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar, and a CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over.

All so you can make your energy infrastructure beholden to one fuel supplier where your country is not allowed to produce any yourself. Then you have to find somewhere to put the waste for millenia.

And that only if you're on the short list of countries that the US, China, or France will even sell fuel to.

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>CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over

None of this have ever happened beyond "research" projects at extremely small scale. You can't take nuclear "actually cost after construction" - which in some countries like Korea or China is maybe 20% more than original estimations - and apply assumption that anything of this is actually able to scale, not even talking about cost of this.

The price difference between wind energy when the supply is high and nuclear when the supply is low is well over 10 times here in northern Europe.

If I can choose the time and place for when to do the trade, I would make a huge profit trading 2 units of energy and getting 1 unit back later at my specified time and place. The top price is around 40cent per kwh when the wind is still and demand is at its peak, compared to ~3c kwh when the wind is at the maximum production and demand is at the lowest. paying 6c worth of wind power and getting 40c when I specific it would be massive profit.

Green hydrogen if burned for energy would cost about 3-10 times that of nuclear per kwh. In the future that cost might go down but for now that is a bit (which is why no one are producing green hydrogen in order to produce energy). Again, if you are willing to sell green hydrogen for the price of nuclear, eating the loss, then sign me up. I will happy buy that and sell it for minimum 3x of what I pay for it since there are plenty of industries that want energy when demand is high and supply is low.

The cost of energy is not determined by how much it cost to produce. It is determined by the time and place it is delivered. 1 unit of energy produced today is not fungible for 1 unit of energy produced tomorrow. Only energy produced at the same time can be evaluated based on how much they cost to produce.

The fact that there is a 10x price arbitrage available in the market is proof that storage is not economically possible currently.

Isn't it the opposite? A 10x variation would be an incentive to invest in storage systems that capture energy at night and release it during the day.

Think a high-altitude reservoir where water is pumped up all night and then released all day when it's required.

Storage that has a reliable 365 charge/discharge cycles each year can be economical viable, especially when the discharge window of peak price is just a few hours. Solar + lithium battery work great in countries where the primary source of energy can be solar every day of the year.

Wind power doesn't work like that. Instead of a daily pattern of high and low supply, you get random amount of weeks and days of high supply followed by random amount of weeks and days of low supply.

Storage need to discharge in order to generate profits. If you get 30-50 discharge cycles each year, then those periods need to provide profits for the cost of 365 days of operations and it also need to repay the original investment.

One way to get around this is with subsidies. This is how some fossil fuel plants operate, called "reserve energy". When the wind blow they don't run the generator, but they still get paid through tax money. Then they start the engines when the wind isn't blowing and demand exceed supply. This scheme helps to reduce the peak price in northern Europe, through obviously it isn't really that cheap. It mostly just hide the true price behind subsidies.

Yes, the fact that such a strong incentive exists, and yet it hasn't been done, shows that cost is so much that even a 10x price difference isn't enough to pay for it.

I'm pretty sure it's done quite frequently. It's a pretty simple battery system with--apparently--an 80+% round-trip efficiency to it.

The biggest problem is getting permission to move that much water around. I live next to a lake and shudder at the regulatory hurdles I'd encounter building something like this. There'd be at least 4 government agencies before I even negotiated to sell to the public utility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

It would be obviously stupid to build storage that there is not enough renewable power to charge up from, yet. So, its not having been built yet only proves money is better spent on generating capacity.

Makes no difference what generates it. OP said that power prices vary by 10x from peak to trough. If you charge from the grid when cheap you can make 10x per cycle selling it back.

Then it is expected the situation will not last long enough to make a profit from.

Can you show any sources for "same price = double the capacity in <renewable> + CAES storage"?

That's a lofty claim and I have heard CAES storage at economic scales is still unsolved, else we'd see a rocketship company in the space. If you do know of a stealthy rocketship here, who is it?

The reason you don't see "rocketship" investment is because the problem isn't hard enough, no matter how well you solve it you wouldn't be anywhere close to virtual monopoly. But despite that, hydrostor.ca got an investment of a quarter billion earlier this year, and they already started projects for A-CAES facilities in the GWh range (comparable to smaller pumped hydro) when their funding was less than a tenth of that (I suppose actual projects wouldn't be included in that funding, I think they see themselves as a project specialist, not as an owner/operator even if some/most/all current projects seem to be subsidiaries, perhaps a bit like spacex/starlink if you like space analogies).

You know Finland gets like 2 hours of sunlight in the winter. Its not a particularly windy place either.

Finland’s low population density means the amount of economically viable wind is more than enough to meet annual power demand.

Production increased from 2.3 TWH in 2015 to 7.8 TWH in 2020, and capacity keeps increasing jumping from 2.3GW in 2020 to 3.3GW in 2021. And that recent growth has been without subsides.

It's so low density people can even blow from their mouth to wind turbine to be self sustainable. You can't just install a turbine and call it solved.

The point was the resource is available and cheaper than any alternative, not that they are actually going to say replace everything else.

Wind really scales best with hydro as you only get so much rain per year, but you have a great deal of flexibility when you release it. As Finland has a great deal of hydro they can make use of plenty of wind.

Heeeeyy, don't make reasonable judgment. This is solar and wind we're talking about, the solution to every climate problem. Even if there's no wind or no sunlight

And in Finland you can replace sun and wind by hydro.

> and double the capacity in solar, a

you are aware that you are posting on an article about Ontario and Saskatchewan, correct?

How about you go review the tables showing how little solar energy these provinces receive in the winter?

So when we need energy to heat our homes and power our lights, our solar output is also greatly reduced?

Solar may be great further south, where it is sunny all year round, but in the north we need reliable power all year long, including our cold and dark winters.

It doesn't get cold and snow here for no reason, it is caused by the reduction in solar energy we receive.

So the best place in canada for solar and one of the better places. Where capacity factor in mid winter is still above 10% and cost per installed watt of output capacity during mid winter is less than the present value of the sticker cost of this nuclear project (excluding running costs and overruns and associated infrastructure and security costs) which won't even be running during the most important decade for stopping climate change? That Saskatchewan?

this will be the case when we transition from natural gas for heating. as it currently stands, electrical demand--with the exception of Quebec--generally is dramatically lower in the winter than the summer.

Using rather bullish on wind+solar+storage https://model.energy, to get stable baseline we need overbuilding of 10x the output power, so 2x + storage gets us nowhere, at least for Polish weather and sunlight data.

> you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar

And the capacity factor of wind is ~33%, which means you need ~3 times as much wind as nuclear. The capacity factor of solar is ~25%, so you need four times as much:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States

You've only quoted half of what you're replying to. You can get the solar, and the wind, and the storage, all for less than the cost of building nuclear once accounting for cost overruns.

It's also with noting that nuclear has a higher capacity factor, but it's not 100%.

And that's priced into the LCOE which is a tiny fraction of nuclear -- especially once you factor in the costs of security and infrastructure, and the public being left holding the ball during decomissioning and waste storage, and of being the USA's and the next Kochs' patsy because now your entire energy infrastructure depends on them for fuel.

And then LCOE isn't even the right metric, because what matters is the CO2 produced by 2040, not the CO2 produced between 2040 and 2100 as we have to solve this now, or the world will be too unstable to finish a nuc.ear reactor, let alone run one until decomissioning. This makes the LCOE of renewables a little higher, but for nuclear it is between 10x and infinity times the cost per unit carbon.

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