Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

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Ah, Texas. I have a quote about nuclear there, from Exelon in 2018.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088

> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.

(current natural gas price at the Henry Hub is $8.67/MMBtu, which is $5.70/MMBtu in 2005 dollars)

Note that the current tightness in ERCOT is tailor-made for solar. The recent weeks' daily demand peaks would be squashed by additional PV capacity, and no storage would be required.

https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards

The modeling I was talking about can be found here.

https://model.energy/

It defaults to using 2030 projections for cost data, but that's ok because any new NPP effort started today likely would not be online before 2030, if then.

That's another problem with nuclear: it's competing against the renewables and storage of the next 40 years, not those of today. Going with nuclear (in addition to being optimistic about the cost of new nuclear) is making a bet that those stop decreasing in cost, and soon.

What the experts with skin in the game think can be seen by where the markets are allocating investment. It's into renewables, not into nuclear. From the point of view of the hardnosed financiers nuclear is a loser, and losers don't get money, they get shown the door. And yet, there's still this weird tech bro fixation with nuclear, for no reason that's grounded in reality.

Why play with old and extrapolated data.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...

Select generation by energy source.

Note, that while solar will probably do fine as long as its cutting off that peak 3-5PM time-frame, it falls off faster than the wind picks up (in general) and the NG plants then peak.

Move around in the year a bit, then flip to daily average.

See that, those are massive swings. One either overbuilds by a large factor, or one comes up with a storage mechanism to de-carbonize that. I'm betting given the political climate in TX the smart money is assuming that will never happen. So, the smart money would bet on just enough renewables to catch those peaks, and then fill in the rest with NG. Should that fail due to rising costs, there are coal plants.

PS: Texas has 4 reactors seen in that graph, producing ~4.7GW of power, which before the NG gas boom were regularly producing some of the cheapest power in the state. They are also some of the most recently constructed reactors in the US comming online in the early 1990s after 15 year construction cycles filled with lawsuits, and redesigns and every excuse in the book (STP actually had 3 different general contractors IIRC) to keep them from coming online, largely by environmentalists. If the remaining 4 reactors at the two sites and just two more sites with similar generation capacity were created it would more than wipe out the baseload carbon in the state leaving the NG plants only spinning up when the renewables failed. In the grand scheme of texas energy production, it would be a drop in the bucket of plant costs, even if they were constructed at the costs of the existing plants. If they could be constructed at the costs of reactors in the 1960's (aka less than NG plants) those price equations would flip on their heads. No one in their right mind would be building renewable energy sources, but because of politics and people who get in the way of Nuke plants, no one in their right mind will bet against gas.

What do you mean, old and extrapolated data? The ERCOT dashboard is giving today's data. The price spikes the last few weeks have been during the day. And the prices have been well above the levelized cost of solar.

I understand there is a large amount of solar in the pipeline in Texas. It's a no-brainer at this point.

Yes, Texas has reactors. Sunk costs are sunk. It would make no sense to build more, which is what that Exelon quote was saying. Really, it makes no sense to start a new reactor build anywhere in the US. All the AP 1000 efforts aside from Vogtle 3/4 have been terminated.

I was replacing your model with actual data... Not suggesting the link I gave you was old data. The important thing to note is the shape and peaks of the renewable data. You can grow those curves but you can't really change their shape much. Solar is going to be offline by 9PM 100% of the time, and when the wind doesn't blow for a week at a time, and rolling blackouts start people will question why their bills are going up, and the reliability is going down.

Anyway, I'm sure solar will be built, and the graph will look similar to the past 15 years of retail pricing.. AKA the solar will suppress the energy investment in other things until it fails catastrophically and retail customers are left holding the bills for all those NG plants that were quietly going out of business until the "black swan" event gave them some breathing room while simultaneously killing a few hundred more Texans and jumping the utility rates up again to pay for all the deferred maintenance on the generators of last resort.

https://www.texaselectricityratings.com/resources/historical...

Bottom line, while presumably installing a lot of really cheap energy Texas energy costs were going up, a little less than double if you factor in inflation.

Which makes sense, if you add the cost of the wind+NG, someone has to pay the bill for building surplus supply, and now we are going to have solar too, so best case a ~3x peak energy overbuild, while simultaneously not having enough to cover actual peak load when the weather doesn't cooperate.

So same as always, some smart investor will make off with a bunch of money from the solar plants, the carbon emissions might decrease slightly, still leaving us with one of the dirtiest energy generation mixes, and likely 3x higher energy bills than just using natural gas 100% of the time.

A winning formula for sure. Unless of course someone actually invents a battery technology that is cheaper than NG plants and can literally store the 10's of TW's required to bridge those black swan weather events that seem to be happening more and more frequently as we continue pumping CO2 in the atmosphere while playing around the edges with wind/solar.

Are you trying to say building more solar is a bad idea, and building more of something else would be better? What would that be, specifically?

Texas needs a bunch of solar, a bit of battery, that would cover peaks due to air conditioning. More insulation specified in residential building codes wouldn't hurt.

Once most Texans have EVs that charge with solar, and plug in at night and feed to the grid, the solution is even more obvious.

Texas also should expose real time variations in rates to all consumers.

More than this?

https://www.ercot.com/mktinfo/prices

edit: As I post it, there is a prime example of how people wave away transmission issues when talking about green energy. The wind farms on the coast near MX have a negative price (-11 to -33) while most of the state is sitting at ~90, and there is a problem in the west/central part of the state where its $180.

I believe retail customers are not being exposed to those spikes. Correct me if I'm wrong?

Solar can be placed almost anywhere in Texas, and in particular can be placed near where demand is expected. Transmission costs for it should be less than for large central power plants.

You wouldn't build a solar farm particularly close to any of the major TX cities which sprawl for long distances because the land is worth more than the solar panels.

A 10MW+ solar installation costs > $100,000/acre. You can find land within 200 miles of the major cities of Texas for far less than that (and probably much closer than 200 miles). Or you can go far to the west to get land at maybe $1000/acre, but then transmission cost goes up.

If land cost ever were a serious constraint on solar, solar would have become so cheap that it would already have destroyed all the competition.

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