US installs record solar capacity as prices keep falling
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I'm actually pro-solar, and plan to get it eventually, but I think the scaminess surrounding it will put a nasty taste in people's mouths for years to come.
If you can buy from a community solar project, instead, that is likely a better deal.
"For every unit of electricity you use, we put a unit on the grid produced by a renewable source like solar or wind. "
But that's only talking about generation from their existing resources - not the building of new resources. In fact they go on to say that they're only purchasing energy from renewable sources to one-to-one match their customers use. Bulb is just a reseller like any other.
https://www.greenmountainenergy.com/home-energy-solutions/so...
They also seem to go beyond the bare minimum and have more information.
I thought the Bulb site was implying they bought bundled RECS, i.e. they paid local Texas renewable developers for both their energy output and the REC at the same time.
Which is better than buying unbundled RECs.
That is... power plants are such significant investments that they are only viable with a government guarantee on future price and demand. But with renewables being deployed at large scale, those guarantees would start being something a gov would pick up the tab on rather than long-term by consumers.
Which is to hypothesis that the gov won't want to pick up the tab, prices of grid energy will rise fast, and there's a long-term incentive to getting off-grid that will accelerate whenever this tipping point occurs.
From what I've read… a few years ago, even for existing plants and just counting fuel costs. Although the cause is because it is cheap, not because of how much is installed.
Gas turbine power plants are cheap to build. (They have to be, because they're used as "peakers", only operating 10% - 20% of the time.) The threat to them is battery storage, not renewable generation.
Combined-cycle gas turbines (combined with steam powered generation using the turbine exhaust for heat) are slightly less cheap, but nowhere near the same league as nuclear costs.
Even so, in some places it's now (2022) cheaper to build new PV than to pay for the gas to run a fully paid-for gas plant. Or so we are told.
Long distance high voltage transmission lines sometimes need government involvement, because 1) they affect many land-owners, at least some of whom won't be happy; and 2) the margins are low in the power transmission game.
The need for long-distance transmission and gas peakers could be reduced quite a bit in a year or so, if PV, wind, and battery storage prices continue on trend (downwards). Not off-grid, but local grid.
With prices going the other, governments in EU (including Germany) is now considering subsidies again by creating a price roof. Any difference between the roof price and the market price will be paid by the government.
Nuclear plants can have similar subsidies. Price guarantees and price roofs are market tools rather than technology dependent tools, but they are more likely to trigger if the market price is fluctuating a lot. The more weather dependent the energy grid is, for now (and in general), the larger and more frequent the difference between max and min price are, the more likely the government will have to pay out in order to offer such subsidies.
Of course the government are not required to offer either subsidies.
Isn't it the other way around? The difference won't be paid; the whole idea is to stop paying over the roof.
The Norwegian government will pay 50% of their citizens electricity bill of anything that exceeds ~€0.07 per kw/h, a decision they made last year.
The Danish government announced today that they will offer any citizen an interest free loan for electricity bills, and removed all the energy taxes for the next 6 months.
Germany stepped in 18 days ago to save the energy company Fortums with 150 billions euros of government money. Fortums had a lot of long term contract to deliver cheap gas, betting that the price would remain low, and lost that bet. The government intervention was said to be done in order to prevent an other 2008 crash.
The UK announced the "Energy Price Guarantee for families and businesses" at the 1st October. This price guarantee is done through a mix of lowered taxes and direct social support (government stepping in and directly pay part of the bill).
It is expected to see a lot of similar initiatives in EU until winter, especially as the energy price is predicted to significant rise when gas supply start to deplete.
At a 15% annual growth rate, you double in 5 years. Throw in economies of scale, tailwinds of regulations and social norms and a 10% electricity generation by 2030 looks probable.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
I imagine fenceposts with bifacial film stretched between, in fence-rows running north-south in pastures everywhere, high enough to walk under. Cheap enough, it would be OK if they last only five years. Replacing them would be much cheaper than the original installation.
Maybe they have foil along each edge, + one, - the other, and you staple or clamp the edges to aluminum bus bars. At one end, bars running between rows gather current from all the rows to a converter box. Voltage everywhere is low, for safety, maybe 24V.
Since they are in productive land, density is not necessary. They are far enough apart to avoid shading one another even when the sun is low.
Cost per mwh from off-shore wind is below 50$ now in a market where the prices peaking north of 500$ recently. Very profitable business. Solar energy is cheaper than that and even more profitable. Basically as panel prices drop, the life time cost of their energy drops as well. And since that is measured in decades, it's very low to begin with.
A 100 watt panel operational for 3 decades producing maybe 0.5kwh per day on average would produce around 5 mwh of power during it's operational life (a bit over 10k days, easy number to work with). More in sunny places, less in cloudy places. You can get solar panels like that at around 50$. Those are consumer prices, power plants would be able get better deals. The higher efficiency ones that people actually put on their roofs are more expensive of course but also produce more energy. The cost of the energy they produce is probably around 30-40$ per mwh That's domestic solar and right now. Prices for commercial solar plants are around 1-2 cents per kwh in some sunny countries (unsubsidized). So 10-20$ per mwh In other places it's a bit higher. We'll see that drop below 10$ very soon. Offshore wind is more expensive typically but still very lucrative.
So, in a market where that is true right now, planning to operate new plants where the energy cost is at least 10x that, you are not going to be able to compete long term. Basically operating at 10x the cost of your competitors is a lousy business plan. And when 10x has a chance of becoming 100x or even a 1000x it's basically madness to even consider that.
Prices will eventually actually drop below a 10 cents per mwh. It's a bold prediction but you can just look at the cost curves and trends and make some predictions. It will happen in the next 2-3 decades. That's a 10x improvement relative to now.
What makes solar panels expensive is all the exotic materials, glass, and energy needed to produce them. Energy cost is trending down. So, that helps. And there are companies producing solar with organic materials that are essentially printing them on rolls. This is a new and emerging business but you'd find those on some EV car roofs for example. That sounds like something that could drop prices a lot and would also be really scalable. Lower material cost, lower energy cost, economies of scale. A 10x cost drop is a conservative estimate. It might turn int 50x or even 100x eventually. So, relative to the 10x difference we have today that adds up to a very depressing outlook for anything else.
So, coal/nuclear/gas power plant creation is not a great investment currently. These plants need to operate for decades to generate meaningful return on investment.
Short term there's plenty of demand for expensive energy, long term energy is going to be so cheap and plentiful that that business will dry up rapidly. More so than is already happening.
Many power plants are of course already unsustainable economically and only survive because of government support and protectionist measures. There are a lot of coal companies that went bankrupt in recent years. And gas plants aren't doing much better. Nuclear plants have similar issues. Yes they are clean but way too expensive. People are building new ones not because they are cheap but because securing access to energy is strategically important to countries. But unless somebody figures out how to make them 100x cheaper than they are now, they are not going to ever be competitive. And there's no guarantee that 100x would be enough even.
The cheap installed renewable plant that is going in today needs to start self replicating itself on a dust-to-dust basis. Otherwise it is going to end up being a one off benefit that we squandered - like easily accessible gas fields.
Which is why nuclear needs to be there as the strategic option. Markets aren't always the best way to make long term decisions.
Stationary batteries do not need lithium. And utilities can store energy in bulk without batteries, in other media.
All the nukes will be mothballed as there comes to be zero hours during which they can offer power at a competitive price. Each reduction in duty cycle means they have to bid higher for what is left. Owners may write off capex and try to get enough just to pay to maintain their turbines, and fail at that, too.
Nuclear costs are builing and decommission, and of course kickbacks to financial system since it's obviously better for energy company to borrow on X+8% rate rather than government on X%.
Capex, of course, is on top of that. Decommissioning is part of capex, though probably taxpayers will mostly end up on the hook for that. Does it cost less to keep running than for decommission?
And regular inspections and repairs. They do break down once in a while too. Basically you have a lot of moving parts that need maintenance.
And waste disposal and storage; which contrary to the popular belief is neither a solved problem nor free. Nuclear waste can't be left unattended either. Securing it in a place that is acceptable seems to be an elusive problem.
And you need specially trained staff, constant vigilance against nuclear incidents, constant drills to practice emergency procedures. Screening people to make sure they are not being exposed to radiation, etc.
All of that is cost and it adds up to quite a lot. Actually generating the power is the easy bit. It's all the rest that makes nuclear tough to do cost effectively.
In short, this is why nuclear in the current market is one of the more expensive options; even in nuclear friendly places like the US where a lot of that cost is hidden and tax sponsored or in France which just decrees an electricity price that is actually below the cost price. It's still cost. Take away the government support and these plants go bankrupt in no time at all.
In theory it can probably be done a bit cheaper and there are some companies working on that obviously. But I'm not really aware of companies pitching solutions anywhere close to solar/wind pricing, even at their current price levels. Which as I was arguing earlier would in any case be a mistake as they are very likely to come down by at least 10x more over the lifetime of whatever plants people are currently planning to build. There are many good reasons to still build a few. But energy price isn't one of those reasons.
Those are problems, which are solvable by predictable amounts of money. Once you commit to it, they aren't a problem. Real problem is that those look like low hanging fruit to politicians, that love to gut programs, where effect will be seen decades later. We can see this now in France, which was so close to actual energy independency.
>But I'm not really aware of companies pitching solutions anywhere close to solar/wind pricing, even at their current price levels.
Yeah, but those regularly produce energy below 5% capacity factor. You have to compare nuclear to renewables + storage. Once you have solution that can withstand December in Poland - very low solar capacity, low wind capacity - you have something to talk about.
Sodium sulfur, iron air, aluminum air are three technologies we have waiting in the wings if lithium ever runs short. We'll never run out of any of those raw materials.
(Edit: I'm not going to mention flow batteries, thermal storage (will we run out of rocks to heat up?), compressed air storage, or other chemicals like hydrogen or ammonia storage.)
But, we are not short of lithium. There is plenty.
There is a temporary shortage of lithium refining capacity, plants that take in the raw mined lithium and produce high purity lithium carbonate ready for the battery factories. But lithium mines? No shortage there.
Also, it'd be reasonable to hold nuclear to the same "dust to dust" standard. Check out what it takes to produce and dispose of nuclear fuel and reaction vessels sometime.
What exotic material is needed for crystalline silicon PV (95% of the market)? Silicon itself is extremely mundane; it's the second most common element in the Earth's crust.
The cheap, grid scale solar panels are all crystalline silicon.
They should be calling the neodymium and stuff sometimes used in wind turbines "lanthanides", instead, to avoid misleading people about their availability.
But maybe he just means that something will keep their cost above zero, which is true. But their cost per watt nameplate capacity will continue on down with the amount of material they need, and the amount of labor going into them.
Today they still need a frame, and glass, and are packed in boxes onto pallets and shipped; to be mounted on rails and brackets. But soon enough they will have no glass, and no frame, and be shipped in big rolls to be stretched between posts.
Copper, silver traces. Ultra-pure silicon. Aluminum frame, glass cover.
And the glass covers and aluminum frames. Making them also uses a lot of energy.
Roll-to-roll low temperature printed PV (using perovskites on plastic film)[1] potentially has lower production cost for this reason.
Put a roll in a shipping container with the controller and inverter electronics, truck it to the site, roll it out on the ground,[2] and hook up the inverter to the grid. Construction costs don't get much lower than that.
1. https://powerroll.solar/unique-solar-film/
2. Bulldoze and steamroll the ground first, if you want. Optional.
Peaker plants only run some of the time. They charge more for their power because they need to cover their fixed costs.
That's partly why people use gas plants, theyre relatively cheap to build, which matters when you are effectively acting as a backup.
We could in theory let these businesses gamble on how often they will be needed but grids/governments already found it better to pay capacity fees to these generators to ensure they are available if needed.
Notably, that money goes to the people who build the plant, not the fossil fuel suppliers, unless the capacity is actually needed.
But even those people are having their business model challenged because batteries that are installed to shift daily solar peaks can bid for the same peaks.
And as the gas gets burnt less, the price goes up, in a vicious circle that leads to more and more battery deployment.
Very low capacity factor peakers could be run with hydrogen (or other e-fuels) without greatly affecting their costs, since they'd use so little of it.
Need to skate where the puck's going, not where it is.
It will be interesting to see where the crossover point between hydrogen (and other e-fuels) and current batteries lies. There are also technologies that will fall between them, including certain battery technologies with low current density (Form Energy's batteries are in this category) and various flavors of thermal storage. The latter has the possibility of shifting over to reheat with hydrogen in emergency situations when the directly stored heat is exhausted.
Batteries cost $120/kWh of initial capacity, but they can be recharged between hundreds and multiple thousands of times before significant degradation, depending on the specific design? Picking x1000 arbitrarily, that adds 12¢ to the cost of electricity that goes via a battery today (a lot to be sure, but significantly less than the average domestic cost here).
I think hydrogen electrolysis is about 60-90% efficient, so 1/0.9 to 1/0.6 times the electricity cost to make as gas (assuming the hardware cost is amortised to the point of being negligible), but that isn't as high as $1/kWh even for domestic electricity prices here in Germany. Square cube law implies large scale storage will be much cheaper than small scale storage, so I'm still expecting that to be lower than $1/kWh as delivered, though I can believe it might cost that to build the capacity.
But for bulk storage, there are still cheaper technologies that cost only per MW to store or extract, not per MWh stored, like batteries. Tankage is cheap.
The per-MW cost is for motor-generators attached to hydro turbine, air compressor, or winch; or for nitrogen liquifier and turbine; or for electrolyser and fuel cell or combined-cycle turbine.
Storing in transportable tanks affords extra revenue opportunities.
A survey of storage technology pilot projects show people doing much more expensive versions of each than will be deployed. The incentives for pilot projects favor over-complex systems based on over-complex processes described in papers that had to be that to get academic attention as novel, and grants likewise.
When civil engineers get involved, systems will get radically simpler and cheaper. Probably designs will trade off efficiency, as the cost for a little extra power is much less than for complexity.
Storage of a combustible gas underground is already done on a massive scale. Natural gas is already stored, by the millions of tonnes, in just these kinds of caverns. The cost is cheap enough that the entire NG consumption of a region's winter can be stored.
Now, hydrogen also has power related costs: cost/W of electrolysers, compressors, and turbines or fuel cells. But for very long term storage this becomes small compared to the per energy capacity costs.
The random element breaks their already fragile cost justification.
Hydrogen generation makes sense because it's a physical product that you can use for other things if you don't burn it, which acts as insurance. A buffer for your buffer.
Heat batteries can have predictable loads and don't need the return trip to electricity.
Lithium and PV have a daily rhythm of usage which covers the higher price.
And throwing some energy away most of the year if there's no demand can still make financial sense if it's needed for rare peaks.
In general, building more renewables and doing the above is cheaper than trying to store energy and convert it back to electricity (unless you do it once or twice a day to amortise the cost).
This is why the climate change deniers go on and on about storage. They have correctly identified that it doesn't make financial sense to use batteries for that last few percent, but ignored all the other, better cheaper options to focus on that totally unnecessary approach. And also that the other 90% are better, cleaner and cheaper so we have money to burn on solutions if we needed it.
The cheaper renewables get, the less the Form battery sales pitch works. Just build more generation and short term storage.
H2, NH3, and clean H2O are so useful there will always be a market for as much as you can produce at zero marginal cost. I.e., once you have the equipment, which you needed anyway, it makes no sense to operate it less than you can afford to, even when the price of those drops to near nothing.
It's all just trade-offs. Generating energy that isn't used, or not using assets to their full capacity is just something to deal with based on costs and benefits.
We have plenty of waste and slack in the world today, and renewables seem likely to radically reduce that, so no point getting caught up in worrying about minor inefficiencies. 10 steps forward, one step back is still forward motion.
The storage tech works (as would a global power grid), we "only" need to scale it up, and at current prices a global grid would cost about the same as current annual spending on fossil fuels, while the cost of batteries depends on your estimate for storage requirements, which depends on the diversity (location and energy sources) of the grid, but could be in a similar range.
(Batteries are also the most expensive of the seriously considered solutions, other storage methods exist and work just fine but aren't so good for cars and we need the batteries for cars anyway).
I'm not sure how long either approach would last before needing servicing/replacement, but I'd be surprised if it was less than a year.
Anyone here know how long underwater HVDC cables last?
Yes, I have, and it is, even including aluminium (surprisingly a better choice for various reasons). I think I'm one of the main proponents of this on Hacker News, so you might have even seen my previous comments calculating this.
WRT economics, not my field; all I can say is that higher demand increasing prices will encourage (but not necessarily ultimately create) an increase in supply, which has a difficult to forecast feedback relationship when planning for a specific total output.
Aluminium has different issues, in that it is very very very energy intensive to refine. It may require new coal/nuclear power generation buildout near the mine for smelting the bauxite to make it even feasible at a large scale, otherwise you run into a chicken/egg problem with your grid idea since the grid doesn't exist yet. This is because aluminium smelters can't be shut down at night, they have a single turn on/off in their lifetime otherwise they need a full disassembly and rebuild, more likely scrap. So it can't just be run intermittently on local solar. To some degree it can be ramped down, so maybe a smaller base generation assisted by solar during the day, but it still needs significant power at night somehow.
The only per-ton expense to produce it is for electricity, which price will be falling very, very fast. So, no, we will not run short of aluminum, even at many times current production rate. Aluminum production process from ore + electric -> metal is extremely mature. Factories to make the factories have already been running for most of a century.
They will operate at night on wind and, during lulls, drawing down storage. They could keep hot by burning powdered aluminum. New ones will be built preferably where wind is reliable, or (as now) hydro power is cheap. Or they might be built near a cliff, and operate their own pumped hydro.
So, no, intermittent sources are not a problem for them or really for anybody, because storage is easy and cheap.
Night time energy storage for the smelters is not a solved issue still and significantly increases the costs beyond just adding sufficient PV panels adjacent to the smelter. Storage is not "easy and cheap" as you assert, otherwise there would be no reason to build the longitudinal grid connections GP was talking about.
Storage cost is falling even faster than renewable generation did, coming from behind. Now the factories for storage are under construction. By the time we have enough renewable generation capacity to charge storage from, storage will be very cheap. It would be stupid to build out more storage than you have excess to charge it from, beyond some batteries for load smoothing.
Unsurprisingly, people responsible are doing non-stupid things. (Except placing solar farms in the desert, that is indefensible.)
You should blog or vlog about this. I've seen you write this enough times over the last few years(?), and linking to a longer-form argument may be worthwhile.
(I should do the same for the global power grid; there are some wrinkles I want to explore with that also).
But its not a fundamental limitation, it was just the cheapest way to take advantage of the existing power system.
Set up somewhere with cheap hydro they can't fully use and ship out the energy as metal, running at nearly full power all the time.
Since there was no benefit to running at a higher variable draw, only costs, no one bothered.
Now there are benefits, so someone made a way to take advantage of them. And smelters who use it will be able to have access to cheaper energy, in more locations:
https://energiapotior.com/how-it-works
And simulaneously, the grid gets more storage, allowing it to roll out more cheap renewables.
This, replicated in specific unique ways across every industry that uses energy, is going to be the real solution to storage of renewables.
• Domestic politics (NIMBYing for both reactors and waste, and you don't get around that just by telling people it's fine)
• International politics (extra costs from proving nobody is using them for proliferation)
• Build time (too slow compared to renewables)
• Depending on your particular perspective, you may also care that the fuel itself is in limited supply (given the assumption that at some point even the currently-poor will want energy-hogging lifestyles and that nuclear reserves, even with breeders are 2500 ZJ compared to 65 ZJ of fossil fuels, then if you give everyone a Qatar per capita use that runs out in only about 300 years).
So today's tech, just with more deployment mostly solves this.
Yes there's room for Wind and heat batteries and all those other things, but even the brutally stupid approach of Solar PV and lithium batteries that we have today, without any new breakthroughs, is good enough to cover most of it.
People use more energy during the day, when the sun is up. Solar PV is the cheapest energy in history and broadly matches this daily profile.
As to going fully off grid, [Rooftop solar + inverters etc + batteries + installation] vs [paying for the same things + an electric grid] seems to favor home installation before you consider economies of scale. When panels where expensive rooftop solar was more competitive because the primary costs where the panels themselves, but as they drop other costs become more relevant and solar farms are pulling ahead. Though specific tax breaks for rooftop solar muddles the issue.
The OddLots podcast has been covering this issue on various episodes but the world of energy is a super complex system of competing interests. Ultimately we need energy to power our transition away to clean energy but the old energy industries have suffered from chronic underinvestment. There was some stat where a university course for oil (or coal?) had dropped to 1 student.
But as we're seeing, without supply prices start to shoot up so unless the world is prepared to undergo huge reduction of consumption, the transition will need to be gradual.
Demand will fall continuously, and supply will track it. The less of it utilities use, the less sensitive they will become to price, i.e. willing to pay more for it, when they need any at all. But as demand falls off, it will be harder to place what you have, if you have extra. So expect investment in sourcing to fall. These factors will make price volatile.
Industries still using mined hydrocarbons will look to get off them well before alternatives cost matches it, just because prices for alternatives will be more stable, falling on a predictable downward trend.
He looked forward to Solar. He said the #1 biggest cost of electricity was 2 fold: 1) running cable everywhere and 2) anticipating demand 10 years away and running cable for that demand
So, putting solar on your roof really helps them with demand "far" from the plant
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
Similarly, examine it on Feb 07 2022.
I'd conclude that until solar has excesses on the peak demand days that it probably makes financial sense to keep rolling out more solar.
And that increase in excess on non-peak days then makes rolling out batteries make financial sense.
And then the presence of those batteries makes rolling out even more solar make sense.
And indeed that is what is happening.
The amount of storage build-out that justifies, thus far, is easy to accommodate with batteries. Later, as renewables shoulder more of the load, the storage needs to get bigger and you start looking for economies of scale.
Ultimately, instead of paying to build out long-term storage, most places will rely on imports of synthesized liquid fuel to burn in peaker plants, from places that produce excess reliably, e.g. tropics, for solar, and reliably windy places. It is always windy somewhere. That synthetic liquid fuel is most likely ammonia.
And, while waiting for those to come online and undercut NG, you just continue peaking with NG.
Today people are breaking ground for factories to build ammonia synthesis equipment, which will take remarkably long to finish and start producing. Then those need to build enough synthesis equipment to absorb hundreds and thousands of excess GW. And we will have ships to transport it in, tanks to keep it in.
All that is a huge job, but it will be done. The stuff that handles an equal amount of petroleum and NG was built and is used, and will wind down and be scrapped.
If build-out matches predictions, collapse is an easy call. But build-out has been consistently beating predictions.
They're also vulnerable to hail, and require a lot of copper wiring.
I would buy any stock related to mini nuclear reactors. It seems like a promising solution, since it's faster and simpler to deploy, they can probably be sold to less rich countries, they're probably even safer.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I wish there was more news about it.
Both are here, right now, and getting cheaper every year. Nuclear seems to be something climate skeptics points to as a way of doing nothing.
The first small modular civilian reactor in the United States in 2022. However, the United States has been producing small modular reactors for military use since the late 1950s.
Ignore dogma and consider cases why nuclear power might be beneficial even if the dollar cost for wind and solar is globally lower: - The power output variance for nuclear is not very correlated with solar, wind, and hydro. Given the issues related to supply and demand variance, adding power sources whose variance isn't correlated with other power sources stabilizes supply and reduces risks of blackouts. - Solar, wind, and hydro are very geographically-dependent sources. To a small degree, so is nuclear— it requires cooling— but it can be built in places that aren't great choices for wind and solar. This means it's very useful for some local markets. - Nuclear has a different set of mineral requirements from batteries. In many ways, they are more complicated (e.g., enriching Uranium for light water reactors), but they are nonetheless different. Using nuclear alongside batteries reduces risk from mineral supply chains being broken.
Most of these effects run in both directions. Relying entirely on one source of energy is more risky than utilizing an ensemble of sources.
There are alternatives that can fill the same roles you envisage for nuclear. We'll get some of those instead.
Don't talk to us nerds, go knocking on doors and persuade soccer moms and instagram influencers that nuclear is safest, cheapest, best for their kiddies. That's who you need to convince.
V.C. Summer and Vogtle 3/4 were the nails in the coffin for nuclear here in the US. Nuclear has no time now to rebuild a reputation for honesty.
Soccer moms and instagram influencers have nothing to do with this.
We are living in the world Edward Bernays built, where democracy holds vanishingly little sway as PR machinery reliably generates votes for whatever whoever pays it wants.
Sometimes opposing payers compete.
Nukes have the extra ball-and-chain of huge capital cost to amortize over all the kWh they will produce over their lifetime. This means that if you end up operating only half time, there are half as many kWh to amortize over, and each kWh costs even more, making you even less competitive. (Operating a steam turbine less might reduce maintenance cost, but probably not if you are starting and stopping it every night, or if you keep it cycling to avoid that.)
So the expectation is that nukes will very quickly become unable to produce enough revenue to pay for continued operation. Then they are mothballed. Suddenly, all that capex is amortized over a much smaller lifetime kWh total, and the actual cost of every kWh ever produced jumps instantly to greater than you ever were able to charge for it. Then you go into receivership, or anyway write off that capex you thought you had invested, but really just poured down a hole.
We will need every non-carbon kW we can muster.
prices change, physical units don't.
We should not care what tech get us to cheap, abundant, emission-free power, and the current trends from nations around the world points in multiple directions. We don't see examples of cheap small modular reactors, but we also don't have national grids that operates exclusively on solar and batteries. Solar seem to have the best cost curve, while short duration batteries looks great in replacing natural gas when those are used in short (a few hours) duration. Battery technology is also looking great to replace grid stabilizers, ie something to temporary supply or take energy when energy plants on the grid boots up or goes winds down.
Skeptics of solar and batteries is generally directed towards the idea of replacing all worlds existing fossil fueled power plants. Replacing them all with nuclear looks conceptional feasible. Getting the solar capacity up to 100% seems also feasible, but batteries is generally were people start to have doubts.
No it isn't, as demonstrated by all the solar being installed alongside the zero mini nuclear reactors.
> require a lot of copper wiring
Intuitively I'd expect the quantity of wiring to be roughly proportional to output power, regardless of method; how much do you need for the coils of reactor turbines, for example?
> panels generally generate much less power after 20 or 30 years.
Maybe? That's the expected lifetime, but the actual outcome will vary depending on how weather-beaten they are. Being entirely solid state with no moving parts larger than an electron-hole pair is quite an advantage.
> can probably be sold to less rich countries
We're just going to stop worrying about proliferation?
Who cares that the panels are mostly made in China? Most of the electronics that would control your hypothetical nuclear plant would be made in China too.
Fusion reactors in theory can be much safer in that regard, but until they are realized and shown to work I do not see any sensible alternative for building solar or wind while keeping coal and gas power stations running.
D-3He reactors might someday find uses in the outer solar system, or in military rapid-deployment corps, if they turn out possible. But availability of 3He will always be a problem. Probably it will be bred by using solar power to accelerate protons.
On 9-7-22 solar production reached a peak just under ~13MW and was at that level for about 7/8 hours.
To me the average seasonal difference actually seems insignificant in the big picture. If its feasible for solar to power most energy on the summer days then it would be doable to get there for winter days especially since demand on 2-7-22 peaked at about 60% of the peak on 9-7-22.
The larger issues seem to be unpredictable off days due to off-season weather (cloud cover or wilfire ash or whatever) and of course storing power at night. But it seems like batteries will improve and running off solar on the day reduces need for natural gas until night.
Not totally sure why solar would ever be negative, but that's the wider explanation I think.
One possibility is that batteries are often colocated with solar, so possibly a solar/battery combination has been misfiled under solar.
I tend to lean toward battery storage as being the piece that will tip the scale. As more efficient and longer lasting batteries come online, grid ops will become a bit easier and some of the DER capacity that would typically be shed could be stored for later needs.