Academics and the grid. Are they studying the right things?
judithcurry.com
judithcurry.com
This is the guy who invented Ethernet, who knew in great technical detail what he was talking about.
But just like the internet in 1996, I’m sure there are plenty of people in the industry who can also foresee what problems there are going to be with renewables - and an increasingly large number of those people have jobs that depend on solving them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Web_prediction...
Rest assured that ancillary services markets absolutely incentivize frequency regulation (if not inertia directly), and in fact a significant portion of energy storage returns so far has been from providing frequency control (and getting paid for it). Overall I also found this post to be fear-mongering.
1991 "Microsoft is abusing its monopoly"
1993 "Wireless computing will flop permanently"
1994 "What the Internet needs now is more competition among greedy entrepreneurs"
1995 "I predict the Internet's catastrophic collapse in 1996"
1996 "Everything on the Internet should be strongly encrypted all the time"
1997 "E-postage is a good thing"
1998 "The skunk is, like Microsoft, an exquisite survival machine"
1999 "Linux will fizzle against Windows"
Not really a prediction, more of a fact
> 1994 "What the Internet needs now is more competition among greedy entrepreneurs"
Competition is definitely good.
> 1996 "Everything on the Internet should be strongly encrypted all the time"
That pretty much came to pass. HTTPS, encryption and signatures are everywhere.
> 1997 "E-postage is a good thing"
What does that mean exactly?
> 1998 "The skunk is, like Microsoft, an exquisite survival machine"
That's not even a prediction
> 1999 "Linux will fizzle against Windows"
Kinda did in the desktop space, it did great by moving into all sorts of mobile devices and the cloud.
It's weakly linked to cryptocurrency. One of the early schemes was "proof of waste" for sending email, where you'd have to show some expensive mining-like calculation to send an email. Occasionally cryptocurrency people try to suggest charging for email or social media posts again.
There was also a lot of y2k doomerism and a lot of work put into preventing it.
>Metcalfe offered several reasons for the collapse. For example, he believed that the internet’s crucial data links would be overloaded, and the “naïve flat-rate business model is incapable of financing the new capacity it would need to serve continued growth”. He contended that investor’s would be unwilling to “absorb projected continuing losses”. He thought that “another series of major security breaches will drive the rest of the productive Internet to safety and out of reach.” Yet, he was incorrect, and internet continued to grow exponentially in 1996.
In summary, this is just another anti renewables "I know better than all the experts" blog post.
Edit: If it turns out that we need conventional types of inertia and new technologies do not suffice we can use synchronous condensers. It will increase cost, but so will using nuclear.
In particular, there's been a lot of work done here in the UK on switching these voltage and frequency control services over from fossil fuels to other, renewable sources that's public but not widely known about. Meanwhile, the voting public think that the government has literally done nothing and isn't even trying because all that gets media coverage is overly-optimistic claims based on ignoring the hard parts of the problem and attempts to spin anything they're not doing (like onshore wind and large-scale solar) as the solution and anything they are doing (offshore wind, hydrogen, etc) as stupid.
The UK is also more difficult, being a smaller grid. Several national grids in the EU are operating at higher levels for significant hours as they "use" the stability of their neighbors. We can gain experience with new tech gradually that way.
The reason we're not building more renewables in the EU is _not_ dynamical instability. The reasons are mostly regulatory and political right now. Grid capacity extensions lagging behind due to nimbyism and onshore wind is stimied by strict location rules. Permits often take a long time, etc...
Economic incentives are also misaligned due to the lack of nodal pricing.
It's wrong to suggest nothing is being done. It's also wrong to suggest that we couldn't do more.
https://judithcurry.com/about/
"Interview with Ron Paul"
"Interview with Tucker Carlson (Fox News)"
"Interview with John Stossel (Fox News)"
Impressive list of disqualifications there.
> Judith Curry resigned from her position at Georgia Tech on January 1, 2017, citing the “craziness” of climate science ...
> Judith Curry wrote on her blog Climate Etc. that her views on climate change are best summarized by her Congressional Testimony on the President’s Climate Action Plan: [6], [7]
> “Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change:
> – The hiatus in global warming since 1998 – Reduced estimates of the sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide – Climate models predict much more warming than has been observed in the early 21st century”
'Impressive list of disqualifications there.' < couldn't be truer.
Wind/solar augmented with big chunks of iron spinning in sync with the grid would easily mitigate whatever scare language is involved with inertia.
Note that this is not about longer term energy storage, so the overall generation mix conversation is still very hot.
The author of the post is Russell Schussler. I believe this is him, and that he knows what he is talking about:
"Russell Schussler works as a Planning Vice President, System at Georgia Electric Membership Corporation"
Previous Work Experience: SERC Reliability, Engineering Committee; North American Electric Reliability, Planning Committee.
Education: bachelor's degree, Ohio State University, Columbus; master's degree, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
[0] https://www.datanyze.com/people/Russell-Schussler/415612919
He's been consistantly wrong about renewable stuff since 2015
https://judithcurry.com/2015/05/12/true-costs-of-wind-electr...
Why? I think nuclear is effectively obsolete at this point. It had a potential once upon a time, but no longer because the world just moved on, like happened with say steam powered trains.
Nuclear is really ill-fitting tech to the modern age. Say, who's going to build it?
Investors? But it has a terrible time making a profit. It's incredibly expensive to build, and has a very long payoff time. If you're into money, then you don't like a business plan that requires a loan of many billions and that might pay off in decades, if renewables don't ruin the business model. If you're a banker you probably don't like that either.
Okay, let's say it's a political project then, we'll pay for it with taxes. But that's not great either because construction times are long. As a politician if you throw your effort behind nuclear, your chances are slim to see it being turned on while you retain your position. The chances of seeing that plan start to profit are even slimmer. The chances of a successor sabotaging your legacy are pretty big. So your incentives as a politician to get behind nuclear aren't great.
Let's say the politicians are onboard anyway. Even then, it's tricky. Governments are sovereign. Even if the current government promised that this plant is guaranteed to sell its power for $X and therefore is guaranteed a profit... guess what, if in the future it turns out that solar is everywhere and your power costs 10X than anyone else's, people will likely get tired of paying for that, and might as well break the promise some other party made 15 years ago, and there goes your profit.
But even from there, nuclear is constantly under development. Its leading edge is miles beyond the nuclear of the generation when it was being built out commonly in the US, and the new tech is both very safe and produces way more manageable waste output. China is building both more nuclear and more renewable energy than any other country in the world, and is just one place showing that that the combination is a viable way of meeting our needs.
Put another way, I do think you're right when you say (lack od) profitability is the major problem. But I think, given a frank assessment of the technology (preferably from sources not funded by people with an interest in maintaining the status quo), we should consider seriously that the problem isn't nuclear tech, but the concept of profit, itself.
True, but arguing in favor of nuclear is unlikely to fix that. That's more of a matter of passing some sort of carbon tax legislation, which I very much support.
> But even from there, nuclear is constantly under development. Its leading edge is miles beyond the nuclear of the generation when it was being built out commonly in the US, and the new tech is both very safe and produces way more manageable waste output.
That's I think is one of the issues with the tech. You can make a new solar panel or new wind turbine quickly. Experimenting with nuclear is an enormous ordeal, which nobody seems to want to engage in all that much. If building a powerplant is already not profitable, imagine building an experimental one, stuffed to the gills with instrumentation.
My view is that on the tech angle it also almost certainly loses. Renewables are just simple and amenable to mass manufacturing.
> we should consider seriously that the problem isn't nuclear tech, but the concept of profit, itself.
I think for a thing as core as energy, we can't really ignore money. Say, what happens if your power is 3X more expensive than your neighbour's? That's unlikely to be competitive, so why wouldn't industry just move across the border? You might have noble ideals, but industry as a whole doesn't.
Further, I can imagine an insurance broker (similar to the FDIC) collaborating across areas of nuclear was an option.
Laws are what’s stopping nuclear, not finances or economics. I’ve mentioned it here before, my family was in the industry building nuclear plants. They’d have 3+ people for every weld, fit; etc.
example of real situation: contractor is supposed to weld frame, the union guy is supposed to weld pipes, there are different inspectors for each. Pipe inspector comes Wednesday, frame inspector comes Thursday. Frame must be inspected before pipe is in.
Contractor welds pipe and frame Tuesday because union guy is out sick. Pipe inspector approves on Wednesday. Pipe welder returns Thursday, frame inspector comes and pipe welder complains, take it out.
Next week, the pipe welder drinks all week. Frame welder welds frame, inspection complete and passes.
Following week pipe welder completes weld for pipe. But inspector was out sick. Further sections must be put on hold until inspected.
Following week pipe inspector inspects and approve.
At this point the project is 1 month behind where it could have been due to union rules (enforced by law) & legal requirements of inspection.
What really put the nail in the coffin, was (I believe it was GE) was caught faking photos of pipes. There was then a requirement to remove and replace all the piping for a project(s) - at cost. Which was a hell of a lot of money and regulations were then dramatically increased. Haven’t built since.
This doesn't solve the economics, if the cost is too high it doesn't matter that you can charge the consumers extra. You have to weigh it against other energy investments you can do instead.
Okay, and if people are selling wind or solar at 30% of the price, why would anyone pay to the nuclear plant?
> Laws are what’s stopping nuclear, not finances or economics. I’ve mentioned it here before, my family was in the industry building nuclear plants. They’d have 3+ people for every weld, fit; etc.
Well, tough shit, that's how things work when you're dealing with dangerous stuff. I fully believe nuclear can be a safe technology. But it's only safe when everything is done by the rules, and there are inspectors for everything.
I agree. Average electricity prices seem to be higher the more renewables are available in a given area.
It seems to me that this, in part, is due to the pricing mechanisms available. Let's say a nuclear based energy company could sell power to its customers at a fixed price, where the customer would commit to buying this even when the spot price went lower.
Now, let's also assume that the customer would only pay for the grid capacity needed to transfer this power from the local power plant. If companies selling wind power needed a grid capable of transmitting the power from the other side of the continent, that extra cost would be slapped on top of the wind power, NOT other power sources.
In sum, this should make it possible to sell the nuclear power to consumers at prices moderatly above the production cost (plus taxes, local grid costs and reasonable profits).
For old nuclear plants (or those built at the prices available in Korea or China), this would make the price to the consumer quite competitive, if not outright cheaper than energy mixes based on renewables and natural gas.
Also, there is nothing technical that prevents us from building nuclear plants at the safety standards of those plants, with designs from about 1970 not only at the same price (inflation adjusted) as back then, but even much cheaper, due to technological developments. If so, I would expect production costs below $20/MWh. This would still cause less total harm per TWh than any other stable power mix available today.
What prevents this seems to be regulations at every level, where nuclear is burdened with all sorts of extra costs, ranging from insane security requirements and other red tape, limits on pricing in many markets, having to pay for the extra grid capacity required by renewable sources, excessive taxes or deposits for externalities that is not required for other energy sources.
Now let's say all power sources were held to the same standards when it comes to externalities such as safety/harm caused.
This would mean that wind would have to deposit enough funds to ensure proper recycling of blades at end-of-life (or at the very least, safe storage). Ditto for solar. Hydrocarbons have the same allowances for toxic substances as nuclear, in terms lives lost and diseases caused. The harm from greenhouse gases could also be priced in this way. Grid costs would be allocated proportionally to grid capacity requirements.
If we do this, I'm convinced Nuclear would come out as the cheaper than renewables combined with enough hydrocarbon plants (or batteries) to even out the variability of the production capacity. If all power source were punished the same as nuclear for any risks, they would be impossibly expensive. If the demands on nuclear were reduced to the same levels as other sources, it would become dirt cheap.
If your impossible to solve for or fairly charge market came about, the net result is no-one would build anything other than parking lot and commercial rooftop solar + battery storage or at-site renewables for industrial until around 60-90% of demand was met. Then nuclear still wouldn't be remotely viable, but it would be harder to build wind and pumped hydro.
And your fantasy about 70s reactors is based on them getting free money, a workforce with free training, free design work, using completely different accounting methods and resulting in designs that were only online half the time. During entire period before TMI construction costs were rising >20% yoy.
The incoherence of the claims about APRs being cheaper than big heavy reactors, then bigger heavier reactors being cheaper, then SMRs being cheaper all for opposite reasons would be kind of amusing if public officials didn't keep falling for them.
> What prevents this seems to be regulations at every level, where nuclear is burdened with all sorts of extra costs, ranging from insane security requirements and other red tape, limits on pricing in many markets, having to pay for the extra grid capacity required by renewable sources, excessive taxes or deposits for externalities that is not required for other energy sources.
These 'ridiculous' regulations constantly prove themselves necessary for preventing multi-trillion dollar damages to the public. Barely a year goes by where there isn't an operator or builder caught doing at least one and often two of the five simultaneous colossally stupid things that have to happen simultaneously to cause a proper meltdown. The strict rules are the only reason there's yet to be an actually bad plant failure or mishandling of Pu239 or waste. Even with regulations preventing a major failure, ukraine and japan are spending enough on cleanup and economic damage to use up over half of your $20/MWh for every joule ever produced by a nuclear reactor anywhere on the planet.
Solar in particular is a big potential issue for nuclear, because so long the sun is shining, why would you buy any nuclear power? Solar is far cheaper to provide, so any rational person would buy solar first. And the more solar the less nuclear has to do during the day, which means that all those billions take longer and longer to pay off.
And you better hope storage doesn't kick off before that.
Capacity is being rapidly added, but there's not enough of them yet.
Renewables started being competitive fairly recently and you can't just magic solar panels and turbines out of thin air, they need to be built. And we're rapidly building them.
Which by the way, the very reason why we're having this conversation. If nuclear was such a great proposition, people would go and build it. We wouldn't be having silly arguments about its worth on websites that affect nothing. People with billions of money to spend and who expect juicy profits don't need Hacker News' validation.
We pay Scottish windfarms about £200million per year to curtail their output, just because we can't get the power from source to sink.
And who the fuck is doing that? Because they're not god-damned cheap if you do that!
I do not care if you can sell your product for cheap if I have to buy a much more expensive, planet-killing fossil-fuel product to make up for your SLA of "ha ha ha oh my god they think we have an SLA", which is why none of these academic ideas actually fucking include storage or SLAs! And no, cheap storage is not a fucking thing! Someone earlier on HN today was boasting of a solution that cost $800,000 per MWh, and if it exponentially decayed in cost at a rate greater than any industrial improvement ever for the next decade, it would still be more expensive than nuclear!
And yes, I'm angry, because empirically, on the very grid I use, that is exactly what has happened. We're paying, not the "extortionate" $100 or so nuclear promised, but over $500, because something needs to keep the lights on at moments not convenient for the intermittence. And I've worked with the industrial consumers of their product, conferences where literally everyone has academic AND industry experience in real engineering, and they're fucking suicidal because of the losses incurred by this shit, Europe-fucking-wide.
This is not okay. This is fraud.
Nobody is doing it yet because nobody is even close to having too much solar or wind at this point. But that's still likely cheaper in the end.
> And yes, I'm angry, because empirically, on the very grid I use, that is exactly what has happened. We're paying, not the "extortionate" $100 or so nuclear promised, but over $500, because something needs to keep the lights on at moments not convenient for the intermittence.
Nuclear promised power too cheap to meter. That's never materialized. Nuclear promises many things, but so far shows no signs of fulfilling them.
Eg, Hinkley Point C in the UK is infamous for that it's already economically nonsensical and can only exist because the government guaranteed a subsidy. It's already not competitive with modern renewables. That's unlikely to improve in the future.
Last time I checked, France's nuclear power stations were keeping the lights on in Europe while Germany scrambles to start up coal plants.
My argument isn't that nuclear doesn't work as a technology -- it obviously produces power. My argument is that building nuclear is not competitive, and that's why nobody is building any.
If you already have a working power plant obviously it can and should be used. Somebody already footed the bill for that one, so that problem is solved for that particular plant. But that has nothing to do with whether building more is a good idea.
It clearly is, if France is selling nuclear power to the rest of Europe.
That wasn't the original hope -- formerly, they hoped nuclear plants would be cheap and plentiful. My understanding is that "too cheap to meter" just refers to a flat rate -- why bother measuring (especially before modern times, back when that required people visiting meters in person), when you can charge a flat rate? But that clearly was extremely optimistic.
What the OP described was looking more like an Italian strike than manufacturing sensitive construction
You do both.
Energy companies can get secured loans for low rates. They can take a massive loan and do both, historically for 3-7% interest. They can immediately start charging for the loan, plus interest.
The more power they have (and if the equipment lasts long enough) they can reduce the overall cost per watt to generate, while paying off their loan.
In other words, they end up building endless capacity. Eventually prices come down and they make more money on the ride.
Do both what? My question is, if it's daytime, the sun is shining, and there's a solar provider selling power cheaper than nuclear, why would a rational person buy any nuclear power at all at that point in time?
> Energy companies can get secured loans for low rates.
Not for nuclear, or there'd be more of it!
Think of it, you're a bank and considering the case of a USD $9B loan that nuclear plant's owner will pay off in 20-30 years if everything goes well. And if it doesn't? 30 years is a very long time, especially with renewables now quickly being built.
If you have $9B to work with there's a lot of alternative business plans that don't involve putting all of it into a single piece of infrastructure that may not ever make a profit.
But the author also focuses on papers that study 100% renewables grid.
I find it pretty annoying that people want to scuttle the first 80% renewable grid because of the problems of the last 5%. Smells like good old fossil FUD.