Wikipedia has higher numbers, but still comparable. And "technology proponent says technology can achieve X" is a really bad selling point if another technology already delivers X, especially if the new technology is going to face social hurdles.
Building enough nuclear for baseload demand, and enough solar+storage for the extra daytime demand, seems ideal to me until we get much cheaper scalable storage.
The electricity demand in the winter is much lower than the summer demand, especially in California due to residential AC.
> Actually this gave me an idea, it would be really neat to have an comprehensive simulator of power grids that incorporated weather, demand spikes etc. to play around with different energy source mix to get an idea of what actually works and when it fails as well as total cost, environmental impact etc.
There's a gentleman in Australia who does ~this for their market -- 5 hours of storage is enough to get to a 99% renewable grid there;
It's hard to make a reliable cost prediction comparing nuclear vs. wind/solar + batteries since we don't know how to build nuclear any more.
Vogtle 3/4 are going to cost maybe $40 billion when all's said and done? With OpEx, you get to something like $0.18/kwh. That's more than 5x the cost of unsubsidized wind or solar installations which would buy you a bunch of storage.
So we still have to pay for dispatchable generation if we want to have power on a calm cloudy day week. We can add that cost to the cost of the storage and overbuilding of capacity that allows solar or wind to deliver rated power overnight. Or live with blackouts
Which is over 50% of the cost of running a combined cycle plant (page 12: https://www.lazard.com/media/sptlfats/lazards-levelized-cost...) -- but also misses that you'd need far fewer plants if you build renewable + storage generation to match the 99% use case so the total cost spend on peakers would drop dramatically even if some were still needed to provide backup generation.
Also has the added benefit of almost entirely decarbonizing power generation.
5 Hours of electricity is something like 13 TWh, so if we get to 5,500 GWh annual production by 2030, it would take ~2.5 years to provide 5 hours of global electricity storage. Handicap it all and double the electricity requirement and halve the annual production figures and it's still only 10 years' capacity to go to a 99% carbon-free grid.
Yes there is pumped storage, but I wonder how much more of that there really is to develop? Plus damns are environmental disasters of their own. The other storage methods are speculative at best. I just wanted to push back a bit on the idea that "just" need solar + storage as many people seem to believe. It is a big ask, and I think we will need more. If we don't want gas plants, then nuclear could be a good option.
My other point stands though -- even if you grant a much larger electricity demand, you can't just look at today's battery production capacity. There are pipeline projects that will 10x that by 2030 (which is what happened in the past 10 years). Even with pessimistic assumptions, you get to pretty reasonable time frames pretty quickly.
The only thing that limits battery production is demand. There will be plenty of materials available and plenty of machine-makers exist. That S will go as big as we need.
The advantage of the batteries is specifically in power density, which makes them suited for mobility and consumer convenience. But the more you get into seriously optimizing electrical storage for scale, the less it's going to be about one specific mode.
My mom's house doesn't need A/C but it does need a lot of heat in the winter. We looked at moving her to solar/battery and an electric heat pump instead of her gas furnace. With even a tiny bit of trees nearby and otherwise pretty good exposure we were told it was going to be hard to make it worth it. Her demand in the winter would be pretty high.
We typically generate 800kW - 1300kW per month (more in the summer). Our panels are angled at 30 degrees to slightly preference winter generation.
so when you design a utility solar system with "+4" storage, what you're really doing is creating a "one days worth of full production" buffer. that can be used to run the output at a fixed rate while the buffer builds and empties every day (its never that simple but thats the basic principle). for example a 100MW farm with 400MWH of storage can in the simplest sense produce 16MW constantly (all through the day and night). in practice there's plenty of other stuff on most grids so they don't do a full battery cycle every night, but rather use the buffer to be able to meet day ahead and dispatchability contracts for a very cloudy day or a lightly cloudy week.
now don't get me wrong, obviously that still doesn't put it in the same reliability category as nuclear, but it closes like 80% of the gap in practice. its not better, but it is clearly on track to be 'good enough'.
[1] https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018...
Then again people freezing to death is certainly effective way to lower co2 emissions, maybe this is their hidden agenda.
Variable and uncertain power generation creates a problem on the electricity grid and the source of the problem does not pay for the solution. Everyone else does. Those energy costs you quote imply that variable generation (wind, solar) do not set the price of energy, which they do not.
The problem with computing a solution is that it depends on where you are, which season you are in and what the rest of the power grid looks like.
If you know anyone selling that (installed, with solar panels) for $4500, I’d like to hear about it.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...
https://signaturesolar.com/complete-all-in-one-off-grid-sola...
of course utility scale beats that handily.
I agree that it doesn't make economic sense in an ideal world with twice as much space per capita and/or a lot more time to find and purchase ideal nooks and crannies and wire them up, but that would require moving to planet B. Note I'm not talking about nearly-empty USA, Australia, northern Africa, etc. here; rather, take 2-3 random European countries (highest emissions per capita after north america, so you know, the place that needs to get change happening) and you're very unlikely to hit only ones where not most/all of the land already is already allocated to some purpose.
I also agree it's likely already too late to get started on new nuclear plants, like, it's nearly so late that we might as well just go solar and wind for the rest of the way. But I don't think it's quite at that point yet, considering for example that regions in southern germany with big-ish distance requirements for wind turbines are placing nearly none (and germany is not even one of the countries that I would count among those that are out of space), it's apparently that full already and they've got like 80% of the way to go in phasing out fossil fuels.
Honestly the main hope I have these days is solar panels on crop fields becoming a real thing. That would grant a level of scale (and somewhat protects from crop failure causes like hail and drought) that would make me see this energy transition as feasible without nuclear (pushing the recycling problem onto the next generation, but better to deal with a billion worn panels than a billion displaced people (both figures are figurative)), but so far there's little adoption.
Thats is the wrong problem - numerous farmers in Britain want wind turbines, they want extra source of income and they are willing to put in their own money. They know the turbines dont take any land away from farming - only fraction of a percent.
They are not allowed to install wind turbines on their own land from their own money, because the british government has banned turbines over a certain, non-viable height, on land.
Even when you want a small turbines installed, it takes 4 years of planning permissions and legal battles.
If we allowed every farmer to install windfarm of their land without interference, we'd solve half the problem.
We are dooming ourselved to disaster out of purely aesthetic concerns.
Farmers are being told they need to diversity but they can't have wind turbines, they can't have businesses that need any kind of premises, they can't build housing on their less productive land. Something has to give at some point.
Everyone agrees they need to do something but many governments are intent on doing nothing
For western europe at least, off shore wind is a great alternative, as are smaller wind turbines on farms. Much of western europe is in the path of the trade winds and so is a great place for wind power.
It is not too late for nuclear. Nuclear is an excellent stop-gap measure while we figure out how to transition to large-scale renewables.
So, in the first 2 months of 2023 the average American paid $0.17 per kWh [1], up from $0.15 one year before. Overall, a lot of people would be happy to pay $0.06/kWh. You are saying solar and wind could come at $0.045 and $0.03. That's great, but 2 cents per kWh is not really something people pay attention too all that much.
[1]https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
Let's consider a few technologies that already exist (in addition to wind and solar) and work at scale or can be made to work at scale that can be freely combined with wind and solar.
- Pumped hydro. As of yet one of the most widely used energy storage on grids in e.g. the US. There's about 22 GW and about 0.5TWH of it on the grid. A lot of it was, ironically, installed decades ago when nuclear plants started coming online and something had to be done with the massive amounts of energy that they produced. It's relatively expensive and it can't be done everywhere. But it's proven technology and its there already. There are lots of smaller scale trials with all sorts of gravity batteries. Not all of them practical of course. Though using e.g. mine shafts seems like it should work.
- Cables. We can use cables to move power around by the GW. It's an old technology. Has been around for as long as we've had electricity. This can be done over thousands of kilometers using modern technology. Examples: cables are already running between Norway, Germany, and the UK and more are being planned between e.g. Morocco and the UK, Australia and Singapore. A single cable can provide roughly the capacity of a largish nuclear reactor. I think the Moroccon cables are going to be 1.8GW each for example. The current plan is to have four of those. Cables aren't cheap. But they are probably comparable to largish nuclear plants in terms of the amount of power they can move and in cost. And they last for a very long time once you have them. Great argument if you hear people make the point that the wind doesn't blow all the time and the sun doesn't come out in the winter. True locally but cables fix the locality problem. Cloudy UK can rely on sunny Morocco. Wind starved central Europe can use off shore wind.
- Geothermal. There are lots of places where people are already exploiting geothermal energy. It seems more interesting to use for heating than for electricity but both are a thing. Digging deep for higher temperature gradients is expensive. But there also are a few newer projects involving heat pumps that don't require that.
- Grid batteries. These are currently being deployed by the gwh and probably soon twh. This is a rapidly growing market. Mostly this seems to be with relatively expensive batteries that provide hours, not weeks of storage. But interest in much cheaper but more voluminous battery chemistries that might be used for longer term storage is picking up as well. Too early to pick any winners here but there's simply too much of this stuff going on to dismiss it.
- Domestic batteries and EV batteries. Love them or hate them, these are being mass produced and installed as well. Tens of millions of EVs are going to require batteries to be produced by the twh per year and that's going to be a reality within a decade. The volume of batteries on the road is soon going to exceed the yearly energy consumption in a lot of places. That would be a problem if those vehicles would be moving 100% of the time. Which of course they don't. Domestic batteries are not far behind this but those too are starting to add up as their cost is going down. So despite there being so much battery on the road, we may not actually have much of a case for vehicle to grid technology to actually tap into that reserve. Because we'll have plenty of other batteries permanently connected to the grid. Either way, hard to dismiss any storage that is going to measured in many twh.
None of thesse things of course are free and relying on them exclusively is not a solution. Especially considering that some of these are actually quite expensive. But the reality is we are already doing those at gw scale and soon at tw scale. And it's all happening on the same interconnected grid.
Cost is not a constant and there's a trend for mass production to get cost down for a lot of these things. This is true for nuclear as well. At least hypothetically because our current nuclear production capacity is too low to show any signs of a learning effect so far (if anything it seems to have gotten more expensive over time). But hypothetically cost would come down if we did more of it.
But the simple fact is that by virtue of people installing solar and wind at break neck speed there's going to be no shortage of vast amounts of excess power peaks that can be moved around and stored. Which does raise the question what the point is of focusing on expensive nuclear projects in a lot of places.
System thinking is the notion that we can use all of these solutions, and more, to create a highly resilient and robust, interconnected grid. Nuclear can certainly play a role in that and it looks like it will. But it's probably going to be a much smaller one than some people would like us to think.
Here in the UK, our solar output varies hugely between summer and winter, and due to our climate we use a lot of heating during the winter. Currently in the form of gas heating, in the future presumably heat pumps.
And while batteries are workable to store daytime solar power for evening use, cycling the battery 365 times a year, summer-to-winter battery storage would only cycle once per year - making the capital cost 365x higher.
It's a shame nuclear is as expensive as it is, as a year-round zero-carbon power source would be a very convenient thing to have!