...if you ignore storage.
Solar and wind will continue to be the most expensive, difficult to scale method until the issue of energy storage is resolved.
Batteries are getting cheaper, but they're not being produced on the scale necessary to supplant base load power. Until then, you need to calculate the full cost of base load into the cost of solar and wind if you want to consider them a substitute, rather than a compliment.
Counter example. South Australia hit 80% of it's electricity production from renewables in the last two quarters:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-enjoys-80-1-pct-wind-and-solar-share-in-blackout-free-summer/
https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_pack.pdf
https://reneweconomy.com.au/five-years-after-blackout-south-australia-now-only-state-with-no-supply-shortfalls/Indeed, if you use solar and wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that for electricity (a process that is ~40% efficient) it's still cheaper.
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
This means that even on the darkest most windless winter days when the grid has to eat into long term seasonal storage, solar and wind energy is currently still cheaper than an MWh of nuclear power is on the sunniest, windiest days.
Nuclear is compact, and can really be built anywhere (may be consider earthquakes and don't build near tsunami zones). Therefore, a country that does not have suitable solar or win terrain would necessarily have to consider nuclear. A place like South Korea.
But of course, countries like australia (and to some extend the USA, and many other countries that's not in europe) would have the land, and it's just political and financial reasons that these power sources aren't more invested in.
It really isn't if mining is expanded. Low yield mines (the only kind left for new resource) produce tens of watts per m^2
It has also shown no evidence of being viable without a river, coastline or lake. It needs specific geological and geographic features and it can't be too close to population centers or important watersheds.
Contrast with wind where the land right up to the base of the tower can be used and solar where the land under the panels can be more productive than it would without partial shade (effectively a negative land use).
Not that the quantity of land matters because for solar it's over 20W/m^2 and usually over 50W/m^2 -- more land is reserved for the average US car to park in than required to power someone's life.
In theory nuclear power being compact would serve it well for small countries without a lot of space (e.g. Singapore), but because of the risks they want nothing to do with it.
South Korea builds nuclear power for the same reason as Iran and Sweden: it's part of their national strategy to be able to quickly develop nukes. It's not about economics.
Maybe nuclear isn't a great alternative to natural gas. I'm down with that. I'm not going to ignore the fact that wind and solar are at best complimentary, and that we can talk about pricing them without also talking about pricing in the base load that they're supplementing.
Windgas (synthesized natural gas) is carbon neutral, for what it's worth. It's inefficient to make but stores for long periods very cheaply so it's good for when the pumped storage and batteries run dry - e.g. rare long spells of relatively dark/still weather.
Short term while grids are 60% natural gas powered with no need for baseload it makes even less sense to build nuclear instead of solar or wind. 5x more expensive and 5x-20x as long to build? Why?
What's the price of the Ukraine war?
Nuclear reactors connected to the grid in 2021 had a median construction time of 88 months. (7.3 years) [1]
According to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) study, Tuesday, 15 countries have built a total of 83 nuclear plants over the last 20 years among the 31 countries with nuclear power. It took on average 190 months to build each plant.
During that period, Korea has built a total of 13 nuclear power plants. The average construction period for each plant was only 56 months (4.6 years), more than three times faster than other countries building nuclear plants. [2]
In France, [ ... ] taking an average of 126 months to build each plant, nearly three times as long as Japan. [2]
The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one. [2]
[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...
Japan, which has built a total of eight nuclear power plants since 1996, was the fastest, taking only 46 months to build each plant, while China ranked third, building 28 nuclear power plants during that period and averaging 68 months to complete each one.
Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 6 is the world’s fastest-built nuclear power plant, taking only 39 months for completion, while of Korea’s Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant Reactor 3 took 49 months to build.Looks like one or two plants never finished.
Most of the cost of nuclear power is in building and demolishing the plant, not in operating it. So if you plan a plant now to go operational in 10 years and run for the next 50, you are locked in to producing electricity for (amortized) $60/MWh for the next decades. Or shut it down early and eat a giant loss, if the projections for solar, wind and storage costs become true. That's a hard sell when you also have the option to build a wind farm in 5 years or a solar installation in two, decommission them after 20 years and repeat with whatever is the most cost effective then.
Time will tell if that hypothesis remains true, but inflation is a thing. What you build now with an amortizing cost over decades may weight much cheaper on your debt than you thought.
In that aspect, if you're a state actor, paying more to get lower maintenance costs is usually a good choice.
Nuclear makes a lot of sense if we want to be off coal and natural gas in the next 5-10 years. If we want to burn fossil fuels until 2060 then solar and wind are okay I guess. There is a reason that fossil fuel companies lobby heavily against nuclear and fund immense campaigns against it. It's a direct competitor. Solar and battery on the other hand are just barely off the ground right now.
1. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...
This is one problem I have with anti-nuclear propaganda. It uses the fact that it's been so successful at destroying nuclear power, as evidence that it's right in the first place.
It's a false dichotomy anyway, because I wouldn't put _any_ money into nuclear stocks.
I also expect a lot more hydro to be built eventually, it's not as dependent on geography if you just build two ponds at different elevations for pumped hydro, or repurpose old mineshafts to get the elevation difference on flat ground.
What's your calculation on the amount of batteries needed for a nuclear grid to meet all peak needs?
Once you've done the sums you'll almost certainly say something like, "well we can just overbuild nuclear and find uses for the excess, including timeshifting".
It's the exact same problem (matching demand and supply), with the same solutions but one gets hyperfocus at the same time the other is totally ignored.
If you want to have all the power generated by renewable, you would need big enough storage to hold all the power consumption during the highest peaks - like really hot summer nights where everyone is running AC at maximum. And it tends to cost quite a lot to have a giant UPS. And, because we need power 24/7, you need to have that in a redundant fashion, which basically boils down to two giant UPS systems in the gigawatt range. And I have this feeling that doing this is very dirty and very expensive to build and maintain.
Note: it's much easier to "overbuild" nuclear because nothing can compare to it in terms of power density.
Of course it can. https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
--- start quote ---
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.
... according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power P. with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of P, per minute.
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% P, per minute.
(Where P is rated power)
--- end quote ---
Wouldn't it make sense to take some of that power and make hydrogen or something that can be stored for later peaks? Then maybe you can close the nuclear plant you only turn on 1% of the time and fill that peak with hydrogen instead and save a lot of money.
Maybe offer cheap rates at night so EV users fill up on cheap nuclear power when it's available. Or store heat in water tanks or brick. Or use some of that power to pump water uphill like nuclear plants have been doing for half a century already.
You could do like France and schedule refueling during the summer when the demand is lower and taking a plant offline has less impact.
Lots of boring sensible things you can do to match nuclear supply to demand.
But of course if you admit these things exist, it kind of puts a big hole in your argument, so best to pretend they don't happen and are only needed for renewables.
So are complaining about changing demand or about overbuilding?
> Wouldn't it make sense to take some of that power and make hydrogen or something that can be stored for later peaks?
Yes, you could probably do that if any if those solutions scaled in any meaningful shape or form.
> But of course if you admit these things exist, it kind of puts a big hole in your argument
My argument was that your claim that "demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs" is a lie.
None of the weird tangent you went off on makes a hole in this argument: nuclear power can scale quickly and is literally used to do that right now.
The fact that it isn't used for something that you want it used for is completely orthogonal to whether it can be scaled or not. For example, no one stores nuclear power in hydrogen or whatever because it's literally not needed because nuclear power can be scaled quickly on demand.
That was someone else's argument, and the second part is kind of irrelevant, but it's also true.
The speed that Nuclear can ramp, even in the best case is not enough to match demand spikes. It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries.
So even if you ramp nuclear, at an increased cost, you still need gas or batteries or hydro for fast ramps. So you might as well use the power you ramp down to fill batteries, make syngas or hydrogen or fill pumped storage.
Just like you'd do with excess renewables.
Because Nuclear isn't 100% of all power output. Of course it can't ramp up from, say 20% to 100%.
And yet, it does ramp up quickly.
> It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries.
5% of rated power per minute is plenty fast. Not as fast as gas plants, true. And for batteries... There's this funny little things of: there are literally no batteries at scale required by demand spikes. And won't be in any near future.
Meanwhile if you followed the links, you could see the graph showing how nuclear power plants go from ~650 MW to ~1400MW to meat demand (which is mostly predictable day to day).
How many batteries you need to have extra ~800 MW per plant every day? And how many renewable sources to provide that excess?
(Edit: largest energy storage seems to be Ouarzazate Solar Power Station with 510 MW of storage, thermal storage. Everything else is lower. To keep up with a single nuclear plant in the report you'd need two of those)
> Just like you'd do with excess renewables.
Except, for "excess renewables" you need to both overbuild them significantly more, and provide significantly more batteries because besides fast load following (which they can't do, and nuclear can) their base load is literally zero (and it's never zero with nuclear unless you take the plant completely offline).
Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia). and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage (that said there's a bunch of R&D currently into better grid batteries since they have very different performance requirements than portable batteries since weight and volume don't matter, just cost and cycles).
Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently.
The first two are easily handled by nuclear (which you'd know if you read the report).
Literally nothing can handle "millisecond spikes due to random chance".
Renewables like solar and wind can't really handle any of the three because their power generation is intermittent. So you have to overbuild both them and their storage.
> Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia).
Of course they don't exist. Not anywhere near the scale required.
> and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage
Ah yes, hydro. That is so easily available and easy to build just about anywhere, and on the required scale.
> Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently.
Of course it's the best tech to "overbuild" (because you don't need to overbuild much).
Once again:
- it's the highest energy density we know
- it's stable power generation (not intermittent like most renewables)
- it requires significantly less storage (because it can scale up quickly: most renewables can't even handle daily power spikes)
- it requires significantly less area to build
- the costs for renewables somehow never include the costs for the required overbuilding and the costs for required storage.
Again: in the report you can see just one of the power plants easily scale from 650MW to 1400 MW during the day. And that's for power plants built 45 years ago. What are your renewable + battery solutions capable of that, and their cost?
I never said or implied otherwise.
> Literally nothing can handle "millisecond spikes due to random chance".
Batteries can (see https://energytransition.org/2015/06/batteries-stabilize-the...)
> Of course they don't exist.
Wrong. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victor...
> That is so easily available and easy to build just about anywhere, and on the required scale.
I know, right! It's so cool! https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/hydropower-program
> because you don't need to overbuild much).
Based on variation of demand, you need to overbuild any source by at least 50% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
> it's the highest energy density we know
Doesn't matter at all. We don't pay by land used, we pay by total cost.
> it's stable power generation
True. That's why it makes sense to have for baseload (but is stupid to overbuild)
> it requires significantly less storage
Not really since no one would ever build a purely nuclear grid because it would cost way too much.
> it requires significantly less area to build
Again. Irrelevant
> the costs for renewables somehow never include the costs for the required overbuilding and the costs for required storage.
That's because the amount of overbuilding and storage needed depend strongly on a bunch of factors and aren't that useful.
Using https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... as a source for LCOE numbers by power plant type (there may be a better one). Solar has LCOE of (very roughly) $70/MWH while nuclear has LCOE of roughly $175 if you ignore nuclear's decommissioning and operational costs (which are both significant and would almost certainly push the figure up to over $200).
This yields a pure nuclear grid cost of approximately $85B. Alternatively, you can overbuild solar and wind by 3x and have a couple days of storage (which is doable with hydro), and you come out ahead.
nuclear "battery" storage is the uranium or plutonium inside the plant.
That’s because it’s weeks, if not months, in places that have actual seasons.
> moving load around to avoid the “worst case,”
There is no such thing with base load in winter. You either provide constant heating or people freeze.
There are places where rearranging the chairs works and there are places where it doesn’t.
The cheapest low-end estimate for sodium-ion batteries is $40 per kw/h of capacity. The Texas grid at any point had about 85 gigawatts of available generation capacity in 2021 (100% would be around 115, but solar and wind aren't always producing, plants are sometimes offline for maintenance, etc).
So, with no nuclear or fossil fuel production, you're looking at $27 billion just to buy the batteries (not counting installation or maintenance costs) to keep the lights on for 8 hours in Texas on a windless night.
That's at the cheapest option, so you can figure that you'll need to pay roughly 1/4 of that a year making up for batteries that have lost capacity. If you double it, that drops to 1/5 to 1/6 the total cost, unless a miracle occurs in anode tech or the weather is wonderful and they don't cycle as frequently.
Of course, three days of mild, cloudy weather means brownouts or blackouts, because 8 hours of storage is not very much at all. If it were connected to other grids, they could import excess energy from across the continent, but that means those places won't be recharging their own batteries, and you now need to factor in more HVDC lines, and over-provisioning to cover transmission losses into your base price.
I wish this bad-faith nonsense would vanish, and people would stick to issues.
I was in South Africa when the blackouts really started, in 2014 and 2015, and every person and business that could afford it bought a diesel generator. Not for their comfort, except in an extreme definition of the word. For their survival. Businesses cannot survive without power. Hospitals cannot. Communications networks cannot. Electric cars cannot.
But diesel and petrol generators and vehicles can. That's the most likely "preparation on our end".
I do not believe "smart-grids" or blackouts are the solution. And especially not having my power cut because someone somewhere decides that I should cook inside my house because the power consumption priority lies elsewhere.
There's a solar install not too far from the Canadian border that has produced zero energy for months. It had to be shut down because, despite the panels being 16 feet tall, there are 12 feet of snow around them from accumulation and drifting. Over the next two days, they're getting another 6-12 inches of snow and sleet- conditions which cause wind turbines to draw energy from the grid to heat the blades so they don't build up ice and get damaged.
Is the answer to everyone not on the coast north of Arkansas to move somewhere else? For the whole of Canada to just get fucked?
And there it is. Active hostility to improving our civilisational capabilities, celebrating decline. "People shouldn't have so much", and of course they never mean themselves. Politburo mindset.
While the fossil companies - the ones that suppressed the research from those scientists for decades - are the freedom-loving heroes in this story?
I'm not saying climate change isn't real or that it isn't a problem, but we're certainly not "boiling the planet", and attacking the most vital foundation our societies are based on, namely reasonably cheap energy (everything depends on this), is insanely dangerous.
If the medicine is worse than the illness, its time to get rid of the doctor.
[0] "Advice to Young People as they face Annihilation" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xlEbMab_dRs4Wx3nESYT0bkF...
See, you accuse me of rationalizing, because I apparently choose „the easy way out“. Making sacrifices is a feature, not a bug! This tells me climate activism satisfies a deep human need, the need for redemption, now that Christianity is dead. We sinned, and thus must atone. I get it, we all like to feel like Good People.
The problem is just that so much is at stake, namely our energy supply.
I take issue with the "if it doesn't hurt, it doesn't count" sentiment I so often encounter in these discussions. This tells me that it is not about solving a physics problem, which it is, but something different and potentially much more dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Cape_Colony_fro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse
They had a real problem with cattle diseases -- and a more imaginary problem with Europeans in "their" land -- and somehow imagined killing ALL their cattle would help solve both problems.
(Both the Xhosa and the Europeans were recent immigrants to the area.)
Also, changing my home’s thermostat to 72 from 68 isn’t going to make renewables-only (or mostly) feasible. It would barely make a dent.
Humans have always fought over resources. The idea that we should sacrifice advancement for purported sustainability is a very recent idea.
I’m overall still very happy the Industrial Revolution happened (despite global warming effects) and that we aren’t still living in an 1800s society where I have to worry about dying from an infected papercut or toiling away with a pickaxe.
We are living in the most peaceful time ever recorded. It’s hubris to think we are the “problem generation” or that the problems we face today aren’t solvable.
Snowy 2. Fengning.
For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.
0. https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/12/20/poland-has-installed-...
1. https://www.world-nuclear.org/world-nuclear-performance-repo...
With less than 30 hours of sunshine in December it contributes to the grid amount known as "fuck all": https://i.imgur.com/QVNpl06.png Capacity was over 10GW at this point.
It was installed only because of net metering policies, so you generate energy in summer when it does not really matter, and receive it in winter where there's lack of it. Bad policy.
Even wind generally fares better: https://i.imgur.com/2R2nfF2.png 1,3 GW out of ~8GW capacity.
On the other hand, the 5,3GW of nuclear capacity displaces 10x more fossils, because it's actually 5,3GW you can generally count on.
>For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.
Yet, we install tens or hundreds of solar "capacity" that end up not generating any power or overgenerating when we have too much of it. It's pointless, especially in our climate.
edit: checked your source and it in fact says global operating nuclear comes to around 370GW which makes more sense. Not making a comment on your point, the numbers just seemed off in my experience
This will not extrapolate linearly into the future though. The grid is already being destabilized by all the local generation of solar (most of the installations are on roofs of people's homes). This caused the government to change the law on how much it's paying the individual producers who sell their excess electricity to the grid and now, you're getting paid the actual, momentary price of kWh (which means that, on sunny days, you'll be paid hardly anything at all), instead of a fixed sum that was paid out before. This decreases the profitability of new solar installations by a lot.
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
32% solar and 60% wind, with an overbuild of 2.5x peak demand each (so 5x peak combined) is the cheapest option, according to the above analysis, filling the remaining 8% with other low carbon options.
There's zero chance, just politically, that anyone in this country will agree on additional gas dependency. Does this "cheapest option" actually includes cost of 30GW gas plants anyway?
Anyway I don't see any actual numbers on this page so it's hard for me to treat this seriously. "Cost comparison" only talks about whether "could POLAND run by only building new solar, wind and batteries?" which is very not interesting to me compared to having 30-50% of nuclear generation.
The model has several conservative assumptions that mean no power is imported as fuel or via cross border wires.
Thats fine, its just a model, the main point is that even with those constraints, renewables can provide 92% of power directly, and provide the power to meet the other 8% too. In Poland! (many other countries are more blessed with renewables).
Trees are great: solar-powered, recursive, self-assembling, carbon sequestration tech.
Forests can't be the only solution to carbon, because of the scale of emissions, but they can be a fraction of the solution.
Regarding other methods, people should Google for: norway carbon sequestration. Note: The volumes are very limited -- not enough to burn coal as your primary energy source, then capture all the CO2 and pump it underground.
To be clear, I am not shilling for non-forest/peat based carbon sequestration. To me, it is mostly a green washing game by big oil, gas, and utility firms to delay action and avoid responsibility.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...
There is no reason at all to scale carbon capture before the electricity generation is mostly carbon-free. As there is no reason at all to scale storage before most of the generation is intermittent.
What leads to ignorant people deciding that since nobody is doing it, it must be impossible.
https://ember-climate.org/app/uploads/2022/02/Global-Electri...
I'd gladly take expensive nuclear power that exists over non-existing cheap renewables. (Of course, renewables are great, I'm totally rooting for them. I just wish that they are actually, you know, available, instead of being only theoretically available and being used as a rhetorical device against nuclear power.)
Also you omitted some relevant details on South Korean politics: the previous president Moon (2017-2022) and his party was staunchly anti-nuclear and tried hard to phase it out, for the sake of the "environment." Which predictably resulted in continued usage of fossil fuels, which these idiots see as a lesser evil.
(Sadly, his successor, the sitting president Yoon, is a raging buffoon. I mean, he muttered "Wouldn't it be fucking embarrassing for Biden" in front of reporters, what more do you want. Being pro-nuclear is probably the only positive thing I can say of him, but I'm not really counting on that - Yoon being such an idiot, there's a very good chance his policies would be put in reverse by whoever succeeds him.)
They are actually available, maybe Korea just doesn't want to build them? They don't play that well with constant output systems like nuclear so it would make nuclear unprofitable in the longer run. Although this obviously depends on the energy mix, maybe up until a certain percentage renewables would be fine for example.
...but it still won't be enough. We need something that can produce power when renewables can't.
They also intend to make 10% of their power from hydrogen/ammonia which is presumably going to be generated from some combination of nuclear and renewables when demand isn't peaking.