I would expect this to continue limiting investment in nuclear, since the outlook for renewables just keeps getting better, and the stumbling blocks are increasingly jejune, like we can't build powerlines fast enough.
Renewable sells when it wants to, for dirt cheap. And they don't sell when they don't want to. At that point, today, typically natural gas picks up the ball. Other storage is as much in its infancy as SMRs, as is "demand response".
The pricing people compare so favorably isn't pure renewables, it's that renewables + fall back fossil mix.
Absent massive government subsidies, any nuclear-based solution has to compete against the renewable + fossil mix, which is dramatically cheaper than any nuclear solution. That means any nuclear investments will have to operate in a pretty unfavorable market until renewables reach a saturation point (maybe 50% of energy generation or more.) That point is still somewhere in the future.
It's not clear when that saturation point will arrives (or if it will), but when that happens today's nuclear investors will also have to "bet" that storage costs won't have dropped to the point where storage eats a big chunk of the market for nuclear generation. And finally: in the course of taking this risky long term bet, nuclear manufacturers will have to build out huge amounts of manufacturing capacity so they can actually meet market demand.
Anyway, the whole thing seems like a pretty risky bet. Maybe not such a risky bet if the technology was mature, but very risky given the fact that storage is relatively mature and basically needs a lot of manufacturing and process tweaks to wipe out the benefits of nuclear.
But demand is also lumpy, so the issues of matching supply to load are basically identical.
What do you think France uses all the gas on its grid for? Why do they have excess electricity in the middle of the night that they need to tempt people to use domestically or export to other countries?
China has a large network of HVDC lines. Unfortunately, due to how the Chinese power market works, they're mostly underutilized, even in times of high power stress.
(A fun fact: many of these high power transmission lines were originally to send power from the hydroelectric power plants in the southeast region to the water-starved northeast region. With the rapid expansion of wind power in the northeast region, the usual direction of the flow has reversed, and it's not uncommon for that wind power to provide over a quarter of the power for the whole country.)
https://apnews.com/article/offshore-wind-orsted-cancellation...
these are not just in different countries but in vastly different climates in different hemispheres
the exact page you linked in your comment literally answers your question: 'due to problems with supply chains, higher interest rates and a failure to obtain the amount of tax credits the company wanted. ... High inflation, supply chain disruptions and the rising cost of capital and building materials are making projects more expensive while developers are trying to get the first large U.S. offshore wind farms opened.'
maybe you should have read it
please don't post random bullshit without respect to whether it's true or not
There's two kinds of wind power: onshore and offshore. Their costs are different, with onshore being cheaper. The ones in Brazil are all onshore, while the one in the article you linked to is offshore. In the USA, offshore is even more complicated because of the Jones Act (it needs specialized ships to transport and erect the structures, while onshore needs only common cranes).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
feb 02022, 0.08% interest. since august, 5.33%
nothing is easy to build in the usa; it's halfway to being zimbabwe
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/charlotte/news/2023/04/03/t...
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/rust-buckets-how-jones-...
in particular, you should expect to see many, many cancelled projects across the entire economy with the interest rate hikes the usa put in place
obviously none of this is relevant to brazil
For example, here in maine, our premier engineering school has spent two decades now being a premier wind energy investment and research institution, and we have minted hundreds and hundreds of trained people into the field, yet our Democrat governor still decided to sign a bill that bans offshore wind, something that Orono has explicitly invested into for years.
Our state desperately needs new generation to bring power costs down, but there's no real incentive for anyone to do so (why build new supply to bring down your own revenue?) and apparently the state government has zero interest to help itself there.
Wind is especially well suited to this - to a certain extent it's always windy SOMEWHERE whereas with solar you ain't generating any at night, no matter what.
Nitpicking: that's only the case for photovoltaics. Solar thermal can store the heat for a while, and keep generating even after the sun goes down.
just like other thermal power plants, it's too expensive to compete with pv and wind
Geothermal is also an 'always on' renewable.
(Gravity Vault, BTW, is 100% scam.)
Suspending weights from ocean platforms (e.g. scrapped supertankers), for flat places with deep sea nearby, should be a viable alternative, but it has not been done yet. Deep cave systems are another, either draining water into them or (for those below the water table) pumping air in. There are a lot of deep caves.
please do the math instead of posting random bullshit without respect to whether it's true or not
specifically hydrogen is 142 MJ/kg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density and is 1/9 of water by mass, so each kg of water you drill, truck in, or collect from cisterns can store 15.8 MJ as hydrogen. a square meter of 21% efficient pv panel produces 210 watts nameplate, or 52 watts derating for the 25% capacity factor typical for deserts. that is 4.5 MJ per day. the water needed to store the panel's daily production weighs much less than the panel itself and is therefore much cheaper to truck in
obviously it would be stupid to truck it back out again unless you decided to do your grid-scale storage somewhere else
You are making it harder by adding that "cleanly" requirement, because the simple answer is going to be "natural gas". Unlike coal or nuclear, natural gas power plants are fast to start and stop (hydroelectric is even faster, but depends on favorable geography), so they can be left powered down (using no fuel) until they're necessary; and both overbuilding wind and solar, and spreading them over a wider area, can reduce the amount of time where that natural gas (or hydroelectric) backup is necessary.
By requiring a perfect solution (100% clean), you are excluding the 90% solution which is already possible, and which can be incrementally enhanced to get closer and closer to that 100% goal (by adding more wind and solar, by strengthening the interconnections so the generation is spread over a wider area, by sprinkling a bit of storage like batteries or reversible hydroelectric, and even by dynamically reducing consumption when there's a generation shortage).
It's also more advantageous than regular hydro, because it does not need to be in the path of flowing water, so you avoid issues with silting up, lack of suitable locations, it's much less environmentally destructive, etc.
Its like a wet dream for those energy traders.
https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_Proposition_7,_Creation_of_Sta...
Going clean with nuclear isn’t cheap right now, and it shouldn’t be. It wasn’t at the start of renewables when solar was expensive.
Cheap, reliable, clean; pick two.
That can be the case only if the demand also increases. If the demand stays the same, adding more wind and solar can only decrease how much the natural gas power plants are used, and the required capacity (that is, how much they can produce at full power) either stays the same or decreases (if the newly added wind and solar are non-correlated enough to reduce the chance of all of them "going dark" at the same time).
they are in fact shutting down in many cases because they can't compete with renewables, and the result is that more grid-scale storage or peaker capacity (or demand response!) is needed
but this is a good kind of problem to have, if you replace 900 megawatts (produced) of coal with 400 megawatts (produced, not nameplate) of solar and 500 megawatts of gas, you've still cut carbon emissions by two thirds, and lowered electricity prices at the same time
1. These are conditions that don't coincidence as often as one would think
2. If they do happen at the same time they are limited to certain places
Now the only thing you need to have your solar and wind installations not in one place and make sure it is unlikely enough to have all of them inoperational at once.
If you have the proper energy storage and a big enough grid that can balance itself this is totally doable.
Storage and batteries are the key. Although lithium ion has limitations in the use case of long term discharge and storage, new chemistries are becoming commercially available that are appropriate for grid scale power. Iron Air batteries are made out of cheap, common materials, can discharge for up to 100 hours and can store power for long periods of time. Form Energy is building a plant in West Virginia that will produce these batteries and will open in 2024 [2].
Renewables are getting increasingly cheaper. Storage is increasingly more available. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are going to win out and it’s going to happen much sooner than conventional wisdom says.
[1] https://www.mcecleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/20...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/form-energy-build-lo...
Also, moving hydrogen by truck is a nonstarter. Pipelines are much better.
The perfect location for solar installations.
The difficulty, as always, is logistics and economics.
e.g. places like outback Australia where it reaches 50C and is a long distance from water.
but, for the time being, the gained efficiency from the hot sun does seem to outweigh the efficiency loss
as an ai language model, i cannot feel pain, so i do not know what outweighs it
So the best place for a solar panel is right next to were the energy is needed (provided there is at least some sun).
Solar installations in deserts could still be a thing if you are willing to think it differently (e.g. use the energy for desalination and to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, transport that hydrogen via container ship etc).
please do the math instead of posting random bullshit without any regard to whether or not it is true
i did
> A crude calculation (earthradius_equatorial^2 * pi * (1000 W/m^2) * 1 year in units(1) --- gosh, Unix is great!) suggests that the total solar energy falling on the earth is about 40000 * 10^20 joules per year.
... that's not a good approximation. There's someone who actually has done less crude math for maximum possible solar energy, at least for the UK: https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml (though the HTML version is somewhat annoying because it's still paginated as if it were a book). Spoiler alert: it's roughly enough energy to cover total transportation energy demand, nowhere near total energy demand in the UK.
The farther north you go the more relevant technologies like wind energy and geothermal will become.
norway in particular gets almost all their electricity from hydroelectric plants https://www.statista.com/statistics/1025497/distribution-of-... but of course its transportation sector is still mostly fossil-powered
while i appreciate mackay's calculations a great deal, his estimates for very polar countries such as the uk are not generally applicable, and even for the uk are probably conditioned on overly pessimistic assumptions; he would undoubtedly agree if he were alive today
in particular, he assumed (reasonably) that 10%-efficient solar panels would be much cheaper than 20%-efficient ones, which would remain impractically expensive. but in fact most solar farms are being built with 21%-efficient panels because they're nearly as cheap as the 16%-efficient kind, and the 10%-efficient kind has been competed out of the market. so mackay's excellent calculations are all too low by more than a factor of 2, because one of his reasonable assumptions turned out to be wrong
but i do think it's plausible that without wind the uk would have to continue importing energy from abroad, as it has done since the 19th century, unless it goes nuclear. because mackay was aware his estimates for very polar countries such as the uk were not generally applicable, importing solar energy from abroad was in fact what he recommended in the chapter you linked but evidently didn't bother to read
Perhaps, but I see nothing in your post that actually corrects for effective solar irradiation on Earth, or for the fact that half the Earth's surface is by definition not receiving any sunlight at any given time, or for the fact that most of the Earth is water and not land (although I suppose you dropping the 4 from the multiplier for the surface area is meant to account for that). In other words, at no point did I see anything that took into account the error I pointed out.
if you're interested in taking the capacity factor into account, which accounts for things like night, clouds, and oblique illumination, a number of my other notes in https://dercuano.github.io/topics/solar.html (linked from the bottom of my above-linked note) do that; for example in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/japan-energy-autarky.html i calculated that energy autarky for japan, if purely solar, would require 5% of its land area and about 1.7 trillion euros of solar modules, taking into account all of those factors as well as panel efficiency. since then, the price has dropped by more than a factor of 2, but the land area required remains about the same, or slightly increased
(floating that 5% of their land area on solar barges off the coast, instead of occupying precious land area, is also clearly feasible; it just isn't economically competitive, much like nuclear power)
of course, the real-life solution also involves wind and grid-scale storage
perhaps it goes without saying that very few places are as densely populated or as heavily industrialized as japan, so much smaller fractions of their land area would suffice
i'm still waiting, it's been two days
"Per MWhr" is a better measure when comparing intermittent-power generation such as wind and solar.
>posting random bullshit
^^
but intermittency is irrelevant to basic incommensurability of units; neither nuclear nor solar uses more and more land over time to produce a constant amount of power, which is what 'land per megawatt hour' implies
Glad we agree
If anyone's reading this and wants a decent resource I suggest Bill Gates's book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
Is it the ground mounted grid solar? I'm sure some countries will happily trade extra land use for much cheaper energy.