Thanks!
Haven't yet found the relevant chart, but since the one in the image ends with WEO 2018: They probably already have.
The followup post (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-international-energy-...) explains that this IEA outlook is not really supposed to be a forecast, it's an explanation of what would happen if all current government policies remained the same. It intentionally does not take into account proposed or predicted future policy changes.
Will the current restart of the german solar panel producers last? No one knows for sure.
To get bad predictions, you need to be "deeply knowledgeable" about energy and come up with all sort of ways to bias the predictions against renewable energy.
Greenpeace (not known for being very numerate in the first place) and Ramez Naam did much better:
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...
The need for nuclear is about base load and making use of space and existing assets and what not.
(We could also in principle do this with a global power grid, the maths says it's fine and surprisingly affordable even if that grid needs extremely frequent total replacement, but geopolitics will almost certainly kill such an idea).
No they aren't. At any given time cost is determined by supply and demand. If you can't supply enough to meet demand, then the cost is high. If there is no supply, then the cost is infinitely high. It really isn't very complicated.
If you burn coal, almost all of it turns into a gas.
Even if a battery catches fire, it mostly turns into a pile of solid metal oxides and water vapour, the water vapour rains into the ocean in a few days, the rest is close enough to the stuff you mine out of the ground you can always just use those same mining etc. processes from the initial production to turn it back into another battery. The only stuff that doesn't end up in a conveniently reprocessable form is the carbon used in any graphite components or plastics etc., which we could get from trees (like we do with lumber in general) but which we almost certainly don't at present.
Batteries are also much easier to recycle if they don't catch fire.
Europe: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...
US: https://www.cmu.edu/ceic/assets/docs/publications/published-...
(German wiki has more numbers)
The focus must be on maximum climate impact per dollar.
The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors which would require a major social shift to make people comfortable with it (& of course there are always risks but for some reason spilling radioactive material into the ocean scares people a lot but then they conveniently ignore how much fossil fuels we spill into the ocean which creates waaaay more ecological devastation).
Finally, it’s the only tech we have right now that’s energy dense enough that we can divert excess capacity into efforts to sequester excess carbon - we’ve already unlocked runaway processes on Earth and sequestration, while insanely expensive, is likely the only mechanism we have to try to undo the runaway processes.
Its LCOE is roughly 5x lower than nuclear power:
https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-sol...
>The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors
The cost of nuclear power as shown above is *enormous*. The only reason it gets built at all is because it provides economic support to the military for maintaining and building nuclear arms:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
Or, in non-nuclear powers (like Sweden or Iran), to provide the skills and industry to quickly ramp up a fully fledged nuclear program while still adhering to the NPT.
It's a shame because the money would be far more efficiently spent on solar and wind capacity and also because nuclear weapons are, well, bad.
The cost overruns are a political problem.
Having said that, the cost of nuclear is lower-bounded by the cost of the turbines and generators. Those exceeded the cost of solar 5-10 years ago. (i.e., if I give you a perpetual motion machine that ~turns a crank~ (edit: generates heat; turning a crank would eliminate the turbine) at a wattage of your choosing, you still can’t use it to provide cheaper power than solar).
However, off peak generation still isn’t cheaper than everything else. Once you plan for “a cloudy weather front parks over our region”, the cost of energy storage is still prohibitive-ish.
In the long term, I think we’ll move to nuclear plants that can rapidly respond to demand (this is a solved problem), since that’s cheaper and cleaner than batteries, and much safer and cleaner than coal.
Edit: Nuclear is probably cheaper than provisioning region-scale batteries for a week of supply during depressed generation and higher than average demand.
Natural gas infrastructure can be maintained and used to store and distribute hydrogen to hydrogen peakers if required. Or electrolyzed hydrogen could be used to make methane, which simplifies re-use of existing infrastructure at the cost of some efficiency loss. That's not an insurmountable problem if sufficient surplus PV capacity is available.
That's one of the competitors to rapid-response nuclear. The main current one is pumped hydro, but expanding that quickly takes more time and money than re-using existing NG plant would. And of course there are all the "revolutionary battery technology of the week" ideas. One of them might be super cheap, super reliable, and super scalable--it could happen.
Solar and wind production anticorrelate and electricity usage declines at night. If you have a grid with paired wind and solar you are unlikely to be discharging every night. The wind doesnt stop blowing at night.
>solar as baseload
This a strawman. Nobody says solar can be baseload. They say that you can combine solar + wind + different forms of storage (pumped, hydrogen, battery) with demand shaping to eliminate the need for baseload.
Ironically the carbon lobby used to say "let the market decide" back when solar and wind were expensive. They stopped doing that a while back when the economics flipped in favor of green energy.
The nuclear lobby and its associated propaganda tries to avoid mentioning costs at all and always did - unless theyre promoting nuclear vaporware. They're gunning for manufacturing consent for subsidies since its the only way theyll survive.
No, Politics actually helps keep the costs down. When it comes to the military purse strings get looser. LCOE doesnt even account for catastrophe insurance the taxpayer shoulders that.
It's just very very expensive to run a nuclear plant safely.
>Edit: Nuclear is probably cheaper than provisioning region-scale batteries for a week
It absolutely isnt. pumped storage is way cheaper and electrolyzing hydrogen from green energy is cheaper than nuclear power.
If you are taking a pro nukes stance (and many people do) you will want more nuclear power, but it only really has military cost sharing value, for providing green energy it is a colossal waste of money no matter what its lobbyists say to persuade you.
https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-co...
For instance, LCOE frequently ignores imposed costs for using solar and wind since they’re intermittent sources. When you factor in those requirements it gets more expensive. The US is also fairly unique in terms of making nuclear more expensive. If we actually started building plants at scale to replace fossil fuel plants, the costs would decrease rapidly over time, especially as we switch to modern designs.
No, the reason it gets built is not because of economic support for the military. It’s because it and hydro are the only non fossil fuel energy source that can provide base load power & run the entire grid 24/7 just like fossil fuels can. In fact, regulations are constantly trying to strangle nuclear and given it’s the only energy source that has repeatedly demonstrated to reduce fossil fuel demand, it’s interesting to consider why that might be (fossil fuel companies don’t care about solar and wind because it lets them greenwash the destruction they’re doing to the environment precisely because fossil fuel demand keeps growing in their presence and at best slightly decreases that curve but never creates a persistent downward trend)
It’s also generally better than hydro because it’s much less destructive to the environment.
Not frequently, always. But, note that it is not just cheaper it is 5x cheaper.
If you pair solar + wind with pumped storage it is roughly 2x more expensive. Now it's a lot cheaper than 5x.
If you pair solar + wind with batteries it roughly 3-4x more expensive. Still cheaper than 5x.
If you pair solar + wind with hydrogen it is roughly 4x more expensive. Even if all solar and wind energy were stored as hydrogen and months later burned to produce electricity it would still be cheaper than nuclear power as well as being able to do load following.
Note that nuclear power can't do load following at anything resembling a reasonable price. An all nuclear zero carbon grid would either need storage too or it would need to overproduce massively.
>In fact, regulations are constantly trying to strangle nuclear and given it’s the only energy source that has repeatedly demonstrated to reduce fossil fuel demand
If Congress wanted to really strangle nuclear power they wouldn't regulate it more they'd just repeal the indemnity act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Insurance for a $1 trillion clean up event like Fukushima would normally be the responsibility of the parties that caused it but the nuclear industry gets to offload the cost of insuring that $1 trillion catastrophe event to joe taxpayer. This helps reduce the costs a lot but they still need lots of other subsidies (which they get).