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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> nearly 7TWh by 2030

That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. (You obviously don't need 1:1 coverage. But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge.)

Now consider EVs. Then add the tens of TWh of annual power demand AI is expected to add to power demand [2]. (And I'm assuming a free market for battery cells, which obviously isn't where we're heading. So add local production bottlenecks to the mix.)

Battery numbers are going up. But they aren't going up fast enough and never could have, not unless we ditch electrifying transportation. Nukes or gas. Anyone pretending there is a third way is defaulting to one or the other.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...

[2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...

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5 hours of storage and a 98.6% renewables system.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr...

Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed.

In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.

This will only worsen the nuclear business case as renewable expansion continues, today being a bonanza fueled by finally finding an energy source cheaper than fossil fuel.

Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns.

> In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.

This is happening because of subsidies given to renewables (renewable energy certificates, net metering, guaranteed feed in prices, CFD) plus policies at the national and EU level (EU Renewable Energy Directive). Take away these policies and you are left with a low quality (intermittent) energy source that requires far more expensive storage to produce power when it is needed.

A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.

Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.

Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.

> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Which is confirmed by Sweden continuing its renewable buildout with both the cheapest electricity prices in Europe and no subsidies on the books for new renewable production.

> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved

Cost assumptions in table 2

Offshore wind 1.9M EUR/MW, 1.67% O&M, 30 year life at 0.51 capacity factor

Onshore wind 1.03M EUR/MW, 2.51% O&M, 30 year life at 0.37 capacity factor

Solar PV 0.6M EUR/MW, 1.50% O&M, 40 year life at 0.14 capacity factor

So they are claiming nuclear (which has a > 0.9 capacity factor in Finland, and 60 year life) needs to have an investment cost between onshore and offshore wind to make sense.

  Due to energy system constraints, there might be reasons for down regulating the nuclear power stations, thus as an output the capacity factor might be lower than 90%, but never higher. The study allows for nuclear power to be down regulated to 25% of the maximum load in for instance hours with high wind and solar production.

So the authors decided that the non-dispatchable wind/solar has market priority over nuclear. Hence it is important to pack out the high nuclear scenario with renewables. Also note how the all renewables scenario adds biogas (presumably from all the pig slurry) to firm up demand along with 6GW of inter-connectors to friendly neighbours.

By way of contrast, https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Nuclea... Page 5 forecasts a 37% reduction in costs when nuclear is part of the energy mix in California.

Edit :- Closer analysis of the high nuclear with district heating scenario (figure 4, in the supplementary material) reveals a total electrical demand of just under 10,000MW (unflexible + heating + transport). Note that the authors have chosen to represent nuclear as a continuous 6,686MW of power (rather than the nameplate capacity of 7,400MW).

> Which is confirmed by Sweden continuing its renewable buildout with both the cheapest electricity prices in Europe and no subsidies on the books for new renewable production.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/09/19/sweden-to-lower-solar...

  The Swedish government raised its subsidy for solar cell installations from 15% to 20% in January 2023. ... The income tax reduction for households and businesses that micro-produce renewable energy was introduced in 2015

Even without subsidies solar and battery are cheaper than nuclear and are getting cheaper by 15-20% a year. So no nuclear is unlikely to be cost competitive any time soon unless they get some new tech for nuclear

> nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed

We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift. Again, excluding EVs and AI. That’s why we’re reänimating coal plants and building new gas turbines.

I’d also love to see the numbers on that simulation going from 98.6% coverage to what we expect from a modern grid. (And if the balance is provided by gas or something else.) It should surprise nobody that going from 1 sigma to 2 can cost as much as 2 to 3, even if the percentage gap is much smaller.

> Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy

Europe has invested €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. That doesn’t go poor without a fight and collateral damage.

> We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift.

A decade to have significant amounts of battery storage is actually a pretty optimistic timeline compared to nuclear. Nuclear plant construction times are on the order of a decade or (realistically) two decades in the West, if you include planning. In China they're managing 7 years, but their nuclear buildouts, while impressive, aren't trending an upward path when compared to renewables (see chart here [1].) SMRs might change this, but they're years from leaving "research" status and entering the mass-production/learning curves that could make them cost competitive.

This doesn't make me happy. If I thought nuclear was viable on the timelines we have to dampen climate change, I'd be 100% in favor of it. If we could assemble the political will to raise taxes and build nuclear at "wartime" speeds, I'd say go for it. I'm also very much in favor of SMR development, just not willing to bet the house on it.

As it stands, there isn't anywhere near enough nuclear power in the planning pipeline for nuclear to matter much on a 20 year timeline.

In any case, we are not going to a 100% renewable/battery grid in 10 years. The first goal is to get renewables to 90-95% or more of power generation, massively overbuilt with short-term battery storage backed by intermittent fossil fuels for the remaining 5-10%. This will represent a massive reduction in emissions. The last 5-10% will have to be completed over the next couple of decades, and the increasing battery production trend gives hope that it can be.

The worst problem with existing nuclear is that with a 15-20 year planning/construction timeline and the current molasses build rate, new nuclear plants will arrive right at the moment when cheap storage is eating the economic use-cases that make them financially viable.

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/China-r...

> * Nuclear plant construction times are on the order of a decade or (realistically) two decades in the West, if you include planning*

Sure. Forecasting twenty years out is tough. But our forecasts out 10 years show the power crunch easing to almost no degree--we'll still likely be making the same tradeoff then as now. (And, I suspect, still filling the gap with gas in teh west.)

You're broadly correct: we need to build faster. There is no reason we can't build a large plant in under a decade and an SMR in a few years. The latter is what Google is experimenting with here. It's a long shot. But so is hoping battery production scales the orders of magnitude necessary for it to become a utlity backbone over the next decades.

> first goal is to get renewables to 90-95% or more of power generation, massively overbuilt with short-term battery storage

We don't have the battery pipeline. What we're repeatedly getting is renewables plus gas generators. There is no world in which you put down trillions of dollars of gas infrastructure and then poof it in a few years because it's no longer needed.

California would like a word with you. Gas generators are increasingly being forced off the grid with storage.

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/

Storage costs are today lower than the most aggressive projection for 2050 according to one widely cited US DoE study from 2023.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-149971818

> If we could assemble the political will to raise taxes and build nuclear at "wartime" speeds, I'd say go for it.

Tepco, Russia, and MetEd all lied to or misled the public about the nature of their respective accidents.

Not enough people who were alive during those incidents have died.

A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.

Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.

Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.

  The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

> a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost

Yes, nuclear is more expensive. SMRs should help with that, but their expense has never been contested.

But marginal economics aren't everything. Renewable and battery production isn't ramping up fast enough to make that margin available at scale. This doesn't seem capital contrained, either--every major economy is throwing gobs of cash at the problem.

> Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables

False economy. A dollar not invested into nukes doesn't go into renewables--partly because of the aforementioned scaling problem, it tends to wind up in gas.

We’re spending trillions of dollars of new money on gas infrastructure with decades of life and financial liabilities attached to them because we need the power, have maxed out renewables and are left with a choice: gas or nukes. Opposing nukes isn’t playing for renewables, it’s playing for gas.

SMRs can potentially do something that renewables can’t: they could be placed near the loads in places with no space for renewables and without relying on the grid. Think industrial areas or even cities or towns that are surrounded by other developed land. The grid moves slowly, and electricity prices via existing transmission lines are, in many areas, hilariously inflated for a number of reasons. A hypothetical portable, easy-to-acquire SMR producing power at $100/MWh would not be an amazing deal if a large electric utility bought it, but a $100/MWh would be an amazing price in quite a few markets if a small utility could actually buy at that price and deliver via a small last-mile distribution system.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... here's another one or this https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/

> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...

Yes, that shit study which models supplying the entire grid with one energy source and lithium storage through all weather conditions.

I would suggest reading the study I linked so you can see the difference in methodology when credible researches in the field tackle similar questions.

The credible studies are focused on simulating the energy system and market with real world constraints. Which apparently works out way cheaper when not involving nuclear in the picture.

> https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/

That entire report is an exercise in selectively choosing data to misrepresent renewables and present nuclear power in the best possible light and wishful thinking.

To the degree that the prominent "renewables vs. nuclear" graph they keep repeating on the webpage and figure 6 in the report is straight up misleading.

This is the source:

What is different about different net-zero carbon electricity systems?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266627872...

Utilizing storage costs from 2018 and then of course making the comparison against the model not incorporating any hydrogen derived zero carbon fuel to solve seasonal problems.

Which is todays suggestion for solving the final 1-2% requiring seasonal storage in the late 2030s.

Something akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity because they run too little to be economical on their own, but zero carbon.

Would they have chosen the ReBF model the difference between made up optimal nuclear power and 2018 renewables would be: $80-94/MWh and $82-102/MWh.

It is essentially: Nukebros writes reports for nukebros, they confirm their own bias. Simply an attempt to justify another massive round of government subsidies on nuclear power.

lmao, you say shit study but you suggest using green h2 as backup which not only isn't economically feasible (for now at least) but current generators are either using a mix with gas or use pure h2 with huge nox releases due to high temp burning. Not just that, most lcoe costs magically assume that 4h storage is enough. Look at yesterday's Germany generation and tell me how 4h storage will be enough there. Or maybe I should link to amount of subsidies Germany is pouring each year in renewables like https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-29/germany-s... or like https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-looks-specia... It's funny that when I ask ren-bros how much subsidies edf in France is getting they are either silent or are linking to price shielding that's totally unrelated and is present in most eu countries after russia's invasion. Renewable bros as usual are dunking on nuclear and promoting their clean supply like a mecca without facing hard reality - most renewables now are subsidized by fossils and will be in any close future

>you suggest using green h2 as backup which not only isn't economically feasible (for now at least)

That's poor logic, h2 as a last-2%er doesn't need to be feasible until we've gotten to the 98% mark. And honestly, h2 feasibility is a function of cheap energy anyway, which probably means midday solar while solar farms are chasing dusk prices.

not, h2 feasibility in the context of power generation depends on many more factors, including how frequent the plant is used when day hours will be mostly tapped by solar generation and how you'll do price compensation. And in the context of h2 for renewables as a peaker, it'll need to be much more than 2%. And again, the emission problem for h2 generation isn't solved yet beyond fuel cells

> Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.

Only if you don't care about reliability.

Seems like you didn’t read the quote from the abstract. Here’s the relevant part:

> with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.

I call BS on that.

You’re asking us to trust your gut reaction over a peer-reviewed study. Do you have any qualifications or experience in the field?

Sorry, was writing on a mobile. Here's a more detailed explanation why it's pure BS.

Because it's simply magic thinking. They postulate a "future fully sector-coupled system" and then say that if this somehow magics into existance, then everything's peachy.

Basically, "a sector-coupled system" allows transforming excess power into something useful (district heating, hydrogen, steel, etc.), and shedding the load and/or providing some power back when there's not enough generated power available.

In other words, if you solve the problem of providing 1 month of energy storage for Germany and Denmark, then renewable energy is basically free. Duh.

The problem is that "sector-coupled systems" don't exist, and their creation will result in far, far, far, far more expenses than building fucking PWRs.

Yes, the study incorporates no lithium storage. Including storage we will easily reach far above 90% renewable penetration.

When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.

Peaker plants today already run too little to be economical on their own, essentially what in our current grids constitute seasonal storage and emergency reserves.

Simply update the terms for the capacity markets to require the fuel to be zero-carbon. It can be synfuels, biofuels or hydrogen. Whatever comes out the cheapest.

As we electrify transportation we can shift over the massive ethanol blending in gasoline in the US to be our seasonal buffer. [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_market#Capacity_ma...

[2]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=27&t=10

> When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.

Capacity markets effectively don't exist in Europe right now. There are plans to create a plan for them by 2027, this is how urgent it is for Europe. But no worries, natural gas is now green, and it's fine to send money to Azerbaijan for it.

There is no pathway for most of Europe to switch to renewables any time soon.

In this context, what is a "modern grid"?

In eu France is the biggest net exporter in the EU while Germany with huge renewable capacity net imported 20+TWh this year. Look how Germany's generation was yesterday to get a sneak peek

This is only because it is profitable for Germany to do so, not because of lack of capacity. Germany imports energy when there is low demand (and price) and exports when there is high demand (and price). Look at this chart: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=...

another reason is to fire up coal less.

Again, look at yesterday generation. They were not able to satisfy local demand with renewables and bumped up coal+gas by a lot.

Also, if you look at the numbers - the price difference isn't that huge but trade difference is huge. This year export price is less than 1$ more than import. Problem is Germany net imported 25TWh so they are still in a big trade deficit and it continues to grow considering dunkelflaute is ahead

Yes, Germany is targeting a 80% renewable electricity mix by 2030 and 100% by 2035. They have no illusions about being perfect today. Their current status is 65% renewable for 2024.

Maybe stop looking at instants and start looking at the larger picture: keeping our cumulative emissions as low as possible.

Starting a nuclear construction project which won't deliver any decarbonization for 15-20 years is accepting large cumulative emissions.

they don't target 100% by 2035. They want to close last coal plant by 2038 which is a bit optimistic looking at yesterday's generation. For gas it's even worse - the plan is totally unrealistic and their planned h2 ready plants that'll use gas initially, will probably still use a mix with gas when/if green h2 becomes reality or they'll replace the generators with pure h2(unlikely) which has huge nox emissions due to high burn temperature

Larger image is yesterday's generation + https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-29/germany-s... and https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-looks-specia...

And nuclear construction can be much faster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant or you can look at projects from China

I had to check the numbers because it grabbed my attention.

No issue with your quoted figure of 30,000 TWh (annual) global electricity consumption.

But we only need to do 7TWh of battery supply in year 1 (or say only 1-2 of that makes it to grid storage).

30,000/365 is 82 TWh daily. So that’s the number to crack, surely? Because a significant percentage of storage will be to make up for wind and solar, which generally approximately follows some sort of diurnal cycle?

If we will be closing in on a couple TWh annual storage capacity in 6 years (leaving aside any real synchronised attempt to get vehicles to be part of large scale distributed grids) then only a few years on from 2030 we’re going to be able to store a significant percentage of our daily energy demands

"But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge."

How much battery storage do you think we need? Surely not a year's worth.

For solar, we'd likely need 10-16 hours of storage to power stuff overnight. Maybe a little more to cover a few cloudy days. Sounds like we are about 5% of that now?

Generally the worst case is two weeks. In the middle of winter you often get cloudy low wind days for that long. Of course how you handle those worse cases are days need not be how you handle typical. If you can handle 16 hours of no input this will over the typical cases this will be enough to max a massive dent in carbon emissions and we can fall back to existing gas (or even coal) plants for the rest. Plus a lot of power use can turn off when needed - give my company a discount and we can turn the factory off.

10-16 hours is not enough at all. On a cloudy day, solar output will only be 15-20%. On top of that, your panels really only generate for 8 hours on a very good day - the sun is a lot dimmer in the early morning and late evening. Really, you need 2x storage for a good day, if you want to deal with two cloudy days you'd want 50-60 hours of storage.

Could you possibly read the article you're replying to again?

Even skimming through it discusses the coverage of wind and a not 50/50 system particularly to cover winter & night time. There is also discussion of a ~2% from "other" and how much storage capacity is required.

The article even goes into using wind & solar data for the simulation and reducing further the output to be conservative.

I obviously understand it's not a 100% solar system. If it was you would need to be able to deal with at least 2 weeks of bad weather, not two days, and you would have to take into account winter (dropping to about 5 hours instead of 8).

Additionally, mixing solar and wind is not as easy as it seems, because the two are correlated. If you have a major storm that makes wind energy impossible due to wind speeds above ~100km/h, you will also have clouds making solar energy unworkable. I'm not aware of any simulations modelling a 95+% solar/wind grid for storage needs, taking into account extreme weather patterns, grid topology, and equipment damage, but if you do then please link it.

I don't see any article linked in the comment I replied to. Perhaps you're mixing up two comment chains.

It's likely enough battery capacity if you combine batteries with e-fuels for longer term storage.

Assuming batteries are used for all storage use cases is one of the classic errors of energy system analysis.

> That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today.

I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting powering a portion of the grid with batteries that are cycled once per year. One can optimistically cycle one or even twice a day (if wind peaks when the sun is down). Or you can try to ride through a week of bad weather, but natural gas is not actually a terrible solution for that. And those batteries last for a lot longer than a year.

So I think your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years.

> natural gas is not actually a terrible solution

Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.

> your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years

The former is calculated from projected 2030 battery production to present energy levels. An essential component of strategy is knowing on whose side time is. Battery production won't reach 1/10 for at least a few decades. That's the point. We need an intermediate solution, and if that's going to be gas, we have to live with the fact that (a) emissions will continue and (b) we perpetuate trillions of dollars of capital infrastructure that will be as difficult to take down in the future as coal has been today.

> Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.

If you come up with some combination of carbon-free energy sources and storage that covers 90% of grid energy needs, and you need to fill in the gap, and that gap is a whole lot of power but only for a handful of days a year, then I don’t think nuclear is a good option at all to fill in the gap. The capital expense would be absurd.

Decarbonization is great, but in the real world, decarbonization per dollar spent is what matters. Instead of spending a zillion dollars on nuclear peaker plants, spend a lot fewer dollars on gas peaker plants and the the rest for more effective environmental improvements.

> Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.

There's a crossover point. If you use natural gas to provide <1% of yearly electricity needs, and you save a zillion dollars while doing so, you can find cheaper ways to decarbonize by the same amount.

We'll figure it out. There is too much at stake and there are already a gazillion engineers out there going to bed every night thinking about how to solve this problem.

Innovation is the grim reaper of analyst reports. No one at my company notifies an investment bank when we have a breakthrough internally (lol).

Why are you comparing the rate of change of battery storage capacity, the vast majority of which if grid connected will be used for at most diurnal storage, to yearly energy consumption?

Holy mother of all type errors there.

Multiply it by 365, and it implies that in 2030 alone, we will create enough battery storage to time shift almost 10% of our total electricity use today.

This is not a stat that should inspire pessimism.

> and never could have

I could just as easily assert the same of nuclear or gas. It doesn't make it true, although there seems to be evidence that nuclear cannot scale as fast as batteries/solar/wind.

That's per year right?

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