https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
You don’t get ”free electricity” with absolutely massive handouts to the nuclear industry.
Instead renewables and storage are delivering on the ”too cheap to meter” promise.
I have said it before, but in order for me to believe the claims that renewables and storage are delivering in places like europe, you first have to stop investing and building new natural gas power plants. Rather than classify natural gas as "green", as Germany pushed through in EU, we should have laws to prevent new natural gas power plants from being built and existing fleet should be slowly dismantled. If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
That renewable buildout leads to larger fossil emissions being wrong is trivial to verify. The UK as one example of many:
- Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero. - Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh. - Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh.
Massively decreasing all fossil fueled electricity production of course "extends the life" of these plants. All those plants that were shut down had their "life extended".
You can do the same for Denmark, Portugal, California, South Australia and everywhere else. First renewables offset coal followed by cutting into gas usage.
After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California:
- Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24
- Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24
https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs...
Storage is exploding globally. China installed 74 GW comprising 134 GWh of storage in 2024. Increasing their yearly installation rate by 250%. The US is looking at installing 18 GW in 2025 making up 30% of all grid additions. Well, before Trump came with a sledgehammer of insanity.
Storage delivers. For the last bit of "emergency reserves" we can run some gas turbines. First our existing fleet and then when it becomes the most pressing issue to decarbonize we can utilize the solution aviation and shipping settled on.
Or just run the gas turbines on biofuels, green hydrogen or whatever. Start collecting food waste and create biogas from it.
Doesn't really matter, we're talking single percent of total energy demand.
I love how completely insignificant issues becomes blown up to enormous proportions try to force nuclear power into the conversation.
Using UK as an example, the majority of energy is not renewables. Why should they build new natural gas power plants? Natural gas produce more energy than any other source in the UK. They are not going from 98% renewables, 2% natural gas. (https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uks-electricity-was-cle...)
UK should increase the production of renewables energy, but they should also decommission their fossil fuel plants. If they want to use non-fossil fuel solutions, then they should do so and compete fairly and without subsidizes. Same goes for nuclear.
The cost of intermittence should not be paid by the environment or subsidizes, otherwise they are just hiding the true cost that society have to pay.
Let’s look at the area under the curve?
You know, we need to decarbonize agriculture, construction, transportation etc. as well.
Let look at what the UK has done:
- Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero.
- Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh.
- Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh.
Would you say this reduction in fossil fuel usage is insignificant because they obviously aren’t done yet?
For EU regulation that requires lower emissions and environmental issues with hydro power, the messy reality is also that the cost of breaking the law and paying the fines are currently cheaper than the economical and political costs of complying with the law. So that is what the Swedish government are doing. The Paris Agreement is just a goal and clearly there is a lot of voters who see it as incompatible with modern society.
It is also the messy reality that many current governments in EU got their votes in the last election because they bailed out the citizens when the power crisis happened and paid the power bills through taxes, causing major harm in the market and further inflated prices. Building out more natural gas power plants will reduce the cost of the next crisis, which is also the stated goal of the new one that got built in Sweden.
It costs 5-10x as much, does not integrate well with renewables due to the capital structure and takes 15-20 years to build from political decision to operational plant.
We need to decarbonize now. Not extend the life of fossil assets for decades waiting for nuclear power to come online. With this nuclear power producing a fraction of the TWh compared to if the same money went into renewables and storage.
Wasting money on enormous handouts to the nuclear industry is not ”doing as much as possible to reduce emissions”. It is a dogwhistle from climate change deniers to extend the life of fossil assets to stymie their disruption by renewables.
I don’t think you’ve kept up with the renewable industry. The absolute explosion we are seeing is because renewables and storage today are cheaper than fossil fuels.
It started as feelgood moonshot decades ago. Today companies and countries are at a competitive advantage if they can retool their fossil dependent processes and systems to renewables.
The only one promising that was the fossil industry, trying to stay relevant by pushing hydrogen as "green" and doing a switcheroo to "blue" fossil-derived hydrogen when green hydrogen inevitably turns out to be nonviable for silly things like mid-term energy storage.
> If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
No. Remember, the goal is to minimize the total greenhouse gas emissions! We're in a transition phase, if that means operating on 97.5% renewables and 2.5% natural gas until we figure out those last 2.5%, then that is totally fine. At the moment natural gas is excellent for peaker plants - especially if you implement carbon capture. Would you rather stay on the current ~50% fossil mix, solely because the transition mix isn't "green enough"? We're trying to save the environment, not trying to be holier than the pope.
Those 97.5% sounds very nice. Denmark has well over 100% renewables production from wind and solar, but in terms of consumption only get around 50%. The rest they need to import. 97.5 vs 50 means there is some work to be done.
I recently posted this link (https://svensksolenergi.se/statistik/elproduktion-fran-solen...) that illustrate how much energy that solar farms produce in Sweden. Getting 97.5% from that would be a nice challenge, especially around the winter months. December and January had around 3% production compared to the best previous month (which we could use as a stand-in for 100% capacity but that would be incorrect).
Natural gas is not fine. The geopolitical consequences are terrible, the environmental impact are not sustainable, and the cost are carried almost exclusively through subsidizes. Trying to sell natural gas as "saving the environment" is a political message that I do not agree with.
For example, nuclear takes days to start from cold and is really only economic if operating at a constant output. Thus you need complimentary sources to help meet changes in demand. These days, typically this means gas turbines.
Whether your grid has nuclear or renewables, it will also have natural gas capacity.
No, turbo-alternators 'burning' hydrogen do exist. And green hydrogen (produced by renewables) is cheaper than pink hydrogen (produced by a nuclear reactor) because the total cost of renewables' electricity is lower than nuclear's.
> hydrogen > contributes less than a rounding error to global electricity generation
True, however it doesn't imply that it will remain irrelevant.
> unviable financially
For the time being, and less and less. Bloomberg NEF predicts that green hydrogen will cost approximately 1.2€/kg in 2050. Carbon taxes or oil prices may also play a role as nearly all hydrogen is now produced thanks to some fossil fuel.
> nuclear > is a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity
Green hydrogen could also be.
> prone to leakage
This is a major challenge for transportation-related usages, especially in small or not-intensively used vehicles. This isn't in the "gridpower backup" role, as mass and volume of storage isn't a major parameter.
One reason for my skepticism is that I've been hearing optimistic predictions around hydrogen as an energy store for decades at this stage (I'm old) and for a long time believed them but here we are, with little to show for it. In fact, at historical scales, hydrogen's significance as an energy store today is less than it was in the 19th century. As a result, I've adopted "I'll believe it when I see it" approach so I just ignore hydrogen predictions - particularly ones 25 years into the future.
But the main reason is simple physics. It simply has NONE of the physical attributes you'd want in a gas to be used to store energy. It's like if you picked all the attributes you WOULDN'T want in such a gas.
Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult. Everything it comes into contact with needs special materials to avoid embrittlement. It's prone to leakage.
It has dreadful energy density. The worst.
It has potent green house gas effects when leaked into the atmosphere.
It's dangerous and highly explosive and burns with such high intensity (and invisibly) that it requires specialist fire-fighting equipment.
Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal - a fraction of that of batteries.
In summary, hydrogen as energy store makes no sense to me. And it's completely hypothetical. If we are going to talk about hypothetical approaches to storing energy in the form of a gas, then green methane makes a lot more sense. Not that I'd advocate for either but I see some potential for green methane but none for hydrogen given its physical attributes.
Fair point, same here (I was born in 1967), however fossil fuels are so effective and adequate as energy sources, as long as we ignored/neglected their dubious effect on the climate, that there was no real attempt to explore other ways.
> Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult
For the "gridpower backup" application there is no transport needed, and storage doesn't have to be compact nor mobile (those are a major challenge for hydrogen in transportation).
> dreadful energy density
This is not a show-stopper for the "gridpower backup" application. For huge volumes or very long-term (not sure this will be necessary) it may be stored in salt caverns ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Underground_h... )
> potent green house gas effects > dangerous
Granted, however we are used to store huge volumes of dangerous materials, some gaseous at ambiant pressure/temp (methane...), even into salt caverns, albeit when we began to do so (in the 1950's) it was quite a challenge.
> Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal
Various new ways to obtain H2 from electricity offer impressive yield in realistic conditions (check SOECs), and other advances are promising ( https://liten.cea.fr/cea-tech/liten/english/Pages/Strategic-... ).
> green methane makes a lot more sense
As does ammonia, in some contexts. There is no one-size-fits-all here!
Unsubsidized solar and storage is today in much of the world cheaper than coal and fossil gas.
The renewable subsidies stil existing simply add fuel to the already raging fire that is renewable buildout.
Where are all these 14 day full load capable storage plants being built?
I’m not saying they aren’t, I am saying I don’t see the data.
Here BESS for $63/kWh installed and serviced for 20 years.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...
https://www.ess-news.com/2024/12/09/powerchina-receives-bids...
China installed 74 GW comprising 168 GWh in 2024. In increase of 250% compared to 2023.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...
After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California:
- Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24
- Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24
https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs...
In the US in 2025 storage was expected to make up 30% of all grid additions. Before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
No one generally expects more than a couple of hours of storage to be needed. But for the fun exercise let’s calculate what spending Vogtles $36.8B on equivalent renewables, as in TWh delivered, and the storage gives.
That makes the renewables come out to about $9B.
With storage costing $0.063B GWh and having $28B to spend we can build 444 GWh storage.
That is the equivalent to running Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days straight.
In this calculation we don’t even bother with Vogtles O&M costs compared to near zero for renewables and storage.
Do you now understand how incredibly expensive new built western nuclear power is?
storage for 12 hours and we are 80% there. If you don't like 80% solutions then please don't participate in society as it's only working on those.
If we included the cost of cleaning up fossil fuel byproducts… well, we don’t even know how much it will cost to clean up all that carbon.
Then we will have to work out how we bill the international relations cost of having to deal with petrochemical producers…
*Yes, I understand it's inflation adjusted. There are so many possible explanations for the observed negative curve that go beyond the bold, broad claim that learning curve theory doesn't hold in nuclear.
In my mind, an (at least) equally reasonable explanation is that the conditions for the learning curve weren't met. (This probably sounds like "no true Scotsman". I admit that the learning curve is a function of scale and relative to mass-production examples, the "signal" for the learning curve is probably weaker to begin with given how many facilities of the same design were actually built.)
-Changes in design pull you backward on the curve. There were lots of changes in French design
-Unsteady expansion timeline messes with the workforce expertise part of the hypothesis. You want ideally an accelerated or at least constant build rate, not large gaps where the workforce either respecializes in another field or retires.
- regulations increase over time. Part of the conditions for the theory are implicitly "all else being equal".
-while inflation adjustment partially accounts for this, labor becomes more expensive as gdp per capital increases (see, for example, low skill manufacturing leaving China as it becomes wealthier). I don't know the details, but given the rapid post-war growth, I'm guessing gdp/capital was growing pretty quickly during the French build out
For relatively low volume manufacturing, the learning curve effects are probably smaller to begin with, so it's easier to get an effective negative learning rate. With so many confounding factors that violate the premise of theory, I find it rather unscientific to definitively claim the theory is just wrong in an entire industry.
We have research on when we have achieved learning effects.
> If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements:
> - It has to be the same site
> - It has to be the same constructor
> - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next
> - It has to be constant labor laws
> - It has to be a constant regulatory regime
> When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world.
From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k
In the meantime renewables and storage have gone from nascent industries to today be the vast majority of all new energy production in TWh and while costing a fraction of new built nuclear power.