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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

>Compare that to the amount of electricity produced by the other main non-emitting sources of power, the so-called “renewables”—hydroelectric (6.8 percent), wind (4.2 percent) and solar (about one quarter of a percent). Not only are nuclear plants the most important of the non-emitting sources, but they provide baseload—“always there”—power, while most renewables can produce electricity only intermittently, when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

He neglected to mention that renewables are cheaper:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/13/wind-powe...

Of course, since the piece seems designed to promote nuclear subsidies of some kind, this isn't entirely surprising.

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No.

The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is estimated to be far greater for PV and wind. Why? The operation and management (O&M) for PV and Wind is insanely high. Grid scale PV has to be continuously cleaned with deionized water because dust and greenery can dramatically decrease efficiency. If a leaf lands on a cell, energy builds up like a capacitor in the shadowed area, and it can eventually decimate the whole cell.

On wind: the intermittency is overwhelming, and the cost to deal with that at base load is estimated in the trillions without even adding an extra megawatt to the grid.

In an urbanized setting, plants must be able to concentrate energy using small land mass. Neither wind or PV can do this at scale.

Some panel data on LCOE in this paper:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w17695.pdf

Naw, you're still oversimplifying it and being way too pessimistic. Renewables aren't 100% the answer yet, but their LCOE in practice isn't that bad right now at all[1]. I realize this is at relatively low levels of penetration, but their uptake has been extremely rapid and tech progression has been quick. Solar is still expensive as fuck, but everyone knows that. Look at those variable O&M costs though, those are some sexy zeroes if you can lock in your other costs adequately.

Pages 10 and 11 here [2](warning, pdf), discuss wind curtailment in MISO, where they've tackled the curtailment problem head-on with great success. They also estimate that they can keep manual curtailment incredibly low until wind doubles in capacity from the time of the report. The intermittentency is not overwhelming until you have much more wind in the system than we currently do. Additionally, there are exiting traditional storage techniques that don't get much traction for a variety of reasons (like pumped storage), which we could build out hard if we actually needed to.

A healthy mix of renewables, storage technology, grid upgrades, and more efficient traditional generation technologies would leave us in a fine position.

[1]http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

[2]http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...

Hmm, never been downvoted before for providing a sourced comment with relevant information. Guess people aren't down for discussion today.

>Grid scale PV has to be continuously cleaned with deionized water because dust and greenery can dramatically decrease efficiency. If a leaf lands on a cell, energy builds up like a capacitor in the shadowed area, and it can eventually decimate the whole cell.

tl;dr the maintenance requirements of a solar panel are that it needs to be wiped down occasionally or it very gradually produces less power.

>On wind: the intermittency is overwhelming

Except in the places its been tried - e.g. Germany or Denmark or China. You can check out a live feed of how much energy is produced by wind energy in those countries and the intermittency is overwhelmingly underwhelming.

He doesn't even try to pass for unbiased...

> the so-called "renewables"

lol Apparently they aren't really renewable: that's just some tree-hugger propaganda...

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