Quite a lot of people live in Texas and California where renewables are already pretty advanced, plus there's nuclear in the north, and they have hydro and grid connections with Canada who have even more hydro and nuclear so the USA should be easier.
The US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035 and it didn't seem particularly a stretch even before the recent climate bill passed, so I'd guess they're well on target, not even sure a second Trump term as president could derail it now.
The problem is that electrification of fossil fuel applications is going to significantly increase the demand on our grid. So it’s not enough to get to parity in renewables, but we have to go far beyond our current capacity in order to accommodate a world in which almost every car is electric (whether electric hybrid or green hydrogen) and almost every home uses electric rather than natural gas for heating (not to mention all of the industrial applications that will need electrification).
It's going to increase the amount of energy flowing through the grid, but there's plenty of excess grid capacity to accommodate that.
The grid is a technological marvel, but one weakness about it is that it has never included storage except small amount of hydro (which I've heard some claim is because nuclear needed it so that the reactor could stay always on, but I have my doubts on that origin story)
Without storage, every grid component must be sized to maximum expected through put, which can be many many times as large as average throughput. The grid is also the most expensive part of delivering energy, more expensive than generation.
This means that storage, and a lot of electrification means storage, whether that's charging the battery on a car, or heating a hot water tank, or cooling/heating a building which can be used as several degrees of thermal storage, is going to drastically reduce the potential peak load as a ratio to average load.
Electrification has enormous potential to reduce grid cost, and overall energy cost, IMHO.
That's an interesting point I hadn't considered before. That said, I would think the net effect is still increased demand on the grid. If everyone buys an EV, I can't imagine that constitutes a net reduction in demand on the grid even if everyone charges off-peak (unless utilities can pull storage from those car batteries during peak hours, and I doubt car owners will want that kind of wear on their batteries). Do you know of any publications which try to estimate the effect of electrification on capacity?
The most advanced modeling I know of is coming from Christopher Clack, whose latest models show that deploying lots of storage at the grid edge now will pave the way for much cheaper energy in the future. I thought this was more recent but it's 16 months old now:
Even if there are grid upgrades, getting a higher utilization factor, or more precisely, knocking off the highest peaks of demand, has huge cost savings on the grid size.
So as we shift spending away from fossil fuel, that money will be going to utilities which will allow them to do the grid upgrades.
Unfortunately utilities make the best profits on grid upgrades, so unless there are really good utility commissions, utilities will not be looking to decrease their grid investments or make grid utilization better, the are literally incentivized to make transmission and distribution costs as high as possible.
If you live in California and have PG&E check out how many times more they charge you to deliver a kWh than to generate it, and you'll be fairly shocked and annoyed at CPUC for having done such a terrible job of reigning in PG&E's management.
In engineering speak, what he means is increased grid efficiency, which can happen simultaneously with increased demand and increased cost.
But all that does is shift the inefficiencies off of the grid. It's redefining the system boundary in a politically/ marketing friendly way, but doesn't eliminate the problem of storage/buffer capacity.
Anyone who thinks the grid can approach steady-state operations near capacity hasn't seriously looked at demand patterns, and that's before complicating things by trying to accommodate the transportation needs of replacing gas/diesel.
It's the equivalent of claiming traffic problems can be solved by staggering when people work instead of doing road improvements.
Even without any other sources of power, storage already makes sense for hydro since ideally you'd like to store excess water that comes during above average rainy seasons so that you have more power to use during a drought, but allowing your nuclear base load to stay running even when the rest of the grid demands less does seem like another useful benefit
> Electrification has enormous potential to reduce grid cost, and overall energy cost, IMHO.
This sounds a bit strange. I'm pretty sure that electric cars and replacing natural gas for heating will require quite significant investment in electric distribution infrastructure.
Also, if you want to be able to transfer a significant fraction of power generated from wind and solar across the country, transmission capacity needs to be multiple times greater than today, as far as I can tell.
Some kind of smart adjustment of the end user consumption may slightly shave up the extremes in demand, but that requires a significant investment per household (not only in money, but also awareness and ability to set this up), and a lot of people do not want to compromise on the charge of the car or the temperature in their living room.
And in the end, I really doubt that those efforts will make a big difference, unless paired with significant spare battery capacity.
> This sounds a bit strange. I'm pretty sure that electric cars and replacing natural gas for heating will require quite significant investment in electric distribution infrastructure.
The total spend on grid infrastructure may increase, but storage will mean we will get more kWh per dollar of grid spending, lowering the energy cost.
Most infrastructures are built to handle maximum load. If the load become nearly flat (by utilizing idle time) thanks to electrification, it makes easy to collect grid cost.
The effect of a lot of renewables can be the opposite, though. When the wind is blowing, all consumers may want to charge their Tesla's at the same time, meaning that the grid wil experience even more spikey load patterns.
Batteries as part of the central grid can help, of course.
More spikes are good, it's the height of the tallest spike that determines the cost, so reducing that specific spike is the key. And one way to do that, is to spike at other times instead.
Think about it like roads and rush hour. The width of the road is set for rush hour, and most of the rest of the time it's empty. Any way of shifting demand away from that peak is good. You'd have to shift an infeasible amount to create a traffic jam in the middle of the night, but every extra car removed from rush hour helps.
When I said "more spikey", I meant generally bigger spikes overall. The frequency of spikes is less relevant and not even very related. It is perfectly possible to have BOTH much higher maximum spikes AND greater numbers of relatively tall spikes. (For instance if you compare energy produced by a set of windmill farm to that produced by a group of nuclear plants.)
If you mean higher annual peaks, then it's probably easier to say that, because that's exactly what has been motivating the early solar deployments and the early battery deployments.
The very high summer peaks correlate well with solar (in many places) and so shaving that peak saves you more than you were spending on solar, even before the price plummeted. Same with batteries replacing expensive gas peaker plants.
Overall demand is predicted to rise a little with electrification, but demand was falling in many places anyway, so between that and the tech above for shaving peaks, it's not really a problem.
Note it's a common thing for "pro-fossil fuel" advocates to show "peaks" without enough context. Usually what looks like a peak on a daily basis is in fact a drop in the bucket compared with the yearly peak.
The famous 'duck curve' is a good example of this, where solar and wind reduced the daily and yearly peak, and then the new lower peak in spring/autumn was pointed at as a "problem".
> One misconception related to the duck curve is that solar photovoltaic power does not help supply peak demand and therefore cannot replace other power plants. In California, solar output is low at 7 pm when daily demand usually peaks.[20] This fact leads some to believe that solar power cannot reduce the need for other power plants, as they will still be needed at 7 pm when solar power output is low. However, California's annual demand peaks usually occur around 3 pm to 5 pm,[21] when solar power output is still substantial.[20] The reason that California's annual peak tends to be earlier than the daily peak is that California's annual peak usually occurs on hot days with large air conditioning loads, which tend to run more during midday.[22] As a result, solar power does in fact help supply peak demand and therefore can substitute for other sources of power.
> Note it's a common thing for "pro-fossil fuel" advocates to show "peaks" without enough context. Usually what looks like a peak on a daily basis is in fact a drop in the bucket compared with the yearly peak.
I'm not pro-fossil, rather the opposite. I'm anti-fossil (GHG in general) fuel, and want us to use all production methods available that allow us to gut GHG emissions, including solar, wind AND nuclear. Eventually (a few hundred years from now, maybe, but eventually) it seems like fusion will be the final source.
Also, I'm concerned with replacing ALL sources of fossil fuels, including for heating, most industrial use. And for that to come true, I think we need to have a razor sharp focus on price to make it happen. Lately, even before the current crisis, it seems that prices have been going in the wrong direction while global GHG emissions continue their sharp increase.
It seems to me that part of the reason is that many "renewable" proponents are much more more happy to burn a lot of natural gas than to allow nuclear power, and that they're employing a variety of measures to make nuclear seem unattractive, even compared to natural gas. (I've seen some of these messages sponsored by oil companies, some of which seem to want to build expensive offshore wind parks close to where they already have oil platforms.)
I'm getting the impression that some costs of wind power, in particular, is being covered over. And I'm particularly thinking of wind power. This involves both the unstable demand, unavailability of storage and things like increased transportation costs not clearly linked to the type of source.
So, basically, what I'm looking for is ways to make ALL of solar, wind and nuclear as cheap as possible, with reasonable (and shared) safety and environmental standards.
For that to happen, honesty about real costs, accurate prediction models and willingness to remove factors that increase prices unnecessarily (often due to special interest groups) need to be investigated.
For now, my impression is that the real LCOE, including transportation, of nuclear could be A LOT lower than what is represented by new European and American plants, both based on historical prices and efforts in Korea and China, while the real LCOE of wind tends to increase sharply when wind power gets to about 20-30% of total energy production.
For now, my opinion is that we should continue to invest in solar and wind at the same rate we're currently doing while ALSO work on adjust regulation and the business climate for nuclear to allow the cost to come down at least to Korean levels. Meanwhile, all fossil fuel sources should be taxed at a high enough level to make sure both nuclear and renewable investments have a chance of being profitable (The tax should at least be brought up enough to cover the negative externalities of fossil fuels).
If such taxes were made federal (in the US) and collected by the EU (in the EU market), instead of being collected by individual states, one could at least set up the right incentives.
I don’t agree that fossil fuel should be “taxed at a high enough level to make sure both nuclear and renewable investments have a chance of being profitable”, but do agree that it should be taxed significantly higher. (If the outcome of that is that renewables have a chance to compete, great. But if there was a renewable that needed a $50/gallon tax to be competitive, it doesn’t get my agreement to tax to that level.)
At that level, nuclear would be much, much cheaper. Also, there could be a "net tax" system where renewables AND nuclear would get some of those taxes as price subsidies. Let's say that fossil fuels were to be disadvantaged by $X per unit of pollution (lets say 1 unit would be the pollution from 1 ton of natural gas). To prevent all of that disadvantage, one could lower it by $Y (for ($X-$Y)/unit pollutant, and at the same time subsidize nuclear and renewables by $Y per unit of pollutant it displaced.
That way, the competitive advantage would still be $X, but Y could be set high enough that net taxes would stay the same as today.
I'm philosophically opposed to referencing it to "whatever amount would be required to make renewables competitive" but more aligned to "whatever amount represents the true costs, including externalities" (and making the same levies against renewables as well, for mining externalities, waste disposal, etc). Or true costs plus a small margin to ensure there's a nudge.
I don't mind people being exposed to the true cost of their energy; I want that. I don't want to get into picking winners and losers by referencing them to economics of an unrelated power source.
Well, I agree with you. I suppose my argument was presuming that either nuclear or renewables WOULD be competitive with fossil fuels for almost all use cases, if all externalities of fossil fuels are included.
I've seen figures like $15-20 being what gas would cost if the real cost of externalities of driving were included, but I think the carbon is only like 90 cents of that.
Wind power is cheap. This has been true for over a decade. It's not a conspiracy (unless you count the fossil fuel companies and their pet politicians lying about everything for decades, and literally profiting from misery and death).
You have to really try hard to make renewables and nuclear enemies, but a lot of money has been spent on that as it became more obvious that renewables were a good idea and a threat to fossil fuels. I've noticed a recent trend where people attack roof mounted solar because it's so much worse than utility solar. Utility solar is just replacing nuclear in the argument as people get wise to the scam and they need to update the message to slow down the fossil fuel phase out by pointing out that "this isn't perfect, do something else" in the hope that they won't do the something else.
For me nuclear is in the same boat as tidal, geothermal or CSP. Cool tech, but entirely on cost, wind and solar are going to dominate energy production in the future so at best a bit player.
Luckily nearly every single other policy supports tidal, CSP and nuclear just as much as it supports solar and wind. Electric vehicles? Can run on nuclear electricity. Green Hydrogen? can be made with nuclear electricity (technically called Pink Hydrogen). Heat pumps? Can be run with nuclear electricity. Carbon taxes? Don't apply to nuclear as it's low carbon. Air pollution controls? Don't apply to nuclear as it's low pollution. Insulation? Makes it easier to use heat pumps, powered by nuclear power. Time of use pricing? Traditionally used exactly for nuclear power. Demand response? Keeps nuclear running at it's peak efficiency. Battery storage peakers? Can time shift nuclear generated electricity. Believing in climate change? Great opportunity for nuclear, lots of people in the climate change community supported it as part of solution, before wind and solar plummetted in price.
> At the end of 2008, James Hansen stated five priorities that he felt then President-elect Barack Obama should adopt "for solving the climate and energy problems, while stimulating the economy": efficient energy use, renewable energy, a smart grid, generation IV nuclear reactors and carbon capture and storage. Regarding nuclear, he expressed opposition to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, stating that the $25 Billion (US) surplus held in the Nuclear Waste Fund "should be used to develop fast reactors that consume nuclear waste, and thorium reactors to prevent the creation of new long-lived nuclear waste."[96]
> In 2009, Hansen wrote an open letter to President Obama where he advocated a "Moratorium and phase-out of coal plants that do not capture and store CO2".[93] In his first book Storms of My Grandchildren, similarly, Hansen discusses his Declaration of Stewardship, the first principle of which requires "a moratorium on coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester carbon dioxide
So disagreeing on nuclear vs renewables is very minor in the big scheme of things. He was wrong about carbon capture and storage for the same reason, renewables got cheap enough that it no longer made financial sense to do on a large scale.
If you don't believe the wind and solar costs, then obviously you'd come to other conclusions, but you'd be wrong. Just as if you thought tidal or geothermal was going to be as big as solar and wind. But in places where tidal or geothermal makes sense, all the other policies work to support it so it's all good. We were right to try all these technologies to see which one worked out, they probably all have useful niches still.
> If you don't believe the wind and solar costs, then obviously you'd come to other conclusions, but you'd be wrong.
If I'm wrong and you're right, then I have no problem with that, although from what I've seen, the various green movements in Europe have attacked nuclear almost exclusively for ideological reasons, not economic ones.
I still believe that if we give nuclear an equal playing field to other energy forms when it comes to safety standards, other environmental regulations and allow them to be built efficiently by private companies without unnecessary red tape, prices will come down enough for them to be competitive.
Likewise, it seems to me that efforts to fully cover the grid with wind power (particularly in climates where solar is still expensive) has met with problems that have been partly covered up by proponents, and that this has contributed to increased prices, at least in Europe.
But if honest analysis proves me wrong, then I see no problem with that, just as long as it is really the economical side, not ideological ideas that the true reason for future prioritizations.
It can, but that would lead to wasted energy when demand is pushed below supply (when there is no way to store the supply).
That sort of defeats the benefit of elasticity in the demand that was the premise. The idea was that when there is a lot of power being generated on a sunny and windy day, everyone should charge all batteries, heat their water a few extra degrees, run heating or air conditioning a bit harder, etc, as an hour later, the sun could go down, the wind stop blowing and power generation could be scarce.
On the other hand elastic supply sources with a fuel cost (hydro, fossil fuels and to some extent nuclear) are much more suited for cases where consumption elasticity is linked to limitations of the distribution systems.
That was why I mentioned the plan (which I can no longer locate) to target 95% carbon-free electricity and focus on electrification instead of the final 5%. That fossil fuel usage can be shifted from cars or heating or industrial uses and used to provide the 5% of electricity instead at a total cost/carbon/pollution saving.
edit: ah, found it (I think, possibly something else quoted this):
> In the Decarb+E scenario, an expanded grid electrifies additional end uses (such as motor vehicles and space and water heating in buildings) that had derived energy directly from fossil fuels. In 2035, the grid is 95% decarbonized, but the additional fossil fuel displacement yields total emissions reductions equivalent to a grid that is 105% decarbonized—more cost-effectively than could be achieved by completely eliminating grid emissions in this time frame. These results show the importance of considering flexible, cross-sector approaches to optimizing the speed and cost-effectiveness of overall emissions reductions.
So I was wrong about the specific date, but the same general concept applies regardless of the target date and this was written before the 100% goal was moved to 2035.
If you can store energy in batteries for days wherever, and store energy for weeks in hydrogen anywhere bigger than a house, and store energy in ammonia for decades and move it wherever there are trained personell, and store energy in NaOH and release it as low grade heat, and store energy in methane and put it through the existing gas network, and all these things cost in the range of $20-100/MWh over and above the energy input...
Do we ever actually need to move our $1-10/MWh peak solar energy through our $100-200/MWh grid?
I'm real bullish on electrification of everything, but the necessary service upgrades for me to get a level 2 charger on my property would cost on the order of $5-10k.
I don't know if these exist on the market for consumers, but the way that the big superchargers work around this is to co-locate battery storage, so they can trickle charge from the grid and then fast charge to the car.
If you're going to need to spend 10K it feels like you could possibly better spend that on solar and/or batteries.
Here's a portable charger which claims that it costs the same as a home charger install: https://www.zipcharge.global/
And less geekily, you may just not need a level 2 charger or a full speed level 2 charger:
That "Zip" thing would be massively improved if it did not act as a car charger but as a portable car battery. Instead of - like the background video shows - taking the thing out of the car, hooking it up to the car charge socket and waiting 60 minutes it should just plug into the car power circuit through a connector in that same trunk, just leave it there and drive the car using power from the thing. This feels like the EV-approach to a spare petrol can in the trunk which itself was the ICE-approach to the bag of oats in the buggy.
Yeah, same for me (I live in a condo building and our parking lot is not adjacent to the building). My wife and I bought a Tesla back in November of last year, and charging at superchargers hasn't been terribly inconvenient. If you do it too much, your peak charge rate gets limited by a small amount, but we haven't noticed it and we have 15k miles on it already. That said, it will be really nice to have a level 2 charger at our next place.
I find this surprising. I specced out an L2 charger and it did cost me $2K for the install + charger a few years ago (in an expensive market). The install required a new 100A line pulled to my garage as I had no existing washer/dryer there.
What else would you need to support L2 than an extra breaker entry for a 100A?
We'd need to upgrade our panel, as it's already maxed out. On top of that, we'd also have to pay the power company to upgrade their distribution box and the wiring that's buried in a trench that runs under the garage. And, joy of medium density, we'd need about 10 other households to get in on the action and the price I quoted is per unit.
Basically, the problem that we're experiencing is that everybody in the neighborhood has already maxed out their service. Infrastructure upgrades are painful.
fyi the inflation reduction act will cut a good chunk of that for you (assuming you're in the US)
> The Alternative Fuel Refueling Property Credit expired at the end of 2021, but the Inflation Reduction Act gave it life again by extending its application through 2032. For homeowners, the credit is worth 30% of the costs of "qualified alternative fuel vehicle refueling property" installed in the home, up to $1,000.
Yeah, but that renewable hydro is unlikely to grow much in the USA, while wind and solar will be growing exponentially. Hydro is cool, and works well with solar/wind/nuclear to help match supply and demand, but ...
If you look at global renewable output, the big chunk of hydro production that's been flat for decades, somewhat obscures the recent sudden rise of solar and wind.
Swapping hydro from 24/7 power to a backup for wind and solar goes a long way to eliminate the need for storage. We don’t need more total kWh per year of hydro we need to be able to more flexibility get those kWh.
I am an engineer that works on hydro control systems - It's worth noting that a hydro turbine, depending on it's construction, has a certain turndown ratio - That ratio of it's full scale output to it's minimum output. At the turn of the century designers of these turbines did not particularly care about operating at a lot of different power output levels, they cared about maximizing power output at a particular point, and importantly, maximizing efficiency at that point. These units typically have a turndown ratio very close to one. Consequently many hydro turbines are capable of a relatively narrow operating range, and are not suitable for fast grid support of the type that would be required as the primary source of solar backup. They're on-off type resources in many cases. These turbines can be retrofitted to variable geometry style turbines with much wider operating bands but these upgrades are slow and expensive.
Long story short - hydro is good as a 'base load' but we desperately need storage. Pumped storage, battery storage, compression storage. And we need massive transmission system upgrades (in the US at least). Nothing else will lead to a reliable grid based on renewables in the US.
Can't you get around this by turning on x% of your hydro capacity to 100% rather than turning 100% of your hydro capacity to x%? Also, batteries are really good as a short term storage, so hydro only needs to work on the hours to months time-scale.
Apart from equipment limitations, most hydro plants I’ve been to have a river downstream and there are restrictions on how fast output can be changed and requirements for minimum flows. You can’t just stop the whole river to fill up the reservoir and release it later in the day
I’m not sure that’s true. Electricity generation is pretty regional, so it’s not like we can use a region’s hydro capacity to store energy for other regions. It can store energy for the region that already has hydro, but that region already has hydro so it probably needs less storage in the first place?
New York just approved $5 billion to import Canadian Hydro. This is already done on various smaller scales in the US and across the globe. People in Norway are being riled up by their right wing parties because they are selling hydro electricity (and gas) at a high profit to the rest of Europe via connections because of the Russian situation, and there's nothing the right-wing hates more than market-based price signals that suggest you should maybe use less fossil fuels and be more efficient.
There is no need for that "right-wing" snub there, the same is happening here in Sweden where power prices in the middle and south have been going through the roof even though power generation costs have mostly [1] been unchanged due to the majority of power generation coming from hydroelectric plants (the north) and nuclear plants (the south). Prices have shot up in the south of Sweden because that part of the country is connected to the European grid and exports power generated in the north. Sweden is divided into 4 price regions, the price difference between the top 2 regions and the bottom 2 tends to be enormous. The explanation for the price difference is supposed to be the lack of power generation capacity in the south [see 1, again] while the north and middle have an excess of generating capacity but supposedly lack the network capacity to export this power to the south. That this is not correct is shown by the fact that the power actually is exported through the network [2] and from there finds its way to consumers both in Sweden as well as in neighbouring countries. The majority of the price difference is found between region SE2 and SE3 with power in SE3 often being several times more expensive than in SE2 (currently at €27/MHh in SE2, €525/MWh in SE3 for a factor of 20) with the proceedings of that differential going to the state. Everyone in Sweden paid for the creation of the power infrastructure but those living in the south get to pay dearly due to this artificial price difference.
[1] thanks to the "green party" shutting down half of the nuclear capacity the top load oil-fired power plant in Karlshamn which used to run only during the coldest periods of winter is now running in the heart of summer, consuming between 70 m³ and 140m³ of oil per hour - it has been running for more hours this year than it ran for the last 10 years combined. Oil did get more expensive but Karlshamn still only produces a tiny fraction of power delivered here
> “I think it’s simply political,” Nilsson says. “The conservative parties are hoping to gain votes by bringing up the nuclear issue. I don’t think they seriously think that we will build new nuclear in Sweden. Everyone knows that it’s terribly expensive and takes a very long time.”
> Söder agrees: “The right-wing parties (Sweden Democrats, Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals) have nuclear power as a common interest where they can show unity. There are also several communities where wind power resistance has become significant, and by stating ‘we think it was stupid to shut down Ringhals’, they can attract voters – even if this will not in any way solve the long-term challenges in Sweden, which is to build a lot of new power production as cheaply as possible.”
> It’s also worth noting that the Energiforsk report estimated that power prices would have been 35–50 percent lower if Sweden had opened an additional large, offshore windfarm off the coast of southern Sweden.
So it appears there was need for my "right-wing" comment after all. I must be psychic.
A "price signal" is artificial when the market is manipulated to set the price artificially as is done in Sweden where electricity prices in the south are tied to the European market while those in the north are not. This leads to extreme differences in price based exclusively on where you happen to live. In some cases people will pay 20-30 times more for the same electricity than their neighbours who happen to just live on the other side of the region.
Should I call this type of manipulation "left-wing" to counter your "right-wing" accusations? State-controlled markets are after all a "left-wing" phenomenon. But no, I won´t since I deem this type of polarised discussion counterproductive.
On the subject of building nuclear power plants it is clear to everyone and his dog that the reason why building new plants is expensive and takes a long time lies in the policies put in place by the same people who claim that building nuclear power plants is too expensive and takes too much time. The "wind farm" argument is just as hollow since it is not the lack of "wind farms" which has driven up the price of electricity but the fact that those same people closed down 6 fully operational nuclear plants, thereby creating an electricity shortage in the south of the country which has led to an enormous increase in the use of fossil fuel-powered plants - the same plants they accuse of causing "climate change". Top load plants which used to only be needed in extreme circumstances - severe cold snaps in the middle of winter - are now needed on a regular basis to keep the net frequency from sagging below 48.5 Hz.
There are literal physical reasons why the prices in different markets are different. The transmission capacity is the limiting factor.
Why do you think those are left-wing and artificial?
Wind has been the cheapest source of energy in Europe for over a decade, yet the Swedish right-wing are against it.
As long as the power plant has decent pollution controls and the carbon is taxed I don't really have an issue with it. That provides a clear price signal to build more cheap renewables, like wind. Unless you are against that, like the Swedish right-wing parties. Which doesn't really give me any confidence that they're doing the smart things to solve this 'problem' they've caused. And the local Swedish energy experts seem to agree with me.
The transmission capacity is only too small because the nuclear power plants were closed. The Swedish distribution network was designed for hydropower in the north, nuclear power in the south. The hydro plants in the north would feed heavy industry, the nuclear plants in the south would feed the needs of most of the population and industry there with the rest being filled in by the overcapacity from those hydro plants in the north.
Then the nuclear power plants were closed while simultaneously allowing the establishment of several data centres by the likes of Google in the south. Those data centres - which easily saturate the local transmission capacity which has already caused other industry to look elsewhere for expansion due to the lack of electricity - do not pay regular electricity rates, they pay far less than either other industries let alone regular consumers.
Who closed those nuclear power plants? Who called for the establishment of those data centres, knowing what problems this would cause? Who did not upgrade the transmission capacity in the full knowledge of its limits?
So, this is not a natural market, it has been manipulated with disastrous results for the majority of the Swedish population - most of whom live in the regions SE3 and SE4 where electricity prices have risen dramatically in the last years.
As to you defence of the use of those fossil fuel power plants due to the (intentional) failure of the policies of the "green" party I can only shake my head in disbelief. What does it take to get those who claim to support "green" policies to admit they were wrong on the issue of nuclear power? More than the environment and the economy can bear it seems.
Also... drop it with that senseless "right" moniker already. It is a tired old trope and as far from the truth as can be. Looking at Sweden the supposed "right-wing" party Sverigedemokraterna is a centrist party (their program is strongly reminiscent of that of the social democrats in the '60s) and the "right-wing" Moderaterna is in reality centre-right (they, like all other Swedish 'mainstream' parties support the welfare state to a large extent). Sverigedemokraterna actually has an "energy expert" on an electable position for the coming elections - Elsa Widding - who wrote a report [1] on the subject of the Swedish grid, if you read Swedish (or feed it to a translator) it gives some insight in what they have in mind if they were to gain power. Their short-term focus lies on the preservation of existing hydropower (which "the left" wants to wind down to a significant extent, up to 1.5 TWh is to be closed down), an increased focus on achieving 100% fossil-free power (to avoid the situation I described where the oil-fired top load power plant is running in the heart of summer) to be achieved by e.g. restarting some of the nuclear power plants which "the left" closed down, focusing on combined heat-power (which "the left" is in the process of regulating out of existence) and getting rid of those sweetheart deals I mentioned where Google/Facebook/Microsoft (et al) get power nearly for free due to contracts signed by "the left". Their longer-term focus lies on increasing the amount of nuclear power in the mix, focusing on 100% fossil-free instead of 100% "renewable" and re-focusing on "climate" effects of power generation instead of "nuclear-free" power generation.
[edit] I just noticed a new article being published in Dagens Nyheter on the subject of the establishment of new nuclear power plants in Sweden. The conclusion is that this is fully possible but requires the removal of barriers put in place by "the left". The most important changes are the removal of the decision to close all nuclear power plants by 2040, the restriction that nuclear power plants can only be established there where there already is a nuclear power plant and a change which makes it possible to establish small modular reactors [2].
I stand by my claim that the 'right-wing' are (for no obvious logical or politically coherent reason) against wind power. It's a weird global phenomenon.
They're also against solar, and efficiency, and EVs and believing in climate change etc. I personally would suggest they're getting paid by fossil fuel interests, not sure if that's generally considered a wacky out there conspiracy theory or not. At the very least they're taking advantage of conspiracy theories created by the fossil fuel lobby to gain votes for their unpopular ideas.
Meanwhile, the strange phenomenon of the 'left-wing' intentionally letting Google set up datacentres in places where they know that it will artificially drive up prices for consumers and selling them power at below market cost. That's not a stereotype I recognise. Sounds a bit right-wing if anything to be honest.
Combined Heat and Power, using carbon emitting fuels? I hope the 'left' is regulating that out of existance in a country with so much green electricity, heat pumps are almost certainly better, cheaper, cleaner.
And this is their energy expert? Their big focus is on 100% fossil-free power, but they also don't like wind power?
Wikipedia suggests that's not their only diametrically opposed policy goals:
> The party argues that other countries should reduce their emissions instead of Sweden which they believe is already doing enough on that front.[169][170] The party advocates keeping nuclear power plants as a prominent energy source in Sweden,[171] believing it to be an efficient way to combat climate change.
So nuclear is good for climate change, but Sweden shouldn't do more for climate change? That makes sense. Maybe the Swedish energy expert who said they were just lying about being pro nuclear is right.
> Nobody is calling them out on this,” he complains of the way the Swedish media has covered the issue. “If they want nuclear, how are they expecting to get it? What type of subsidy will they give? For Hinkley Point in the UK, there’s a 35-year contract where the government promises to pay £93.5 per megawatt hour — so about 1.1 krona per kilowatt hour for 35 years. That’s a heavy subsidy. So if the Moderates or the Liberals really want this, how are they going to set it up? They should explain that.”
> At the Hinkley Point price, Nilsson adds, it might actually be cheaper to generate hydrogen from wind power when power prices are low, store it, and burn it in gas turbines when prices are high, even though more than half of the electricity produced would be lost in the process.
Given what you state here and what is written in that report on the Swedish grid I assume you agree that the "right-wing" Sverigedemokraterna is not a "rigt-wing" party? They want more efficiency, they want 100% fossil-free power generation, they want to focus on "climate" impact of energy generation.
Realise that the only reason I use these senseless "left-wing" and "right-wing" labels is to show just how nonsensical they are. I do not think in these terms, I just responded to your use of the "right-wing" moniker.
By the way, where would you put the CEO of a company like Vestas or General Electric? Are they "right-wing" because they are greedy capitalists or are they "left-wing" because they want to build more wind turbines?
> Wikipedia suggests...
Wikipedia has become weaponised and is even less of a trustworthy source than it was before the weaponisation.
> US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035
Getting to 100% carbon-free generation is a goal of the President's Long Term Strategy [1]:
> DECARBONIZE ELECTRICITY. Electricity delivers
> diverse services to all sectors of the American
> economy. The transition to a clean electricity
> system has been accelerating in recent years—
> driven by plummeting costs for solar and wind
> technologies, federal and subnational policies,
> and consumer demand. Building on this success,
> the United States has set a goal of 100% clean
> electricity by 2035, a crucial foundation for net-zero
> emissions no later than 2050.
Other releases have set a goal of 2030 [2]:
> 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity (CFE) by 2030, at least half of which will be locally supplied clean energy to meet 24/7 demand;
I don't agree with the rosy outlook of the previous commenter, though. Things are looking up, but I think it would be quite a stretch to hit this goal.
I think the latter is talking about procurement of energy by the government, not generation. Which obviously helps and is something the government has more control over, but is a slightly different thing.
The 100% by 2035 is fairly widely communicated, but there's definately a document that talks about aiming for 95% in 2030 and then focusing on electrification of other sectors as the diminishing returns start to hit. Can't find it at the moment, too many other announcents with very similar google search terms.
edit: I can only find sligthly older commitments to 80% clean energy by 2030. Which I guess is close enough, as the targets keep ratcheting as it becomes more obviously a good idea.
> the latter is talking about procurement of energy by the government, not generation
Cute how they don’t link to the order nor mention its number. Here it is [1].
It exempts the GAO and independent agencies as well as anything not “an executive agency as defined in section 105 of title 5, United States Code” (§ 603.b). So no military, which is reasonable.
And the big elephant in the room? getting the US military on board is going to be tough. Every year, US armed forces consume more than 100 million barrels of oil to power ships, vehicles, aircraft, and ground operations
The US military spends more on renewables each year than most countries. They were on board long before the wider US Government felt it was politically safe.
> The military’s push into alternative energy started under Republican President George W. Bush in 2007, when he signed a law requiring the Pentagon to get 25 percent of the electricity for its buildings from renewable energy by 2025.
What is in the bill that is investment in renewables? My understanding is that there aren’t so much subsidies to generators-suppliers, but rather rebates and savings for homeowners and consumers.
Getting people to use more efficient appliances and insulating their homes should help reach these targets. We don't need to generate today levels of energy if we can drop usage by some percentage and just generate all of that with renewables.
That being said, the bill is also pushing for heat pumps to replace natural gas burning furnaces, so I'm guessing the net impact will be we need today levels of electricity generation, or maybe even a little more once we look at electrifying things that currently don't interact with the grid and consume fossil fuels directly.
And actually as I even type this, I'm remembering that electrifying cars is a big part of this that will definitely drive up electricity need way more than efficiency gains suppress demands for some use. Hopefully we can get to some of the more transformative ideas suggested about improving city planning and density together with investments in public transit so we don't end up producing way too many batteries simply to preserve a car centric transportation system.
I do think even just incentivizing consumers to buy electric everything will have a strong movement to drive more electricity generation, and renewables are the cheapest or very cost competitive options for new power generation installations. I think there are some funds in the new bill for encouraging sunsetting fossil fuel based plants early, but we likely need more of that down the line.
> Getting people to use more efficient appliances and insulating their homes should help reach these targets. We don't need to generate today levels of energy if we can drop usage by some percentage and just generate all of that with renewables.
Sure, but if the bulk of the problem isn’t residential inefficiency (or if these incentives are only going to recoup a small portion of that inefficiency), then perhaps this money and political will might be better spent elsewhere.
In particular, I suspect industry is a big emitter and the big gains are probably to be had in disincentivizing carbon emissions in industry. The low hanging fruit would be a border adjustment tariff on countries that don’t meet our current emission standards (bring more jobs to the US, which improves our supply chain security). From there we could set a low price on carbon and ratchet it up as necessary. I would much rather us squabble over the price of carbon than trying to play whack-a-mole with specific incentives and disincentives. Moreover, carbon pricing isn’t a cost, it’s a revenue source.
Besides carbon pricing, it would also be neat to see the money spent on increasing our renewable energy capacity. It’s not enough to convert our grid to renewables because we have all of these new EVs and electric heaters and electric industrial applications coming online and replacing fossil fuel applications. The grid is going to be much more strained than before, so we need to increase that capacity as quickly as possible.
Lots of little things, but a big one is that I think you can generate Green Hydrogen with Renewables and get tax credits on both (though I did read some conflicting stuff on that, think it still makes sense if you don't get the credit on the renewables, but if you do then it's another big push).
I am still not clearly getting the picture here - what exactly this means.
US has about 30% electricity generated by Coal and I do not see that go away in next 20 years let alone 8. What am I missing here?
As of today, US energy portfolio is around 83% fossil. The best case scenario for 2040 is something like 50%, that includes we get Nuclear fusion, massive battery storage, material science breakthroughs that will put a dent on steel and cement consumption.
I don't expect the US to hit that ambitious 2030 target. But you may not realize how fast the American generation mix has been changing recently. In 2015 coal supplied 33% of American electricity generation and renewables supplied 13%:
The largest increases in U.S. electricity generation in our forecast come from renewable energy sources, mostly solar and wind. We expect renewable sources will provide 22% of U.S. generation in 2022 and 24% in 2023, up from 20% in 2021.
All the big developed nations have committed to phase out coal by 2030, the USA skipped it because of politics, but if you read any of the coverage of that they usually say that it would happen with or without a government commitment e.g.
Why the U.S. Didn’t Join 40 Other Countries in Pledge to End Coal
subtitle: Economics is already playing a large role in curtailing American coal power
The trouble is, the economics only worked out that way because natural gas was cheap - it's not anymore, and countries have been rolling back their coal shutdowns as a result. There's a good chance it never will be again. The same people who were campaigning for that managed to convince pretty much all developed nations other than the US to end new natural gas investment and extraction, and without the supply there prices won't go down and it won't be feasible to use as a coal replacement. This will probably also cut into the switch to renewables because all of the alternatives to natural gas, like coal, play much less well with them.
High gas prices help renewables, because they are even cheaper by comparison. As shown by this model, which as well as removing the 75% of coal fired electricity, reduces the gas fired electricity from 15% to less than 5% and saves lots of money in the process.
The American move from coal to gas shows that even in places where it's still politically favorable to pretend climate change isn't happening, or that coal is clean, simple economics is a big driver of change.
I read somewhere that it's the storage/distribution part that's hurting California. Can't go full-throttle without disaster. If the storage/distribution part was worked out, CA would be full renewable tomorrow.
Is California at the point now where more renewables are not just diminishing returns, but potentially negative returns due to inconsistent generation causing thrashing and large levels of curtailment required to stabilize the grid?
They're definitely causing faster natural gas generator breakdown due to them having turning up and down more frequently, causing greater wear and tear.
More batteries and demand response to stabilize the day to day grid and absorb the uncontrollable generation output is going to be increasingly necessary.
No, because there never is such an issue. Renewables can turn themselves off and on so fast that this won't ever be a problem. The current Australian model we're discussing has about 15% 'overgeneration' because that's economically efficient, there's no problems caused by that.
If you have so much wind and solar generation that they spend too much of their lifespans sitting idle and not generating income, they potentially never even pay for their initial build cost and basic maintenance, let alone be a better investment than just buying a treasury note yielding 1%. That's a recipe for long term stagnation and depression.
If whole solar or wind farms find themselves sitting idle someone will drop off some containers nearby to split water into hydrogen or run a data center or something else that drinks power and skip the grid middle-man. Over-idle is not going to be a real issue; someone will always find a way to use of excess power.
Another use is thermal batteries. Dump the power into a resistively heated mass and use that for industrial purposes. Thermal storage can be incredibly cheap per stored unit of energy.
I agree that there are solutions, I just think it is silly when people propose these high capital solutions. E.g. run a desalination plant 4 hours a day, ect.
The real solution, like you mention, is more capacity + storage. Pumped storage is my personal favorite, as it is much cheaper than batteries for anything more than 2 hours of power/day. Pumped seawater has a pretty small footprint.
Anyone for whom the ROCE is better than 1% (per the given scenario).
I doubt that data centers will be built, but there are other uses beside hydrogen -> ammonia->urea. Desalination, for instance. Carbon capture, to make money in the carbon credit markets. Even at 4 hours a day, mechanical capture with plausible costs can compete with forests.
Bitcoin miners are the key players innovating in that space right now. It's something that can very easily be packaged up in portable containers. I believe Chinese miners for years had a yearly migration to soak up massive amounts of excess hydro power during the rainy season that would have been otherwise wasted.
There might be a place for more generic computation datacenters, but they would have to find a relatively unique customer that has compute loads that can be turned off and on at a moment's notice, and potentially be down for days, weeks, and even months. There's probably a startup to be founded here, if you can figure out how to severely undercut equivalent AWS services to justify the lack of uptime guarantees.
I don't know enough about hydrogen production to know if it can be quickly spun up/down to suck up variable load. I imagine gas transport infrastructure is going to be the biggest blocker.
Well the economic part is solved by solar/wind/batteries being much cheaper than all the other options, that's why this model overprovisions wind and solar.
So yes, lots of solar might make it more cost effective to add some wind and/or batteries and vice versa but that's a good thing and what this model explores.
Can you build out enough capacity that the lowest wind conditions during nighttime in winter don't cause outages? I worry about distribution as the answer due to the vulnerability of our existing power distribution infrastructure. Do we have answers for that yet? We need them in any case I suppose unless you build out local storage to such an extent that you don't need any grid at all even in the coldest winter or hottest summer.
You can back up the entire grid with combustion turbines burning hydrogen or some other e-fuel. A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant costs $500/kW, 20x cheaper than a nuclear plant ($10,000/kW).
What you have in mind requires someone to do the coordination. that is currently the system operator and they operate at a data rate measured in minutes or 4 s for the fastest changes (e.g. PJM).
Meanwhile, solar output can go from 100% to 10% in three seconds. How is this not a problem?
An energy storage regulating resource, such as a battery or flywheel, cannot burn fuels to produce electricity, but instead charge and discharge energy from the bulk electric system itself through a power inverter. Energy storage devices can match a desired output within 200 milliseconds of receiving the regulating signal; therefore these resources do not need to model any dynamics, ramp limitations, or dead-bands.
Australia is also using batteries in a similar way:
"South Australian Battery Responded in Just 140 Milliseconds After A Coal-Fired Power Plant Failed"
One thing I've learned recently is that grid management is extremely primitive. People are literally emailing each other word docs and pdfs and calling each other on the phone to make changes to generation output to keep the grid stable.
It's an area that's ripe for some software innovation, if they can actually break through the legacy management club that currently runs the grid.
The problem anonporridge was talking about was the 10% of solar meeting the current demand and then suddenly going to 100% in three seconds, so there's 'too much' power on the grid i.e. overprovision breaking things. Which it doesn't.
While your example is solar at 100% exactly meeting demand, and then dropping to 10% in 3 seconds, and the fix for that is: overprovision (and some other stuff).
They do need to have decent predictions of demand and supply, like this graph that shows the 1-hour ahead and 24-hour ahead predictions:
Well, you need a 30 minute battery buffer to get gas peakers online. Whether those gas peakers are running natural gas or green hydrogen depends on how much excess solar capacity there is and how much hydrogen plants cost.
Also, medium term storage is a very, very young industry. Things like redox batteries, flow batteries, molten salt, compressed air, and many others are on the horizon. The better these work the more gas peakers are solely used as backup.
Thermal storage, like resistively heated sand, can also act as a backup source, since once the sand is exhausted they could then resort to burning something to get the heat.
California has a massive battery/solar rollout pipeline, and again that's before the IRA stuff, which lets you get incentives for batteries that aren't part of a solar/wind project, which can be used to fix transmission issues as wel as just being storage, so they'll be fine.
For the cost of 5kW nameplate of new western nuclear (>$10/W) you can get, right now, at retail, as an individual: 50kW nameplate of solar, and 8kW nameplate of wind, and 75kWh of storage and a 5kW generator (which will almost never need turning on) and a biogas digester.
And it will produce enough excess power to replace itself (with a cheaper version) or just triple the batteries if you can get 2-3c/kWh for the surplus well before the reactor is built
Mentioning nuclear as an option is about as sensible as a generator bicycle.
I wouldn't advocate for new nuclear (for the same reason the creator of this model gives, it just isn't cost effective) but existing nuclear in stable, northern regions that also have hydro is definately a positive if you're aiming to get to carbon-free power faster.
If you don't have the much hydro then it can fight with solar/wind for usage of that dispatchable resource, and if you don't have the nuclear you can build solar/wind for less so there's no reason to start.
Most countries should be able to reach such levels if providing guarantees for the credit, removing overly excessive regulation and allowing the most capable and experienced construction companies to lead construction and initial operations, especially if large enough numbers are built that economies of scale kick in.
Renewables-only systems (apart from hydro, where available), are not able to provide constant power output at anything near such levels yet, without a significant percentage of the power being generated by natural gas.
Massive capital investments in the grid, hydrogen generation, etc, MAY be able to actually provide stable power, but would be very unlikely to match nuclear if nuclear is optimized for price.
This could change in a few years, obviously, especially if storage becomes super cheap. But there is no guarantee of that.
As for the astronomical costs of some recent nuclear plants in western countries, those are a bit like evaluating the price of electric cars based on the Tesla Model S Plaid. We can get perfectly serviceable plants for a fraction of the price, by removing most of the bells and whistles, while still making sure that they are safer than most of the plants in operation today.
There are a couple of problems with that analysis.
Firstly I am very sceptical of their 60 year claim with an additional 20 years for LTO. Every time I look a supposed 60 year reactor in the west up it is having major problems after less than 40 -- I'd be interested in seeing a survey of reactors broken down by location (china is provably much more cost efficient at doing large projects than anyone else albeit at a high human cost) and whether they're funded by geopolitical incentives (russia subsidizing reactors to induce energy dependence). Additionally half of the reactor lifetime is irrelevant to meeting 2050 targets even if we take design lifetime as true.
Even if we take the $30/MWh as an assumption. There are solar projects completing right now on the order of 80c/fixed Watt or $1.2 tilting. These produce 5-6 and 6-8 kWh/day/kW respectively.
Ending the day with half of that production in a battery nets you an LCOE around $50 and that is falling by 15%/year with little indication of slowing down.
Wind is a similar story (although not dropping as precipitously) and moderately anti-correlated.
When 'we promise we can reduce the price by 3x and we'll follow through on that promise for 70 years even though costs have been going up and we've never followed through before' is a pretty hard sell against 'we've been consistently dropping costs for 10 years at a rate that will make even the most optimistic projections of nuclear look expensive before you can build even the first one'. Then with the shorter lived renewables you get your money back after 10-20 years, and cna spend it on a new system that is $3/MWh (or more likely 10 as land and coupling costs will dominate).
And then there's all the geopolitical problems going nuclear entails for the large portion of the world who aren't allowed to make their own fuel. We did that with fossil fuels and it was awful -- and they can be refined by more than 5 countries.
> (china is provably much more cost efficient at doing large projects than anyone else albeit at a high human cost)
Tesla and SpaceX is proving that with the right leadership, western countries can also do large projects. Anyway, I think we should let international corporations compete for such projects, kind of like ship construction or more remotely, the car industry.
> Ending the day with half of that production in a battery nets you an LCOE around $50 and that is falling by 15%/year with little indication of slowing down.
That is great, and I'm a huge believer in solar for many purposes in suitable climates. Where I live, though, we have about 4-6 hours of faint daylight in the middle of winter, when it's really cold.
Also, unlike nuclear, no country has so far been able to demonstrate an electrical grid that is powered exclusively by renewables (and Europe has tried). So far, everyone who tried, ended up with a huge reliance on (mostly Russian) natural gas, while having prices quite a bit above $50/MWH LCOE (for the grid as a hole). Currently, consumer facing prices are above $500/MWH, and may reach $1000/MWH this winter.
If some country wants to invest in a plan to make them independent of natural gas without nuclear, I wish them the best of luck, but in my opinion, nuclear is the proven path. Also, it's not like one cannot do both at the same time.
> Wind is a similar story (although not dropping as precipitously) and moderately anti-correlated.
Wind also has longer variance in supply. To some extent, making a grid the size of Australia may lower the variance, but at the cost of a grid that competes with nuclear in zero day investment costs while bringing its own set of political risks (especially in places where the grid needs to span many countries with different cultures).
> spend it on a new system that is $3/MWh
With all due respect, this is a fantasy number. When you're not including the storage and/or distribution needed to provide stable supply, this number means nothing. (Or rather, it's only relevant as long as only a small fraction of the power comes from such a source.)
Actual costs (LCOE, including enough enough storage to provide stable supply) are much higher. Different estimates exist. Your $50/MWh is probably the lowest I've seen. Typically I see $100-$200/MWH when including moderate storage, and several times that (up to $1000/MWH) when including enough storage to last several days with very little wind.
From my point of view, paying $30-$50/MWH for stable electricity production, with the lowest carbon emissions (construction emissions for concrete, etc, are about the same as the best renewables), low dependence on minerals that are in short supply (rare earths, etc) using proven technology is quite fair.
Hopefully, renewables, thorium, fusion etc will continue to develop to a point where they become clearly superior to nuclear in terms of price. But if so, I see that as a potential upside. Building more nuclear provides a hedge against the risk that this will take a long time.
> And then there's all the geopolitical problems going nuclear entails for the large portion of the world who aren't allowed to make their own fuel.
It's not for every country, but unlike natural gas, there are enough deposits in stable democratic western countries to power all such countries.
Also, there are alternatives sources for China and Russia to not worry too much about the risk either. India, being somewhat in-between these worlds would probably be able to source fuel from at least one.
And unlike natural gas, transporting nuclear fuel is quite trivial, due to the energy density.
Finally, it's not like we need to have 100% of one source of energy. Some should probably go mostly renewable (Australia, for example), due to climate. Some already have plenty of hydro, and some would benefit from having more (or much more) nuclear.
Some might also need to go for fossil fuels, at least as backup. I'm thinking of smaller islands, for instance (like Hawaii). But it would be good if we could soon start to REDUCE the dependence on fossil fuels, instead of consuming more and more every year, globally.
> With all due respect, this is a fantasy number. When you're not including the storage and/or distribution needed to provide stable supply, this number means nothing. (Or rather, it's only relevant as long as only a small fraction of the power comes from such a source.)
Distribution will dominate at some point, you are correct. This was more meant to be illustrative of how current battery and solar prices look from the point of view of the market that existed when just finished nuclear projects were approved. $50/MWh with 4 hours storage would look just as crazy from the POV of 2006
Speaking of distribution. 80% of the world's population lives at a lower latitude than washington DC, and about 90% of the remainder is within 2000km. Over this distance HVDC is a viable transport method with costs commensurable to $10-20/MWh. The main issue is security (both political/market and against disaster). For areas without sufficient hydro a reserve of green ammonia or (even physical transport) could be viable.
> Currently, consumer facing prices are above $500/MWH, and may reach $1000/MWH this winter.
Green hydrogen is scalable at about $400/MWh presently and this is decreasing rapidly. This was a wakeup call that doing so is needed. Ammonia is not far behind. Realistic projections for the next 8 years are around $100/MWh.
Combined with short term storage, this makes the $50/MWh with ~unbounded buffer seem pretty achievable by 2030 if sodium batteries and perovskites (or equivalent improvements) are scaled.
> Green hydrogen is scalable at about $400/MWh presently and this is decreasing rapidly. This was a wakeup call that doing so is needed. Ammonia is not far behind. Realistic projections for the next 8 years are around $100/MWh.
The present price is obviously too high. I fully support any investment into this kind of tech, including from the government(s), though in my experience, even when tech is available, it takes time to roll it out.
Maybe by 2050 we will have the ability to provide stable, fully renewable energy at $50/MWh or below, without being limited in how much we can roll out due to some rare mineral or industrial capacity.
But we KNOW we have the tech to produce nuclear at such levels (or below) already.
In my opinion, we should do both, and if, 30-40 years from now, some nuclear plant companies go bankrupt, so be it.
And these claims that the prices can go down are contingent on serial production. 30-40 years is the time window at which significant capacity starts being made, not finishing.
What matters is Joules before 2050 not starting at 2060, and even the most optimistic projections have them costing on the order of $200-500/MWh with nuclear.
When supply cannot meet demand, prices do not represent production costs.
Building a nuclear plant takes about 5 years. In situations with sufficient sense of urgency, construction speeds can be ramped up surprisingly quickly.
From 1940 to 1944 US federal spending went up about ninefold (while GDP almost doubled as a result)
The liberty ships were the most obvious example. Initially it took 230 days to build them (in 1941), in 1943 it took 39 days.
A more modern example is the number of cars built by Tesla each year. From 2013 to 2023, the number of cars built per year will have increased by a factor of about 100x.
Similar economies of scale are available for energy plants, if we choose to. For solar panels and batteries, we're already seeing this.
If the political will was there today to vastly expand the amount of nuclear power, we would be able to produce A LOT within 10-15 years.
The same goes for renewables, of course, as long as raw materials and technologies are available.
You appear to agree that solar and wind and batteries are the best options for most of the world even if your optimistic nuclear price point is reached.
So it's not clear what you are arguing against? Isn't that the best way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels which are a global commodity?
Eventually, perhaps, but I see fully renewable as just slightly less sci fi than fusion or thorium.
Instead, I'm seeing countries like Germany restart their dirty, old, lignite fueled power plants (due to lack of natural gas, another, slightly cleaner, fossil fuel), because "environmentalist" organizations have been fighting against nuclear for the last 40 years or more.
Germany has TRIED to build up a lot of renewable capacity, but have hardly built up more than the electricity provided by the nuclear they shut down.
What I want is for us to SHUT DOWN all fossil fuel plants ASAP, stop using natural gas for heating and oil based fuels for most transportation.
This should and could have been started 40 years ago, if it were not for the scaremongers.
I welcome all renewable initiatives that are able to prove they can deliver stable power at a competitive price, and wish them the best of luck. I do NOT welcome the Utopia-chasers that promote renewables as part of their virtue signaling, while either being unrealistic or deceitful about motives, costs, challenges around stability, etc (both before and after investments are made).
And this is especially bad when they spread lies about the safety level of nuclear (either direct lies, or more likely when talking about "radiation" as something dangerous regardless of intensity).
I do realize that such behavior exists in all camps, but I find it especially bad when so called "environmentalists" have promoted policies that have had the net effect of NOT being able to reduce emissions nearly as much as we could have, while still causing prices to increase and ALSO maximize our dependence on Putin and various Arab dictatorial kings and princes.
And btw, while you seem to be charitable about nuclear, only arguing from a cost perspective, there are plenty of organizations out there that still place nuclear in the "dirty" camp alongside fossil fuels when arguing about strategies for the future.
So, while I'm certainly supporting most initiatives that aim to improve renewable power production, I think we (and especially Europe) should invest in a relatively large number of new, reasonably priced nuclear plants, for instance based on recent Korean designs.
Corruption potential. It's pretty typical for large long term projects to 'go bankrupt' and the cleanup fund is mysteriously empty. There are also a lot of hidden externalities -- publicly funded security, infrastructure, concessions required to keep fuel producers placated. It's too centralized for believable complete accounting.
Geopolitical. Adoption of nuclear outside of UK/France/USA/China/Russia essentially tips the global power balance even further in favour of colonial powers and corps that have caused the problem in the first place and continue to export mass suffering.
Incomplete. Most of the world will never be allowed to have enrichment capabilities, and many countries will never be allowed a nuclear program at all. This means low burnup reactors, and there is not enough uranium for a complete replacement to primary energy at 3% burnup.
Consistent overpromising. Predictions for large projects seem to be consistently wrong when they're 40 years out.
Cost doesn't look great anymore when you include cleanup. Incidents will happen, especially if regulations are relaxed. Even if the rate goes down tenfold we'll still be talking on the order of one a decade, and spending a trillion on cleanup starts making other solutions look pretty great.
I think my main objection with your points is that I see nuclear as an alternative to fossil fuels, NOT as an alternative to renewables.
As for each point, I will start with the last:
> Cost doesn't look great anymore when you include cleanup.
Actual harm caused by nuclear is miniscule when compared to fossil fuels. Chernobyl caused somewhere between 1000 and 100000 casualties, probably less than air pollution from fossil fuels cause EACH YEAR, only in Europe.
Wind and even hydro also create considerable environmental effects, so the alternative cost should not be seen as zero.
There is no evidence (at least not conclusive evidence) that exposure to radiation doses below 80-100mSv cause any health hazard, and a lot of the "cleanup" and other measures are done to prevent exposure to doses that are often below 10mSv per person, and are probably not needed.
> Corruption potential.
I live in a country with very low levels of classical corruption, luckily. I think corruption affects everything, and should be dealt with as a separate problem.
> Geopolitical. Adoption of nuclear outside of UK/France/USA/China/Russia ..
I suppose India should be added to your list. Anyway, some of the biggest deposits are in countries like Australia. Obviously, I don't want to force anyone to adopt nuclear, but it's a lot easier to find friendly suppliers of nuclear fuel than natural gas.
> Incomplete.
Same thing.
> Consistent overpromising.
40 years ago, reactors were typically built to only last 40 years. (They were also cheaper to build back then). Only newer models are designed for longer lifespans. Anyway, from my perspective, most reactors continue to deliver despite old age, if well maintained, and they don't shut down just because Putin has a temper tantrum.
If you're living in Europe, just imagine what the price of electricity would be if France's electricity depended on natural gas the same way the German does...
So you can buffer the wind/solar output for just 78 minutes? Doesn’t sound like a complete solution.
Edit: I guess per the paper it really depends on the specific details of generation/load timing. Could be workable for a certain region but not for another.
The parent is pointing out, that if you are trying to find a solution to generate 5kw of constant power using nuclear, for the same cost you can get an absurd amount of renewable generation and storage plus a backup generator. The batteries can store 15 hours worth of energy at peak demand, you get a 10x overbuild of peak capacity in solar, plus wind, biogas and a backup generator to boot. It is highly unlikely that the system would ever fail. I would guess you could probably cut the system size in half and still have uptime in the high 9's. And the added bonus is you would have a fair bit of redundancy should any part of the system need maintenance, whereas the nuclear solution doesn't even come with a backup generator.
The demonstration is 5kW year round with insignificant consumption of fossil fuels everywhere with a climate about as good as Toronto or better, not having somewhere to put all the sunlight. Mid-winter in high latitude you get as little as 2hrs of sunlight/day (or 0 in the arctic, but hardly anyone lives there). If you live in the tropics, 10kW is probably fine.
Also if you feel the need to use it up, electrolyzers are cheap and hydrogen is worth money. You can also store a great deal of energy in a few tonnes of NaOH and avoid using precious winter electricity for heating.
You can also reshuffle the wind, solar and battery for your local climate, or wait a year or three for sodium batteries to halve the price.
I'm not all in on nuclear, but nameplate comparison is meaningless. Solar might hit the name plate for a few hours a day with suitable weather while nuclear can run 24/7 or on demand.
Good thing we weren't comparing nameplate then but instead comparing ability to meet baseload on a cost basis (that thing that's supposed to be most strongly in favour of nuclear) and finding the result insanely in favour of renewables
5kW nameplate nuclear is 3-4.5kW net with 10-40% of the time needing total backup and zero ability to meet higher peak demand.
The system I described needs 2.4 hours of peak sunlight spread throughout a day or 15 hours of wind in a day or 30kg of biofuel (not doable for very many days) or 30kg of imported fuel or any combination with the battery averaging 1-5(ie. you meet ~85% of load with wind/biofuel and draw ~20% of battery) days to meet the 5kW target. It also has a massive peak capacity which dwarfs the nuclear system during half of the year. You might need to tilt the panels two or three times a year in parts of Canada or similar, and maybe import a few days worth of ethanol (or any other stable hydrocarbon you can run your generator on) each year, but this is still less backup than a fission plant needs.
Couple it to an uncorrelated system or trade some solar for an electrolyzer and fuel cells and you can reduce reliance on imported fuel even more. Solar cells and batteries will also better than halve in price well before your plant is finished -- likely making it impossible to even run, let alone recoup your costs. Additionally perovskites work better with partial shade and are quite likely to hit cost parity with solar so the nameplate value can be reduced (or reliability on a still, cloudy, winter, northern morning will increase).
This has been an article of religious faith, but I'm not sure it has ever been a technologically defensible opinion. Before the recent order of magnitude drops in battery prices, it may have been an economical argument, but to make that economic argument one would have to ignore the technological tech curve of solar and renewables.
And now that nuclear won't be able to compete on the economics, whereas 10 years ago we though we could still build nuclear for historical prices, people have not updated their reasoning.
Most of the models that included nuclear alongside renewables used far far lower prices for nuclear than we can actually build it for. And even then, nuclear was only selected at ~10% of generation for cost reasons, not tech reasons.
The data doesn't include SMRs and MSRs which could be extremely compelling both from a cost and time to build perspective (or they could be a dead end).
Current gen LWRs are problematic for all sorts of reasons but i wouldn't rule nuclear out of the fight just yet. Especially when you take into account china's track record of delivering nuclear plants at a competitive price.
I'm reminded of Admiral Rickover's thoughts on this:
> An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
>On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.
SMRs and MSRs are in the academic stage at the moment. We don't know what they will look like at the end when they are actual products, but there are technical and practical reasons that they haven't been tried before now, so I think it's only prudent to withhold enthusiasm until we have data on their characteristics and potential.
Back in the 80s, we had PV panels in hand, and knowledge of silicon tech curves that could predict the rosy future we live in today. SMRs are a bit more shaky.
Please note that SMR technology has advanced beyond the academic stage. After years of review, NuScale's design has been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Unconstructed plans are the very definition of academic.
NRC approval doesn't say anything about constructability or economics. It doesn't even say much about the operating characteristics, except that the NRC is pretty sure it meets the safety guidelines.
This is why there are these characteristics that Rickover lists, which NuScale will encounter when they finally build, but are not revealed by any planning they have done up until now:
> (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems.
You're literally commenting on a thread about how 100% renewable is possible on a comment demonstrating that an individual can beat the cost effectiveness of new nuclear with 100% renewables.
The utility scale version of the digester is a gas peaker running on green ammonia possibly with a mix of long distance transmission. Everything else scales at least linearly.
Nuclear is dead. The last nail went into the coffin when green hydrogen first hit parity with delivered grey hydrogen in some regions. The case just gets worse from here. Stop shilling.
The US is a lot more than just California and Texas.
Where I live isn't anywhere close to being fully renewable. And home solar is much less economical than it is in California or Texas, largely due to having less sunlight.
Artisanal scale rooftop solar is only economical in Califoria due to feed in tariff subsidies. We could build out utility scale solar of the same capacity for the cost of the subsidy to rooftop solar.
Feed in tariff subsidies are a good policy instrument.
Lots of green tech needed initial subsidies to get started because we currently subsidize fossil fuels and removing those subsidies was politically harder than adding subsidies.
California also very sensibly, introduced net-zero house regulations that mean most new houses will have solar, making it a great deal less artisinal and just another thing you need to build a house.
And rooftop (and generally bulding integrated) solar is in general a good thing. Transmission has a cost and as solar and battery prices plummet, transmission loses the economic battle more and more often when you do the sums. Grids are looking at Non-Wire Alternatives aka Non-Tranmission Alternatives for lots of situations where upgrading or building transmission is the easiest place to minimise costs.
Solar feed in tariffs made a lot of sense initially when they helped bootstrap the market for solar panels but now panels have gotten so cheap the costs of rooftop solar are dominated by installation costs we really should reconsider where we allocate our money to achieve the highest reduction in in emissions.
I have more sympathy for the regulations requiring solar on new buildings since it is far cheaper to install while the roof is being built than to retrofit later.
But as a renter who pays for these subsidies through my electricity bill and cannot benefit from them I want to see the maximum amount of renewable generation built out for the cost added to my bill. Utility scale solar works out 1/3rd the price of residential, or roughly the cost of the residential subsidy alone.
Distribution accounts for only 5% or so of the cost of electricity. It is far more cost effective to build utility scale solar in the desert than on individual roofs.
Deserts aren't good locations for solar, for several reasons:
1. They get hot, and solar PV needs light, not heat to work. Heat actually reduces the effectiveness which is why the difference in output between the best and worst places for solar PV in the USA probably isn't as wide a delta as you would think.
2. They're generally not near people, who mostly live on the coast and so have higher transmission costs. Transmission is enough of a cost factor that building solar and battery (or datacenters) on sites of old coal plants is often done to re-use transmission and save money.
Desert like conditions are required for concentrated solar, which require strong direct sunlight and heat, but PV doesn't have that requirement and can still work in cloudy regions and is generally cheaper than CSP these days even in the desert regions. So solar should be distributed more towards where people live and use electricity.
I think adding the costs to the consumers electricity bills made sense when the grid was mostly polluting, as it incentivises efficiency but as we get closer to a clean grid, it makes less sense. Shifting to time-of-use is probably a good next step to keep the incentive to not burn polluting fuels, shifting the costs to people still burning gas makes sense too.
The whole of society is rigged to give money to homeowners (due to racism and classicsm mostly), so it's not unexpected that solar would lean the same way, it's not inherent to the tech though, just how society works at the moment.
The US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035 and it didn't seem particularly a stretch even before the recent climate bill passed, so I'd guess they're well on target, not even sure a second Trump term as president could derail it now.