I remember as a child being on a school tour of the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant South of Detroit being told that nuclear power would soon become too cheap to monitor. This was over sixty years ago!
So I am a bit skeptical. I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas. Close to fifty years later I am still waiting.
I bet if you're in San Diego, Dallas or Tampa its already there. We have tons of solar getting built in the state of Michigan area but if you inquire its all either government subsidized or wealthy folks who can afford to not care about the economics.
I am not against solar in the least. But it needs to be pointed out that those of us in the Northern climates need a Plan B whether it be nuclear, geo-thermal or something else.
We are very much there already, Solar and Wind are both cheaper than Natural gas which is itself is cheaper than Coal. Solar is around 5 cents a KWH whereas Nuclear is more like 15 cents a KWH. The prices of Wind and Solar are being set by Gas at the moment as well and at some point that pricing will detach once more batteries are in place.
The intermittency is a huge problem. Grid scale batteries and/or pumped hydro are laughably inadequate for bridging the gap. Wind and solar energy is only cheap when they aren’t responsible for maintaining baseload capacity on the grid.
Simply consider the case of China. They install and export more solar PV than anyone else in the world, and they are aggressively building out wind as well. It is literally impossible to get a better price than China when it comes to renewable energy, yet for some reason the Chinese have decided to dump tens of billions of dollars into nuclear energy.
Those plans are to some degree a consequence of a conservative outlook when they were initially approved mixed with local politicians fearing a backlash in a cold winter if there is even a short period with a power shortage. This happened a couple of winters ago in some regions of China and is part of the reason for the coal power plant build spree they went on. Have a search for news on the coal power plant news in 2023. However, these plants turn out to not be really needed and are idle a lot and approvals are plummeting for new coal plants in 2024 already and I would expect to see the same for nuclear soon as renewables continue to prove their reliability and as battery storage continues to grow massively.
That said the growth in renewables will still take some years to make a big dent in coal in China so the nuclear power is welcome!
At some point we need to "tell" people to adjust. The "effectively infinite, at any time" tap of electricity that's subsidized and enabled by an all-encompassing government needs to stop.
We've been effectively spoiled with this capability, and we need to be weaned off quite abruptly. Just because we've been spoiled and expect the grid to give us on-demand energy in the middle of the night, doesn't mean we have to continue doing so.
> I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas
My understanding is commercial solar (as opposed to household solar) is cheaper than natural gas so that prediction is at least partly true
Not really, the over-cited LCOE of solar/wind does not account for the cost of (its increased need of) battery storage. As time of use does not align with the time of generation. Also, battery storage has its own ongoing costs with battery degradation.
You can tell solar+storage is cheaper than anything else except conditionally wind at least in the US because people have stopped building new generation capacity for anything else.
What is the point of citing theoretical values like LCOE when we have direct practical information on predicted profitability?
Energy producers in Texas are are adding 8x as much solar capacity (24 GW) as natural gas capacity (3 GW) [1] over 2024-2025. Do you believe that the entire Texas power plant industry is deliberately choosing less profitable and capital inefficient generation?
That could be the case, they may optimistically forecasted or undercounted potential future problems, but at this point in time their calculations seem to show that solar is tremendously more cost efficient to deploy over its expected lifetime.
It could also be the case that there are just subsidies for renewable energy in Texas that tip the balance. But at the scales we are now discussing, 10-20% of total energy generating capacity, the total value of those subsidies would need to be quite tremendous (in the G$ to 10 G$ per year range).
There isn’t a free market for energy really, it is a global marketplace and the government of every major player puts their thumb on the scale.
Governments are investing in solar because they want to be ahead in the renewable economy, where energy literally just falls from the sky. Is that a subsidy? I guess. It is also a good strategic move.
Are petrochemicals taxed or subsidized? I have no idea, it is a big tangled web. What are the costs of staying plausibly friendly with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members, who pays that bill?
I’m not going to try and defend either way, but I don’t believe anybody who says they have an answer. If they did manage to analyze the entire global economy somehow (where to even start) I don’t think they’d post the answer here.
Wouldn't the answer be to provide a simple number for the cost of a thing (oil, solar, wind, etc), that removes the government subsidies/taxes from the equation.
Otherwise, you can tax what you don't like to oblivion or subsidise what you do like until it appears viable, but in neither case are you getting a true picture of the cost. The subsidies/tax moves a simple cost question, into the murky world of politics and society and opinion.
We are only pretending to discuss costs if the social infrastructure is determining taxes/subsidies.
Right. This is to say there nothing real or authentic about the numbers we are given. Solar numbers will shrink or inflate as a function of subsidies or taxes. The whole thing is operating within the confines of government largesse. It's nothing to do with the actual cost of energy, those numbers are a mystery.
'too cheap to meter' was always nonsense and is nonsense now. the only time you're getting unmetered energy is if you have so much distributed generation and storage that transmission is unprofitable to build except for unusual cases. for example, most people with a household solar system with storage have unmetered energy during the day
the numbers you saw for solar in 01975 were wrong, based on at most five years of commercial solar panel production. now we have 50 years of commercial solar panel production to estimate the learning rate from, and consequently for the last five years or so solar is cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas in most of the world. you should have stopped waiting five years ago
in northern climates your plan b is probably a combination of wind, batteries, thermal energy storage, and emergency generators burning emergency-priced liquid fuels — initially fossil fuels, later electrolysis-sourced
Hi Kragen, small world! At an individual scale, I think plan B is pretty much always a small tri-fuel generator. At a society scale, it's probably a natural gas turbine. If batteries continue to follow their own price curve down, storage may well be a viable answer to 95%+ dunkelflautes at some point in our lifetimes.
I'm curious about the land use analysis and the embodied energy. Given the capacity factor inherent in my climate, will solar panels ever pay off the energy used to make, ship, and install them? Similar question for batteries. And how much land do we need to cover to handle the P95 dark/calm weeks?
Anyway, interesting stuff. Solar continues to eat the world, slowly but surely. :)
batteries use an insignificant amount of land, but probably overprovisioning of solar production is cheaper than batteries until you get into those 95th percentiles you're talking about. so probably we're talking about something like 10× the land use for solar panels that would be needed to meet demand on average? it depends a lot on how much demand flexibility there is; will dunkelflaute electrical grid demand be 20% of average grid demand, 2%, or 0.2%? that's a question that depends on things like what new designs people come up with for aluminum smelters and haber-bosch fertilizer plants, which is impossible to anticipate ahead of time
I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas.
There was a brief period in the US from the late 1960s through the early 1970s where it looked like new nuclear power plants were going to supply electricity cheaper than coal. A few commercial reactors had just been finished on a reasonable schedule and budget. Government cost projections showed that just-completed reactors were competitive with coal and that by the mid 1980s, with rising coal production costs, nuclear would have a clear edge.
Most people who care about the history of nuclear power know about the ballooning costs and schedule overruns for nuclear reactors after Three Mile Island, so that explains part of why this projection didn't pan out.
The other part is that real coal prices fell in the 1980s instead of rising. Increased surface mining of coal reversed the upward price trend for coal as a fuel. At the same time, the thermal efficiency of coal fired power plants kept improving beyond what was considered practical circa 1968. So new coal fired power plants were spending less per gigajoule of fuel and turning more of the fuel into electricity. New coal plants in America became so cost-effective in the 1980s that nuclear would have been hard pressed to compete even without the actual delays and cost overruns that nuclear foundered on. France dodged this environmentally dreadful rise of coal because they didn't have abundant domestic coal like the US, so they were committed to developing non-fossil electricity regardless of improvements in coal technology.
I wonder if those over-optimistic solar cost predictions you saw in 1975 also assumed ever-rising fuel costs. If solar companies expected coal power to keep getting more expensive, that would indirectly accelerate the adoption of solar power (lowering its costs) as well as directly easing the cost benchmark that solar power needed to meet.
Or maybe, like in many other cases, the people working on solar back then were just over-optimistic about improvements and had blind spots about the obstacles ahead.
> Most people who care about the history of nuclear power know about the ballooning costs and schedule overruns for nuclear reactors after Three Mile Island
Costs were ballooning even before TMI.
> The other part is that real coal prices fell in the 1980s instead of rising.
More importantly, 1979 saw the passage of PURPA, which began to open the power market to non-utility providers. There was enormous untapped potential for cogeneration (and, as it turned out, cogeneration-in-name-only) that produced a slug of new output, mostly gas fired, into the grids just after what had been inexorable 7%/year increase in electricity demand in the US suddenly moderated.
In this environment, it was very difficult to make the case for new nuclear power plants.
> I wonder if those over-optimistic solar cost predictions you saw in 1975
In what sense were they over-optimistic? PV has experienced a remarkably relentless cost decline along an experience curve of about 20% decline in cost with each doubling of cumulative production.
The OP said "I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas."
That would mean PV cost parity with coal-generated electricity in the early 1980s. Actual PV cost declines have been remarkable but they didn't go that quickly.
Their memory may well have been perfect, as public speakers and newspapers do get things wrong every so often.
One show I watched as a kid, Blue Peter, introduced Thrust SSC as a car that would go faster than the speed of light. (Or perhaps my memory of that is wrong, too…)
Not much cheaper as can be clearly seen in France who did go all in and is only able to keep costs reasonable (not low) by skimping on maintance.
Nuclear has received significantly more subsidies than solar or wind (in both the US and EU) and is still not viable (mind you fossils have received by far the most subsidies) .
France went all in, but they saturated the energy market by when? They've built a couple since, but after an intense build out during the 70's they haven't had to keep building.
Part of the idea to me is that, if you want to be a nuclear civilization, you need government scale investment in not just building plants but in improving the designs.
You need to stay in for decades, stay evolving, where-as France simply isn't big enough, doesn't have enough demand to keep at building again and again (to the scale that they would iterate on new significantly improved fuel cycles).
America's efforts like the Integral Fast Reactor, a fast reactor with on site pyro processing, seemed so promising. A safe & proliferation-safe way to not just reprocess but to keep burning tons of the transuranics (something France doesn't really do, afaik). But we gave up. The related PRISM designs have been kicking around for decades now, and I think one might even maybe get built, but generally the atmosphere around nuclear feels like it's building old/boring designs & not trying at all to advance. Then externalizing the massive incredibly long lived waste problems.
I haven't done any research in a bit, but India for a while was talking a big game about building out Thorium reactors, at scale, and I distantly recall that seemed to have some potential to be an improved fuel cycle over the basic designs/fuel-cycles we've had for so long.
> They've built a couple since, but after an intense build out during the 70's they haven't had to keep building.
I don't get this. France had 71% of their grid nuclear in 2018. From 1980 until 2000, the only new power installed in France was nuclear. What do you mean "keep building"? Reach 100% nuclear, banning/removing all other forms of energy? Even more than that and export energy?
The main body of Franc nuclear are old reactors which require increasing maintenance and extension of operations license to keep producing. If France planned to keep their nuclear power, a lot more reactors would have to be build quickly. Reality is, there is one reactor in construction and it is long delayed and way over budget. It is supposed to get online this year or next.
But with the costs of that one reactor, it is not thinkable to replace the aging reactors. As a consequence, France needs urgently to develop and implement a plan B.
On the other side, even France sees the increased competition of renewables. This summer they even had to take three nuclear reactors temporarily off grid, because demand for nuclear was just too low.
I like to read the pro-nuclear articles, and the more I read the more I'm convinced they are trying to scam the governments/citizens. In the last 5 years or so they are asking for:
- We want a minimal payment around 80€/MWh because we provide base load. (Average price in Europe this year is 65€).
- We want our obsolete centrals to have their lifespan extended to (depending on the source) 50, 75 or even 100 years. At 80€/MWh guaranteed.
- We want the government to deal with the residues. Maybe we pay half the cost.
- We want the regulators to ease safety requirements, so our building and manteinance costs are competitive.
And now:
- Do you remember we wanted our centrals lifespans extended? Now we want them demolished and replaced, because after 40 years they are old. Government should pay/finance it, even when budgets blow up 5x.
- Do you remember that we wanted to be paid extra for being the baseload? Now we want to be the whole grid, 70% is not enough. At 80€ guaranteed, no competition guaranteed, financed by the state, and if anything goes wrong we won't pay shit.
So I am a bit skeptical. I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas. Close to fifty years later I am still waiting.
I bet if you're in San Diego, Dallas or Tampa its already there. We have tons of solar getting built in the state of Michigan area but if you inquire its all either government subsidized or wealthy folks who can afford to not care about the economics.
I am not against solar in the least. But it needs to be pointed out that those of us in the Northern climates need a Plan B whether it be nuclear, geo-thermal or something else.