mspohr
Well-Known Member
I'd be more concerned that this guy doesn't have any fall protection. He is just one slip of the foot from taking a slide down a steep roof.
-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
Nuclear power
- Thread starter eledille
- Start date
-
- Tags
- Energy Environment Policy
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
Feel better? :wink:
Yes the panels drifted... in my defense I wasn't the one that racked them; That's what happens when you act before discussing the consequences a few panels down the road...
This array will produce ~24MWh/yr and cost ~$18k.. 5 years ago it would have cost >$50k. 5 years from now you should be able to get all the materials for <$10k.
ME TOO! ...post stuff about installing solar... no one really bats an eye. Post detailed instructions on how to enrich uranium AND EVERYONE LOSES THIER MIND!
Last edited:
mspohr
Well-Known Member
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
MIT study pegging the cost of nuclear at ~$0.084/kWh; Fuel cost ~$0.0067/kWh. So the cost per kWh will rise proportionately when capacity factor starts to fall. Nuclear cannot operate economically as a load following generator.
The LCOE cost of this system in ~70% of the US; Is ~$0.05/kWh. This was ~2 years ago... costs are ~20% lower today;
I'd be willing to bet that you will be able to DIY a system in 3 years that will generate electricity at an average 20 year cost of ~$0.03/kWh in any southern US state.
No one has yet addressed my key point. As solar continues to expand... how does it not displace other forms of generation? As other forms of generation are displaced how does the Capacity Factor of Nuclear not fall? As the Capacity Factor of nuclear falls how does a plant with a business model depending on a high CF stay in operation? There are really only 3 options...
- We don't build nuclear plants
- We HEAVILY subsidize nuclear plants
- We restrict the growth of competition to nuclear plants
The LCOE cost of this system in ~70% of the US; Is ~$0.05/kWh. This was ~2 years ago... costs are ~20% lower today;
I'd be willing to bet that you will be able to DIY a system in 3 years that will generate electricity at an average 20 year cost of ~$0.03/kWh in any southern US state.
No one has yet addressed my key point. As solar continues to expand... how does it not displace other forms of generation? As other forms of generation are displaced how does the Capacity Factor of Nuclear not fall? As the Capacity Factor of nuclear falls how does a plant with a business model depending on a high CF stay in operation? There are really only 3 options...
- We don't build nuclear plants
- We HEAVILY subsidize nuclear plants
- We restrict the growth of competition to nuclear plants
beeeerock
Active Member
Well Alex, I'm going to take "Things That USED to Glow in the Dark" for $100...
What is 'nuclear reactors'?
Well Alex, I'm going to take "Things That USED to Glow in the Dark" for $100...
What is 'nuclear reactors'?
But they STILL glow in the dark, even when decommissioned.
nwdiver;1119164[quote said:
Statement A: "Battery storage can be used to capture the peak solar output and store it for use when the sun is below the horizon, and this is economically attractive given that the required reliability is supplied by the grid for free."
Statement B: "Battery storage can be used to make a power grid based on wind, solar, some hydro and a little tidal power reliable, and this is technically and economically feasible."
Making statement B become true is about 100 times more challenging than making statement A become true. I am discussing statement B. You responded as though we were discussing statement A.
Besides this, your cost calculation makes no sense. The long cycle life doesn't affect upfront cost at all. You can't divide by cycle life to calculate the cost, you have to consider the cost of capital! High capital cost is the nemesis of nuclear, remember? Storage is far worse.
There are two completely different concepts that are both measured in kWh - capacity and lifetime capacity. Lifetime capacity is the total number of kWh the battery can deliver over its entire lifetime. Capacity is the number of kWh it can deliver when fully charged before you need to charge it again. It's the second concept we're interested in when discussing statement B above, because that's what tells us what keeping the lights on for a given time will cost. A long cycle life just tells us that capital cost of the initial investment will dominate.
Last edited:
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
So.... it's a bit of an apples/oranges comparison to try to compare the economics of nuclear vs storage since a power plant is rated in kW and a battery is usually more kWh than kW.
But... if you assume you want a 1GW facility ~50% of the day you can pay $7B for a 1GW nuclear power plant or $3B for 12GWh of Tesla Power Packs. And... that's using the 2015 price of $250/kWh. When we reach the $100kWh target that is widely viewed as an inflection point vs ICE you can effectively replace a nuclear plant as daily base load for ~$1.2B. Even storing 48 hours of energy would sill be less than the cost of a nuclear plant at ~$5B.
This isn't going to happen overnight... perhaps in 10 years there will be a day that renewables generate enough to carry the country for a day. Then a few years later for a week. A few years after that for a month.... then for most of the year.
Storage will come on line as it's needed... because there will be an economic incentive to store energy when it's cheap and sell when it's expensive. What's going to drive nuclear growth? Nuclear is more expensive than most other alternatives... Grid 2.0 needs load following plants... grid storage is the new base load.
No one has yet addressed my key point. As solar continues to expand... how does it not displace other forms of generation? As other forms of generation are displaced how does the Capacity Factor of Nuclear not fall? As the Capacity Factor of nuclear falls how does a plant with a business model depending on a high CF stay in operation? There are really only 3 options...
- We don't build nuclear plants
- We HEAVILY subsidize nuclear plants
- We restrict the growth of competition to nuclear plants
But... if you assume you want a 1GW facility ~50% of the day you can pay $7B for a 1GW nuclear power plant or $3B for 12GWh of Tesla Power Packs. And... that's using the 2015 price of $250/kWh. When we reach the $100kWh target that is widely viewed as an inflection point vs ICE you can effectively replace a nuclear plant as daily base load for ~$1.2B. Even storing 48 hours of energy would sill be less than the cost of a nuclear plant at ~$5B.
This isn't going to happen overnight... perhaps in 10 years there will be a day that renewables generate enough to carry the country for a day. Then a few years later for a week. A few years after that for a month.... then for most of the year.
Storage will come on line as it's needed... because there will be an economic incentive to store energy when it's cheap and sell when it's expensive. What's going to drive nuclear growth? Nuclear is more expensive than most other alternatives... Grid 2.0 needs load following plants... grid storage is the new base load.
No one has yet addressed my key point. As solar continues to expand... how does it not displace other forms of generation? As other forms of generation are displaced how does the Capacity Factor of Nuclear not fall? As the Capacity Factor of nuclear falls how does a plant with a business model depending on a high CF stay in operation? There are really only 3 options...
- We don't build nuclear plants
- We HEAVILY subsidize nuclear plants
- We restrict the growth of competition to nuclear plants
mspohr
Well-Known Member
Good point. Everyone worries about "base load" but the problem now is that we have too much generation to cover not enough base load so the power companies (which can't easily throttle coal or nuclear plants) end up essentially giving away electricity at night. We don't need more base load plants. We need flexible peaking plants and that is battery storage (and solar which has a natural generation curve that closely matches peak load).
That's because a capacity rating is kind of irrelevant for a technology that just produces power, and continues to do so, day in and day out, for 60 years or so (ok, ok, there will be planned outages and the occasional hiccup, but these things happen one at a time).
If you want to replace the grid with something different which includes storage, then you need to make absolutely sure that you don't run out of capacity. A nation-wide blackout once per decade would be much too frequent.
There is no such thing as "daily base load". You can't afford to let the grid fail.
So you're willing to pay the same amount for 24 hours of storage as you would pay for a 1 GW nuclear power plant. But so far you have bought zero actual generation capacity - only a pathetically small amount of storage! A week is not enough, you have only a single day, and you still have not deployed a single PV panel or wind turbine. I think this is an awfully bad deal.
Repeating it will not make it true.
No, it will not, because the capacity factor of the storage system will be extremely low, so prices would have to be correspondingly extremely high when it's operating for it to break even. A system whose purpose is to provide reliability must be fully charged as much of the time as possible. A system whose purpose is to earn money by buying low and selling high must be producing as often as possible. Those are mutually exclusive. The only way to make it work is to recognize that controllability and predictability are valuable assets and require intermittent generators to buy the missing predictability from the storage system.
No, nuclear is very much less expensive, very much less complicated and infinitely more proven than any other way to get the required reliability in sufficient quantity - except for fossil power. You can't get away with only one day of storage, and nobody in their right mind would buy a whole over-budget nuke's worth of battery backup to get a single day of reliability when they can buy said nuke instead and get 60 years of reliability, plus a gigawatt of 0.9 capacity factor electricity to boot.
As the situation is in the US right now, they would probably buy open cycle gas turbines for $0.5/W and run them as required instead. In Germany, where natural gas is expensive, they are building brand new coal-fired power plants. This has to stop, and batteries will not help anywhere near enough.
The lack of predictability and controllability is what's causing the wild electricity price swings and decreasing grid reliability currently seen in Europe. This can be fixed by making reliability a tradable commodity, and requiring undispatchable generators to buy the predictability they lack from someone else. The lack of a carbon tax skews the market towards carbon emitting technologies. So first make costs reflect what's actually needed to run society reliably and without CO2 emissions, then let the market sort it out. Choosing the right values for the parameters would allow us to integrate as much intermittent power as possible, in the most cost-effective way, while ensuring that the grid stays reliable.
By the way, the term "reliability" is confusing. The key concepts are predictability and controllability.
Last edited:
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
Ok.... eledille... let's go the nuclear route for arguments sake... do you think solar/wind will never encroach on nuclear base load despite doubling every 30 months for the past ~10 years. It will magically slow down? What happens when the nuclear fleet is running at ~50% capacity? Voglte cost $7B... how does nuclear survive as renewables expand? I don't want to Gish gallup this... I haven't seen a response to that question... if I missed it than please link to where it was missed....
How does nuclear.... which needs a high capacity factor to survive; survive economically... as solar and wind expand? Do we outlaw self generation?
You believe storage will forever be economically impossible despite what Tesla has accomplished with the Model S... fine....
How does nuclear.... which needs a high capacity factor to survive; survive economically... as solar and wind expand? Do we outlaw self generation?
Respond to that... and pick 1 item you would like me to respond to.
How does nuclear.... which needs a high capacity factor to survive; survive economically... as solar and wind expand? Do we outlaw self generation?
How does nuclear.... which needs a high capacity factor to survive; survive economically... as solar and wind expand? Do we outlaw self generation?
You believe storage will forever be economically impossible despite what Tesla has accomplished with the Model S... fine....
How does nuclear.... which needs a high capacity factor to survive; survive economically... as solar and wind expand? Do we outlaw self generation?
Respond to that... and pick 1 item you would like me to respond to.
How does nuclear.... which needs a high capacity factor to survive; survive economically... as solar and wind expand? Do we outlaw self generation?
Last edited:
Assign a cost to CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions.
Make balancing capability a tradable asset.
Make availability guarantees a tradable asset.
Require intermittent sources to buy balancing capability and guaranteed availability.
Let the market sort it out.
Self generation is ok, but you would have to buy balancing capability and availability guarantees unless you want to go off-grid. As intermittency increases, you can't expect to continue to get reliability for free.
If you have any better ideas on how to deal with it, I'm all ears.
Last edited:
This image reminds me that per unit energy produced, more people have been killed from solar than from nuclear. This is typically due to installers falling off of roofs.
Skotty
2014 S P85 | 2023 F-150L
Doubling something that is nearly zero to begin with isn't that hard. Self generation is nice, but having it contribute more than a small minority of generation is a pipe dream. Most can't afford it or can't install it (e.g. apartment complex or condo), and many of those that can simply won't.
There's nothing wrong with solar taking over, but a lot of it will still need to be utility scale. And if it grows so big that the nuclear plants don't run at high capacity, then you can start shutting down nuclear plants. Until then, nuclear plants can happily cruise along at high capacity. As for new plants, I don't see any reason to stop building whatever alternative power we can until all fossil fuel plants can be retired.
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
I never proposed that reliability would be provided for free... Germany and Australia already require PV inverters to be capable of curtailment and reactive power control. I'm sure California is only a few years away. With the rest of the world not far behind.
My whole premise is that if you allow people and businesses the option to generate their own power... and the cost of distributed generation is ~$1.50/w and still falling ~10%/yr... then building generators that cost ~$7/w is a non-starter. The capacity factor will fall as more people choose the less expensive option. See for yourself how fast it's growing.... It's obviously already an attractive option... it's the fastest growing industry right now and it's only getting cheaper.
I've already explained the most likely outcome... but you're unable to accept the reality that batteries do in fact get cheaper.
Would you build your house at sea level on the ocean if sea level was rising 1' every 5 years? Solar PV isn't some cute novelty anymore... it's ~6-10% of generation in California now. Which is really impressive when you think of where it was just 5 years ago. It's grown ~1000% in 5 years and that growth is accelerating.
This is a tally of utility scale generation in California; it does not include residential or commercial.
I wouldn't assume that renewable power installations continues to grow at its current pace. Renewable power developers are driven by economics, just as fossil-fuel developers are, and adding renewable power changes prices.
Importantly, adding intermittent renewables changes all prices:
Unfortunately, nuclear is poorly set up to earn these reliability premiums because they don't ramp well. As was pointed out upthread, gas turbines (either simple or combined-cycle) in the US are the primary beneficiary of this shift in relative value of the product bundle that power plants sell.
Importantly, adding intermittent renewables changes all prices:
- Renewables drive down the wholesale energy cost. Renewables produce power at zero marginal cost, so they're always used first, bumping the highest-offer-cost units off the stack. Energy prices are set by the most costly unit operating, so prices fall.
- Renewables drive up the price of ancillary services (regulation and operating reserves) because
- More regulation and reserves are needed to balance the higher volatility of input energy and
- Fewer regulation-capable units are committed, with others having been displaced by renewables.
- Renewables drive up the capacity price (long-term reserves) because intermittent renewables have much lower capacity ratings than fossil- or nuclear-fired units (compared to their energy output).
Unfortunately, nuclear is poorly set up to earn these reliability premiums because they don't ramp well. As was pointed out upthread, gas turbines (either simple or combined-cycle) in the US are the primary beneficiary of this shift in relative value of the product bundle that power plants sell.
Bangor Bob
Member
Chile just approved a solar facility with a planned 90% capacity factor, where the PPA is expected to come in under $0.10/kWh.
Cheap Baseload Solar At Copiapó Gets OK In Chile (Exclusive Info) | CleanTechnica
Aside from the almost total lack of rainfall, Copiapo isn't hugely different than big chunks of the southwest. I'm not sure how nuclear survives that in sunny places, prices on CSP+thermal storage seem to be coming down as well, not as fast as PV, but trending down nonetheless.
Cheap Baseload Solar At Copiapó Gets OK In Chile (Exclusive Info) | CleanTechnica
Aside from the almost total lack of rainfall, Copiapo isn't hugely different than big chunks of the southwest. I'm not sure how nuclear survives that in sunny places, prices on CSP+thermal storage seem to be coming down as well, not as fast as PV, but trending down nonetheless.
SmartElectric
Active Member
And even more people are injured fainting when they realize they can produce their own power on their roof and save money doing it compared to paying billions for utility nuclear power.
If so many people are falling off roofs with solar, there must be a lot of local jobs in solar...that can't be a bad thing now can it?
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
Certainly possible... however... I think it's likely that declining module prices, cheaper storage and demand response will help buffer any potential deceleration in growth as daytime energy production gets more crowded. We'll find out in a few years...
I still can't believe how fast solar modules got this cheap... if you had told me 3 years ago that I would be able to buy grade 'A' modules for <$0.75/w in 2015 I would have thought you were insane... Never underestimate the power of exponential growth.
Grid 2.0 will certainly be more complicated... but increased efficiency may wash out the increased cost.
Similar threads
