> We need more of these. The path to 100% green energy without coercing people and making decisions that could backfire, is to upgrade the energy grid to the point that electricity is dirt cheap.
These two statements are at odds with each other, however. Every new nuclear plant we build like Vogtle will end up increasing our cost of carbon-free energy rather than decreasing it.
Buying a nuclear power plant locks the energy price for 40-60 years, and all the current buildable designs are more expensive than current renewables plus the cost of storage to make the renewables a firm energy source.
And the trend for renewables and storage is drastic price decreases, slowed down only by occasional supply shortages that get innovated around, which in turn drive prices even lower. So when we replace the storage in 15-20 years at EoL, the replacement will be vastly cheaper. And we get 2-3 of those price drops during the time that we would be locked into the cost of current nuclear.
Our energy future is one of energy abundance, and cheap cheap cheap energy, but it's very unlikely to include nuclear as part of that mix. And any nuclear we do invest in will hinder energy abundance and energy cheapness.
See how this strategy is turning out in Germany right now, turns out this "cheap cheap cheap energy" was not including the diplomatic, environmental and financial costs of the gas backups.
How was the nuclear nuclear nuclear energy in France going?
Germany had to burn more gas to substitute for France's downtime of nuclear power plants.
The cost and time for the construction of new one not included and the risk of sabotage not mentioned.
I bet russia will at least try to damage them as a revenge for the help of Ukraine.
Well, if Germany had more nuclear power they would not be burning gas to help France during the French downtime now would they? Nor would they be restarting coal power plants, the dirtiest form of energy.
It's funny how the Green idea of a large grid that shares power, i.e. it's always windy somewhere, suddenly falls flat when the neighbors wind(nuclear, in this case) is no longer blowing.
The only fault of France is trusting Germany to have a sane power production plan when they entered a peering agreement with them.
>it's always windy somewhere, suddenly falls flat when the neighbors wind(nuclear, in this case) is no longer blowing.
There is a difference between the outage of an nuclear power plant and the outage of wind turbine.
One power plant less has a much bigger effect than thousand wind turbines without wind.
Nuclear power plants are the equivalent of Cloudflare, one outage has massive effects. Wind turbines are decentralization and that's better especially since Russia return as the bad guy.
Didn't hear much fear about Ukrainian wind turbines but lits of worries about nuclear power plants.
Yes, one nuclear power plant has greater output than a large number of wind turbine. That is not what the analogy was about.
The analogy is about how people pushing for wind and solar only/main are relying on every other area to be able to pick up the slack when their area is down. And the fact that they are not able or willing to pick up the slack when someone else's area is down.
Your comment was that Germany is having to support France while they have their reactors down and viewing that in a negative light. If France was supplying power to Germany during a lull in the wind, the response would be "This is just so, even though the wind does not blow all the time, with enough interconnects we can ensure that a green grid is possible."
There was even talk about expanding Europe's grid across to Libya in order to ensure that the wind would be blowing somewhere.
That is just holding one energy source to an impossible standard(i.e. zero downtime) while giving generous excuses to the other.
You can't replace a nuclear plant with wind turbines. Just to replace Fessenheim (the french plant the greens closed), you would need 20k turbines ... without taking into account backups
A typical wind turbine on earth is more like 1.5MW... This outlier isn't representative of anything and it's not like you can build sea turbines ... in the east of France.
> And an ancient leaking nuclear plant
According to whom? Not the nuclear safety bodies at least.
> current gen offshore wind.
Those are a bit worse than nuclear plants but take roughly the same time to build anyways, the one in France which just went into production took 10 years of development + 4 years of planning so about 14 years.
From Wikipedia:
>On August 15, 2006, Southern Nuclear formally applied for an Early Site Permit (ESP) for two additional units. The ESP determined whether the site was appropriate for additional reactors, and this process is separate from the Combined Construction and Operating License (COL) application process.
Part of the reason that the construction took so long was that the containment building was redesigned to be stronger, that caused a redesign of all the internal components that were already being built.
> In December of 2011, a 19th revision was written for the AP1000 Design Certification, which effectively included a complete redesign of the containment building:
>The wall is appropriately reinforced and sized where the composite wall module joins the reinforced concrete sections and as appropriate to accommodate seismic loads and aircraft loads. This design is new to the amendment; previously the structure was all reinforced concrete.
>As this change to the design requirements was made after engineering contacts were already signed and manufacturing had begun on the reactor's long-lead-time components, it resulted in a halting of construction as the containment building had to be re-designed.
For a large scale project that had the design changed drastically, I think 10 years is not bad.
The main difference being that this always happens.
> On August 26, 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued an Early Site Permit and a Limited Work Authorization. Limited construction at the new reactor sites began,
13 years and counting, 14 if nothing else goes wrong (unit 4 scheduled for end of 2023).
Then there's all the projects that go the way of VC Summer which get conveniently forgotten about. Vogtle is the 'success' story.
The main takeaway from that is that 2009 is not the 90's.
California is building a new desalination plant, a fairly straightforward project with no surprises or midstream design changes, construction is expected to take 3 years.
Let's look at something simple, such as a railway in California.
>On December 2, 2010, the Authority Board of Directors voted to begin construction on the first section of the system from Madera to Fresno.
>In July 2012, the California legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown approved construction of the high-speed system.
>Fresno hosted a groundbreaking ceremony on January 6, 2015, to mark the commencement of sustained construction activities.
It took 5 years from the vote to begin construction to groundbreaking. In 2022, there is still not a ride able section of track yet. The Fresno station, where groundbreaking occurred is scheduled completion in 2029. 14 years, or about the same length of time as Vogal if everything stays on track.
The point is, big construction projects take time and are complicated. If they whipped up a nuclear plant in 3 years, there would be fear mongering about how they must have cut corners and it is unsafe.
We could get the plant completion times down by committing to build more of them. Then all the large and specialized components would be built in more of a production manner rather than a bespoke manner, allowing for both cost and time savings.
> We could get the plant completion times down by committing to build more of them. Then all the large and specialized components would be built in more of a production manner rather than a bespoke manner, allowing for both cost and time savings.
If that's true then go for it (it never happened in the past -- costs increased exponentially even before three mile island), but don't ask for special treatment. Whatever deal you demand in terms of fast tracking environmental assessment, guaranteed loans, billions of dollars for free insurance, public resources for security and 40 year guaranteed price for generation should be available for anyone who can meet the 50g carbon intensity target, risk of major accident, and a minimum availability. If you need just two (or ten) more $13/W projects to get you started, then offer the same $30 billion guaranteed loan to tidal and see what happens.
On a level playing field noone in their right mind is going to choose to build nuclear.
I give you the nuclear heat source up front for free. Brand new AP1000 appears up to the second cooling loop by magic.
Steam turbines sans the emission control equipment are about $3k/kWe
Fuel rods are $10-20/MWh. Take it at a constant $10 for an AP1000 (costs of uranium and SWUs go up, but fuel efficiency and fabrication improves at about the same rate).
Decomissioning is underfunded at $10/MWh but we'll pretend this is enough
O&M costs for a steam turbine sans fuel is $10/MWh
Demonstrate how nuclear makes sense with these constraints vs wind at $2000/kW net or solar at $2500/kW net while the gas turbines still run.
Demonstrate how nuclear makes sense vs. Projected costs of pv + wind + h2 + batteries.
Gas in Germany is mostly used for heating. There is not much Germany can do with gas to support France, where 26 (!!) nuclear reactors are offline. France supplies Germany with gas. Germany tries to support France with some electricity, but the majority of the will come from coal or renewables.
Nuclear issues in France are due to the french greens who lobbied to stop investments hoping that renewables would take over (hence the crisis because they were wrong)
The crisis in both countries is caused by renewables, just in different ways
That's nonsense. The crisis in France is because of aging reactors needing quite more maintenance.
The reactor France builds is many years late and extremely expensive. France has for decades extremely nuclear friendly governments. The actual problem is money, number of engineers, technical capabilities, ...
The investments stopped on the last 20 years because the greens thought that renewables would take over, they even put the reduction of nuclear straight into the law.
To my knowledge, that's the only form of energy with a specific target of reduction in the law, not even petrol is subject to it.
The truth is that the nuclear grid is holding up quite well considering those facts, I don't know anything else where which would still work after two decades being forced to sell electricity below production costs to "competitors" (another subject)
> France has for decades extremely nuclear friendly governments
> they even put the reduction of nuclear straight into the law
after decades of little investing in renewable energy, which is now cheap. France has a long coast and lots of sunshine...
Example: there are thousands of offshore wind turbines in Europe. A tiny fraction of those are in France.
> two decades being forced to sell electricity below production
The French nuclear industry now is mostly government owned. It picked up the failed business of EDF, which had debt of around 60 billion euros from exploding costs of new reactor constructions. It was always a political instrument to sell cheap electricity, while the tax payer pays for the hidden additional costs.
> There were never greens in the French government.
France is a democracy, you don't need to be in the governement to have an influence. They had agreements with Chirac and then Hollande against nuclear for their votes.
> after decades of little investing in renewable energy, which is now cheap. France has a long coast and lots of sunshine...
France has invested half of the total price of the nuclear grid in renewable. I do agree that those tremendous renewable investments went poorly though.
Since you're talking about wind turbines, the last one opened took 14 years to build.
> The French nuclear industry now is mostly government owned. It picked up the failed business of EDF, which had debt of around 60 billion euros from exploding costs of new reactor constructions. It was always a political instrument to sell cheap electricity, while the tax payer pays for the hidden additional costs.
Again, I don't see how anything else would have been better. Renewable companies won't last 20 years without investments (that's the full lifetime of solar and wind turbines anyways...) and forced to sell electricity below production cost to their competitors.
> France is a democracy, you don't need to be in the governement to have an influence.
Real influence is when a party is part of the government, has ministers, etc. Like the greens in Germany.
Just see the difference renewable energy for electricity production in France is at 20%. In Germany it's currently at around 50%.
If the 'greens' had any influence in France, this influence is not very visible in the results.
> I do agree that those tremendous renewable investments went poorly though.
The investments in nuclear went much worse: half of the reactor fleet is offline and more than a hundred billion Euros is needed for this fleet just to keep it running and replace some of these aging reactors. No wonder EDF is nationalized, with huge debt and billions of more needed - a normal company would already be bankrupt.
> Renewable companies won't last 20 years without investments (that's the full lifetime of solar and wind turbines anyways...) and forced to sell electricity below production cost to their competitors.
Renewables are currently the cheapest source of electricity and its getting cheaper.
Nuclear is only getting more expensive. See the French nuclear power plant in UK (Hinkley Point C), which a very expensive way to produce electricity. Delayed. Cost increases.
> Real influence is when a party is part of the government, has ministers, etc. Like the greens in Germany.
Yes that's what happened. Real influence is when you sign agreements for your votes at the presidential election in exchange for a few ministers, exactly what the greens did during the past 20 years.
> If the 'greens' had any influence in France, this influence is not very visible in the results.
I can point at actual laws propped up by the greens against their votes if you want, at this point it's just denying reality.
> The investments in nuclear went much worse: half of the reactor fleet is offline and more than a hundred billion Euros is needed for this fleet just to keep it running and replace some of these aging reactors. No wonder EDF is nationalized, with huge debt and billions of more needed - a normal company would already be bankrupt.
Well that's what happens when you stop investments and force selling electricity to below production costs yeah, again you're lucky it's nuclear we're talking about, it would be renewables, the production would have dropped to zero at that point.
> Renewables are currently the cheapest source of electricity and its getting cheaper.
France spent around half the price of the nuclear grid on renewables ... for 7% of the production. This puts it at around 5 times more expensive than the existing nuclear grid without taking into account the backup infrastructure.
The french investment on renewable was one of the most expensive with the lowest output ever performed by the country
This also did not help the current situation either.
How do you envision energy storage of the future? Where are you going to get the metals? How much fossil fuel is going to burn in order to extract it?
Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years.
I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear.
> How do you envision energy storage of the future?
Not the guy you responded to, but: a combination of traditional batteries, molten metal batteries, liquid air or CO2 storage, pumped hydro, gravity storage, stored thermal energy, and more. All of which are around the commercial demonstration plant phase right now.
> Where are you going to get the metals?
Many of these don't require much metals. Molten metal batteries use metals that are extremely abundant.
> How much fossil fuel is going to burn in order to extract it?
In a decarbonized world? Zero. What? You think climate change can be solved without making mining zero-emission? If you're wondering how this will be done, it'll be battery/hydrogen/ammonia/e-fuel for mining equipment, trucks, ships, etc. We have to do that no matter what, otherwise we've just postponed climate change, not solved it.
> How else do you provide base load requirements?
Personally I believe a good share of base load will be provided by nuclear in many countries. I have nothing against nuclear. But I also think the base load problem can be solved without nuclear quite easily, assuming we actually solve CO2-emissions. This is because solving CO2-emissions means we'll produce batteries/hydrogen/ammonia/e-fuels on the same order of magnitude needed to balance renewables to provide baseload.
I think advanced geothermal may become a significant part of renewable base load in the future. It would be a huge hail mary for the climate change cause, because it'd make it SO much easier to get political willpower and investments from the whole oil/gas-sector. Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2P2stuQ_KY
> It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear.
Optimistic, but not naive. There's a clear path. Difficult, but not much more difficult than rebooting the nuclear energy industry.
And you have to be optimistic to think we can get to zero CO2-emissions anyway.
This is science fiction-thinking. Not just optimistic: absolutely naive.
We have the tech for nuclear, today. In fact, we could have switched the entire country over to nuclear 30+ years ago.
Instead, we’ve been burning fossil fuels for decades because, for so-called environmental activists, an impossible perfect solution is the only thing they’ll accept.
Run the numbers, time tracking throughout the day, on how you're going to run an entire grid on nuclear. Calculate how much storage you need in order to convert baseload into something that matches demand.
Do the same calculation for renewables. Both need storage, and renewables need a bit more storage, but their primary energy is also 5-10x cheaper than nuclear.
Calling something "naive" or "fantasy" requires evaluating the current state of the tech, and where the tech is going. From that perspective, especially with the data coming from the nuclear build at Vogtle and Summer, thinking that nuclear GenIII+ reactors have any place on the grid is completely unrealistic.
We can not even build four of these nuclear reactors . We started plans to build about a dozen, started on only four, and had to abandon two mid-build. Nuclear is not a good fit for advanced economies, anymore than complex Victorian style wood carving is a fit for advanced economies. Nuclear requires way too much skilled labor, too much construction versus manufacturing.
We no longer live in the 80s, we have much better tech, 40 years of advancement, and we need to use the best tech, not the one that was best in 1980.
> Run the numbers, time tracking throughout the day, on how you're going to run an entire grid on nuclear. Calculate how much storage you need in order to convert baseload into something that matches demand.
Very tiny amounts are needed. It's pretty straightforward to make reactors that can ramp along with daily power use.
> Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years.
Because of the $30 billion dollar loan and $40/MWh of O&M costs.
> How do you envision energy storage of the future? Where are you going to get the metals?
Sodium ion is made purely of abundant materials. There are electrolyser chemistries that use nothing less common than Nickel.
Current PV tech is made of sand, copper, and silver. Olympic dam is one of the largest Uranium mines in the world. For every joule of uranium fuel for a PWR it produces, it produces enough silver for 0.5 joules of solar at the current 9mg per net watt (as well as enough copper). This is improving by 10-20% per year. So by the time your nuclear reactor opened you could get more energy from that mine from PV than solar.
The nuclear reactor will also require most of that silver and a bunch of indium, cadmium, zirconium, chromium, molybdenum, iron, and almost as much copper as the PV (if using 1.5kV strings).
> I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear.
Base load is a myth. What matters is being able to provide a joule at the time it is required at a given resource, carbon, and labour cost, if you have surplus joules available at other times for the same cost that's an upside, not a downside. France's continued unreliability or any of the recent western nuclear plants show that the nuclear is an absolute joke from both the time and cost perspective. Whenthe >0.04% concentration uranium mines run out it will also be a joke on the carbon front.
There's no need to ban it. Just give all installations that hit a low carbon threshold (without loopholes like CCS or 'biofuel') and net availability the same deal with regard to public insurance, guaranteed loans, decomissioning obligations, and guaranteed electricity prices and see if anyone even considers nuclear.
> How do you envision energy storage of the future? Where are you going to get the metals? How much fossil fuel is going to burn in order to extract it?
Where do they come from for electric vehicles? Also where do you get the uranium from? If we significantly increase nuclear energy production we run out of uranium in 40 years or so.
> Also, why are energy prices locked for 40-60 years? The energy required to create a nuclear plant is equal to what it can produce in ~5 years.
Maybe you should have a look how contracts for these things are made. Nobody would invest into a nuclear power plant if they don't get a guaranteed price.
> I don't understand how you believe the future is "very unlikely to include nuclear". How else do you provide base load requirements? It's naive to think we can transition to a "green grid" without nuclear.
Wind, solar are provide base load, they are not load following, to quote wikipedia:
Base load demand... can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market.
> We should extract 30x times more lithium and rare earths to make your strategy work
I don't know why everyone focuses on lithium, as if battery tech has reached its pinnacle and will no longer change. Lithium is only the latest element used in batteries, it will not be the last or necessarily even the best. Sodium batteries are already in production, for instance, and sodium is ridiculously abundant and cheap and the power density is comparable to lithium ion. Solid state batteries are also starting production. Lithium and rare earths are not needed for any of these.
Even if batteries increase now, they will drop more in the future as production capacity ramps up. Same thing happens again and again for every other tech curve, for example solar. A price drop suddenly makes an entirely new application class cost feasible, and there's a non-linearity in the demand function, and demand explodes.
We are currently at one of those non-linear increases in demand. Additionally, we are experiencing massive supply chain bill whip effects across the entire economy.
Increasing extraction is happening and will continue to happen. But also take into account that a lot of the price drops come from needing to use fewer input materials.
Rare earths are not relevant for current battery technologies. Further, there are plenty of other sources of rare earths that will open up as we need more in the future.
Do try to keep up. Prussian blue sodium ion mass manufacturing is starting up as we speak. They use abundant materials and most of the same manufacturing processes as lithium.
I'll have to really look into the price breakdown. I thought the output of nuclear would more than make up for that. Regardless, renewables can also be built. I don't think it should be all nuclear, but it seems like the only way to scale consumption at the moment. Both technologies will get better as well, and I think the biggest innovation right now is on the nuclear side with nuclear fusion.
These are last year's numbers, but I don't expect that we will see much of a drop later this month when the new numbers come out, since demand is still way outpacing supply at the moment.
Additionally, we do not expect nuclear to decrease in cost. Throughout its entire history, it has not, and there's no tech on the horizon to expect a change. Nuclear is primarily a construction project, not manufacturing. Construction does not see the massive productivity gains that manufacturing does. In France and the US, one country with favorable regulatory conditions, and one with supposedly bad regulatory conditions, subsequent builds of the same reactor get more expensive, not less. South Korea managed to figure out how to decrease costs with subsequent reactors, but SK also sent many of their suppliers' execs to jail for corruption on certifications.
In contrast, solar, wind, and storage see massive innovation year after year, for decades. They are in a true tech curve, and have scaled to hundreds of GW/year of deployment.
Scaling nuclear to the point of deploying hundreds of GW/year is pretty difficult to imagine. We don't have the labor force to enable something like that, and couldn't build it in any reasonable time frame. Nuclear simply does not scale as well as the manufactured technologies of solar, wind, and storage.
Bear in mind that generation is only part of the holistic system of energy delivery. Intermittent sources require storage, which is separated out into a separate chart. Even just 4 hours of storage would bring solar's $30/MW to $210 to $350/MW. And 4 hours of storage is pretty thin - most plans call for 12 hours of storage. And storage costs are only projected to increase: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik...
By comparison nuclear costs $131-$204/MW, so it's still cheaper after storage. The Lazard estimate also didn't include the transmission expansions necessary to support the distributed nature of renewable generation (explained further here: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...)
> Even just 4 hours of storage would bring solar's $30/MW to $210 to $350/MW
(Assuming you mean MWh here and it's just a typo.). Where are you getting those numbers
Lazard's estimates that I linked have solar at $130-$230/MWh when charging directly from the grid, and $85-$160/MWh when charging from attached solar which shares the same inverters. (And for additional duration, just add more batteries and discharge them at less power)
So if you blend 50% stored electricity with 50% delivered from primary renewable generation at a fraction of the cost, it's way below nuclear's costs.
Finally, we don't even really know that those are nuclear's costs. We haven't finished Vogtle, so we are at scientific-wild-ass-guess stage of how much it will be when it finishes. Go back 10 years and the estimated cost of nuclear is almost reasonable, but every single year that we have had Vogtle delays and cost increases, the general estimates of nuclear's cost goes up. We don't know when it will stop going up, until we have a few more reactors built. And when you add in the cost of potential construction failure, like at South Carolina's Summer addition, started at the same time as Vogtle, nuclear goes up even more.
People always overestimate the potential of nuclear, for some reason, and reality bites them. In contrast, people always underestimate the potential of storage and renewables, and reality delights them. It's time to reset our expectations based on the copious amounts of data we have collected over the past decade.
No, the units are being mixed up. 100 MW / 100 MWh under "Levelized cost of Storage" means "storage of a capacity of 100 MWh, that can be released at a rate of 100 MW". So if I have a 100 MW solar plant, and I want it to run for 4 hours after sundown, I need 100 MW / 400 MWh of storage capacity. So it's that storage cost, plus the cost of 100 MW solar generation that yield the net cost.
Why not just measure in MWh? Because storage is useless without means to put that energy back in the grid. The electrical transformers to do this are not insignificant. So 100 MW / 100 MWh is more than a quarter of the cost of 100 MW / 400 MWh because of this overhead.
Current nuclear builds have indeed been expensive, the plants last a long time. As per your own source, it's still less than intermittent sources when you include the cost of storage. Furthermore, Lazard is not examining the transmission infrastructure needed o support low-density sources like solar and wind. So, yeah, despite the expense nuclear is still the most cost-effective option.
Furthermore, Lazard's estimates about nuclear are actually quite conservative. Nuclear plants were cheaper when built at scale. During the 1960s through the early 1980s, nuclear plants were often built for less than a quarter of what present builds [1]. Nuclear doesn't need technological improvement to get cheaper, it needs the economy of scale that previous plants enjoyed.
> Bear in mind that generation is only part of the holistic system of energy delivery. Intermittent sources require storage, which is separated out into a separate chart. Even just 4 hours of storage would bring solar's $30/MW to $210 to $350/MW.
Solar is not $30/MW in any part of the world. The raw module cost is $200/MW (gross) presently and might reach $30 in an optimistic 2050 scenario.
Solar LCOE for recent projects is $15-50/MWh depending on climate and land/labour cost.
> By comparison nuclear costs $131-$204/MW, so it's still cheaper after storage. The Lazard estimate also didn't include the transmission expansions necessary to support the distributed nature of renewable generation (explained further here: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...)
There's no reason to compare a peaking storage facility to a net capacity buffer one.
For the use case of 8-12hr storage you can use the same inverter and frequency matching equipment as the solar panels use. If transformers are a cost factor then why would you transform the energy three times at 4-6x the needed power load? Put it in a battery on site and decrease the size of your solar farm's inverter. You need to add an efficient buck charger for the battery but that will cost much less than the money you saved from the smaller inverter. At current grid storage prices of $260/kWh you need about 7 years. Give it a year for price spikes related to EV adoption to settle and you only need 3 years -- sodium ion batteries are well on the path to industrialisation.
In the counterfactual world where you're offering guaranteed $130-200/MWh for 60 years and guaranteed loans and free insurance building such a system from solar and battery would be immensely profitable,
Now I'm having trouble following your use of units:
> Solar LCOE for recent projects is $15-50/MWh depending on climate and land/labour cost.
Do you mean MW here? Capacity costs is nowhere near $15 / MWh.
> For the use case of 8-12hr storage you can use the same inverter and frequency matching equipment as the solar panels use. If transformers are a cost factor then why would you transform the energy three times at 4-6x the needed power load?
This is why storage costs include both the output and the capacity. 100 MW / 100 MWh is different from 100 MW / 400 MWh. Why would someone use a 1:1 output to capacity ratio? So that renewable builders can advertise "100 MW of storage", without actually specifying the actual capacity. In fact some plants have a output to storage ratio less than 1. I've seen 200 MW / 100 MWh facility before.
> In the counterfactual world where you're offering guaranteed $130-200/MWh for 60 years and guaranteed loans and free insurance building such a system from solar and battery would be immensely profitable,
I think you're misunderstanding that figure. It's the levelized cost of energy: meaning every $200 MWh of energy stored and retrieved, you have to pay $200, or $0.20 per KWh. Existing energy costs are less than that. In the US it averaged $0.16/KWh. Storage alone would amount to more than what we currently pay for electricity, for half the energy we use. And remember you need to add generation, and transmission costs on top of that.
No, I'm saying if you offer me a contract where you give me $200 and I give you 1MWh of electricity distributed over the day proportional to demand. You guarantee my loans and I have free insurance. I can spend $30-80 of that on the energy (doubling for seasonal demand), $80 on storage and pocket $40. Then in 10 years I'll replace the worn out battery and start pocketing $160/MWh. I will also be able to sell my other variable MWh for another $15.
LCOS is presently much higher than current electricity costs, but you're not proposing current costs, you're proposing the deal the nuclear industry gets.
So let's be clear about these figures: If I have a 1 MW solar farm, it produces 1 MWh of electricity every hour of daylight - let's just ignore weather, and assume tracking solar panels so we don't care about incidence of the sun. The levelized cost of energy is answering the question, "how much did it cost me to produce that 1MWh of energy". This is mostly the construction cost, divided by the lifetime of the facility, plus operational costs.
Then there's the cost of storage: how much does it cost to store 1 MWh of electricity, and retrieve it later. The total cost of generating 1 MWh of solar energy, storing it, and releasing it into the grid later is the sum of both of these: 1 MWh of electricity is $30-40 from solar according to the Lazard doc. Then storing it and retrieving it is another $160 to $279. So it's a round trip cost of $30-40 to generate 1MWh of electricity, and $160-$280 to store and retrieve it, for a net cost of $190 to $320. But only half that energy is getting stored and retrieved, so the effective cost of producing solar energy round the clock is $120 and $180 per MWh
> you give me $200 and I give you 1MWh of electricity distributed over the day proportional to demand. You guarantee my loans and I have free insurance. I can spend $30-80 of that on the energy (doubling for seasonal demand), $80 on storage and pocket $40.
Except storage costs are more than that, and they're actually rising [1]. Furthermore you'll also need to pay money to build transmission lines to solar farms and wind farms - something not included in Lazard's estimates, it just lists transmissions costs as N/A and says it's too hard to estimate. Even at a high cost of $200/MWh, 3-4x the price of natural gas as per the Lazard doc, it's dubious you'd turn a profit.
Thus is why the vast majority of solar power is used without storage, and we just burn fossil fuels to make up for intermittency.
You said a solar facility plus a storage facility has a cost of $120-180 (this is not neccessarily correct as in some places you might need to store 70% of energy).
Then said you could not combine them (eliminating half of the conversion loss and shrinking the transforming electronics) for less than $200.
Additionally storage isn't increasing in price. Lithium is. And LiFePO4 is already being replaced for this purpose with sodium with prussian blue and carbon (which also does not need copper bus bars). Manufacturing hits GW scale next year, and price parity will follow shortly thereafter.
You are right in that solar is largely used without storage. That is because solar + storage is only marginally cheaper than heavily subsidized and insured for free nuclear and thus is unaffordable. It is also because a mix of solar and wind is a vastly better strategy for reducing emissions with limited resources than anything else.
You also haven't included electrolysers in your calculus (which have just started doing what the solar and battery market did over the last year).
Steam engines are obsolete. Throwing away 70% of your energy with a huge complex machine which wears out quickly due to operating conditions just doesn't work.
You seem to be mixing up some units, but it doesn't change the point. Assuming your numbers are up to date (which I'm sceptical of at 4h storage):
Firstly nuclear also requires storage otherwise you're paying $400-600/MWh on account of the idle capital. Secondly you don't need to lead with storage, you can build out up to 50% or so renewable without.
Thirdly if the costs of battery were to halve or quarter, such as by the conversion of lithium ion to sodium ion production which is already happening, then the reasoning evaporates entirely.
The units aren't being mixed up, they're in both MW and MWh. 100 MW / 400 MWh refers to the storage capacity required to put out 100 megawatts for four hours. Say you have a 100 MW solar facility, how much does it cost to keep the plant running 4 hours after sundown? That's what 100 MW / 400 MWh means. So sum this number with the cost of generation up on the chart above, and that's the net cost with storage.
Nuclear doesn't need storage, since it's power output is not intermittent. The amount of wasted capacity varies with season, but minimum demand is usually 80% of peak demand. In the summer, this increases and the peak demand occurs during the day. This is a good place for solar: rooftop solar mitigating A/C is a great application of solar. But to fulfill base load, which is the vast majority of electricity demand, it is an ineffective choice.
To do that, we'd also have to pay 1960s and 1970s wages. In the meantime labor productivity has massively increased, so it's harder to find skilled labor at those prices.
These two statements are at odds with each other, however. Every new nuclear plant we build like Vogtle will end up increasing our cost of carbon-free energy rather than decreasing it.
Buying a nuclear power plant locks the energy price for 40-60 years, and all the current buildable designs are more expensive than current renewables plus the cost of storage to make the renewables a firm energy source.
And the trend for renewables and storage is drastic price decreases, slowed down only by occasional supply shortages that get innovated around, which in turn drive prices even lower. So when we replace the storage in 15-20 years at EoL, the replacement will be vastly cheaper. And we get 2-3 of those price drops during the time that we would be locked into the cost of current nuclear.
Our energy future is one of energy abundance, and cheap cheap cheap energy, but it's very unlikely to include nuclear as part of that mix. And any nuclear we do invest in will hinder energy abundance and energy cheapness.