[DennisP]

Maybe. And maybe Terrestrial Energy really will deliver a molten salt reactor delivering nuclear at 3 cents/kWh in 2025.

Renewables advocates have a bad habit of comparing the renewables of the future to the nuclear of the past.

[toomuchtodo]

Nuclear advocates have a bad habit of never delivering on time and/or without massive cost overruns. Renewables (solar and wind) are already below 2 cents/kwh at utility scale. They, theoretically, should be considerably cheaper in 5 years (and so, nuclear must target 1 cent/kwh to be profitable).

[DennisP]

Solar/wind with enough storage to be reliable without fossil backup is nowhere near that cheap.

[toomuchtodo]

It doesn’t have to be storage backed at every hour if the day. ComEd in Northern Illinois provides me nuclear at 1 cent per kWh from midnight to 5am because demand is so low in the middle of the night. You can overbuild renewables, and ramp battery production to arrive at a cost below nuclear, coal, and natural gas (and even used load shedding and coordinated storage orchestration using electric vehicles).

Maybe I’m just optimistic based on historical cost decline curves, but I’d bet $1000 on my thread thesis (renewables replace all fossil generation by 2030). It’s the economics.

[hueving]

Stop confusing batteries with wind/solar prices. Until the battery problem is fixed, overbuilding doesn't do jack because you have nowhere to store the bursts.

Stop talking about wind and solar prices and just look at the price of batteries. They aren't on the trajectory you are projecting. It's hard enough to get them cost competitive for a single house, let alone industries with massive 24/7 consumption (e.g. electric mine shovels).

[toomuchtodo]

"A study from McKinsey & Co. last summer found the continued energy storage cost declines present a growing threat of disruption for utility business models. Recent bids for utility-scale solar-plus-storage projects may also give a glimpse where the industry is heading.

An Xcel Energy resource solicitation received more than 400 individual proposals last month, including what may be record-low prices for renewable energy paired with energy storage. The median price bid for wind-plus-storage projects in Xcel's all-source solicitation was $21/MWh, and the median bid for solar-plus-storage was $36/MWh. Previously, the lowest known bid for similar solar resources was $45/MWh in Arizona." [1]

(By comparison, the lowest cost conventional technologies were gas combined cycle technologies, averaging $74 per megawatt-hour, and coal plants, averaging $109) [2]

"An acceleration of the 70% cost reduction seen in lithium-ion prices since 2012 will drive global uptake of energy storage over the next few years, finds a new report by IHS Markit.

The analysts forecast prices for lithium-ion battery modules to tumble below $200/kWh by 2019, enabling previously “uneconomical applications” such as the colocation of battery storage and solar PV to surge.

This sharp and sustained cost reduction will help cement lithium-ion as the battery chemistry of choice in all energy storage markets, including grid-scale behind-the-meter storage, residential storage, and micro-grids.

By 2025, the world’s base of cumulative installed storage capacity will reach 52 GW, IHS Markit says, up from around 4 GW today. Last year, 1.3 GW of grid-connected storage was deployed globally, and this rate is poised to accelerate to 4.7 GW a year by 2020, and 8.8 GW annually by 2025." [3]

[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/eia-700-mw-of-utility-scale...

[2] http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-ene...

[3] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2017/08/03/lithium-ion-batteries...