[bilbo0s]

In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive. Witness Vogtie. Take away all taxes and regulations, then compare the price of, say, Iowa, building a nuclear plant instead of just slapping up windmills wherever they want. (Remember, we're assuming zero regulations. So while slapping up windmills would normally be incredibly illegal, we're able to do that under the conditions that our thought experiment postulates.) There's just no way to make nuclear compete. Which is why when you drive through Iowa, all you see are windmills everywhere. It's cheap. Much cheaper than nuclear.

If people want nuclear, the government has to provide the lion's share of the assistance to make it happen. Even then, there are no guarantees you'll be in love with what that looks like. At Vogtie for instance, the government has taken the unprecedented step of prohibiting future users of Vogtie power from ever switching to cheaper wind or coal alternatives. And that's on top of the government agreeing to pay over half of the initial construction costs. So you basically have government paying the lion's share of the tab, and mandating that everyone use it, and it's still over budget, late, and more expensive than wind and coal alternatives.

Too many analyses of nuclear power ignore the financial realities. Iowans choose wind, because it's cheaper than nuclear, solar, and coal. So they slap up windmills, and they have the old coal plants to fill in the gaps. Now Iowa was not trying to put its nuclear plants out of business, but as a consumer if you can choose an electricity bill at 2 cents per kWh, wouldn't you? Or would you continue to pay the minimum 8x 2 cents per kWh for nuclear? That's why nuclear is on the ropes in the US, if you give people a choice, they tend to vote with their wallets.

[rayiner]

Your first paragraph misses the mark, because, unlike a nuclear plant, a windmill or solar plant isn't a standalone power source. To have reliable baseload power with renewables, you need massive battery storage. Right now, you don't factor in the (very high) cost of building battery storage into the cost of wind power because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power. But the cost of all that baseload capacity that's increasingly sitting around not being used (but has to be there to ensure grid stability) can't be ignored.

[bilbo0s]

>because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power...

That's right. So why would you not decommission all of that incredibly expensive nuclear, and draw down your use of the coal plants to fill in the gaps? That's how most dispatch stacks work. It's just common sense. Consumers want to save money. Utilities want to make enough money.

There's just no way you use nuclear in any scenario you can come up with, unless the government is paying for it. Then you don't care, because you're not paying the costs.

[rayiner]

Coal can't dispatch fast enough, and most coal plants are at the end of their lifecycle and need to be replaced. So you have to build new baseload capacity, usually gas. (And really, you still need a bunch of batteries to handle short-term fluctuations in renewables output.) The problem, then, is that you have all new coal or gas plants, which are expensive capital assets, that you're basically using for standby power. (And they incur operating and maintenance costs even when not running.) You can't say that electricity from renewables is cheap without accounting for the cost of that standby capacity renewables require. A nuclear plant, by contrast, doesn't need a bunch of coal or gas plants sitting around on standby. You can shut down that old coal plant, stop paying the workers, reuse the land, etc.

[bilbo0s]

>So you have to build new baseload capacity...

No, you don't. The coal plant in another Alliant Energy area has been around since roughly 1900? or so. It's been updated several times. Never was there a need to rebuild from scratch any coal plant. (This is Madison Wi btw.) Now we stopped using coal there in 2011, (all gas now). But the point is, all the renovations are much cheaper than building a nuclear plant. Utilities around here, (the midwest), are run by old, stodgy, conservative guys who are generally not prone to rash action. There are very few executives around here who are going to build entirely new plants because the machinery in the old one has reached its end of service life. They are going to replace the machinery, at a fraction of the cost. I don't think executives in other parts of the nation are all that different in this regard. Now all that said, even if they did completely tear down and rebuild their plants, which they wouldn't, but even if they did, it would still be cheaper than building a nuclear plant.

So the coal plants are fine. And as I mentioned elsewhere, whatever you use to fill gaps will be a transitional technology. Wind turbines will become more efficient. (Work at lower windspeeds.) Pumped hydro storage will be built in new and innovative ways. What will fill the gaps in 2069 will bear little resemblance to what is filling the gaps in 2019. Because the new methods will likely be not only more clean, but much cheaper to boot.

And incidentally,

>You can't say that electricity from renewables is cheap without accounting for the cost of that standby capacity renewables require...

the 2 cents per kWh people see on their bill does factor in every source in the dispatch stack.

[torpfactory]

Just to back up your point a bit:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Running existing coal and nuclear generation appears to be cheap (2nd chart), but new generation appears to be much more expensive (1st chart). The cost of Solar + Storage is low and dropping, and already beats the cost of new nuclear plants (4th chart).

BTW, I grew up on the east side of Madison, Cheers.

[epistasis]

Baseload is not the necessity, the necessity is to match the power to the load.

Up until now, baseload has been a convenient way to do that matching because baseload was usually the cheapest source of power.

Once baseload is no longer the cheapest source, it's time to re-evaluate that model. Also, when we have a global communication grid and lots of flexibility in our load schedule, it's also fine to re-evaluate how we are doing pricing for electricity.

That time is now. Utilities are highly regulated, and both utility and regulator are slow to adapt to the quickly changing technology that they're now confronting, after nearly a century of glacial technology change. But they will adapt. As we must not only change our economic mode but also become carbon neutral.

Those with huge capital investments may resist, but as you say, we can repurpose that old coal plant and reuse its connections to the grid, which are valuable and expensive to recreate. In Moss Landing, California, gas turbines are getting replaced by over a GWh of lithium ion battery. The change will happen as soon as utilities start bringing recent pricing into their planning process.

[ourlordcaffeine]

>And really, you still need a bunch of batteries to handle short-term fluctuations in renewables output.

Not really the case. Renewable output does not fluctuate fast enough to require the fast response of batteries.

Fast responding storage, in the case of the UK pumped hydro, is usually needed due to thermal plants tripping and causing the grid frequency to suddenly nosedive.

[imtringued]

Power plant failure also generally happens due to extreme environmental effects. During those events renewable energies often reach their maximum production capacity and therefore actually contribute to grid stability.

[dv_dt]

Renewables and storage are already beating natural gas in that gap capacity. As both continue to decrease costs, that niche use will grow. Natural gas and coal tech are cost mature, while both renewables and storage are following natural tech development S-curves down and still have a long way to run.

[saagarjha]

> So you have to build new baseload capacity, usually gas.

Since when was natural gas ever good for base load? It's almost always used peak load because it spins up quickly.

[deburo]

The promise of new nuclear plant designs is to cut down construction cost. This is pretty exciting. I think nuclear power will make a come back in popularity in the next few years, as more and more news and promises surface about those designs.

Here's an article shared by Bill Gates last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-ch...

[freeflight]

Cut down construction costs still won't solve fundamental problems like final waste storage [0] or a lack of proper epidemiological studies into the effects on people, particularly children and pregnant women [1], living near those plants.

Imho the way we've handled nuclear fission so far is far too reminiscent to other environmental disasters that took humanity decades to even recognize and finally act on, even when we had plenty of warnings from the very beginning [2].

[0] http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/looking-trash-can-nuc...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2757021/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and...

[Gibbon1]

> To have reliable baseload power with renewables

You have to be careful baseload power isn't the same thing as battery backed (time shifted) renewable power.

Coal and Nuclear baseload power exists for two reasons. Excess generating capacity at night. And the inability of coal and nuclear plants to shutdown. It's cheap because of oversupply. Time shifted renewable's is more expensive because of under supply.

Some percentage of base load power consumers are only in it for the balance sheet economics. If the pricing structure changes they'll shift their usage to the cheapest source.

Take away: Renewables don't need to generate as much baseload as coal and nuclear plants do now.

[new4thaccount]

You also need base load during the day when wind is blowing and it all of a sudden disappears. Don't say this doesn't happen as I've seen it many times.

Think about it. Wind might be 30% or more of your dispatch and then it just disappears quickly (even with multiple forecast vendors you are lucky to have a 2 hour warning). At this point you have to either have a lot of headroom (excess thermal generation for times like this) or you hope you can startup a resource in time. Therefore you either need storage on a massive unheard of scale, very fast starting resources, or lots of thermal generation for those times of trouble. Another option would be drastically increasing the demand response in the region (basically shut all the A/C's off at a few universities for an hour or so).

[manicdee]

You have seen wind disappear from an entire continent during a very cloudy day?

[jhayward]

We can't really think of the electrical grid as a continental-scale system because it is severely constrained by transmission resources. It as to be modeled as, at best, regional networks with weak interconnection between them.

Even within regions it isn't a well-connected grid.

To give a specific quantitative example within Texas the generation network is modeled as several dozen individual markets (the "nodal market" concept) with generation and load grouped together to form nodes, which are mainly separated by key transmission congestion points.

Lack of transmission capacity sometimes leads to strange artifacts in pricing wind power in Texas, such as negative pricing (due to the Production Tax Credit lowering the floor below zero). These artifacts tend to go away as new transmission capacity comes online and paying loads in more distant markets become reachable.

[new4thaccount]

Additional transmission lowers congestion costs, but you actually increase the "wind artifact" you referred to as you have even more wind online (depending on where the transmission is placed) bidding in below zero as long as the PTC is still in effect. I don't think any new thermal generation has come online in Texas despite their extremely high shortage pricing, so you're really just putting more wind online with new transmission build outs.

[new4thaccount]

In the USA a very large geographical subsection can lose many GW of instantaneous wind generation across an hour, which can be concerning if the system is currently running pretty economic (not a whole lot of excess reserves).

The way dispatch is done is completely different than the way it was done 10 years ago and also completely different than the way it was designed in so many ways.

[skybrian]

It's not really baseload power (which runs 24-7) that's needed. It's backup power that runs much less often. That has different economics.

[nickelcitymario]

Don't disagree with anything you said here, however:

> and they have the old coal plants to fill in the gaps

...this is the problem with solar and most renewables. They have gaps.

The question, it seems to me, is are we in a fight for the survival of our species, or not? If we are, then we should pull all the stops. I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to have a liveable planet. I'll pay the bloody premium to make that happen.

[SiempreViernes]

Get more hydro then as it's faster at adapting to changing loads than nuclear.

[nickelcitymario]

Hydro is damaging to the local ecosystem and has a long history of fucking over small communities, in particular indigenous communities who somehow never factor into these decisions.

Show me a powerful river than can be dammed with minimal to no impact to the ecology or the communities up- or down-stream of it, and you will have my support.

[SiempreViernes]

Oh, so "we should pull all the stops" turns out to be "please don't impact local ecology and communities"? Concerns about local ecology seems like a bit of climb down from "I'll pay the bloody premium"

[saagarjha]

Hydropower has environmental issues and the number of places with sufficient hydraulic head and no dam there already is not all that large.

[SiempreViernes]

Sure, but if you say things like "I'll pay the bloody premium" I expect you're willing to take the environment and political issues for the sake of clean, reliable, and fast power.

[bilbo0s]

>If we are, then we should pull all the stops...

But is coal not one of the stops?

I guess you should help me understand. Why should we use nuclear instead of coal to fill the gaps? They both pollute. With wind providing the lion's share of the energy, the use of coal is drawn down considerably in any case. And coal is far less expensive than nuclear, even with the onerous regulations that have been slapped on it recently. So how are you going to sell nuclear to your consumers when your competitor may be selling a wind/coal package?

And as to the question of the long term, clearly that is using pumped hydro storage and other such technologies along with more efficient wind turbines. Both lowering the duration of gaps, and providing more power during gaps. So your nuclear or coal plant is, even in the optimistic case, transitional. Who's gonna put up money like that for a transitional technology without some kind of draconian government guarantees?

[manfredo]

> Why should we use nuclear instead of coal to fill the gaps? They both pollute.

The idea that nuclear waste disposal is even remotely comparable to fossil fuel pollution is intellectually dishonest in the extreme. Coal plants pump toxic, carcinogenic, and radioactive waste directly into the atmosphere. Nuclear plants produce waste that can be sealed up and buried in a remote area. The hypothetical situations in which nuclear waste disposal could result in poisoning humans are borderline fantasy, usually involving societal collapse to such an extent that all records of the disposal sites are lost and some future civilization digs a mile deep in rural Finland for no conceivable reason.

[ekimekim]

> They both pollute.

In this "pulling out all the stops" scenario to stop climate change, only one of them pollute in ways that matter.

Unless you mean the CO2 emissions resulting from construction, etc. I admittedly don't know the numbers there, and I'd imagine a nuclear plant uses a LOT of concrete - but it's also very long lived, which means it should amortize and come out ahead of coal which produces CO2 in operation even if it produces more upfront.

[nickelcitymario]

^this. This was going to be my response.

All energy production creates pollution in construction. Nuclear is the only source I know of that can produce consistent and reliable energy without creating any emissions from operation.

[Qwertystop]

To my understanding, while nuclear and coal do both pollute, nuclear pollutes in a less environmentally harmful and more containable way - pollutants that stay in boxes instead of going up in smoke.

[nickik]

> In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive.

This is only now wit the current regulation and legal technology. There is no fundamental reason, that nuclear power production should be so expensive.

If we go from first principle, nuclear power requires the least amount of land, the least amount of resources and not a lot of people to run. It runs for very long time.

Nuclear plants were massively out-competing coal in the 80s until there was a huge regulatory changes that essentially killed the industry. Since then no new reactor technology has been license, pretty much all research has been killed, access to nuclear materials is basically impossible, almost no new nuclear plants were built.

And just as with anything else, higher production makes things efficient. If you build one nuclear plant ever 10 years its gone be very expensive. This has been proven for nuclear plants over and over, any place that attempted to build many found that you could actually build them pretty fast and cheap.

Also, there is a massive step up in our ability to improve nuclear power. Wind and solar will not get all that much better. With nuclear we are operating on 2% efficiency and we are having to build massive building and civil engineering to get it done. Even if we have know for 40-50 years that we could massively improve this technology, it just wasn't done. For example, having nuclear power plants that can load follow very effectively.

> That's why nuclear is on the ropes in the US, if you give people a choice, they tend to vote with their wallets.

If its all about cost then nothing competes with gas most of the time. If you take into account end-to-end cost of solar its quite a bit more expensive then people like to quote. In reality with intensive and tax credits, solar and wind would not be so successful outside of a few perfectly located places. And the cost goes up the closer you want to go to 100%. The approach the government likes of slowly getting utilities to up their % of green energy will run into more and more problems the longer it goes on.

[joecool1029]

>Nuclear plants were massively out-competing coal in the 80s until there was a huge regulatory changes that essentially killed the industry. Since then no new reactor technology has been license, pretty much all research has been killed, access to nuclear materials is basically impossible, almost no new nuclear plants were built.

Are you talking about the US or South Korea? China seems to be investing pretty hard into nuclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

[nickik]

The US and the West in general. China is going in that direction but China is expanding everything quite hard. The are using the 'lets do everything' strategy.

But yes. By now, you can actually order pretty interesting reactors from China. Their Pebble Bed reactor is interesting.

[jatsign]

Does anyone know if Saudi Arabia has explored solar power. Seems like they have a lot of unused land that gets a lot of sunlight...

[manicdee]

There has been significant noise in the space, with a SoftBank project set up to install 200GW of solar projects. That project was cancelled relatively quickly though.

I am not up to date with current projects.