[Reedx]

Or we could just stop kidding ourselves.

As Bill Gates and others who've done the math have repeatedly said[1], there is no storage solution anywhere on the horizon. Batteries are orders of magnitude too expensive.

You have to consider the problem holistically. Steel and concrete production. Places like Tokyo that go days without power. Countries like India that are not going to pay a premium.

If you're concerned about climate change, please take a serious look at nuclear energy[2][3][4].

1. https://youtu.be/d1EB1zsxW0k?t=520

2. https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Year-in-Review-2...

3. https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...

[yorwba]

According to the U.S. Energy Information administration, nuclear is more expensive than battery storage: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.p...

[acidburnNSA]

Nuclear builds in the west right now have been boondoggles; the nuclear industry must regain its ability to build effectively to play a role here. This has been done before through standardization of design and serialization of production. This could conceivably be scaled back up if we were serious about decarbonization, with high likelihood of success given previous successes (e.g. France decarbonized 80% of its electricity grid in 15 years by building 58 standardized nuclear plants).

Current prices for variable renewables and batteries are mostly on the current margin. Everyone agrees that costs of variable sources skyrocket as penetration increases due to curtailment and overbuilding. When you get 100% of your electricity on a sunny day (including from storage through the night) from solar, the next solar plant you build will have to be curtailed. Seasonal and crazy-weather variations are much harder and more expensive to fill with variable sources than the daily fluctuations.

These lowlow prices we see headlines about today are about building renewables in a world alongside hilariously cheap fracked natural gas plants that can pick up the slack.

There's good info along these lines in here: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/66970.pdf

Nuclear is unique in that it's the only low-carbon energy source that can run 24/7 for years at a time (followed by a month outage, then 2 more years, etc.). Hydro can kind of do this in certain geographies, but is very hard to scale to the point we need. Nuclear also uses far less land and raw materials than the variable renewables, especially when chemical battery storage is included.

But yeah unless nuclear folks can get costs back down soon, no one is going to be interested. If in the end variable stuff is indeed hard at massive scale (I strongly believe this will be the case), then if we don't have nuclear, fracked and high-carbon natural gas and oil (for transportation) will be around at 50% of our total energy for a long time.

[ZeroGravitas]

Interesting coincidence that France stopped at 80%. That's the same amount that widely touted as being straightforward with current renewable tech.

I'd guess it's for the same reason, after that you're dealing with seasonal variations that would leave nuclear or renewables unused for most of the year.

[Reedx]

Yet in practice let's take a look at France (nuclear) vs Germany (leading solar/wind):

"French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. As such, according to the prevailing economic wisdom, French electricity should be far more carbon intensive than German's. And yet the opposite is the case. France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity.

Why? Because France generates 72% of its electricity from nuclear, and just 6% from solar and wind."

France is cheaper and produces 2x more electricity from clean sources compared to Germany, where costs keep going up.

[ZeroGravitas]

And yet both France and Germany plan to move to mostly renewable. Which the French government thinks will save them money. Something that probably wouldn't have been possible without Germany's far sighted leadership on this issue.

I wonder how you could attribute the carbon saved by all the people choosing solar and wind as the current cheapest options to the people who put their money where their mouth was when that was just a projection.

[thrower123]

Right. Far sighted leadership of shutting down perfectly good, clean, nuclear power plants, and trying to replace them with intermittent renewables. That need to be backed up by more reliable alternatives, like strip mining old-growth forests for dirty brown coal to burn in steam generators, or importing electricity from France's nuke plants.

Just brilliant.

[ZeroGravitas]

You're thinking too small.

Climate change and deforestation are global problems, and Germany has helped fund a global solution.

Solar and wind are growing rapidly, they're currently passing the total yearly generation of nuclear but with 30% yearly growth will soon be adding the equivalent of the total nuclear fleet every year.

It is actually brilliant.

If Germany has sacrificed some of their own woodlands to make that happen then that's just more impressive.

[thrower123]

Avoiding nuclear power is just stupid, and shutting down functioning plants is cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you actually care about net effects on the environment, anyway.

[yorwba]

Most of the difference in prices is due to Germany having very high taxes: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

And those are still (non-household) consumer prices. That means they don't just reflect the cost of generation, but also what consumers are able and willing to pay. Unfortunately I didn't find any information on generation costs.

[imtringued]

The problem is that the cost of elecricity in germany is going down but industry is excempt from the EEG fee which is used to pay for the renewable energy plants. The end result is that households end up paying the electricity bills of industrial companies and so the retail price rises as the renewable share goes up.

[Beldin]

Germany (leading solar/wind):

Huh? Germany leading? Their fabled Energiewende was about moving away from nuclear. It had the unfortunate effect of moving to more coal plants to ensure base load is met.

One problem with wind power in Germany is that they don't have sufficient capacity for north-south power transmission. They've got wind in the north, they need it in the south... problem solved, you'd think. Alas! They need far, far more capacity over very long distances (1000km).

Anyway, I would not have called Germany leading in solar xor wind, but i didn't look into this. Perhaps the rest of the world is even worse? Seems unlikely though.

[imtringued]

Germany never added coal, the amount of power being generated by coal remained unchanged from 2010 to 2014. Of course one should asking oneself what the point of renewable energy is if it isn't being used to reduce dependence on fossil fuel but that is a different topic. The problem with the Energiewende is that the lazy government isn't deploying renewables fast enough. The renewable technologies that are available are more than sufficient until Germany hits 80% renewables.

[Gatsky]

I don’t know how they compare these costs, the document doesn’t say. Battery storage doesn’t generate power after all. Nuclear power’s great feature is that all the externalities tend to be included in the price. This is also makes it look more expensive than almost anything else. Do these wind/solar prices include decommissioning and full life cycle maintenance costs?

[choeger]

A short, back-of-the-envelope calculation gives a price of 600billion dollars for Germany's consumption over a whole year when the cost drops by just two orders of magnitude. So yes, it is still expensive, but the technology is still in its early years and it could plausibly work out at a truly grand scale.

[205guy]

Here's another link for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeness_Nuclear_Power_Statio...

Summary: Dungeness B reactors were scheduled to be complete in 1970, but finally cam online in 1983 and 1985 at 4 times the original budget, but now "have been non-operational since 2018 due to ongoing safety concerns."

[brandmeyer]

> Or we could just stop kidding ourselves.

Speaking of kidding ourselves,

> If you're concerned about climate change, please take a serious look at nuclear energy.

Please take a serious look at human political structures over the last decade. I don't believe that any nation in the world has sufficient stability to safely manage nuclear waste for the next few decades, let alone hundreds of years.

[z-cam]

Electric cars add storage at almost no cost to the utility.

Consumers in North America bought 260,000 battery electric vehicles in 2018. This is over 15 GWh of storage. And utilities paid $0 for it. As many others pointed out in this thread, EV penetration is minimal--so imagine how much storage potential will be added as adoption grows exponentially in the next 5 years.

There is no way for utilities to access this storage yet--but this is what we are building (at least the software part of the equation).

I agree that nuclear should be taken way more seriously.

But V2G is also game-changing since it lets utilities "rent" capacity instead of "owning" it.

[paulmd]

I'm not putting additional power cycles on my battery and necessitating early replacement unless you pay me for the privilege.

[AstralStorm]

Most importantly, where do you place the discharging posts? Definitely you do not want the cars discharged during night so you cannot use them in the morning, so you'd have to somehow predict how much the given car is driven. Plus it would have to be connected to the grid during the middle of the day to charge with solar. Which means reworking all parking spaces...

[_ea1k]

Lithium Ion battery cells right now cost ~$100USD/KWh and are good for approximately 1000 cycles. That works out to ~.10USD/KWh of provided capacity, which is too expensive, but not "orders of magnitude" too expensive. Obviously there are a lot of additional costs, but I don't think they add up to making them orders of magnitude too expensive either. For perspective, Natural gas comes in at ~.025USD/KWh here.

There is also some evidence that cycle count may improve on cells in the near future as prices fall. a 5x improvement in cell lifespan would make a huge difference.