[travisoneill1]

> The rise of variable renewable sources means that there is an increasing need for electricity grid flexibility, the IEA notes. “Robust electricity networks, dispatchable power plants, storage technologies and demand response measures all play vital roles in meeting this,” it says.

Which is why it's not really the cheapest. Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.

[civilized]

It might be the cheapest if you factor in the costs of climate change, as responsible economists have insisted for decades & the fossil fuel industry has spent billions fighting

[bassman9000]

Then nuclear is the cheapest, and most reliable, by far.

[hartator]

Solar panels productions reject more co2 than nuclear plants.

[ZeroGravitas]

Do you have any recent data to back this up?

It was kind of a statistical tie the last time I looked at this (wind was possibly slightly in the lead out of the three in terms of CO2 per KWh) but the wind and solar numbers seemed to be trending downwards over time.

[acidburnNSA]

2014 data from an IPCC meta-analysis here roughly supports this [1]. 800 gCO2-eq/kWh for coal, 490 for gas, 48 for solar, 12 for nuclear, 11 for wind.

To be clear, any non-carbon energy source can decarbonize almost to zero assuming all the lifecycle activities are converted to the non-carbon energy as well. One exception might be hydro with it's potential biogenic methane emissions.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

[cbmuser]

Germany: 350 million tons of CO2 per year in the energy sector

France: 50 million tons of CO2 per year in the energy sector

Germany: 50% renewables

France: 70% nuclear

[shiftingleft]

Germany uses ~30% Coal in its energy mix, France less than 2%. Your argument is misleading at best, and targeted misinformation at worst.

Since you've repeated the same argument at least 5 times by now, even though others have informed you about the wrong conclusion, I must assume it is meant to misinform.

[papaf]

Your point is interesting enough to think about once but please don't spam multiple threads with the same argument.

[cbmuser]

Except that solar power isn’t an effective measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector. Nuclear is far more effective as the comparison between France and Germany shows with Germany emitting _seven_ times the emissions as France in their energy sector.

[throwaway2245]

Because Germany burns seven times as much fossil fuel as France.

This tells us that France has a cleaner energy mix than Germany, but I don't think this cherry-picked example contributes much to the discussion otherwise, no matter how many times you repeat it.

[Jweb_Guru]

That's an incredibly disingenuous comparison; Germany gets just 10% of its power from solar, while France gets about 75% of its power from nuclear. Once again, this is not some sort of demonstration that "solar doesn't reduce greenhouse emissions," it's an indication that people need to start building pumped storage.

[oezi]

I think your argument could be good if nuclear had any chance in the future. Unfortunately though, it hasn't. The complexity, risk and political cost make it unlikely that we will see a nuclear renaissance. Even countries like the US that can be very market driven, see much higher levels of investment in renewables including solar than nuclear.

[literallycancer]

Nuclear is too expensive, takes too long to deploy and the projects always exceed their budget.

[patmorgan23]

I think a some of that is because of the way nuclear has been deployed. Similar to reason the US Navy has been offered a buy 1 get one half off deal for it's air craft carriers. Using standardized designs and the same labor force to build multiples of the same thing is exponentially cheaper than doing one off designs/contracts.

There is of course a limit to this effect, for nuclear there's site specific engineering/design that has to happen which you don't have for ships.

But the savings in workforce cost can absolutely be realized in nuclear if a large enough pipeline of projects is developed which it looks like the French power company EDF is doing.

[anigbrowl]

You already made a top level post asserting this, there's no need to keep repeating it.

[antr]

I was just going to say this. This is what many people do not understand, it's "the cheapest" technology but the cost of the necessary ancillary services, balancing mechanism, FFR, inertia, etc., to make this happen is not baked into the LCOE models. That's how shortsighted this sort of messages are.

[Jweb_Guru]

While that's true, it's also true that the total cost of solar (taking storage into account) is far lower now than it was even 10-15 years ago. The logical thing we should be doing now is building massive amounts of storage, rather than complaining about how solar costs don't take it into account. As an added bonus, large pumped storage or fuel cell batteries can be reused for any renewable source (unlike solutions like concentrated solar), so any improvements in one can be mostly decoupled from improvements in the other, which is why I find the insistence that people add the cost of the batteries to the cost of solar to be pretty wearying. And I don't find arguments that pumped storage takes a long time and has high maintenance costs to build very convincing when the alternative, nuclear, has exactly the same requirement.

[cbmuser]

We have lots of solar in Germany (50% renewables in our electricity mix) and we’re paying the highest price per kWh in the whole world.

Let alone that we’re emitting 400 grams of CO2 per kWh on average while it’s just 50 grams on average in France.

[_Microft]

Since you seem to be from Germany, you must be fully aware that the emissions problem we have is one caused by our coal power plants and not by renewables (which also means that the emissions stats that you repeatedly posted here no longer feel like an honest mistake but rather disingenuous)

You are also conflating production cost and end user prices.

[Jweb_Guru]

Germany counts a bunch of incredibly dumb stuff as "renewables," including wood burning, which is just one of the many reasons Germany's emissions are far higher than France's (another is continued support for coal use for political reasons). It gets only about 10% of its energy from solar.

[xiphias2]

Sadly it's not just Germany, the whole EU is transitioning from coal to wood in poor parts of the countries, and governments are helping in it.

[literallycancer]

Your cost is due to how the policies are set up, not because the tech is not up to par. Countries that invested in solar early on have a similar problem, where they funded the progress but their own solar installations are now outdated. To get out of solar now would be a mistake since you'd not even reap the benefits of that early investment.

[oezi]

The reason for this is that we bankrolled much of the initial trajectory of cost decline. Unfortunately, we stopped investing heavily when prices dropped due the black/red grand coalition not wanting to risk losing votes over potentially higher power prices. Now we are stuck at high Co2 and high prices.

[antr]

The price of electricity is not only generation cost, which represent c. 30% of your total energy bill.

[hokkos]

Taxes to pay feed in tarif, contract for difference for renewable being another 30%

[blake1]

They absolutely do have these associated costs.

Robust electricity networks? The US has spent trillions on transmission networks in the era dominated by coal.

Dispatchable power plants? We’ve had both base-load and peaker plants for decades. Indeed, base load gas is cost-competitive with solar now. But all base-load gen is so slow to start up and shut down that peakers can charge 2-3 orders of magnitude more per MWh.

Storage technologies? Given the exorbitant cost of peaker power, pumped storage has been in use for decades.

Demand response has also made sense for decades, but we’ve lacked the technology and market structures to make it a reality until recently. It was introduced before renewables had real market share.

In short: yes, renewables require these technologies. So does fossil-fuel generation. The IEA’s bias is showing if they’re implying that this is unique to one technology.

Of course, our current system is optimized around the characteristics of huge fossil plants, and a lot of capital will be required to optimize it around a different technology. These investments are worth it if you consider the externalities of carbon emissions. If you do it correctly, and include extreme weather costs, we should try to get to a zero emissions ASAP.

But even if you ignore externalities, as you appear to be doing, renewables are now so much cheaper that there is no economic reason to replace obsolete generation with non renewables. Under this approach, we’ll still get to 100% renewable in 40-50 years.

[throwaway2245]

I understand the contrary: nuclear power is extremely inflexible - not dispatchable, no demand response. You can't turn it off and on.

[travisoneill1]

True, but solar doesn't have demand responsiveness either, it has sunlight responsiveness, which is not the same thing.

[myself248]

But unused capacity in nuclear overspeeds the turbines, you can't allow that to happen -- generation and frequency are both controlled by the same steam valve. Unused capacity in solar just sits there basking in the sun. The frequency is controlled by software in an inverter.

To make solar demand-responsive, you just build more of it. It's really that simple.

[antr]

It's not about being dispatchable or not, it' about the volatility renewable generation and the problem this generates... and how other non-renewables need to be called by the TSO.

[pfdietz]

Renewables look at nuclear's inability to deal with the fluctuations and respond "That's a 'you' problem, not a 'me' problem."

[cbmuser]

Which is actually not true at all. Modern nuclear plants can be operated in load-following mode and reduce and increase their output by 10% and more within minutes.

[pfdietz]

The issue is not primarily technical, it's economic. Operate a nuclear plant at lower capacity factor and the economics becomes even more hopeless.

[travisoneill1]

If the economics are impossible, how is it that France currently runs 70% of its grid on nuclear and has electricity costs substantially lower than the EU average?

[pfdietz]

We don't know how much those reactors cost to build then (it was mixed with the military nuclear program and the paperwork I understand does not exist to disentangle the spending). They are cheap now because they are not being charged for the cost of their construction. We do know that France cannot afford to replace them now; new reactors would be far out of the running economically.

[travisoneill1]

So economically viable if the government subsidizes the construction. I would be happy for my tax money to go to a project that gets 70% of electricity generation off of carbon.

[hokkos]

That is not true the Cour des Comptes has extensive documentation for its cost, also nuclear LTO should be preferred, but replacement is economically possible.

[Gwypaas]

The main issue is that the largest cost of a nuclear power plant is the capital investment to build it and staff to run it, which is fixed. In comparison fuel costs seem to hover at about 25%. Therefore you need to run your plant at about full power all day to have a chance to recoup the investment. With renewable, although intermittent, sources vastly undercutting nuclear energy on price many hours of the day this becomes an almost impossible calculation.

Based on this nuclear is an uniquely bad pairing together with renewables, and it will only get worse. Say you can make massive profits on average one hour per day, but that means all other methods of energy generation or storage can make the same, and still undercut you.

This isn't even factoring in that it is impossible to get insurance for a nuclear power plant.

[Krasnol]

Don't forget the costs for the waste which generations will have to take upon them.

[08-15]

A glass log at the ocean floor costs no one anything.

[mycall]

Could someone grab them, melt them, then make dirty bombs?

[08-15]

Of course! Anyone can grab something from the ocean floor (~3000m deep), especially something as easy to find as a lump of glass. Glass is also totally easy to melt on your kitchen stove and adding radioactive glass to the bomb you have lying around anyway, turns the bomb from a harmless firecracker into a totally menacing doomsday machine.

Yes, that's the first thing a terrorist would think of.

Seriously, dirty bombs are a red herring. It's the "bomb" part you should be worried about, not the "dirty" part.

[virmundi]

Right. That makes it ideal for baseload. It can produce more than enough for regular loads. If necessary it can be augmented by solar and other power generation.

[Jweb_Guru]

Let's be honest here--nuclear is not "ideal" for baseload, and it is indeed inflexible w.r.t. power output. What's actually ideal for baseload are fossil fuels. Unfortunately, those aren't going to be an option going forward, so we have to choose between a number of less-than-ideal options. I think it would be better to be realistic about the tradeoffs of those options than to try to argue that we actually aren't giving anything up.

[08-15]

Yes, you can. Most nuclear power plants are more dispatchable than most gas burners. Countries with lots of nuclear power plants (France) absolutely run them in a load following regime.

[Edit: And, as usual, downvotes rolling in for pointing out a verifiable fact. HN being HN, I guess.]

[alex_g]

My propane tank doesn’t magically fill itself every other month.

[wnevets]

>Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.

because those cost have been socialized to the rest of us. We are all paying for higher cancer rates, temps, etc but these companies get to keep the difference as profit.

[FabHK]

FWIW, nuclear power does have quite some associated costs (storage, security, etc.) - I'd love to see a sensible estimate. It might still be worth it to cover base loads.

[Joeri]

Are you accounting for the refining and transportation costs of fossil fuels and for the fissionable material mining and refining and for the waste storage costs of nuclear?

[cbmuser]

Yes, that’s all accounted for. Can be looked up in one of the IPCC reports.

Google for “GHG emissions life cycle IPCC”. I’m currently on mobile so I don’t have the sources at hand.

[tigershark]

No, stop spreading your disinformation please. You just compared the retail energy costs instead of the production costs in all your nauseating pro-nuclear comments.

[api]

Nuclear has a lot of hidden costs too such as waste disposal or reprocessing, insurance (whether private or effectively public and socialized), and remediation.

If you look at the whole picture including capacity factor, flexibility, engineering overhead, etc., coal and gas are still very cheap... provided you ignore long term externalities. This is the problem.

[Jweb_Guru]

Yup. Everyone keeps saying "people ignore the cost of batteries!" but what the thing everyone in all these threads ignores is that fossil fuels have absolutely amazing economics and will for much longer than it will take to inflict catastrophic ecological damage on the world. Waiting for them to become more expensive than renewables just means that by the time you finally panic and start building storage and nuclear infrastructure, fossil fuels will be so expensive that the last thing people are interested in is big public works projects.

[api]

This really is a classic tragedy of the commons issue that requires government intervention of some form. We have to put a price on fossil fuel externalities and push alternatives. Markets are short term optimization engines and can’t price in what they can’t “see.”

Market fundamentalism is the doppelgänger of dogmatic Marxism and is no better.

[cbmuser]

Waste disposal or reprocessing are neglectible if you keep in mind that a single nuclear reactor produces electricity worth over one million US Dollars per day.

See: https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY

[jay_kyburz]

I watched your video and he didn't factor waste at all?

[dehrmann]

> Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs

They do, but with coal, it's the pile out back, I assume natural gas networks have tanks. Nuclear is interesting because it's almost control rods.

But your point stands; storage is a lot simpler for conventional fuels.

[SubiculumCode]

Sure. But let's talk about the true costs of fossil fuels: Climate change is pretty damn expensive. Leaving out the costs of the wars fought for oil.

[cbmuser]

Yep, and Germany proves that renewables don’t help to drive down emissions in the energy sector unless you can use abundant amounts of hydro power.

Germany has 50% renewables, yet their kWh causes 400 grams of CO2 on average while France with 70% nuclear causes 50 grams of CO2 per kWh on average.

[SubiculumCode]

Yes, you've repeated this elsewhere, and as others have noted, your stats and figures do not reflect an accurate assessment the the advantages/disadvantages of renewables.

[roenxi]

"We've tried it and it failed" is a pretty strong argument, too strong to be brushed aside with out an argument or evidence.

The Energiewende is recent history, and the major cause of the highest electricity prices in Europe. But that wasn't enough, not even close, to bring Germany into line with France's excellently low CO2 production.

Even if the situation has changed to the point where solar is the most cost-effective option, there are a lot of lessons to be learned from Germany about how dangerous it is to take an anti-nuclear stance. They look like fools.