[tsjackson]

The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas peaker plants during heat waves), but this blog post is a lot of complicating noise in what is a fairly simple economics of implementation problem.

[ThePhysicist]

Storage is a big, unsolved problem. As a quantitative resource on that I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" by the great (and unfortunately recently deceased) David MacKay [1], it's available for free.

For a large country like the UK or Germany you need to increase electricity production with a slew rate of 6-8 GW/h in the morning, and decrease it with the same rate in the evening. Currently the only feasible storage form (in terms of quantity and regulation speed) for that is hydro, but most countries simply don't have enough mountain areas to make this work.

1: https://www.withouthotair.com/

[thehappypm]

Does storage matter short term?

If my utility runs a gas generator, wind and solar allow it to run at some fraction of its capacity most of the time. Sure, overnight when there’s little wind, the gas might go full throttle. But that’s still a huge reduction in emissions if most of the time the grid is fully wind/solar.

[snapplebobapple]

Yes, storage matters quite a lot because electric grids burn out if supply doesn't equal demand constantly. You need the storage not only for overnight, you need it to store energy when wind and solar are overproducing relative to current demand and you need it to supply that stored energy when wind and solar are underproducing if you expect the grid to get rid of demand resources like coal and especially natural gas.

another unmentioned cost of especially wind, but also to some extent solar is the huge transmission upgrade needed to support wind. It is a huge cost and it is never accounted for in the numbers when people are pushing for wind and solar (because it usually ruins the claim that wind and solar are cheaper over their lifecycle vs natural gas). They are also costs the consumer largely gets stuffed with via billing items outside of energy cost so it's kind of insidiously hidden from the consumer.

[vkou]

The problem is that we don't need to halve our emissions, as would happen if we fully switched from coal to natgas (Presumably sourced from a magical, peaceful land of unicorns, as opposed to, say, the Russian Federation, or some middle eastern despot.)

We need to zero our emissions, if we want to avoid climate catastrophe. And natgas isn't going to do that for us.

[thehappypm]

I think you’re letting perfect be the enemy of good. How do we get to zero? First cut in half. Then cut the second half. Waiting for a perfect solution today when there’s incremental progress to be made is foolish

[vkou]

That's not going to happen, though. What is going to happen is we'll invest trillions of dollars into natgas infrastructure and then go all whoopsie-daisies-we-can't-afford-to-just-let-it-sit-idle, and we'll be permanently locked into it.

Temporary hacks have an odd way of becoming permanent features, especially when mind-blowing amounts of money are on the line.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

That's exactly why you don't do that kind of temporary hack. Temporary hacks come in a variety of colors.

[raxxorraxor]

It is certainly an unsolved problem but there are nice ideas floating around. I don't know about feasibility or scalability but some suggest to just elevate land with fluid pressure or they suggested air filled tanks that are drawn to the bottom of seas so that energy is generated from buoyancy. That latter approach allegedly can be scaled to multiple GWh.

Sure, you need a deep see and installation is difficult but the latter approach has the advantage of not needing pumps, which are usually maintenance heavy.

[throwoutway]

Where can I read more about the air filled tanks being “scaled to multiple GWh”?

[macspoofing]

>The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close.

So what? Or put another way, if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come? What do they (and every other country) know that you don't?

The reality is you're not comparing apples to apples. Natural gas can serve as base load and power a modern economy. Solar/wind can't - doesn't matter if they are free. They can't.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

By the time any new nuclear reactor is designed, built and turned on, we'll certainly have many new/more ways to store energy for longer time (e.g new battery chemistry, hydrogen…).

Here in France, half of our nuclear reactors are now off (and we had to turn on some old coal plants because of many unexpected technical issues). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

The new EPR (Flamanville) continues to be delayed and the one in Finland that just went live has been shut down last week. Also, we may have to reduce the power of many of our plants that are built along rivers because we won't be able to cool them off during droughts.

It's much easier and safer to install renewables now (as we just started with offshore wind) that bet on nuclear. It's also quite difficult to envision relying on Niger and Kazakhstan to supply uranium in the long term…

[melling]

We’ve been BEGGING for more nuclear power for decades.

The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/ukraine-war-europe-turns-to-...

Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc?

We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

> We’ve been BEGGING for more nuclear power for decades.

Yes, it really made sense for De Gaulle to launch the French civil nuclear program in 1969 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_programme_nucl%C3%...

But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue. And by the time we hit such limits, we'll have many more long term storage options.

I'm not against nuclear (it's fine) but let's not pretend we're still in The Glorious Thirty.

>The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine.

Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants.

>Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc?

We're not waiting https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2021/executive-summar... but we could do much, much more with renewables.

>We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050.

We're also talking about being carbon neutral and retiring all nuclear power plants in France by 2050, so… https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...

[melling]

“we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables ”

If this were the case, we wouldn’t be starting all these coal plants.

“Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants.”

Yes, so coal, with its large greenhouse emissions, is still used instead of renewables

[macspoofing]

>But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue.

Really? 'Easily' and 'cheaply'? So even with massive cultural pressure to move to renewables, somehow we don't want to move to a cheaper energy source? You sure about that?

What if ... we can't actually replace fossil fuels with wind/solar.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

You write about "massive cultural pressure to move to renewables" but what about all the money to be lost by the fossil fuel industry? Billions of € coming every year in deep pockets weight definitely more than the "pressure" of a Greta, a few Extinction Rebellion members and some ecologists/socialists.

Let's look at the UK, between 2000 to 2021 Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-nuclear-output-falls... (3rd chart):

- renewables went from 3 to 40%

- imports: 3.6 to 7.6%

- nuclear: 22 to 14%

- oil & gaz: 40.1 to 39.7%

- coal: 31.7 to 1.9%

Looks like we managed to replace 40% of fossil fuels in two decades, without much inflation (almost in line with countries who did not deploy renewables):

UK electricity component of the consumer prices index (in real terms 2010=100): 68.1 to 128.2 (source https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...)

Can't find the exact same series for France but you can compare the two between 2010 and 2020 here and see a comparable trend: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/d40f8154-...

We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...: "As of May 2022, the project is two years late and the expected cost is £25–26 billion,[2] 50% more than the original budget from 2016" Oops!

[photochemsyn]

The 20th century power grid structure - baseload, load-following, and peaker - is decrepit, and this should be more generally understood. It was designed around a few centralized power plants feeding into a large regional grid from which cities and industry would draw power.

Modern electrical grids are powered by a much larger range of primary energy sources, and increasingly have distributed storage and generation as key components. This requires some sophisiticated load-balancing technology, but we're not reliant on engineers throwing switches on a mainboard like it was 1950 and slide rules were in everyone's pockets, are we? For example see:

https://www.nrel.gov/grid/advanced-distribution-management.h...

For example, if solar input to a grid at noon greatly exceeds demand, or there's strong afternoon offshore winds, an advanced grid could instruct all battery storage linked to the grid (in the form of everything from electric cars to home battery systems) to switch to absorbing that output in real-time, while keeping the overall grid energized. The notion that you'd even want a steady state baseload system dumping power into the grid in that situation makes little sense. If the sun goes down and wind dies down, then switch all the battery storage to feed into the grid, on a real-time second-by-second basis. That's how future grids will operate in the absence of either nuclear or fossil fuel inputs.

[thesimon]

> if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come?

Because Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor who approved NS1 in his last days, liked Russia, which earned him nice board seats on Russian energy companies. And because Angela Merkel had her constituency in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the landfall site of the pipelines.

And LNG was always associated with fracking in the US, so for environmental reasons it was not very popular.

[macspoofing]

>Because Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor who approved NS1 in his last days, liked Russia, which earned him nice board seats on Russian ene

Yeah - it's always corrupt politicians and big oil, big gas, big whatever. Alternatively, maybe it means that wind/solar cannot meet German energy needs.

And by the way, this isn't just Germany. It's every country that doesn't have access to hydro or nuclear.

[ikt]

> And by the way, this isn't just Germany. It's every country that doesn't have access to hydro or nuclear.

I don't believe Australia plans on going to Nuclear any time soon.

For those of you interested you can see a complete breakdown of our power generation here: https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=1d&interval=30m

Of interest is SA which has a wind/solar/gas mix, Tasmania which is Hydro/Wind, and Vic/NSW/Qld who are all still heavily using fossil fuels.

[macspoofing]

>I don't believe Australia plans on going to Nuclear any time soon.

Yeah, so they'll use natural gas and coal as baseload.

>For those of you interested you can see a complete breakdown of our power generation here: https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=1d&interval=30m

Expand the range to more than a day, and yeah, Gas+Imports(Coal?) is ~40%, so you're stuck on fossil fuels forever.

South Australia is also so small that it's almost pointless to use as a data point.

[rowanajmarshall]

To be fair Germany isn't especially sunny or even _that_ windy. Somewhere like Colorado or Morocco is far more reliable for renewables. Maybe not to the point of baseload, but enough to plan for. So location is really important here.

[kolinko]

Solar is so cheap now that even in Germany it ends up as a cheapest energy source.

[black_puppydog]

> why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come?

German here. Let me tell you that a lot of us have been asking the same question. :)

Your argument seems to be that "they built these pipelines so that must have been a rational decision" but looking at the track record of the conservatives (Merkel's party, "in charge" for 32 out of the last 39 years), their donors, and the just straight-up corruption cases routinely found-and-ignored in this party... I'd say you need to find better arguments.

EDIT: and yes, as siblings point out, their competitor SPD didn't exactly take a rational stance on this either...

[macspoofing]

The point is, it isn't just Germany. There is no country on Earth that actually replaced fossil fuels with wind/solar. The point with Germany is that you guys invested billions into this, and you still are building pipelines for natural gas and buying coal-derived power from your neighbors.

[kolinko]

Wind/solar no, but Iceland is running 100% geothermal - granted it won’t scale to other countries.

[black_puppydog]

"we guys" also had Peter Altmaier, Markus Söder, and all the other Conservative leaders who successfully legislated solar & wind to death.

[macspoofing]

Are you sure you're not just making excuses for the failure of renewables in Germany to replace fossil fuels?

Again, I mentioned Germany, but it isn't just Germany. No country in the world is running on wind/solar. There are no near-term plans for any country on Earth to replace fossil fuels with wind/solar. It isn't the fact that some conservative leaders put some extra taxes or regulations on solar and wind. It's that solar and wind cannot actually replace fossil fuels. Solar and Wind are diffuse, intermittent power sources, with no grid-scale battery technology available to bridge that intermittence. Therefore, you need natural gas to use a base load when the sun isn't shining, and the wind isn't blowing. This is also why natural gas companies tend to be one of the biggest supporters of solar and wind.

[black_puppydog]

Yes, I'm pretty sure. The conservative govts of the different regions introduced legislation that meant you can't currently build wind energy _at all_ in many of the places where it would make sense. That wasn't a fluke; the stated intent was to keep wind energy from "ruining our beautiful landscape". The new (SPD/green/liberals) coalition is just in the process of slowly unwinding these.

For solar, the ministries are by now steeped in a mentality that's hostile to renewables. Robert Habeck (greens) is now minister of economy and ecology, and even when he told his houses to come up with regulation improvements to solar, the results were... weird. One report stated that the proposals included rules like "if I use any of my own PV generated power in my home, I receive none of the regular public subsidies anymore for the power I send into the national grid." There was no technical or logical grounds for that; it was just that all the ministry mentality by now was "if there's a way to put stones in the way of renewables, the default is to do that."

Frankly, and I'm sorry to sound rude about this, you need to stop using a country as an argument for which you clearly have no idea what the political & societal conditions are. Like I said in my first reply: find better arguments.

[svnt]

Look up iron flow batteries and other developing solutions. Assuming no one has been working on this problem and that you know more than them is usually a poor choice.

The other countries know that if they hard stop energy flow their economies will suffer, and these projects take a decade to plan, a decade to sell, and a decade to implement. Anything Germany is building now was probably developed or announced in the 00s.

[andruby]

> Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage

That will work for shifting day & night, but I don't see any feasible energy solutions for summer-winter shifting, or even to bridge weeks with limited sunshine (and/or wind).

There are large populations living relatively far from the equator, which see huge differences in daylight during summer & winter.

We should try to get as much energy from renewables like sun & wind, but I think we'll still need another form of energy generation. Energy storage can help us increase the upper limit of renewables in the total yearly mix though.

[telchar]

There are different types of storage with different trade-offs. In my opinion we'll eventually see lower-efficiency but low cost-per-kWh storage like CO2->hydrocarbon storage used for longer-term seasonal or disaster-preparedness storage, while higher-efficiency higher cost-per-kWh or limited-capacity means like battery and pumped hydro will be primarily used for short term day/night storage.

The cost of inefficiency is a function of energy stored, not storage capacity per se, so effectively its cost scales as (storage capacity) * (# of times charged/discharged). Therefore low efficiency isn't particularly expensive for long-term storage.

So maybe we'll see gas turbines continue to provide power that ultimately is sourced from wind and solar via hydrocarbon conversion, but that's perfectly OK since it would be carbon neutral.

The upshot is this is all a reason to be sanguine about solar and wind.

[svnt]

If we could reduce our energy dependence on burning things to use cases where it actually makes sense to burn things (such as heating in extreme regions), we could basically consider the problem solved.

[konschubert]

Power to Gas is the answer to that.

[glitchc]

Solar and wind will always suffer from a storage problem. The key to modern power is not potential but throughput and consistency. Modern infrastructure needs x Watts delivered 24/7, shifting to y Watts during on-peak hours and z Watts during off-peak hours.

Because of inconsistency, solar and wind will remain non-viable as a primary source of power.

[pfdietz]

Making solar and wind consistent with various kinds of storage is likely going to be more economical than producing said energy with nuclear power plants.

As for comparison to natural gas and such, CO2 taxes will be increased until those are phased out. Still economical? Taxes will be raised until they aren't. We have to leave most of the carbon in the ground.

[nightski]

Economical is one thing, but what about sustainability? Isn't nuclear more sustainable in that it produces less overall waste?

[pfdietz]

The waste produced by a renewable energy system will be small (and of the same kind) compared to the waste produced by industrial society as a whole. If the renewable energy system isn't sustainable because of waste, then neither will be that industrial society, even if it were nuclear powered.

To be fair, waste isn't really the issue with nuclear power either.

[77pt77]

> waste isn't really the issue with nuclear power either.

So what is?

Because you're working overtime here against it without giving any reasons whatsoever.

[pfdietz]

> So what is?

Cost. It's the reason few nuclear plants are being built. No other reason is needed.

[raxxorraxor]

Nuclear does create waste and that problem is not solved contrary to popular belief.

[thehappypm]

I disagree with this premise.

Wind and solar will provide cheap power at times, extremely cheap at times when the production outstrips demand. It’s a simple and easy business model to buy this cheap power and sell it back to the grid at times of high demand. Buy some batteries, then buy low and sell high electricity. Bam, grid evened out by the invisible hand.

[seibelj]

If renewable is so radically better then why did the City of Boston automatically increase everyone's electricity bills by 30%, requiring customers to opt-out? https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2021/01/08/eversource-co...

I keep hearing its so much cheaper, but renewables keep requiring dark patterns, more money, more subsidies. If it was so much cheaper it would just win automatically because of the market.

[thehappypm]

Boston doesn’t have a huge amount of renewable energy in our mix, sadly. Most of New England is fossil fuels. More renewables would make it easier to keep prices low.

[seibelj]

But how does the narrative of “this is so impossibly cheaper and better” square with “we can’t build enough here so it’s 30% more expensive”. Either the region simply isn’t cost effective for solar / wind in which case we need nuclear to have any hope of clean energy, or renewables aren’t actually cheaper. If it was actually cheaper then it would just happen automatically.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

Did you know that electricity prices have exploded in France because EDF (French power company) have lowered their production from 360 to ~300 TWh year over year? That's due to technical problems with the nuclear plants (half of the fleet is still offline).

https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/espaces-dedies/journalistes/to...

[poutine]

So given that it's so cheap you've converted your home to be 100% solar with battery storage and went off grid, right?

Probably not. As you'd like to have power for those dark winter days where you don't see the sun for weeks on end and any viable battery storage will only last a day or two.

Dont get me wrong, I love solar, I'm building a house with it. But outside of select niches there's no viable storage for solar or wind that deals with seasonal intermittency.

Wind even has major long term intermittency issues. This just happened in Europe: https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

[bradgessler]

Could somebody smarter than me comment on the feasibility of geothermal energy breakthroughs like gyrotron drilling?

https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/why-this-fusion-tech-may-be...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrotron

[mdavis6890]

I think you're missing the fact that solar and wind, being quite mature and otherwise unencumbered, have been pretty well optimized to what physics and chemistry will allow. Further gains will be slow and incremental.

Nuclear has been around quite a while as well, but is heavily encumbered by public sentiment, sub-optimal regulations, and knowledge atrophy. There is much more room for optimization before running into physical laws.

[xbar]

There are fairly simple economics of implementation that have prevented a complete transition over the past 20 years. It's not even close.

[thepangolino]

>cost per kWh of solar and wind

Are you looking at installed capacity or effective production?

[mpweiher]

The cost or the price?

The price of renewable energy is often very low, frequently even negative. This does not reflect renewables advantages, but their disadvantages: being available in abundance when the energy is not needed or wanted.

Even the Energy Return on Investment is barely sufficient for solar, for example, so I have a hard time believing that the cost is actually competitive.

[XorNot]

This is false[1].

PV produces 10 to 20 times as much energy as it takes to make, dropping all the time with improvements.

[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/busting-the-myth-on-energy-retur...

[svnt]

No, where the price is negative it reflects the value of storage, which is basically missing from the market, but will not continue to be.