[fineIllregister]

> While the plants themselves are expensive, producing wind and solar power at large scale and offsetting intermittency incurs costs in the form of increased transmission capacity and storage requirements.

My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear even when accounting for storage.

That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning.

[throw0101d]

> My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear even when accounting for storage.

In Ontario nuclear costs 10¢/kWh while wind costs 15¢ and solar 50¢ (Table 2):

* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2022...

And when wind goes to zero at night, then (natural/methane) gas generators are often spun up.

> That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning.

Which wind and solar also have. You may be able to extract some metals from solar panels, but turbine blades are not (AFAICT) recyclable.

[Manuel_D]

> My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear even when accounting for storage.

This understanding is either based on geographically limited storage options (hydroelectric storage), or is incorrect. The amount of batteries required to even out intermittent sources is many times more than the amount of batteries produced. The cost of a 1 GWh facility is very different from a 1 TWh facility. The latter is 2x the amount of batteries produced worldwide each year. But it's only 2 hours of the USA's electricity consumption. That's how big of a mismatch there exists between battery supply and the demands of grid storage.

> That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning.

Waste disposal and decommissioning are already factored into nuclear power's cost. They have to pre-pay the cost of disposal and decommissioning.

[epistasis]

You need to update your talking points.

Vogtle is $170-$180/MWh. https://www.powermag.com/blog/plant-vogtle-not-a-star-but-a-...

New solar is on average $40/MWh: https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/utility_scale_solar_...

Back in 2022 when prices were higher, NREL put batteries at $482/kWh:

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf

That's $87/MWh for storage, backing out the battery lifetime and round trip efficiency from the same report.

So depending on the time usage of electricity, the average solar+battery installation will have an averaging of $40/MWh and $127/Mwh electricity.

That's using old prices. It's cheaper today, and will get cheaper in the future.

[Manuel_D]

The cost estimates are for a 4 hour storage system - not enough for diurnal let alone seasonal storage. Furthermore, actually attempting to build storage systems at grid scale would cause battery prices to skyrocket. Even just 4 hours of electricity supply for the world works out to 10,000 GWh of batteries (global electricity demand is ~60 TWh per day). In 2023, 680 GWh of batteries were produced [1]. If you were to try and build 10,000 GWh worth of battery storage you'd buy up all the batteries on the market, causing the price to skyrocket. And even if you literally bought every single battery produced in 2023 you still wouldn't have 1/10th the batteries required to provision just four hours of storage (and not to mention you'd kill 100% of EV production in the process). The scale between the batteries produced and the amount of batteries required to deliver even small amounts of storage are vast.

And we're not even talking about electrifying other fossil fuels uses like heating, transportation, etc. That's going to make electricity demand even larger.

1. https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufactur...