[tonyarkles]

> But they can't convince the accountants.

Neither can "pure renewables" in many places. I acknowledge that this article is 10 years old but... https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nancy-pfotenhauer/2014/...:

> "For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."

I'm an electrical engineer and am personally mixed on wind and solar. I'm in a Canadian province that has fantastic solar and wind potential but doesn't have the geography for effective pumped hydro storage. Battery storage, currently, is so ridiculously badly priced compared to nuclear. For the same price you can get a battery plant with 8 hours of 300MW capacity, or a SMR with 18-24 months of capacity before scheduled downtime for refueling. Even if you're in the "nuclear always goes over budget" camp, that SMR would have to go dramatically over budget to cease to be cost competitive.

I'm quite convinced that in the medium term it's pretty much got to be wind + solar, hydro, natural gas, and nuclear as a mix. They're complementary! Wind and solar are great at providing "free" energy into the grid when they're producing. Hydro is great but there's only so much available for a given geography without having other negative environmental effects. Natural gas is good for handling peak capacity quickly for situations where the other sources can't ramp up quick enough. Nuclear's great for providing steady baseload.

During the winter my province only gets 8 hours of sunlight per day and it's often enough -40 outside. Right now the vast majority of our homes are heated with natural gas; on a per kWh hour on an annual basis the gas company sells 3x the energy that the electricity company sells. If we're going to drop our carbon emissions dramatically then we're going to need to convert to either electric heat or district heating (probably via massive geothermal plants, which we can get heat out of but the reserves aren't good enough for electricity generation). And if we do switch to electric heat we need to do so with zero fear that we're going to freeze when we have a prolonged -40 degree stretch of calm cold 8-hour days.

[matthewdgreen]

Citing an article from ten years ago on renewables is like citing an article from the 1800s. Go look at the cost and deployment curves for solar PV and wind. Make sure you focus on recent numbers: you’re out of date if your information is even a year old.

[tonyarkles]

While I don't have any links handy, my understanding from doing some digging into this a few months ago is that currently off-shore wind is awesome and has about a 40% capacity factor. On-shore not so much.

As far as the battery capacity and pricing goes, that math was done using the Wikipedia pricing for Tesla Megapacks quite recently.

The vast majority of sources I've found for trying to actually compare prices typically involves levelized-cost-of-energy (LCOE), which as far as I can tell completely ignores the intermittency problem; that's where I did a dive into the battery storage prices and found them eye-wateringly bad.

I'm strongly not opposed to wind and solar; I'm just strongly suspicious of anyone who suggests that, in my climate and geography, we're capable of replacing all of our electricity generation and heating (currently natgas) with solar and wind without some form of baseload long-term backup. I prefer that baseload backup to be nuclear and not coal or natural gas, as is the current status quo here.

I did just do a relative cursory search to try to find some current numbers but the majority of articles had theses like "wind is struggling due to inflation and interest rates but is going to bounce back this year!" so that's... not super useful.

[matthewdgreen]

Battery prices have collapsed 60% in the last year. Tesla Megapacks from whenever you calculated them aren’t even close to competitive now. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collap...

[tonyarkles]

That's awesome but assuming that that means getting Tesla Megapacks at half the price (inverters and infrastructure would likely prevent a 60% reduction and it makes the math easier), you're now getting 16 hours at 300MW out of your batteries for the same price as a 300MW nuclear plant that runs 18-24 months before refuelling.