seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia, why would Google waste $120B when they can get the same output for at most half the price (and realistically more like 1/10th) using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades.
edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)
> using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades
We have nothing close to the battery fabrication pipeline to make that timeline true, certainly not at scale. If this move works, Google will have cemented its power needs and economics for decades to come.
Global battery manufacturing capacity was 2,600GWh in 2023 [1], and has probably already exceeded that this year. The IEA projects closer to 4TWh by 2025, and nearly 7TWh by 2030 [2].
You need to pay attention because this is happening fast.
That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. (You obviously don't need 1:1 coverage. But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge.)
Now consider EVs. Then add the tens of TWh of annual power demand AI is expected to add to power demand [2]. (And I'm assuming a free market for battery cells, which obviously isn't where we're heading. So add local production bottlenecks to the mix.)
Battery numbers are going up. But they aren't going up fast enough and never could have, not unless we ditch electrifying transportation. Nukes or gas. Anyone pretending there is a third way is defaulting to one or the other.
Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed.
In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.
This will only worsen the nuclear business case as renewable expansion continues, today being a bonanza fueled by finally finding an energy source cheaper than fossil fuel.
Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns.
> In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.
This is happening because of subsidies given to renewables (renewable energy certificates, net metering, guaranteed feed in prices, CFD) plus policies at the national and EU level (EU Renewable Energy Directive). Take away these policies and you are left with a low quality (intermittent) energy source that requires far more expensive storage to produce power when it is needed.
> nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed
We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift. Again, excluding EVs and AI. That’s why we’re reänimating coal plants and building new gas turbines.
I’d also love to see the numbers on that simulation going from 98.6% coverage to what we expect from a modern grid. (And if the balance is provided by gas or something else.) It should surprise nobody that going from 1 sigma to 2 can cost as much as 2 to 3, even if the percentage gap is much smaller.
> Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy
Europe has invested €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. That doesn’t go poor without a fight and collateral damage.
In eu France is the biggest net exporter in the EU while Germany with huge renewable capacity net imported 20+TWh this year. Look how Germany's generation was yesterday to get a sneak peek
I had to check the numbers because it grabbed my attention.
No issue with your quoted figure of 30,000 TWh (annual) global electricity consumption.
But we only need to do 7TWh of battery supply in year 1 (or say only 1-2 of that makes it to grid storage).
30,000/365 is 82 TWh daily. So that’s the number to crack, surely? Because a significant percentage of storage will be to make up for wind and solar, which generally approximately follows some sort of diurnal cycle?
If we will be closing in on a couple TWh annual storage capacity in 6 years (leaving aside any real synchronised attempt to get vehicles to be part of large scale distributed grids) then only a few years on from 2030 we’re going to be able to store a significant percentage of our daily energy demands
"But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge."
How much battery storage do you think we need? Surely not a year's worth.
For solar, we'd likely need 10-16 hours of storage to power stuff overnight. Maybe a little more to cover a few cloudy days. Sounds like we are about 5% of that now?
Generally the worst case is two weeks. In the middle of winter you often get cloudy low wind days for that long. Of course how you handle those worse cases are days need not be how you handle typical. If you can handle 16 hours of no input this will over the typical cases this will be enough to max a massive dent in carbon emissions and we can fall back to existing gas (or even coal) plants for the rest. Plus a lot of power use can turn off when needed - give my company a discount and we can turn the factory off.
10-16 hours is not enough at all. On a cloudy day, solar output will only be 15-20%. On top of that, your panels really only generate for 8 hours on a very good day - the sun is a lot dimmer in the early morning and late evening. Really, you need 2x storage for a good day, if you want to deal with two cloudy days you'd want 50-60 hours of storage.
> That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today.
I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting powering a portion of the grid with batteries that are cycled once per year. One can optimistically cycle one or even twice a day (if wind peaks when the sun is down). Or you can try to ride through a week of bad weather, but natural gas is not actually a terrible solution for that. And those batteries last for a lot longer than a year.
So I think your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years.
Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.
> your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years
The former is calculated from projected 2030 battery production to present energy levels. An essential component of strategy is knowing on whose side time is. Battery production won't reach 1/10 for at least a few decades. That's the point. We need an intermediate solution, and if that's going to be gas, we have to live with the fact that (a) emissions will continue and (b) we perpetuate trillions of dollars of capital infrastructure that will be as difficult to take down in the future as coal has been today.
We'll figure it out. There is too much at stake and there are already a gazillion engineers out there going to bed every night thinking about how to solve this problem.
Innovation is the grim reaper of analyst reports. No one at my company notifies an investment bank when we have a breakthrough internally (lol).
Why are you comparing the rate of change of battery storage capacity, the vast majority of which if grid connected will be used for at most diurnal storage, to yearly energy consumption?
Holy mother of all type errors there.
Multiply it by 365, and it implies that in 2030 alone, we will create enough battery storage to time shift almost 10% of our total electricity use today.
I could just as easily assert the same of nuclear or gas. It doesn't make it true, although there seems to be evidence that nuclear cannot scale as fast as batteries/solar/wind.
Nobody claims renewables + battery doesn't work long term. (And not only work, but do so at rock-bottom costs.)
The problem is the timeline. Time out building that additional infrastructure, including expected demand growth, and you always need more power in the interim. Particularly if you're planning on taking coal offline.
If there is an arugment that we can ramp up battery production even faster than we are, the math changes. But we're already in a Herculean effort to mass produce more batteries faster.
Battery manufacturing capacity is greatly underutilized in China. That was battery cell prices there fell by nearly 1/2 in the last year. There is tremendous room for expansion of production.
The problem with nuclear in Georgia, and in the US, was that no one remembers/ed how to do it, and so all the lessons of yore had to be relearned, and the supply chain had to be stood up.
If you put in an order for several reactors, the very first one (especially of a new model, like Vogtle 3 was) will be expensive AF. The second will be expensive. All models after that will be at a more 'reasonable' cost.
Nuclear reactors are just like any other widget: the cost goes down with economies of scale. If you order 4 or 8 reactors at one sites they'll get progressively get cheaper (there is a floor of course). If you then put in an order at a second site, and move the workforce (or a portion) there, the lower costs will still be present.
If you start and stop construction, or order a whole bunch of different models/types, then there economies of scale goes out the window.
Sort of - nuke plants are fundamentally phenomenally complicated compared to true economies of scale technologies like solar. You won’t reap 100x cost savings in nukes, no matter how many you build
You can't just invent a number because you like it more. Solar and Wind are cheaper than nuclear even if you go beyond LCOE and include system costs. Even the nuclear lobby acknowledges this nowadays and has switched to other arguments.
Not even close. Wind and solar are cheap _only_ if you don't depend on them. In particular, for the wind the adequacy rating is about 10% in most places. It means that you can expect 10% of the nameplate capacity to be available at all times system-wide. So multiply the wind energy costs by 10x, and suddenly they are quite more expensive than nuclear.
It's not even a question for the solar, it simply can't provide power during a day without storage.
> Even the nuclear lobby acknowledges this nowadays and has switched to other arguments.
First, capacity factor is a silly metric to use for this. The industry uses LCOE or system LCOE, because this is about dollars per actual TWh produced, not capacity. In other words: A capacity factor of 10% doesn't matter if building 10x the amount is still cheaper.
With that said, the wind capacity factor in Germany is 20% for onshore and 40% for offshore, so even that was wrong by a factor of 2-4.
Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.
And new AP1000s in the US would cost significantly less, because there are already experienced workers & supply chains from Vogtle and getting a license requires less work too, because you can copy much of Vogtle.
The median build time for nuclear reactors is 7 years. This is archivable if you continue building and not just build 1 or 2 every few decades.
The scale just isn't there. A single nuclear power plant near me, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant, produced 17,514 GW·h in 2005. The entire potential output of the Tesla (cough Panasonic) Gigafactories in California and China have a combined output of ~50 GWh per year. [0] Nuclear power is amazing at producing a reliable base load of power that massively outstrips our ability to produce and store solar power. Say our load is well aligned with the cycle of solar power and we're ignoring weather so we can derate the amount we want to store to 30% that's 105 years of production out of what I think is the two largest batter plants in existence to store the power produced continuously by a single large nuclear power plant.
Global stationary storage deployed for 2024 will be ~150GWh, and this is accelerating. Batteries are easy, nuclear appears to be impossible (economically speaking).
So 35 years then to store the power generated 24/7 by McGuire at that rate of production which ignores that the huge spike of AI loads will want 24/7 power, if we're looking at that kind of load I'd rate it at 50% for starters (low to be honest because it doesn't account for how solar ramps up during the day) which is around 60 years. Plus that's giving full capacity to those batteries when ideally we'd only use the middle 60% to avoid deep cycling the batteries daily unless they've completely solved that problem.
So using your numbers, it is solidly a little less than half the cost, not one tenth (26GWh seems around the necessarily amount for riding out ~14 hours of darkness. I'm assuming your factor of 3 makes up for seasonal variation and cloudy days). The panels take up 9 acres of land area, and need to be kept clean of snow and dust. The battery lifetime is small compared to expected life of a nuclear reactor, but the battery lifecycle is more straightforward. This seems like the territory of having a reasonable tradeoff between the two, not some unequivocal win for an Internet smackdown about how we should avoid one approach.
That is seemingly such an absurdly high number to get a nuclear planet up and running.
Is the majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?
> Is that majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?
One part this, two parts the economics of a novel technology platform being deployed in a large size, three parts American labor costs and inexperience with megaprojects.
Similar to why we can't build ships [1]: high input costs, notably materials and labour, and a coddled industry that is internationally uncompetitive. With ships, it's the Jones Act and shipyard protectionism; with civilian nukes, it's misguided greenies. (Would note that we're perfectly capable of nuclear production if it happens under the military.)
Nuclear is still much more expensive than renewables in China, where there aren't too many "misguided greenies" setting policy. Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable, not the other way around.
The faster people can internalize this lesson, the sooner we'll get to economically-viable nuclear power.
> Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable
As far as Europe is concerned, there seems to have been various political move and lobbying to affect energy independence (e.g. France): economy is transformed energy, so by nuking (…) energy independence, you're suffocating countries. The military role of nuclear is furthermore crucial; civil & nuclear must be correlated.
That's to say, giving up nuclear is not something a sane, well-driven country should do lightly, regardless of ideologies.
It's a tricky topic; what I regularly hear from economists is that wind & solar are still far from being able to compete with nuclear. And because of the previous two points, people can't but frown upon "green" arguments, even if the underlying intentions are honest and well-intended.
(China may not have misguided greenies, but it has a strong incentive to sell whatever it's offering).
If China had a super cheap nuclear design they would be very happy to export that the same way they export their other technologies like EVs, high speed trains, solar panels, batteries, etc. But it simply does not exist.
is it? New plants cost 3-3.5bn for a stable 1gw output. For renewables - much more needs to be built to provide same reliability or compensate with fossils
IMO they only continue to exist because of the Jones Act not the way I think you're implying where Jones Act protectionism prevents them from flourishing. High material and labor alone are enough to explain why people wouldn't build ships in the US. What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea? Gone are the days when the US dominates on skill or capacity, and that's not because the US has lost something the rest of the world just caught up with us.
Whenever we're looking at the 1900s and wondering why the US used to be so dominant as an industrial power I think it's incredibly important to remember our industry got all the upside (an absolute torrent of money and demand) and none of the downside (bombing) of two world wars. IMO the US industrial base was riding high on that easily into the 80s and people mistake that dominance for skill and prowess rather than the waning boon of WW2's mobilization and destruction of every other extant industrial power.
The point is there are downstream costs to our moribund shipping industry. We have a internally-navigable waterways we barely use, offshore wind power gets stalled due to lack of ships, et cetera.
Post-WWII effects are one component. But another is that we want a protected shipbuilding industry for its own purposes, which is fine, but that curtails a lot of other production.
> What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea?
Energy. Our energy costs are much lower than theirs.
There is a huge difference between the US accounting for 20% of Global GDP and merely being "in first place" at the end of WWI and the USA having half of global GDP (and 80% of the world's hard currency reserves) at the end of WW2. While also say, having a Navy easily more powerful than the rest of the world combined, and being able to to focus on an upcoming surge in consumer consumption as opposed to desperately struggling to stabilize food production and rebuild cities and industries that had been ravaged by war.
Britain, a victor that had never been occupied, wasn't able to lift many significant food rationing schemes until the 1950s. Bread, which wasn't rationed during the war, had to be rationed from '46 to '48.
There is a meaningful distinction between being the leading industrial power and being the overwhelmingly dominant economic power.
France, with all their nuclear base, just raised their estimate for new reactors (I'm so shocked!):
> State-owned Electricite de France SA has raised its estimate for the future construction costs of six new atomic reactors in France by 30% to €67.4 billion ($73 billion)
6 reactors, 1650MW each, $7B per 1GW vs Vogtle's $17B. Planned. In 2 decades, after it's finally built, it will have doubled of course lmao.
That right, blame the hippies. Nothing at all to do with nuclear power plants being the one thing that you really do want to be engineered well. But no, regulations are of course to blame!
The anti-nuclear hippy movements of the 60s and 70s are pretty directly responsible for a lot of the slow down in expansion of nuclear power.
>Between 1975 and 1980, a total of 63 nuclear units were canceled in the United States. Anti-nuclear activities were among the reasons, but the primary motivations were the overestimation of future demand for electricity and steadily increasing capital costs, which made the economics of new plants unfavorable.
because 1 - 1gw of solar capacity isn't the same as nuclear, even 3gw of solar isn't the same as 1gw of nuclear (to get a proper perspective, look at germany's grid yesterday& how much overcapacity of solar/wind they have and how much was actually generated/imported). 2 - vogtle unit 4 was 30% cheaper than unit 3, proving positive learning curve, meaning (in theory, according to https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/ ) new builds should be significantly cheaper
I'm fairly pro-nuclear but the EIA (Energy Information Administration) publishes a "Levelized Costs of New Generation" report every year that compiles the total cost of installing new generation, taking into account the fuel, build up, maintenance, interest, and inflationary costs, and nuclear ends up costing more $$$ than other renewable alternatives.
It's no conspiracy why nuclear never gets traction these days -- maybe it was cost-effective 10-30 years ago but renewable technology has gotten relatively cheap. (Shutting down active nuclear reactors earlier than needed is a whole different issue though.)
Nuclear is a terrible investment in 2024. Price per delivered megawatt-hour is guaranteed to be much lower for a combination of solar+battery+wind.
-- Edit --
To clarify, "Nuclear is a terrible investment for private industry in 2024." However, I understand why nation states (and their equivalents) would want a diversity of power sources. There many be non-economic reasons why nations want to build nuclear over solar+battery+wind.
There's something to be said for space. A nuclear reactor takes up far less land than an equivalent amount of wind and solar generation. That's quickly going to become a limiting factor in wind/solar rollout and already is in some smaller countries (unless they're willing to bulldoze their entire land to cover it in solar panels)
Ok we can all agree that the US has not a land problem.
This argument is relevant in Europe but the US has more than enough space power transmission is a problem but it's solvable.
Just because the US has a lot of area doesn't mean it should all be paved over and turned into solar farms. "Who needs nature and green spaces? It could be cheap electricity instead" is a mindset the next generation will hate us for, just like our generation resents previous generations for thinking "Why not burn coal? It's cheap electricity and there's lots of air left."
The US has a massive green space problem. It's a country of roads, parking lots, and corn fields and it's a problem that's visible from space.
Don't take this as opposing solar energy. I support it versus fossil fuels. But if nuclear is viable, I'm for it.
I see this argument a lot. Yes, the density is very high for nuclear power plants, but you need to build them in the middle of nowhere, for political and safety reasons. So, are we really saving space compared to solar? Plus, there is much less political resistance to solar farms, and almost zero safety issues (for PV).
This comment:
> unless they're willing to bulldoze their entire land to cover it in solar panels
Your sentiment is interesting. No one says that when we talk about building new farms. Really, that is what people have done for the past 2000 years to alter our landscape. Can you imagine what Brazil looked like in 1800 vs today? Dramatic landscape changes due to farming. Same for US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. California has plenty of desert or very unproductive land that can be covered with solar panels.
Nuclear may not be competitive for electricity, but it could be a viable option for district heating. If you ignore electricity generation completely, you could make small simple low-pressure reactors and hide them underground. There is a spin-off company from a national research institute in Finland that believes it can make 50 MW (thermal) reactors for €100 million, with some municipal utilities semi-committed to buying ~15 of them.
Google's entire thing only consumed on average 2.6x worth of AP1000 energy last year. Why does anyone think that the IT industry needs to pull all of the weight of electrifying the American economy by building 7 AP1000 power stations?
People say trillion dollar corporations need to start taking steps to limit climate change, then when they do, "Why should trillion dollar corporations need to pull their weight?"
This top-down corporate order will make more change than Americans can individually.
They have the capital, and are the ones who need the extra generation capacity now. They will share the cost along with the average consumer as EVs take up a larger proportion of total vehicles on the road.
And you are applying this equally across all American industry? The production of chlorine by electrolysis consumes twice as much electricity in America than Google consumes worldwide. But I don't see you up here calling for Olin Chlor Alkali to build nuclear power stations, for some reason. Are you suggesting that the American chemical industry lacks capital?
edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)