[thebmax]

This is partly the problem with renewable power. You get large swings in generation where some days it's your entire demand and you may even have to pay to export the excess power and other days it's 0 and you need to fire up the gas plants in order to avoid brownouts. Building two power plants (wind and gas) results in double the cost and less reliable grid overall. It's surprising how much people seem to discount the reliability of wind and solar when discussing them as true alternatives to fossil fuels.

[crdoconnor]

It's surprising just how much people seem to discount the reliability of markets to smoothly deal with variations in supply and demand.

German aluminum smelters for instance are already building their plants to be able to scale electricity with supply. They've seen these periods where electricity prices dropped almost to zero and they want in.

As always, markets often take time to adjust to new realities, so this shift won't be instantaneous.

[Gibbon1]

I'm totally with this, the idea that no market for 'excess' electric will appear doesn't pass the sniff test. A paper I read discussed a pilot plant in the 50's that produced iron from sulfide ores. Certainly sounds like a process that can consume excess power without much trouble provided that situation happens frequently enough.

http://www.ulcos.org/en/docs/Ref03%20-%20Electrowinning%20-%...

'High purity iron was produced, with a current yield of 85% and a power consumption of 4.25 kWh/kg iron'

Far as I can tell, 1 GW for an hour would produce ~250 tons of iron.

[Qantourisc]

In some countries it gets even more interesting: they pay you to consume power, as they have nowhere to dump it.

[_delirium]

In Denmark this is mostly managed by the interconnects with neighboring hydro-heavy grids. On calm days, Sweden releases more water from reservoirs and sells electricity to Denmark; on windy days, it closes the hydro gates and buys cheap electricity from Denmark. Fairly fortunate situation to be near large amounts of hydropower (Sweden gets about 50% of its electricity from hydro).

[polack]

I remember being in Denmark a couple of years ago when there was a massive spike in the electrical price. Think it was due to low wind and that Sweden had abruptly shut down one of its power plants. As an effect it costed the Danes more than 11-12 USD to run the clothes dryer (one time). So it can be expensive to depend on others :)

[sireat]

I am actually shocked to hear that any Danes have a clothes dryer.

In most of Europe clothes dryers are relatively uncommon (people use clothes lines or for inside use you have drying stands ).

So with the Danish emphasis on energy conservation one would think clothes dryers in Denmark would be an expensive luxury.

[_delirium]

They're still not that common, at least in Copenhagen, partly because most apartments are pretty small, so space is at a premium. But in recent years I've seen combo washer/dryer units that reuse the same tumbler for both functions, so they take only the space of a normal washer.

As for the cost, well, many Danes have money to spare.

[usrusr]

Fossil fuels are not exactly immune to outside influence on price either, as long as you are importing.

[static_noise]

See renewables as fossil fuel saving addition to the grid. Yes, you need conventional power generation to cover the worst case scenario. Yes, it will make the power grid more expensive. No, it will not make it less stable if configured properly. Every Joule generated by a renewable source saves a Joule from fossil fuels for future use. Every Joule saved on fossil fuels means less import (for most countries). So, financially for most countries, renewables are like a savings account which pays back over the next twenty years.

[snowwindwaves]

I disagree with the statement that highly variable sources of generation won't make the grid less stable. The more non-dispatchable variable generation there is the more quickly dispatchable firm generation you need to make up for the power which can suddenly disappear. Electricity systems use the frequency in the short time frame to determine if more or less power is required, big changes in generation cause changes in the frequency, which is one aspect of grid stability.

good points otherwise!

[hueving]

That last statement is unfounded. With the current price of fossil fuels, there is no evidence that renewables pay back after 20 years.

[Intermernet]

The current price of fossil fuels is not sustainable, and has wildly fluctuated over the last decade. It's not really a metric that can be used for long term planning, except to say that fossil fuels are finite (in the "human scale" of time. Everything is finite if you want to get pedantic.), and therefore the cost will eventually go up if we keep relying on them.

The varying monetary cost of fossil fuels also causes huge destabilization of the world economy (See 1973 OPEC crisis etc). It would make the global economy much more stable if we could eliminate such an unpredictable variable.

Also, mathematically, something that is "renewable" will, given time, obviously provide a better ROI than something that isn't. The figure of 20 years may not be accurate, but fossil fuels will never pay back. Once used, they're practically gone for good.

[hueving]

>Also, mathematically, something that is "renewable" will, given time, obviously provide a better ROI than something that isn't.

Only on a global scale, but people don't act globally. The ROI for the actual entity buying the windmills will be worse if natural gas prices are almost nothing.

[Zigurd]

By that logic, the fact that heating with wood is cheap means that converting to oil or gas was not a good thing at the time.

Oil might stay cheap, or it might not, depending on supply. That should have little impact on a shift to sustainable energy.

[caf]

You do not ever have to pay to export excess power from wind turbines (or solar) because they're instantly dispatchable - you can just feather the blades if no-one is willing to pay for the power.

[snowwindwaves]

In Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, Canada and Washington, USA at least, I am certain that company that builds a wind farm gets a contract where some entity guarantees they will buy all of the power the wind farm will produce at a pre-determined rate(s). Otherwise nobody would put up the money to build the wind farm.

You are correct that new renewable plants never have to pay to export excess power, but conventional generation such as old-hydro, gas, nuclear, coal, etc that don't have sweetheart contracts with the government do have to contend with negative prices, and the system does have to pay someone to take that power. Then the local rate payers through some non obvious lumped in "market operating charge" or other mechanism end up paying for that power they didn't use.

You could feather the blades, but at least in the markets I've worked in they never would.

edit: Actually, the ratepayers don't pay to get rid of the energy they didn't use, the generators that generated it at a negative price have to pay for not being able to shut down.

[lyschoening]

Much as with cloud computing, as long as the grid is large enough (covering multiple weather zones) and there is an electricity market that responds to supply and demand, the storage overhead required for renewable power becomes negligible. Within Europe, the European super grid will largely solve the problem -- at a cost equivalent to building a couple of nuclear plants.

[xux]

If we had efficient batteries, would wind be feasible then?

[Intermernet]

Wind is feasible now, but efficient batteries would be a complete game changer. They would make all sorts of power generation viable (wave power, tidal power etc).

With efficient batteries, the entire concept of "the grid" changes. You have distributed energy buffers everywhere, so you don't need to worry so much about high / low loads, brownouts, high voltage line requirements, power losses over distance etc.

[threeseed]

Sure that is a problem, now. But there is a lot of investment in energy storage solutions e.g. electric cars, molten sands, large scale batteries, smart grids.

People are very aware of the problems with wind/solar but that doesn't mean that we should continue to use fossil fuels or blindly pursue unpopular, problematic technologies like nuclear. The status quo is simply not an option.

[sjwright]

I can't see how anyone could describe nuclear power as 'problematic'. At best you could argue that the shitty reactor designs from the 1960s don't always endure outrageous levels of incompetence and systemic corruption.

Chernobyl was an onion of layered stupidity and incompetence. (Fun fact: eleven reactors of the same core design as Chernobyl are still operational today. Eleven. Today.)

In the case of Fukushima, it took a one-two punch of the largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history and an absolutely catastrophic tsunami in order for TEPCO's incompetence to become a problem.

Though it may not seem it, you can make a statistical case for nuclear power being among the safest forms of electricity production per unit of energy. Burning fuels for power kills tens of thousands of people every year. Hydro dam failure has the blood of hundreds of thousands on its hands. Workers fall off wind turbines and rooftops -- rarely, but it's statistically significant compared to the unit output.

[rsync]

No, I would argue that the shitty reactor designs from the 1960s (and 1950s, actually) never endure even normal levels of competence and systemic corruption. Given a long enough time horizon, those bad designs will fail. They are designed to fail.

Going further, they are designed to fail in the face of "normal accidents"[1] which we can expect to happen. Every single one of the failures will have some kind of unique dramatic human-discerned narrative, just like the two you narrated above, but they will all have their failure in common.

I think we should be in favor of nuclear power in general. I think we should be marching in the streets in protest of the standard model of nuclear plant currently deployed around the world. Like you said, there's 11 more chernobyls out there just waiting for their own "normal accident".

[1] Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow, 1984 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents

[sjwright]

> No, I would argue that the shitty reactor designs from the 1960s (and 1950s, actually) never endure even normal levels of competence and systemic corruption.

That is a statistically impossible assertion. Plenty of these shitty designs managed to endure normal levels of competence and systemic corruption for the entirety of their planned life span and have been decommissioned without catastrophe.

[thaumasiotes]

> In the case of Fukushima, it took a one-two punch of the largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history and an absolutely catastrophic tsunami

How is this a one-two punch? It sounds like a one-punch to me; the tsunami wasn't visited upon Japan by a vengeful god. You might as well complain about the "one-two punch" of getting hit by both fingers when a guy with three missing fingers punches you.

[vpeters25]

It was an one-two punch because either one by itself unlikely would have produced the disaster: the earthquake not only produced the tsunami, it also sunk the coastline about 4 feet rendering tsunami barriers useless.

I read somewhere their tsunami barriers where just high enough to stop the tsunami but the coastline sinked. No engineer could have predicted that.

[thaumasiotes]

> It was an one-two punch because either one by itself unlikely would have produced the disaster

But that's what I'm saying! Tsunamis can't happen by themselves. They're caused by earthquakes (or volcanic eruptions, nuclear explosions, or other literally earth-shaking events). The odds of a record-breaking earthquake co-occurring with an extreme tsunami approach 100%. Similarly, it's not at all surprising for the coastline to sink in an earthquake.

[sjwright]

You're arguing over an analogy?

You do realise that two fists tend to be attached to one person, right? A one-two punch can (and often does) represent two attack vectors in quick succession originating from the same cause.

[thaumasiotes]

Seriously, saying "this plan required two different rare events to coincide before it failed" is very different from saying "this plan required a rare event to happen before it failed". The implications are not the same.

And while a boxer may want to hit his opponent with both hands, hitting with the left definitely doesn't cause hitting with the right. Most punches are not one-two punches. Tsunamis (or, as wikipedia would have it, "seismic sea waves") are generated by earthquakes, not by some mysterious root cause that might or might not also put off earthquakes.

[ams6110]

Earthquakes frequently do not cause tsunamis. Or the tsunami strikes an area where it does minimal damage. So yes, an earthquake WITH a tsunami that also happened to strike a nuclear reactor is a combination of rare probabilities.

[sjwright]

I think the intent of my original words is sufficiently clear. Aside from not liking my analogy, is there an underlying point you're trying to make?

[rory096]

> blindly pursue unpopular, problematic technologies like nuclear.

Why is it blind problematic pursuit? Because it's unpopular?

[crdoconnor]

I'll consider it non-problematic when the nuclear liability cap is eliminated and the private sector insures it fully. Without subsidies.

If it were so incredibly safe, there wouldn't be a need to give taxpayer support.

The real reason, of course, is that it isn't actually that safe, and private insurers aren't willing to take the risk without a liability cap that is pathetically low (a few hundred million).

And, if you got rid of this subsidy: no more nuclear plants.

[rhino369]

The problem is that the law can easily place blame for big huge accidents but can't doesn't put any blame on massively distributed harm. A lot of the dangers of traditional fossil fuel generation doesn't stick to energy companies. They increase the chance you get cancer or respiratory diseases, but there is never a direct link. You'll never know if global warming caused a forest wire that wipes out several towns.

But when a nuke plant goes belly up, you know it ruins the small town it is in.

But the liability cap is part of a government enforced insurance scheme. It's a super highly regulated industry. It's not like they can ruin your house and stiff you.

The law is set up so nuke plants don't abuse corporate liability shields and then go bankrupt in an accident without paying for it.

Some claim it is a form of subsidy, but the government is allowed to retroactively raise rates if it turns out the risk profile wasn't accurately measured. It's really not that different from unemployment insurance companies have to pay for.

The reason it isn't just covered by private insurance is because when plants were first built, it was just impossible to underwrite. It still maybe hard to underwrite.

Insurance works on the law of large numbers. But with a low probability, catastrophically highly loss, it's impossible to insure.

If you exclude Chernobyl (and you should since modern nuke plants can't have a core explosion) there aren't any confirmed or even estimated deaths in the commercial nuclear power field. Even a super conservative estimate (no threshold radiation) would yield under 200 people world wide.

Shit, iPhones kill people than that a year (texting while driving)

[crdoconnor]

>The problem is that the law can easily place blame for big huge accidents but can't doesn't put any blame on massively distributed harm. A lot of the dangers of traditional fossil fuel generation doesn't stick to energy companies.

Sure. They get this type of massive subsidy too.

They can both be consigned to the scrapheap of history if it were mandated that all new generation capacity had to come from renewable sources. This is, by the way, a very easily achievable goal given the last few years' plunge in the price of renewable energy.

>it was just impossible to underwrite. It still maybe hard to underwrite.

Which is why I'm still unconvinced about their relative safety.

As far as I'm concerned Merkel was right to adjust Germany's energy policy to favor renewables after Fukushima. There's just no point in taking the risk when the alternatives are there.

[13thLetter]

"The real reason, of course, is that it isn't actually that safe"

Perhaps you'd like to go into detail on why you think it isn't actually that safe, especially when compared with the fossil fuel energy generation ecosystem it would be replacing.

[ghshephard]

They demonstrated why it's not safe. No private insurer is willing to take the risk. If it was safe, then someone would see the opportunity to profit by insuring nuclear plants -but anybody who looks at the technology realizes they could end up having to spend on the order of a trillion+ in the event of a major disaster, and so walk away unless they have their liability capped at some small number.

Their point is very good - as soon as private insurers feel comfortable insuring nuclear power plants, then we have some evidence that nuclear energy is becoming more safe.

[peteretep]

I think a few minutes of research would leave you amazed at the number of liability caps for all sorts of things you do...

[crdoconnor]

Renewables are more than capable of substituting the fossil fuel energy generation ecosystem and the nuclear energy generation ecosystem. I think this article makes that point pretty clearly.

And, like I said, I'll be convinced of nuclear power's true safety as soon as the industry puts its money where its mouth is and the liability cap becomes history.

After all, if it were as riskless as they tell us it is, they would be happy to see it go. Right?

[13thLetter]

"Renewables are more than capable of substituting the fossil fuel energy generation ecosystem and the nuclear energy generation ecosystem. I think this article makes that point pretty clearly."

The article makes the point that one small country which has invested extensively in the technology was able to fill its electricity generation needs on one specific day. Now, I'm not going to minimize that -- it's an impressive demonstration of what wind power can do under optimum conditions. But it says absolutely nothing about the practical replacement of fossil fuels and nuclear worldwide, including in nations that aren't nearly as well situated to take advantage of wind energy as Denmark, or which aren't wealthy enough to build and subsidize expensive wind infrastructure.

"And, like I said, I'll be convinced of nuclear power's true safety as soon as the industry puts its money where its mouth is and the liability cap becomes history. After all, if it were as riskless as they tell us it is, they would be happy to see it go. Right?"

Why would any industry, no matter how safe, turn down a government-provided liability cap? If the government was willing to put a liability cap on Nerf guns, I guarantee you that Hasbro would happily go along with it, and most likely fight to keep it once in place.

[davidgerard]

> Renewables are more than capable of substituting the fossil fuel energy generation ecosystem and the nuclear energy generation ecosystem. I think this article makes that point pretty clearly.

The fossil fuel energy system is huge. I don't have the numbers to hand, but AFAIK to stop pumping out carbon we're going to need nuclear as well, ASAP. That all present nuclear is problematic (e.g. insurance, as noted) doesn't change this.

[peteretep]

As far as I'm aware the EU is the only jurisdiction without a liability cap for airlines. Presumably you think that's because planes are dangerously unsafe too?

[hueving]

Airlines have liability caps as well. Your argument is pointless. Liability caps are because of the potential size of the black swan events, not because they are frequent.

[crdoconnor]

Yes, all sorts of industries have hidden subsidies. Airlines feed at the public trough too.

The airline industry doesn't have a habit of trying to convince you that flying is 100% safe though.

[forrestthewoods]

Because the rest of our energy sector isn't also propped up by subsidies.

[ghshephard]

The Oil and Coal industry have massive subsidies, and not just the environmental externalities.

[crdoconnor]

Of course it is. This is just a subsidy that is very well hidden compared to the rest of them.

Unlike all of those renewables subsidies. They get a disproportionate amount of attention.

[seesomesense]

Because the sheeple are bleating.