[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/7/13/1755187...
But we should also fix the unnecessarily difficult regulatory environment for advanced nuclear, because so far, we don't have a single example of a country running almost entirely on wind/solar/storage, and current storage technology isn't scalable or cheap enough to get large populations through windless nights.
You can say that we'll get there, but that's no less speculative than Terrestrial Energy saying when their reactors will be ready.
[1]: sit on hands and watch existing markets follow their current trajectories. Odds of success: excellent. [2]: make a major change in the existing political economy of energy, beating all the entrenched interests who will oppose it. Odds of success: ___________.
We really need two different words: one for hydro/geothermal which are steady supplies but geographically limited, and another for wind/solar, which can be installed anywhere but are unpredictable and require massive storage or fossil/nuclear backup. The use of the same word for both has been a constant source of misleading rhetoric.
Renewables advocates have a bad habit of comparing the renewables of the future to the nuclear of the past.
Maybe I’m just optimistic based on historical cost decline curves, but I’d bet $1000 on my thread thesis (renewables replace all fossil generation by 2030). It’s the economics.
Stop talking about wind and solar prices and just look at the price of batteries. They aren't on the trajectory you are projecting. It's hard enough to get them cost competitive for a single house, let alone industries with massive 24/7 consumption (e.g. electric mine shovels).
An Xcel Energy resource solicitation received more than 400 individual proposals last month, including what may be record-low prices for renewable energy paired with energy storage. The median price bid for wind-plus-storage projects in Xcel's all-source solicitation was $21/MWh, and the median bid for solar-plus-storage was $36/MWh. Previously, the lowest known bid for similar solar resources was $45/MWh in Arizona." [1]
(By comparison, the lowest cost conventional technologies were gas combined cycle technologies, averaging $74 per megawatt-hour, and coal plants, averaging $109) [2]
"An acceleration of the 70% cost reduction seen in lithium-ion prices since 2012 will drive global uptake of energy storage over the next few years, finds a new report by IHS Markit.
The analysts forecast prices for lithium-ion battery modules to tumble below $200/kWh by 2019, enabling previously “uneconomical applications” such as the colocation of battery storage and solar PV to surge.
This sharp and sustained cost reduction will help cement lithium-ion as the battery chemistry of choice in all energy storage markets, including grid-scale behind-the-meter storage, residential storage, and micro-grids.
By 2025, the world’s base of cumulative installed storage capacity will reach 52 GW, IHS Markit says, up from around 4 GW today. Last year, 1.3 GW of grid-connected storage was deployed globally, and this rate is poised to accelerate to 4.7 GW a year by 2020, and 8.8 GW annually by 2025." [3]
[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/eia-700-mw-of-utility-scale...
[2] http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-ene...
[3] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2017/08/03/lithium-ion-batteries...
A couple years ago I got to sit in a meeting between a former head of the NRC, and representatives from over a dozen advanced reactor startups. The main complaint of the startup people was that the NRC requires them to spend several hundred million dollars on a detailed design before the NRC will even look at their proposal. Then the NRC gives a straight yes or no. If "no" then the project is over; if "yes" then they still have nothing but a paper reactor.
It's a very difficult environment for investors. The startups said just going with a more phased approach would be a huge help.
By contrast, Canada has regulators much more friendly to new technology, without compromising safety. Terrestrial Energy, a molten salt reactor startup in Canada, has spoken highly of their regulators, and thinks they can have reactors on the grid by the mid-2020s.