Reading that link, levelized solar plus battery storage is twice the cost of nuclear. It is cheap to generate the electricity, but only when backed by natural gas or hydro.

yes, solar and wind energy generation is intermittent, that's no surprise to anyone. but it is much much cheaper than nuclear energy.

This misses the point. You cannot compare solar and nuclear directly, because they serve different needs.

Without battery or natural gas, solar and wind are not useful. You have to have some sort of backup, sufficient to avoid brownouts or blackouts, and so you end up with the full capitalization and maintenance cost of not-solar anyway.

To properly compare solar with nuclear, you must add on the cost of battery and / or natural gas (or equivalent fast backup), at which point nuclear is cheaper.

Here's solar+battery for $40/MWh. https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...

That's at least half the cost of nuclear, maybe as much as a fifth.

your link does not include nuclear, it only includes an elusive "advanced nuclear". This is not for China, which I have the feeling has a different take on "advanced". In the US, existing plants have much lower costs, around the same as cheap coal and gas.

PV capacity costs about 1 dollars per Watt and achieves a 20-25% capacity factor. In the article they say less than 0.5 dollars per watt of nuclear. If they can achieve that, it's obviously cheaper to go nuclear than PV. Nuclear has higher operating costs, true, but also a 90% capacity factor, meaning you need 5 times less capacity installed than PV. 1200 GW of nuclear for 440 billions is the equivalent of 5000GW of PV for 5000 billions. This is just to produce the same amount of energy, at any time during the day/year, before considering the cost of storage or intermittent power on the grid.

I truly hope China can pull this off at the advertised price. Because of the sheer size of the initiative they might be able to just do it using the economy of scale. France did it in 10 years in the 70s-80s, no reason China can't do it today.

We need all the energy sources, being PV+wind+battery purists won't be enough.

I found this article with a more global take https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

Apparently France managed to build it's nuclear plants at a cost of 1 dollar per Watt. Going to 0.5 dollars today might be a challenge for China, even with economies of scale. The article estimated 2.5 per Watt.

Even at 2.5 USD per Watt installed, that would still be about the same price as PV installed. But you gain stability in the grid for a slighter higher operating cost.

That PV cost of $1/watt is the levelized cost. In other words, it already includes the cost of batteries and the capacity factor adjustment. So 1200GW of nuclear for $440B with a capacity factor of 0.9 is equivalent to 1080GW of levelized solar at $1T. But solar+batteries is halving in cost every 4 years or so, whereas economies of scale / learning effect doesn't appear to apply to nuclear, or at least it didn't for the French. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...)

You're confusing Watts, which is power, with levelised cost, which is price of energy over the lifetime of the plant.

It costs 1 dollar to install 1 W of solar PV with no batteries. To include a 2-4 hour battery it's double that. Long term storage for day to day or seasonal is much much more, and likely impossible to do with the current tech.

And in regards to France, compare France's electricity cost with Germany's, Nuclear clearly beats PV and wind on cost. People will say that wholesale prices are the same, and Germany pays such a huge price solely because of taxes. But the point is...those taxes are so high in order to support renewables subsidies.

This being China, all comparisons are moot. They can reduce costs significantly, like they showed with the PV modules. They are the ones that truly commoditized the modules.

It costs $20 to install 1 MWh of solar PV[1]. That's 18 cents per watt averaged over the 8760 hours per year. And since the sun doesn't shine at night, that's 18 cents for at least 2 watts, probably 3-5.

It costs $40/MWh to install solar with batteries[2]. That's 35 cents per watt.

1: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/888004cf-1a38-4716-... 2: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...

Again, you're confusing MWh with MW. MWh is not something you can install, it's something you produce over time. Also, I don't know how but you end up with the ridiculous number of 18 cents per 2 Watts? That is crazy, the module alone is 20 cents per Watt.

I think you should understand first what MW and MWh mean. One costs 1 million dollars to install, and then will proceed to produce 8000 hours per year divided by the capacity factor. So about 2000 hours * 1 MW = 2000 MWh per year. At a price of 5 cents per KWh, you can sell that for 100k dollars.

I figured out my mistake, I was assuming that MWh is an annual figure.

MWh is a much better figure than W when comparing disparate technologies because it takes into account capacity factor, operating costs and disposal costs as well as installation costs. It also relates directly to the price consumer pays. It's also why all the links are pricing in MWh.

So 1 watt of PV with a capacity factor of 33% and 30 years of lifetime would generate 86.7KWh. $20/MWh is thus $1.80/W total for installation, operating and decomissioning costs.

If China can build 150 reactors for $500 billion when it costs the west over $20B to build a single one, then yes nuclear is cheaper than solar.

MWh makes solar look very good because they can pump cheap energy during the day, but none during the night.

33% capacity factor is unheard of, US is around 25%, and even that is higher than most of the world. Not even excellent desert states in the US don't break 30% https://www.statista.com/statistics/1019796/solar-pv-capacit...

Currently the West has massively inflated prices because there is no economy of scale. A planned economy + economies of scale might just pull it off. Especially if they're going to build the nuclear plants in factories, like the west is trying to do now. We'll see.

I'm personally rooting for all the technologies, except coal. Even gas is good as a temporary measure - it allows us to get off coal faster.

My main objection against nuclear is the time scale. I'll happily endorse any nuclear project that comes online before 2030. Even if solar/wind is more expensive than nuclear (and I don't believe they are unless the 150 plants for $500B number is achievable), it's still better simply because they can come online quickly.

People significantly overestimate the amount of batteries that a solar+battery project requires. All you need is enough batteries to handle a single night (and demand is low at night), and enough overcapacity to handle a moderately cloudy day. That'll get you above nuclear's 90% capacity factor.

Those batteries only add $20/MWh to the project. https://www.energy-storage.news/battery-storage-at-us20-mwh-...

CSP solar in California is 33%.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343184782_Capacity_...

Well, nuclear is twice as expensive in the US. China's economics might be a lot different.

China's economics on solar might also be a lot different, but given that it doesn't publish these numbers all we have to reason about are the US and maybe Europe.

Btw, ask France about cost of nuclear, I've heard their new reactors are absolutely in time and budget ;)

For one thing, they can strong arm suppliers to give them the best price. On the other hand, regional corruption might also raise the price up.