Do you have some links?
All I could find was [1], where it says the rates will be raised by 2.6% in 2023 and 4.5% in the next two years, which is not unreasonable given the current inflation rate. The justification for the increase does not mention Vogtle at all, instead it mentions strengthening the grid, investments in renewables, improving costumer experience, enhancing operations.
[1] https://www.georgiapower.com/company/news-center/2022-articl...
> Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.
“Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.”
Seems like Minnesota is more lakes, but that same concept should apply, and it is not like they freeze to the bottom each winter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monticello_Nuclear_Generating_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Crosse_Boiling_Water_Reacto...
In 20 years I think we'll look back on this idea that cheap solar could be the cornerstone of our electricity production as a goofy idea which was about as realistic as the ethanol fuel schemes of the early 2000s.
50 dwellings on one acre is at the low end of the urban density scale.
But I meant retrofit all existing housing stock with solar collectors and heat storage, neither of which require much room.
What I haven't read enough about is whether it's limited to a certain geology. I assume it wouldn't work in Florida, but it's not needed there.
Back to your tangent, Drake Landing isn't a giant paved area: the vast majority of the area is not paved or building. I also don't know why you're counting only arable acres as they're houses not farms. Since the system only needs a large-garage-roof-sized thermal collector and the average house roof is larger than that (and if the roof is even smaller so is the thermal load) it's completely irrelevant.
Stationary storage batteries are expected to last 25 years. Given that we've only been doing stationary storage batteries for about 5 years, it's not really surprising that they aren't being recycled.
You also didn't address the recyclable part. From what I can see LiFePO4 batteries are supposedly easier to recycle but I'm going to take that with a grain of salt. Almost all the things they've told us are being recycled just get dumped in the ocean in China. I have my doubts that anyone is actually recycling these batteries effectively.
Post-consumer recycling is quite poor, but post-industrial recycling is much better because they don't have to sort out random junk. Many battery plants already recycle the batteries that fail validation.
Cars are recycled quite thoroughly. In the US: 99% of lead acid batteries are recycled. 95% of vehicles are recycled, and of those 95%, 80% of the materials in the vehicle are recycled. (mostly steel).
Your lie is promulgated by the "green energy" industry.
There's just as much money and bs coming from the other side. You can't pretend there's not when you have massive donors and and entire elitist political party backing something like that.
Here's the deal... right now, fossil fuels heat my home, get me to work, cook my food, create a massive amount of the household products I own. They've kept my family alive and well and several generations back as well. Green Energy CAN'T do this effectively at all right now.
If/When it does I'll switch. However, I'm not going to listen to some shill, bully and shame me into using something because they feel they're morally justified in doing so.
The issue here is everyone knows green energy can't provide enough energy on it's own and yet governments and sjw's every seem to think it's a good idea to pull the rug out of the average middle class person and force them onto green power by taxation, social pressure etc.
Although I guess that the political situation in the USA precludes a rational policy. Every argument turns into a culture war sooner or later. The opposition is criticised for moral weakness (child slave battery) whilst your own side are blameless victims.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/05/uk-prepares...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uk-wind-solar-builde...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/01/uk-effor...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/21/energy-cris...
https://e360.yale.edu/features/africa-europe-solar-wind-powe...
I'm actually surprised you had the gall to even make this comment.
This ISN'T a political side argument. It's a reality argument and it's time for you to wake up. I'm choosing the side that keeps my family I alive during the winter. When/If renewables do that I'll embrace them, right now they aren't cutting it.
The hilarity here is you've chosen some cult type rational to convince yourself "renewables" are your Jesus and you'll never stop praying to your renewable "God" even when it strikes you down over and over again. Stop drinking the koolaid bud.
People need to realize nothing about living in our modern culture comes without a cost.
Take green steel using hydrogen as a chemical feedstock. Oversize the electrolyzers and add some storage and the plant is now able to utilize low prices and leave the firm 10% to more important consumers, while enabling more producers to exist.
This without paying the round-trip cost.
Almost all studies looking into 100% renewable systems finds them easily possible globally but a holistic approach is required. Simply shifting the current electricity sector to renewables won't cut it.
We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions.
At that point it would be much cheaper to look elsewhere for more improvements. There's no need to invent a reason for massive new energy infrastructure. The gas plants already exist; no exotic solutions are required to give 100% continuous power supply.
Gas peaker plants are also not cheap. People think they are cheap when looking at the theoretical cost, but having energy plants in stand-by mode costs a lot of money. Generally those are paid by either taxes or as part of the grid connection cost because governments will pay a lot of money to have grid stability. In theory we could remove those subsidizes and let the market pay to have grid stability, but no governments in Europe do this.
Europe also do not have any easy access to natural gas. The only country would be Norway. Being energy self-sufficient is important from a geopolitical perspective and I doubt anyone is unaware about the strong connection between current wars and fossil fuels. Nuclear fuel can be both mined and constructed in EU, the fuel is much less sensitive to geopolitical events, and the diversity in the nuclear fuel production chain is fairly good. Countries can much easier store up decades worth of fuel.
Right now the most important aspect of the grid is not price, it is the reduction of fossil fuel dependency. It is not sustainable to use fossil fuels in the short run and it is definitively not sustainable in the long run. Countries need to invest and start building replacement for existing fossil fuel power plants, and they also need at the same time increase capacity. On top of that we also need to start replace and remove part of the hydro energy production in order to prevent several extinctions.
It is also not morally or economically sensible to continue spend subsidizes on fossil fuel plants. A minimum requirement for government subsidizes should be zero green house emissions and geopolitical self-sufficient within the borders of EU.
The next problem nuclear faces is that the CAPEX heavy economic model requires them to run at 100% all the time, they used to be able to do that but renewables undercut them wildly.
Now you start to lower the capacity factor of the nuclear plants, which has now gone from $0.15/kWh to ~$0.3/kWh when operating at 50% capacity factor.
Who even wants electricity for that price? It's beyond what we today call an "energy crisis". This is locked in until that nuclear plant has paid of its initial investment after 40 years.
Every dollar spent on nuclear, or every dollar spent on gratuitous nuclear regulation? Renewables kill many more people and render far more land uninhabitable per kWh generated; if we normalized our safety requirements then we'd turn off more coal more quickly by going to nuclear.
Germany switched their policy away from nuclear and the result is they've spent more money (just look at the cost of the required grid upgrades alone from their renewable programme) and generated more CO2 (with coal plants being kept open past planned shutdowns, and in some cases even restarted).
There's plenty of space for renewables in the mix, but opposing nuclear doesn't mean more money gets spent on renewables and certainly doesn't mean more emission reduction; quite the opposite.
Ehh what. None of this is true.
> Germany switched their policy away from nuclear and the result is they've spent more money (just look at the cost of the required grid upgrades alone from their renewable programme) and generated more CO2 (with coal plants being kept open past planned shutdowns, and in some cases even restarted).
The great thing is that we are in 2023 and not 15 years ago. Germany spearheaded the renewable transition with the subsidies and huge buildout they enbaled. Today we can utilize the fruits of that.
We make choices based on the options today, not past results.
> There's plenty of space for renewables in the mix, but opposing nuclear doesn't mean more money gets spent on renewables and certainly doesn't mean more emission reduction; quite the opposite.
Then the money gets spent on other economic activity, rather than siphoning state subsidies to a pet nuclear project.
The problem that we have is that governments steps in to subsidize grid stability. Industries and citizens in general do no accept a government that allows for black outs, and they also do not accept a government that allow the energy price to reach the natural market price when supply is very low and demand is high.
A second major problem is that if cheap renewables can produce 90% of supply and we need to 10% of expensive storage to meet demand, the cost that customers will have to bear is as if 100% of the produced energy came from the expensive storage. This make it very expensive to customers to have a combination of very cheap and very expensive energy production.
And finally, EU law dictate that if a country has surplus energy production then they must sell it to countries that has a deficit in energy production. This makes grid stability an EU wide issue, and even if a single country has an very stable production they will still share the high costs of energy unstable countries.
All of it create a market where the cost of $/kWh of energy created within a country is just loosely connected by the real price that customers pay. This winter demonstrated that multiple times, and all the governments subsidizes and price roofs illustrated how ready governments are to pay when the real cost of grid stability lands.
We are. Marginal cost + paying for CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emissions_Tradi...
You are missing the time factor. Supplying 90% means that a vast majority of time they fulfill 100% and the expensive storage is not required. All based on the marginal price market Europe employs.
The storage would still be needed, but it is not the marginal cost and maybe storage is not the right path? Maybe it is sector coupling? Maybe it is demand response from hydrogen production for industrial use? Maybe it is not charging most cars for a couple of days?
As with all capitalistic systems a holistic organic approach will emerge. If it is not good enough adjust the market conditions. Sweden is already putting most stabilization services on an open market, with the goal to trade all day-ahead like power.
Pulling out a five-year plan of having nuclear solve it in 20 years will only lead to pain.
Sweden is a prime example of a country that is paying the cost of stabilizing the grid for the rest of the continent. They could have had one of the cheapest energy grid in EU thanks the the large stable production from nuclear and hydro, but because of how the EU system is setup the opposite occurred. The result is the highest inflation rate in EU coupled with a significant hit to the economy. Germany in contrast is using the profits they historically gained by using cheap natural gas from Russia and injected billions to their industry in the form of energy subsidizes, sheltering their economy from the same fate. Who cares if the energy prices reaches well above $1/kWh if the government foot the bill?
Massive subsidizes and huge difference between marginal cost and actually price is not a free market. There is nothing free about it.
It’s that simple.
Have a look at this crudely drawn graph to see the nuclear French cost over time with Flamanville 3 added as a cherry on top:
On the other hand Germany has gone from about zero to 50% renewables while spearheading the renewable market. Sure, personally I would prefer if they had closed fossil generation before nuclear, but Fukushima threw a wrench in that plan.
To not utilize the fruits of Germany's efforts today would be insane. We are making decisions 2023, not 2005.
Short of that transforming the electricity sector of Germany from all fossil and some nuclear to 50% renewables in 15 years is nothing short of incredible.
Add the current exponential growth in renewables to that, now when the cost side does not require subsidies anymore, and we have an incredible future ahead of us.
Or as wiki puts it, they choose after Fukushima to not use nuclear as a bridging technology.
> The key policy document outlining the Energiewende was published by the German government in September 2010, some six months before the Fukushima nuclear accident.[1] Legislative support was passed in September 2010. On 6 June 2011, following Fukushima, the government removed the use of nuclear power as a bridging technology as part of their policy.
We are now in 2023. This is how the cost for solar PV and wind have transformed, since that decision.
https://www.lazard.com/media/451886/grphx_lcoe-09.png
We are at the end of that graph. The outlook is not 2009, it is 2023. In 2023 renewables are the only choice, economically. When we hit 70-90% penetration depending on country there will be new problems to solve, but we are extremely far from that.
The current large build-out is off-shore wind, since that has higher capacity factors. We will see to what percentage of penetration that brings us. Then some sprinkling of solar on top because it is essentially free.
Nuclear and renewables both compete for the slice of the energy market being the most inflexible cheapest power source. Renewables win that by a landslide. Now nuclear becomes load following, and that horrific investment became even worse.
A stupid solution, which is cheaper than nuclear, is simply burning hydrogen in turbines like todays peaker plants. We are not at the point where it is needed, so everyone is instead looking for smarter solution.
The European grid is interconnected. UK awarded contracts to add 7 GW @ 60% capacity factor = 4.2 GW average last summer.
Germany seems to have added ~500 MW in off-shore wind in the last three years, so with that generations capacity factor about 230 MW in average power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in...
Not just wrong but backwards, we in fact need to REMOVE gigatons of carbon to avoid dangerous, possibly catastrophic warming of the planet.
I have heard that 3x normal load in renewables is enough for nearly all the time with storage for load-shifting during the day. That results in extra capacity most of the time which can be used for carbon capture, making hydrogen, and making legacy fuels.
> We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions.
And now instead of paying for the expense nuclear power plant, you have to pay:
- Pay for 3x the raw capacity of the plant in solar and wind because they never run at peak capacity
- Pay for the battery for storage
- Pay for the Gas power plant that will never be cost effective because running 10% of the time.
And you still emit more CO2 than a damn nuclear power plant.
1500 cycles, 95% capacity retention: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ee/c7ee0...
2000 cycles, "100%" capacity retention (degradation below measurement limits): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202001...
It's rare that I see a battery that meets the triple criterion of high stability (>>1000 cycles), cheap materials and high current efficiency (which in a large installation is also related to heat dissipation), but these seem to do it. The density is too low for vehicles, but fine for grids.
The American way.
When they had not winterized the grid and an abnormal amount of gas, coal and nuclear power went offline.
I did that for you: [1] has the average electricity prices in different regions of the US as published by the EIA. As of December 22 (latest data available), the average price for residential use in the whole of the US was 14.96 cents/kWh. In Georgia it was 11.96 cents/kWh. The report also has December 21, and also other sectors (commercial, industrial, transportation, overall). As far as I can see the price in Georgia was systematically below the nationwide average.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Georgia Power (most of metro Atlanta) charges 5.8-10.6 cents per kWh depending on season and amount consumes [1].
Georgia is very lucky to have cheap electricity. I think it’s in part to having nuclear power plants.
[0] https://file.sawnee.com/web-docs/rates/Residential-Service-R... [1] https://www.georgiapower.com/residential/billing-and-rate-pl...
Actually Sawnee is tiered so you would only get that rate below 100 kWh and the warm weather rates go up during specifics months. Cobb EMC rates don’t change unless you do the Niteflex program.
I feel like in reading these comments people feel like there’s some other third party that foots the bill
On the other hand, Europe by and large operates on a marginal pricing open market with utilities providing the transmission grid and stabilization services.
In that market the investors take the losses. Unless huge state subsidies are brought out like Hinkley Point C leading to the government guaranteeing a strike price of $150/MWh over 35 years.
what's being described is a regulated natural monopoly, standard economics. No economist would recommend unregulated natural monopolies.
marginal pricing would not pay for a transmission grid, and utility investors would not agree to build or maintain a grid without it being paid for. Marginal pricing refers to the cost of electricity given the grid, where there is no extra amount covering the cost of extra grid capacity.
I looked at the numbers for this Georgia plant extension. It cost something like $22B and took over 15 years to build. If such a new plant was started today it would not go online until 2037. Meanwhile you can generate as much total power (accounting for only daytime exposure) with $11B in solar panels, and if you spend the other $11B on battery and grid tied EV storage, you can both make the public happy by giving them discounted stuff while also meeting all of your overnight and weather related storage needs. And best of all that decision can be made tomorrow and you can see customers starting to feed energy back to the grid next month, not in 15 years when climate change is significantly worse.
I’m not inherently opposed to nuclear, but it’s hard to see the benefits of a single centralized plant versus a distributed system that can begin build out and operation immediately.
Proliferation risks seem like something we pretend to care about much more than we actually do. India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea all developed nuclear weapons with little more than complaining from the US.
If we look at a long enough timeline, there really shouldn't be much change. The replacement of coal and gas plants would be with much cheaper renewable but also with higher cost nuclear. The average should land near the old price. What we observe is that the renewables have a head start compared to nuclear adoption so it seems like prices are higher because our minds are only remembering the recent price drops compared to the true legacy prices.
Seems to me that, now that both transportation and grid management is pouring bucketloads of money into energy storage technology, they'll just continue to improve and come down.
I mean, just as some countries are hitting 50%+ of renewables, and the variability is becoming a significant challenge, we're also starting to see a lot of EVs entering the market. I've got a car charging in my garage right now that my electricity provider can start and stop charging based on electricity prices. I can easily delay charging for 2-3 days if need be.
Seems to me that everything is coming together for a fully renewable solution. And this is probably what smaller island nations and such will want to standardize on anyway. It'll be the default for most areas.
Not that I mind nuclear.. just not sure where it'll fit in in the future. Just used in some key industrial areas maybe?
Nuclear submarines, and that is about it.
Desalinization?
May even in a generation or two. I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime though.
Reactors might also work for ships. A super reliable small reactor that doesn't require much support personnel might be option for powering cargo ships.
Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it.
If the US were serious about climate change, I have no doubt we would move mountains tomorrow, but we absolutely are not serious. Sacrifice/compromise/responsibility aren't even part of the conversation.
Stadiums, airports, and semiconductor fabs. But yeah, we are off our game.
Space shuttle, reusable rockets, cell phone networks, Fibre deployment
They’re incremental (and out of order of importance), but these radically changed our lives in some way.
Airports can be complex, and of course chip fabs are an overwhelming case of quality over quantity, so in conclusion you're definitely right on the "hard" count still being accomplished, but I notice a particular gap missing here on "big".
Two generations is 40-60 years, so has the U.S. built anything big or hard since 1963? And I only have to name a single thing as an existence proof? I think I can! :-)
Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969. Since then, the Space Shuttle, Skylab, the ISS, various missions to Mars including as I recall, a helicopter. Hubble. James Webb Space Telescope. Does SpaceX building re-usable rockets count?
And for something more recent: how about Operation Warp Speed. Does not building a vaccine for a novel virus count?
Does the Boeing 747, introduced in 1970 count? How about the F-22? The MIM-104 Patriot?
Did you mean only infrastructure projects in the last 20 years, so since 2003? The Big Dig opened in 2003. Here's some other random projects I found completed since 2003:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barclays_Center
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi%27s_Stadium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_River_Bridges_Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Point_Floating_Bridg...
Really complex things we completely fail at, Nuclear power plants take decades longer than intended. California's High Speed rail is billions of dollars over budget and many years behind schedule and may never finish.
The main issue we have in our built environment comes down to massively prioritizing automobile tech and privatized sprawl development at every turn, when we've known for some time that it's a money pit and doesn't produce the equitable outcomes promised. That's only shifted recently with changes in demographics(Boomers, the biggest block of homeowners, fading, immigration from places with different standards), and new direction from the higher levels of government(e.g. Biden admin infrastructure packages and policy-setting, or California's move to address housing by pressuring cities to build denser).
There's a definite correlation going on between "housing cost increase" and "infrastructure cost increase", which I believe has the causation mostly on the end of housing, and the trend towards financialization that set in at the end of the 70's and consolidated the homeowner demographic into voting towards asset inflation. The 2nd Ave subway was expensive because New York's land is expensive, not because the tunnel itself was a uniquely nefarious technical problem. But New York's land is expensive in a speculative sense: the structure of the tax policy and valuation is such that a rational move is to leave a building vacant and try to sell it for more, rather than set rent at a lower price and record a valuation in line with what tenants can afford.
Anyone "serious" about climate change realizes that it's a very slow moving thing that's not going to result in some sort of Hollywood Dante's Peak type scenario. Anyone "serious" about climate change also realizes it's neither fair nor realistic to expect up and coming continents like Africa to continue burning dung for heat while western nations get to reap the benefits of a century plus of fossil fuels turning them into superpowers.
Right now fossil fuels are still the best energy source you're going to get and still the best way of bringing nations to an industrialized point where they can actually consider "green energy".
Additionally, you seem to not understand that America has vast areas of emptiness and any federal plan for mass infra (especially transportation) is a massive waste of materials, taxes, and possibly incredibly destructive to certain eco-systems. Even my Dutch friends think it would be stupid to build mass transit on a European scale here. Our population is too spread out.
Lastly, stop thinking everything is a political issue. If you haven't figured it out by now... big government moves like a snail and will NEVER be the quickest or most efficient way to get anything done. If all this stuff is as good as you think it is, people will embrace it on their own without the need of any political battle.
Here in California we seem to be shutting down nuclear plants while energy demand grows.
https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325
Also, unlike many "Red Dawn" fantasies, the US isn't getting successfully invaded anytime in the near (or distant) future. Mexico, Canada, and the islands of the Caribbean are neither inclined nor capable of such an action, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans make one hell of a moat.
Trying to get solar and wind to reliably provide baseload will likely be a big engineering project too (assuming it can be done). I also like the idea of smaller power generation sites. I think it would be really healthy if we had a mix of small nuclear, gas, and renewables, so we're not reliant on one thing. We need a bit more overlapping capacity in our grids.
By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nature of the tech means each individual unit isn't very important, and failure means no power and maybe an eyesore, no catastrophic pollution.
One further consideration is the decentralized nature of renewables. As the war in Ukraine is showing us, for any country dependent on a small number of central power plants, those become extremely vulnerable weak points if your country is invaded, whereas a decentralized network of renewables is hardier and can degrade rather than hard fail.
I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., but I think in the messy world of reality micro generation is going to swamp everything else in the very long run.
1: Perhaps the small modular nuclear reactors idea can eventually be proven out.