Cost. New built nuclear costs $0.12 - 0.2/kWh [1], already completely uncompetitive. Now add storage on top of that.
There are ideas with for example salt based heat storage, but they all boil down to added cost on something uncompetitive if it ran at 100% all year around.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
I’m more interested in learning where all the storage that’s going to be needed to decarbonize is going to come from.
According to Woodmac’s most recent grid storage update, there was only 13.4 GWh of grid storage in the US 2022.
Projected growth for the next five years is 10-17 GWh per year with a declining growth trend.
Paid-off nuclear plants are in the same range as new built renewables in cost. They don't magically appear out of thin air though, someone has to pay to build them.
As a result electricity prices dropped about 5 cents per kWh across the board.
However, as noted before, this isn’t really all that interesting. The storage part is the big interesting trillion dollar question.
The problem is, someone has to eat the loss. People proposing nuclear power generally have no answer regarding who this "someone" is rather than generic handwaving about "the grid!"
> However, as noted before, this isn’t really all that interesting. The storage part is the big interesting trillion dollar question.
For the Nordics this is already solved with the existing hydropower. Sweden as of this week stores 19 TWh in their reservoirs. This is the reason no storage gets built in the Nordics, it is impossible to compete with scheduling the release of water more in line with renewables rather than daily consumption cycles.
The power companies paid for the nukes and the French paid for botching the job.
> The problem is, someone has to eat the loss. People proposing nuclear power generally have no answer regarding who this "someone" is rather than generic handwaving about "the grid!"
The end user always pays in the end.
Around here people will rather pay for working power rather than freeze to death.
> For the Nordics this is already solved with the existing hydropower.
Um, no. Even if you aren’t from around here these things are easily looked up on Wikipedia.
Norway is the only Nordic country with enough hydro, but even they, like Sweden, are lacking in north-south transmission capacity.
Iceland is too far away.
Denmark has no hydro.
Sweden only has enough for 50%.
Finland only has about 20%.
To further point out the obvious, Finland has to import more than a gigawatt during peak power usage, even when using all generation capacity in the country!
> Sweden as of this week stores 19 TWh in their reservoirs. This is the reason no storage gets built in the Nordics
Um, no. Again.
The reason more hydro isn’t being built is because there is nowhere left to put more off it!
Plus, in Sweden’s case, lack of north-south transmission capacity. Which nobody is building.
So, tell me again, why isn’t more grid storage being built out in the Nordics?
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C-Olkiluoto-3-EPR-parties...
> "In the event that the supplier consortium companies fail to complete the OL3 EPR project by the end of 2019, they will pay a penalty to TVO for such delay in an amount which will depend on the actual time of completion of the OL3 EPR project and may not exceed EUR400 million,"
Note the article is from 2018
> The latest schedule sees grid connection taking place in December, with the start of regular electricity production in May next year.
Whoops.
Yes, the French had to pay penalties and cost overruns. Even so that only doubles the system costs from 4 cents to 8 cents.
The problem is that renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible, like the article goes into depths about. Renewables easily win this battle as the cost for new built renewables are in the same range as operations and maintenance for paid off nuclear plants.
Generally, the research available see no issues building 100% renewable grids, so I do not know why you keep hampering on about it being impossible?
The research in question ignores the fact that we've already passed that level.
>However, a clear deficit and research gap exist, since a detailed description of the industry sector, i.e. separated major industries such as cement, iron and steel, chemicals, aluminum, pulp and paper, etc., is lacking in almost all cases. Therefore, a full defossilization of the non-energy feedstock demand of the industry sector has not been modelled in global 100% RE analysis.
The research in question conveniently says "we don't really know how much industries use, but surely it can't be that bad right ? Anyways, we're not taking it into account"
>The industry sector is described in detail in Pursiheimo et al. [145], though the authors admit that TIMES, the model used, was not capable of applying full power-to-X functionality for the industry sector, thus fossil hydrocarbon inputs to the industry sector were still required by the model. Similarly, Teske et al. [125] and Luderer et al. [146] mention that the chemical industry is still fully based on fossil fuels.
The research in question confirms that the whole industrial sector still requires massive amounts of hydrocarbons.
Overall, all these full renewable grids papers assume one critical thing: a complete change of all of our infrastructure, to add storage, better grid organisation, and overall a complete rework of... everything. While that's a lofty goal, looking at the reality where we can't even phase out simple things makes it quite unbelievable. Everything is possible if you ignore reality.
Well, obviously. Either you overbuild generation capacity or you use dispatchable generation. This is 101 stuff.
Why would you assume I would be overlooking such an obvious thing?
> If storage is "impossible" then a nuclear grid is impossible unless you overbuild it leading to costs multiples higher than Ukrainian war gas crisis costs.
That’s an interesting comparison. How did you come up with the cost comparison?
A nuclear grid isn’t “impossible”. We already have a nuclear grid. What we don’t have is a 100% nuclear grid.
> The problem is that renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible
Yes, because of the rules imposed on the electrical market.
Begin by changing the rules so that they stop disincentivizing running nuclear at 100% all the time. Variable renewable sources should not be must take. Nuclear should be paid first and then, if there are any takers, variable renewables.
Non-variable renewables should be free to eat nuclear’s lunch.
> Renewables easily win this battle as the cost for new built renewables are in the same range as operations and maintenance for paid off nuclear plants.
Only because must take rules and renewables using other generation to compensate for their variability.
> Generally, the research available see no issues building 100% renewable grids, so I do not know why you keep hampering on about it being impossible?
Please stop putting words in my mouth. I have never said or implied that 100% renewable grids are impossible. Clearly they are from a theoretical perspective and small grids have been built using 100% renewables.
What I am specifically asking is, how are nation size grids going to be decarbonized, i.e. turned into 100% renewable grids in practice and what timescales are required?
As far as I can tell we either need a boatload of new nuclear, storage and/or megaprojects to build out trans/intercontinental transmission networks.
Storage projections don’t look optimistic.
Trans/intercontinental megaprojects are hard and come with fun spices such as geopolitical risks and massive failure modes.
Nukes are expensive and take a long time to build, but at least we know how to do it.
If we don’t have a plan and know how to build TWh grid storage faster than new nukes, then we should start mass producing nukes right now. At least we’ll have the nukes built eventually.
Obviously nuclear power is economically viable if you use price-fixing to make it economically viable, but that is a huge divergence from the way our economy normally operates.
The EU disagrees with you. A certain percentage of power generation is mandated to come from renewables and nuclear is specifically excluded. IIRC there are no means for power companies to refuse feed-in of renewables.
> They want to because it's the cheapest source of power at the time.
The cheapness is mainly due to the artificial construction of the pricing mechanism.
Variable renewable generation should be priced differently from non-variable fossile free generation.
> Obviously nuclear power is economically viable if you use price-fixing to make it economically viable, but that is a huge divergence from the way our economy normally operates.
It's not a matter of price fixing, but rather of a more rational cost allocation.
Variable renewables are free riders on other generation methods.
Obviously nuclear power is economically viable if you use price-fixing to make it economically viable, but that is a huge divergence from the way our economy normally operates.
Some of the largest costs in grid infrastructure comes from the requirements needed when nuclear reactors trip.
€11bn for 1.6GW on a European nuke that will run about 70% of the time and statistically will close in around 30 years while costing $30/MWh for O&M is around 16c/kwh
So if for example 66% of the time solar+wind+hydro+misc provides enough and nuclear is not needed, nuclear kWh will be triple the price (estimated with historical load factors).
Already at play in Finland a few weeks after the nuclear power plant has been turned on it had to scale back its production to "not loose money":
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Finnis...
What will happen in a decade with more and more solar and wind?
Imagine we turn of all fossil generators tomorrow, forever. Solar panels will still be cheap, but instantaneous energy price in California will tend towards infinity every night, making solar-based generation an extremely expensive solution. That expense is not captured in Lazard's numbers.
Neither do they capture the cost of transmission lines and storage necessary to eliminate blackouts in that scenario. People talk a lot about the time it takes to build nuclear, but transmission lines aren't much faster, and unlike reactors they don't generate on their own.
They have a whole section when they compare renewables with battery storage against other "near firm" options.
Things like sky high electricity prices during that blackout in Texas a few years ago don't really reflect in LCOE.
That particular firming calculation on page 8 (if that's the one you have in mind) is a bit misleading, they use average capacity instead of historical capacity factors [1], which doesn't make any sense in places with seasonal variability. You need waaay less storage to "firm" an energy source that is active 25% of every day vs one active only during the summer. Time distribution matters, and they do acknowledge it in small print in a footnote, suggesting that they only mean firming the "duck's head" in the duck curve [2]. Which only captures a tiny part of a system that would need to store a whole night (or season's) worth of energy.
[1]: "ELCC is an indicator of the reliability contribution of different resources to the electricity grid. The ELCC of a generation resource is based on its contribution to meeting peak electricity demand. For example, a 1 MW wind resource with a 15% ELCC provides 0.15 MW of capacity contribution and would need to be supplemented with 0.85 MW of additional firm capacity in order to represent the addition of 1 MW of firm system capacity."
[2] "For PV + Storage cases, the effective ELCC value is represented. CAISO and PJM assess ELCC values separately for the PV and storage components of a system. Storage ELCC value is provided only for the capacity that can be charged directly by the accompanying resource up to the energy required for a 4 hour discharge during peak load. Any capacity available in excess of the 4 hour maximum discharge is attributed to the system at the solar ELCC."
Or more specifically, why couldn't you convert any baseload plant into a "flexible supply" plant by adding storage?
You can interpret the post in two ways: Either, solar capacity will grow to such an extent that eventually it will be enough to cover all demand: Meaning, during summer days, there will be enough supply to cover the immediate demand and fill up storage enough to cover all evenings, nights and winter days. If that were the case then there wouldn't be the need for any power sources except solar and storage and we'd have basically solved energy. Hooray!
However, that seems pretty unrealistic. The second interpretation of the article is that solar will grow (and will be able to contribute to storage to some extent) but will not be able to fully cover the dark hours - hence the duck curve. For those times, other energy sources are still needed.
However, if there is still a need for other energy sources, then why couldn't baseload plants cover that need? Yes, it's only for a few hours per day (in summer), but then the baseload plant is needed the rest of the time to fill up storage - as solar, by initial assumption, would not be sufficient to do that.