Renewables have been well over half of new power generation capacity for the last couple of years. But it'll take many years before the relative changes look significant in absolute numbers.
And again, you can’t get there because of storage and storage is an intractable technical problem where “just throw batteries at it” is a flippant answer. We grow battery energy density very slowly. It’s expected to double by 2030 and triply by 2040. But our energy demands grow very quickly & we’re talking about a world where most people don’t actually have as cheap easy access to energy as we take for granted in the West. We also are talking about using a significant chunk of that capacity and using it to replace existing cars (which don’t get me wrong - you 100% need batteries for cars because it’s the only way to connect renewables to automotive). Then you’ve got shipping which everyone ignores and I don’t see a path forward there except to have nuclear reactors on commercial ships going all over the place (but that would 100% require molten salt or other reactors that can’t melt down).
1) EV's have a TCO lower than gasoline vehicles. 2) Renewable power generation is cheaper than fossil power generation. 3) Heat pumps are cheaper than fossil heating
In 2003 nobody ever thought that we would ever get to this stage. Everybody assumed that we'd need massive subsidies to switch to carbon free sources. They were hopeful that once we got to mass scale rollout that the prices would be competitive but getting below parity was seen as completely unrealistic.
Remember sites like The Oil Drum and dieoff.org? Where we are today was considered laughably impossible and those arguments came with pages of calculations.
We are on track for what might be peak CO2 emission this decade. At that point we will start moving in the right direction emission wise. This is not good enough to avoid some amount of dangerous climate change, but it’s better than the doom scenarios of 20 years ago.
GDP is decoupling from carbon emissions too, which is massively important.
Now it seems we’re back to the big existential risks being war and awful politics with the latter driven by social media algorithms that prioritize the most toxic ideas for “engagement.” (Unless you buy AI doom. I don’t.)
Storage has lots of options, for example, batteries, pressure, gravity (incl. underground).
Things like shipping could run perhaps on other fuels and planes will be on high energy density fossil fuel (or synthetic) for a while (at least long haul).
Even today fission and renewables have very similar generation prices. And no, it’ll be a long time before batteries are a solution to the energy density needs for grid scale solar to truly allow replacement and shuttering of fossil fuel plants (automotive electrification is going to eat up a huge amount of battery manufacturing capacity world wide).
Where did I advocate batteries as only storage? There are many options.
I might potentially be better to put more money into fusion rather than chase fission for anything beyond materials, medical, research, and weapons applications.
Nuclear never had a strong fall costs that is what makes it a tougher thing because you likely need a change in technology.
There are some reasonably well understood cost evolution in technology.
Wanting to spend huge amounts of money in the hope that the economics will somehow work out is not an easy proposition when other things are already cheap.
https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ILAB/ILAB20210624 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...
Yes, nuclear power has gotten more expensive with time but even still, today, in absolute terms, $/khw is competitive.
> Grid-level system costs for intermittent renewables are large ($8-$50/MWh) but depend on country, context and technology (onshore wind < offshore wind < solar PV). Nuclear system costs are $1-3/MWh.
Or https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45436 which shows that nuclear remains cheaper than wind and waaay cheaper than solar in California. And wind/solar prices AFAIK don’t factor in the additional cost of storage since we don’t pair wind/solar generation capacity with matching storage requirements.
And in terms of why it’s gotten more expensive, part of that is naturally inflation. The other part is that nuclear keeps getting more regulations and we disinvest from building more. It’s the opposite of the Wright effect - when you build less of something and disinvest it gets more expensive to make. Some of the regulations are legit costs (e.g. making sure the plants remain safe and don’t melt down) but you’d be surprised at how much of it is BS driven by FUD (a not insignificant portion powered by FUD from fossil fuel companies who benefit from nuclear taking as long as possible).
It’s also amusing to me the overlap between “renewables need more investment to replace grid fossil fuels” and “fusion instead of fission” camps. Like yes, fusion is exciting and I hope we get there some day. And we criminally underfund investment into it at government scale in the same way as we do with fission. But fusion’s road is even harder and longer out. Like we still don’t know how to generate more energy than we consume. It’s strictly in the pure research phase and is many many decades away from starting production and will take an even longer time to build out large amounts of capacity.
Your second link has prices, not generation costs which is a much more difficult thing to compare. Inflation isn't specific to nuclear and regulations will continue to be part of nuclear.
Over time, cheaper generation should win out - absent interventions - so nuclear isn't in a great place to start.
What is your distinction of "generation costs" vs prices?
> Inflation isn't specific to nuclear and regulations will continue to be part of nuclear.
Inflation is a bit relevant in that the average nuclear power plant age is 42. Solar installations by comparisons are a lot more recent. That means that inflation has operated on a longer time period than for solar. And again, I said that's a small part. The primary driver is we've divested from building nuclear because of overblown fears around safety of operation or security or whatever other fear you may associate with nuclear.
As for "regulations will continue to be part of nuclear", that's why I'm saying. Part of investing in nuclear means organizing politically to remove the BS regulations and calling BS on things like security concerns which seem to be purely hypothetical.
> Over time, cheaper generation should win out - absent interventions - so nuclear isn't in a great place to start.
Huh? Like you're shifting the goal posts. It matters very little right now if the cost curve is better for solar. That's for 5-20 years from now and comparing it against a technology we've divested from is a false comparison. It's even more BS considering nuclear remains cheaper today even with effectively 0 investment (most funds have been going to maintenance only) and still remains cheaper than wind & solar. Nuclear can even outperform fossil fuels on price in some cases.
But again. Cost to generate the energy is ultimately a very myopic view because fossil fuels externalize the true cost substantially and literally anything is better. It's estimated to cost $200 trillion dollars to zero out human carbon emissions by 2050 & if we fail it'll cost the US alone ~14.5 trillion dollars in the next 50 years (which again involves on externalizing and ignoring the impact of climate change since the biggest impact to the US is illegal immigration but the biggest direct financial impact is not to the US). Climate-related disasters already cost the world ~$650 billion dollars anually. By comparison the costs associated with building and cleaning up a nuclear power plant and cleaning it up seem quite trivial. Sure at some point solar may get cheaper in absolute dollars to. But it all doesn't matter because the thing we need to get to is negative carbon emissions. Oh and btw. Solar won't be able to solve that. The energy required to start pulling carbon out of the air en masse will require huge energy production that really only a nuclear power plant can scale sufficiently well to handle.
If you believe regulations will be substantially reduced, fair enough, but is there legislation to that effect in the pipelines?
You continue to claim nuclear is cheaper, but that is certainly not how it plays out in places like France (or on average) - Californian prices are not the right measure there, nor hypothetical costs of nuclear.
You can allege that there will huge cost improvements on nuclear, but my point is that on other energy generation the costs are already down (without tinkering with discount factors because a lot went into operation with funding) and that technologies that are stagnant in costs tend to fail on that front. Changes to the technology as such (e.g., building different reactor types) could change that, but we don't know.
And, of course, solar could generate huge amounts of energy by, for example, plastering some large desert with it. That said, no-one is seeing solar as the only solution: wind, tidal, hydro, eventually fusion to name few. Some fission will be in the mix, too, because it is around or being build.
~25B on nuclear weapons (likely maintaining our military arsenal)
~5B on nuclear energy
~27B on renewables
And nuclear requires waaaaaay more for R&D because it’s a more difficult energy source than solar which is scientifically more straightforward & more of an engineering problem that industry is well suited to solving.
No you can’t just plaster solar cells in the middle of some desert because while HVDC has gotten cheaper, it’s still quite expensive and even harder than nuclear tech in some ways to cost reduce. You want to minimize the distance between where you produce energy and where you consume it.
If you need the power to remove carbon dioxide from the air, you do that where the power is. (And there is also chemical storage if you had to transport energy long distance - but a moot point).
The problem is that solar capacity just grows too slowly. We’re growing solar manufacturing capacity as quickly as possible and still fossil fuels remains stubbornly the dominant fuel type for grid energy production in America and barely shifts regardless of how many renewables we add. So from the perspective of “we tried something maybe it’s not working” I’d rather look at the impact scaling up an energy source has on fossil fuels and all evidence suggest that solar has trouble taking over (fossil fuel use and solar energy generated seems uncorrelated whereas it is inversely correlated with nuclear which is what you want).
Why are you so focused on solar, other things like wind are cheap, too? I couldn't care less about what particular energy source is used, I am just making a cost argument. No goal posts are being shifted by me. If you now want to discuss industrial capacity, then, sure, let's discuss how we can somehow build a few hundred nuclear power plants quickly but not expand wind, solar, geothermal or other things quickly.
If there already are cheap technologies, pushing for another one that isn't but might be is a tough proposition.
China built more wind and solar in the first nine months of 2023 than the sum total of all their nuclear reactors under construction, and they have 26. They are likely to build even more over the next nine months. Current estimates are that their emissions will begin a structural decline as soon as next year, because their renewable construction is outpacing demand. Your statement is so far off factually it’s not even in the same universe as reality.
I think this is endemic of your comment, every "fact" is fallacy or false. France is not near 100% fossils fuel free, nuclear is not that great at getting to 100% and would require massive amounts of storage, just like renewables. Here's France's actual mix:
> The electricity sector in France is dominated by its nuclear power, which accounted for 71.7% of total production in 2018, while renewables and fossil fuels accounted for 21.3% and 7.1%, respectively[1] (compare to 72.3% nuclear, 17.8% renewables and 8.6% fossil fuels in 2016).
There's been a recovery this year but that recovery has faltered last month with about a 15% unexpected fall in output.
Whenever France is hit by a heatwave, nuclear output drops significantly - the water of the rivers used for cooling/condensing becomes too warm to operate plants at full capacity safely.
And even with effective monopoly advantage, nuclear generation is a money pit - French government had to bail out EDF at the start of this year - taking on 65B euro of debt.
> nuclear generation is a money pit - French government had to bail out EDF at the start of this year - taking on 65B euro of debt.
Power generation is a money pit period. California has to constantly bail out PG&E here too because of all the lawsuits about fires & I see this happen frequently all over the world. Pretending like large scale power generation isn't a substantial government problem and the free market can solve it by itself AFAICT is a complete pipe dream. Hell in California there's a massive fight now because California is having to alter the rules to support grid solar installations by making roof top solar less attractive & this is a common problem facing all grid operators. And honestly, 65B euro is a pittance to have such a major reduction in fossil fuels for the year. Think about it this way - would you add a $300B line item to the US budget to bail out nuclear if it meant that only 10% of grid energy would be generated by fossil fuels? Like that seems like a laughably small number. France has 56 nuclear reactors and the US has 96 spread across 60 plants despite being 5x the size. In France, fossil fuels have seen 0 growth in terms of TWh produced since the 80s & in fact a small dip. Nowhere else in the world is that true including Germany which invested in renewables early & by a lot.
That 10 percent of fossil, plus the controllable hydro in France is working in tandem with the nuclear to match demand.
Remove that gas and hydro and a nuclear grid needs storage just as a mainly solar and wind grid does.
Yes in theory, if price is no object, both can just overbuild so much you avoid needing storage but that would be stupid.
Also, not sure if you’re aware, but most modern reactors don’t need storage. They can vary load generation dynamically and so don’t actually need storage. France’s reactors are all very old as they’ve been infected with the same disease of failing to take on large public works projects in a timely and cost efficient manner. It’s not as fuel efficient, but that matters very little for a nuclear plant in the grand scheme of things.
What matters is that the upfront capital costs of nuclear are so insanely high that any hour you’re not producing 100% you’re losing money you can’t afford to lose.
I’m not convinced that load following nuclear makes economic sense compared to next generation energy storage solution. Say Ambri’s molten metal batteries.
Nuclear had better pray that these energy storage solutions never become economically competitive, because if they do then solar/wind+storage will beat nuclear in almost every application. And if that’s the case, nuclear just won’t have the economies of scale necessary to be competitive at all.
Nuclear energy also has to pray that advanced geothermal doesn’t catch on, as it competes directly with nuclear, but has the benefit of being able to take direct advantage of skilled labour from the oil and gas industry that’s soon becoming increasingly redundant.
Yeah, electricity pricing for consumers is mismatched in terms of how energy demands work. Solar has the opposite problem where it may be unable to supply energy when you need it which is a much bigger problem - instead of losing money your energy grid goes down. Of we turn on peaker power plants because while batteries can weather short outages I don’t believe anyone has demonstrated running a grid off stored energy for any reasonable amount of time.
And again, I’m going to call it an unsubstantiated claim that hybrid nuclear plants that can scale energy output as needed are uneconomical. I know they’re slightly more expensive but I’m not aware of any data suggesting that it is actually intrinsically uneconomical. Same goes for any claims that solar or wind is cheaper than nuclear - all the data I’ve found had solar as way more expensive and wind as slightly more expensive vs nuclear.
And I wouldn’t hold my breath on storage. I think we’re less likely to get a crazy new battery technology that solves all the things we need from it in a cheaper and safer way than nuclear research. There’s lots of crazy battery ideas but those ideas have been around for a long time and we have no indication that can scale. China is building a molten salt reactor right now. And additionally we don’t need government R&D dollars flowing into battery research as much as we need it flowing into figuring out how to make nuclear even safer and more economical. Normal market economics are already a big enough prize to cause private R&D dollars to go after that (batteries are everywhere and the essentially the same battery tech that’s in your smartphone is what’s in an EV which makes the market opportunity massive and obvious - that’s not as obviously clear for private investors for nuclear energy because it need regulatory approval to build a plant which means we don’t know how big that market would actually be). It’s not nuclear vs solar. It’s nuclear vs fossil fuels and renewables vs fossil fuels and so far fossil fuels has kicked renewables’ butt and had it butt kicked by nuclear. If this were a fight, where should the actual smart money be in terms of achieving net zero?
I think we probably also need hydrogen fuel cells for fleet cars / trucking because they can eat the logistical and safety costs of storing hydrogen (hydrogen fuel cell consumer cars are a pipe dream IMO because you simply can’t have refilling stations scattered around everywhere - it’s massive explosion risk in population dense areas with untrained people dealing with it).
But if we’re talking about grid energy production, nuclear is the only real path for solving climate change. It sucks but that’s the reality.
I don’t know why you claim nuclear has no advantage if we’re talking about a country whose grid manages to achieve that only 10% of grid production is coming from fossil fuels. That’s a lot smaller storage problem to solve than the 60-80% that renewables has to solve (not to mention it needs to actually build that capacity which is going to take a long time because all the evidence is that that % mix by renewables grows very slowly over long periods of time).
Now let's look to the future: solar is vastly cheaper and easier to install per TWh generated. It can be installed quickly and incrementally. Solar modules come in at around 1% of the cost per W of nuclear right now, and still decreasing, that's an enormous margin to work with: If you have a way to seasonally offset energy through efuels for ships and planes as you propose, and a fleet of EVs with 100kWh of storage, the effort to just solve the remaining grid fluctuations seems straightforward. Roughly speaking, without storage nuclear has no useful solution for transport, transport is the hardest part of emissions to mitigate, but any solution that uses nuclear derived electricity for transport will be far cheaper with renewables.
We have South Australia, which produced more low carbon energy this year from solar and wind than France did from nuclear, and without any significant storage as a counter example for your low carbon grid. It appears that the French model is harder to reproduce than the South Australian model, and the evidence is that it could be copied organically everywhere: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41971-7
It kind of feels intentional because it'd be like me arguing that grid solar is pointless because ships still burn diesel. Like you get that at this point we need to get to negative emissions to start removing carbon from the atmosphere and carbon recapture is a really energy intensive process (you basically have to spend more to recapture than you spent burning in the first place & we've still today burn fucktons of fossil fuels).
Non-grid consumption is driven by many more use-cases. Even if you had 100% nuclear or 100% solar or 100% wind in the grid, you'd still see more oil consumption today than in the past simply because of transportation which even today is predominantly fossil fuel based. EV electrification will help bring that down & that's happening but you still have non-electric trains, planes, and shipping and we don't really know how to solve that for the latter 2 which are massive contributors (much more than cars).
In fact, if you look at your own graph, the share that is consumed by nuclear has a direct inverse correlation with fossil fuels. The same is not true for other fuel sources. If we get more solar, the percentage that fossil fuels takes up seems to be largely unmoved. If we get more nuclear, there's a direct reduction in fossil fuels. If we use less nuclear you see an uptick. The reason the numbers don't look as impressive for consumption is that there's a huge amount of fossil fuels being consumed that have nothing to do with the grid. But replacing fossil fuels in the grid is hugely important because otherwise your EV car would be an expensive toy and would be a marginal benefit to the environment (grid fossil fuel power plants are marginally better at generating electricity than your smaller car engine but it's like a small % improvement vs nuclear/solar/hydro/wind which all have 0 emissions generated per KWh).
It's fascinating that South Australia is the model you've chosen as "this can be replicated" when your talking about one of the most arid, deserted, and sparsely populated places in the world that has continuous sine shine year round. Like you get that's not actually a representative scenario right & renewables are hugely dependent on geographically specific conditions? Grid-scale renewables face substantial technical hurdles in addition to policy ones. Nuclear doesn't really have technical hurdles and faces much larger political and regulatory ones but given that the US has had a movement to impede civillian nuclear reactors globally, 32 countries are still operating 443 plants globally. We can always choose different policies and choose to build 5000 reactors even if we overbuild capacity and it costs us a lot of money. If we remain with the current status quo, solar will win in the long run, but that long run concerns me. Like I have doubts we'll get to 50% freedom from fossil fuels for production (not consumption - just production) by 2050 focusing on renewables like we have been. This is a problem because as mentioned all the investments we make in EVs are pointless if the grid itself isn't carbon free. It may make you feel good but it isn't solving the problem. And on the consumption side, we need to figure out how to switch all the largest ships to nuclear reactors cause I don't know what else solves that problem & that's a huge contributor. Plastics are another huge fossil fuel consumer and I don't know what to do there either. But none of that is relevant in the discussion of solar vs nuclear as a replacement strategy for existing fossil fuel dependence within the power grid.
I've noticed this claim being made repeatedly, but it's simply not true. Germany is decreasing its fossile energy production long-term.
Please look at this very easy to understand graph:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/Fil...
Renewable energy is expanding rapidly enough to offset the production from both nuclear and fossil fuels. While acknowledging the temporary spikes in fossile energy sources due to the Ukraine conflict, the continued growth trend of renewables, as evident in the graph, suggests that these fluctuations will have minimal impact in the long term. For instance, projecting to 2030, the ascendancy of renewables appears to significantly outweigh these temporary variances.
re security concerns, take for example North Korea which has been nearly globally embargoed but yet still has built successful nuclear weapons. They struggle with ICBMs because that’s what it would take. By comparison, Iran has been subjected to all kinds of targeted military and covert action to sabotage their nuclear program. By all accounts those actions have kind of been successful in the sense that experts agree it’s going to take Iran longer to create those weapons, but it’s a question of if not when. That’s why I’m so frustrated by critics of Obama’s Iran deal. The 0 tolerance approach is not going to work and the Obama deal had the best concessions from Iran that we’re going to get - it’s not going to be better when Iran actually has nuclear weapons. And Iranians have AFAIK been very honest players in terms of at least trying to stick to the Iran nuclear deal even after Trump blew it up. The primary problem there is that Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Israel which complicates things a lot (a stronger Iran that a nuclear deal allowed for is a problem for other security issues in the region). But notice how none of those issues have anything to do with enrichment capabilities of civilian nuclear reactors. And generating fissile material is not the bottleneck for building those weapons. So it’s all silly FUD-driven BS we pick up from movies and imagining things than actual problems on the ground.