Her analysis is fundamentally flawed. For a stable energy source, it cannot be solar alone or wind alone. Rather it needs to be solar plus battery and wind plus battery. Let's factor in the costs of producing maintaining and environmentally disposing of those batteries and let's see how the numbers shake out, ceteris paribus of course.
Batteries aren't the only way to store energy. Here's a short list of other ways to store energy:
- Pumped hydro: Use electricity now to pump water uphill. When power is needed, water is allowed to flow back downhill, powering a turbine to generate electricity.
- Thermal storage: Heat up water or molten salt. This heat can be used directly later (e.g., use hot water for showers) or to power steam turbines to generate electricity
- Flywheels: spin up a heavy wheel, which can "smooth" out power delivery when inputs briefly shut off
- Compressed air: can be stored / used to power turbines to generate electricity later
- Fuel generation: can use electricity during high-production times to generate fuels like hydrogen (electrolysis ) or methane (reverse methanogenesis).
None of these are silver-bullets. But if used intelligently for specific problems, they're excellent tools to help cover the volatile output of wind/solar.
I love the idea of flywheels as storage. The failure modes would be outrageous, giant discs rolling at high speeds hundreds of miles across the landscape. Or exploding into huge smooth faced fragments and strewn for miles around leaving deep craters. Relatively benign compared to fiery or radioactive explosions, it would be almost funny to get killed by one.
Interesting point. One other very important point is what those batteries will be made of. Using lithium is really only necessary for batteries that move with the devices they power, because it's so light. For stationary energy storage, lithium is overkill and you may be able to use heavier storage solutions (sodium instead of lithium, sand batteries storing thermal energy, etc.) for installations.
There's also still the real possibility that we develop suitable supercapacitors with graphene or other extremely cheap materials. I don't know what the process is for recycling graphene but considering it's pure carbon I doubt it will be much trouble. I know supercapacitors are not batteries but the advancements in one can definitely help cross-pollinate advancements in the other.
Unfortunately nuclear doesn't appear to be a viable supplement.
Suppose a grid with just nuclear and solar. Nuclear may be overall very stable, but solar is still not, and so you still need storage. The only difference is how much of it you need.
But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really economical. Solar is much, much cheaper and therefore any economically minded person would build solar if they had a choice, and would just not enter the business space at all if they couldn't.
The business model of nuclear is just broken in modern times. The idea was that nuclear is cheap but unwieldy, and can be supplemented with small amounts of more flexible but more expensive sources for when it can't adjust fast enough. But that just hasn't panned out.
If you want the cheapest power, then burn lots of coal and don't hold power plants accountable for their emissions. Do you really want the cheapest power?
What I want doesn't really matter. What I'm saying is that solutions must be possible to implement.
So say somehow I've got $10 billion burning a hole in my pocket. Would I build nuclear with that? No, it'd be stupid, because chances are high I would never see a profit.
So I would build solar. It's not reliable and troublesome for the grid? Well, not my problem to solve, I'm merely a power provider, balancing the grid isn't my responsibility.
Ok, say there's a really well intentioned politician, will they use lots of tax money to build nuclear? But why would they? In modern countries such things are achieved by consensus, which means one person can hardly take credit for it, and they may never see it actually start operating during their term.
A political party then? Power tends to switch back and forth, and the next power in party is fairly likely to sabotage their predecessors legacy. Since the plants take a long time to build the chances are slim for a party in favor to see the benefits.
> If you want the cheapest power, then burn lots of coal and don't hold power plants accountable for their emissions.
That's not the cheapest, because the price for the emissions gets paid (whether or not we choose to account for it).
The cheapest is the source of new power capacity that provides the lowest total levelized cost - including its externalities - at a given level of reliability (firmness). Right now, that's a race between renewables+storage and combined cycle natural gas.
> Right, because it's not really a business. Power is infrastructure.
An infrastructure that underlies way too many things. Say we subsidize nuclear with taxes. But everyone uses electricity. So what does it matter whether the nuclear plant gets $50 from me from my power bill, or $50 I have paid in taxes?
In the end, it has to be paid for, and that means that if you go with an expensive power source people and industries will have a reason to move somewhere cheaper.
> if you go with an expensive power source people and industries will have a reason to move somewhere cheaper.
The other options aren't cheaper, you just aren't being sued for the damages they caused (yet).
Creation and decommissioning of solar and wind are quite polluting, natgas is a byproduct of the dirtier fossil fuels, and geothermal and hydro are only practical in a limited number of areas.
> So what does it matter whether the nuclear plant gets $50 from me from my power bill ...?
Because treating dirty power production as just a business, like a muffin shop, isn't appropriate for society. We're making poor decisions for the group because we make them individually, buying dangerous gasoline today rather than saving to build clean power.
At what price difference does this become a non-issue? I.e. if wind and solar are 10x cheaper than nuclear, can we have a stable grid by overprovisioning like crazy and building distributed networks, coupled with limited storage in the form of pumped hydro and batteries?
For what it's worth, I do agree, but I think we'll probably need to have (subsidized) nuclear as part of the solution anyways, especially in places where we don't have ample room for wind/solar/battery storage.
Honestly, given the trajectory of nuclear costs compare to battery costs - it's going to make far more sense to build power lines to places that don't have renewable potential.
It'll be interesting to see how everything develops but Japan has an absurd amount of offshore wind potential. Their country is set up perfectly to take advantage of it given their major cities are all up and down the coast, they're also ~100 miles from mainland Korea which has plenty of wind and solar potential as well.
There are geopolitical concerns to relying on your neighbors for energy transmission, but it's hard to think of any technical or financial reasons that would stop it. Given current learning rates and cost trends, utility solar will likely be under $0.01/kwh in just about every place on earth. Certainly within 15 years, likely within 10. When new-build nuclear is above $0.10/kwh and takes a decade to build, the delta buys you a ton of storage.
I agree that it'll be interesting to see. A primarily-wind Japan would be cool if it could be done, and it seems like a win/win.
I wonder if it still makes sense to keep nuclear energy around in the mix as a sort of backup, though. We've already got a ton of plants that could probably last more decades with proper maintenance to my understanding, and despite making up a small number of energy production facilities they make up a huge mix of the energy in the world, so it seems like it could be a solid backup plan in a primarily wind and solar world.
Oh yeah, existing plants can be operated at very low cost -- if they're sited in safe locations, and certified / refurbished for extended use beyond their design life, it definitely makes sense to keep them running for as long as possible. If Japan overbuilds their wind resources while maintaining their nuclear fleet, they could send the nuclear electrons the other direction and power Korea with nuclear.
A huge amount of the cost increases are there to make it actually safe.
Windscale could have been cheaper, but some jerk called Cockfort insisted on additional filters just in case -- oh wait, that "Cockfort's folly" turned what could have been a horrifying accident into a merely bad one.
Chernobyl was cheap, but it didn't have a containment building. Modern nuclear is safer, but that cost more money. Nuclear needs emergency cooling to be safe, which costs more money. It needs redundancy, which costs more. And so on.
So what is it exactly what you think needs cutting?
