Solar and wind are low density power systems and work 20-35% of the time. The rest of the time you need backup. You can't replace a coal/gas/nuclear plant (say 1 Gwatt plant) with 1 Gw of solar (or wind) you need to build 3-4 Gw, and then at least 12 hours of battery or some sort of backup. A review of California, UK or Canadian minute by minute power inflow and demands show that every now and then, 2-6x/year there will be days when no wind blows and essentially no sun shines. If you plan for these you will need more than 12 hours of backup. So even at $1/watt for utility solar build costs your built out system capex, ignoring the transmission lines will result in a much higher capex for the system than exists for the present coal/gas/nuclear/hydro system, which means the $ cost per kw-hr is not going to be anywhere near "so cheap it will cause an economic boom" scenario. Ask Californians what price fluctuations they see, and ask UK and German rate payers what there kw-hr costs are now versus 20 yrs ago. And you ignore the nimby factor and the environmental impact and regulatory regime that will greatly hinder any major solar/wind/transmission line build out unless we have a political revolution.
I hate to embrace conspiracy theories but i have to think that's the long term vision with the smart grid. Since the society has "chosen" intermittent sources of power, the whole function of the smart grid will be not to create cheap abundance but to wean society off the idea that power can really be on demand at all. They'll just make everyone turn off their ACs, electric stoves and fridges at "peak demand". ...making sure that preferred uses get priority. Having created an artificial scarcity, theyll be happy to ration it out.
That's exactly what I'm doing now. My friends and I compete to see who can lower their electric bill. So far I'm down to 1/3 from same time last year. That's equal six lunches out with friends per month. I have an advantage in that my little house, which was built 30 years ago, faces South. I have an overhanging eve in the firm of a terrace upstairs, and a big Tromby wall, big windows and insulated "estores", so I get passive solar heating and cooling here in Northern Portugal. I'm on two acres, planted lots of trees, and have the smallest wood stove on the market. Pardon me for bragging. I listed my house for sale last year, just to get in on the housing bubble joke. No one, including all the real estate agents and all their clients, understood passive solar. It should be taught in all math classes in grade school.
Congratulations! Really. It sounds like you have a great handle on your energy use.
P.S. I have a friend in the US who just bought a house in Porto. I hope the real estate joke doesn't get out of hand with foreigners, like my friend, driving up local prices. I live in a popular retirement area in Washington State, so we get people from California coming in with a lot more money than local people can scrape together.
That depends on the local storage options. I tend to keep a supply of cheese on hand so I can have cheese whenever I want. When I run low on cheese, I stock up at the supermarket. This means I can have as much cheese as I want when I want it. If battery storage gets cheap enough, building a battery in every home would add marginal cost but allow everyone to have the AC and hot water they want while managing demands on the grid.
I like cheese and if batteries are as cheap (either by weight or calories) then I would buy them too. I have a couple UPS batteries to keep my computers and internet working across power failures, but for the whole house it would be a Ford F150 Lightning or a Tesla power wall which are very expensive.
Right now, they are relatively expensive, but the costs are coming down. If you priced a transistor in 1964, as I did once, you would never consider owning a smartphone with hundreds of millions of transistors in it.
Moore’s law works because of increasing miniaturization and improving optical lithography equipment, which doesn’t apply to batteries at all. I have seen lots of researchers and startups extolling new battery technologies for over a decade but not much improvement has actually come to market. Maybe they will - the sand/iron batteries for grid storage sound promising because of the cheap materials but are only in testing still.
They’ll not only force you, they already can (at least in Hawai and California) turn off your hot water heaters and air conditioners to lower peak usage.
That would never pay for itself. Even in California where million dollar homes are most of them and electricity is ridiculously expensive, the marginal efficiency of adding geothermal to a heat pump doesn’t make it worthwhile with the temperate climate. In colder urban areas geothermal would make heat pumps better, but would make most sense for multi unit buildings where the expense can be shared.
Wait, over a certain price economics don’t matter? That’s a ridiculous MMT idea. If more expensive means whatever cost is needed is okay then let’s build a nuclear plant every day for the next decade. Even if you ignore the dollar cost, a geothermal heat pump only saves energy if there is a high differential between the subsurface temperature and the exterior temperature. If you just want to punish owners of expensive homes, you can require a gold plated Trump Toilet in every bathroom after the first two.
I disagree with the premise of the argument. An individual solar plant has a 20% capacity factor, a portfolio of wind and solar assets more like 65%. You don't back up individual assets, you build a portfolio of diversified, uncorrelated generation sources and add as much peaking capacity as you need. Tiny cloudy countries aside, it is not that hard to build a grid of uncorrelated assets that can work with a moderate amount of storage. We're doing it in Australia - some states are already over 50% RE and so far it seems completely manageable.
Not necessarily. But "only way" seems to ignore lots of other possible technology combinations. The best strategy is "all of the above" = tax on net CO2 emissions plus cost benefit regulation of the technologies.
That Jack Devanney article is a fantasy. Firstly, it says that solar and wind are high capex, when they’re not compared to nuclear. He doesn’t talk about the high labour costs associated of nuclear at all. Second, he uses Germany as a case study, which is a heavily populated smallish cloudy country, the worst place you would try and do an all wind and solar strategy. Third,he ignores the role of interconnectors. Any high renewables grid for Europe is going to make heavy use of interconnections to link southern PV to northern wind. There’s no learning curve for storage. There’s no learning curve for electrolysers. There’s no demand response. There’s no expansion of waste to energy. Is hydro even in the model? There’s no hydro. All these things are really happening in the real world. And yet when it comes to nuclear it’s all happy talk about two bucks a watt.
You make valid points. But are there not incremental improvements that can be made with a more federated approach. That is with houses that have Tesla Powerwalls and Solar panels on the roof?
Forcing wind and solar in the name of climate change lacks balance (the costs greatly outweigh the benefits) but I would like to have uninterruptible power and I might not mind having solar panels on the roof if I can save money over time.
At some point, it just makes economic sense. If we combined nuclear, natural gas and federated solar, we would greatly reduce carbon emissions, make the grid more resilient and reduce the cost of electricity.
And the main reason they are cheap is not a learning curve, it’s because the vast majority are made by slave labor in Xianjiang China using coal power, which doesn’t seem to get factored into the cost curves.
Have you ever tried recycling a nuclear plant? Besides, the whole point of this article is that the cost has been coming down and that this trend may continue.
Nuclear power plants last over 50 years and can be upgraded after that, solar panels maybe half that and need complete replacement since the cells which wear out are embedded in the glass. A nuclear plant’s containment building and cooling towers are reinforced concrete and should last even longer. Replacing the piping, control systems and generators could be costly but since the fuel waste is already stored on site it’s probably better to update rather than demolish and recycle.
Solar panels don't wear out by going to zero power output. They go below some level, usually around 80-90% or so at which point they should be replaced for economic reasons. That means they still have a useful life, just not at a prime site. There are all sorts of opportunities for a second tier market in the US and in other parts of the world. That includes areas currently off any power grid.
As for nuclear power, has anyone managed to refurbish a nuclear plant after 50 years? I can see doing that for components outside the containment building, but I'm not sure anyone has done it inside. If nothing else, everything is radioactive and, possibly more seriously, in an enclosed space, so doing anything is relatively expensive.
I can envision a future with a lot of renewable power, especially with prices falling as they are. I can envision increasing use of grid level and home local power storage as they get less expensive. My work with power dispatchers suggests that they'd love to have more stored power available.
I can envision a new generation of nuclear plants, but I get the impression that they are going to be quite different from the first generation if only because of lessons learned. I expect they'll be smaller and modular. The most successful and cost effective user of nuclear power is the US Navy, and that's the approach they take.
Cost? How are costs coming down if everyone then has to put up short lasting solar panels on their homes? Nuclear is the safest and cheapest by far... but they’ve told you a lie and spread false fear on that. Next would be natural gas. But hey... you put up solar panels made by slaves on your home. Such an altruistic vibe you’ll then have. Fake feels are everyone’s favorites now a days.
Most people put up 25-30 year roofs on their homes. Maybe short lasting roofing is more of an issue. I considered putting solar panels on my roof 20 years ago, but they were really expensive. I checked again a year ago, and they were much cheaper, so now I have solar panels on my roof. I have a tile roof, so it will probably last another 20-30 years, though the tiles used are no longer manufactured. Whoever owns my house in 25 years - most likely not me, as I'll probably be dead - will have to choose dealing with 80-90% effective solar panels or replacing them around the time they have to buy a new roof.
I don't know what you've been reading, but nuclear power is not the cheapest power by any measure. Nuclear power plants are way expensive, and it isn't about regulation. Even in France, where nuclear power was adopted as a matter of state, they were expensive. I don't think they're particularly dangerous, but one day we'll have to do something about all that spent fuel, and I'm hoping we'll do something safe. The French were hoping to recycle nuclear fuel, but so far they've no luck.
Were the solar panels on my roof made by slaves? Possibly. They were made in the US, and I'm sure there are slaves around here somewhere.
Great. Want an award or somewhere to put it. I’m guessing you think that those who are the bottom of our economic system will think this is feasible? Aren’t those people the ones you all say you love?
They are much cheaper to own and operate. They are getting cheaper. They actually last longer than 25-30 years. They have residual value rather than residual costs.
The excess (very cheap) solar/wind can be "stored" as CO2 capture or electrolysis to produce hydrogen to permit combustion of Hydrogen or fossil fuels off peak. Either of these put a cap on the maximum tax rate on net CO2 and methane emissions. Solar+CCS can be places in sunny but otherwise low value land like deserts. And hydrogen is transportable, though not cheaply.
@Noah I think you need to do a better job of responding these reasonable critiques of solar before declaring that solar & batteries are "the future of cheap energy".
Solar is going to be so large that we will need to subsidize it to keep building new farms. There will always be a cost for solar, even if module price goes to 0. So, if solar gets 30 or 40 USD per MWh, it would be somehow a subsidy as on the market, it will be worth almost nothing.
Naive question..how "competitive" would solar be if the panels weren't being build by Uyghur slave labor and other CCP subsidies?
I'm less enthusiastic about solar also because even if you ignore the above issue, there are unanswered questions regarding massive disposal of degraded solar panels, the enormous amount of land usage needs of industry and the environmental impact on 3rd world countries from the mining for the rare earth minerals needed for a solar economy.
Can we just do Gen III or Gen IV nuclear power? We know that fission can deliver on demand power to industrial society. Solar is still a question mark to me
Because of regulation (some would say over-regulation) of nuclear power. What's the share of nuclear in countries (such as France) that have encouraged, rather than discouraged, this form of energy?
France has a lot of nuclear power, but it was very expensive. The costs were kept a military secret until around 2000 when they were revealed. The smaller, early reactors were expensive, but the larger, later ones were extremely expensive. I think the French model for nuclear power and treating nuclear power as a matter of national defense were perfectly reasonable, but it isn't clear anyone else can follow that model.
Nuclear power fans complain about regulation, but that has only been part of the problem. Nuclear plants have been ridiculously expensive, and large ones more expensive per unit of power than smaller ones. I'd suggest looking up a good survey of the issue at Construction Physics. Unlike the private sector, the Navy managed to get workable, affordable reactors. They limited the size. They subsidized two manufacturers. They actually built full scale mock ups to avoid construction snafus. I have hopes for the smaller, modular reactors that were recently approved, but, since the private sector is involved, I also have my doubts.
Yeah great. Solar only "works" when dumped onto world market by China (who has abundant sources of free labor both to build the panels and to mine for the rare earth materials in the Congo). when It "works" when everyone looks the other way wrt water pollution from the mining run off in Africa. It "works" when we handwave away the massive transmission costs needed to get the power to population centers far away. It "works" when we pretend we won't have to pay to dispose of massive numbers of worn out solar panels. And it "works" if we pretend we don't need some sort of on demand back up to run on days that aren't very sunny....nuclear, gas or coal.
China once again has figured out a way to cash in on this addiction of western elites to this utopian social vision.
It wasn't about China dumping solar panels. It was about China deciding it wanted solar panels and being willing to provide a marketplace of sufficient size.
Also, stop pretending that there are no side costs to other power sources. The petroleum industry isn't all dolphins and rainbows. Brush up the power grid, and you'd realize that an awful lot of power is generated far from its users. Yawn.
Gawd. I can't believe I'm arguing with some drivel from ChatGPT.
Even if you ignore the questionable sourcing and labor practices, the Chinese subsidies, the US subsides, the analysis of solars cost advantage is flawed in another way too. It essentially parasites off of reliable on demand fossil fuels. If you price in massive quantities of storage batteries needed to be truly on demand and dispatchable, then the cost savings mirage goes away completely.
The whole LCOE cost modeling this is based on is problematic. You aren't comparing apples to apples.
Fossil fuels have their own massive subsidies. That includes operating subsidies, tax subsidies and subsidizing research and development. Surely, you've looked at our tax code which was heavily shaped to support the fossil fuel industry. As an energy user, I expect the government to pick some winners and losers. It's not like I can afford to dredge a channel for an LNG compression plant.
Solar power will only work for the foreseeable future if it makes liberal use of natural gas or oil as a backup. The chart Noah is depending on doesn't include the cost of intermittent storage and dispatch because no economical solution to that problem is on the horizon.
That's not me saying that. That the Lazard team's fine print asterisk below their LCOE chart that Noah and many others are misrepresenting to present a much ..ahem..sunnier picture for solar than really exists.
That increased solar and wind are highly variable and intermittent as well as subsidized so not a good comparison with nuclear or fossil generated electricity.
Nuclear power, like fossil fuel power, is heavily subsidized, so ignore the subsidy issue. Odds are good that we are never going to have to send our armed forces to the sun to defend our solar power source. I agree that there is a problem with intermittent power, but that seems to be a problem with a technical solution. This is a techno-optimist blog, so it is no surprise that many of us here believe that technology can provide solutions.
The overly strict LNT regulations of the NRC are a negative subsidy, more than outdoing the liability shield which is the only nuclear subsidy I know of. Solar and wind get production credits which is a direct payment from taxpayers to solar and wind investors. And you probably got some of my taxes as a rebate on the solar panels you put on your roof. America is self sufficient in all fossil fuels so armed forces are irrelevant. I am a technical optimist, but if you have optimism for technology you shouldn’t want politicians deciding which technologies we should used with market distortion. Solar is great for rooftop or over parking lots, but the government should stop subsidizing it and we shouldn’t be sourcing it from countries that use slave labor and we need to realize that it’s intermittent and that if we need batteries for electric vehicles then they aren’t a good grid storage solution. And the NRC is anti-technology and pessimistic. They just refused to relicense Diablo Canyon being kept open.
You seem to have started your argument from the premise that nuclear power was sidelined by regulation rather than its own internal cost structure. Despite government subsidies and much a much laxer regulatory structure in the early decades or in a definitely pro-nuclear country like France, nuclear power has not been cost effective unless you consider it, as the French did, an element of national security. You can argue about the relative value of subsidies for nuclear as opposed to solar power, but nuclear power is just a lot more expensive.
I get the impression that over-regulation seems to mean trying to prevent things like the Fukushima mess or the Chernobyl disaster. The Japanese still haven't cleaned up the site, and, if Gorbachev was right, the latter disaster led to the collapse of the USSR. No one is turning old reactor sites into charming hotel complexes like the JW Marriott Power Plant in Savannah. I grew up in the glory days of nuclear war threat analysis, so maybe we need to do some analysis here. If we want to get nuclear power as cheap as solar power, just how much should we relax regulation? Just how often should we accept a Chernobyl scale disaster or a lesser Fukushima mess?
Odds are it would still be competitive. Labor costs aren't a big percentage of the cost. Right now, the big labor cost is the guys bolting the panels to the roof.
The energy thesis is not new, see "Where is My Flying Car?" by J. Storrs Hall.
That is not a refutation of the "regulation caused the Great Stagnation" thesis, it's actually a vindication. Regulation choked nuclear and is the reason it's so expensive.
That's also a key reason why Jim Pethokoukis & others like J. Storrs Hall are less excited about solar, they are afraid regulation did not create a level playing field.
I'm personally agnostic, I'd like to have more of everything and a level-playing field for all technologies - but I do share concerns like ...
- if solar is so great, why aren't we getting it faster? From a cost perspective, it disappointed strongly in the late 2000s; I hear my friends in renewable energy talking about it for a decade and little happens.
- the LCOE analyses has been criticised for not properly comparing, e.g. nuclear is artificially expensive and solar & wind artificially cheap (I can't adjudicate whether that's true or not)
- Solar & wind suffer often from the same problems that other sources of energy like nuclear suffer (albeit less of those): NIMBYism, land use regulation, environmental reviews etc.
So we definitely need to do the work on de-regulation or "energy innovation zones" (special economic zones with less regulation), a nuclear revival and a new science race to find other cheaper sources, even better battery technology etc. either way.
Betting just on existing solar technology doesn't seem enough.
Nuclear power had a cost problem before it had a regulation problem. Large nuclear power plants cost a whole lot more than smaller ones per unit of power. It isn't just the US. That was the case everywhere, including France where the costs were considered a state secret until around 2000.
Even in the early 1970s, the problems with nuclear power were becoming apparent. There was no learning curve. Each plant started as a blank slate. Traditional construction methods which overlapped design and construction led to massive overruns as work had to be undone and redone. There were no returns to scale. Instead, scaling up made the cost problem worse.
This completely ignores the fuel risks and disposal problems. The rising costs had nothing to do with regulation which didn't become more stringent for another decade. Large reactors are just expensive to build with our current methodologies.
As usual, the original post is focused solely on "green" answers solely from an American perspective. In and of itself, that is not unexpected or unrealistic. However, the true costs on a global scale (especially to the countries that produce the basic materials for batteries) are never factored in. True, American energy costs are falling, and the applied formulas seem to make sense on the surface. But, I would be more accepting if a worldwide perspective were taken. The "bloom" is rapidly coming off the "green" rose around the world as true costs are being realized. I realize this is unsubstantiated for the moment, but if a conversation ensues I will gladly provide required
Yep. The whole wind and solar fad was a giant elite western utopian social vision for which the reality is slowly setting in. It wasn't the first. And it won't be the last.
But the true prices are artificially depressed and the full costs are being hidden.
And the likely loss of "on demand" power is not being candidly admitted. We"re instead told that as yet non existent future batteries will solve intermittent problem.
'Jim Pethokoukis, for example, who writes my favorite techno-optimist blog, pointedly refuses to mention solar at all.'
Because solar is coded left, an example of where the dirty hippies were right and the 'realist' right aligned types were wrong. Much better to hype up nuclear, where he can blame the hippies and government regulation for killing it. Ignore the fact that it's currently failing the market test.
Could you elaborate (a link or two, even) on failing the market test?
I've been under the (admittedly uneducated) impression that nuclear hasn't emerged as the dominant energy supply due largely to anti-nuclear lobbying by oil & gas.
The argument I've read goes something like "big fossil doesn't mind adopting renewables because they don't threaten to overturn the whole energy economy -- but nuclear does, so they lobby against it with billions"
Simply that not much energy is generated by nuclear relative to solar. And you can see the effect of solar on coal. Fossil fuel definitely campaigned against all threats. They and others killed the carbon price in Australia. With help from the so called free market types.
Thanks. So based on that, if I'm reading it not too stupidly, it's back to just a question of technology. I.e., given that nuclear (nor anything else we know of) can compare to the energy output of the sun, the most straightforward path to energy security is a matter of improving and leveraging solar tech.
To your original comment, the "coding" is SO frustrating because it's all hypocritical anyway! Solar is "left," but deregulation is "right," and so is Elon Musk. Big tech and electrification are "left" but deference to market dynamics is "right."
I'm not wedded to solar, just pointing out that it's been performing very very well alongside wind. I don't have anything against nuclear either, there's just a certain type of nuclear booster who's in there because they fancy themselves as realists who make hard choices. The fact is it may be useful in the future, and that's good, but it's not very useful right now.
I agree, you want to keep that political coding away from your thinking so it doesn't affect your judgment. While Elon is not someone I admire uncritically and is coded as being right wing these days, I don't think you can deny he's helped a lot in the electric car space. I doubt very much a rational, profit maximising, risk minimising guy in his position would have done what he did with Tesla. Even if you don't buy into the Tony Stark image he projects, he certainly was willing to throw money and resources at a problem that not many believed in, and it paid off for everyone as a whole, whether or not Tesla itself eventually wins.
I'm not saying he's a saint, he's clearly not. But like I said, I don't think a rational profit maximising, risk minimising guy in his position would have done what he did, government handouts or not. I think he's a guy who gets excited by cool sounding ideas and throws money and resources at it, which paid off for everyone if you're talking about electric vehicles. I think the space thing is a waste of money, but that's his money, I suppose. Better than buying sports teams, anyway.
Oil and gas (especially BP) now lobby more for solar and wind because they know both are intermittent and require fossil peaking plants because batteries are both expensive and unavailable since the auto industry is using the whole supply.
Warner Buffet puts insane amounts of money in to oil. Renewables are about 3% of our energy use.... the refineries need to be on and cost most to fill in the gaps. Can’t you see this?
Yeah Ning if you read the comments here there's some pretty obvious questions about solar that haven't been convincingly answered.
And it *does* matter that the folks pushing hardest for a zero carbon future are divided on nuclear energy. It makes one question whether zero carbon is the only goal or some other utopian social vision.
It’s not a goal... the goal is to use it as money making thing for them. And they’ll have no issue with whom it hurts. It pulls on the hearts of those who believe these lies... but really poorer nations will then burn wood for n the end... to survive. It’s all insane. We all called to care for our world and take care of it, but never over the costs of humans.
So? What matters is that they're part of the answer right now. It doesn't have to be a complete mapped out answer now and forever more.
You can question it if you want. There are some genuine nuclear supporters around, but you want to watch out for those in there for tribal reasons. The renewables people are successfully sidelining the degrowth types and producing results. The nuclear people are not successfully sidelining the own the libs types, nor producing results for now. I hope they do both in the long run.
Nuclear doesn't need "hype", it needs deregulation and lack of interference for long-term investment to pay off. Government regulation and "hippies" certainly did kill off the only reliable, scalable zero carbon energy source in the 70s/80s. Alternatively, building nuclear plants at scale for the past 40 years would have produced far less CO2 while producing abundant and reliable energy. Shouldn't the left feel at least a little guilty about the part they played here?
If you remain dedicated to unreliable energy sources like solar and wind, then the reality is that we will just continue to use fossil fuels as our energy backbone. If you care about CO2 emissions, better to swallow your pride and just admit you were wrong about nuclear and support deregulation.
Well, we'll see. The fact is that they're not much of a solution right now, but solar and wind are. If they are then great. But we want to see results.
As for guilt, uh huh. Sure. A bunch of hippies yell about nuclear, and the left should feel guilty? You think the general public is in love with nuclear? By that standard we should ascribe much more guilt to the 'right', who greatly undermined the consensus around global warming for so long. And now they mostly lose the battle, and now come in with 'but muh nuclear'. Please. I don't mind having alternatives but far too many nuke advocates are global warming deniers in disguise or own the libs tribal warriors.
I am responding to a substack article about how solar panels are not only going to produce enough energy to meet our current needs, but lead to a dramatic increase in energy production and therefore productivity. Renewable advocates referring to nuclear energy as hype is laughable.
Actually, you were responding to a comment suggesting why Jim Pethokoukis avoids mentioning solar power. And for a real laugh, compare nuclear's learning curves to solar's.
I like Jim Petholoukis' blog too. But a nuclear plant requires 500-800 staff fulltime (NEI). That's a lot of opex. It is hard to see how nuclear will ever be really cheap unless you address both the opex and the capex question (I suspect the cheapness of nuclear in the 1950s was due to a combination of subsidies, loss leader pricing and lax safety requirements).
Meanwhile here in Australia now one third of all households now have some solar on the roof. Just deregulate solar on the roof. Two guys on the roof for a day then you're set for twenty years.
IMHO people over-dramatise the challenges of intermittent solar. David Osmond posts regular model updates showing Australia can get by with close to 100% renewables and only 5 hours storage (https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8). Many people think Australia will be able to get more than that from the light vehicle fleet alone.
This is oversimplified (haven't even discussed wind, hydro and hydrogen). But by 2030 a lot of people will live in hot countries with a lot of EVs on the street. And cheap solar + bidirectional chargers can get you surprisingly far with no megaprojects required.
Great points. On the other hand, I wonder what the staff breakdown is of that 500-800 people? How many (if any) of the jobs will be replaced with automation and AI in the next 20 years?
On the other, other hand, and maybe more saliently, how many jobs in OTHER sectors will automation and AI replace in that timeframe, and would we be thankful for more 500-800 employee operations?
SWAG (scientific wild ass guessing) indicates that we'd need to have a bajillion of that size employer to offset the job loss from automation alone, but I suppose this is more of a thought exercise than a practical approach.
If you care so much about externalities, would you support a nuclear grand bargain, then? A price on carbon in exchange for repealing bans on nuclear power?
Nuclear is over regulated, look up Linear No Threshold and the latest NRC updated rules. With automation a plant can run with fewer operators. More sensible regulation would also prevent accidents, I still don’t understand why seaside nuclear plants (situated near cooling water) don’t require the backup diesel generators to prevent meltdown not to be located on the roof or above highest tsunami levels.
Your set for twenty years but less then half the day (or less depending on latitude and cloud cover). Don’t you need AC in the evenings in most of Australia?
You should read the post before replying: "Australia can get by with close to 100% renewables and only 5 hours storage." So, yes, they do have AC in the evenings. Perhaps where you're from, insulation hasn't been invented yet?
I don't know where you live but where I am, the sun sets around 8:30 in the middle of the summer. If you had 5 hours of battery backup (as stated in the post you are now replying to twice), you would still have at least 1.5 hours of backup power at midnight (presumably a lot more since the temp must have dropped since midday).
Isn’t part of the problem the amount of non-renewables it takes to build wind and solar? Maybe I’m out of the loop, but doesn’t it offset at the very least as things are? I am trying to get on the renewables train, but it feels like the main solution is to address poverty in those places where pollution is a consequence of economic hardship. Maybe it’s a both and I’m missing things? Anyone care to educate me?
In other news, I wrote an article about Andrew Tate and the internet fathers of today. I’m an aspiring writer trying to hone my craft. Any eyeballs and input matters!
Hehehe...you're not supposed to ask the question of where all the energy will come from in the coming massive transition to renewables.
You're supposed to imagine that solar panels and wind turbines will power their own expansion, while they are also flooding the grid with cheap clean to meet society's current uses.
No, it doesn't make a ton of sense to anybody who thinks about it. But the whole point is not to get people reading the fine print; it's selling a social vision. Benevolent neoliberal technocrats and other experts can be trusted to work out the practical details.
You are not missing anything. While I too wish we could live in the world Noah imagines, not considering the tradeoffs is - well - that’s why it’s an essay.
Without going all the way down the nuclear rabbit-hole I'm still increasingly convinced that solar/wind aren't viable as a whole-grid.
The problem loosely is that because they are intermittent (and as a civilisation we can't really tolerate not having power) they need to be both significantly overbuilt and have something approximating a 100% back-up. Whether that's a whole fleet of gas plants or a monumental amounts of batteries. The cost of the over-build and the way the cost of the back-up needs to be added to the solar cost. When you do that it becomes obvious that it isn't really viable as a whole-grid.
Let’s not forget the damage to animals and important insects with the mention of the ridiculous wind turbines. The fact that they don’t consider the down sides or have any foresight- means they’re snake oil salt
Birds have the same problem with glass windows. Odds are, the problem will be easier to mitigate for wind turbines than for the billions of glass windows out there.
What percentage of American windows have you checked? We just had a dead thrush the other day. The study I checked, "Bird–building collisions in the United States", estimate between 365 and 988 million birds are killed by collisions with buildings in the US. This was published by the American Ornithological Society.
That sounds like a case for a mixed strategy which is something we are already committed to. The winning strategies for most games, particularly all games without perfect information, are mixed strategies, so no big surprise there.
It doesn't become "obvious that it [solar/wind] isn't really viable as a whole grid". If the costs of "overbuilding" and storage keep coming down as they have been, there's a very good chance that solar and wind power will prove more than satisfactory with or without a more traditional backup strategy.
Look at a traditional solar powered system, agriculture. No sun, no crops,. Lousy sun, lousy crops. If we are going to have enough food, we need to overplant and maintain stockpiles as Joseph suggested to Pharaoh in the Bible. Somehow or another, agriculture worked. I'm sure it had its detractors and it definitely has had its discontents, but no one questions that it does manage to produce most of our food.
I'm disappointed that the author didn't address the resource issue related to solar and wind power: is there enough lithium, are there enough rare-earth metals on the planet to support the battery requirements of these cheap but partial energy sources, on the scale needed to power this abundant energy future, for 7 billion people and counting? Do we think we're going to get batteries out of rocks? Battery technology is constrained by physics; available land is constrained by geography. These are real issues, I think, that should be addressed in a techno-optimist piece?
And there’s no end in sight to this revolution. New fundamental advances like solid state lithium-ion batteries and next-generation solar cells seem within reach, which will kick off another virtuous cycle of deployment, learning curves, and cost decreases.
Above is from the essay. 'Seems to be within reach' is Noah dismissing any problems.
Do you have solid proof that we are at the limit of battery technology and energy storage? Have you already tried every alternative and demonstrated the impossibility of a solution? If you do, maybe you should post it somewhere and let us see it. Do you also have solid proof that powered flight is impossible? That would make good airplane reading.
Meanwhile, solar and battery technology keep improving and getting cheaper.
I think it's incumbent on the proposers to address the question of why they think that battery technology hasn't reached its limit, rather than to demand that skeptics prove they have. What are the assumptions? Is there math, somewhere, about the quantity of storage batteries needed for full, on-demand power? How much lithium will those batteries require, and where and how will it be mined?
That's easy. There are too many prototypes with much better performance in the pipeline. Arguing that every last one of them and all of the various alternatives not yet investigated will fail to provide better density and performance takes a fair bit of hubris. It there were no prototypes or promising leads, it might be possible to make reasonable argument that we are near some technical peak, but that kind of prediction, especially in the face of evidence to the contrary, tends to be wrong.
Energy expenditures are <5% of US GDP. Any productivity is a good thing but this feels like a drop in the bucket compared to the large (and growing) sources of anti-productivity: housing, healthcare, education, etc.
I share your optimism on energy but at the same time fear it gives us a false sense that we are beginning to solve the productivity problem in aggregate. We are not (wake me up when we fix zoning).
But energy is an input to most other industries. I agree that housing, healthcare and education need productivity the most but it’s not a coincidence that these are the sectors with the most regulation and government involvement.
One problem is that only individuals and the government can capitalize human health or education. That means that healthier, better educated people don't appear as a positive on any private sector balance sheets. Individuals might appreciate their better health and their improved skills, but this doesn't show up in the GDP. Governments need a healthy and educated citizenry to be competitive in the modern world, if only for military reasons. Private companies just take advantage of government and individual efforts, but only their product seems to count for anything in policy making.
While it's exciting to think of a battery centric future there isn't enough Lithium in the world to run it for cars alone, not to mention backing up excess solar production. When we can get solid state batteries using different, cheaper metals I think we'll 'be there'. In the meantime we should be building SMRs and getting thorium plants figured out (we can burn existing nuclear waste stockpiles in thorium plants!). I'm not trying to malign solar--its great for some things (desal is perfect if they can figure it out better as it produces when the sun's out and doesn't matter if it shuts down at night). But we need constant power sources and the current SMR designed nukes are the best replacement for large scale fossil fuel generation--modular, simple, and safe.
How many thorium nuclear plants are currently online? The best I can tell is that there are the same number as non-lithium, non-lead-acid grid storage battery systems.
" cheap, energy-dense batteries". Until these batteries become commercially available, solar and wind will remain significantly more expensive than combined cycle gas (especially offshore wind).
* 365 days per year = 438 kWh per year per square meter
Round numbers: a 1 meter square set of panels will generate about 400 kWh of electricity per year.
Total US usage: 3.8 trillion kWh
Round numbers, call it 4T.
4T kWh / 400 kWh = 10B m^2
This is the amount of land area that would have to be covered with solar panels in order to provide for our current electricity usage. Being America, I have a hard time relating to square meters, so how big is 10 billion m^2? An acre is about 4,000 square meters. So...
10B m^2 = 2.5M acres (+/-) = 4000 sq miles (+/-)
How big is that? It's about the size of the Baltimore / Washington DC metroplex. Paving over this area with solar panels would therefore improve life both by what is destroyed and by what it produced. We may need to enlarge it to accommodate the coming electrification of the entire transportation system. (Of course, with DC's bureaucratic apparatus paved in silicon and lithium, that may not happen, but I digress...) I think covering most of New Jersey would take care of that too. Leave the Jersey Shore; its reality TV is far too entertaining.
Oh... and expect to replace all of this every 20-25 years.
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To be clear, while I disagree with your solar optimism, Noah, I love this article, since it points out the critical importance of energy cost to everything we do. It is not hyperbole to say that human developmental history IS the gradual discovery and cultivation of new and more dense energy sources. Any eco-movement that fails to recognize this is shooting itself in the foot.
Personally, my money is on the fusion people. You know what they say: "fusion energy is just 10 years away!" Unfortunately, "they"' have been saying this for my entire 50 year life, but I still have hope. Thanks for another great article.
I agree paving over Washington DC or even New Jersey would be a good side benefit, your calculations don’t include the required storage for nights and cloudy days. as well as all the grid connections needed. Rather see each State capital building as well as the one in DC replaced by 10 gigawatt nuclear reactor.
You need transmission, not storage. We know when the sun will shine and when the wind will blow. Across Australia, with a connected grid, we can easily get by, as previously stated, with only 5 hours storage, he's run the numbers using real grid data. Rockhampton in Queensland (north) is 2000 km away from Geelong in Victoria (south). Geelong is 700km away from Adelaide (west not including Perth far west as it's too far and has a separate grid)
Never a cloudy day down under, eh mate? In the states worst case is sunset in NYC at 4:30 PM EST and sunset in LA 3 hours later. Sunrise in NYC would then be 10 hours later. So even if there was a nationwide grid (there isn’t) that can handle terawatt flows (there won’t be unless superconductors are used) or you try to include Hawaii or the Aleutian Islands on the grid massive storage would be needed.
It'll be sunny and windy somewhere (actually many places) along a 2000km x 1000km area.
That's basically the same area as New York to New Orleans to Dallas. You reckon they all rain at the same time and if it's not windy in Dallas it won't be windy in NY, and everywhere in between
That's really quite a small area in the US. The Europeans look at our agricultural system, which is heavily solar driven, and are amazed at our wasteful practices. We justify them because land is relatively cheap in the US which makes sense. We have 150,000 square miles of land planted with corn, and it has to be replanted EVERY year. Four thousand square miles is rounding error.
P.S. Worse, most of the corn planted is hybrid corn, so there is an entire alternate ecosystem producing purebred corn just for hybridization.
How much of USA is already paved over? How many acres are already covered in flat or low pitch roofs? Most all factories, big box stores, warehouses and distribution centers, parking lots, low-rise apartment buildings, let alone residential roof tops, are good candidates. A lot of PV acreage could be installed w/o paving a single square foot of grass. I don't know the answer, but if I were younger this would be a great GIS project. My bank has PV over the parking lot. Parking lot solar charging BEV's parked underneath. And no, that's not the total solution, but a good step.
That makes it sound so tiny and easy. But the United States is huge, So let's talk about actual solar farms that exist today.
The largest solar farm in the world is the Indian desert. Bhadla Solar Park spans about 15K acres and was completed last year, I think. To power the United States on only the sun would require construction of about 150 of these. You would then have to recycle and reconstruct about 8 of them every year, continuously, for wear and obsolescence. Increasing your power usage (for electric cars or the phasing out of gas stoves or even just population growth) would require new installations as well.
The opportunity cost of that level of investment is just too high.
What remarkable about all this is how timid it is compared to the past, the US is entirely electrified and that means some company, or multiple companies, in the late 19C committed to building out a grid to everybody’s house by 1920, or thereabouts.
And that was a huge undertaking at the time. And it took decades. The Rural Electrification Act was passed in 1936, the same year Hoover Dam was completed. And you're talking about building 8 Hoover dams every year. Can it be done? Yes. But there's that opportunity cost again.
Actual solar farms are not 100% of area covered with solar panels but more like 30-40% of area covered with panels, so your size estimates should be 2-2.5x larger. Doesn't seem like a large number, but when you consider that your production rate only works for 6-9 hrs/day, considerable back up and storage will be needed so the area and capex to build more solar to charge the batteries mean build out will be 3-4x the calculated number of solar panels with an additional 3x on top of the 2-2.5x. As a construction project this will be never ending as by the time you finish your first 50% of the project the earliest installed panels will be failing and begin to need replacement.
Only 150 to power the entire US! We have 92 nuclear power plants, and they produce only a small fraction of our power. I can't figure out what the problem is with having to rebuild eight of them every year, and that's assuming future solar power systems don't have longer life spans. Nuclear power plants require a fair bit of maintenance too, and we still haven't figured out what to do with their spent fuel. Since solar panels don't become radioactive, they are much easier to dispose of or recycle. Also, it's not like they stop producing power. They just become less efficient, so there will probably be a secondary market that milks another 10-20 years of power out of them, possibly after refurbishing.
It's also provides a solid base of reliable power for dispatch planning. Of course, what dispatchers love is stuff like hydro with a startup time of minutes, assuming you have the water.
And you (try to) make it sound so massive and hard. But a number with units only has meaning relative to other numbers with units. And 4000 square miles really just isn't that big compared to the area of the lower 48.
> The opportunity cost of that level of investment is just too high.
You need to compare the cost of some alternative course of action to demonstrate this, not just make shocked faces at the figure of 4000 square miles or gesture in the direction of a single solar park in a far poorer country. The US is a big country, it can build big things and rebuild big things if needed; if you want to show that it can't build enough solar you need at least a rough estimate of the US's capacity to build solar.
Fair enough. The Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona generated about 30 billion kWh last year. The entire site takes up about 3 sq miles. Palo Verde has been in operation for 60 years and will continue for at least 20 more. Modern reactors are even more efficient, lower cost, and smaller, so Palo Verde is a conservative model.
It would take about 120 Palo Verdes to meet current US demand. They require essentially no unobtainums (rare earth minerals). Uranium is readily available within the USA and from several friendly foreign sources. The power generated would be always-on, not conditional on weather or battery storage. The reactors would last for nearly a century instead of 25 years. The total land area consumed would be about 400 sq miles, less than a tenth of solar arrays. However, since paving over DC still strikes me as useful, we could fit them all inside the 495 ring road. Palo Verde is even a domed architecture; it would fit right in. :-)
Nuclear: Scalable. Long lasting. Proven. Available domestically. Not intermittent. No emissions. Hi-level waste over the life of the plant fits into a cargo van. And can be built near demand.
Solar: Huge. Intermittent. Requires elements we can only get from hostile foreign countries. Has a comparatively short lifespan. Can only be built in near-deserts where few people live.
To top it off, there are major inventions that need to happen (particularly in batteries) before any weather-dependent system could be relied on. If you really think CO2 emissions are going to destroy the Earth, there is a proven, zero-CO2-emission technology available right now.
That's a start, but it's telling that your response to my point that "[y]ou need to compare the cost" doesn't quote any dollar values.
I don't doubt that nuclear power plants take up less space per watt, but unless land cost's the binding cost of power generation there's no basis to think that ~ 0.01% of the contiguous US for nuclear versus ~ 0.1% of the contiguous US for solar is the key cost of concern. Similarly, comparing the lifetime of nuclear vs. solar isn't probative either. Merely documenting that nuclear has a longer lifecycle doesn't directly address the question of cost.
The rest of your comment puts an obvious thumb on the scale in favor of nuclear (e.g. writing "Scalable. Long lasting. Proven." for nuclear alone, never mind that solar is also scalable, long-lasting, and proven) and in any event doesn't directly confront the matter of cost.
Let's actually try to compare costs, finally. The US Energy Information Administration tries to estimate the levelized cost of electricity generation each year, and their latest report of their findings appears to be at https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf. From table 1b, I see that they price
• new nuclear generation at $88 per MWh,
• new solar generation at $36 per MWh without batteries, and
• new solar generation at $53 per MWh with batteries.
It kinda looks like you're trying to hyperbolically browbeat the rest of us ("If you really think CO2 emissions are going to destroy the Earth") into going for the costlier technology.
Yeah.... batteries with elements dug up by slaves? Solar panels made by slaves? And to know they take up so much land...and not to forget that they’re not recyclable? Cheaper to make new ones? Also lose their strength year over year? Nah.
Noah, when you cite Lazard LCOE as proof that solar is now the cheapest form of electricity, you’re simply telling us all that you haven’t done a realistic, in-depth analysis.
From Lazard’s website: “Analysis excludes integration (e.g., grid and conventional generation investment to overcome system intermittency) costs for intermittent technologies.”
Also from Lazard: “Although alternative energy is increasingly cost-competitive and storage technology holds great promise, alternative energy systems alone will not be capable of meeting the base-load generation needs of a developed economy for the foreseeable future. “
When you flip on your light switch, the product you access is reliable on-demand 24x7 electricity. This is not the product exiting a solar array field.
Solar and wind are low density power systems and work 20-35% of the time. The rest of the time you need backup. You can't replace a coal/gas/nuclear plant (say 1 Gwatt plant) with 1 Gw of solar (or wind) you need to build 3-4 Gw, and then at least 12 hours of battery or some sort of backup. A review of California, UK or Canadian minute by minute power inflow and demands show that every now and then, 2-6x/year there will be days when no wind blows and essentially no sun shines. If you plan for these you will need more than 12 hours of backup. So even at $1/watt for utility solar build costs your built out system capex, ignoring the transmission lines will result in a much higher capex for the system than exists for the present coal/gas/nuclear/hydro system, which means the $ cost per kw-hr is not going to be anywhere near "so cheap it will cause an economic boom" scenario. Ask Californians what price fluctuations they see, and ask UK and German rate payers what there kw-hr costs are now versus 20 yrs ago. And you ignore the nimby factor and the environmental impact and regulatory regime that will greatly hinder any major solar/wind/transmission line build out unless we have a political revolution.
I hate to embrace conspiracy theories but i have to think that's the long term vision with the smart grid. Since the society has "chosen" intermittent sources of power, the whole function of the smart grid will be not to create cheap abundance but to wean society off the idea that power can really be on demand at all. They'll just make everyone turn off their ACs, electric stoves and fridges at "peak demand". ...making sure that preferred uses get priority. Having created an artificial scarcity, theyll be happy to ration it out.
That's exactly what I'm doing now. My friends and I compete to see who can lower their electric bill. So far I'm down to 1/3 from same time last year. That's equal six lunches out with friends per month. I have an advantage in that my little house, which was built 30 years ago, faces South. I have an overhanging eve in the firm of a terrace upstairs, and a big Tromby wall, big windows and insulated "estores", so I get passive solar heating and cooling here in Northern Portugal. I'm on two acres, planted lots of trees, and have the smallest wood stove on the market. Pardon me for bragging. I listed my house for sale last year, just to get in on the housing bubble joke. No one, including all the real estate agents and all their clients, understood passive solar. It should be taught in all math classes in grade school.
Congratulations! Really. It sounds like you have a great handle on your energy use.
P.S. I have a friend in the US who just bought a house in Porto. I hope the real estate joke doesn't get out of hand with foreigners, like my friend, driving up local prices. I live in a popular retirement area in Washington State, so we get people from California coming in with a lot more money than local people can scrape together.
That depends on the local storage options. I tend to keep a supply of cheese on hand so I can have cheese whenever I want. When I run low on cheese, I stock up at the supermarket. This means I can have as much cheese as I want when I want it. If battery storage gets cheap enough, building a battery in every home would add marginal cost but allow everyone to have the AC and hot water they want while managing demands on the grid.
I like cheese and if batteries are as cheap (either by weight or calories) then I would buy them too. I have a couple UPS batteries to keep my computers and internet working across power failures, but for the whole house it would be a Ford F150 Lightning or a Tesla power wall which are very expensive.
Right now, they are relatively expensive, but the costs are coming down. If you priced a transistor in 1964, as I did once, you would never consider owning a smartphone with hundreds of millions of transistors in it.
Moore’s law works because of increasing miniaturization and improving optical lithography equipment, which doesn’t apply to batteries at all. I have seen lots of researchers and startups extolling new battery technologies for over a decade but not much improvement has actually come to market. Maybe they will - the sand/iron batteries for grid storage sound promising because of the cheap materials but are only in testing still.
They’ll not only force you, they already can (at least in Hawai and California) turn off your hot water heaters and air conditioners to lower peak usage.
It would be better just to raise the price during off peak to account for the higher marginal cost of off peak power.
That would never pay for itself. Even in California where million dollar homes are most of them and electricity is ridiculously expensive, the marginal efficiency of adding geothermal to a heat pump doesn’t make it worthwhile with the temperate climate. In colder urban areas geothermal would make heat pumps better, but would make most sense for multi unit buildings where the expense can be shared.
Wait, over a certain price economics don’t matter? That’s a ridiculous MMT idea. If more expensive means whatever cost is needed is okay then let’s build a nuclear plant every day for the next decade. Even if you ignore the dollar cost, a geothermal heat pump only saves energy if there is a high differential between the subsurface temperature and the exterior temperature. If you just want to punish owners of expensive homes, you can require a gold plated Trump Toilet in every bathroom after the first two.
I disagree with the premise of the argument. An individual solar plant has a 20% capacity factor, a portfolio of wind and solar assets more like 65%. You don't back up individual assets, you build a portfolio of diversified, uncorrelated generation sources and add as much peaking capacity as you need. Tiny cloudy countries aside, it is not that hard to build a grid of uncorrelated assets that can work with a moderate amount of storage. We're doing it in Australia - some states are already over 50% RE and so far it seems completely manageable.
The "uncorrelated generation sources" is doing a lot of work in your argument.
A portfolio of renewables implies permanent fossil fuel dependence.
Batteries to store intermittently generated power would destroy whatever cost advantage solar supposedly has.
It would be more feasible to store excess solar power as hydrogen but in most cases this wouldn't be cost effective either.
This guy has a lot more technical and specialized knowledge than Noah Smith who is basically parroting solar industry talking points.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-and-windsolar
The only way to get to zero carbon while maintaining the energy intensive lifestyle that Noah rightly praises is nuclear.
Are you ignoring the problem of nuclear waste and polluted water?
Not necessarily. But "only way" seems to ignore lots of other possible technology combinations. The best strategy is "all of the above" = tax on net CO2 emissions plus cost benefit regulation of the technologies.
That Jack Devanney article is a fantasy. Firstly, it says that solar and wind are high capex, when they’re not compared to nuclear. He doesn’t talk about the high labour costs associated of nuclear at all. Second, he uses Germany as a case study, which is a heavily populated smallish cloudy country, the worst place you would try and do an all wind and solar strategy. Third,he ignores the role of interconnectors. Any high renewables grid for Europe is going to make heavy use of interconnections to link southern PV to northern wind. There’s no learning curve for storage. There’s no learning curve for electrolysers. There’s no demand response. There’s no expansion of waste to energy. Is hydro even in the model? There’s no hydro. All these things are really happening in the real world. And yet when it comes to nuclear it’s all happy talk about two bucks a watt.
Nothing wrong with continued use of fossil fuels if CCS is cheap enough and its peak output marginal cost that prices CCS or electrolysis.
Thank you!
A phishing scam I think
You make valid points. But are there not incremental improvements that can be made with a more federated approach. That is with houses that have Tesla Powerwalls and Solar panels on the roof?
Forcing wind and solar in the name of climate change lacks balance (the costs greatly outweigh the benefits) but I would like to have uninterruptible power and I might not mind having solar panels on the roof if I can save money over time.
At some point, it just makes economic sense. If we combined nuclear, natural gas and federated solar, we would greatly reduce carbon emissions, make the grid more resilient and reduce the cost of electricity.
Solar panels are not recyclable, lose strength each year and are expensive.
And the main reason they are cheap is not a learning curve, it’s because the vast majority are made by slave labor in Xianjiang China using coal power, which doesn’t seem to get factored into the cost curves.
Yep. China will never choose climate over money and it’s naive to believe otherwise
They are world leaders in spending on renewable technology.
The solution to that is to build more factories in Europe and the US. Automation generally reduces prices in high wage countries.
Have you ever tried recycling a nuclear plant? Besides, the whole point of this article is that the cost has been coming down and that this trend may continue.
Nuclear power plants last over 50 years and can be upgraded after that, solar panels maybe half that and need complete replacement since the cells which wear out are embedded in the glass. A nuclear plant’s containment building and cooling towers are reinforced concrete and should last even longer. Replacing the piping, control systems and generators could be costly but since the fuel waste is already stored on site it’s probably better to update rather than demolish and recycle.
Solar panels don't wear out by going to zero power output. They go below some level, usually around 80-90% or so at which point they should be replaced for economic reasons. That means they still have a useful life, just not at a prime site. There are all sorts of opportunities for a second tier market in the US and in other parts of the world. That includes areas currently off any power grid.
As for nuclear power, has anyone managed to refurbish a nuclear plant after 50 years? I can see doing that for components outside the containment building, but I'm not sure anyone has done it inside. If nothing else, everything is radioactive and, possibly more seriously, in an enclosed space, so doing anything is relatively expensive.
I can envision a future with a lot of renewable power, especially with prices falling as they are. I can envision increasing use of grid level and home local power storage as they get less expensive. My work with power dispatchers suggests that they'd love to have more stored power available.
I can envision a new generation of nuclear plants, but I get the impression that they are going to be quite different from the first generation if only because of lessons learned. I expect they'll be smaller and modular. The most successful and cost effective user of nuclear power is the US Navy, and that's the approach they take.
Cost? How are costs coming down if everyone then has to put up short lasting solar panels on their homes? Nuclear is the safest and cheapest by far... but they’ve told you a lie and spread false fear on that. Next would be natural gas. But hey... you put up solar panels made by slaves on your home. Such an altruistic vibe you’ll then have. Fake feels are everyone’s favorites now a days.
Most people put up 25-30 year roofs on their homes. Maybe short lasting roofing is more of an issue. I considered putting solar panels on my roof 20 years ago, but they were really expensive. I checked again a year ago, and they were much cheaper, so now I have solar panels on my roof. I have a tile roof, so it will probably last another 20-30 years, though the tiles used are no longer manufactured. Whoever owns my house in 25 years - most likely not me, as I'll probably be dead - will have to choose dealing with 80-90% effective solar panels or replacing them around the time they have to buy a new roof.
I don't know what you've been reading, but nuclear power is not the cheapest power by any measure. Nuclear power plants are way expensive, and it isn't about regulation. Even in France, where nuclear power was adopted as a matter of state, they were expensive. I don't think they're particularly dangerous, but one day we'll have to do something about all that spent fuel, and I'm hoping we'll do something safe. The French were hoping to recycle nuclear fuel, but so far they've no luck.
Were the solar panels on my roof made by slaves? Possibly. They were made in the US, and I'm sure there are slaves around here somewhere.
I’ve put solar panels built in Germany on my house.
Great. Want an award or somewhere to put it. I’m guessing you think that those who are the bottom of our economic system will think this is feasible? Aren’t those people the ones you all say you love?
25-30 years life compared to maybe twice that for Nuclear.
What's the argument?
They are much cheaper to own and operate. They are getting cheaper. They actually last longer than 25-30 years. They have residual value rather than residual costs.
Yes they are, increasingly so.
Not really.
Not really.
Other than that, you’re spot on.
That can be fixed.
The excess (very cheap) solar/wind can be "stored" as CO2 capture or electrolysis to produce hydrogen to permit combustion of Hydrogen or fossil fuels off peak. Either of these put a cap on the maximum tax rate on net CO2 and methane emissions. Solar+CCS can be places in sunny but otherwise low value land like deserts. And hydrogen is transportable, though not cheaply.
True but cheap nuclear overall makes 100 times more sense.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-and-windsolar
Agree. Whatever is cheapest in the context.
@Noah I think you need to do a better job of responding these reasonable critiques of solar before declaring that solar & batteries are "the future of cheap energy".
You might be interested : https://gemenergyanalytics.substack.com/p/solar-cannibalization-more-details
Solar is going to be so large that we will need to subsidize it to keep building new farms. There will always be a cost for solar, even if module price goes to 0. So, if solar gets 30 or 40 USD per MWh, it would be somehow a subsidy as on the market, it will be worth almost nothing.
That's a serious problem, but the fuel cost is very low.
Naive question..how "competitive" would solar be if the panels weren't being build by Uyghur slave labor and other CCP subsidies?
I'm less enthusiastic about solar also because even if you ignore the above issue, there are unanswered questions regarding massive disposal of degraded solar panels, the enormous amount of land usage needs of industry and the environmental impact on 3rd world countries from the mining for the rare earth minerals needed for a solar economy.
Can we just do Gen III or Gen IV nuclear power? We know that fission can deliver on demand power to industrial society. Solar is still a question mark to me
Wind and solar have already surpassed nuclear power, so I think you can remove the question mark. https://ieefa.org/articles/bp-wind-solar-provided-more-10-global-power-2021
Because of regulation (some would say over-regulation) of nuclear power. What's the share of nuclear in countries (such as France) that have encouraged, rather than discouraged, this form of energy?
France has a lot of nuclear power, but it was very expensive. The costs were kept a military secret until around 2000 when they were revealed. The smaller, early reactors were expensive, but the larger, later ones were extremely expensive. I think the French model for nuclear power and treating nuclear power as a matter of national defense were perfectly reasonable, but it isn't clear anyone else can follow that model.
Nuclear power fans complain about regulation, but that has only been part of the problem. Nuclear plants have been ridiculously expensive, and large ones more expensive per unit of power than smaller ones. I'd suggest looking up a good survey of the issue at Construction Physics. Unlike the private sector, the Navy managed to get workable, affordable reactors. They limited the size. They subsidized two manufacturers. They actually built full scale mock ups to avoid construction snafus. I have hopes for the smaller, modular reactors that were recently approved, but, since the private sector is involved, I also have my doubts.
Yeah great. Solar only "works" when dumped onto world market by China (who has abundant sources of free labor both to build the panels and to mine for the rare earth materials in the Congo). when It "works" when everyone looks the other way wrt water pollution from the mining run off in Africa. It "works" when we handwave away the massive transmission costs needed to get the power to population centers far away. It "works" when we pretend we won't have to pay to dispose of massive numbers of worn out solar panels. And it "works" if we pretend we don't need some sort of on demand back up to run on days that aren't very sunny....nuclear, gas or coal.
China once again has figured out a way to cash in on this addiction of western elites to this utopian social vision.
I'm not on board. Sorry.
It wasn't about China dumping solar panels. It was about China deciding it wanted solar panels and being willing to provide a marketplace of sufficient size.
Also, stop pretending that there are no side costs to other power sources. The petroleum industry isn't all dolphins and rainbows. Brush up the power grid, and you'd realize that an awful lot of power is generated far from its users. Yawn.
Gawd. I can't believe I'm arguing with some drivel from ChatGPT.
Even if you ignore the questionable sourcing and labor practices, the Chinese subsidies, the US subsides, the analysis of solars cost advantage is flawed in another way too. It essentially parasites off of reliable on demand fossil fuels. If you price in massive quantities of storage batteries needed to be truly on demand and dispatchable, then the cost savings mirage goes away completely.
The whole LCOE cost modeling this is based on is problematic. You aren't comparing apples to apples.
Fossil fuels have their own massive subsidies. That includes operating subsidies, tax subsidies and subsidizing research and development. Surely, you've looked at our tax code which was heavily shaped to support the fossil fuel industry. As an energy user, I expect the government to pick some winners and losers. It's not like I can afford to dredge a channel for an LNG compression plant.
All true, but you're still missing the point.
Solar power will only work for the foreseeable future if it makes liberal use of natural gas or oil as a backup. The chart Noah is depending on doesn't include the cost of intermittent storage and dispatch because no economical solution to that problem is on the horizon.
That's not me saying that. That the Lazard team's fine print asterisk below their LCOE chart that Noah and many others are misrepresenting to present a much ..ahem..sunnier picture for solar than really exists.
Sorry, I thought you were genuinely interested in the answer. I'll leave it there
Doesn't the link just describe shares of energy?
I read Mr. Pete's comment as, "If we embraced nuclear power, it's unclear to me whether solar would be competitive (at this time, presumably)."
I might have read him wrong.
That increased solar and wind are highly variable and intermittent as well as subsidized so not a good comparison with nuclear or fossil generated electricity.
Nuclear power, like fossil fuel power, is heavily subsidized, so ignore the subsidy issue. Odds are good that we are never going to have to send our armed forces to the sun to defend our solar power source. I agree that there is a problem with intermittent power, but that seems to be a problem with a technical solution. This is a techno-optimist blog, so it is no surprise that many of us here believe that technology can provide solutions.
The overly strict LNT regulations of the NRC are a negative subsidy, more than outdoing the liability shield which is the only nuclear subsidy I know of. Solar and wind get production credits which is a direct payment from taxpayers to solar and wind investors. And you probably got some of my taxes as a rebate on the solar panels you put on your roof. America is self sufficient in all fossil fuels so armed forces are irrelevant. I am a technical optimist, but if you have optimism for technology you shouldn’t want politicians deciding which technologies we should used with market distortion. Solar is great for rooftop or over parking lots, but the government should stop subsidizing it and we shouldn’t be sourcing it from countries that use slave labor and we need to realize that it’s intermittent and that if we need batteries for electric vehicles then they aren’t a good grid storage solution. And the NRC is anti-technology and pessimistic. They just refused to relicense Diablo Canyon being kept open.
You seem to have started your argument from the premise that nuclear power was sidelined by regulation rather than its own internal cost structure. Despite government subsidies and much a much laxer regulatory structure in the early decades or in a definitely pro-nuclear country like France, nuclear power has not been cost effective unless you consider it, as the French did, an element of national security. You can argue about the relative value of subsidies for nuclear as opposed to solar power, but nuclear power is just a lot more expensive.
I get the impression that over-regulation seems to mean trying to prevent things like the Fukushima mess or the Chernobyl disaster. The Japanese still haven't cleaned up the site, and, if Gorbachev was right, the latter disaster led to the collapse of the USSR. No one is turning old reactor sites into charming hotel complexes like the JW Marriott Power Plant in Savannah. I grew up in the glory days of nuclear war threat analysis, so maybe we need to do some analysis here. If we want to get nuclear power as cheap as solar power, just how much should we relax regulation? Just how often should we accept a Chernobyl scale disaster or a lesser Fukushima mess?
Odds are it would still be competitive. Labor costs aren't a big percentage of the cost. Right now, the big labor cost is the guys bolting the panels to the roof.
The energy thesis is not new, see "Where is My Flying Car?" by J. Storrs Hall.
That is not a refutation of the "regulation caused the Great Stagnation" thesis, it's actually a vindication. Regulation choked nuclear and is the reason it's so expensive.
That's also a key reason why Jim Pethokoukis & others like J. Storrs Hall are less excited about solar, they are afraid regulation did not create a level playing field.
I'm personally agnostic, I'd like to have more of everything and a level-playing field for all technologies - but I do share concerns like ...
- if solar is so great, why aren't we getting it faster? From a cost perspective, it disappointed strongly in the late 2000s; I hear my friends in renewable energy talking about it for a decade and little happens.
- the LCOE analyses has been criticised for not properly comparing, e.g. nuclear is artificially expensive and solar & wind artificially cheap (I can't adjudicate whether that's true or not)
- Solar & wind suffer often from the same problems that other sources of energy like nuclear suffer (albeit less of those): NIMBYism, land use regulation, environmental reviews etc.
So we definitely need to do the work on de-regulation or "energy innovation zones" (special economic zones with less regulation), a nuclear revival and a new science race to find other cheaper sources, even better battery technology etc. either way.
Betting just on existing solar technology doesn't seem enough.
Nuclear power had a cost problem before it had a regulation problem. Large nuclear power plants cost a whole lot more than smaller ones per unit of power. It isn't just the US. That was the case everywhere, including France where the costs were considered a state secret until around 2000.
Even in the early 1970s, the problems with nuclear power were becoming apparent. There was no learning curve. Each plant started as a blank slate. Traditional construction methods which overlapped design and construction led to massive overruns as work had to be undone and redone. There were no returns to scale. Instead, scaling up made the cost problem worse.
This completely ignores the fuel risks and disposal problems. The rising costs had nothing to do with regulation which didn't become more stringent for another decade. Large reactors are just expensive to build with our current methodologies.
I Released a podcast episode today with one of the world’s top experts on nuclear: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5yzi8xzMdw7nFcFXTiX7aI?si=k13V9fEpS7qTtPQsMJ_sPA
Gives the big picture, it’s a story of regulatory capture and it overreaction
As usual, the original post is focused solely on "green" answers solely from an American perspective. In and of itself, that is not unexpected or unrealistic. However, the true costs on a global scale (especially to the countries that produce the basic materials for batteries) are never factored in. True, American energy costs are falling, and the applied formulas seem to make sense on the surface. But, I would be more accepting if a worldwide perspective were taken. The "bloom" is rapidly coming off the "green" rose around the world as true costs are being realized. I realize this is unsubstantiated for the moment, but if a conversation ensues I will gladly provide required
Yep. The whole wind and solar fad was a giant elite western utopian social vision for which the reality is slowly setting in. It wasn't the first. And it won't be the last.
The reality setting in for wind and solar is that they produce more of the world's electricity (not just American electricity or "elite western" electricity, but all electricity) than ever, and their share is accelerating, not leveling off: https://energydigital.com/renewable-energy/wind-and-solar-generate-10-of-global-electricity
But the true prices are artificially depressed and the full costs are being hidden.
And the likely loss of "on demand" power is not being candidly admitted. We"re instead told that as yet non existent future batteries will solve intermittent problem.
*Throws down yellow flag* Goalpost shift! 5-yard penalty!
The ongoing cost reduction is not due to any artificiality.
Intermittent and unreliable is the reality and being used by subsidies not actually because of cost.
Eppur si muove.
'Jim Pethokoukis, for example, who writes my favorite techno-optimist blog, pointedly refuses to mention solar at all.'
Because solar is coded left, an example of where the dirty hippies were right and the 'realist' right aligned types were wrong. Much better to hype up nuclear, where he can blame the hippies and government regulation for killing it. Ignore the fact that it's currently failing the market test.
Could you elaborate (a link or two, even) on failing the market test?
I've been under the (admittedly uneducated) impression that nuclear hasn't emerged as the dominant energy supply due largely to anti-nuclear lobbying by oil & gas.
The argument I've read goes something like "big fossil doesn't mind adopting renewables because they don't threaten to overturn the whole energy economy -- but nuclear does, so they lobby against it with billions"
Simply that not much energy is generated by nuclear relative to solar. And you can see the effect of solar on coal. Fossil fuel definitely campaigned against all threats. They and others killed the carbon price in Australia. With help from the so called free market types.
Thanks. So based on that, if I'm reading it not too stupidly, it's back to just a question of technology. I.e., given that nuclear (nor anything else we know of) can compare to the energy output of the sun, the most straightforward path to energy security is a matter of improving and leveraging solar tech.
To your original comment, the "coding" is SO frustrating because it's all hypocritical anyway! Solar is "left," but deregulation is "right," and so is Elon Musk. Big tech and electrification are "left" but deference to market dynamics is "right."
Too much signalling to keep up with XD
I'm not wedded to solar, just pointing out that it's been performing very very well alongside wind. I don't have anything against nuclear either, there's just a certain type of nuclear booster who's in there because they fancy themselves as realists who make hard choices. The fact is it may be useful in the future, and that's good, but it's not very useful right now.
I agree, you want to keep that political coding away from your thinking so it doesn't affect your judgment. While Elon is not someone I admire uncritically and is coded as being right wing these days, I don't think you can deny he's helped a lot in the electric car space. I doubt very much a rational, profit maximising, risk minimising guy in his position would have done what he did with Tesla. Even if you don't buy into the Tony Stark image he projects, he certainly was willing to throw money and resources at a problem that not many believed in, and it paid off for everyone as a whole, whether or not Tesla itself eventually wins.
Left or right is over already, Musk and others in solar, BEV and wind are pro government handouts because their profits depend on it.
I'm not saying he's a saint, he's clearly not. But like I said, I don't think a rational profit maximising, risk minimising guy in his position would have done what he did, government handouts or not. I think he's a guy who gets excited by cool sounding ideas and throws money and resources at it, which paid off for everyone if you're talking about electric vehicles. I think the space thing is a waste of money, but that's his money, I suppose. Better than buying sports teams, anyway.
If we used nuclear, the works would have more energy than it could use and it would be cheaper. But there’s no money in it for globalists.
Oil and gas (especially BP) now lobby more for solar and wind because they know both are intermittent and require fossil peaking plants because batteries are both expensive and unavailable since the auto industry is using the whole supply.
Warner Buffet puts insane amounts of money in to oil. Renewables are about 3% of our energy use.... the refineries need to be on and cost most to fill in the gaps. Can’t you see this?
That's also what I've gathered.
Yeah Ning if you read the comments here there's some pretty obvious questions about solar that haven't been convincingly answered.
And it *does* matter that the folks pushing hardest for a zero carbon future are divided on nuclear energy. It makes one question whether zero carbon is the only goal or some other utopian social vision.
It’s not a goal... the goal is to use it as money making thing for them. And they’ll have no issue with whom it hurts. It pulls on the hearts of those who believe these lies... but really poorer nations will then burn wood for n the end... to survive. It’s all insane. We all called to care for our world and take care of it, but never over the costs of humans.
So? What matters is that they're part of the answer right now. It doesn't have to be a complete mapped out answer now and forever more.
You can question it if you want. There are some genuine nuclear supporters around, but you want to watch out for those in there for tribal reasons. The renewables people are successfully sidelining the degrowth types and producing results. The nuclear people are not successfully sidelining the own the libs types, nor producing results for now. I hope they do both in the long run.
Nuclear doesn't need "hype", it needs deregulation and lack of interference for long-term investment to pay off. Government regulation and "hippies" certainly did kill off the only reliable, scalable zero carbon energy source in the 70s/80s. Alternatively, building nuclear plants at scale for the past 40 years would have produced far less CO2 while producing abundant and reliable energy. Shouldn't the left feel at least a little guilty about the part they played here?
If you remain dedicated to unreliable energy sources like solar and wind, then the reality is that we will just continue to use fossil fuels as our energy backbone. If you care about CO2 emissions, better to swallow your pride and just admit you were wrong about nuclear and support deregulation.
Well, we'll see. The fact is that they're not much of a solution right now, but solar and wind are. If they are then great. But we want to see results.
As for guilt, uh huh. Sure. A bunch of hippies yell about nuclear, and the left should feel guilty? You think the general public is in love with nuclear? By that standard we should ascribe much more guilt to the 'right', who greatly undermined the consensus around global warming for so long. And now they mostly lose the battle, and now come in with 'but muh nuclear'. Please. I don't mind having alternatives but far too many nuke advocates are global warming deniers in disguise or own the libs tribal warriors.
Claims that "Nuclear doesn't need 'hype'" are rather belied by the nuclear hype men who show up in comments sections like these!
I am responding to a substack article about how solar panels are not only going to produce enough energy to meet our current needs, but lead to a dramatic increase in energy production and therefore productivity. Renewable advocates referring to nuclear energy as hype is laughable.
Actually, you were responding to a comment suggesting why Jim Pethokoukis avoids mentioning solar power. And for a real laugh, compare nuclear's learning curves to solar's.
I like Jim Petholoukis' blog too. But a nuclear plant requires 500-800 staff fulltime (NEI). That's a lot of opex. It is hard to see how nuclear will ever be really cheap unless you address both the opex and the capex question (I suspect the cheapness of nuclear in the 1950s was due to a combination of subsidies, loss leader pricing and lax safety requirements).
Meanwhile here in Australia now one third of all households now have some solar on the roof. Just deregulate solar on the roof. Two guys on the roof for a day then you're set for twenty years.
IMHO people over-dramatise the challenges of intermittent solar. David Osmond posts regular model updates showing Australia can get by with close to 100% renewables and only 5 hours storage (https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8). Many people think Australia will be able to get more than that from the light vehicle fleet alone.
This is oversimplified (haven't even discussed wind, hydro and hydrogen). But by 2030 a lot of people will live in hot countries with a lot of EVs on the street. And cheap solar + bidirectional chargers can get you surprisingly far with no megaprojects required.
Great points. On the other hand, I wonder what the staff breakdown is of that 500-800 people? How many (if any) of the jobs will be replaced with automation and AI in the next 20 years?
On the other, other hand, and maybe more saliently, how many jobs in OTHER sectors will automation and AI replace in that timeframe, and would we be thankful for more 500-800 employee operations?
SWAG (scientific wild ass guessing) indicates that we'd need to have a bajillion of that size employer to offset the job loss from automation alone, but I suppose this is more of a thought exercise than a practical approach.
Yeah it's not like our society couldn't actually use a few more Homer Simpson jobs. Just sayin.
And while we're on the subject of labor...how many slave labor man hour inputs in China or the Congo does it take to build one solar panel?
Where is the pricing analysis of the other externalities if massive ramp up in mining that will be needed for the panels and the batteries?
If you care so much about externalities, would you support a nuclear grand bargain, then? A price on carbon in exchange for repealing bans on nuclear power?
https://johnquiggin.com/2019/09/02/a-nuclear-grand-bargain/
I would. How many nuclear supporters would? I asked a nuke supporter this and all he could do was run around in rhetorical circles.
Nuclear is over regulated, look up Linear No Threshold and the latest NRC updated rules. With automation a plant can run with fewer operators. More sensible regulation would also prevent accidents, I still don’t understand why seaside nuclear plants (situated near cooling water) don’t require the backup diesel generators to prevent meltdown not to be located on the roof or above highest tsunami levels.
Your set for twenty years but less then half the day (or less depending on latitude and cloud cover). Don’t you need AC in the evenings in most of Australia?
You should read the post before replying: "Australia can get by with close to 100% renewables and only 5 hours storage." So, yes, they do have AC in the evenings. Perhaps where you're from, insulation hasn't been invented yet?
Insane to believe this lie... 100%? Hahahahahaahahahahahahahahahaahahahah
My house is insulated well but when it’s over 30 degrees C until after midnight every summer night solar alone is worthless.
I don't know where you live but where I am, the sun sets around 8:30 in the middle of the summer. If you had 5 hours of battery backup (as stated in the post you are now replying to twice), you would still have at least 1.5 hours of backup power at midnight (presumably a lot more since the temp must have dropped since midday).
Isn’t part of the problem the amount of non-renewables it takes to build wind and solar? Maybe I’m out of the loop, but doesn’t it offset at the very least as things are? I am trying to get on the renewables train, but it feels like the main solution is to address poverty in those places where pollution is a consequence of economic hardship. Maybe it’s a both and I’m missing things? Anyone care to educate me?
In other news, I wrote an article about Andrew Tate and the internet fathers of today. I’m an aspiring writer trying to hone my craft. Any eyeballs and input matters!
https://open.substack.com/pub/tothestorehouse/p/abdicated-responsibility?r=tn513&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Hehehe...you're not supposed to ask the question of where all the energy will come from in the coming massive transition to renewables.
You're supposed to imagine that solar panels and wind turbines will power their own expansion, while they are also flooding the grid with cheap clean to meet society's current uses.
No, it doesn't make a ton of sense to anybody who thinks about it. But the whole point is not to get people reading the fine print; it's selling a social vision. Benevolent neoliberal technocrats and other experts can be trusted to work out the practical details.
You are not missing anything. While I too wish we could live in the world Noah imagines, not considering the tradeoffs is - well - that’s why it’s an essay.
Where they go wrong on the most basic level is to put renewables above humans.
Without going all the way down the nuclear rabbit-hole I'm still increasingly convinced that solar/wind aren't viable as a whole-grid.
The problem loosely is that because they are intermittent (and as a civilisation we can't really tolerate not having power) they need to be both significantly overbuilt and have something approximating a 100% back-up. Whether that's a whole fleet of gas plants or a monumental amounts of batteries. The cost of the over-build and the way the cost of the back-up needs to be added to the solar cost. When you do that it becomes obvious that it isn't really viable as a whole-grid.
This is some interesting analysis (albeit potentially too pessimistic, I haven't unpacked the model) https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-and-windsolar
Let’s not forget the damage to animals and important insects with the mention of the ridiculous wind turbines. The fact that they don’t consider the down sides or have any foresight- means they’re snake oil salt
Birds have the same problem with glass windows. Odds are, the problem will be easier to mitigate for wind turbines than for the billions of glass windows out there.
Lame comment. I don’t see hundreds of dead eagles, falcons and so on by American windows.
What percentage of American windows have you checked? We just had a dead thrush the other day. The study I checked, "Bird–building collisions in the United States", estimate between 365 and 988 million birds are killed by collisions with buildings in the US. This was published by the American Ornithological Society.
Salesmen
That sounds like a case for a mixed strategy which is something we are already committed to. The winning strategies for most games, particularly all games without perfect information, are mixed strategies, so no big surprise there.
It doesn't become "obvious that it [solar/wind] isn't really viable as a whole grid". If the costs of "overbuilding" and storage keep coming down as they have been, there's a very good chance that solar and wind power will prove more than satisfactory with or without a more traditional backup strategy.
Look at a traditional solar powered system, agriculture. No sun, no crops,. Lousy sun, lousy crops. If we are going to have enough food, we need to overplant and maintain stockpiles as Joseph suggested to Pharaoh in the Bible. Somehow or another, agriculture worked. I'm sure it had its detractors and it definitely has had its discontents, but no one questions that it does manage to produce most of our food.
I'm disappointed that the author didn't address the resource issue related to solar and wind power: is there enough lithium, are there enough rare-earth metals on the planet to support the battery requirements of these cheap but partial energy sources, on the scale needed to power this abundant energy future, for 7 billion people and counting? Do we think we're going to get batteries out of rocks? Battery technology is constrained by physics; available land is constrained by geography. These are real issues, I think, that should be addressed in a techno-optimist piece?
And there’s no end in sight to this revolution. New fundamental advances like solid state lithium-ion batteries and next-generation solar cells seem within reach, which will kick off another virtuous cycle of deployment, learning curves, and cost decreases.
Above is from the essay. 'Seems to be within reach' is Noah dismissing any problems.
I think it’s more delusion than dismissal.
Do you have solid proof that we are at the limit of battery technology and energy storage? Have you already tried every alternative and demonstrated the impossibility of a solution? If you do, maybe you should post it somewhere and let us see it. Do you also have solid proof that powered flight is impossible? That would make good airplane reading.
Meanwhile, solar and battery technology keep improving and getting cheaper.
I think it's incumbent on the proposers to address the question of why they think that battery technology hasn't reached its limit, rather than to demand that skeptics prove they have. What are the assumptions? Is there math, somewhere, about the quantity of storage batteries needed for full, on-demand power? How much lithium will those batteries require, and where and how will it be mined?
That's easy. There are too many prototypes with much better performance in the pipeline. Arguing that every last one of them and all of the various alternatives not yet investigated will fail to provide better density and performance takes a fair bit of hubris. It there were no prototypes or promising leads, it might be possible to make reasonable argument that we are near some technical peak, but that kind of prediction, especially in the face of evidence to the contrary, tends to be wrong.
Start here: https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction
Energy expenditures are <5% of US GDP. Any productivity is a good thing but this feels like a drop in the bucket compared to the large (and growing) sources of anti-productivity: housing, healthcare, education, etc.
I share your optimism on energy but at the same time fear it gives us a false sense that we are beginning to solve the productivity problem in aggregate. We are not (wake me up when we fix zoning).
But energy is an input to most other industries. I agree that housing, healthcare and education need productivity the most but it’s not a coincidence that these are the sectors with the most regulation and government involvement.
One problem is that only individuals and the government can capitalize human health or education. That means that healthier, better educated people don't appear as a positive on any private sector balance sheets. Individuals might appreciate their better health and their improved skills, but this doesn't show up in the GDP. Governments need a healthy and educated citizenry to be competitive in the modern world, if only for military reasons. Private companies just take advantage of government and individual efforts, but only their product seems to count for anything in policy making.
While it's exciting to think of a battery centric future there isn't enough Lithium in the world to run it for cars alone, not to mention backing up excess solar production. When we can get solid state batteries using different, cheaper metals I think we'll 'be there'. In the meantime we should be building SMRs and getting thorium plants figured out (we can burn existing nuclear waste stockpiles in thorium plants!). I'm not trying to malign solar--its great for some things (desal is perfect if they can figure it out better as it produces when the sun's out and doesn't matter if it shuts down at night). But we need constant power sources and the current SMR designed nukes are the best replacement for large scale fossil fuel generation--modular, simple, and safe.
How many thorium nuclear plants are currently online? The best I can tell is that there are the same number as non-lithium, non-lead-acid grid storage battery systems.
" cheap, energy-dense batteries". Until these batteries become commercially available, solar and wind will remain significantly more expensive than combined cycle gas (especially offshore wind).
Solar panel production:
150 W/sq m * 8 hours sun = 1.2kWh / m^2 / day
* 365 days per year = 438 kWh per year per square meter
Round numbers: a 1 meter square set of panels will generate about 400 kWh of electricity per year.
Total US usage: 3.8 trillion kWh
Round numbers, call it 4T.
4T kWh / 400 kWh = 10B m^2
This is the amount of land area that would have to be covered with solar panels in order to provide for our current electricity usage. Being America, I have a hard time relating to square meters, so how big is 10 billion m^2? An acre is about 4,000 square meters. So...
10B m^2 = 2.5M acres (+/-) = 4000 sq miles (+/-)
How big is that? It's about the size of the Baltimore / Washington DC metroplex. Paving over this area with solar panels would therefore improve life both by what is destroyed and by what it produced. We may need to enlarge it to accommodate the coming electrification of the entire transportation system. (Of course, with DC's bureaucratic apparatus paved in silicon and lithium, that may not happen, but I digress...) I think covering most of New Jersey would take care of that too. Leave the Jersey Shore; its reality TV is far too entertaining.
Oh... and expect to replace all of this every 20-25 years.
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To be clear, while I disagree with your solar optimism, Noah, I love this article, since it points out the critical importance of energy cost to everything we do. It is not hyperbole to say that human developmental history IS the gradual discovery and cultivation of new and more dense energy sources. Any eco-movement that fails to recognize this is shooting itself in the foot.
Personally, my money is on the fusion people. You know what they say: "fusion energy is just 10 years away!" Unfortunately, "they"' have been saying this for my entire 50 year life, but I still have hope. Thanks for another great article.
I agree paving over Washington DC or even New Jersey would be a good side benefit, your calculations don’t include the required storage for nights and cloudy days. as well as all the grid connections needed. Rather see each State capital building as well as the one in DC replaced by 10 gigawatt nuclear reactor.
You need transmission, not storage. We know when the sun will shine and when the wind will blow. Across Australia, with a connected grid, we can easily get by, as previously stated, with only 5 hours storage, he's run the numbers using real grid data. Rockhampton in Queensland (north) is 2000 km away from Geelong in Victoria (south). Geelong is 700km away from Adelaide (west not including Perth far west as it's too far and has a separate grid)
Never a cloudy day down under, eh mate? In the states worst case is sunset in NYC at 4:30 PM EST and sunset in LA 3 hours later. Sunrise in NYC would then be 10 hours later. So even if there was a nationwide grid (there isn’t) that can handle terawatt flows (there won’t be unless superconductors are used) or you try to include Hawaii or the Aleutian Islands on the grid massive storage would be needed.
It'll be sunny and windy somewhere (actually many places) along a 2000km x 1000km area.
That's basically the same area as New York to New Orleans to Dallas. You reckon they all rain at the same time and if it's not windy in Dallas it won't be windy in NY, and everywhere in between
Are there any nuclear reactor designed that feature a dome on top? Perhaps you wouldn't even have to change the architecture much.
That's really quite a small area in the US. The Europeans look at our agricultural system, which is heavily solar driven, and are amazed at our wasteful practices. We justify them because land is relatively cheap in the US which makes sense. We have 150,000 square miles of land planted with corn, and it has to be replanted EVERY year. Four thousand square miles is rounding error.
P.S. Worse, most of the corn planted is hybrid corn, so there is an entire alternate ecosystem producing purebred corn just for hybridization.
How much of USA is already paved over? How many acres are already covered in flat or low pitch roofs? Most all factories, big box stores, warehouses and distribution centers, parking lots, low-rise apartment buildings, let alone residential roof tops, are good candidates. A lot of PV acreage could be installed w/o paving a single square foot of grass. I don't know the answer, but if I were younger this would be a great GIS project. My bank has PV over the parking lot. Parking lot solar charging BEV's parked underneath. And no, that's not the total solution, but a good step.
4000sq miles by my calculation is < 0.1% of the total size of the contiguous US.
That makes it sound so tiny and easy. But the United States is huge, So let's talk about actual solar farms that exist today.
The largest solar farm in the world is the Indian desert. Bhadla Solar Park spans about 15K acres and was completed last year, I think. To power the United States on only the sun would require construction of about 150 of these. You would then have to recycle and reconstruct about 8 of them every year, continuously, for wear and obsolescence. Increasing your power usage (for electric cars or the phasing out of gas stoves or even just population growth) would require new installations as well.
The opportunity cost of that level of investment is just too high.
What remarkable about all this is how timid it is compared to the past, the US is entirely electrified and that means some company, or multiple companies, in the late 19C committed to building out a grid to everybody’s house by 1920, or thereabouts.
And that was a huge undertaking at the time. And it took decades. The Rural Electrification Act was passed in 1936, the same year Hoover Dam was completed. And you're talking about building 8 Hoover dams every year. Can it be done? Yes. But there's that opportunity cost again.
Actual solar farms are not 100% of area covered with solar panels but more like 30-40% of area covered with panels, so your size estimates should be 2-2.5x larger. Doesn't seem like a large number, but when you consider that your production rate only works for 6-9 hrs/day, considerable back up and storage will be needed so the area and capex to build more solar to charge the batteries mean build out will be 3-4x the calculated number of solar panels with an additional 3x on top of the 2-2.5x. As a construction project this will be never ending as by the time you finish your first 50% of the project the earliest installed panels will be failing and begin to need replacement.
So what? Replace them.
Only 150 to power the entire US! We have 92 nuclear power plants, and they produce only a small fraction of our power. I can't figure out what the problem is with having to rebuild eight of them every year, and that's assuming future solar power systems don't have longer life spans. Nuclear power plants require a fair bit of maintenance too, and we still haven't figured out what to do with their spent fuel. Since solar panels don't become radioactive, they are much easier to dispose of or recycle. Also, it's not like they stop producing power. They just become less efficient, so there will probably be a secondary market that milks another 10-20 years of power out of them, possibly after refurbishing.
Nuke provides about 20% of all US power.
It's also provides a solid base of reliable power for dispatch planning. Of course, what dispatchers love is stuff like hydro with a startup time of minutes, assuming you have the water.
> That makes it sound so tiny and easy.
And you (try to) make it sound so massive and hard. But a number with units only has meaning relative to other numbers with units. And 4000 square miles really just isn't that big compared to the area of the lower 48.
> The opportunity cost of that level of investment is just too high.
You need to compare the cost of some alternative course of action to demonstrate this, not just make shocked faces at the figure of 4000 square miles or gesture in the direction of a single solar park in a far poorer country. The US is a big country, it can build big things and rebuild big things if needed; if you want to show that it can't build enough solar you need at least a rough estimate of the US's capacity to build solar.
Fair enough. The Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona generated about 30 billion kWh last year. The entire site takes up about 3 sq miles. Palo Verde has been in operation for 60 years and will continue for at least 20 more. Modern reactors are even more efficient, lower cost, and smaller, so Palo Verde is a conservative model.
It would take about 120 Palo Verdes to meet current US demand. They require essentially no unobtainums (rare earth minerals). Uranium is readily available within the USA and from several friendly foreign sources. The power generated would be always-on, not conditional on weather or battery storage. The reactors would last for nearly a century instead of 25 years. The total land area consumed would be about 400 sq miles, less than a tenth of solar arrays. However, since paving over DC still strikes me as useful, we could fit them all inside the 495 ring road. Palo Verde is even a domed architecture; it would fit right in. :-)
Nuclear: Scalable. Long lasting. Proven. Available domestically. Not intermittent. No emissions. Hi-level waste over the life of the plant fits into a cargo van. And can be built near demand.
Solar: Huge. Intermittent. Requires elements we can only get from hostile foreign countries. Has a comparatively short lifespan. Can only be built in near-deserts where few people live.
To top it off, there are major inventions that need to happen (particularly in batteries) before any weather-dependent system could be relied on. If you really think CO2 emissions are going to destroy the Earth, there is a proven, zero-CO2-emission technology available right now.
That's a start, but it's telling that your response to my point that "[y]ou need to compare the cost" doesn't quote any dollar values.
I don't doubt that nuclear power plants take up less space per watt, but unless land cost's the binding cost of power generation there's no basis to think that ~ 0.01% of the contiguous US for nuclear versus ~ 0.1% of the contiguous US for solar is the key cost of concern. Similarly, comparing the lifetime of nuclear vs. solar isn't probative either. Merely documenting that nuclear has a longer lifecycle doesn't directly address the question of cost.
The rest of your comment puts an obvious thumb on the scale in favor of nuclear (e.g. writing "Scalable. Long lasting. Proven." for nuclear alone, never mind that solar is also scalable, long-lasting, and proven) and in any event doesn't directly confront the matter of cost.
Let's actually try to compare costs, finally. The US Energy Information Administration tries to estimate the levelized cost of electricity generation each year, and their latest report of their findings appears to be at https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf. From table 1b, I see that they price
• new nuclear generation at $88 per MWh,
• new solar generation at $36 per MWh without batteries, and
• new solar generation at $53 per MWh with batteries.
It kinda looks like you're trying to hyperbolically browbeat the rest of us ("If you really think CO2 emissions are going to destroy the Earth") into going for the costlier technology.
Solar and wind should be called unreliables. Sorry...
Yeah.... batteries with elements dug up by slaves? Solar panels made by slaves? And to know they take up so much land...and not to forget that they’re not recyclable? Cheaper to make new ones? Also lose their strength year over year? Nah.
If you believe that batteries are made by slaves, then why are you using a device with a battery?
It’s likely any large scale batteries will not be using rare earth minerals.
Noah, when you cite Lazard LCOE as proof that solar is now the cheapest form of electricity, you’re simply telling us all that you haven’t done a realistic, in-depth analysis.
From Lazard’s website: “Analysis excludes integration (e.g., grid and conventional generation investment to overcome system intermittency) costs for intermittent technologies.”
Also from Lazard: “Although alternative energy is increasingly cost-competitive and storage technology holds great promise, alternative energy systems alone will not be capable of meeting the base-load generation needs of a developed economy for the foreseeable future. “
When you flip on your light switch, the product you access is reliable on-demand 24x7 electricity. This is not the product exiting a solar array field.
LCOE does not tell the full story. https://gemenergyanalytics.substack.com/p/the-imperfect-lcoe-and-cfd