[travisoneill1]

> The rise of variable renewable sources means that there is an increasing need for electricity grid flexibility, the IEA notes. “Robust electricity networks, dispatchable power plants, storage technologies and demand response measures all play vital roles in meeting this,” it says.

Which is why it's not really the cheapest. Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.

[civilized]

It might be the cheapest if you factor in the costs of climate change, as responsible economists have insisted for decades & the fossil fuel industry has spent billions fighting

[bassman9000]

Then nuclear is the cheapest, and most reliable, by far.

[hartator]

Solar panels productions reject more co2 than nuclear plants.

[cbmuser]

Except that solar power isn’t an effective measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector. Nuclear is far more effective as the comparison between France and Germany shows with Germany emitting _seven_ times the emissions as France in their energy sector.

[antr]

I was just going to say this. This is what many people do not understand, it's "the cheapest" technology but the cost of the necessary ancillary services, balancing mechanism, FFR, inertia, etc., to make this happen is not baked into the LCOE models. That's how shortsighted this sort of messages are.

[Jweb_Guru]

While that's true, it's also true that the total cost of solar (taking storage into account) is far lower now than it was even 10-15 years ago. The logical thing we should be doing now is building massive amounts of storage, rather than complaining about how solar costs don't take it into account. As an added bonus, large pumped storage or fuel cell batteries can be reused for any renewable source (unlike solutions like concentrated solar), so any improvements in one can be mostly decoupled from improvements in the other, which is why I find the insistence that people add the cost of the batteries to the cost of solar to be pretty wearying. And I don't find arguments that pumped storage takes a long time and has high maintenance costs to build very convincing when the alternative, nuclear, has exactly the same requirement.

[blake1]

They absolutely do have these associated costs.

Robust electricity networks? The US has spent trillions on transmission networks in the era dominated by coal.

Dispatchable power plants? We’ve had both base-load and peaker plants for decades. Indeed, base load gas is cost-competitive with solar now. But all base-load gen is so slow to start up and shut down that peakers can charge 2-3 orders of magnitude more per MWh.

Storage technologies? Given the exorbitant cost of peaker power, pumped storage has been in use for decades.

Demand response has also made sense for decades, but we’ve lacked the technology and market structures to make it a reality until recently. It was introduced before renewables had real market share.

In short: yes, renewables require these technologies. So does fossil-fuel generation. The IEA’s bias is showing if they’re implying that this is unique to one technology.

Of course, our current system is optimized around the characteristics of huge fossil plants, and a lot of capital will be required to optimize it around a different technology. These investments are worth it if you consider the externalities of carbon emissions. If you do it correctly, and include extreme weather costs, we should try to get to a zero emissions ASAP.

But even if you ignore externalities, as you appear to be doing, renewables are now so much cheaper that there is no economic reason to replace obsolete generation with non renewables. Under this approach, we’ll still get to 100% renewable in 40-50 years.

[throwaway2245]

I understand the contrary: nuclear power is extremely inflexible - not dispatchable, no demand response. You can't turn it off and on.

[travisoneill1]

True, but solar doesn't have demand responsiveness either, it has sunlight responsiveness, which is not the same thing.

[antr]

It's not about being dispatchable or not, it' about the volatility renewable generation and the problem this generates... and how other non-renewables need to be called by the TSO.

[cbmuser]

Which is actually not true at all. Modern nuclear plants can be operated in load-following mode and reduce and increase their output by 10% and more within minutes.

[Krasnol]

Don't forget the costs for the waste which generations will have to take upon them.

[virmundi]

Right. That makes it ideal for baseload. It can produce more than enough for regular loads. If necessary it can be augmented by solar and other power generation.

[08-15]

Yes, you can. Most nuclear power plants are more dispatchable than most gas burners. Countries with lots of nuclear power plants (France) absolutely run them in a load following regime.

[Edit: And, as usual, downvotes rolling in for pointing out a verifiable fact. HN being HN, I guess.]

[alex_g]

My propane tank doesn’t magically fill itself every other month.

[wnevets]

>Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.

because those cost have been socialized to the rest of us. We are all paying for higher cancer rates, temps, etc but these companies get to keep the difference as profit.

[FabHK]

FWIW, nuclear power does have quite some associated costs (storage, security, etc.) - I'd love to see a sensible estimate. It might still be worth it to cover base loads.

[Joeri]

Are you accounting for the refining and transportation costs of fossil fuels and for the fissionable material mining and refining and for the waste storage costs of nuclear?

[cbmuser]

Yes, that’s all accounted for. Can be looked up in one of the IPCC reports.

Google for “GHG emissions life cycle IPCC”. I’m currently on mobile so I don’t have the sources at hand.

[api]

Nuclear has a lot of hidden costs too such as waste disposal or reprocessing, insurance (whether private or effectively public and socialized), and remediation.

If you look at the whole picture including capacity factor, flexibility, engineering overhead, etc., coal and gas are still very cheap... provided you ignore long term externalities. This is the problem.

[Jweb_Guru]

Yup. Everyone keeps saying "people ignore the cost of batteries!" but what the thing everyone in all these threads ignores is that fossil fuels have absolutely amazing economics and will for much longer than it will take to inflict catastrophic ecological damage on the world. Waiting for them to become more expensive than renewables just means that by the time you finally panic and start building storage and nuclear infrastructure, fossil fuels will be so expensive that the last thing people are interested in is big public works projects.

[cbmuser]

Waste disposal or reprocessing are neglectible if you keep in mind that a single nuclear reactor produces electricity worth over one million US Dollars per day.

See: https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY

[dehrmann]

> Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs

They do, but with coal, it's the pile out back, I assume natural gas networks have tanks. Nuclear is interesting because it's almost control rods.

But your point stands; storage is a lot simpler for conventional fuels.

[SubiculumCode]

Sure. But let's talk about the true costs of fossil fuels: Climate change is pretty damn expensive. Leaving out the costs of the wars fought for oil.

[cbmuser]

Yep, and Germany proves that renewables don’t help to drive down emissions in the energy sector unless you can use abundant amounts of hydro power.

Germany has 50% renewables, yet their kWh causes 400 grams of CO2 on average while France with 70% nuclear causes 50 grams of CO2 per kWh on average.