The article hints at it through the "investments" angle but doesn't come out and state the importance of political will.
One big reason renewables became so cheap is because around 2008 Beijing Olympics, China decided that they were done with air pollution in the cities. IIRC at that time coal power and other industrial production had to be stopped for a couple of months in the surrounding provinces to make the games happen and people (importantly top bureaucrats who lived in Beijing) decided they liked the clean air.
China doesn't have any substantial deposits of fossil fuels that give get clean air (like gas that US has) and Oil and Gas has to be largely imported leaving them at the mercy of international market prices and currency fluctuations. So they started heavily investing in renewables production capacity, first in wind (China's installed capacity started doubling yoy around then) and then Solar from 2010/11 even if they were expensive then and it wasn't clear how much of a learning rate benefit there would be. Similarly massive electrification of public transport and introducing subways later in the decade again to reduce pollution in the cities. Now i believe they have 3X the installed base of the next biggest country (US) and still accelerating.
Later on the Paris Climate treaty just added extra momentum with the climate change and carbon reduction angle. But it was originally a political decision that took political will - to get cleaner air in the cities even at a possibly higher cost.
One big factor is that many renewables are "many smaller instead of one huge construction".
E.g. many wind turbines instead of one huge power plant.
This means that adaption over time can happen much faster and can potentially happen during the implementations of larger long term projects (e.g. huge off shore wind farms).
It also means prototyping cost tends to be cheaper and it can be easier adopted by smaller groups instead of needing larger consensus.
While I used wind turbines as an example it's also true for many other aspects like Geo-termal power, solar energy, solar powered water heating, etc.
Even some classically "huge" projects like dams have smaller (micro) versions by now which as far as I can tell advance much faster in technology (often technology about micro-dams having less negative effects on the small-river they are build into, wrt. to fish but also sediment movement).
Add to this that research on many of the renewable energies is ongoing since quite a long time and that increasingly more people and countries realize the importance it's not too surprising I think.
You can really see this in the wind farms east of LA. You see the initial, less aerodynamic tiny wind turbines and like Russian nesting dolls they get bigger and bigger.
Another big factor is that we lie about capacity when making up the numbers. We assume summer numbers under ideal conditions and not actual daily average capacity or minimum daily capacity. Just going from summer to winter greatly reduces energy production per day not even including weather events.
One interesting thing that I didn't see mentioned in the (excellent) article - is that renewables allow for local and hyper-local electricity generation. With any system, there will be transmission loss. But when the solar panels are in the field down the street, or on your roof, that becomes negligible.
It also touches a little on the installation time. Nuclear power stations takes years to build - even after the tortuous planning process. Wind farms are quicker to install. A solar array is almost instantaneous by comparison. The panels on my roof took a week - and most of that was dealing with scaffolding and my dodgy wiring.
If you can install solar panels day-after-day, you benefit from an increased learning rate. And, frankly, the training for how to do it isn't arduous. Nuclear might be the future - but it requires a highly trained workforce and constant maintenance. All of which are expensive.
Electricity transmission costs are really negligible. You will never be able to produce enough power just from solar panels on your roof, and the cost and complexity of needing to maintain and repair installations at each house may offset the negligible gain obtained from getting rid of the transmission loss
> renewables allow for local and hyper-local electricity generation. With any system, there will be transmission loss
Not only that, but democratizing energy production creates resilient communities. This is a necessity in a world facing climate change, increasing inequality and social unrest.
On the other hand, centralizing production creates centralization of political power and systemic risk. Nuclear fission and fusion are the worst offenders in this.
Nuclear must be being distorted upwards in price because of excessive regulatory burden though, right? I’m reacting to the phrase ‘torturous planning process.’
Here's the simplest way to get to net zero: solar, wind, batteries, natural gas, then hydrogen.
Solar and wind are cheap, but intermittent. Batteries can help store energy from day to night. To help store energy from summer to winter, they need to become 1000 times cheaper, which is not going to happen. For that you need peaker plants. Initially methane-based, later they can be converted to hydrogen.
Storing energy in the summer to be used in the winter probably isn't going to ever be practical with batteries. (Maybe it's practical by using electricity to make synthetic liquid fuels? That wouldn't be very efficient, though.) Batteries are useful for buffering shorter-term variations, like the day/night cycle.
There are some alternatives, though. One is to just build enough spare capacity into the system that one can still run a surplus on cloudy winter days when the winds aren't blowing.
Better I think is to connect power grids to even loads around. Barring megavolcano eruptions or nuclear winter, the sun is always shining somewhere in the world. And the wind is always blowing somewhere.
I think the thing that's needed most right now (aside from just more solar or wind plants everywhere) is high-capacity transcontinental grid connections. The United States should be able to buy solar power from the Sahara when it's night here, and sell surplus solar to Europe and Asia when the sun is shining here. This makes renewable energy much more attractive because there's always a buyer or a seller somewhere, and batteries aren't strictly needed.
Fossil fuel plants can continue to exist as emergency backup power sources in case something happens to the HVDC links. Ideally we'd get to the point where they never need to be used.
Apparently Chile and China are working on a plan whereby Chile supplies China with solar power via a trans-pacific HVDC line [1]. We need more of that: connections between North America and Europe, connections between South America and Africa, and so on.
> Solar and wind are cheap, but intermittent. Batteries can help store energy from day to night.
You don't need batteries per se, only energy storage systems.
Pumped storage, pressurized air, flywheels, ultracapacitors, and of course chemical batteries. Pumped storage and compressed air systems store orders of magnitude more energy and power than batteries.
I'm curious : where does the hydrogen come from ? You mean you could use it as energy storage between summer and winter ? (in summer, excess of solar / wind production is used to produce H2 by Electrolysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production#Electrolys... ), then you store H2, and then next winter you consume it to produce energy again ?
Not sure it works well, because those reactions are not 100% efficient (so you have to take that loss into account, requiring more energy production) and then transporting/storing hydrogen is hard :
- either you compress it and you don't transport many of if
- either you cool it to make it liquid and then it takes a lot of energy
Why wouldn't the learning curve apply to nuclear power? There the fuel cost is almost negligible. I think the large unit size hampers learning - less iterations per decade.
"Apparently negative learning curve" means from the raw data it is each plant is getting more expensive to build. Worse, when they analyse it, the main driver behind the cost increases doesn't appear to be government regulation or politics. It's all about construction and supply issues.
I can't help but think that in post industrial societies, maybe we are getting worse at building things.
Nulcear reactors cost millions of dollars to make. Solar Panels and wind turbines are much smaller and more modular. It's much easier to optimize production if you are making millions of panels than dozens of reactors. Also, some important parts of reactor design involve local conditions like water availability which makes it harder to have a single design that can be widely copied.
Can someone ELI5 why renewables are more expensive for consumers where I live? In Pennsylvania my electric utility allows me to choose my supplier. Invariably, the renewables are more costly than the fossil fuels. What gives? Is this just a regional phenomenon?
Pennsylvania (particularly western and northern PA) is right on top of the Marcellus shale, which is loaded with frackable gas. Your renewables are competing with cheap gas, locally sourced with low pipeline cost, that isn't being charged for CO2 emissions.
Renewables are cheap per kWh, but they are only intermittently available, and since storage is basically nonexistent at grid scale, these kWh are only worth anything if there is demand for them, and are useless when there is demand, but sun is not shining or wind is not blowing. In effect, you still need to have some other way to produce electricity on demand, when there is no renewable supply. What’s worse is that if these more flexible sources of electricity (typically coal or gas) cannot compete with renewables when they do produce, they need to charge much more when renewables are out, in order to stay profitable — otherwise, they’d close, and we’d wouldn’t be able to meet the demand at all times. This would result in customers getting disconnected with very little notice, making them very unhappy.
To sum up, it’s more expensive, because even as renewables grow in installed capacity, we cannot reduce installed capacity of fossil sources on 1-1 parity, and also we pay more per fossil generated kWh than we used to in all-fossil grid. Cheap grid-scale storage would solve this, but it’s no going to happen any time soon.
I presume by "renewable" you really mean solar and wind. Hydro is generally pretty cheap, but also mostly tapped out. With that in mind, renewables are often more expensive for consumers due to a combination of a few factors:
1. The sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow strongly
2. People want to use power at all times of the day
3. Fixed costs in fossil fuel electricity generation are non-trivial
4. The utility scale electricity storage story is dire
The result is that renewables need to be overbuilt compared to their nameplate capacities to make up for less-than ideal weather and expected daily and annual weather cycles. I've heard those renewables produce something like 30% of their annual nameplate where a coal or gas plant will produce 90+%.
This overbuilding then ruins the wholesale price of electricity during high production times. For example, on a bright sunny spring day solar might push wholesale spot electricity prices negative. So the generating companies don't make as much money as you would expect from looking at average wholesale prices.
But people still want to use power after the sun has gone down and even if the wind has stopped blowing. So those generating companies need generating capacity to fill in that several hour long gap. Utility scale power storage in batteries isn't anywhere near being able to affordably store several hours worth of electricity. Also a cloud can roll across quickly or the wind might die suddenly. Therefore that backup generation is almost uniformly natural gas turbines because they can spin up and down quickly.
But even if no power is being sold by those plants, they need to be kept running to be instantly ready. So they are constantly burning some fuel to keep hot and spinning. The maintenance hours still keep racking up. There still needs to be people working 24/7. The costs of all that "idle" time need to be made up in the twelve hours of active generation.
So you end up with essentially double the generating capacity, half solar/wind half natural gas, and are continually paying the costs for both. Obviously that's going to be more expensive than simply burning a bit more fuel to run the natural gas plants near capacity full time. Or even build more efficient base-load plant types like coal or nuclear which have troubles scaling up and down quickly enough to balance out changeable renewable generation.
Also there are a lot of renewables just sold on the grid without consumer marketing. The only reason the have a "renewable consumer plan" would be to charge people more. It wouldn't make sense to have a consumer plan with renewables and charge people less than the market rate.
Same reason internet bandwidth if more abundant and cheaper than ever, but your Comcast bill seems to actually only go up.
Local rooftop solar, with no reliance on utility monopolies, is the most important thing in the global energy picture, and I'm afraid it isn't even close. And I'm pro nuclear. But it's past time to recognize that it's the distribution monopolists that are the problem. Solar and batteries free you from that.
I’m afraid the premise stated in the summary is bullshit, which discouraged me from reading the article itself. It is very exciting that the cost of renewables has been falling.
The bogus explanation:
> renewable energy technologies follow learning curves [erroneous description elided]. The price of electricity from fossil fuel sources however does not follow learning curves
Learning curves can have different shapes (the steeper the better) so I cut that bill out.
It’s true that manufacturing and installing solar panels and wind turbines has followed a relatively steep learning curve as volume has increased but it’s foolish to claim that drilling, transporting, and burning fossil fuels do not.
Fossil fuels are at a flatter point on the curve, true, due to maturity but in a commodity market there is a lot of competitive development pressure. And very high volume.
What doesn’t move down the curve as fast is power plants themselves because they are not built identically in high volume.
All of this is a bit bupkis without taking into consideration the cost of grid, distribution, maintenance - and especially the quasi monopolistic and massively bureaucratic powers that operate those systems.
Energy prices to business and consumers are staggering, and the 'transport' fees are proving to be a substantial portion of that. The 'Sunshine List' in Ontario, the government list used to publicise all civil servants making over $100K frankly was very focused on the electricity grid providers, with average wages multiple times the national average, and large swaths earning over $100K even a decade ago when that used to mean a lot.
Start to show us prices being reduced to consumers (or significantly increased consumption) and then we can talk about the great future.
IMVHO renewables do not really became "so cheap" nor so fast. If we see the speed of innovation in the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s actual evolution speed and outcome are far, far, far slow and almost "broken".
Anything get "better" but we seems to be unable to really produce something really new.
In personal terms: having built a new home (so insulated, airtight and properly ventilated, properly exposed/designed to passive heat/cool as much as needed and possible) with domestic p.v. the "progress" just means that now start to be possible not being autonomous but nearly autonomous and start to be interesting IF it's not much needed and not every day having an EV but that's not much because such systems became chap more than because other systems became far more expensive and hearing many source their higher prices are voluntary made to make renewable cheap enough to push people who can adopting them. In practical terms I'm satisfied by the outcome, quality of my life is improved, resilience also. BUT in absolute economical terms that's not cheap nor really "naturally interesting".
IMVHO renewable can only succeed naturally, not artificially, only if they will be the byproduct of PUBLIC research (not private one more or less publicly founded) producing FLOSS/Open hardware tools and standards for it. So far most products on the market, even the formally "FLOSS for software" are just crappy piles of crap, sold as production ready products when they really are just prototypes.
Seems to me that fossil fuels have been so manipulatively overpriced for enough decades that is the low-hanging fruit renewables are performing favorably against.
Old folks remember when fossil fuels were way cheaper and it does not feel like that underlying floor is quite being struck.
It's physically difficult to capture enough energy in one lifetime to compare with vast deposits of energy captured over millions of years.
However it looks like those controlling the biggest oilfields might have already spent the petrodollars that have not even been pumped out of the ground yet.
This would be expected to compromise their ability to drop the floor out and have as halting of an effect on alternatives as there was in the early-to-mid 1980's. Before that alternatives had extreme progress mostly in response to shortages, and skyrocketing costs remaining from the early 1970's, rather than climate, but it was still progress that could not continue after it became unfeasible financially.
Now renewables are again moving fast toward the cost of currently-captured energy especially when they are widely distributed and operated by individuals rather than large powerful controlling organizations. Plus there is an urgency with climate degradation that is more recognized than ever.
One reason for high price of fossil fuel based power is that they are extremely in-efficient. Coal plants are about 30% efficient, Combined cycle plants about 40 - 45%.
Compared to Solar and Wind, which have no input costs other than initial investment and very low maintenance and upkeep costs.
And, the investment costs of setting up a 1 MW coal/gas plant vs. 1 MW solar plant, is about the same.
A much better explanation why fossil fuels are getting more expensive is that the EROI factor is getting smaller and smaller as fossil fuels get harder and harder to extract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
Since this is about price, how is is price of solar, nuclear etc calculated and compared? It seems like naively looking at dollar per Wh for an intermittent source is like looking at the price of a particular flower that only grows at one time of year, which will be misleading for our purposes since we have a baseload demand that we can't really adjust. What corrections are done to adjust for this obvious bias?
It is complicated, but actual professionals have looked into this with more depth than a random internet commenter who has a weird feeling that they have been lied to for years by the news sources they trust and isn't quite ready to accept they've been conned and just Google the answer to their own question.
When you are ready for that next step try LCOE and LCOES (levelized cost of energy / energy and storage) as Google terms to find more info or click this link:
It's a well understood way to evaluate cost. In short nuclear is at the very high end of the spectrum and not really dropping because (so far) of a lack of a learning effect.
Solar is on the very low end of the spectrum, as the article points out. And wind is somewhere in between. Both of those are still dropping dramatically because of learning effects. E.g. with offshore wind, bigger turbines mean more surface area and more load. There are some 20 MW models now coming online. These things are gigantic and obviously a bit capital intensive. But they also produce a large amount of power very reliably. And compared to nuclear which has gigantic capital cost, it's actually very good. And there are still plenty of ways left to find further cost reductions.
Baseload is a poorly defined notion often wielded in hand wavy style to argue that nuclear is needed. This overlooks a few important things.
1) nuclear is expensive for that too and cheaper technologies exist with learning effects of their own. Batteries were mentioned in the article for example. Another one is cables. Cables allow different regions to import and export electricity to each other. That provides base load and the average peaks and dips in supply and demand over large areas are far less dramatic than they are locally.
2) intermittency is not actually random but predictable and typically local. So are demand cycles. Weather forecasts allow grid operators to plan weeks/months in advance; mostly intermittency does not come as a surprise. Hot weather means everybody puts on their AC, high solar output, relatively little wind. That happens every year in roughly the same months. Of course air heats up and you get a lot of airflow to other areas, which will have lots of wind as a result. Weather predictions are mainly about figuring out where the low and high pressure areas are and how they move around.
3) base-load is a relatively poorly understood notion. How much for how long do we need? And how much extra would that be? Those would be reasonable questions to ask (and answer) if you are a grid operator. People assume a lot of answers to these questions that are probably false/irrational. The real answers are far less dramatic.
4) Some countries already have very high proportions of renewables on their grid. So far without causing issues. Better still, some countries with historically very unreliable grids (e.g. in the middle east), rely increasingly on renewables to fix that. That suggests, renewables actually improve resilience if you don't have enough base load.
So, it's not all that black and white. The answer isn't blindly putting your trust in nuclear to get some really expensive base load that you don't actually need. But sitting down and doing the math. A lot of people seem to be coming up with outcomes where renewables are cheap, feasible, and plenty reliable especially when you use cables and batteries as well. The sun always shines somewhere and wind is always blowing somewhere. If you simply connect those places with cables, there's not a whole lot of base load that you would need beyond that. If any at all.
if you follow /r/futurology /r/technology and sometimes here throughout the years you will see breakthrough after breakthrough, these small advancements do make it into manufacturing sooner than what people think, one of the biggest challenges was for me was reading about cool tech and waiting forever for it, then giving up on it and deeming it as a probably just a clickbait promise, but not to much sooner after i have forgotten the advancements, they make their way into everyday life proving to me that technology never comes as soon as you think it does, but it comes eventually.
It's what goes on under the table in Washington. Same thing for Australia. The Australian Government isn't hardly as crafty as the US though so it's more apparent.
China has corruption which they try to keep under control. The US has bureaucratic incompetence which is not under control.
When highway construction offers bonuses for fast construction, things go quickly. When governments have no idea what something should cost and offer cost plus contracts, the costs skyrockets and the gravy train rolls slowly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02ramp.html
The article says that for each doubling of capacity, solar has dropped 20% in cost. Nuclear currently represents 10% of world capacity. So if we scale nuclear to 80% (3 doublings), the cost would drop to ~50% of what it is now -- which would only drop it to about twice the cost of solar at present.
So apart from the fact that nuclear probably wouldn't react the same way as solar, even doing so wouldn't make it cost competitive. But I still like nuclear.
Nuke costs are not coming down like solar, wind, and storage. There is no reason to think they would: they are really mostly concrete, plumbing, pumps, heat exchangers, and steam turbines, all extremely mature tech.
And they are unavoidably expensive to operate. Those costs also will not be coming down.
Fortunately, we don't need for them to come down. All we need is not to build any; then the cost stays fixed at zero.
Renewables are on the same clear exponential trend for decades. There have been some small deviations, but they always correct back.
At some point the article pulls out the monolog graphs where you can clearly see there was no trend change and people expected that since the 70s. Yet, there's that surprised tone all over it.
>If you compare German and French electricity prices, you will see that renewables are a long way from being cheap.
Don't they sell energy to each other, on account of being in the EU and having their grids connected?
I'd assume that's true given that one of the bigger reasons given for the higher energy prices in Sweden this winter, despite running our grid on cheap renewables and nuclear, has been that we've sold a lot of that cheap electricity to Germany.
Like all new tech stacks, solar and wind benefited from modest R&D, access to cheap capital (subsidies, financial markets), "economies of scale" (low enough unit cost with high enough production rate to unlock Wright's Law aka the learning curve).
It remains to be seen if (or when) renewables will benefit from better accounting. Most impactfully, carbon tax to bake externalities into the street price of fossil fuels. Also, better energy market designs. And crucially, sufficient hush (extortion) money to soak up all the stranded assets held by incumbents. All those polluting coal power plants being run at a loss, teetering on the edge bankruptcy, because some revenue is better than none.
--
FWIW, my thesis doesn't account for turf battles preventing widespread adoption. In the case of high volt energy transmission, required for next growth phase of renewables, the blocker in the USA are all the jurisdictional boundaries. We can't just build up the new power lines we need, because every Bubba in every county in every state needs to be bought off.
David Roberts of https://volts.wtf does a great job of covering these policy tarpits.
[+] [-] sfifs|4 years ago|reply
One big reason renewables became so cheap is because around 2008 Beijing Olympics, China decided that they were done with air pollution in the cities. IIRC at that time coal power and other industrial production had to be stopped for a couple of months in the surrounding provinces to make the games happen and people (importantly top bureaucrats who lived in Beijing) decided they liked the clean air.
China doesn't have any substantial deposits of fossil fuels that give get clean air (like gas that US has) and Oil and Gas has to be largely imported leaving them at the mercy of international market prices and currency fluctuations. So they started heavily investing in renewables production capacity, first in wind (China's installed capacity started doubling yoy around then) and then Solar from 2010/11 even if they were expensive then and it wasn't clear how much of a learning rate benefit there would be. Similarly massive electrification of public transport and introducing subways later in the decade again to reduce pollution in the cities. Now i believe they have 3X the installed base of the next biggest country (US) and still accelerating.
Later on the Paris Climate treaty just added extra momentum with the climate change and carbon reduction angle. But it was originally a political decision that took political will - to get cleaner air in the cities even at a possibly higher cost.
[+] [-] dathinab|4 years ago|reply
E.g. many wind turbines instead of one huge power plant.
This means that adaption over time can happen much faster and can potentially happen during the implementations of larger long term projects (e.g. huge off shore wind farms).
It also means prototyping cost tends to be cheaper and it can be easier adopted by smaller groups instead of needing larger consensus.
While I used wind turbines as an example it's also true for many other aspects like Geo-termal power, solar energy, solar powered water heating, etc.
Even some classically "huge" projects like dams have smaller (micro) versions by now which as far as I can tell advance much faster in technology (often technology about micro-dams having less negative effects on the small-river they are build into, wrt. to fish but also sediment movement).
Add to this that research on many of the renewable energies is ongoing since quite a long time and that increasingly more people and countries realize the importance it's not too surprising I think.
[+] [-] bin_bash|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardolaf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edent|4 years ago|reply
It also touches a little on the installation time. Nuclear power stations takes years to build - even after the tortuous planning process. Wind farms are quicker to install. A solar array is almost instantaneous by comparison. The panels on my roof took a week - and most of that was dealing with scaffolding and my dodgy wiring.
If you can install solar panels day-after-day, you benefit from an increased learning rate. And, frankly, the training for how to do it isn't arduous. Nuclear might be the future - but it requires a highly trained workforce and constant maintenance. All of which are expensive.
[+] [-] tonmoy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodpoint|4 years ago|reply
Not only that, but democratizing energy production creates resilient communities. This is a necessity in a world facing climate change, increasing inequality and social unrest.
On the other hand, centralizing production creates centralization of political power and systemic risk. Nuclear fission and fusion are the worst offenders in this.
[+] [-] whiddershins|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] credit_guy|4 years ago|reply
Solar and wind are cheap, but intermittent. Batteries can help store energy from day to night. To help store energy from summer to winter, they need to become 1000 times cheaper, which is not going to happen. For that you need peaker plants. Initially methane-based, later they can be converted to hydrogen.
It's as simple as that.
[+] [-] elihu|4 years ago|reply
There are some alternatives, though. One is to just build enough spare capacity into the system that one can still run a surplus on cloudy winter days when the winds aren't blowing.
Better I think is to connect power grids to even loads around. Barring megavolcano eruptions or nuclear winter, the sun is always shining somewhere in the world. And the wind is always blowing somewhere.
I think the thing that's needed most right now (aside from just more solar or wind plants everywhere) is high-capacity transcontinental grid connections. The United States should be able to buy solar power from the Sahara when it's night here, and sell surplus solar to Europe and Asia when the sun is shining here. This makes renewable energy much more attractive because there's always a buyer or a seller somewhere, and batteries aren't strictly needed.
Fossil fuel plants can continue to exist as emergency backup power sources in case something happens to the HVDC links. Ideally we'd get to the point where they never need to be used.
Apparently Chile and China are working on a plan whereby Chile supplies China with solar power via a trans-pacific HVDC line [1]. We need more of that: connections between North America and Europe, connections between South America and Africa, and so on.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29230066
[+] [-] fivea|4 years ago|reply
You don't need batteries per se, only energy storage systems.
Pumped storage, pressurized air, flywheels, ultracapacitors, and of course chemical batteries. Pumped storage and compressed air systems store orders of magnitude more energy and power than batteries.
[+] [-] edelans|4 years ago|reply
Not sure it works well, because those reactions are not 100% efficient (so you have to take that loss into account, requiring more energy production) and then transporting/storing hydrogen is hard : - either you compress it and you don't transport many of if - either you cool it to make it liquid and then it takes a lot of energy
[+] [-] goodpoint|4 years ago|reply
1000 times? Citation desperately needed.
[+] [-] ipaddr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gravityloss|4 years ago|reply
Why wouldn't the learning curve apply to nuclear power? There the fuel cost is almost negligible. I think the large unit size hampers learning - less iterations per decade.
[+] [-] rstuart4133|4 years ago|reply
You would think so.
Which is why nuclear's apparent negative learning curve in the west is such a surprise. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-...
"Apparently negative learning curve" means from the raw data it is each plant is getting more expensive to build. Worse, when they analyse it, the main driver behind the cost increases doesn't appear to be government regulation or politics. It's all about construction and supply issues.
I can't help but think that in post industrial societies, maybe we are getting worse at building things.
[+] [-] adgjlsfhk1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdauriemma|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
You may think I'm joking, but one of the fuels that meets Pensylvania's Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard is "waste coal":
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0894192090344333...
[+] [-] pfdietz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzyz|4 years ago|reply
To sum up, it’s more expensive, because even as renewables grow in installed capacity, we cannot reduce installed capacity of fossil sources on 1-1 parity, and also we pay more per fossil generated kWh than we used to in all-fossil grid. Cheap grid-scale storage would solve this, but it’s no going to happen any time soon.
[+] [-] travisb|4 years ago|reply
1. The sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow strongly 2. People want to use power at all times of the day 3. Fixed costs in fossil fuel electricity generation are non-trivial 4. The utility scale electricity storage story is dire
The result is that renewables need to be overbuilt compared to their nameplate capacities to make up for less-than ideal weather and expected daily and annual weather cycles. I've heard those renewables produce something like 30% of their annual nameplate where a coal or gas plant will produce 90+%.
This overbuilding then ruins the wholesale price of electricity during high production times. For example, on a bright sunny spring day solar might push wholesale spot electricity prices negative. So the generating companies don't make as much money as you would expect from looking at average wholesale prices.
But people still want to use power after the sun has gone down and even if the wind has stopped blowing. So those generating companies need generating capacity to fill in that several hour long gap. Utility scale power storage in batteries isn't anywhere near being able to affordably store several hours worth of electricity. Also a cloud can roll across quickly or the wind might die suddenly. Therefore that backup generation is almost uniformly natural gas turbines because they can spin up and down quickly.
But even if no power is being sold by those plants, they need to be kept running to be instantly ready. So they are constantly burning some fuel to keep hot and spinning. The maintenance hours still keep racking up. There still needs to be people working 24/7. The costs of all that "idle" time need to be made up in the twelve hours of active generation.
So you end up with essentially double the generating capacity, half solar/wind half natural gas, and are continually paying the costs for both. Obviously that's going to be more expensive than simply burning a bit more fuel to run the natural gas plants near capacity full time. Or even build more efficient base-load plant types like coal or nuclear which have troubles scaling up and down quickly enough to balance out changeable renewable generation.
[+] [-] rr808|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gameswithgo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microdrum|4 years ago|reply
Local rooftop solar, with no reliance on utility monopolies, is the most important thing in the global energy picture, and I'm afraid it isn't even close. And I'm pro nuclear. But it's past time to recognize that it's the distribution monopolists that are the problem. Solar and batteries free you from that.
[+] [-] gumby|4 years ago|reply
The bogus explanation:
> renewable energy technologies follow learning curves [erroneous description elided]. The price of electricity from fossil fuel sources however does not follow learning curves
Learning curves can have different shapes (the steeper the better) so I cut that bill out.
It’s true that manufacturing and installing solar panels and wind turbines has followed a relatively steep learning curve as volume has increased but it’s foolish to claim that drilling, transporting, and burning fossil fuels do not.
Fossil fuels are at a flatter point on the curve, true, due to maturity but in a commodity market there is a lot of competitive development pressure. And very high volume.
What doesn’t move down the curve as fast is power plants themselves because they are not built identically in high volume.
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
Energy prices to business and consumers are staggering, and the 'transport' fees are proving to be a substantial portion of that. The 'Sunshine List' in Ontario, the government list used to publicise all civil servants making over $100K frankly was very focused on the electricity grid providers, with average wages multiple times the national average, and large swaths earning over $100K even a decade ago when that used to mean a lot.
Start to show us prices being reduced to consumers (or significantly increased consumption) and then we can talk about the great future.
The story is nice, but it's only halfway there.
[+] [-] kkfx|4 years ago|reply
Anything get "better" but we seems to be unable to really produce something really new.
In personal terms: having built a new home (so insulated, airtight and properly ventilated, properly exposed/designed to passive heat/cool as much as needed and possible) with domestic p.v. the "progress" just means that now start to be possible not being autonomous but nearly autonomous and start to be interesting IF it's not much needed and not every day having an EV but that's not much because such systems became chap more than because other systems became far more expensive and hearing many source their higher prices are voluntary made to make renewable cheap enough to push people who can adopting them. In practical terms I'm satisfied by the outcome, quality of my life is improved, resilience also. BUT in absolute economical terms that's not cheap nor really "naturally interesting".
IMVHO renewable can only succeed naturally, not artificially, only if they will be the byproduct of PUBLIC research (not private one more or less publicly founded) producing FLOSS/Open hardware tools and standards for it. So far most products on the market, even the formally "FLOSS for software" are just crappy piles of crap, sold as production ready products when they really are just prototypes.
[+] [-] fuzzfactor|4 years ago|reply
Old folks remember when fossil fuels were way cheaper and it does not feel like that underlying floor is quite being struck.
It's physically difficult to capture enough energy in one lifetime to compare with vast deposits of energy captured over millions of years.
However it looks like those controlling the biggest oilfields might have already spent the petrodollars that have not even been pumped out of the ground yet.
This would be expected to compromise their ability to drop the floor out and have as halting of an effect on alternatives as there was in the early-to-mid 1980's. Before that alternatives had extreme progress mostly in response to shortages, and skyrocketing costs remaining from the early 1970's, rather than climate, but it was still progress that could not continue after it became unfeasible financially.
Now renewables are again moving fast toward the cost of currently-captured energy especially when they are widely distributed and operated by individuals rather than large powerful controlling organizations. Plus there is an urgency with climate degradation that is more recognized than ever.
[+] [-] the_why_of_y|4 years ago|reply
This IMF research estimates fossil fuels are subsidized globally by $5.2 trillion in 2017, and $649 billion in the US.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...
[+] [-] kumarvvr|4 years ago|reply
Compared to Solar and Wind, which have no input costs other than initial investment and very low maintenance and upkeep costs.
And, the investment costs of setting up a 1 MW coal/gas plant vs. 1 MW solar plant, is about the same.
[+] [-] legulere|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klabb3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
When you are ready for that next step try LCOE and LCOES (levelized cost of energy / energy and storage) as Google terms to find more info or click this link:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|4 years ago|reply
It's a well understood way to evaluate cost. In short nuclear is at the very high end of the spectrum and not really dropping because (so far) of a lack of a learning effect.
Solar is on the very low end of the spectrum, as the article points out. And wind is somewhere in between. Both of those are still dropping dramatically because of learning effects. E.g. with offshore wind, bigger turbines mean more surface area and more load. There are some 20 MW models now coming online. These things are gigantic and obviously a bit capital intensive. But they also produce a large amount of power very reliably. And compared to nuclear which has gigantic capital cost, it's actually very good. And there are still plenty of ways left to find further cost reductions.
Baseload is a poorly defined notion often wielded in hand wavy style to argue that nuclear is needed. This overlooks a few important things.
1) nuclear is expensive for that too and cheaper technologies exist with learning effects of their own. Batteries were mentioned in the article for example. Another one is cables. Cables allow different regions to import and export electricity to each other. That provides base load and the average peaks and dips in supply and demand over large areas are far less dramatic than they are locally.
2) intermittency is not actually random but predictable and typically local. So are demand cycles. Weather forecasts allow grid operators to plan weeks/months in advance; mostly intermittency does not come as a surprise. Hot weather means everybody puts on their AC, high solar output, relatively little wind. That happens every year in roughly the same months. Of course air heats up and you get a lot of airflow to other areas, which will have lots of wind as a result. Weather predictions are mainly about figuring out where the low and high pressure areas are and how they move around.
3) base-load is a relatively poorly understood notion. How much for how long do we need? And how much extra would that be? Those would be reasonable questions to ask (and answer) if you are a grid operator. People assume a lot of answers to these questions that are probably false/irrational. The real answers are far less dramatic.
4) Some countries already have very high proportions of renewables on their grid. So far without causing issues. Better still, some countries with historically very unreliable grids (e.g. in the middle east), rely increasingly on renewables to fix that. That suggests, renewables actually improve resilience if you don't have enough base load.
So, it's not all that black and white. The answer isn't blindly putting your trust in nuclear to get some really expensive base load that you don't actually need. But sitting down and doing the math. A lot of people seem to be coming up with outcomes where renewables are cheap, feasible, and plenty reliable especially when you use cables and batteries as well. The sun always shines somewhere and wind is always blowing somewhere. If you simply connect those places with cables, there's not a whole lot of base load that you would need beyond that. If any at all.
[+] [-] fshbbdssbbgdd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] questiondev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endisneigh|4 years ago|reply
The answer is China (well, Asia, really).
Now that we've answered that, let's pose a new question:
Why is China capable of such investment but not the United States, even though the United States has more money?
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
https://news.mit.edu/2018/explaining-dropping-solar-cost-112...
[+] [-] bamboozled|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newuser94303|4 years ago|reply
When highway construction offers bonuses for fast construction, things go quickly. When governments have no idea what something should cost and offer cost plus contracts, the costs skyrockets and the gravy train rolls slowly. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02ramp.html
[+] [-] gcanyon|4 years ago|reply
So apart from the fact that nuclear probably wouldn't react the same way as solar, even doing so wouldn't make it cost competitive. But I still like nuclear.
[+] [-] ncmncm|4 years ago|reply
And they are unavoidably expensive to operate. Those costs also will not be coming down.
Fortunately, we don't need for them to come down. All we need is not to build any; then the cost stays fixed at zero.
[+] [-] marcosdumay|4 years ago|reply
Renewables are on the same clear exponential trend for decades. There have been some small deviations, but they always correct back.
At some point the article pulls out the monolog graphs where you can clearly see there was no trend change and people expected that since the 70s. Yet, there's that surprised tone all over it.
[+] [-] cubefox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] occz|4 years ago|reply
Don't they sell energy to each other, on account of being in the EU and having their grids connected?
I'd assume that's true given that one of the bigger reasons given for the higher energy prices in Sweden this winter, despite running our grid on cheap renewables and nuclear, has been that we've sold a lot of that cheap electricity to Germany.
[+] [-] specialist|4 years ago|reply
Like all new tech stacks, solar and wind benefited from modest R&D, access to cheap capital (subsidies, financial markets), "economies of scale" (low enough unit cost with high enough production rate to unlock Wright's Law aka the learning curve).
It remains to be seen if (or when) renewables will benefit from better accounting. Most impactfully, carbon tax to bake externalities into the street price of fossil fuels. Also, better energy market designs. And crucially, sufficient hush (extortion) money to soak up all the stranded assets held by incumbents. All those polluting coal power plants being run at a loss, teetering on the edge bankruptcy, because some revenue is better than none.
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FWIW, my thesis doesn't account for turf battles preventing widespread adoption. In the case of high volt energy transmission, required for next growth phase of renewables, the blocker in the USA are all the jurisdictional boundaries. We can't just build up the new power lines we need, because every Bubba in every county in every state needs to be bought off.
David Roberts of https://volts.wtf does a great job of covering these policy tarpits.
[+] [-] throwaway73838|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] known|4 years ago|reply
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