I spent some time trying to figure out what the story is with Diablo Canyon. It seems to be the case that the operator wanted to leave it in service, passed the safety evaluation for relicensing, but then got held up on environmental review, which ultimately led to them cutting a deal with environmental and labor groups whereby they agreed to retire the plant in exchange for (and this part is hazy/speculation on my part) political support with the utility regulator for passing the costs of investments in carbon-free generation on to customers. More Vox on this:
Subsequent to the article above, it looks like the utility regulator rejected the carbon-free replacement proposal. It’s not clear if the environmental groups just got rolled here or what.
Partially offset by tariffs and its not like nuclear isn’t subsidized.
I am a solar booster, but it’s not because of my book. This is my 3rd “career” (more than 5 years doing something) and my least profitable and I didn’t start it because I thought it was the best way to make money. My book would be better off if I closed it.
But kidding aside, i don’t have any problems with nuclear or solar subsidies. What should happen is a carbon tax where the market has to take into account the actual costs of our various energy usage, including a medium-to-pessimistic case of global warming impact. Then probably everything will sort itself out, cost-wise.
And nuclear is actually probably the one power generation mode where waste/environmental damage is contained and dealing with it is actually budgeted for throughout the life of the plant.
This. It really isn’t solar vs nuclear. They aren’t even in the same lane. Nobody prefers nuclear to solar + battery, but solar + battery isn’t something we can roll out to the cities at scale right now. There isn’t enough battery production, and that battery production has some natural limits on it.
Battery + solar will be for rural areas that are too small to justify nuclear base load generation, and the cities will run a ton of solar to pay for daytime (much of this is commercial) activity with nearly limitless nearly free daytime power and fairly expensive night time power handled by nuclear. Some areas with awesome wind, hydro, or geotherm won’t need nuclear and that’s great… but a lot of major cities will absolutely require it.
Natural gas is not a long term solution. Figure what price per ton of carbon makes natural gas stop making sense and you’ve pretty much found the optimal level for carbon taxes.
So what’s your solution for sudden dips in energy during the day?
You need to look at the carbon cost of a system as a portfolio. Gas enables more solar and wind. (In the absence of alternative renewable storage at scale, e.g. battery, pumped hydro, hydrogen)
Well nuclear can replace coal and baseload gas (and new nuclear can replace current 50 year old nuclear that is due to go out of service). But the only way for nuclear to replace peaking gas plants is to overbuild nuclear capacity and load-follow with the excess capacity.
I’m assuming batteries will help even this out some… but yeah. Is there another route to being truly carbon free?
Let’s be clear, natural gas is a transition option that is only morally (and economically if you zoom out to the long term view) viable because it’s better than coal.
Yeah and batteries or other storage can turn any energy source into a peaking plant. And actually storage on the grid helps baseload coal as much or possibly more than solar: you can turn a baseload coal plant into a virtual peaking plant just as easily as you can turn solar into a virtual peaking plant. And arguably more because the coal plants can charge up the virtual peaking plant during the night when solar is doing nothing and demand is low. Which is why a tax accounting for the externalities of energy use is so crucially important.
That’s a pretty dumb take on batteries IMO. They help the grid in an agnostic way… sort of. But the single product they help the most is solar. Because solar generates tons of cheap power for a limited time window obviously. The batteries are the peaking plant. How the energy gets on the grid is a different matter entirely.
The only reason why solar + batteries isn’t going to make the whole idea of a grid obsolete (if you had enough solar and enough batteries to run your house 100% without any real risk of losing power why even bother maintaining the grid at all?) is that the raw materials for batteries are not unlimited.
I mean the dudes in that link did some studies and actually showed that emissions rose as energy storage rose. Because that storage could turn the baseload coal plants into virtual peaking plants. And I think the only way to prevent that is a carbon tax.
One question as a layman I have about batteries: Do the “mechanics” involved with storing electricity put a practical limit on how small and/or efficient solar batteries can ever be?
Yeah the need for a carbon tax is very real. We could go to 40 dollars a ton tomorrow and that might not be big enough. Obviously it has to be used to fund UBI payments to the general population. The point of it isn’t to raise revenue it’s to force the market to value carbon like it’s money.
I think this is wrong at current levels of solar penetration. Solar is always going to be the cheapest provider of electricity during the day, so it’s nonsolar generation that gets driven out of the market when the sun is shining. What batteries enable is using something other than contemporaneously generated power to supply evening demand when people are still awake but the sun isn’t shining. That could be solar, but the price during the daytime hours should be set by the highest-cost producers who aren’t driven out by cheap solar. So in theory you could bank solar from daytime to evening, but the value of that arbitrage is limited by the fact that you have to take solar out of current production during the daytime hours and replace it with higher cost power. Note that this analysis changes when solar production starts to exceed current demand by a lot.
What keed is saying is that there is a second thing enabled by batteries, which is shifting power from the dead of night to peak times. That doesn’t benefit solar (although maybe it’s good for wind), but it can benefit low-cost fossil fuel plants. And since there are a lot of nighttime hours with lots of excess capacity, the late-night arbitrage can dominate.
It’s also confusing because, on an individual level, retail solar owners effectively “store” power in the grid during daylight hours via net metering (i.e., they overproduce relative to demand and run the meter backwards) and draw it back in the evening. But at a system level, I don’t think that’s what happens. More specifically, I think the criterion for figuring out who benefits from storage is that it’s the lowest-cost producer who is otherwise priced out of the market. Even more specifically, the question is, does the amount of low-cost solar during the day outweigh the fact that there is also a lot of daytime demand? Or does the fact that there’s little demand at night mean that only the most efficient sources get to run, which means that very cheap producers are sidelined even though there’s no solar?
In my 20s I had several buddies who worked for contractors who traveled around and worked the shutdowns at the various plants around the country and hoo boy that bunch worries me more than meltdowns, sabotage and planes crashing into the plants combined. They worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and from what I was told 6 of the 12 hours of down time were devoted exclusively to drinking.
Nuclear is still a fairly infant industry when you consider the technology. They know how to get the energy for the most part (there are different ways though- enriched uranium vs regular uranium). How to harness and make the plants as efficient as possible however is far from being solved. Every plant opening someone comes up with a new design that’s slightly more efficient and it ends up way overbudget because none of the project managers or builders have any experience building that style of plant. South Korea has the most efficient plants that come under budget, mostly because they have been building the same style of reactor and becoming more and more efficient at it. The other reason is that they stole design plans from Canadian architects and don’t pay for it.
By making nuclear plants more common the price will go down, and the research into making more meaningful improvements rather than slight improvements there will be more research into it as well.
I fully support solar, but you need nuclear too and right now solar can’t make up a significant portion of our energy from an implementation perspective.
And the late night night arbitrage could also benefit nuclear. I said earlier in the thread that the only way to have an all nuclear grid would be to basically build to the peak capacity and then load-follow with the nuclear plants. Which is possible but inefficient as the costs are basically 100% fixed in a nuclear plant. But storage offers another way: build a nuclear grid below the necessary peak capacity and make up the difference with storage and turn the baseload nuclear plants into virtual peaking plants.