Is that still true without incentives, green grants, rebates, and tax credits? Because without all of that and with mountains of red tape nuclear still produces energy at the lowest cost, and without emitting any CO2.
That little bit of waste can be dealt with, and comparatively cheaply. Think about it, you can produce 8TWh of electricity, sell it for maybe $400M, and you only have to deal with one ton of waste. That's not a big deal, but doing it is illegal.
Don't blame the industry for a dysfunctional government.
Unsubsidized solar and wind are both listed as $40 while coal and nuclear are listed as $34 and $29 respectively. The article also mentions that increased solar and wind necessitates batteries but doesn't list a price for those.
> "In the case of both utility-scale solar and onshore wind power, this rate has dropped to about $40 per megawatt hour..."
> "With government subsidies, the average costs of onshore wind ($28 per megawatt hour) and utility-scale solar ($36/MWh) are roughly equivalent to those of coal and nuclear generation ($34/MWh and $29/MWh, respectively)"
> "Third, in order to be able to use more wind and solar power, we’ll need to improve our ability to store that power"
"The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
"Onshore generation costs, at the upper bound installed cost of $2,000/kW, vary from $101/MWh at 6m/s, down to $55/MWh at 9m/s.
At the median cost of $1,600/kW, the corresponding figures are $80/MWh and $44/MWh.
At the lower-bound installed cost of $1,200/kW and a wind speed of 6m/s, the generation cost is $59/MWh, falling to $38/MWh at 8m/s.
... Apart from gas, wind now has no other competitor among fossil-fuel sources. There have been no new nuclear developments, leaving the UK price for its Hinkley Point C power station as a benchmark, at around $130/MWh in 2017 money."
https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1455361/tipping-poi...
"According to the US Energy Information Agency, the average nuclear power generating cost is about $100 per megawatt-hour. Compare this with $50 per megawatt-hour for solar and $30 to $40 per megawatt-hour for onshore wind."
https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/the-false-promise-of-nuclear...
See also: https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... and https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation..... In the last report the cost for advanced nuclear is estimated to between $75.1 - $81.2/mWh and to $38.9 - $72.9/mwH for onshore wind.
Worth adding that after this year's round of UK offshore auctions, wind power comes in cheaper than new gas and under a quarter of heavily subsidised nuclear. Despite subsidy and six proposed plants, the only certain remaining nuclear is Hinkley C. Five of the others have had participants withdraw, go bankrupt in one case (Moorside under Westinghouse-Toshiba), and the final remaining UK proposed nuclear - Sizewell C looks increasingly unlikely. Depends on the package and strike prices I suspect as it's an exact copy of Hinkley. EDF (behind Bradwell B, Hinkley and Sizewell using a Chinese reactor design) are busy accumulating a Shenzen style reputation for worker conditions and suicides at Hinkley. Even the majority right wing UK media has noticed enough to report conditions.
The next auction round of offshore wind licences should see it easily come in under existing gas.
To account for those rapid jumps in non-renewable demand, you need an energy source that can ramp up really fast on short notice, like hydrocarbon fire.
So long as you don't care how to dispose of the nuclear waste. But we'll be dead by then anyway, so who cares right.
Are you sure you are accounting for Nuclear's extreme incentives? Nuclear as an industry gets its liability capped to around $12.6 billion, whereas there are plausible trillion dollar accident scenarios. It is as if you got free insurance and only had to pay insurance on paying the deductible.
The law was passed in 1957 partly because we wanted to subsidize nuclear proliferation and used byproducts from plants for weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Who is paying for that? Guess who is not paying for
Also some of the red tape, for nuclear, is there for a reason.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...
These technologies are extremely sensitive to weather conditions which means that other, more stable sources must exist and have "stand by" production cap to produce all the energy these tech won't under bad conditions. If so, what's the point? (I mean in the grand, climate crisis, scheme of things) what am I missing?
Even in "green" countries, most of the green energy comes from bio fuel which is just burning young "soon to be coal".
(You probably mean "geological" not " geopolitical".)
But what you're pointing out is why the IPCC and most climate scientists want nuclear as a stop gap. Because it's better than coal. But then the conversation becomes about nuclear vs renewables, which no one on the nuclear side wants to get rid or even slow the development of renewables.
Wide deployment & interconnection will also erase some of the local variability of, e.g. a cloud passing over.
> just build twice as much solar capacity
This would increase the land use from 1% to 2%. That's a huge amount of the country to give over to power production.
[1] https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/if_solar_covered_one...
There's also a saying "the wind is always blowing somewhere". A good grid reduces variability a lot.
Renewables are projected to get cheap enough that over provisioning can handle most, (but not all) of the stalls, drastically reducing the need for storage or peakers. For example, if you have enough solar to provide 3X as much power as you need on a sunny day, you get about 1X on a cloudy day.
Over-provisioning results in incredibly cheap power on sunny/windy days which can be a huge boon to industry.
In my city the electric scooter companies have carpet bombed the city centre with their vehicles. When I'm downtown can I be certain that one is available to take me from place A to B? I can't and in the worst case I'll have to walk a block to find one to ride on. Big deal.
The electricity grid works the same. It doesn't matter if one wind farm isn't producing because there are so many of them. As long as the total output from them is big enough. Think of it like a RAID system.
> what am I missing
Battery storage is a thing and will become much more of a thing
Historical cost declines would agree with that thesis. Renewables will approach a price so close to 0 that the battery storage will be the dominate cost in supplying dispatchable energy (but still a lower cost than fossil fuels). Utility lithium battery storage is already cheaper than the most expensive peaking plants, and the cost model improves as costs continue to decline.
https://data.bloomberglp.com/professional/sites/24/Capture2....
https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b... (A Behind the Scenes Take on Lithium-ion Battery Prices)
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/73222.pdf (PDF: NREL Cost Projections for Utility-Scale Battery Storage)
Unreasonable optimism about battery technology/cost.
There are large regions in the country where Solar is not a good solution due to fog. And Wind is not a good solution due to lack of wind.
We have a global climate system. As is such if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions in some areas Nuclear power is the most effective method to achieve this goal. Furthermore, moving China to non-carbon energy sources would have the largest impact globally. They use ~ 22 GigaWatts of electricity per year. Which is 3.6 times as much as the US which is the 2ed largest consumer of energy by country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
They claim texas recieves >300x the amount of power consumed in the form of sunlight.
Another source claims that the Sun delivers enough power in a single hour to power the earth for a year: https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of-sol...
I can respect the fact that we cannot capture 100% of that power, but even a fraction should power the earth, no?
the main exceptions--radiative exchange with the rest of the universe and energy from earth's core--are relatively insignificant sources compared to the solar influx of energy.
fossil fuels are just solar energy captured and (inefficiently) transformed over hundreds of millions of years through plant and animal intermediaries. wind and hydro (weather-based energy) are also intermediated forms of solar energy.
the sun is effectively unlimited energy for billions of years, mostly being radiated away right now, so the closer we get to transforming it directly into useful forms, the better off we are.
I just think it is more realistic to first build nuclear power plants within 50km of every city with a population greater than 1mil people in China.
I am not sure a there has ever been a UHV line longer than 3,000km? Efficiency loss only increases the longer a UHV line is.
You can see the hourly Ontario energy use by source here:
One of the worst inefficiencies of the Ontario grid is that we run an abundance of energy during parts of the day, during which we dump electricity to the US at extremely cheap rates. If that electricity were offered at the same rate to Ontario residents (who are paying for it!) you would see residents retrofit homes with dual-fire gas/electric heating and other utilities. Or if we had a means to store that electricity it would cover the highest-use parts of the day (approximately 3 hours later) where we still fire natural gas to cover demand.
Or push my freezer into deep-freeze mode.
Or my water heater tank into super-heat mode? I already have a thermostatic valve anyway.
Or have my dishwasher start whenever it wants between midnight and 6AM? All I can do is start now or in 4 hours, meanwhile these might be terrible times.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/why-does-elect...
