The success of solar (and the end of coal) is really a story of the success of natural gas. Gas turbine capacity was so cheap to deploy that most of what's deployed in the past is enough to cover demand, in other words there are very little 'new' gas generators coming online because they're not needed. Solar capacity is much slower to deploy, hence why we will see 'new' capacity added over a long time to come. This is also a good thing, since with gas you still need to provide it was gas and expand the sources of gas and without carbon capture of gas generation it still has co2 emissions. However, gas allowed a massive short term reduction in co2 emissions and displaced coal and will for a long time fill in where solar can't, until we find a way to store energy from coal and that way might actually be synthesised gas.
Gas can also be produced from biological and even synthetic processes. There's been a great deal of research in producing CH4 from CO2 and H2O using surplus electric power from wind, solar, and off-peak nuclear. That means someday all our gas turbines could double as battery discharge machines for a giant chemical battery and the existing gas transport and storage infrastructure could store and transport renewable energy. That's pretty nice from a recovery of sunk cost perspective.
Coal and oil can pretty much only be economically obtained from fossil sources.
I think combining advanced nuclear power (producing both electricity energy and incredibly good thermal energy) with synthetic fuel (methanol) plants would be far better.
The fact is that the amount of solar and wind you would have to install to cover all intermittent AND large parts of the fuel sector is mostly unrealistic. There is absolutely no scenario the cost of synthetic fuel in large quantities could beat extracted carbon based fuels.
Nuclear is too late. Five years to get permits and five years to build? Perhaps that's optimistic. Hinkley Point C is taking fifteen from announcement to scheduled completion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... , and that's right next to its two nuclear siblings.
The problem of the current industry are well understood and Hinkley is a perfect example.
However I am talking about something broader then that. Even 5 years ago people would say 'nuclear is to late' solar and wind are gone solve us.
This has been going on since the 1970 when environmentalist turned against nuclear.
Solar and Wind are ALWAYS just around the corner and nuclear is 'not needed' somehow it still tiny.
Nuclear to be effective will need some regulatory and government changes but my real point is that if the whole technical intelligence plus the environmentalist are solar/wind cheerleaders the carbon producers are the one laughing themselves to the bank.
The US and EU have been decommissioning a few older nuclear power plants early because just operating let alone building them is not cost effective.
People talk about base load power like it's a good thing, but it's the opposite demand varies a lot over the day and you want to be able to ramp up and down quickly. You can do this with nuclear, but it pushes costs up even higher.
There is some regional differences and areas with a lot of dispatchable hydro don't care nearly as much. Still nuclear needs to be under 6c/kwh to be viable as base load power or be able to ramp up and down with demand while staying fairly cheap and it can't do either when you look at total lifetime costs.
In the US it it has more to do with how the utilities are regulated. For example, solar/wind get production tax credit when the produce energy that is not needed.
We could go into a long debate about how political management of these market hide many of the costs and so on
> People talk about base load power like it's a good thing, but it's the opposite demand varies a lot over the day and you want to be able to ramp up and down quickly. You can do this with nuclear, but it pushes costs up even higher.
Many modern nuclear plants designs you would build are actually able to load follow. Even in that situation some amount of base-load exists. A nuclear plant actually doesn't cost that much more if you have to run it while demand is low, the fuel cost does not matter in nuclear.
Even worse with solar and wind these things are even worse, you have variability on the demand and the supply side.
> There is some regional differences and areas with a lot of dispatchable hydro don't care nearly as much.
Yeah but that is a fantasy. Hydro is already largely build out all over the world and there is not nearly enough for most dense population centers.
> Still nuclear needs to be under 6c/kwh to be viable as base load power or be able to ramp up and down with demand while staying fairly cheap and it can't do either when you look at total lifetime costs.
6c/kwh is realistic, maybe a little more. But nobody can compete against gas. However against solar/wind and batteries it would easily compete.
Not being perfect does not mean the smart grid/solar/wind/battery approach is cheaper or better in any way. In fact is makes every problem harder, specially in terms of regional differences.
The designing for load following does not directly cost that much more, but it quickly pushes up average kWh costs through the roof while adding a lot of thermal stress.
Nuclear has become a political issue in the US, and these kinds of decisions can be political, not done for economic or safety reasons as one might have hoped.
As an example, the California Public Utilities Commission, decided to shut down Diablo Canyon even though PG&E says in regards to the Diablo Canyon power plant:
>...At 2.78 cents per kilowatt-hour, DCPP’s average production costs are lower than all other forms of electricity, but are higher than the national average of 2.19 cents per kilowatt-hour for nuclear power
(Doesn't bother PG&E, the CPUC will let them increase the rates.)
Advocates do a disservice when they ignore the realities of capacity factors. As Bill Gates said in an interview: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...
Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.
China is investing a lot of money in solar (maybe more than the US), but they don't pretend that will solve all the problems of producing power and we shouldn't either. China plans to have 1400 GW of nuclear power by 2100, so they also realize that decarbonizing energy production will require a multi-faceted approach.
Do you have a source for that? According to wikipedia it would look to be at least 50% higher than that:
>...Nuclear power contributed 3% of the total production in 2015, with 170 TWh,[5] and was the fastest-growing electricity source, with 29% growth over 2014.[6] Nuclear generation increased again in 2016 to 213 TWh, a 25% increase,[7] and in 2017 to 246 TWh, a 15% increase.[8] China ranks fourth in the world in total nuclear power capacity installed, and third by nuclear power generated.
Don't remember... I looked it up the other day as a data point in a discussion of the lack of nuclear power penetration in the market. (I was arguing against the popular idea that the limiting factor on nuclear is the cost of those liberal treehugger regulations, by pointing out that neither Russia nor China have significantly more, despite their disdain for environmentalism.) I was kind of shocked by the numbers, actually. Russia and the US are basically equal in nuclear output percentage-wise, but China lags far behind.
If my numbers were dated even a few years, China is probably doing better, due to current crash efforts to scale up nuclear power. Still, 3% isn't exactly huge market penetration.
The difference in terms of fusion and fission is not that large. In fact I would argue that any likely fussion plant would have the exact same capx problem that fission now has.
If we can't get fission to work, fusion will not help us.
Compared to carbon based fuel fission is 10^-12 more dense, while fusion is 10^-15. While that is a large change I don't think it matters when competing with wind.
> even with the new advanced plants
I disagree. Once we mass produce nuclear plants the price would be radically reduced, just like in any other mass produced object.
The problem at the moment is nuclear is almost to dense and long running. Its hard getting the scale you need to do that. Specially if every single place you want to put a reactor you get sued 200x by Greenpeace and everybody else.
Compare a nuclear reactor to a rocket engine. SpaceX produces rocket engines for incredibly cheap amounts and he produces 100s a year. A nuclear reactor does not need all that different materials or attention to detail.
The problem with nuclear is the development cost and the regulatory hurdle. If you clear that then you have to find costumers enough to have mass production.
That is why it has not happened and unlikely to on a large scale.
However if nuclear reactors were produced like solar panels and you had global markets, nuclear would trounce solar in terms of price.
The minimum commercially viable size of a power reactor is much larger than the size of a commercially viable wind turbine or PV module. A typical wind turbine today is rated for 2-4 megawatts peak output. A solar module is 0.2-0.4 kilowatts-peak. Commercial light water reactors under construction today are rated for more than 1000 megawatts. Even "small" reactors like NuScale is designing would generate 60 megawatts each.
The large capacity and high capacity factor of nuclear reactors has some significant benefits: once they start operating, they can rapidly displace use of fossil fuels. But it also means that there are many fewer opportunities to iterate on designs. A single large solar project can use a million panels and be constructed over a few years. The millionth panel installed on the site can be significantly improved vs. the first. Most solar manufacturers are tuning module production lines near-continuously and formally introducing new models frequently.
To generate the same amount of power with a nuclear reactor, it would take just a portion of a current Generation III reactor or maybe 2 small modular reactors. To the nearest whole number, there are 0-1 opportunities to upgrade equipment on the fly with a nuclear project vs. the dozens of opportunities with comparable-output utility scale renewable projects.
"Though that sounds thermodynamically bonkers, such fuel would, from a legal point of view, count as “zero carbon” because making and then using it involves no net release of CO2 into the atmosphere."
> Coal and oil can pretty much only be economically obtained from fossil sources.
Given that vegetable oil can be used in a Diesel engine after being used for deep fat frying fish and chips, and given we currently over-produce food to the point that obesity is one of our largest health issues, I’m going to have to [citation needed]-you on that.
2012, but I don't think the economics have changed significantly. At this point, biodiesel is significantly more expensive than fossil diesel. This would be even more strongly true for synthetic diesel, which is probably economically unviable at any substantial scale.
There's still a lot of excess energy wasted in farming for something like this that you end up with less energy in the oil than was used to make it. See the case of ethanol, which completely failed as a sustainable product and was only propped up by subsidies.
As for capturing CO2, has anyone tried to use it in greenhouses or vertical farms? Some waste heat and abundant CO2 would do wonders for plant growth in colder regions and abundant CO2 would still make plants happy in warmer climates.
Would be complicated with coal (nobody wants radioactive lettuce unless you can enrich it to commercial grade) but I assume gas is much cleaner.
Yes, they do this with greenhouses in the UK. The greenhouse complex has a small gas powerplant, electricity is sold to the grid, waste heat and waste CO2 are used to increase yields.
