I'm not saying I completely agree with closing the plant, but to be fair to the argument they make, the agreement does seem to spell out that the plant will be replaced with greenhouse gas free energy sources, including renewables + storage.
IMO the biggest problem with nuclear is the cost and time to construct. I don't think the energy industry would be so keen to shut them down if they were cost effective.
I'm not sure about that goal, California currently imports around 32% of its power now. That number will likely increase if we shut down all of the remaining nuclear.
How much night time solar can Arizona and Nevada give them, today, or in say ten years? Serious question.
The nice thing about Nuclear is that it's boringly reliable. You buy a 500MW nuclear power plant, you're getting ~500MW from that maybe 80-90% of the time. Own a half dozen of those (3GW nameplate capacity) and you can have 2GW or more pretty much always.
You buy 3GW of solar panels obviously they don't do anything for a big portion of every day because the sun is on the far side of the planet, so then either you're also buying a lot of storage and more panels, or you don't have a replacement for the nuke plant.
Now, if you have 3GW of molten salt concentrated solar maybe you can hit that 80-90% reliability on the individual units and replace the nuke plant, but do Nevada and Arizona have any of those today? Are they expected to build a California nuke plant's worth any time soon?
Serious answer: as much nigh time solar as you want, via battery storage, at cost competitive prices. Here's a three year old project in Arizona for solar plus storage at less than $45/MWh:
Since then, the public bidding processes in Nevada and Colorado have revealed many more projects at similar costs. Since utility planning is typically on a five year timeline, bids are expected to be at the cost of storage at the time of delivery, and since the cost of storage is falling 20% per year, outsiders think that these projects are taking future cost drops into account. But if a three year old project is so affordable, anything delivered in the next six months will be pretty equivalent.
We'd need to seriously advance battery technology to make it better than nuclear in the terms we're talking about here. Batteries require minerals from mining, including strip mining, and that's going to fail the environmental test. Mining involves slave labor, and that's going to fail the humanitarian test. They also have a short lifespan and tend to explode.
Maybe if sodium proves out then batteries will be acceptable. Right now, though, we don't have a viable technology that serves the purpose.
It's not like we are going to stop mining copper tomorrow, because it fails the "environmental test," so I'm now sure why batteries are held to a completely different standard than every other single aspect of our economy.
We don't need any big leaps in battery tech, just the current learning curve will serve us wonderfully.
As for environmental damage, I've never ever heard that strip mining is essential for any battery component. Could you clarify? Neither is child labor necessary.
Current grid storage has warranties longer than a decade of daily cycling. Fire suppression is greatly improving.
All the hurdles are easily surmountable. Certainly far more easily surmountable than the difficulty of building new nuclear. There are clear and easy paths for all of batteries, and we are going to be building TWh of them for cars anyway, so we may as well clean that up then use the same industrial process for grid storage.
We are building our massive energy stowage factories. Car companies are scrambling to create supply chains. This is happening really fast.
Since I did not estimate the amount of energy to store for a day, I don't know why you think I underestimated it. If you think we will turn off all generation for an entire day, ignoring solar and wind and hydro resources, and just run off batteries for no good reason, I'm not sure why you would think that.
What is the real resin that Germany is building gas plants? And how do they justify new gas plants, economically, in this day and age? They will be stranded assets in a few years, so it sounds like corruption or ignorance. Surely the economics can't be so different there than what exists in this Rocky Mountain Institute analysis of US costs, where we have super cheap gas?
> We find that the natural gas bridge is likely already behind us, and that continued investment in announced gas projects risks creating tens of billions of dollars in stranded costs by the mid-2030s, when new gas plants and pipelines will rapidly become uneconomic as clean energy costs continue to fall.
Will be large scale batteries very soon, as the grid storage market is growing at an exponential pace.
As battery prices fall, entirely new markets open up. Right now batteries beat the cost of natural gas peaker plants. In Arizona, where solar is so cheap, batteries are becoming economical for correcting the duck curve in the evening.
Germany has plenty of wind overnight.
It's not like an entire country's grid will ever be powered by a single source of energy, so I'm not sure what the point of comparing hydro capacity to total energy consumption is.
194MWh would be a lot for you but it's not enough for this context. Suppose it's dark for just 10 hours. 194MWh over ten hours is 19.4MW which is enough to power a small town.
The primary purpose of that Tesla battery is to manage short-term discrepancies, it can do 200MW power output for ten minutes without problems and that's enough time for relatively slow standby systems to spin up.
To give a comparison hydro storage systems of 10GWh (almost two orders of magnitude more) are totally a thing. Why didn't Australia buy one of those? Well the problem is geography, the hydro storage needs a mountain because what it's really storing is gravitational potential energy, and er, that bit of Australia is a bit flat.
The project you linked can store... 1 hour and 10 minutes of its own electricity. Now, maybe Tucson has much shorter nights than anyplace else on Earth, but where I'm from that'd fall badly short of overnight power.
It's honestly so weird to read comments like this that presume no one else has ever realized before that the sun sets every night. I would guess that the California power regulators actually do know this and have plans for it.
Assuming the competence on the part of California power regulators seems unwarrantedly generous in the light of recent (and less than recent) failures.
They are expensive and take long to construct because of political and environmental requirements on them. This is not an inherent property of nuclear, and can be solved with a single stroke of the pen. This is not going to happen, though, because people tend to think that if something is "environmental", then it must be good.
No, companies are extremely happy to make huge capital expenses, if they expect to make a good profit on them. For example, California's PG&E is planning to spend a whopping $40B in investment over next 5 years, because California government guarantees 10% annual return on investment.
Wtf is the point of sourcing market investment if you are going to guarantee profits? All the usual market mechanisms to ensure efficiency don't work, you are just handing out free money at the expence of the taxpayer.
You might as well just issue bonds and invest money directly.
Maybe in California. In Plattsburgh, NY, electric rates are 75% less than the state average. Pretty sure the other municipal utilities are similar. (About 30 in NY)
With civil service employees, management overhead costs are usually way lower. Corporate management usually gets overpaid.
Right. There are many things the government could possibly do, and it could theoretically do them as well as private sector does, and in many case even better than private sector (as governments enjoy many privileges that private companies don't). However, this is upper bound of what we could get from governments running things. Most of us need to settle with governments as they actually exist, and the actual outcomes. The track record does not seem encouraging, and arguments of the sort "this time it will be different, we'll just put our people in charge, who are better than people who were previously in charge" aren't particularly appealing.
You are missing the point entirely, the state or the market are fine, each approach has it's strengths.
Deals like this one are unacceptable because they are a Frankenstein monster - state guarantees profit, so the state bears all the risk. The normal market mechanisms don't work, inefficiencies and wastefulness is not punished, but profits are still private. It encourages the worst possible behaviour.
IMO the biggest problem with nuclear is the cost and time to construct. I don't think the energy industry would be so keen to shut them down if they were cost effective.