If moderates were good for anything, it would be repealing anti-green regulations. Conservatives win by not having to pay subsidies. Liberals win by getting clean energy. Wouldn’t the folks in Kansas like to sell us easterners some wind power? Wouldn’t the precious swing voters in Arizona like to sell Californians some solar? The fact that anti-renewable regulations still exist is a scathing indictment of Congress.
There needs to be a group that lobbies for this stuff and gets it on Congress's radar. Is anyone doing that? Our environmental orgs like Sierra Club are mostly hopeless, plus this issue is probably too technical and wonky to capture the public's attention. Plus you'd want to do it in a low-key way anyway, so that it doesn't become a high-salience partisan issue. So if there is a wonky org doing this work, I guess we wouldn't know who it is.
There are lots of things that would improve gdp by a few tenths of a percent or lower emissions by a couple percent which don’t capture the imagination because they are not transformative and exciting. However, if you combined them all, we really would build back better. See also funding more med schools/residencies and encourage foreign doctors who speak english or spanish to practice here
Matt is definitely Doing the Work in his way, but I'm talking about a group that actually drafts proposed legislation and meets with congresscritters. A lobbying group rather than a journalistic one.
I've been working at the bottom of the technology readiness scale on renewable energy generation and storage for over two decades and I think MY hits the nail on the head here, but doesn't say the magic words: we need to diversify energy generation and invest in electricity grids.
The fossil fuel industry likes the idea of throwing money at R&D and hoping for a major breakthrough because they are fully aware how unlikely that is. (Remember the fights over corn ethanol? Switch grass? When BP and others rebranded as 'energy companies'? The ongoing biomass controversy? Not to mention Chinese solar cells made with slave labor.) Saul Griffith has it right—we have to invest in innovation and deployment (i.e., use existing technologies and electrify everything). And MY zeroes in on a major hurdle there, which is the grid. You cannot just dump any old kind of electricity onto an old-school electricity grid. But 'smart grid' technology is a thing that exists and that we can just throw money at to make happen in preparation for it to receive geothermal, wind, solar, etc.
My first lesson in the cynicism of green energy was when my PhD advisor was involved in Bush's hydrogen task force. They made a big show about the 'hydrogen economy' and, IIRC correctly, Bush himself cut an add where he pretended to pump hydrogen into a car at a filling station. My advisor and the rest of the task force immediately stated the facts: we cannot make H2 efficiently, we cannot transport it safely and storing it both dangerous and inefficient. But no one cared. They wanted to cut the ads and, as I would learn, were just greenwashing H2 generation from methane, which is still how much if not all H2 is generated. The scientists on the task force were just props.
After decades of spinning our wheels and playing politics with solar everything from solar panels on the White House to fantasies about moving hydrogen around the existing oil distribution infrastructure, we are too far behind on R&D to make a dent in the near-term. We need to rip out the old regulations that were written with the advantages and caveats of fossil fuel in mind and throw money at proven and emerging technology.
That stuff is above my pay grade... I am down in the weeds. But I think the things MY suggests make a lot of sense; more wind and solar, invest heavily in applying fracking technology to geothermal, small-scale nukes and the biomass technologies that have already been proven/deployed. Then throw a ton of money at the electricity grid and, of course, don't stop investing in R&D, but be realistic about the timelines and probabilities of breakthroughs; There are areas like water splitting that seem to be on the cusp of commercialization and niche areas like thermoelectrics for capturing low-quality waste heat that should be a part of every day life 50 years from now.
In my experience, it is hard to get people (including policy makers) to think about energy correctly. There is an entrenched thinking that is fossil fuel centric; i.e., where you can pretty much just plop down a power plant and throw carbon fuel at it for elastic power generation onto a grid designed for those inputs. Plus you have young people who are pushing for energy austerity and doing the fossil fuel industry's lobbying work for them by advocating for de-growth, which reminds a lot of people of getting yelled at for leaving lights on or touching the thermostat. But, as MY has written, plentiful electricity from diverse, zero-carbon sources should be our North Star.
The more I hear about environmental impact reviews, the less I like them. CEQA has the same damn problem of exempting the stuff with the biggest environmental impact.
You'd think at least in Sacramento it would be easy to pass an amendment that says "all renewable energy and mass transit projects are exempted." Is anyone even trying?
I would at least like to see someone make an effort so we can see who if anyone opposes. Efforts have been made on housing, and you can at least understand where the opposition is coming from there: NIMBY property owners and developer-hating leftists. I get that NIMBYs dislike transit too, but this would be a procedural change at a further level of remove from their concerns, so I would think it would be less likely to generate the same level of opposition. But we'll never know unless someone tries.
1) The way NEPA exemptions are described is very misleading and makes it seem as if all environmental laws and standards are waived. It happens a bit in this piece and is common elsewhere too, where some sort of NEPA shortcut or categorical exclusion is talked about as exempting from "environmental review". This is not correct. The exemption is from the NEPA process, because NEPA is a process statute - it tells you rules for public comment, meetings, broad guidelines, etc.
Exempting from NEPA just exempts from that process - every single underlying environmental law or regulation still applies, whether it's the clean air act, a wetlands permit, or a land management agencies charge to " preserve for future generations". What's happening is the public process of NEPA is no longer required - sometimes you can even still have public process requirements from some other law (like the Endangered Species Act or APA) even if you are excluded from the NEPA part.
2) I need to nitpick the NEPA public land oil and gas exemptions bit... Yes those categorical exclusions exist but they're actually pretty narrow in the scheme of things - and prior to getting down to the scale of those exemptions there already will have been an EIS or EA level NEPA process on oil and gas development/leasing at large.
That said, having equivalent (or broader, tbh) geothermal versions isn't a bad idea.
Regarding heat pump heating in the winter, another way to make things more efficient is to lay pipes underground and extract heat from there. Not quite geothermal, but temperatures are much less extreme ~20 ft below the surface or so. You can pump heat from underground into a heating system and heat homes. The most efficient way to do this would be to have a system for a neighborhood, as it's a little expensive for every house to dig a 20 foot trench. The other advantage is that in the summer, these underground pipes stay cooler and offer a good place to sink heat rather than the sweltering outdoors.
I had never thought of this but it makes perfect sense. Just do a single heat-exchange fluid reservoir underground, as a snaky manifold, lay it in just like you would the water and sewer lines, and then have hot/cold lines where each house hooks up their heat pump; you draw from the "hot" line in the winter and pump to the cold line; in the summer you reverse the flow.
Hah I have no idea of relative efficiencies or ROI on an underground system. If it's easy enough to build heat pumps that operate at low temperatures, then by all means do so! It does look like the COP's of such systems were pretty low, though. Wikipedia even mentions ground source heat pumps as a more efficient technology.
Yeah ground source heat pumps are more efficient for sure, but residential air-source heat pumps are available now that have a CoP (i.e., efficiency rating over resistant heating) of ~1.8 even below 0°F.
Nice post. I agree, there are some regulatory barriers that are a real problem, and folks like Kevin Drum who think "it just needs more R&D" are too naiive about this.
It's on my mind in particular, because I recently bought a newly constructed home. It has a nice, tall, south facing roof which gets lots of sun. Perfect for solar, right? Well... it's not that easy.
The solar panels themselves are the easy part. About $500 per KW, or $3000 for a typical 6KW system. But installation (plus some other equipment like an inverter) will run you about $15,000-$20,000. You'll have to wait for a licensed electrician (who are in short supply right now), and then get it it inspected by the city before you're allowed to turn it on (ditto). Hopefully the permitting process goes smoothly, because it's completely nonstandard and up to the discretion of the city whether they feel like approving you or not. Even if the cost of panels falls to zero, it wouldn't make much difference in the overall cost.
But hey, once it's done, you've got free electricity right? Nope. You're still on the grid, so they'll charge you for that connection even if you never use it. For me, I don't really use a lot of electricity, so that's about half my electric bill. And I can't "overproduce" and get money back, the most I can do is reduce my energy used to zero, while still paying the grid connection fee.
It'll be a nice backup in case the power grid goes down though, right? NOPE. Solar panels are designed to shut off whenever the grid goes down. In theory this is for safety reasons, but it seems like the utilities just aren't trying very hard to make this work. So despite owning your personal home power plant, you'll still be shivering in the dark with everyone else.
What about going completely off grid, by adding a battery backup? Then you can skip the grid charge and have a real backup. You can buy a 10KWh system from LG (Tesla doesn't even sell there's individually anymore) for that, but it'll run you $10,000, and be prepared to wait a while for installation. And 10KWh really isn't that much- many homes would blow through that in less than a day, or even one night. Might want to get 2 or 3. So now the total cost is more like $40,000-$50,000, even though the panels were only $3000.
But wait- I have an electric car! You can get a used EV for surprisingly cheap, and it'll have a battery way bigger than a wimpy home battery system. A 2019 Leaf has 40 or 60KWh, for example, more than enough to ride out a storm. Charge it during the day, run off the battery over night. The perfect combo, right?
Nope. You can't just "plug in" your house to your EV. EV charging connections are one-way only. There are some hacks you can do to charge a few appliances off of it, but it's pretty limited. Ford claims their new electric F-150 will be able to power your house though. Hopefully they allow it!
Speaking of EVs, you'd think that a new house would include a 240V, high amp outlet in the garage for fast charging, or at least level 2, right? Nope. That's only included for the dryer, in case you need to melt your clothes with ridiculous power. Gotta pay to rewire the garage (Or DIY) if you want to charge an EV inside at any reasonable speed.
Interestingly, none of this is really specific to solar. You'd have the same problems if you want to run your home off a home wind turbine, gas generator, or (in theory) a mini-nuke. And it's a real chicken-and-the-egg problem... there isn't enough political pressure to fix these problems because not many voters have home solar, and not many people have home solar because of these problems. We need to start putting pressure on political leaders to fix these issues.
Where do you live? In Georgia, where I live, the power company buys overproduction at 80% of wholesale price. Lengthy power outages are also extremely rare here, so a grid-tie inverter + whatever renewable you want to generate power with seems like a pretty good setup in my area.
True, all of this stuff is regional, which makes it hard to speak in generalities. Where I live, you can't sell overproduction. I guess you can feel good about yourself that you're doing something good for the environment, but I'm in this for the money!
Being in a sunny, southern state, and having them buy your overproduction- is there a limit on that? Otherwise I'd be tempted to completely cover my roof with solar panels, and make them pay me.
I think there is a limit of output at which you are no long considered "residential," but I'm not sure what that is and I haven't read any accounts of people hitting that limit.
For me, the bigger deal is that the grid-tie saves the need for battery storage, so you can build an array that gets you about your daily power use on average and use grid power to fill the gaps. People in less-sunny areas could also supplement with micro-wind.
Now that I think about it (shooting from the hip with no real expertise beyond what can be read on the internet), a comprehensive solution might be lots of residential-generated power with centralized local storage for smoothing.
I think that solution makes a lot of sense, at least as a high level concept (with the devil in the details).
Right now we have (in the US) a weird system where you can use a *massive* amount of power and barely even notice. I could run a dryer all day, every day, on maximum heat setting, using the energy equivalent of a literal truckload of coal- and the power plant will just me a big bill. The infrastructure is set up for *way* more power than any normal person needs.
But then something goes wrong and like, one tree takes down a power line, so the area loses power. Then I have *nothing*. Better stock up on blankets and canned food, I guess, because they really don't want me generating my own electricity.
Having residential (or at least local) generated power not only saves on transmission, but it also makes people a lot more aware of how much they're using and how this stuff works. People *like* being in control of their own power, it's why tesla solarwalls were so popular despite being massively expensive. The government should handle "smoothing", businesses with unusual power needs, and emergencies, not try to deliver an all-you-can-eat buffet to everyone.
"It'll be a nice backup in case the power grid goes down though, right? NOPE. Solar panels are designed to shut off whenever the grid goes down"
How does this work, technically & practically? How does the solar panel know that the grid is 'down'? It has some kind of automatic shutoff? That can't be overridden? I find this all a bit tough to believe
It would be more accurate to say that the inverter that connects them to the grid (and converts DC to AC) is designed to shut off when there's no power flowing from the grid. And cities/utilities won't allow it otherwise. Possibly there's a way you could hack it yourself but.... how confident are you in your ability to rewire high-voltage power lines?
The inverters are sensing the 60 Hz wave off the grid and using that as their frequency reference --- their waveform needs to be grid-synchronized for your connection to work; otherwise, you'd be imposing the equivalent of an inductive or capacitive load to the system, which drops efficiency. The cutoff's automatic so that your system doesn't feed power into the lines on your street if they've been powered down by the utility (e.g. because they've fallen in a storm), which is a safety hazard.
There are systems that don't do this, but they need specific design and equipment to prevent feeding into the grid if there's nothing on the other end. For most home solar setups to date, the grid's reliable enough that it's not worth doing.
It seems like you're up on the technical details of this. I'm curious, would it be possible to make a house that runs entirely off DC power? I feel like that could massively unlock the potential of home solar. Given that:
Solar panels produce DC
Almost all home appliances use DC (except a microwave, I guess)
So we're paying a double efficiency loss to convert it from DC->AC->DC again, as well as the cost of the inverters and the difficulty of setting it up.
You could build a house entirely off grid, set to be all-DC. Just plug in your solar panels and batteries. Or maybe it's on a small grid with your neighborhood. As long as you understand that the batteries are limited, you'd have some massive efficiency gains, and have a lot of excess power to do whatever you want around noon (mine cryptocurrency maybe).
As I understand it, the main advantage of AC was that it allows stepping up high voltage for long distance transport. But that's totally unnecessary if each house/neighborhood is producing its own power, it's just a huge sunk cost and safety liability that we've gotten used to because... that's how it was always done. Meanwhile we're running 120V of AC through the house everywhere, just to power small consumer appliances that only need 5-10V of DC.
n principle, yes, you could directly power the smaller appliances with DC. I'm less sure about larger items like ovens and fridges and washers and dryers; I think most of their power goes to motors or direct heat conversion, where you don't need to convert to DC but just use AC directly. That said, a few points:
(1) how much power do small appliances & electronics actually use? I suspect it's a minority in most houses.
(2) the switching costs are pretty enormous, given that we've standardized on AC --- though maybe something like a mandate that newly-installed outlets must include a USB-A or USB-C plug might work.
(3) we could impose minimum AC->DC conversion efficiency standards. There's already an Energy Star program for computer PSUs, so you could imagine extending that to anything else with a rectifier, like your phone charger. I think the state of the art these days is well above 95%+ efficiency with 85-90% being pretty standard, but you're probably not going to get that in a $5 phone charger.
If we were doing it again, might it make sense to just do DC directly? Yeah, maybe. Could you imagine a rural electrification program in countries with lots of sun and no existing grid that just jumps directly to self-sufficient / local solar? Sure. Does it make sense to do in the developed world? Meh, not sure....
Most of my energy use is natural gas, not electric. Once I subtracted all that out, I was left with basically an even split between the "kitchen" (mostly refrigerator/freezer) and "entertainment" categories (mostly from computer monitors). Washer, dryer, dishwasher, and microwave didn't add much because they're just not on very often.
So at least half of my electricity is running off DC anyway, and I'm pretty sure the refrigerator/freezer could be also, if we wanted it to. Not to mention an EV would basically double the electricity usage by itself, and electric heating would massively increase it.
I agree it would be a massive upfront cost. But pretty much anything is going to have that problem. Seems like it would make sense to start by just adding USB-C plugs everywhere, since that's where consumer electronics are heading anyway. And meanwhile, there's a massive developing world that is just now getting large-scale electricity for the first time.
It's probably possible (other countries allow it), but you'll have to do it yourself. And either somehow convince the city to allow it, or do it secretly and not tell them.
This is an amazing comment. Weird that Tesla stopped doing vehicle to grid (V2G) after the roadster. Would be a huge selling point now that we’re all preppers.
It would be helpful for writers who wish to weigh in on such subjects to get some sort of basic knowledge of science. It would be really really helpful. I quite agree that confronted with facts most people who lack such knowledge.usually resort to the "need more money for R&D" argument. As if spending a pile of money changes the fundamental laws of physics or chemistry or anything else. It never does. It's not that I am against R&D. On the contrary I strongly favor such investments. But then, as a STEM guy, I have made it my business to keep abreast of what is going on in various fields. And the advances, real and potential, just aren't what people imagine them to be. You need to understand the problems.
As a general critique I would say that the idea that deployment is the problem is a real problem. You can't deploy what you don't yet have. But as a more on point critique I would say trying to pass off problems with wind and solar as regulatory problems is really kind of bullshit. Most people just ignore the intermittency problem and speaking vaguely of energy storage. And they generally have zero idea of what they are talking about on that score. When it comes to transmission and getting, say, solar power generated in Arizona to Minnesota the problem isn't regulatory. The problem is that both energy storage and ,sophisticated transmission systems are going to cost a shitload of money and will have their own very evident vulnerabilities. Which means when those cost burdens, which only wind and solar bear, are added to your electricity bill those sources are not cheap. No one else needs them. And I doubt anyone will get away with pretending they are somebody else's problem. Ironically, if we had such capabilities they would literally work better with any generating system than wind or solar. They are particularly well suited to nuclear generation.
I have no objection whatsoever to spending money to explore large scale geothermal experiments. But most of the examples I have looked at are just fundraising scams. The fact is that geothermal sources require a high heat gradient (magma) unless your goal is to generate a big underground mass of cold rock. Any competent engineer would tell you that. Rock is an excellent insulator. You take out heat it gets cold. And without a proximate source of magma to reheat the rock you are screwed. The technology needed to drill to those depths does not exist. It does not matter what red colored maps show. They might as well be on the surface of the sun.
Finally you need to lose this idea that oil and gas are used exclusively for fuel. They are not. A huge percentage, currently over forty, are the basic raw materials of modern civilization. And there are precious few things that you can make without them. If not a single gram were burnt you would still need vast amounts of oil. So we'll just ad those thousands of very specific technological problems we will need to address before we keep anything in the ground.
Closed-loop geothermal is the holy grail - all the benefits of geothermal without the downsides of fracking. A key player here is Dr Eric Van Oort at the University of Texas. Last I heard he was working on a project in Japan to prove the science behind it (heat transfer through dry rock at depth, etc).
If the science gets proven then it's game on. Although my impression is that a SpaceX-style company is needed to bring fast iteration & high error tolerance to the geothermal sector. We're running out of time.
A quibble about heat pumps: if you dig down to where the temperature is 55 degrees year round (so like wine cellar depth) and run the heat exchanging refrigerant lines down there, you can get them to work well even in very cold winters and very hot summers. This is called "ground source" or sometimes confusingly "geothermal" though it is not, AIUI, much like the kind of geothermal heating that Iceland uses.
The sticking point is the up front cost and space requirements of the digging of holes for the exchanger pipes. I would speculate that some combination of creative easement-making and creative financing could make it easier to fit a bunch of buildings with ground source heat pumps at once. Perhaps a coordination problem worth pushing on.
Yeah ground-source is cool, but not super practical compared to air-source cold-climate heat pumps, right? Since you typically install heat-strips to provide backup when you get down to -10°F, these should cover most of the country (and have been popping up in SLC).
So good to hear progressives moaning the out of control regulatory state.
Hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations. Some doing very important work. But many of them being straight up red tape.
My wife used to work in government permitting/real property management I asked her how long it takes to get something through. She said 1 to 2 years.
I asked her how long it could take if you cleared the red tape, and government bureaucrats actually did their job (while still protecting the environment etc). She said 1 to2 months.
We need real regulatory reform. And we REALLY need to reform our public servants, get rid of most of their protections that make them pretty much impossible to fire, even if they do a poor job.
Gonna be fun politicking to convince the environmental faction that fracking for geothermal is good because it's deep enough to not matter, after oil & gas companies said the same thing about regular fracking
Fracking was always safe as a process. The seismic activity induced is beyond trivial, the "chemicals" involved are less dangerous than the oil and natural gas being extracted, the groundwater contamination risk is beyond trivial (parts of upstate PA have had flammable well water since it was settled in the 1700's)...
The only real risks were always oil and gas leaks, which, surprise, aren't a problem if I'm just injecting and extracting water.
Of course they're idiots and always have been, but they're important idiots when it comes to the present-day Democratic Party. You go to war with the idiots you have, not the idiots you might want or wish to have at a later time.
My overriding theory is "things will get worse before they get better". Has been since the day I got to college and realized exactly how profoundly screwed-up the "left" is, having already realized from my family that the "right" has no interest in confronting any challenge and prefers to pretend everything is A-OK.
We are too rich, too stable, too able to paper over the cracks, and too divorced from the reality of how our ancestors built America into a first-world nation to formulate truly effective policy and fix problems. This is *marginally* less true of the Democrats than the Republicans, but not nearly enough.
So the ship of state will continue to drift until such time as the problems become too large for tribalists to ignore, the cracks too wide for half-assed measures to paper over, the failures too glaring for a bit of money to assuage.
We literally *cannot* go to war with our current idiots, and as such, we simply have to hope that they stop being so stupid once the problems really start to bite.
I think being unable "to formulate truly effective policy and fix problems" is a condition afflicting every government that has ever existed. By its very nature, good government has always been an act, as the great economist Charles Lindblom put it, of "muddling through." To pull out an even more obscure quote, one might liken it to the "slow boring of hard boards."
I agree, to the extent that I think almost every first world nation's governance is always hovering about the edge of "failing, but slowly" and "succeeding, but slowly".
Those two things are very, very different in the long run, though, and the US is on the wrong side of the line at the moment and has been for a couple decades.
There's no guarantee they'll then get better, but actual suffering (as opposed to the cosplayed suffering that the loudest voices on both sides currently engage in) has a tendency to burn some of the fat away.
I believe the current system bears a lot of resemblance to what we saw in the 1910's and 20's, and it's very likely that a major realignment will occur as it did then, and at least an even chance that it will be productive rather than harmful.
I'm beginning to realize that the fundamental issue isn't one of redistribution vs. unfettered capitalism, though that's one of the largest secondary issues. Rather, the biggest problem is that much of the apparatus of state has been captured by rentiers in every facet of life, from housing, through infrastructure, to the healthcare system.
The Democrats mostly want to spend money to paper over cracks best solved by gutting the rentiers, the Republicans are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the rentiers themselves, and the little guy/gal isn't being presented with the information or proposed solutions that would allow him/her to make effective decisions and vote on that basis.
"I believe the current system bears a lot of resemblance to what we saw in the 1910's and 20's..."
I hope not. From 1900 to the depression was one of the most turbulent periods in American history. And much of the power and angst was more distributed then than it is now.
I was nodding in agreement until you said "seismic activity induced is beyond trivial." I live in a state that had an insane increase in earthquakes during fracking boom, that subsided after appropriate regulations. Seismicity was related to the wastewater disposal wells, not the actual fracking. Once they put some rules in around wastewater injection rates and locations everything was fine. But I can tell you, from data to lived experience, there was definitely some seismicity.
It had nothing to do with fracking itself and everything to do with injection storage of wastes. Most of which have nothing to do with fracking. And it is true that some sites are unsuitable for waste injection. Just like everything else.
I guess our disagreement is how proximal the need to to dispose of fracking wastewater is to “fracking.” I don’t think people complaining about earthquakes would have been reassured by a narrowly but accurately construed definition of what is “caused” by “fracking.” I think on the substance we agree. I’m just saying you’re not going to reassure people who correctly identified increases in earthquakes following increases in fracking and tell them “fracking doesn’t cause earthquakes.”
You don't live in Oklahoma if you think the seismic activity induced by fracking was/is trivial. It caused damage to buildings and homes and I'm not sure that continuing was beneficial vs the costs of repair.
Surprised no mention of the (kind of wild) op ed in WSJ this week claiming that horizontal geothermal drilling under Yellowstone could provide energy AND stave off a civilization altering supervolcano eruption.
I’ve seen some estimates that if the Yellowstone caldera strata giving us problems releasing the heat/pressure buildup would only cost $25 billion. Even if they were off by one or two orders of magnitude that’s easily doable.
Oh this one definitely is pretty out there! Was quite surprised to see the supervolcano framing in a major newspaper. But, hey, if this is what it takes folks to get on board with geothermal, maybe it's worth a try.
How do you guys read all these news articles? Do you have subscriptions to every single major newspaper, or is there still a way to bypass the paywalls that I don't know about?
On the nuclear regulation question, is there a model country that is getting it right? I don't think there is.
Folks keep saying excessive regulations are a big obstacle for nuclear power, but even countries like France, with a history of an industry friendly regulatory climate are backing away from nuclear power because the economics of new builds aren't workable even there (see Flamanville).
China seems to be investing a lot in nuclear power, but their focus seems to have shifted from mass commercial deployments to prototype deployments of innovative new technologies.
Which country is the exemplar of how to build and regulate mass produced commercial nuclear power plants the right way in 2021?
I think it's revealing that China hasn't gone hard on nuclear. If the problem was NIMBYism and squeamish regulators, the folks who happily demolish neighbourhoods that get in their way would be doing it. They are not.
Last time Matt advocated for nuclear, a guy who works in the industry wrote in the comments that Matt under-rates the cost of waste storage, which once added really makes the economics of nuclear unattractive.
China leads the world in coal-fired generation. They're leading the world in building new coal-fired plants. I think their continued reliance on coal is more revealing than their lack of nuclear. They're still very much optimizing on the cost side of energy production.
As of this year, wind and solar paired with battery storage that enables it to run all day long on most days now costs less than nuclear power. Also, unlike nuclear power, the cost curve for renewable plus storage projects is trending steeply down.
So given that we have a workable and economic zero carbon solution for 80-90% of our electricity needs, it's just not clear what role current generation nuclear power technology could play.
To make matters worse, nuclear power in general is a terrible option for the other 20% of needed power because it can't economically adjust output quickly based on grid load. With nuclear power, you have to pay 5x the cost 24/7 even if you only need it for a few weeks each year.
Perhaps in 20-30 years one of the promising next-gen nuclear power technologies will be ready for prime time and offer lower costs and/or more scheduling flexibility, but for now, aside for demonstration projects, there isn't a viable economic nuclear power technology that's ready to deploy.
We go over this again and again. That document is good, but misleading because everyone gravitates toward the lowest solar costs which represents the best solar situation possible and doesn't take into account what is required to make that work. Once you get into those details, solar's cost advantages start mitigating quickly.
Eh, this is a reasonable point, but the citations need to go both ways. How limiting in practice is "the best solar situation possible"? How much worse does it need to get before coal and gas start to get price competitive?
Also, solar is still pretty early in its tech development cycle, so starting out at 5x better when you have ideal conditions is a really great place to be. Presumably that return will continue to improve as solar technology and practices continue to develop.
Why is solar in the early stages of its tech development cycle? I would have figured it was mid cycle at least.
As for where its at. The chart that most people use to talk about how low the cost of solar has gotten is from Lazard's "Levelized Cost of Energy Comparison - Unsubsidized Analysis" which shows Solar PV - thin film utility scale at between $28 and $37 a MWh in comparison to Nuclear at $131-204. Their research also says that rooftop residential has a cost between $147-$221 which is higher than the nuclear cost.
If you aren't optimizing for solar reception like a utility solar plant, you lose a lot of efficiency by location and placement.
Another challenge is that none of these costs include the cost of storage that is required for solar/wind which is currently very expensive. Nor does it account for utility upgrades necessary to handle power fluctuations from solar/wind. The key is that solar and storage has been getting cheaper while nuclear has been getting more expensive. If the trend continues, then solar/wind + storage could be a great answer. The last issue that became very clear to me is simply the scale of rollout for solar. Using the most efficient method, utility solar, it would take an area about the size of W. Virginia to replace existing fossil fuel generation in the US. That's a huge area dedicated to solar plants and brings immense engineering, construction, and political challenges to the issue as well.
On the amount of land needed, I'd counter that no one is suggesting we only use solar. It'd be a mix of solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, and hydro. onshore wind land use is very compatible with dual use as the ranchers in Texas have learned.
Finally, even if we stick with the 22,000 sq mile land area estimate that's been thrown around, you have to put it into context:
Here are some other examples of land use in the range of tens of thousands of square miles:
40,223 square miles – size of the land leased by oil and gas industry
13,000 square miles – the US land impacted by coal surface mining
49,300 square miles – the land used to grow corn for ethanol
Comparing the cost of rooftop solar to nuclear is meaningless.
Rooftop solar production does need to the transmission and distribution network before it gets used. In New England, transmission and distribution make up about 60% of the delivered kWh charge. Energy is only 40% of the cost. So rooftop solar is competing against the entire delivered kWh cost, not just the 40% of cost for generation.
Second, I agree with your overall point that Lazard is just an estimate and it includes a ton of assumptions and generalizations and leaves out some relevant stuff. But it does cut both ways. L:azard uses the same cost of capital input for all generation sources even though nuclear is a ton more expensive to finance compared to wind, solar, or storage. And that's after giving nuclear a huge handicap from ratepayer and taxpayer guarantees.
Finally, pro nuclear folks (I used to be one, btw) seem to ignore the fact that you can't run a grid with only nuclear power just like you can't run a grid with only solar or wind.
Nuclear power can't economically follow load and that means to have a workable grid, you need to pair it with something else that's more flexible like batteries or hydro. For some reason the folks that say we should add in the cost of storage to solar or wind seem to ignore that nuclear power also needs storage or something else to support it.
I'm not sure if we are disagreeing with each other or not, but it seems to me like your rooftop solar example is useful (especially because a lot of residential rooftop solar includes an onsite storage battery). On the one hand, you can look at that and say that it's somewhat inefficient and not cost competitive with industrial nuclear, which has its own issues discussed elsewhere. But you could also look at that and say that we are basically turning residential housing into a relatively inefficient power source that might be less efficient than a massive industrial solar farm but can sit on top of the existing built infrastructure, is safe and maintainable, and which provides all of the roof-related benefits that people have traditionally built roofs on their homes to obtain. And when you do that, you drive an industry that continues to innovate in the solar space and shrinks the size and cost of your West Virginia solar farm a lot by providing localized energy collection and storage and by improving recovery rates.
Thanks for posting. This section on cost structure from the Bloomberg article is very interesting:
About 70% of the cost of Chinese reactors are covered by loans from state-backed banks, at far lower rates than other nations can secure, said Francois Morin, China director at the World Nuclear Association.
That makes a huge difference because most of the cost of atomic energy is in upfront construction. At 1.4% interest, about the minimum for infrastructure projects in places like China or Russia, nuclear power costs about $42 per megawatt-hour, far cheaper than coal and natural gas in many places. At a 10% rate, at the high end of the spectrum in developed economies, the cost of nuclear power shoots up to $97, more expensive than everything else.
“People say nuclear is expensive in the West, but they forget to say it’s expensive because of interest rates,” Morin said.
China keeps the exact costs a state secret, but analysts including BloombergNEF and the World Nuclear Association estimate China can build plants for about $2,500 to $3,000 per kilowatt, about one-third of the cost of recent projects in the U.S. and France.
I definitely think nuclear storage is underplayed by nuclear advocates, but not sure if that is biggest issue for China. I think its more likely that coal production and power generation in China sustains a lot of jobs and has a lot of political influence.
Actually, Matt didn't use the term "Nevada NIMBYs" which I think was astute of him. "NIMBY" is a pejorative term, often for very good reasons. But if I were a Nevadan, I'm not sure how excited I'd be about having a mountain full of deadly nuclear waste in my backyard.
(If there are actual Yucca Mountain YIMBYs reading these comments, I'd love to hear from them.)
France is instructive since they are basically carbon neutral for electricity generation (around 80% nuclear, 20% renewables) but they have lost the appetite for more nuclear. Since nuclear energy in France is government-run, socialising all the risks, one has to assume that renewables are much cheaper than nuclear even for them.
As an aside, a big caveat with France's high nuclear output is that the only reason they can achieve this is that they have very high power exports. Generally, nuclear power output is inflexible and can't economically follow grid load. This means you usually can't run a grid with much more than 30-40% nuclear power, which is the minimum level of demand over the entire day. France has done some innovative things with adjusting nuclear output, but doing this really kills the already terrible economics of nuclear power.
In general, you need other more flexible generators to cover the variable part of demand. France gets around this limitation by being able to export their excess power to nearby countries that's don't have much nuclear power.
Can you say more about nuclear power output being inflexible? This means they can't easily lower or raise the level of steam generation? I'd like to be more informed.
Obviously, if true, that makes nuclear a poor candidate for peak load management.
In the past, nuclear power plants could really only run with steady stable output that barely budged over days or even weeks. Within the past 10-15 years, plant operators have innovated newer technology that helps reduce this inflexibility.
Depending on the plant's age and other factors, changes in output greater than 15-20% may still need to be scheduled hours or days in advance. However in Europe they're using some newish automated controls that can shorten that gap significantly.
The bigger problem with operating nuclear power plants flexibly has to do with economics. The costs of running a nuclear power plant are mostly fixed costs that don't vary much with plant output. So if you take a nuclear power plant running all the time and instead run it flexibly, so it's only using part of its potential capacity, the plant's operational costs barely budge despite huge drops in power output. To make things worse, plant maintenance costs can actually increase when a plant is run flexibly compared to the 'always running' baseline. So either way, the cost per MWh produced using a flexible nuclear power increases significantly (over an already very high baseline).
Not in the energy business myself, but my understanding is it's hard to manage the "chain reaction" you've undoubtedly heard of. It's apparently a more delicate process to slow down the chain reaction without stopping it entirely, compared to "stop shoving coal/gas into the fire box". I assume the "why is it slow" is a mix of reactor design and safety protocols.
I don't know that there is the analog nation you are looking for, but the UK is reforming its financing for the nuclear industry and is looking to build a new, 1.7 billion pound station.
Since it's a national project, they have the leeway to just do it anyway, and since it's the Tories, they have no one whining about fiscal constraints to their right.
This is a great example of the lobbying power of the nuclear industry. IMO, the new finance approach is basically a scam that shifts even more risk from the power plant construction industry onto ratepayers and taxpayers.
Hinkley Point is way over budget and years late and even though ratepayers and taxpayers are on the hook for a lot of the overage, investors and project owners at least shared some of pain.
The new approach is to move all of the project risk fully onto ratepayers and taxpayers starting from day one. This ensures that when the inevitable delays and cost overruns hit, investors and the people running the project can laugh all the way to the bank.
Perhaps you're right about the landscape in the UK -- I just don't know enough to say. But I attended several nuclear industry events in DC a couple of years ago and I can tell you that if the domestic lobby was as powerful as you suggest, there might have been a few brighter eyes and firmer handshakes. I'm with MY on this one -- rethinking the US regulatory environment to give new nuclear technologies a chance to make it to a demonstration and deployment phase is long overdue.
Sure, there's no harm in regulatory reform (within limits)... but you should understand the expected payoff to be exactly zero.
The nuke bros are living in a fantasyland. None of the extant technologies will ever play out and none of the 4th generation ones really meaningfully change the cost equation.
The only way to change that is to go well beyond "regulatory streamlining" to "cutting corners."
Meanwhile, storage is getting cheaper by the month, as is solar.
Our past discussions of this have been really interesting and changed my opinion on this pretty significantly. I think you have highlighted some major issues that nuclear power has and how it doesn't really clear answers to how to solve them. Unfortunately, I've also grown much disenchanted with Solar in the process. I had seen the Lazards chart that Noah Smith and others have posted and thought that Solar had finally broken through and would be the obvious answer moving forward. Researching it some more, I discovered that Solar bros have almost as many problems to solve as nuclear bros. They've been making progress unlike the nuclear bros, but they need to probably double again the progress they've made to achieve success. I'm much less confident that is feasible in anything close to the short/medium term.
I understand where you're coming from, but I'll point out that the problems that must be solved for renewables to work well are, at heart, *manufacturing* challenges, not engineering, construction, or research ones.
Global society is incredibly good at solving those; we've been good at it and getting steadily better since America and Britain figured out some of the fundamentals in the early 1900's, and especially since WWII.
For the last 5 years, battery technology and manufacturing has been improving at least as rapidly as solar did between 1990 and 2015. Not only in terms of capacity, but also charge/discharge rates, longevity, safety, inputs/precursors, and recycling.
We are arguably already well into "EVs are better than ICEVs" territory as is, but that is only a tenth of the impact we're talking about. We're talking about achieving battery storage costs equivalent to solar installation costs within a decade. The ability to use urban and suburban commuter cars as a "bank" to mitigate the need for public storage infrastructure. Cheaper, longer-lasting vehicles of all sorts, with modular components designed to be swapped out around a powertrain that lasts 1,000,000 miles.
We bought a Nissan Leaf over the weekend after having my current beater hatch totaled by another driver, and frankly that decision was probably premature; they will be better and cheaper in 2 years because of the advances in battery technology.
The only thing that made it sensible now was Nissan's (insane) financing and the fact that the Leaf will lose the full EV credit next quarter.
So I'm quietly optimistic that renewables are, indeed, going to come to the rescue and that the developed world will basically never build another fossil fuel-fired generating station again, nor will most of the poorest nations.
It's the ones in the middle, with meddling governments, lobbying natural resources tycoons, and brand new carbon-intensive investments, that worry me.
I don't self-identify as a nuke bro but I think ruling out any technology is short-sighted. The benefits of nuclear are self-evident and given their role in electricity generation right now I think it's very prudent to ensure that the industry has a future.
Realistically, energy storage creates its own problems. See: the mining of critical minerals that leaves developed countries dependent on less-than-democratic nations with poor environmental and human rights records. Let's not pretend that any of these pathways are going to be easy or that resolving any of these issues will be solved overnight.
Not to me. Again, my expectation for any *sane* loosening of the regulatory environment on nuclear, i.e. one that does not compromise safety, is that it will change absolutely nothing.
The technology is just *hopeless* at present, and I see nothing on the horizon to change that.
"But if all of Minneapolis is on heat pumps and there’s a cold snap, you then have a huge surge in electricity demand that we might need massive overcapacity to meet."
It's a good point, but top of the line heat pumps have a CoP of 2.5 at 17°F (see below), so even at -10°F you're not necessarily running on backup high-wattage heat strips. A combination of these would mitigate the worry:
- More of these cold weather heat pumps
- Electric cars that can provide power to grid overnight (aka V2G; Tesla does NOT currently)
- Air sealing and R60 attic insulation <-- we need better programs here
If I can't heat my home with pumped magma like it's Dwarf Fortress, we haven't developed enough geothermal power.
If moderates were good for anything, it would be repealing anti-green regulations. Conservatives win by not having to pay subsidies. Liberals win by getting clean energy. Wouldn’t the folks in Kansas like to sell us easterners some wind power? Wouldn’t the precious swing voters in Arizona like to sell Californians some solar? The fact that anti-renewable regulations still exist is a scathing indictment of Congress.
There needs to be a group that lobbies for this stuff and gets it on Congress's radar. Is anyone doing that? Our environmental orgs like Sierra Club are mostly hopeless, plus this issue is probably too technical and wonky to capture the public's attention. Plus you'd want to do it in a low-key way anyway, so that it doesn't become a high-salience partisan issue. So if there is a wonky org doing this work, I guess we wouldn't know who it is.
There are lots of things that would improve gdp by a few tenths of a percent or lower emissions by a couple percent which don’t capture the imagination because they are not transformative and exciting. However, if you combined them all, we really would build back better. See also funding more med schools/residencies and encourage foreign doctors who speak english or spanish to practice here
I may be taking crazy pills but I think this is basically the raison d'etre of Slow Boring.
Matt is definitely Doing the Work in his way, but I'm talking about a group that actually drafts proposed legislation and meets with congresscritters. A lobbying group rather than a journalistic one.
I've been working at the bottom of the technology readiness scale on renewable energy generation and storage for over two decades and I think MY hits the nail on the head here, but doesn't say the magic words: we need to diversify energy generation and invest in electricity grids.
The fossil fuel industry likes the idea of throwing money at R&D and hoping for a major breakthrough because they are fully aware how unlikely that is. (Remember the fights over corn ethanol? Switch grass? When BP and others rebranded as 'energy companies'? The ongoing biomass controversy? Not to mention Chinese solar cells made with slave labor.) Saul Griffith has it right—we have to invest in innovation and deployment (i.e., use existing technologies and electrify everything). And MY zeroes in on a major hurdle there, which is the grid. You cannot just dump any old kind of electricity onto an old-school electricity grid. But 'smart grid' technology is a thing that exists and that we can just throw money at to make happen in preparation for it to receive geothermal, wind, solar, etc.
My first lesson in the cynicism of green energy was when my PhD advisor was involved in Bush's hydrogen task force. They made a big show about the 'hydrogen economy' and, IIRC correctly, Bush himself cut an add where he pretended to pump hydrogen into a car at a filling station. My advisor and the rest of the task force immediately stated the facts: we cannot make H2 efficiently, we cannot transport it safely and storing it both dangerous and inefficient. But no one cared. They wanted to cut the ads and, as I would learn, were just greenwashing H2 generation from methane, which is still how much if not all H2 is generated. The scientists on the task force were just props.
After decades of spinning our wheels and playing politics with solar everything from solar panels on the White House to fantasies about moving hydrogen around the existing oil distribution infrastructure, we are too far behind on R&D to make a dent in the near-term. We need to rip out the old regulations that were written with the advantages and caveats of fossil fuel in mind and throw money at proven and emerging technology.
Diversifying generation and investing more in electricity grids sounds good to me, but as always, the devil is in the details.
What would your bullet list of say the top 5-10 things to throw more money at have on it?
That stuff is above my pay grade... I am down in the weeds. But I think the things MY suggests make a lot of sense; more wind and solar, invest heavily in applying fracking technology to geothermal, small-scale nukes and the biomass technologies that have already been proven/deployed. Then throw a ton of money at the electricity grid and, of course, don't stop investing in R&D, but be realistic about the timelines and probabilities of breakthroughs; There are areas like water splitting that seem to be on the cusp of commercialization and niche areas like thermoelectrics for capturing low-quality waste heat that should be a part of every day life 50 years from now.
In my experience, it is hard to get people (including policy makers) to think about energy correctly. There is an entrenched thinking that is fossil fuel centric; i.e., where you can pretty much just plop down a power plant and throw carbon fuel at it for elastic power generation onto a grid designed for those inputs. Plus you have young people who are pushing for energy austerity and doing the fossil fuel industry's lobbying work for them by advocating for de-growth, which reminds a lot of people of getting yelled at for leaving lights on or touching the thermostat. But, as MY has written, plentiful electricity from diverse, zero-carbon sources should be our North Star.
The more I hear about environmental impact reviews, the less I like them. CEQA has the same damn problem of exempting the stuff with the biggest environmental impact.
You'd think at least in Sacramento it would be easy to pass an amendment that says "all renewable energy and mass transit projects are exempted." Is anyone even trying?
I would at least like to see someone make an effort so we can see who if anyone opposes. Efforts have been made on housing, and you can at least understand where the opposition is coming from there: NIMBY property owners and developer-hating leftists. I get that NIMBYs dislike transit too, but this would be a procedural change at a further level of remove from their concerns, so I would think it would be less likely to generate the same level of opposition. But we'll never know unless someone tries.
Two quick NEPA thoughts:
1) The way NEPA exemptions are described is very misleading and makes it seem as if all environmental laws and standards are waived. It happens a bit in this piece and is common elsewhere too, where some sort of NEPA shortcut or categorical exclusion is talked about as exempting from "environmental review". This is not correct. The exemption is from the NEPA process, because NEPA is a process statute - it tells you rules for public comment, meetings, broad guidelines, etc.
Exempting from NEPA just exempts from that process - every single underlying environmental law or regulation still applies, whether it's the clean air act, a wetlands permit, or a land management agencies charge to " preserve for future generations". What's happening is the public process of NEPA is no longer required - sometimes you can even still have public process requirements from some other law (like the Endangered Species Act or APA) even if you are excluded from the NEPA part.
2) I need to nitpick the NEPA public land oil and gas exemptions bit... Yes those categorical exclusions exist but they're actually pretty narrow in the scheme of things - and prior to getting down to the scale of those exemptions there already will have been an EIS or EA level NEPA process on oil and gas development/leasing at large.
That said, having equivalent (or broader, tbh) geothermal versions isn't a bad idea.
Regarding heat pump heating in the winter, another way to make things more efficient is to lay pipes underground and extract heat from there. Not quite geothermal, but temperatures are much less extreme ~20 ft below the surface or so. You can pump heat from underground into a heating system and heat homes. The most efficient way to do this would be to have a system for a neighborhood, as it's a little expensive for every house to dig a 20 foot trench. The other advantage is that in the summer, these underground pipes stay cooler and offer a good place to sink heat rather than the sweltering outdoors.
I had never thought of this but it makes perfect sense. Just do a single heat-exchange fluid reservoir underground, as a snaky manifold, lay it in just like you would the water and sewer lines, and then have hot/cold lines where each house hooks up their heat pump; you draw from the "hot" line in the winter and pump to the cold line; in the summer you reverse the flow.
I wonder if you could do a city bond, paid off by a property tax surcharge, to fund this, similar to how we have that for utility undergrounding?
Yeah that'd be amazing but it seems that cold climate heat pumps are more practical, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_source_heat_pump#In_cold_climates
A few friends and I have them in Utah and they work a treat.
Hah I have no idea of relative efficiencies or ROI on an underground system. If it's easy enough to build heat pumps that operate at low temperatures, then by all means do so! It does look like the COP's of such systems were pretty low, though. Wikipedia even mentions ground source heat pumps as a more efficient technology.
Yeah ground source heat pumps are more efficient for sure, but residential air-source heat pumps are available now that have a CoP (i.e., efficiency rating over resistant heating) of ~1.8 even below 0°F.
https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/qlecuw/coldweather_info_on_top_of_line_bryant_heat_pumps/
If there's a company in US that's democratizing ground source installs I'd love to read about them.
Nice post. I agree, there are some regulatory barriers that are a real problem, and folks like Kevin Drum who think "it just needs more R&D" are too naiive about this.
It's on my mind in particular, because I recently bought a newly constructed home. It has a nice, tall, south facing roof which gets lots of sun. Perfect for solar, right? Well... it's not that easy.
The solar panels themselves are the easy part. About $500 per KW, or $3000 for a typical 6KW system. But installation (plus some other equipment like an inverter) will run you about $15,000-$20,000. You'll have to wait for a licensed electrician (who are in short supply right now), and then get it it inspected by the city before you're allowed to turn it on (ditto). Hopefully the permitting process goes smoothly, because it's completely nonstandard and up to the discretion of the city whether they feel like approving you or not. Even if the cost of panels falls to zero, it wouldn't make much difference in the overall cost.
But hey, once it's done, you've got free electricity right? Nope. You're still on the grid, so they'll charge you for that connection even if you never use it. For me, I don't really use a lot of electricity, so that's about half my electric bill. And I can't "overproduce" and get money back, the most I can do is reduce my energy used to zero, while still paying the grid connection fee.
It'll be a nice backup in case the power grid goes down though, right? NOPE. Solar panels are designed to shut off whenever the grid goes down. In theory this is for safety reasons, but it seems like the utilities just aren't trying very hard to make this work. So despite owning your personal home power plant, you'll still be shivering in the dark with everyone else.
What about going completely off grid, by adding a battery backup? Then you can skip the grid charge and have a real backup. You can buy a 10KWh system from LG (Tesla doesn't even sell there's individually anymore) for that, but it'll run you $10,000, and be prepared to wait a while for installation. And 10KWh really isn't that much- many homes would blow through that in less than a day, or even one night. Might want to get 2 or 3. So now the total cost is more like $40,000-$50,000, even though the panels were only $3000.
But wait- I have an electric car! You can get a used EV for surprisingly cheap, and it'll have a battery way bigger than a wimpy home battery system. A 2019 Leaf has 40 or 60KWh, for example, more than enough to ride out a storm. Charge it during the day, run off the battery over night. The perfect combo, right?
Nope. You can't just "plug in" your house to your EV. EV charging connections are one-way only. There are some hacks you can do to charge a few appliances off of it, but it's pretty limited. Ford claims their new electric F-150 will be able to power your house though. Hopefully they allow it!
Speaking of EVs, you'd think that a new house would include a 240V, high amp outlet in the garage for fast charging, or at least level 2, right? Nope. That's only included for the dryer, in case you need to melt your clothes with ridiculous power. Gotta pay to rewire the garage (Or DIY) if you want to charge an EV inside at any reasonable speed.
Interestingly, none of this is really specific to solar. You'd have the same problems if you want to run your home off a home wind turbine, gas generator, or (in theory) a mini-nuke. And it's a real chicken-and-the-egg problem... there isn't enough political pressure to fix these problems because not many voters have home solar, and not many people have home solar because of these problems. We need to start putting pressure on political leaders to fix these issues.
Where do you live? In Georgia, where I live, the power company buys overproduction at 80% of wholesale price. Lengthy power outages are also extremely rare here, so a grid-tie inverter + whatever renewable you want to generate power with seems like a pretty good setup in my area.
True, all of this stuff is regional, which makes it hard to speak in generalities. Where I live, you can't sell overproduction. I guess you can feel good about yourself that you're doing something good for the environment, but I'm in this for the money!
Being in a sunny, southern state, and having them buy your overproduction- is there a limit on that? Otherwise I'd be tempted to completely cover my roof with solar panels, and make them pay me.
I think there is a limit of output at which you are no long considered "residential," but I'm not sure what that is and I haven't read any accounts of people hitting that limit.
For me, the bigger deal is that the grid-tie saves the need for battery storage, so you can build an array that gets you about your daily power use on average and use grid power to fill the gaps. People in less-sunny areas could also supplement with micro-wind.
Now that I think about it (shooting from the hip with no real expertise beyond what can be read on the internet), a comprehensive solution might be lots of residential-generated power with centralized local storage for smoothing.
I think that solution makes a lot of sense, at least as a high level concept (with the devil in the details).
Right now we have (in the US) a weird system where you can use a *massive* amount of power and barely even notice. I could run a dryer all day, every day, on maximum heat setting, using the energy equivalent of a literal truckload of coal- and the power plant will just me a big bill. The infrastructure is set up for *way* more power than any normal person needs.
But then something goes wrong and like, one tree takes down a power line, so the area loses power. Then I have *nothing*. Better stock up on blankets and canned food, I guess, because they really don't want me generating my own electricity.
Having residential (or at least local) generated power not only saves on transmission, but it also makes people a lot more aware of how much they're using and how this stuff works. People *like* being in control of their own power, it's why tesla solarwalls were so popular despite being massively expensive. The government should handle "smoothing", businesses with unusual power needs, and emergencies, not try to deliver an all-you-can-eat buffet to everyone.
"It'll be a nice backup in case the power grid goes down though, right? NOPE. Solar panels are designed to shut off whenever the grid goes down"
How does this work, technically & practically? How does the solar panel know that the grid is 'down'? It has some kind of automatic shutoff? That can't be overridden? I find this all a bit tough to believe
It would be more accurate to say that the inverter that connects them to the grid (and converts DC to AC) is designed to shut off when there's no power flowing from the grid. And cities/utilities won't allow it otherwise. Possibly there's a way you could hack it yourself but.... how confident are you in your ability to rewire high-voltage power lines?
The inverters are sensing the 60 Hz wave off the grid and using that as their frequency reference --- their waveform needs to be grid-synchronized for your connection to work; otherwise, you'd be imposing the equivalent of an inductive or capacitive load to the system, which drops efficiency. The cutoff's automatic so that your system doesn't feed power into the lines on your street if they've been powered down by the utility (e.g. because they've fallen in a storm), which is a safety hazard.
There are systems that don't do this, but they need specific design and equipment to prevent feeding into the grid if there's nothing on the other end. For most home solar setups to date, the grid's reliable enough that it's not worth doing.
It seems like you're up on the technical details of this. I'm curious, would it be possible to make a house that runs entirely off DC power? I feel like that could massively unlock the potential of home solar. Given that:
Solar panels produce DC
Almost all home appliances use DC (except a microwave, I guess)
So we're paying a double efficiency loss to convert it from DC->AC->DC again, as well as the cost of the inverters and the difficulty of setting it up.
You could build a house entirely off grid, set to be all-DC. Just plug in your solar panels and batteries. Or maybe it's on a small grid with your neighborhood. As long as you understand that the batteries are limited, you'd have some massive efficiency gains, and have a lot of excess power to do whatever you want around noon (mine cryptocurrency maybe).
As I understand it, the main advantage of AC was that it allows stepping up high voltage for long distance transport. But that's totally unnecessary if each house/neighborhood is producing its own power, it's just a huge sunk cost and safety liability that we've gotten used to because... that's how it was always done. Meanwhile we're running 120V of AC through the house everywhere, just to power small consumer appliances that only need 5-10V of DC.
n principle, yes, you could directly power the smaller appliances with DC. I'm less sure about larger items like ovens and fridges and washers and dryers; I think most of their power goes to motors or direct heat conversion, where you don't need to convert to DC but just use AC directly. That said, a few points:
(1) how much power do small appliances & electronics actually use? I suspect it's a minority in most houses.
(2) the switching costs are pretty enormous, given that we've standardized on AC --- though maybe something like a mandate that newly-installed outlets must include a USB-A or USB-C plug might work.
(3) we could impose minimum AC->DC conversion efficiency standards. There's already an Energy Star program for computer PSUs, so you could imagine extending that to anything else with a rectifier, like your phone charger. I think the state of the art these days is well above 95%+ efficiency with 85-90% being pretty standard, but you're probably not going to get that in a $5 phone charger.
If we were doing it again, might it make sense to just do DC directly? Yeah, maybe. Could you imagine a rural electrification program in countries with lots of sun and no existing grid that just jumps directly to self-sufficient / local solar? Sure. Does it make sense to do in the developed world? Meh, not sure....
I did a quick estimate on https://www.saveonenergy.com/energy-resources/energy-consumption/. Not sure how accurate that site is but at least it seemed to line up roughly with my total bill.
Most of my energy use is natural gas, not electric. Once I subtracted all that out, I was left with basically an even split between the "kitchen" (mostly refrigerator/freezer) and "entertainment" categories (mostly from computer monitors). Washer, dryer, dishwasher, and microwave didn't add much because they're just not on very often.
So at least half of my electricity is running off DC anyway, and I'm pretty sure the refrigerator/freezer could be also, if we wanted it to. Not to mention an EV would basically double the electricity usage by itself, and electric heating would massively increase it.
I agree it would be a massive upfront cost. But pretty much anything is going to have that problem. Seems like it would make sense to start by just adding USB-C plugs everywhere, since that's where consumer electronics are heading anyway. And meanwhile, there's a massive developing world that is just now getting large-scale electricity for the first time.
To use your solar when the grid is down, can’t you make that work with a transfer switch?
It's probably possible (other countries allow it), but you'll have to do it yourself. And either somehow convince the city to allow it, or do it secretly and not tell them.
This is an amazing comment. Weird that Tesla stopped doing vehicle to grid (V2G) after the roadster. Would be a huge selling point now that we’re all preppers.
It would be helpful for writers who wish to weigh in on such subjects to get some sort of basic knowledge of science. It would be really really helpful. I quite agree that confronted with facts most people who lack such knowledge.usually resort to the "need more money for R&D" argument. As if spending a pile of money changes the fundamental laws of physics or chemistry or anything else. It never does. It's not that I am against R&D. On the contrary I strongly favor such investments. But then, as a STEM guy, I have made it my business to keep abreast of what is going on in various fields. And the advances, real and potential, just aren't what people imagine them to be. You need to understand the problems.
As a general critique I would say that the idea that deployment is the problem is a real problem. You can't deploy what you don't yet have. But as a more on point critique I would say trying to pass off problems with wind and solar as regulatory problems is really kind of bullshit. Most people just ignore the intermittency problem and speaking vaguely of energy storage. And they generally have zero idea of what they are talking about on that score. When it comes to transmission and getting, say, solar power generated in Arizona to Minnesota the problem isn't regulatory. The problem is that both energy storage and ,sophisticated transmission systems are going to cost a shitload of money and will have their own very evident vulnerabilities. Which means when those cost burdens, which only wind and solar bear, are added to your electricity bill those sources are not cheap. No one else needs them. And I doubt anyone will get away with pretending they are somebody else's problem. Ironically, if we had such capabilities they would literally work better with any generating system than wind or solar. They are particularly well suited to nuclear generation.
I have no objection whatsoever to spending money to explore large scale geothermal experiments. But most of the examples I have looked at are just fundraising scams. The fact is that geothermal sources require a high heat gradient (magma) unless your goal is to generate a big underground mass of cold rock. Any competent engineer would tell you that. Rock is an excellent insulator. You take out heat it gets cold. And without a proximate source of magma to reheat the rock you are screwed. The technology needed to drill to those depths does not exist. It does not matter what red colored maps show. They might as well be on the surface of the sun.
Finally you need to lose this idea that oil and gas are used exclusively for fuel. They are not. A huge percentage, currently over forty, are the basic raw materials of modern civilization. And there are precious few things that you can make without them. If not a single gram were burnt you would still need vast amounts of oil. So we'll just ad those thousands of very specific technological problems we will need to address before we keep anything in the ground.
Closed-loop geothermal is the holy grail - all the benefits of geothermal without the downsides of fracking. A key player here is Dr Eric Van Oort at the University of Texas. Last I heard he was working on a project in Japan to prove the science behind it (heat transfer through dry rock at depth, etc).
If the science gets proven then it's game on. Although my impression is that a SpaceX-style company is needed to bring fast iteration & high error tolerance to the geothermal sector. We're running out of time.
A quibble about heat pumps: if you dig down to where the temperature is 55 degrees year round (so like wine cellar depth) and run the heat exchanging refrigerant lines down there, you can get them to work well even in very cold winters and very hot summers. This is called "ground source" or sometimes confusingly "geothermal" though it is not, AIUI, much like the kind of geothermal heating that Iceland uses.
The sticking point is the up front cost and space requirements of the digging of holes for the exchanger pipes. I would speculate that some combination of creative easement-making and creative financing could make it easier to fit a bunch of buildings with ground source heat pumps at once. Perhaps a coordination problem worth pushing on.
Yeah ground-source is cool, but not super practical compared to air-source cold-climate heat pumps, right? Since you typically install heat-strips to provide backup when you get down to -10°F, these should cover most of the country (and have been popping up in SLC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_source_heat_pump#In_cold_climates
So good to hear progressives moaning the out of control regulatory state.
Hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations. Some doing very important work. But many of them being straight up red tape.
My wife used to work in government permitting/real property management I asked her how long it takes to get something through. She said 1 to 2 years.
I asked her how long it could take if you cleared the red tape, and government bureaucrats actually did their job (while still protecting the environment etc). She said 1 to2 months.
We need real regulatory reform. And we REALLY need to reform our public servants, get rid of most of their protections that make them pretty much impossible to fire, even if they do a poor job.
Excessive regulation....bad. Please inform the squad.
Gonna be fun politicking to convince the environmental faction that fracking for geothermal is good because it's deep enough to not matter, after oil & gas companies said the same thing about regular fracking
They're idiots.
Fracking was always safe as a process. The seismic activity induced is beyond trivial, the "chemicals" involved are less dangerous than the oil and natural gas being extracted, the groundwater contamination risk is beyond trivial (parts of upstate PA have had flammable well water since it was settled in the 1700's)...
The only real risks were always oil and gas leaks, which, surprise, aren't a problem if I'm just injecting and extracting water.
Of course they're idiots and always have been, but they're important idiots when it comes to the present-day Democratic Party. You go to war with the idiots you have, not the idiots you might want or wish to have at a later time.
My overriding theory is "things will get worse before they get better". Has been since the day I got to college and realized exactly how profoundly screwed-up the "left" is, having already realized from my family that the "right" has no interest in confronting any challenge and prefers to pretend everything is A-OK.
We are too rich, too stable, too able to paper over the cracks, and too divorced from the reality of how our ancestors built America into a first-world nation to formulate truly effective policy and fix problems. This is *marginally* less true of the Democrats than the Republicans, but not nearly enough.
So the ship of state will continue to drift until such time as the problems become too large for tribalists to ignore, the cracks too wide for half-assed measures to paper over, the failures too glaring for a bit of money to assuage.
We literally *cannot* go to war with our current idiots, and as such, we simply have to hope that they stop being so stupid once the problems really start to bite.
I think being unable "to formulate truly effective policy and fix problems" is a condition afflicting every government that has ever existed. By its very nature, good government has always been an act, as the great economist Charles Lindblom put it, of "muddling through." To pull out an even more obscure quote, one might liken it to the "slow boring of hard boards."
I agree, to the extent that I think almost every first world nation's governance is always hovering about the edge of "failing, but slowly" and "succeeding, but slowly".
Those two things are very, very different in the long run, though, and the US is on the wrong side of the line at the moment and has been for a couple decades.
We'll see.
There's no guarantee they'll then get better, but actual suffering (as opposed to the cosplayed suffering that the loudest voices on both sides currently engage in) has a tendency to burn some of the fat away.
I believe the current system bears a lot of resemblance to what we saw in the 1910's and 20's, and it's very likely that a major realignment will occur as it did then, and at least an even chance that it will be productive rather than harmful.
I'm beginning to realize that the fundamental issue isn't one of redistribution vs. unfettered capitalism, though that's one of the largest secondary issues. Rather, the biggest problem is that much of the apparatus of state has been captured by rentiers in every facet of life, from housing, through infrastructure, to the healthcare system.
The Democrats mostly want to spend money to paper over cracks best solved by gutting the rentiers, the Republicans are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the rentiers themselves, and the little guy/gal isn't being presented with the information or proposed solutions that would allow him/her to make effective decisions and vote on that basis.
That can only last so long before it breaks.
"I believe the current system bears a lot of resemblance to what we saw in the 1910's and 20's..."
I hope not. From 1900 to the depression was one of the most turbulent periods in American history. And much of the power and angst was more distributed then than it is now.
I was nodding in agreement until you said "seismic activity induced is beyond trivial." I live in a state that had an insane increase in earthquakes during fracking boom, that subsided after appropriate regulations. Seismicity was related to the wastewater disposal wells, not the actual fracking. Once they put some rules in around wastewater injection rates and locations everything was fine. But I can tell you, from data to lived experience, there was definitely some seismicity.
It had nothing to do with fracking itself and everything to do with injection storage of wastes. Most of which have nothing to do with fracking. And it is true that some sites are unsuitable for waste injection. Just like everything else.
I guess our disagreement is how proximal the need to to dispose of fracking wastewater is to “fracking.” I don’t think people complaining about earthquakes would have been reassured by a narrowly but accurately construed definition of what is “caused” by “fracking.” I think on the substance we agree. I’m just saying you’re not going to reassure people who correctly identified increases in earthquakes following increases in fracking and tell them “fracking doesn’t cause earthquakes.”
You don't live in Oklahoma if you think the seismic activity induced by fracking was/is trivial. It caused damage to buildings and homes and I'm not sure that continuing was beneficial vs the costs of repair.
less than 2% of the induced earthquakes are due to fracking - they are byproducts, mostly, of oil extraction.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/oklahoma-has-had-a-surge-earthquakes-2009-are-they-due-fracking
Closed-loop geothermal gets you all the benefits without the fracking.
But in turn is a fairly hellacious engineering challenge.
Kinda. In the end it's just drilling a hole and pushing water down it.
Surprised no mention of the (kind of wild) op ed in WSJ this week claiming that horizontal geothermal drilling under Yellowstone could provide energy AND stave off a civilization altering supervolcano eruption.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/drilling-yellowstone-energy-caldera-eruption-geothermal-super-volcano-renewable-11635449956
I’ve seen some estimates that if the Yellowstone caldera strata giving us problems releasing the heat/pressure buildup would only cost $25 billion. Even if they were off by one or two orders of magnitude that’s easily doable.
Oh this one definitely is pretty out there! Was quite surprised to see the supervolcano framing in a major newspaper. But, hey, if this is what it takes folks to get on board with geothermal, maybe it's worth a try.
The WSJ op-eds (unlike the editorials) are not necessarily bad. You just have to look at the individual author.
How do you guys read all these news articles? Do you have subscriptions to every single major newspaper, or is there still a way to bypass the paywalls that I don't know about?
On the nuclear regulation question, is there a model country that is getting it right? I don't think there is.
Folks keep saying excessive regulations are a big obstacle for nuclear power, but even countries like France, with a history of an industry friendly regulatory climate are backing away from nuclear power because the economics of new builds aren't workable even there (see Flamanville).
China seems to be investing a lot in nuclear power, but their focus seems to have shifted from mass commercial deployments to prototype deployments of innovative new technologies.
Which country is the exemplar of how to build and regulate mass produced commercial nuclear power plants the right way in 2021?
I think it's revealing that China hasn't gone hard on nuclear. If the problem was NIMBYism and squeamish regulators, the folks who happily demolish neighbourhoods that get in their way would be doing it. They are not.
Last time Matt advocated for nuclear, a guy who works in the industry wrote in the comments that Matt under-rates the cost of waste storage, which once added really makes the economics of nuclear unattractive.
China leads the world in coal-fired generation. They're leading the world in building new coal-fired plants. I think their continued reliance on coal is more revealing than their lack of nuclear. They're still very much optimizing on the cost side of energy production.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-china-coal/china-generated-over-half-worlds-coal-fired-power-in-2020-study-idUSKBN2BK0PZ
The economics of nuclear are already plenty unattractive without adding in any extra costs.
The 2021 Lazard levelized cost of energy (LCOE) report just came out and has nuclear power averaging five times the cost of wind and solar:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/
As of this year, wind and solar paired with battery storage that enables it to run all day long on most days now costs less than nuclear power. Also, unlike nuclear power, the cost curve for renewable plus storage projects is trending steeply down.
So given that we have a workable and economic zero carbon solution for 80-90% of our electricity needs, it's just not clear what role current generation nuclear power technology could play.
To make matters worse, nuclear power in general is a terrible option for the other 20% of needed power because it can't economically adjust output quickly based on grid load. With nuclear power, you have to pay 5x the cost 24/7 even if you only need it for a few weeks each year.
Perhaps in 20-30 years one of the promising next-gen nuclear power technologies will be ready for prime time and offer lower costs and/or more scheduling flexibility, but for now, aside for demonstration projects, there isn't a viable economic nuclear power technology that's ready to deploy.
We go over this again and again. That document is good, but misleading because everyone gravitates toward the lowest solar costs which represents the best solar situation possible and doesn't take into account what is required to make that work. Once you get into those details, solar's cost advantages start mitigating quickly.
I’ll just go with “CITATION REQUIRED” as we’ve been through this roughly 6,742,109 times already.
:p
Eh, this is a reasonable point, but the citations need to go both ways. How limiting in practice is "the best solar situation possible"? How much worse does it need to get before coal and gas start to get price competitive?
Also, solar is still pretty early in its tech development cycle, so starting out at 5x better when you have ideal conditions is a really great place to be. Presumably that return will continue to improve as solar technology and practices continue to develop.
Why is solar in the early stages of its tech development cycle? I would have figured it was mid cycle at least.
As for where its at. The chart that most people use to talk about how low the cost of solar has gotten is from Lazard's "Levelized Cost of Energy Comparison - Unsubsidized Analysis" which shows Solar PV - thin film utility scale at between $28 and $37 a MWh in comparison to Nuclear at $131-204. Their research also says that rooftop residential has a cost between $147-$221 which is higher than the nuclear cost.
If you aren't optimizing for solar reception like a utility solar plant, you lose a lot of efficiency by location and placement.
Another challenge is that none of these costs include the cost of storage that is required for solar/wind which is currently very expensive. Nor does it account for utility upgrades necessary to handle power fluctuations from solar/wind. The key is that solar and storage has been getting cheaper while nuclear has been getting more expensive. If the trend continues, then solar/wind + storage could be a great answer. The last issue that became very clear to me is simply the scale of rollout for solar. Using the most efficient method, utility solar, it would take an area about the size of W. Virginia to replace existing fossil fuel generation in the US. That's a huge area dedicated to solar plants and brings immense engineering, construction, and political challenges to the issue as well.
On the amount of land needed, I'd counter that no one is suggesting we only use solar. It'd be a mix of solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, and hydro. onshore wind land use is very compatible with dual use as the ranchers in Texas have learned.
Finally, even if we stick with the 22,000 sq mile land area estimate that's been thrown around, you have to put it into context:
Here are some other examples of land use in the range of tens of thousands of square miles:
40,223 square miles – size of the land leased by oil and gas industry
13,000 square miles – the US land impacted by coal surface mining
49,300 square miles – the land used to grow corn for ethanol
https://www.freeingenergy.com/how-much-solar-would-it-take-to-power-the-u-s/
Comparing the cost of rooftop solar to nuclear is meaningless.
Rooftop solar production does need to the transmission and distribution network before it gets used. In New England, transmission and distribution make up about 60% of the delivered kWh charge. Energy is only 40% of the cost. So rooftop solar is competing against the entire delivered kWh cost, not just the 40% of cost for generation.
Second, I agree with your overall point that Lazard is just an estimate and it includes a ton of assumptions and generalizations and leaves out some relevant stuff. But it does cut both ways. L:azard uses the same cost of capital input for all generation sources even though nuclear is a ton more expensive to finance compared to wind, solar, or storage. And that's after giving nuclear a huge handicap from ratepayer and taxpayer guarantees.
Finally, pro nuclear folks (I used to be one, btw) seem to ignore the fact that you can't run a grid with only nuclear power just like you can't run a grid with only solar or wind.
Nuclear power can't economically follow load and that means to have a workable grid, you need to pair it with something else that's more flexible like batteries or hydro. For some reason the folks that say we should add in the cost of storage to solar or wind seem to ignore that nuclear power also needs storage or something else to support it.
I'm not sure if we are disagreeing with each other or not, but it seems to me like your rooftop solar example is useful (especially because a lot of residential rooftop solar includes an onsite storage battery). On the one hand, you can look at that and say that it's somewhat inefficient and not cost competitive with industrial nuclear, which has its own issues discussed elsewhere. But you could also look at that and say that we are basically turning residential housing into a relatively inefficient power source that might be less efficient than a massive industrial solar farm but can sit on top of the existing built infrastructure, is safe and maintainable, and which provides all of the roof-related benefits that people have traditionally built roofs on their homes to obtain. And when you do that, you drive an industry that continues to innovate in the solar space and shrinks the size and cost of your West Virginia solar farm a lot by providing localized energy collection and storage and by improving recovery rates.
12 hours after you posted this, China announced a plan to build 150 nuclear reactors and produce more nuclear energy than the US.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/china-premiers-cautious-take-on-economy-boostscommodity-pessimists/2021/11/03/bcfd1030-3c71-11ec-bd6f-da376f47304e_story.html
Thanks for posting. This section on cost structure from the Bloomberg article is very interesting:
About 70% of the cost of Chinese reactors are covered by loans from state-backed banks, at far lower rates than other nations can secure, said Francois Morin, China director at the World Nuclear Association.
That makes a huge difference because most of the cost of atomic energy is in upfront construction. At 1.4% interest, about the minimum for infrastructure projects in places like China or Russia, nuclear power costs about $42 per megawatt-hour, far cheaper than coal and natural gas in many places. At a 10% rate, at the high end of the spectrum in developed economies, the cost of nuclear power shoots up to $97, more expensive than everything else.
“People say nuclear is expensive in the West, but they forget to say it’s expensive because of interest rates,” Morin said.
China keeps the exact costs a state secret, but analysts including BloombergNEF and the World Nuclear Association estimate China can build plants for about $2,500 to $3,000 per kilowatt, about one-third of the cost of recent projects in the U.S. and France.
I definitely think nuclear storage is underplayed by nuclear advocates, but not sure if that is biggest issue for China. I think its more likely that coal production and power generation in China sustains a lot of jobs and has a lot of political influence.
Actually, Matt didn't use the term "Nevada NIMBYs" which I think was astute of him. "NIMBY" is a pejorative term, often for very good reasons. But if I were a Nevadan, I'm not sure how excited I'd be about having a mountain full of deadly nuclear waste in my backyard.
(If there are actual Yucca Mountain YIMBYs reading these comments, I'd love to hear from them.)
I think the YIMBYs case for Yucca Mountain storage is that there is very little risk and we should pay the state of Nevada to store it.
Isn't South Korea doing this? They're building 4 for the Emirates per a NYT article yesterday.
France is instructive since they are basically carbon neutral for electricity generation (around 80% nuclear, 20% renewables) but they have lost the appetite for more nuclear. Since nuclear energy in France is government-run, socialising all the risks, one has to assume that renewables are much cheaper than nuclear even for them.
I agree.
As an aside, a big caveat with France's high nuclear output is that the only reason they can achieve this is that they have very high power exports. Generally, nuclear power output is inflexible and can't economically follow grid load. This means you usually can't run a grid with much more than 30-40% nuclear power, which is the minimum level of demand over the entire day. France has done some innovative things with adjusting nuclear output, but doing this really kills the already terrible economics of nuclear power.
In general, you need other more flexible generators to cover the variable part of demand. France gets around this limitation by being able to export their excess power to nearby countries that's don't have much nuclear power.
Can you say more about nuclear power output being inflexible? This means they can't easily lower or raise the level of steam generation? I'd like to be more informed.
Obviously, if true, that makes nuclear a poor candidate for peak load management.
In the past, nuclear power plants could really only run with steady stable output that barely budged over days or even weeks. Within the past 10-15 years, plant operators have innovated newer technology that helps reduce this inflexibility.
Depending on the plant's age and other factors, changes in output greater than 15-20% may still need to be scheduled hours or days in advance. However in Europe they're using some newish automated controls that can shorten that gap significantly.
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power-plants-ramps-up/
The bigger problem with operating nuclear power plants flexibly has to do with economics. The costs of running a nuclear power plant are mostly fixed costs that don't vary much with plant output. So if you take a nuclear power plant running all the time and instead run it flexibly, so it's only using part of its potential capacity, the plant's operational costs barely budge despite huge drops in power output. To make things worse, plant maintenance costs can actually increase when a plant is run flexibly compared to the 'always running' baseline. So either way, the cost per MWh produced using a flexible nuclear power increases significantly (over an already very high baseline).
Not in the energy business myself, but my understanding is it's hard to manage the "chain reaction" you've undoubtedly heard of. It's apparently a more delicate process to slow down the chain reaction without stopping it entirely, compared to "stop shoving coal/gas into the fire box". I assume the "why is it slow" is a mix of reactor design and safety protocols.
I don't know that there is the analog nation you are looking for, but the UK is reforming its financing for the nuclear industry and is looking to build a new, 1.7 billion pound station.
https://www.energylivenews.com/2021/11/02/britains-nuclear-hits-milestone-as-eyes-are-glued-to-cop26/
£1.7b is a recent cash injection. The current cost estimate is £22b (about $30b), and it's already been revised up many times.
Christ, the last time I checked it was about half that.
Y'all are even worse at this than we were in Georgia.
May I introduce you to California High Speed Rail.
HS2 is no prize on that front, either.
Marginally less fucked, but only marginally.
Since it's a national project, they have the leeway to just do it anyway, and since it's the Tories, they have no one whining about fiscal constraints to their right.
Thank you for this clarification!
This is a great example of the lobbying power of the nuclear industry. IMO, the new finance approach is basically a scam that shifts even more risk from the power plant construction industry onto ratepayers and taxpayers.
Hinkley Point is way over budget and years late and even though ratepayers and taxpayers are on the hook for a lot of the overage, investors and project owners at least shared some of pain.
The new approach is to move all of the project risk fully onto ratepayers and taxpayers starting from day one. This ensures that when the inevitable delays and cost overruns hit, investors and the people running the project can laugh all the way to the bank.
Perhaps you're right about the landscape in the UK -- I just don't know enough to say. But I attended several nuclear industry events in DC a couple of years ago and I can tell you that if the domestic lobby was as powerful as you suggest, there might have been a few brighter eyes and firmer handshakes. I'm with MY on this one -- rethinking the US regulatory environment to give new nuclear technologies a chance to make it to a demonstration and deployment phase is long overdue.
Sure, there's no harm in regulatory reform (within limits)... but you should understand the expected payoff to be exactly zero.
The nuke bros are living in a fantasyland. None of the extant technologies will ever play out and none of the 4th generation ones really meaningfully change the cost equation.
The only way to change that is to go well beyond "regulatory streamlining" to "cutting corners."
Meanwhile, storage is getting cheaper by the month, as is solar.
Our past discussions of this have been really interesting and changed my opinion on this pretty significantly. I think you have highlighted some major issues that nuclear power has and how it doesn't really clear answers to how to solve them. Unfortunately, I've also grown much disenchanted with Solar in the process. I had seen the Lazards chart that Noah Smith and others have posted and thought that Solar had finally broken through and would be the obvious answer moving forward. Researching it some more, I discovered that Solar bros have almost as many problems to solve as nuclear bros. They've been making progress unlike the nuclear bros, but they need to probably double again the progress they've made to achieve success. I'm much less confident that is feasible in anything close to the short/medium term.
I understand where you're coming from, but I'll point out that the problems that must be solved for renewables to work well are, at heart, *manufacturing* challenges, not engineering, construction, or research ones.
Global society is incredibly good at solving those; we've been good at it and getting steadily better since America and Britain figured out some of the fundamentals in the early 1900's, and especially since WWII.
For the last 5 years, battery technology and manufacturing has been improving at least as rapidly as solar did between 1990 and 2015. Not only in terms of capacity, but also charge/discharge rates, longevity, safety, inputs/precursors, and recycling.
We are arguably already well into "EVs are better than ICEVs" territory as is, but that is only a tenth of the impact we're talking about. We're talking about achieving battery storage costs equivalent to solar installation costs within a decade. The ability to use urban and suburban commuter cars as a "bank" to mitigate the need for public storage infrastructure. Cheaper, longer-lasting vehicles of all sorts, with modular components designed to be swapped out around a powertrain that lasts 1,000,000 miles.
We bought a Nissan Leaf over the weekend after having my current beater hatch totaled by another driver, and frankly that decision was probably premature; they will be better and cheaper in 2 years because of the advances in battery technology.
The only thing that made it sensible now was Nissan's (insane) financing and the fact that the Leaf will lose the full EV credit next quarter.
So I'm quietly optimistic that renewables are, indeed, going to come to the rescue and that the developed world will basically never build another fossil fuel-fired generating station again, nor will most of the poorest nations.
It's the ones in the middle, with meddling governments, lobbying natural resources tycoons, and brand new carbon-intensive investments, that worry me.
I don't self-identify as a nuke bro but I think ruling out any technology is short-sighted. The benefits of nuclear are self-evident and given their role in electricity generation right now I think it's very prudent to ensure that the industry has a future.
Realistically, energy storage creates its own problems. See: the mining of critical minerals that leaves developed countries dependent on less-than-democratic nations with poor environmental and human rights records. Let's not pretend that any of these pathways are going to be easy or that resolving any of these issues will be solved overnight.
"The benefits of nuclear are self-evident"
Not to me. Again, my expectation for any *sane* loosening of the regulatory environment on nuclear, i.e. one that does not compromise safety, is that it will change absolutely nothing.
The technology is just *hopeless* at present, and I see nothing on the horizon to change that.
"But if all of Minneapolis is on heat pumps and there’s a cold snap, you then have a huge surge in electricity demand that we might need massive overcapacity to meet."
It's a good point, but top of the line heat pumps have a CoP of 2.5 at 17°F (see below), so even at -10°F you're not necessarily running on backup high-wattage heat strips. A combination of these would mitigate the worry:
- More of these cold weather heat pumps
- Electric cars that can provide power to grid overnight (aka V2G; Tesla does NOT currently)
- Air sealing and R60 attic insulation <-- we need better programs here
Just bought this: https://www.behler-young.com/UserFiles/Resource/PDS284ANV-01.pdf