Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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And this shows exactly why investing in nuclear is not the answer every tech bro thinks it is. Its far cheaper to built renewable and more importantly far far far quicker.
It is AN answer, but also not the only answer. Generating and moving power around is extremely complex and just seeing "Solar cheaper per Watt" and defining it as the best in all cases is silly. If you changed the axis to be size per MWh, then you would draw a totally different conclusion.
It was the answer. Now solar is so cheap that spamming panels and investing into ways to save the excess energy seems cheaper. By the time nuclear plants are done you're going to be at least 8 years into the future. Solar panels however are directly implementable. And even cheaper now.
Solar still doesn't work at all night, no matter how cheap it gets.
It's not very useful for most of Northern Europe and birth America during the winter months. Even if it was free you'd still need alternatives.
Yup, and you're not going to be able to make enough batteries, and if you could, it would be prohibitively expensive.
There are other options for energy storage, but they all have massive caveats. We'll need something reliable as a backbone until we find a good way to store power.
This is the issue: you can use batteries to store energy for the night during the day. Batteries that store over longer periods such as long cloudy spells and large seasonal differences are too expensive. On the other hand, on a global scale this is really mostly a concern in Northern Europe (where I happen to live).
Even overnight storage is expensive.
But yes, it needs to work in both the summer and the winter, so anything not at the equator is going to have seasonal challenges. I'm excited about a lot of innovating battery proposals, such as stacking heavy boxes and hydrogen generation, but none of those are anywhere near capable of production scale. The massive gorilla in the room is using EV batteries during the night and recharging them during the day (the car would reserve enough for your morning commute), but that's largely theoretical and charging infrastructure is far from sufficient to make that work at scale (not to mention I don't think there are enough EVs). We have trouble making enough batteries to keep up with EV demand, so there's no hope of using conventional batteries to actually transition a large countries anytime soon.
So until we solve those problems, we need an energy backbone. Nuclear is a great option, especially if we can destigmatize it so construction can be cheaper. I live in an area that would be perfect for it (Utah USA, just stick it in the desert on the other side of the mountains), yet people keep blocking every proposal out of FUD. So a lot of our energy comes from coal and gas, and we sell a our excess to California, which is utterly stupid since we have geography that collects pollution and makes the air unhealthy to breathe.
Scotland has been meeting pretty much its entire energy demand with renewables for a good while now, because there are options other than solar, primarily wind
Renewables. Not solar.
8 years is a drop in the bucket when it comes to long term production.
I'm all for renewables but keep in mind a nuclear plant can produce 24/7 regardless of conditions while many renewables cannot. I don't see an issue with diversification here rather than pointlessly advocating for a one-size-fits-all solution.
A nuclear plant can't "produce 24/7 regardless of conditions". Obviously natural disasters affect them. Nuclear plants need water so any flooding or tsunami can affect them. They also need maintenance because they are very complicated water boilers.
They require a lot of educated people to run them, whereas a wind turbine requires a few guys to check on them sometimes. Solar just requires some dudes to brush off the panels occasionally. That can probably be automated too.
Solar's lack of moving parts is something people overlook, too. Hail storms supposedly rarely damage them, and if they do, you can just replace individual panels.
Navy has been operating nuclear submarines for 80 years. You don't have to be that educated
I used to work with a guy who was a nuclear tech before getting out of the military and he legitimately made me concerned about the level of intelligence they require to do the job.
Demand isn't a 24/7 constant value.
Nuclear doesn't match demand and supply.
Nobody said it was, and I have no idea what the statement, "Nuclear doesn't match demand and supply" is supposed to mean.
Because it doesn't help. Renewables want to be paired with something that can easily be spun up and down as needed. Nuclear doesn't fit that model. It tends to make it worse, because cheap energy we could be getting from solar or wind has to give way to the nuclear baseload instead.
It's something of the opposite problem of the sun not shining at the same time the wind doesn't blow. At times where you have tons of both, you want to store them up for later. Nuclear forces a situation where you have to do that even more.
I'd be willing to bet that the cost of nuclear energy derived electricity is going up because most countries haven't been building new plants for the last like 50 years
Average age of a nuclear power plant in the USA: 42 years
Average age of a nuclear power plant in the EU: 31 years
Average original intended operational lifespan: 20-40 years
To put their age into perspective, the average US nuclear plant was built closer in time to the Trinity nuclear test in 1945 than to today (along with any other plant 39 years or older)
This doesn't prove that nuclear energy is bad, only that slowly degrading nuclear energy technology from decades ago is bad
You can look up the costs of nuclear in a country like France which is easily the most consistent builder of nuclear in the west and its not much better.
The average age of a nuclear power plant in France is 37 years
They have 56 total reactors, and have only built 6 in the last 30 years (with the most recent one being connected to the grid in 1999, 24 years ago)
Which is a fraction of the nuclear the United States has.
I mean, it's a fraction in the sense that 2/3rds is a fraction (The US has 92 operating nuclear reactors as of 2023)
Even if that's true, it's not something we can change without more than a decade of investment. Good batteries will be here before that, if not here already.
No it doesn't. Cheap solar is great but even if it was $0, you'd still need some other tech to provide electricity when the sun is down. So it's either gas, batteries, nuclear, etc. but you can't just use solar alone.
And until batteries get good enough, nuclear is the cleanest option we have.
How long will it take for us to get good enough batteries? If it's less than 10 years, then it's less than the time to build a nuclear power plant.
Oh, and the answer may very well be that we already have batteries that are good enough.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1126523766/water-batteries-could-store-solar-and-wind-power-for-when-its-needed
Diversifying our energy needs in case of a crisis isn't a bad idea, but we do need to prioritize renewable energy.
The problem right now is that we need to find better ways to turn renewable energy into stable, reliable power. The power production problem is highly dependent on balancing power generation and demand, and any excess energy must be stored, used, or wasted.
The main benefit of gas/coal/etc. is that we can (almost) always control the output to a close margin based off of demand projections, which are typically updated every 15 minutes. That being said, the drawbacks of using this form of generation are obvious and need to be addressed.
For renewables like solar and wind, we can't always predict the output, so in the larger scale of power balance, we need to supplement it with something that can make up for fluctuations in generation. In the current system, this is from conventional sources.
The goal is to implement a robust energy storage system, ideally one that can hold a huge amount of excess renewable power during the day (largely due to solar), and reliable output that power when it is needed (higher demand at night). I would love to see the day where our nation is fully powered by renewables, and I'm super happy to see that there have been pushes to build up renewables, but the target scenario relies on big advancements in storage.
I would suggest anyone who is interested in what I said to look up "california duck curve solar" for some reading on what challenges solar overgen presents in bright and sunny states.
All that being said... we can do it! I sincerely hope we reach a point where we can phase out dirty generation across the globe, but it will take a lot of time and effort.
source: taking several power systems courses as part of my EE degree
Agreed. This is spending that our country isn't willing to do, mostly because of what we already have (both in terms of infrastructure and in political influence). Personally, I hate this.
As for Cali's duck curve issue, desalination is a great idea, but expansion of renewables and storage should really come first. Keep in mind that the current Cali grid generates much less dirty power during the day, where solar covers a majority of demand. Should we divert that solar power to desalination, we would need to ramp up dirty power generation during the day, and we would continue to generate dirty power at night.
While I agree with you, we also have to consider what this would do at scale. The 70% of excess power that you lose here translates to wear on the solar panel systems that is never realized into power. That is, the systems will wear at the same rate, but the amount of power you can utilize over the lifespan of the systems is decreased. It's still a better solution than not implementing these at all, but I'd be wary as to how reluctant our society would be to the spending, especially if the ratio of cost to utilization(?) becomes skewed.
Well, that's an issue in of itself. It'd be great if we could waste less power in conventional generation, but it'd be even better if we could match or even beat that with renewables. I hope we can reach a point where everyone can agree to implement renewables sooner than later, but I don't see dirty power's political influence allowing for changes until renewable is equal to or better than dirty power. Which sucks, but a lot about our political system sucks.
Yeah, solar + wind + highly connected grids can go a long way to balance loads and make up for the intermittent nature of wind and solar.
Also every bit of atomic energy we use now humans have to pay for for centuries to keep the waste safe
Normally these guys are all about passive income and buying over subscriptions and things like this but if your actions lead to generations having to pay for it suddenly it's not as bad...
Pay for centuries to keep it safe? We literally just throw it in an old mine shaft and fill it with concrete, it's really not that monetarily or resource intensive
We have reactor designs that use already spent fuel, we just aren't building them. We have enough spent fuel for centuries, and afterwards the reprocessed fuel is much less radioactive, and only for a few decades.
The vast majority of nuclear waste isn't fuel, it's cladding, equipment, etc. With that said, nuclear waste is literally a solved problem and the fact that people are still droning on about it shows how powerful fossil fuel propaganda is.
The folks that work at the nuke plant around here have this really cute saying. They say working there is like playing "Hide and seek for a grand a week" (it's an old saying so needs adjusting for inflation) Then they like to say "the cost of labour has no impact on the cost of electricity"
They also like to shit on wind power.
None of that is true. That's not how it works.