> But this is simply wrong. One can easily imagine a 100% renewable system of that kind. At current costs in the US it would likely be cheaper than a nuclear solution.
Sorry my friend, in order to make assertions like that one has to take the time to do some of the math. I have. The gap between what people are imagining and reality is quite large.
Assuming a 1000 GW requirement, in other words, we need that much power and we do not currently have it...so we have to build it:
Using 325 W panels, considering their cost, cost of installation, wiring, structure costs, permits and battery (without them the whole thing is kind of pointless), the total cost of the system is in the order of $40 trillion dollars.
A 1.1 GW nuclear power plant costs about $9 billion. We would need 910 of them. That total cost comes out to $8.2 trillion.
In other words, nuclear is about 1/5 the cost of the equivalent solar system.
However, the story does not end there. This is still very much hand-wavy until we look at other numbers.
For example, how long would it take to build these systems?
Assuming it takes 10 days to install a solar a 10 kW system, and we manage to install 10,000 solar systems at a time (simultaneously) across the entire nation. In other words, every ten days 10,000 new systems come online. Well, we need one billion systems, which means this will take 2740 years. Imagine that: We bring online 365000 systems PER YEAR and it still takes nearly 3000 years. Check my math please.
Nuclear? If we had a mandate to start building nuclear plants tomorrow and we took the time to setup a the process and controls to achieve a run rate of 1 year per plant...and we build one plant per state per year...that means 50 per year. Which translates into 1000 plants in 20 years. If I am off by 100%, this means we do it in 40 years.
To me nuclear --with commitment and a no-bullshit united effort to execute-- seems like the only viable solution.
There's more...
How many cells would be needed for the aforementioned solar solution. Assuming approximately 1200 cells per battery pack (Tesla 2170's), this means we need nearly 3.5 trillion cells. I am not even going to get into what this might translate into in terms of minerals, mining, transportation, CO2 generation, environmental damage, etc. I don't even know how long it might take to make 3.5 trillion cells and how much energy it might take to make them. These are numbers I need to research and put into the model at some future point. Right now, given what I've looked at, the whole thing seems entirely ludicrous on first inspection.
Even better, the above calculation for solar assume 100% efficiency. In other words, a 10 kW solar array that actually produces 10 kW 24/7, which is ridiculous. It also assumes inverters and energy conversion equipment that is 100% efficient...which is equally ridiculous.
What I am trying to convey, going back to your comment, is that we can imagine anything at all and it can sound fantastic. Until we take the time to do the math there is no way to know if reality and these imaginary solutions actually align in any way.
I don't think I am wrong at all. I could be off by some amount, sure, yet I think the difference still dwarfs solar by far. If we want electric ground transportation, I think the only path forward is a massive commitment to nuclear.
Speaking of utopia: It would be fantastic to see the worlds nuclear arsenals being converted to nuclear energy generation. From destroying humanity to improving life all over the planet. Not sure that kind of leadership exists anywhere.
>Right, but then how do you displace the remaining fossil fuel use?
The cost effective way would be with wind farms, pumped/battery storage and demand shifting.
(this would be a nice problem to have, by the way, but we are STILL churning through terawatt hours of gas while the sun is shining and the wind is blowing all over).
Nuclear power isnt dispatchable. It's not just 5x more expensive. It would overproduce during times when we don't need electricity and underproduce when we do.
> d be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper
Cost is not just a single factor. Energy density is very important too. Solar farms take huge amounts of space to produce very little energy compared to a nuclear plant.
> we already have them in mass production: solar panels, wind power generation and battery storage.
I always hear that abstract argument but do we have the math right on this?
What would it take to provide enough power in the US with only those solutions (+ hydro and other non nuclear non fossil fuel solutions)?
Do we have an idea of the amount of material and pollution that would be generated by building (and then recycling) all those panels and batteries?
I would like to live in a world where we don't need nuclear but I am not convinced we can realistically do without (assuming the same standard of living).
> Currently the alternative to solar and wind, is coal and gas.
No, and this vision is the problem. Hydro, geothermal, nuclear, are other options that can make sense depending on the context (of course you don't want to start a nuclear program from scratch, but if you already have a nuclear industry and you're in northern Europe, then it makes much more sense than solar).
> I don't see how wind and solar don't make sense.
Wind and solar make total sense. All we need to do is overbuild wind/solar generation + invest in energy storage capacity. This can be done relatively quickly, certainly much more quickly than building new nuclear plants.
> with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear ... does it even make sense for governments to go down this route?
If this works without the sun shining then, yes, it makes sense. It is always good to have multiple sources of energy even if only as a form of redundancy. Our world depends on power.
> You don't think we need to, or you hope we don't need to?
I'm researching this to have some concrete data, but I doubt I'll have it together soon enough to share in this thread. Will definitely share on HN when this topic comes back around with what I find.
> Look around: all the ideas to replace them right now are wishful thinking.
I don't think this is true at all. Solar is improving at a rapid pace and is already cheaper. We need a large scale rollout, but that's a will issue, not a tech issue. Nuclear is always an option as well. You can see this in many places, here's a graph of solar production in the US, that rise looks amazing!
>Everything has an impact on the ecosystem, is your point that nuclear has less of an impact than solar?
Yes. That was my point. Much less.
The other argument I would make is I'm not seeing any evidence that solar actually solves any problem for us. It can't replace fossil fuels, and in fact needs fossil fuel back-up because there is no battery technology (today or upcoming) that can store enough energy to, say, power a city overnight. The global population continues to grow and with it energy needs. Worse, energy/capita is also growing. This means that as bad as solar is today on the environment, it is only going to get worse.
>>And maybe most importantly, acknowledge that nuclear energy is far more expensive than other green energy options
It is not really though when you factor in ALL of the costs of the main renewables (wind and solar), one of the big problems with both is the fact their output curves normally do not match demand curves every well, meaning when wind and solar are producing power, the demand for that power is at its lowest.
Thus wind and solar can only be a viable replacement for Fossil fuel and nuclear if you add in methods of energy storage, so electricity can be stored when it being produced and then consumed when it is needed.
Once you factor in this storage / demand problem the costs of wind and solar go through the roof
> Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall.
I like nuclear. I have always liked nuclear. However: it's always sunny somewhere on Earth, and the total amount of solar energy delivered to us by nature's finest fusion reactor is something like 170TW.
If you will indulge me the geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place, is there any particular reason we couldn't switch to all-solar?
>have to start deploying as much renewable energy generation as physically possible
Do reasonable people still believe we can simply produce millions of square miles of solar panels and wind mills(that have their own production and maintenence issues), and that will somehow solve our energy issues? It's just not going to happen. We need nuclear power....and more.
> Solar and wind are economical, so now the biggest issue is scaling them up.
I appreciate your passion and desire to fix our planet. But am I the only one who thinks this is the biggest distraction to solving the energy problems of today and the next 100 years? It is just very difficult to get solar to produce the type of energy the world needs for the next 100 years. And it’s the 21st century — its embarrassing that we are talking about wind energy!
Simply put, we need nuclear power. We need to spend more time and energy trying to innovate on nuclear energy. That’s what is needed to support the power needs of 10 billion people who will have the energy demands of a modern western nation today. Solar and wind will just not cut it.
> Compare this to nuclear. Let's increase our production levels 100x.
Nuclear power already produces 10% of the world's electricity [1]. A 100x increase leaves the world with 10 times as much electricity as is needed, all coming from a decarbonized energy source.
Wind and solar are cheap because we don't currently have to even out their intermittency. Take away peaker plants and then intermittent sources become way more challenging. Solar produces energy in a sinusoidal pattern daily, requiring at least 12 hours of storage for truly non-intermittent solar plants. It also fluctuates over the course of the year due to weather and inclination of the Earth [2]. Wind power similarly sees fluctuations over the course of the year [3].
>Is it worthwhile compared to wind farms and solar power?
The sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t blow all the time, and batteries often are astronomically expensive and impractical at large scales. Solar and wind vary greatly, both over an individual 24-hour period, and seasonally throughout the year. A nuclear plant is producing its maximum capacity 93% of the time, as opposed to wind (34%) and solar (24%). To get 1 GW of reliable energy at any given time, you need 3-4 GW of wind and solar in the hope it will be enough, as opposed to 1.1 GW of nuclear. (Worth noting that coal is only 48% reliable).[1][3]
In order to build a grid that is able to meet demand consistently and reliably, you would have to massively overbuild renewables so they were able to meet peek demand, and deal with the issue of huge load shedding during times of overproduction. See section 5 and 6 of [1] for a study of what it would take to reach 80% and 100% renewables for California. To reach 0% fossil fuels, a total of about 7GW of nuclear power (the equivalent of 4 Diablo Canyon plants) would reduce needed wind by 11.5GW (the equivalent of over 5 million wind turbines) and solar by 5.7GW (the equivalent of 1.8 million rooftop systems). When you only need 40% the capacity, even double the cost is cheaper. Nuclear is only expensive when you compare it to coal and natural gas, which are baseload generating power sources. Again, with intermittent renewables, it is cheaper to build nuclear than to massively overbuild solar, wind, and grid level batteries.
>Is it cheaper than demand shaping/wind/solar/grid-scale batteries though? That's the real question.
Hmm, I think one should also add other factors.
Space Requirements for Wind and solar. To generate the same amount of energy as a nuclear power plant a lot of space is needed for Wind and Solar.
Resources to Produce Batteries, Solar Panels and Wind mills. Battery production requires a fuck ton of water. With impeding Water shortages this is suboptimal.
How many Solar Panels and Wind mills can we produce daily?
Not just construction and installation on site, but also mineral mining for the Solar panels.
And then how many factories can produce these, and can that be scaled up?
How many construction workers are there and how many on site installation can be completed.
We need 1200 wind turbines to replace an 30year old nuclear power plant. Windturbine = 3mW, Nuclear power plant = 1.2GW
Just to cover our current demand of electrical energy we need a ton of wind turbines and solar panels. Than add to that every other industry that needs to switch to electricity, Transportation, Chemical Industry, Steel Industry, heating etc. This would quintuple our electrical energy consumption.
Nuclear. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear to produce the same amount of energy (source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/08...)
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