There are a couple of things everyone should know when it comes to energy production:
1) Energy investment is primarily driven by cost, not perceived/actual safety. Safety regulations do affect cost, but not enough to significantly change investment (at least in the US, with the current conditions).
2) Base load power and intermittent (e.g. solar/wind) power are not the same thing, and are not comparable. The concept that "solar and wind will save us all" by themselves is fundamentally incorrect, and actually they make things worse in many ways.
Nuclear fear mongering has resulted in high levels of regulations around nuclear power, but even without that natural gas has an edge in $/kWh. There just hasn't been demand to build nuclear. On top of that, nuclear needs to run 24/7 to amortize high capital costs. With solar/wind, there is high variability in grid supply, so nuclear is significantly less cost effective, and is getting phased out in favor of low-capex plants (i.e. natural gas).
Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
(source: I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group)
> The concept that "solar and wind will save us all" by themselves is fundamentally incorrect, and actually they make things worse in many ways.
Sure, this comes up a lot in these discussions. We don't need to rely 100% on any one type of plant, and we don't even have to eliminate coal plants completely. In the end, we're going to have to use a variety of options to fight climate change, and some of the major ones (like increased efficiency) aren't even going to deal with energy production.
I agree that we'll likely have a mix, but the point I was trying to make was:
Before, we had low variability in demand, so things like nuclear, hydro, and geothermal ("clean" methods of producing base load power) had a chance to compete.
Now, we have high variability in demand, so all of those solutions are out (though hydro is a special case), unless externalities like future-cost of CO2 is priced into production cost via taxes or cap&trade.
Wind/Solar + Storage is too expensive, so the market will shift to wind/solar + natural gas. We'll end up burning possibly more fossil fuel, or roughly the same.
>Base load power and intermittent (e.g. solar/wind) power are not the same thing, and are not comparable.
>Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
Does this scenario look any more promising with a massive government project to build HVDC? That reduces the intermittent aspect of solar/wind (weather comes in band and sun and wind are somewhat anti-correlated, more true over larger distance). Could we push that renewable percentage up higher and use gas more for peaking?
Without HVDC, renewables will probably peak lower (15%) than the 35% I mentioned.
HVDC and UHVDC is getting fairly cost effective now, so I don't think we'll need huge government subsidies to see adoption there, and it can be driven by utilities.
You can amortized wind really well with interconnect (unlike solar, which is strictly diurnal), so we'll see a trend back to wind in the renewable space.
However, I don't think we'll get beyond 50% renewable/hydro. Wind is built in areas where it is cost effective, which are the areas already taken. As you get HVDC, that area expands slightly, but I don't see us getting to 300GW of average wind capacity.
>HVDC and UHVDC is getting fairly cost effective now, so I don't think we'll need huge government subsidies to see adoption there, and it can be driven by utilities.
I've been told by people trying to build these things that there are some pretty terrible incentives discouraging HVDC.
States without access to good wind sites may still oppose HVDC because they would prefer to build either different power sources or less efficient windmills in their own state to capture the tax revenue (or to use federal subsidies that might go unused), so they prefer not to be able to buy power form a farther away state.
And even the reverse can be true. Localities with extremely cheap energy prices can sometimes oppose a HVDC market expansion because if local sources were able to sell to more consumers it would raise their local prices (the market changed over time or was estimated incorrectly, etc).
1) Energy investment is primarily driven by cost, not perceived/actual safety. Safety regulations do affect cost, but not enough to significantly change investment (at least in the US, with the current conditions).
2) Base load power and intermittent (e.g. solar/wind) power are not the same thing, and are not comparable. The concept that "solar and wind will save us all" by themselves is fundamentally incorrect, and actually they make things worse in many ways.
Nuclear fear mongering has resulted in high levels of regulations around nuclear power, but even without that natural gas has an edge in $/kWh. There just hasn't been demand to build nuclear. On top of that, nuclear needs to run 24/7 to amortize high capital costs. With solar/wind, there is high variability in grid supply, so nuclear is significantly less cost effective, and is getting phased out in favor of low-capex plants (i.e. natural gas).
Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
(source: I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group)