I was curious how it compares to the large nuclear plants and came across this [1] where it turns out the top 7 stations are all hydro. The top one being 22GW! Wild.
I really want to like hydro but it has clear negative effects on ecology (namely fish). I am really hoping wind and solar don't affect local ecology as much.
In NV it has really depended on the type of solar but seems anything that takes up large acres of land is going to be an issue. For ground based solar cell arrays we've had issues with the desert tortoise and other animals that it encroaches on their habitat. When you are using the molten salt method the bird population ends up at risk due to the laser like beam of light that gets directed towards the tower. They go so far as to deploy hawks and sounds but inevitably some bird brain gets fried.
There is nothing of meaningful physical scale that can be built that doesn't encroach on some animals habitat. There are no exceptions, whether we're talking about a house, a road, a store, a factory, a power plant, a train line, a commercial office building.
Humans only have two choices: de facto suicide, or encroach.
There is plenty of desert and piles of garbage which are great for building solar panels on.
Another aspect often overlooked is shade is very important, there are methods where building solar panels can actually help the environment by providing much needed shade.
You can also build solar panels of the water, theoretically you could build solar panels suspended in the air.
And they don't really require much to hold them down, compared to a wind turbine which needs to basically be a tree.
We just don't try. There is no effort to experiment because everyone is scared to change.
Hydro is mostly (not entirely) tapped out for power generation (not, of course, for pumped storage, which doesn't require rivers). Creating reservoirs is also ecologically damaging, and releases a lot of methane (although I'm not sure how large the impact is relative to the carbon savings, this could be FUD I'm repeating)
Layman's question: don't the reservoirs create a new habitat for fish? They'd be "artificial" in a way but eh, so is everything else. Or is the problem that they all get turned into fish pie in the turbine...
Fish ladders are expensive and have a fairly large negative impact on yearly electric output. Forcing upgrades makes most dams too expensive, which would mean they get replaced by fossil fueled power plants which can more cheaply operate as backup for wind and solar.
As a result, most hydro power in Europe is in direct violation of environmental laws, but are also given exceptions given the yearly and regular energy crisis.
Imagine in countries like Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos where they dam up rivers for hydro so badly that it prevents downstream flows, wiping out the downstream natural ecology.
They also have wet/dry seasons, so for part of the year everything gets flooded, overruns the dams and wipes out whole villages.
Pretty much a complete eco disaster that few talk about.
> This implies a degree of incompetence or corruption on the part of the dam designer and/or dam builder.
Of course it does!
In Laos/Cambodia, the dams are mostly built by China in order to help them build their silk road to Sihanoukville (so that they can have an easier route to Africa). In Vietnam, it is just plain greed since they aren't in as much of a rush to help China.
Unless you ride a motorbike into the furthest remote areas of these countries, like I have, you wouldn't be the wiser. I've see it all.
Dams are incredible for wet/dry seasons. They allow you to moderate the flow as you fill and release the revivor. It sounds like youre just describing incompetence.
That’s not how it works. After it fills up you have to let water out of the dammed reservoir at the same rate it flows in (on average) or else it overflows. The issues created are related to sediments and flow consistency. More info in the top response here: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/18287/do-da...
I don't appreciate the downvote because you aren't listening to what I'm saying.
When it rains, it floods. They (stupidly) build dams for rate of flow during low season (cause it isn't raining)... then the wet season comes and the dams all overflow. Poor construction practices doesn't help either. They also build dam after dam along the same river... I've see 10+ of these things... ends up being a chain of mess when the first one fails.
Before the dam they'd have around the same amount of water, actually slightly less than that, as the reservoir loses water through evaporation.
Dams don't create water that wasn't there before.
It sounds like they're upset that the dam wasn't oversized to handle flood control in addition to hydropower.
That's a legitimate gripe with public investment and shortsightedness, but the damn aren't going to be making it worse (unless they're managed by morons).
And in many areas, migratory fish are impeded from reaching their spawning grounds. Fish ladders and other contrivances are a poor workaround for an unimpeded flow.
people already mentioned fish, but still water harbors bacteria and generally has lower oxygen levels than turbulent water. also nutrient-rich sediment piles up at the base of the dam instead of getting distributed evenly down the river.
From Wikipedia about the largest dam in the world: 3 georges dam in China.
Mind-boggling size:
"Terrestrial impact
In 2005, NASA scientists calculated that the shift of water mass stored by the dams would increase the total length of the Earth's day by 0.06 microseconds and make the Earth slightly more round in the middle and flat on the poles.[104] A study published in 2022 in the journal Open Geosciences suggests that the change of reservoir water level affects the gravity field in western Sichuan, which in turn affects the seismicity in that area.[105]
"
Tbey just announced the close of financing on Dec 27 so this is great news that the order with GE was confirmed so quickly. Things are moving along nicely.
The GE press release made it sound like they've previously done more than 1GW worth of wind power business with this company. I imagine that the track record made it really easy to get the financing in place.
Offshore stuff is just bigger: the sweet spot is different due to substantial fixed cost of wind park installation. But for perspective, two decades ago when we had our earliest deliveries to wind power sector, 1.3MW turbines were state of the art for offshore.
The thing is you could run the nuclear stations at almost full tilt pretty much all the time while your wind turbines park will output as you noted about 35% of their theoretical capacity.
So, it's cheaper but its output is also almost half of the nuclear plus the intermittent issue.
Even if we consider that you "saved" $23bn, that would buy about 58 Megapack XL from Tesla, at around 4 MWh a piece. So, in the end, you would only be able to pay for 230 MWh, or 0.23 GWh.
You are still very far from the excess 1GW available at any time that the nuclear station would give you.
The way I see it, the economics would need to increase at least 5 folds before it can be thought of as a "solution" and that's before considering the longevity and logistics of those systems.
It is extremely likely that they won't last as long and will be even more of a pain in the ass to manage in the very long term, but that's something greenwashing would rather keep under the radar.
I was actually looking for an impressive picture of an unused wind farm I read about a bit ago (unrelated, on an urbex site) that didn't make sense to run economically but was just sitting there...
Considering all their foreseeable long-term problems, most of the "green" solutions look like more trouble than they are worth. But the only other answer is to force people to consume less or kill 2/3 of humans on the planet so I guess we will keep on the lies...
Vogtle notoriously suffered from cost overruns and was complicated by Westinghouse going through bankruptcy during the construction. It's not obvious that this is a representative example and "1" is not a statistically valid sample size. It was also the first US plant brought online in 40 years, which required a lot of lessons to be learned for the first time in a generation, as would not be the case for future construction.
And you're comparing the ultimate cost of the completed reactor to the estimated cost of the wind project -- the estimated cost of Vogtle was $14B, and now SunZia is getting sued for whatever it is this time. The US makes it unreasonably expensive to build anything.
And even then, by the time you account for capacity factor, short-term storage and long-term storage, even with all the cost overruns, the cost of Vogtle was the same order of magnitude as the estimated cost of a wind project that would supply the same amount of power.
I honestly don't understand why people think these things are particularly in competition with each other. If we're going to stop burning carbon, we're going to electrify transportation, and that is where most of the storage batteries are going to go for the foreseeable future. And then we're going to have to increase the amount of generating capacity to charge all of those batteries. But that's great -- they're batteries so we can charge them with new renewables without having to worry about intermittency.
Except that means we just allocated the bulk of our production capacity for both storage and renewable generation to electrifying transportation, and we still need to stop burning carbon for the existing baseload power generation. Hence nuclear.
Keep in mind that about half the cost is the transmission line. [1]
Vogtle closely matches nuclear costs in Europe so trying to frame it as a special snowflake we will never repeat does not add up. Until proven otherwise it is what nuclear construction is expected to cost in advanced economies.
Bent Flyvbjerg has studied megaprojects. Looking at those the most likely to come in on time and budget are solar pv and wind projects. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum we have nuclear energy only beaten by the Olympics and nuclear waste storage in terms of cost over runs and delays.
The HVDC line adds risk but we have gotten quite experienced at building those globally.
The equivalency in risk you try to construct does not exist.
> Keep in mind that about half the cost is the transmission line.
The main cost of a transmission line is the land. This is a good synergy when it's available but you can't just subtract the cost of the transmission line if you want to know how much the generation costs to build anywhere there isn't a transmission line because you'd still need to pay for the land.
> Vogtle closely matches nuclear costs in Europe so trying to frame it as a special snowflake we will never repeat does not add up.
Western Europe has only brought one reactor online in the last 15 years, resulting in the same kind of issues as Vogtle. Problems caused by not building enough of something can be solved by building more of them, which makes that a poor justification for not building more of them.
> Bent Flyvbjerg has studied megaprojects.
"The Iron Law of Megaprojets: Over budget, over time, over and over again." -Bent Flyvbjerg
Claiming that the estimates are more often wrong for nuclear reactors doesn't help you when you're already comparing the actual finished cost of the nuclear reactor to the estimate for the wind project.
Lets just keep the blinders on and ignore the other projects in Europe:
- Flamanville: Construction start 2007. Hopefully finished 2024. Five times over budget
- Hinkley Point C: Political decision and construction start 2008. Investment decision 2013. Hopefully done by 2028, costs spiraling. n:th of a kind reactor.
- Olkiluoto 3: Construction start 2005. Done 2023.
- Hanhikivi: Never passed the phase when they tried to certify a Russian reactor for western safety requirements.
The problem with nuclear is the Baumol Effect [1]. The construction industry has barely become more efficient while labor costs has increased. Thus magically investing another trillion dollars in subsidies for nuclear is not certain to meaningfully make it cheaper.
We have already had one massive round of subsidies, those didn't pan out. France famously experience negative learning by doing in their nuclear program. [2]
Given the outcome of previous wind projects it is almost certain that it will be on time and on budget.
> Hanhikivi: Never passed the phase when they tried to certify a Russian reactor for western safety requirements.
Hardly an opportunity to learn how to build reactors efficiently when they didn't build anything.
> Olkiluoto 3: Construction start 2005. Done 2023.
This isn't "other projects", it's the one they brought online in the last 15 years.
> Flamanville: Construction start 2007. Hopefully finished 2024. Five times over budget
> Hinkley Point C: Political decision and construction start 2008. Investment decision 2013. Hopefully done by 2028, costs spiraling. n:th of a kind reactor.
The newest of these was started only 3 years after Olkiluoto 3 and 15 years before it came online. The premise is that you can learn from past efforts, not that you can't make the same mistake concurrently in parallel projects.
These are also each in a different country with a different regulator.
> The problem with nuclear is the Baumol Effect
> France famously experience negative learning by doing in their nuclear program.
The Baumol effect would explain the negative learning, but then that isn't anything unique to constructing nuclear reactors. The cost of constructing wind farms or natural gas plants would be equally affected. So something else is going on here, and the something else has a cause that can be analyzed and addressed. If it was possible to do it in 1975 then it should be possible to do it now.
The final investment decision came in 2017. Saying that they didn't learn anything from the 12 years in between is horrifying. Even worse is calling it acceptable to make nuclear sound feasible.
Massive subventions made it possible in the 70s. What was sold never matched reality.
It is easy to see what happens when humanity finds an energy source cheaper than fossil fuels.
We've dammed up almost every single river globally. Nuclear energy never became cheaper.
Today we have found a new power source that is cheaper than fossil fuels. Renewables. Which barely have an geographical limitations. We are in for a ride as Jevons Paradox plays out its course.
- CCGT plants take advantage of scale from the airline industry.
- Coal is dead.
- Wind turbines are productized with only the foundations being true construction.
Nuclear is attempting to be a more expensive coal in 2024.
> Saying that they didn't learn anything from the 12 years in between is horrifying.
Construction has a timeline. You can't install the pipes before you pour the foundation. If in year 15 you learn about a mistake you made in year 10, the plant which is three years behind you has already done the same thing. But the one that starts construction today doesn't have to do that.
> Massive subventions made it possible in the 70s. What was sold never matched reality.
We built hundreds of nuclear plants that have been providing clean power for decades, and they cost significantly less to build than they do now.
> Nuclear energy never became cheaper.
The US and most of the world stopped building new reactors after the 1980s, largely as a result of political pressure. It can't become cheaper if you don't do it at all.
> Today we have found a new power source that is cheaper than fossil fuels. Renewables. Which barely have an geographical limitations.
And they're likely to do something interesting because their generation pattern is very different. But nobody seems able to answer what you're supposed to do if it's ever cloudy and still for a month, which actually occasionally happens.
> Wind turbines are productized with only the foundations being true construction.
If this is all it takes then why is it limited to wind? Build reactors in a factory and put them on rail cars.
> France famously experience negative learning by doing in their nuclear program. [2]
This article is flawed ; it mixes reactors from different generations.
> Our results suggest that neither the scale-up nor cumulative experience induced cost reductions, but we have found a positive learning effect within similar types of reactors
Why not compare it to Vogtle 1-2, which cost about half? It seems obvious that if equivalent reactors built at the same location cost twice the price, there has to be an explanation besides the technology.
Vogtle 1 & 2 started construction almost 50 years ago and were a completely different reactor design. The DOE looked at 3 & 4 and found the following sources of delay / cost overrun:
> 1. Rework / remediation – Rework was a significant source of project delay for many years. Known test failure rates of components have ranged from 40–80% over different time periods. Many of the tested components did not function properly and required corrective action to function as designed.
> 2. Supply chain delays – Poor module-delivery performance was a result of a few factors. Some of the designs sent to fabricators were incomplete and changed after fabricators started. In some cases, it was unrealistic to construct the modules as designed. In other instances, the required quality-assurance paperwork was lacking, so modules could not be shipped. Finally, site management eventually gave up on the module fabricator, and the modules were shipped incomplete for finishing on location.
3. Low productivity – Tasks often took longer than estimated—even before rework—due to acute shortages in key trades. This shortage (1) necessitated the hiring of an inexperienced workforce, (2) resulted in poor management that delivered inadequate directions and improper scheduling, and (3) resulted in difficult-to-construct design (e.g., high levels of workspace congestion from a small plant footprint).
4. Attrition / absenteeism – labor has been unavailable when needed, and attrition hindered learning COVID-19 caused a much higher than normal rate of absenteeism—as many as 2,800 positive cases by December 2021—impacting all workstreams. This absenteeism was compounded by attrition. For example, there was a 50% attrition rate on electricians from Unit 3 to Unit 4. Because labor projections factored-in a positive learning rate from Unit 3 to Unit 4, these high levels of attrition caused these projections to be inaccurate.
These seem like exactly the kind of problems you run into the first time you try to do something in a generation. People doing something for the first time make rookie mistakes that cause blockages or duplication of effort.
But why would this not be solvable? Now you know what went wrong last time and remediate it next time. Investigate the source of the component failures or move testing them earlier into the supply chain so defects are caught sooner. Make sure the designs sent to fabricators are complete and have adequate quality-assurance paperwork. Try to avoid this "COVID-19" thing happening again, whatever that is, since it was obviously the fault of the construction plan.
The hardest problem for new plants to solve from that list is the trade labor shortage -- not because it can't be solved, but because it has to be solved by someone else. But it has to be solved by someone else anyway, because it's causing a lot of problems in general -- it's one of the reason housing costs are so unreasonable, because construction is so expensive.
The full report is very detailed in addressing most of this - there is a chicken-egg problem for all of the issues they call out.
You can't get a complete design because nobody is going to spend the money designing a reactor that might never be built -- the utilities who buy them don't want to wait several years after committing to the project to wait for a finished design, so the engineering firms are selling 50% designs and the utilities are sending those plans to the firms to get fabrication started.
Similar with all the specific trades - there's a ton of turnover because the job is so difficult due to the poor planning so they actually saw negative learning curves on Vogtle 4 -- it actually took them longer to complete much of the same work on the 2nd reactor they're building.
The government is the only possible buyer who can fix these issues since they have an infinite timeline and infinite money to do so. We'd need a commitment to buy say 10 reactors of the same design, a design firm to commit to the length of the project and we'd have to pay them to get to an ~80% design multiple years before construction begins on the first plan. So we "just" need a stable government commitment to spend tens of billions of dollars over several decades.
> You can't get a complete design because nobody is going to spend the money designing a reactor that might never be built -- the utilities who buy them don't want to wait several years after committing to the project to wait for a finished design, so the engineering firms are selling 50% designs and the utilities are sending those plans to the firms to get fabrication started.
They just finished building one, so start by build more of those.
> there's a ton of turnover because the job is so difficult due to the poor planning
Which is still the scale problem -- it's poor planning because they have no experience doing it. The more you build the more experience people have.
> they actually saw negative learning curves on Vogtle 4 -- it actually took them longer to complete much of the same work on the 2nd reactor they're building.
COVID hit during Vogtle 4, which is obviously an outlier.
> So we "just" need a stable government commitment to spend tens of billions of dollars over several decades.
By some estimates the US government pays $20B in subsidies a year to the oil industry, so this isn't even a big ask. But it's also not clear why you inherently need there to be a single buyer. Why can't 10 independent entities all buy reactors of the same design?
Looks like they currently have around 4.51 GW of power generation in the state based off of this (someone please double check my math, but 3250GWh in Sept / 720 hours in Sept = 4.51GW): https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=NM#tabs-4, so this should be a 53% increase in power generation for the state. Truly a massive project.
The stated 2.4GW of the article is "nameplate" output (± peak output).
You computed the average generation over a whole month.
The difference between both is called "capacity factor" and is of course different per region. I've found some online numbers between 30 and 45%. Multiplying your 53% number with a 35% CF becomes a more realistic but less impressive 18.5%
As a somewhat interesting aside, the transmission line associated with this project (the "SunZia" project) has been a bit mired in a web of (legitimate) complexities, mostly related to environmental protection and Indigenous sovereignty.
The San Carlos Apache Tribe and the Tohono O’odham Nation in particular have protested the line's route in Arizona, and it's currently in Bureau of Land Management review.
The US Govt has hardly honored any of their Native American agreements. I find it acceptable to extract money from a belligerent government in any way possible.
Wikipedia says a typical lightning bolt releases 1 GJ, so 10 GW you can have for 100 ms, for 50 µs you can have 20 TW. And most importantly 1.21 GW for the better part of a second, 826 ms to be precise.
In the 70s, fossil fuel companies stirred up anti-nuclear propaganda in order to deter nuclear plants, which they perceived as the biggest threat to their business.
In the modern day, fossil fuel companies stir up pro-nuclear propaganda in order to deter renewables, which they perceive as the biggest threat to their business, because it's long since become clear that nuclear power is not economically viable as a replacement for fossil fuels even without the effect of their original propaganda (and the fact that they propagandized against nuclear in the 70s has yielded fertile harvests of people who are still salty about that, inspiring them to take up the pro-nuclear torch with little provocation).
Is the fossil fuel industry different in the US than EU? When Germany wanted to defined natural gas as "green investment", to act as a backup solution for wind power, it was the fossil fuel industry that was in favor and nuclear industry that was against. The pro-nuclear side wanted EU to clearly take a stand against all fossil fuels in the energy grid, while the pro-renewable side wanted to keep and promote investments into new construction of fossil fueled power plants with the hope that green hydrogen will at some point become cheaper than natural gas.
> fossil fuel companies stir up pro-nuclear propaganda in order to deter renewables,
Source?
Nuclear power plants replace coal plants. Renewables on the other hand can coexist nicely with fossil fuels as backup power for days without wind / sun.
Probably because it's the only known carbon-free source of dependable and non-intermittent energy that can be deployed nearly anywhere.
Let's be realistic about the devastatingly massive amounts of environmental damage wind/solar are doing by requiring unimaginably large amounts of minerals to be mined for both solar/wind AND the required batteries.
Right now, it's an "out of sight, out of mind" kind of a problem because the mining happens in poor countries. How many cobalt and lithium mines have been approved in the U.S? I can think of only a couple in the past couple of decades. Why? Because they're terrible for the environment.. so we outsource the environmental damage to poor countries.
Nuclear is expensive, but if we build a new plant every 40 years... what do we expect? Each plant is a one-off bespoke creation. The same economies of scale that have made solar+wind so cheap also apply to nuclear tech.
We have the technology to solve the climate emergency. Nuclear lets us do it. Everything else is wishful thinking.
p.s wind and solar have a part to play - specially in unstable and failed states where the existence of fissile material could be very dangerous.
Nuclear cannot be deployed anywhere, it needs a source of water. It also needs staffing, and it needs to be kinda near to people who need electricity.
This last point is important because nuclear plants generate a lot of power, so you cant easily build a plant “just” for 500 people in the same way you can for other energy sources.
I am fine with nuclear in principle. There are real reasons nukes are expensive and not the ideal option in many situations. We have to be clear eyed about this.
Also as was seen in France this summer for instance, one of the interesting edge cases of water cooled reactors (really any generation that needs a lot of water) is that they can get basically thermally throttled e.g. the inlet water is too warm, you might be limited on how much water you can discharge to curtail affecting local ecology.
I guess it makes sense to me that the conditions that spike electric demand also stress generation and transmission, but I do find it astonishing how universal it is, solar/wind/hydro/nuclear included.
There is at least one (I would say rather nice looking!) nuclear power plant that was build in arid climate & is cooled by evaporating treated waste water:
Also you can reduce the heating requirements to use some of the waste heat for district heating. Modern heating pipelines have negligible losses even over dozens of kilometers, you you can heat even quite distant cities. Such a project is now in the works here in Brno:
Molten salt reactors don’t need a source of water, as much staffing, and could be used for industrial and other purposes given their improved safety profile.
I want to believe with MSRs but the it’s had 80 years to prove itself and I have a hard time believing its large scale feasibility at this point. Lobbying only explains away so much. Remember, France is a large industrialized nation still building nuclear power plant. There’s gotta be some real reason they didn’t pick up MSRs.
> The same economies of scale that have made solar+wind so cheap also apply to nuclear tech.
They really don’t. Nukes are fundamentally extremely complex pieces of technology, that also happen to benefit from being physically large. They will never be simple.
Solar is brain dead simple in comparison, which is why it’s so amenable to manufacturing efficiencies
> Right now, it's an "out of sight, out of mind" kind of a problem because the mining happens in poor countries. How many cobalt and lithium mines have been approved in the U.S?
Mainland USofA is relatively mineral poor wrt economic feasibilty.
There's a reason the bulk of US Cold War yellow cake came from Africa, Canada, etc and very little from the "weak tea" leach mines in the contiguous US.
( 'Relative' meaining exactly that, the US does of course have a 64 year prospect for copper (and other resources), it's just that other parts of the world have higher grades of most things that are cheaper to extract. )
Lithium you'll find is mostly mined in Australia - mining isn't the dirty part, it's the post processing of the spodumene concentrates - this currently takes place in China, Malaysia, and elsewhere.
The US is currently building at least three spodumene concentrates facilities - one in Texas for use by Tesla.
If you think we oil enriched uranium out of thin air, I’ve got news for you about uranium mining. You can reuse lithium and cobalt from batteries over and over, but you can only use the same nuclear fuel maybe two times. I would love more nuclear, I was a trained nuclear electrician in the navy for a short time, but it’s not feasible in many ways, and the biggest today is its cost.
Breeder reactors are something like 100x more fuel efficient than conventional reactors, and produce much less waste.
According to wikipedia, we already have enough fuel to produce enough energy for the entire planet for 5 billion years (assuming 1983 global energy demand):
The main issue is that they produce and then consume weapons grade material as part of the reaction, and you have to periodically re-refine the reactor's contents. That makes it hard to prevent people from stealing the weapons grade material.
I've long thought that we should build robots to maintain the facilities, and a second fleet of robots that stay near the plant and shoot anyone they see on sight.
That reduces the security problem to programming the fuel-handling robots.
So, your answer to “why do they have to preach” is… preaching? This is like someone posting, “Ban cars! Bikes are better!” every time someone mentions a breakthrough in, say, EV tech. It is both off-topic and everyone here knows it will derail the discussion into mudslinging, just like how all EV discussion gets derailed. It only adds noise.
I think those that make "what about nuclear" posts should be required to invest in a company that would build an AP1000. This is the reactor that was supposed to lead the US nuclear renaissance. Instead it's 2 projects were utter financial failures, with one getting cancelled after spending $9b on a hole in the ground and the other is coming online after going 2x+ budget in time and money.
All in development AP1000 projects were cancelled after this debacle. But this shouldn't be daunting to true believers. The most advanced cancelled project was Turkey Point in FL. It had received all approvals so a developer can start tomorrow if they want.
If we made everyone who said "what about nuclear" buy a $100 share that sucker would be funded in no time.
The military nuclear industrial complex needs civvy nuclear power to share an industrial ecosystem and skills base. They run expensive PR campaigns to manufacture consent for subsidies. Those PR campaigns work.
Loud PR campaigns dont work on everybody but can reliably convince a large % of people to believe most things.
They will probably have an energy storage facitilty nearby. There’s little benefit to bundling these, and the cost of maintenance is increased. Also, batteries will have shorter timespan than the turbines.
It may begin to make sense when battery prices get so low that installation and setup costs increase - similarly to solar where a large part of price currently is installation and scaffolding, not the panels themselves
> What if they just built batteries into the base of turbine?
What would this gain other than making the turbines more expensive to build and maintain? It’s cheaper to put the batteries almost anywhere else and altogether.
Adding batteries is already quite common to allow for small amounts of price arbitrage. Its more common for utilities scale solar, with over half of new solar including storage, but wind isn't far behind, IIRC.
The advantage of putting it next to the generation is that you get to reuse the transmission line, and make better use of it. And since transmission and distribution are more expensive than generation, anything that cuts those costs is a big win. Also, it's a site that the wind farm owner already controls, which makes it far easier than obtaining interconnection somewhere else, as interconnection queues are one of the biggest roadblocks to deploying more renewable resources right now.
(Additionally, with solar, you get to reduce your inverters, which you can't do if the storage is placed at a second site)
That has no advantages compared to the point the turbines are connected to the electricity grid — N locations to service rather than 1, N copies of everything rather than 1 big one, etc.
Because of finite transmission capacity, the optimal place to put batteries is pretty complicated.
Consumption varies over time, and there can be bottlenecks getting power into an area, so you might want storage near consumption. Wind power is going to vary in how much it generates, so if there are bottlenecks getting power out of the area, you might want storage near generation.
Plus, bottlenecks can move around. For example, if two power plants share the same line to send power to two cities.
~$100/mile really highlights the challenge of transmission.
Already, our transmission and distribution costs are more expensive than generation costs. Utilities want us to ignore these costs, as unavoidably, because they get to "rate base" T&D costs and charge a fixed rate of profit, meaning that anything extra they can spend on T&D is more profit that, without any competition.
This is why residential solar get such stiff propaganda against it by utilities, going as far to say that residential solar "freeloads" on the grid, rather than saving everybody costs on the grid by reducing the peak needs of T&D.
With wind, perhaps these transmission costs are somewhat unavoidable, but solar can be place elsewhere, and all solar that avoided this doubling of costs due to extra T&D costs should be highly encouraged by everyone (except the utilities, who lose out on profit).
I find it hard to believe that truly self-sustained residential solar (solar panels + batteries all local) is going to be net cheaper than centralized grid generation. The maintenance costs should be significantly higher, particularly for the batteries.
It’s not propaganda. The reason it’s freeloading is that you’re still connected to the grid and thus the T&D costs are still there as they’re largely fixed. Utilities have done a poor job of pricing T&D costs correctly (your hookup cost is massively subsidized on the assumption that you will consume an average amount of energy from the grid). Additionally, for a long time (at least in California) utilities were forced to buy back your excess electricity at retail instead of wholesale rates (even if they didn’t need it & they can’t really control electricity you generate like they can with power plants).
Residential solar is a greedy tragedy of the commons solution that is subsidized by everyone else. And if everyone had residential solar + batteries + no grid hookup, someone would have to do the analysis if the maintenance cost vs T&D.
Except the ACC calculation used in CA is absolute nonsense and deliberately uses monthly averaging so you don't get a fair cut.
Utilities always want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to pay you almost nothing for power sent to the grid ($0.02) that only considers generation using the most optimistic figures. Then during the worst summer peak times when the spot price for power hits $0.20, $0.50, or even $1.00/kWh you don't get to reap any of that benefit. Thanks to the averaging you still get paid $0.02 and PG&E saves $0.96.
If utilities want "fairness" then let them pay the spot price in realtime or to the average of the nearest 15 minutes on a daily basis. Then I could choose to drain my batteries when the spot price hits ultra high marks which makes it worth my while, incentivizes storage, and helps grid stability.
This also means you pay for distribution on inbound power but don't get credit on outbound. Even though that saves the utility a little bit on distribution that seems fair. If utilities want to get paid for maintaining grid access then let an independent entity run those numbers and bill it accurately. I don't mind paying a grid access charge if it weren't pulled out of PG&E's ass as a backdoor attempt to kill solar.
I agree that making them buy power back at the full retail rate is not sustainable but NEM3 in CA (and the upcoming income-based monthly fixed charge) are nothing but utility scams.
Last but not least as a matter of public policy I strongly believe encouraging energy independence is a social good. In emergency situations having a few neighbors with enough solar+batteries to keep the lights on is a good for society as a whole. We are in that situation and plan to run a cell phone charging station in our driveway if it ever happened that the grid was down for more than a few hours (eg earthquake/storm/grid collapse). Having an EV also means if we are careful we can charge the car enough to make short or medium trips every few days. Not being beholden to gas tanker trucks or utility operators is great IMHO. I just need to add Starlink for backup internet :)
Wholesale rates never go to $1/kwh. Why should you get paid more than what PG&E pays its suppliers?
As for why a monthly average is used, I don’t know but there could be legitimate reasons (eg smart meters weren’t built to measure the reverse direction and maybe the software isn’t properly certified or something)
> In emergency situations having a few neighbors with enough solar+batteries to keep the lights on is a good for society as a whole
In a rich neighborhood this works really well. Most people benefit from a stable and highly functioning grid. It’s also cheaper than a bunch of poorly planned adhoc solar and battery capacity randomly scattered about.
> Having an EV also means if we are careful we can charge the car enough to make short or medium trips every few days. Not being beholden to gas tanker trucks or utility operators is great IMHO. I just need to add Starlink for backup internet :)
Again, you’re describing your privileged situation and acting like society would benefit from making your personal situation better.
If everyone had an EV and solar, their solar capacity would need to first be overbuilt to accommodate that addition. But solar capacity sizing today is a mix of how much your current pre-EV usage constrained by the panel efficiency multiplied by available rooftop space. Most people don’t live in single unit dwellings either and rooftop solar for an apartment complex isn’t going to provide all the necessary power.
So yeah, I’m on pg&e’s side here. It’s their grid. They’re being forced to take electricity generation from residential but if they weren’t being forced by regulators they should be free to just say no to capacity being fed from anyone but official suppliers. Otherwise you’re selling into their grid without actually paying for access (+ the utilities didn’t factor in rooftop solar when building out the generation for the grid). You can’t have things both ways and rooftop solar in California is 100% a massive subsidy being provided to the privileged people adding that capacity.
> In emergency situations having a few neighbors with enough solar+batteries to keep the lights on is a good for society as a whole
In what world is the grid down but your personal solar + battery installation is keeping the lights on for the entire neighborhood without using said grid?
> Wholesale rates never go to $1/kwh. Why should you get paid more than what PG&E pays its suppliers?
I believe CASIO's spot price cap on generation is in fact $1/kwh. This is only ever reached on a handful of peak summer days and only for a a few hours at most.
> In a rich neighborhood this works really well.
Solar is not exclusively a rich neighbor hood thing... well it certainly is now with NEM3 since the economics are broken.
> Most people don’t live in single unit dwellings either
Well you'll be pleased to know the utilities have colluded to make shared solar for apartments/condos un-economic too so everyone can get screwed.
>So yeah, I’m on pg&e’s side here. It’s their grid.
PG&E can't exist without eminent domain forcing private property owners to give away space for power poles and buried lines. They also enjoy both a monopoly and guaranteed profit! The regulator by law ensures that they get to recover all costs no matter what those are.
I'm not saying utilities shouldn't get paid to build and maintain the grid. I'm also not saying they shouldn't get paid something to maintain extra generating capacity.
I'm saying the hand-wringing about how rooftop solar owners are all rich leeches hurting the utilities and low-income people is a bunch of utility-created BS to justify screwing everyone over for higher utility company profits.
Arbitrage is how utilities make money. Forecasting, signing contracts, making hedges. Figuring out what average price to charge consumers to even out the fact that electricity is dirt-cheap at 3am and outrageously expensive on the hottest summer days at 3pm. They can and do understand the impact of solar. Solar lowers their profits so they want to kill it. Was CA NEM2 unreasonable to the utility? Yes. Is NEM3 a good compromise? Absolutely not. Is charging customers a fixed monthly charge based on their income a reasonable or even fair thing to do? Hell no.
> In what world is the grid down but your personal solar + battery installation is keeping the lights on for the entire neighborhood without using said grid?
That's not what I mean. I'm not saying every home would be able to run this way, just that it is a good thing in a disaster if some homes here and there are able to supply their own power. It means there is somewhere in the neighborhood that can power a fridge/freezer to save food or handle sensitive medications. Where neighbors can go to charge cell phones. If you've never lived in a hurricane-prone area you may not understand how much of a lifeline it is for someone on the block to have a generator or solar+battery.
I mean EV the same way: if someone on the block has an EV and solar then they can assist their neighbors... eg driving to a water/food distribution point even when gasoline supply is cut off for a few weeks. Or drive to a pharmacy to pickup critical medication.
Hopefully you never find yourself in such a situation but from a public policy POV having that kind of distributed self-sufficiency capability (paid for by individuals on their own) is a good thing.
Residential solar is primarily really for single family homes and similar types of residences. Within populated areas of California (which is where most energy consumption is going to be in California) it is 100% a richer area. Sure, those kinds of homes are also common in the suburbs but the suburbs where that’s affordable are where there’s significantly fewer people living. I don’t know the setup in other places but any big metropolitan area is probably going to look similar and that’s where most of the energy demand and resultant CO2 emissions are coming from.
You don’t see solar on high rises because this kind of strategy does not work.
As for emergency disaster response, historically this entailed the government having designated shelter places with disaster supplies (eg diesel generators, large amount of food stores, cots to sleep people, etc). This would typically be things like schools and sports arenas because of how much emergency shelter could be provided. I don’t see how adhoc disaster preparedness where you rely on some neighbors thinking ahead for everyone else is better than a strategic plan intentionally meant to cover everybody. It’s a nice perk if you’re lucky, but I’d rather make sure that centralized planning can actually help everyone. Btw this wasn’t because the local government was competent - if I recall correctly there were federal and state laws requiring cities be able to handle such emergencies. I’m not sure if we’ve gotten worse at them that you’re now concerned, but generally I have seen pretty good disaster response mechanisms.
I was specifically referencing shared-billing scenarios which was just getting under way but has basically been knee-capped by the CPUC.
The idea was that a homeowner's association (for condo owners) or apartment building owner could install solar panels connected to a designated meter. Then they could associate other resident meters to be the recipients of credits generated by the designated meter. The utility would distribute the credits in the configured proportions.
This would allow condo owners to collectively buy solar panels for the whole complex. Or allow an apartment building owner to let renters buy "shares" of the panels to offset their own usage, or offer it for "free" as a feature eg "we have solar panels that lower your electric bill for free, rent here"*.
None of that matters now though, they've made it not economically viable to do.
* All features of an apartment are paid for in rent, absolutely nothing is really free. Anything an apartment offers for free just means "I'm paying for it in my rent as long as I live here".
Thank you. I can't believe how much FUD is out there from IOU (investor owned utilities) lobbyists that the general populace has accepted uncritically as fact. We need to encourage distributed generation by policy for so many reasons, not the least of which is a reduced need for transmission and land use.
So how come that rhetoric is only coming out of the US? The rest of the world's distribution networks don't have a problem with residential solar (afaik).
What other countries have meaningful residential solar and haven’t had to deal with the problems? Can you cite anything because I can’t find any good resources online, but AFAICT the US and China are leading the world in solar and it’s possible that the US is leading for residential solar on normalized terms (haven’t checked).
California is probably one of the places in the world with the largest solar residential install and therefore has the most experience with this vs some dark propaganda conspiracy to keep residential solar down? Trust me, residential solar is hugely popular because you basically have free electricity and the government subsidizing the install cost on top + forcing utilities to buy your electricity generation during the day? The political incentives are for more residential solar, not less. The utilities aren’t popular and you can accuse them of shady shit (& they do engage on it), but in this specific instance it does seem more sincere that people are acting because of the threat that residential solar placed to the financial stability of the grid. And no, residential solar doesn’t remove the need for the grid.
4 of the top 5 solar cities in the US are in California. California has stopped with the explicit rebates to fund residential solar and it’s not just because solar prices have dropped - it’s bad policy. Other places are still lagging because they don’t have enough residential solar installed to make it obviously a bad idea. The residential solar market has seen a massive contraction since the state government stopped forcing utilities to subsidize them as much - they’re still subsidizing a bit but they switched from buying back electricity from residential at retail rates & now instead use wholesale which is what they’d pay any other generator (T&D costs are subsidized because the monthly grid hookup rate is still too cheap for these kinds of houses).
We’ve already carried out this experiment. Rooftop solar is a luxury good that doesn’t actually reduce fossil fuel dependence.
Thankfully Spain has learned the lesson of California & is only giving a wholesale rebate on the bill meaning you’ll never make money from rooftop solar:
But that doesn’t change the math that using public funds to incentivize rooftop solar is a populist direction that isn’t actually a good idea for the grid. Once enough rooftop solar is installed, watch the grid in Spain start to struggle financially if they haven’t priced the T&D hookup fee correctly (+ expect that fee to rise over time). All that being said, Spain & Europe are slightly different stories - they have a unified electricity grid I believe which lets them export their surplus. Not sure if that actually works for rooftop solar but may help mediate some of the problems that we have in the US.
>...This is why residential solar get such stiff propaganda against it by utilities, going as far to say that residential solar "freeloads" on the grid
The problem with rooftop solar is that it is very expensive compared to utility grade solar:
>…Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 147 and 221 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
If we want to subsidize a renewable energy source, why should we subsidize rooftop solar when we could subsidize utility grade solar or wind? Money is fungible and not unlimited - a dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind. Rooftop solar subsidies are also unusual in that much of the subsidy is often paid by less well-off households to subsidize their wealthier neighbors - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
Something's off there.
From the product description:
3000WProduct Description
Widely used: Under 4 hours of full sunlight, the daily production capacity is 400wh/day. It is very suitable for RVs, caravans, oceans, camping vehicles, electric scooters, golf carts, power wheels, fishing motors, tool trailers, and backup power sources for small sheds.
【 Excellent Performance 】: Single crystal solar panels are made of corrosion-resistant aluminum frames, which can be used for more than ten years and can withstand strong winds (2400Pa) and snow loads (5400Pa). IP65 rated terminal box and 21% high battery efficiency.
[Easy to install]: Pre drilled holes on the back and plug and play cables allow for quick installation
【 Multi protection 】: 20A PWM controller: built-in short circuit, open circuit, and overload protection to ensure safety. And it supports three types of batteries: lithium batteries, lead-acid batteries, and colloidal batteries.
Single listing for multiple items. Second item is 100W panel 24x35cm for $22. The last item is supposed to be 3kW panel 98x54cm. I wouldn't buy from a seller with such messed description.
residential solar freeloads on the grid because it doesnt reduce peak need, and home generators have historically been paid at a price equivalent to generation plus transmission rate. This means other consumers have to pay generation + 2X transmission for any home solar power they consume.
The economics of home solar are terrible. There is some value in home battery, but even then it still makes far more sense for industrial scale battery than home.
Either way, Peak need is still determined by when residential batteries are empty because residential batteries are not sized to a day without sun, let alone multiple.
Therefore, you are always stuck with a grid built with capacity for the same peak.
So assuming 25 to 45% capacity factor, $10k to $18k per effective kW. Depreciate that linearly over 20 year's and you get 5.8 to 10.5¢ per kWh before maintenance and operations. Given Arizona pays about 16¢/kWh, the project seems likely to be viable.
You are lumping together the transmission and generation costs, which will have different service lifetimes.
Wind turbines are 30+, but advances in technology and falling costs have incentivized many wind farms to repower with bigger turbines far before the end of service life in order to increase profitability.
An adjacent 350MW project from the same owners has a 46% capacity factor and signed a 20-year agreement for $0.04/kWh (they did qualify for the PTC so their 'real' cost is $0.06/kWh) - this project will surely be well under $0.10/kwh wholesale as well:
> In the event Red Cloud qualifies for 100 percent of the PTC, the energy price will be reduced by $2.00 per MWh and the new energy price will be $41.00 per MWh. The price for Test Energy will be reduced to $30.25 per MWh and Excess Energy will be reduced to $16.40 per MWh.
The best estimate was the 50% in the comment with the original link, which would correspond to $120/mile for transmission, which IIRC is right in the correct ballpark.
An output of 2.4Gw would make it the second most powerful onshore wind farm by nameplate output. China's Gansu is much (3-4x) more powerful. The UK's most powerful offshore farm, Hornsea, is being built in phases. Their phase 1+2 nameplate output is ~2.5Gw from 339 turbines, when finished they're aiming for 6Gw.
It's big. It isn't the biggest and not really close to the biggest, but it's big.
The announcement doesn't seem provide any estimation of power output? Just the peak power. It would be interesting to see what the overall output is expected to be.
Typical capacity factors of current wind farms are between 25% and 45%. Nuance is expected curtailment [1], if there are batteries at commissioning or potentially in the future for firming and curtailment reduction [2], how this compliments solar and other generation types in the US West at delivery points, etc.
Siting, of course, is the other big factor. I assume the project developer has priced this in and judged this project to be at least profitable, so you might assume they have good wind.
> Typical capacity factors of current wind farms are between 25 and 45%
Offshore being about 10% higher than on land.
Of note is that it is in unconstrained conditions, defined by the weather; when it is needed or when a flexible production can reduce its output, or when flexible consumption can absorb it. As renewables' share increase, this is becoming a problem in some parts of the world: electricity prices can even go negative at times.
It’s a problem that fixes itself. The market for renewable energy is different because of these peaks, it just takes a while for business to learn to take advantage of the opportunities periodic low pricing.
Yay! More ugly landscape-disturbing things helping only during certain hours, compared to established nuclear technology, or still-in-research fusion technology.
PS, the usual peeps downvoting not just me: Sure, let your emotions guide you, don't care. My comment above is not offtopic.
"Ugly" is an opinion, which means it's neither true nor false. Me, I like them, but I know that me liking them doesn't invalidate your dislike.
And calling them "landscape-disturbing" is true, but so are all other things — I've been to some wind farms, they are much less disruptive to the environment than the nuclear reactors I can only see from a distance. Sheep grazing under and around them, for a start.
> I've been to some wind farms, they are much less disruptive to the environment than the nuclear reactors I can only see from a distance. Sheep grazing under and around them, for a start.
Huh? Every nuclear reactor I've seen has ended up surrounded by a de facto if not legal wildlife preserve.
I agree with you, they have a big impact on several levels: noise, landscape, soil, wildlife and even local economy (would you like to go on a rural escape to a beautiful mountain village full of roads and metal giants)?
Where I live in Spain there are several associations trying to prevent the installation of wind turbines in many of the beautiful mountains that are otherwise going to be industrialised [1].
I recommend joining local associations if you want to prevent wind turbines from being installed on your home.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations