As long as the gas plants aren't burning any natural gas, I would say that's fair.
Standing by to supplement power on load spikes is one of the primary roles of gas plants (together with pumped hydro), and that they didn't need to supply any electricity over those six days is noteworthy.
From a climate standpoint there also isn't much wrong with having generating capacity in fossil fuels, what matters is how many greenhouse gases and how much pollution they put out. Which isn't much if they are just standing by.
No? Either you have enough nuclear to cover 100% of peak demand, in which case you just run them exclusively (at a terrible capacity factor) because nuclear is almost exclusively capex, or you don't, in which case you need gas peakers.
Nuclear is emphatically not an instant-on hot backup. Plants take time to spool up, and very importantly time to cool down. Fukushima happened because you can't just turn a reactor off, it produces energy that has to go somewhere while the intermediate fission products decay over hours-to-days.
> Fukushima happened because you can't just turn a reactor off,
Fukushima happened because the plant was hit with both an earthquake and a flood significantly exceeding its operational parameters (already extremely high)
> Fukushima happened because the plant was hit with both an earthquake and a flood significantly exceeding its operational parameters (already extremely high)
That's exactly the incorrect analysis that caused the meltdown!
That use of "and" and "both" is simply wrong. It wasn't an unforseeable collision of two events, it was a single event (an earthquake) with a predictable correlate (a tsunami). It's not like people didn't know that tsunamis follow earthquakes, and no one who does know that would make the argument you just did.
This was literally the definition of a black swan event: "an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight"
No, Japanese authorities and TEPCo knew tgat earthquakes and tsunamis could happen, and usually together. They planned for it, they simply planned insufficiently, so quite the opposite of a black swan.
The definition of a catastrophic one-in-a-lifetime event: you can't plan for it.
Fukushima had been in operation since 1971. You truly really believe that there were no earthquakes in the meantime, and the only reason for failure in 2011 is that they didn't plan for the largest earthquake and one of the worst tsunamis in Japanese history?
Just found another highlight from the executive summary:
>> Prior to the earthquake, the Japan Trench was categorized as a subduction zone with a frequent
occurrence of magnitude 8 class earthquakes; an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 off the coast of
Fukushima Prefecture was not considered to be credible by Japanese scientists. However, similar or
higher magnitudes had been registered in different areas in similar tectonic environments in the past
few decades.
Now, tell me again, how the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami were totally impossible to predict events?
And it gets better:
>> In addition, a number of trial calculations were performed by the operator before the accident, using
wave source models or methodologies that went beyond the consensus based methodology. Thus, a
trial calculation using the source model proposed by the Japanese Headquarters for Earthquake
Research Promotion in 2002, which used the latest information and took a different approach in its
scenarios, envisaged a substantially larger tsunami than that provided for in the original design and in
estimates made in previous reassessments. At the time of the accident, further evaluations were being
conducted, but in the meantime, no additional compensatory measures were implemented. The
estimated values were similar to the flood levels recorded in March 2011.
So, in 2002 they predicted pretry accurately the strength of potentail tsunamis. And then they did nothing for next nine years. The USSR knew about the control rod issue of RBMKs, and as TEPCO in Japan, did nothing until Chernobyl. See the inherent risk of nuclear power here? Because both, Chernobyl and Fukushima were pretty much predictable (as the risk was prpoerly identified before both accidents) and preventable if people in charge, and the organizations, would have put counter measures in place.
Edit: And now you can google the material difference between common and special causes.
>> The common cause failures of multiple safety systems resulted in plant conditions that were not
envisaged in the design.
Well, according the IAEA, the planning against, and risk evaluation of, earthquakes and tsunamis for the Fukushima Daiichi NPP were insufficient:
>> The seismic hazard and tsunami waves considered in the original design were evaluated mainly on
the basis of historical seismic records and evidence of recent tsunamis in Japan. This original
evaluation did not sufficiently consider tectonic-geological criteria and no re-evaluation using such
criteria was conducted.
Stop speculating and assuming, stop thinking from first principle and do the following instead:
- read text books on basic engineering, electricity generation and grid operation
- read some basics regarding nuclear reactors (or, in all seriousness, watch Chernobyl which provides some really good basic explanations)
- read the publicly available incident reports from the IAEA on thebaccidents of your choosing
All the questions you might have about any nuclear accident are answered in those reports. Those reports are prepared and investigated by experts in their field, going painstackingly over documents, event logs, design documents, meeting minutes (like a real and thorough investigation you know). Try understand all of that, and then draw whatever conclusion you want. Because by doing that, we have a basis for discussion, one rooted in reality in facts, as opposed to the headline-talking points fairytale stuff we have now, where people without any basic knowledge how things work draw assumptions from some headlines...
Once HN was a place where people applied critical thinking to topics, and where curious to learn from people knowing more (of which you find a ton around here). Since COVID, more and more people seem to think some general smartness allows them to understand even the most complex issues better than anyone else based on headlines, opinion pieces and social media talking points. I hope we can return to how things were before, it is getting really frustrating at times.
Edit: Some general engineering advice: Those once in a life time event are actually planned for, the USSR had rules for that in the 70s as well. The approach od identifying those risks was formalized as Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, FMEA. They are done for the design, production and operation, for processes, in order to identify those risks, the likelihood, the criticality and the ability to detect them. Following that, mitigation actions are defined and put into place. And, very important, they revisited regularly.
This wasn't done neither for Chernobyl nor Fukushima (just because the formal process didn't exist back then doesn't mean engineers didn't do those exercises, and the USSR had regulations in olace basically asking for the same thing. Regulations that were ignored by everyone for Cherbobyl unit No. 4). The IAEA reports for Chernobyl and Fukushima point thaz insufficient planning out explicitely, as do the USSR reports on Chernobyl. And if you think those fuck ups only happened in the distant past, the Boeing 737 Max can basically be traced back to the same root cause. Because these failures are not as much about people as they are about organizations. Hence processes and rules to follow in safety critical industries, and other large scale organizations. The cowboy style of operating in a start-up doesn't translate well to those places.
This is what I don't like about anti-nuclear FUDers: overconfident post-hoc rationalisation completely ignoring everything (context, history etc.).
Not a single one of these FUDers said anything about Fukushima in the 40 years of its operation in an active seismic zone (translation: multiple earthquakes) in a country that had at the time over 50 operating nuclear reactors.
But the 2011 happened. And look at them crawling out of the woods with armed with overconfidence, thinly veiled ad-hominems and TV shows.
Ad-homones and TV shows? I litterally cited the IAEA report on Fukushima... But I agree, cunducting regular audits, similar to after incident investigations, is something the IAEA should do. Similar to what the FAA and EASA do.
But let me guess, you don't even know where to find said IAEA report, do you?
In this scenario you could just run the nuclear plant all the time, but just direct its electric production to heating a giant pool of water or whatever.
Then when the grid needs more power you do less of that, and instead send electricity to the grid.
Yes, but the point is that the problem is isomorphic to wind or solar: you get power when you don't want it. So nuclear isn't backstopping any particular need, it has the same drawbacks. The reason gas plants are used as peaker plants is that they can be turned on and off more or less instantly.
You're just assigning magical value to "turn it off".
That's only a big deal with fossil fuels due to the fuel cost, the fuel cost of nuclear is marginal.
Yes, I agree that it's stupid to build a (big) nuclear power plant only to use it to boil an Olympic sized swimming pool most of the time.
But that's stupid because we're over-relying on "green" energy that can't provide baseload power.
It's even more stupid with fossil fuels, now you also need an entirely different backup infrastructure, but the fossil one pollutes much more than nuclear.
The problem with your logic is, that nuclear is _only_ competitive with a 100% utilization rate/capacity factor. Only with these 90+% capacity factors do you get to competitive rates per kWh produced. Otherwise the initial CapEx is just too large, especially in a non-zero rate environment, as these plants are _already_ scoped/calculated/financed to 40 years. At 90+% capacity factor!
That amount of CapEx is basically impossible without either very high earning potential (that’s why TSMC works. Everyone will just pay their price) or government backing (because then you don’t have to care about financing and optionality costs and can just pay for it with taxes). Neither one will be possible, at least in western societies
(And yes this ignores a certain amount of externalities, like the tendency of requiring large scale evacuations in their surroundings every second decade, but we can set that aside, as it’s irrelevant for the economic argument above)
At some point society will realize comparing power pricing to the lowest cost per kwh on a given day is a silly waste of time.
What matters is what is the most realistic mix of power generation and storage for 24x7 reliability. This can of course look very different depending on the situation. Many will argue for distributed storage (e.g. home batteries) - but that just means poor people don't get reliable electric service.
I really don't find that solar is "too cheap to meter" during peak sunlight very interesting. Who cares. What I find interesting is that I can turn a dial on my nuclear power plant to whatever it is I feel like at any time, and have it operating at that capacity within an hour or three.
Since we have such a dial, if you owned both the solar and the nuclear plants you would very likely combine them in a manner that maximizes profits while maintaining continuous service. Short of clouds, regional solar and wind prediction is extremely good to the point that modern nuclear plants may as well be load following. Add in a bit of battery for those minutes (hours max) that surprise you and you're good to go on that front.
You still will need some gas peaker plants for those crazy once-in-a-decade days you don't want to overbuild nuclear capacity for, but you could drastically reduce this infrastructure from what is effectively a 1:1 ratio today.
How would they regulate fluctuations in demand? Nuclear can’t do that. You need storage, or a reasonably scalable generation medium. Nuclear as a base load is moot
You can technically use nuclear power plants as load followers in much thr same way that you can technically keep warm by setting $50 bills on fire.
Load following with a nuclear plant basically means provisioning a 2GW plant and then using, say, 0.5GW of that - throwing away the rest.
(since the vast majority of the cost is capex not fuel)
Every kilowatt hour produced by that 2GW power plant is already 5x the cost of a kilowatt hour produced by a wind farm. If you assume it is used for load following that goes from 5x-20x depending on capacity utilization.
Pumping water uphill (snowy 2, coire glas, etc) is way way WAY cheaper and the geography to do that is ridiculously common.
Electrolyzing water and storing hydrogen underground is way cheaper too, and can be stored for months cheaply.
Nuke plant -> btc mining with excess load when load is not demanded
Nuke plant -> consumers when in demand
Pretty easy equation, much more reliable and much more scalable and not subject to the whims of the elements / can be done anywhere and on any planet in the solar system.
BTC mining is the exact opposite of scalable: there's a fixed supply of BTC available to mining, so you can only pay for so many nuclear power plants with it. Even the entire bitcoin market cap is about enough for 20 nuclear power plants, optimistically (and that's ignoring the cost of the miners themselves, risk, etc, etc).
Mining fees will more than cover mining costs when the block reward becomes negligible. The use case of balancing excess power generation and load profitably is real and would significantly reduce carbon emissions if understood & properly implemented. Instead of approaching with emotions, I recommend investigating ideas with an open mind.
Beyond that, bitcoin works and is here to stay. It is the first sovereign currency free from the tyranny of small minded rulers. It will always have significant and likely increasing value over time, and its pattern of value generation (bound to physics / energy) will always exist now in one form or another.
trust me, I have thought about it. I was enthusiastic about bitcoin early on, but I have become more and more pessimistic about it becoming a net good as time goes on. Especially this idea of it being useful for promoting green energy, especially a useful supply of green energy for the grid, just doesn't hold up much to scrutiny, especially at scale.
There are safety-related limits (power modulation proportion, duration of a pause needed after each modulation, modulations frequency...) to nuclear load-following capacity, and the very combustible status is a major parameter.
Quote:
« un réacteur peut varier de 100 % à 20 % de puissance en une demi-heure, et remonter aussi vite après un palier d’au moins deux heures, et ce deux fois par jour »
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
Even in nuclear-packed France (which exports electricity) fossil fuels are also burnt in order to produce electricity since nuclear's inception, for most of the load-following and peak (about 9% in 2021), and it would be much worse without hydro.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
On the other hand green hydrogen (produced by intermittent renewables at over-electric-generation time) can be stored then used at insufficient-generation time.
Yes - the plants are on standby, not consuming much beyond a "pilot light" worth of natural gas and not putting energy into the national grid.
This is quite different to coal fired power generation which doesn't have low energy standby mode with rapid online to full generation ramping up in the manner of gas fired turbines.
During the six day period the national grid was supplied only with energy from renewable sources.
At the cost of building enough solar and wind farms to supply the nation I would guess, with additional costs to upgrade the distribution infrastructure for smarter load balancing, etc.
It's quite possible Portugal has put out a white paper on their transition toward renewable energy that you can find with some hunting about.
Wikipedia has a rough overview that'll provide some points to drill down further into if you're interested in the per capita comparative costings of a hybrid national power scheme.
At a glance it looks like a paper worth reading so yes, that's the kind of paper I'd chase down (and still look for others).
Most countries have policy and costing papers, most companies file technical reports with stock exchanges, fossil fuel companies such as BHP have fat technical reports on the energy demands that they meet and project - these are all sources for hard data that can be compared (after normalising for apples V oranges).
The US is a mixed bag - Federal infomation is free and transparent, digging into details can get harder. The UK has a good civil service that puts out a lot of infomation on things that affect policy - from crime to consumption to energy use.
My comment was intended to encourage the user asking "at what cost" to form a better question and pursue their own answers.
What's the cost of maintaining both green energy plants & non-green plants for Portugal? What's the cost of electricity there? Is it subsidized (perhaps heavily)?
On one hand, solar and wind are very cheap - significantly cheaper than fossil fuels. On the other hand, you still also need either a significant amount of fossil fuel capacity or energy storage available to kick in during hours when solar and wind can't provide as much production. So instead of building enough fossil fuel production for 110% of your peak need, you might lower that to 50% and then still also build 110% of your need in renewable energy -- so you'd be over-capitalized at a total installed capacity of fossil fuels + renewables at about 160% of peak need.
So, marginal cost is lower. Total capital outlay might be higher. Portugal provides energy at an average of 9.7¢ / kWh which presumably is high enough to pay back all the capital costs in addition to the marginal costs. Mississippi only has 1% renewables and provides electricity at 11.55¢ / kWh.
So it would appear at a very rough glance that the answer to "At what cost?" is..."Negative cost".
For those six days they could. But even if we need fossil fuel as backup for some time, burning a lot less of it means we don't cook the planet as much.
And for good reason, it proves wrong the mainstream thinking that this is impossible. Quite a few countries already run the full year over 90% renewable[1] and we still neglect it with all kind of excuses.
If only they all listened to you! I don't have all the answers but a few of the ones I researched that are being built are needed to ensure people have heating through the winter in the next 3-7 years until reliable other solutions appear.
a lot of data there is pre-covid, would be interesting to see what’s happening today - especially in Europe, with the consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war on energy markets.
"The first half of 2023 saw a collapse in EU fossil generation, leading to the lowest output on record. Wind and solar continued their growth, with solar generation increasing by 13% and wind by 5%. Hydro and nuclear are recovering from their historic lows in 2022, though their long term outlook is uncertain."
The section "Wind and solar are leading the renewables charge" has graphs for each EU country showing H1 TWh generation by either fossil or renewables.
The issue is that renewables require extensive, expensive redundancies which are misleadingly excluded from the ubiquitous “renewables are cheaper” studies.
First give me a world that runs on 90% renewables all the time. The last 10% is really not something that will have weight.
Actually I consider complaining about that bad faith. Too many countries run on pretty much majority fossils, reducing that has the largest impact and setting an example will help there. A world where we run on 90% renewables is a good one.
First of all, to avoid the 2 degrees warming threshold, we need to be at net 0 emissions in like 10 years. Which absolutely requires 0% fossil fuels in electricity and heating, all year round, all over the world. 10% fossil fuels in electricity is nowhere close to good enough.
Secondly, the current best for renewables is nowhere close to 90% year round. Those 6 days in the article are a huge record for Portugal. 90% would essentially mean 330 days of exclusive renewables use, which no one in the world is close to, except maybe Iceland.
no, they do not. The vast majority of studies that estimate the LCOE for renewable generators consider only the spot price of electricity and OPEX costs. The cost of reliability is absolutely not factored into this energy cost.
The point of the article was that there is sufficient renewable capacity that the standby wasn't needed, for six days. So that's a milestone of some sort. Or, if not a milestone, then at least a checkpoint that shows that seven, eight, ten, or twenty days is only a matter of continuing to scale up.
