New research shows renewables are more profitable than nuclear power
New research shows renewables are more profitable than nuclear power
www.pv-magazine.com
New research shows renewables are more profitable than nuclear power
64 comments
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Renewables are incredibly cheaper to build, come online orders of magnitude faster, are completely non-centralized, require massively less infrastructure, have no millennium length waste storage dangers, etc etc etc. The only component still to be built out is energy storage to meet the baseload, and that's well on its way with batteries, water pumping, and other energy storage technologies.
It's just not even a question, renewables are the better choice for new construction.
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Renewables are incredibly cheaper to build, come online orders of magnitude faster, are completely non-centralized
All true.
require massively less infrastructure
Not true. In fact, very much the opposite is true, nuclear plants are vastly more compact.
have no millennium length waste storage dangers
Neither does nuclear, really. Waste storage is a non-issue, that has had effectively zero observable impact over the decades we've been doing it.
But the bottom line is that this is a distraction. The longer we continue focusing on short term profit, repeating the previous generations' mistakes, the harder it will be to get to zero emissions. Nuclear and renewables are not mutually exclusive. The more diverse our energy sources, the more robust our fossil-fuel free grid will be.
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Not true. In fact, very much the opposite is true, nuclear plants are vastly more compact
Distributed solar and agrivoltaics have 0 or negative land use and require less material than a nuclear reactor. Whereas low-yield uranium resource (like Inkai) has a lower area specific power than a dedicated utility solar install.
Distributed solar + battery also has the effect of massively reducing strain on transmission. A household that previously had a summer peak consumption of 20kW, a summer average of 2kW and a winter max daily average of 1kW can now be fed with 800W of transmission instead of 20kW. Results are less extreme in high latitude but it can still halve.
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Great news if you want the free market to solve all the world's problems.
I'm more into ensuring we have a diverse carbon free energy generation future, though, and nuclear is just able to solve the storage problem today, which makes it incredibly valuable to society.
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Are there any nuclear plants today that implement energy storage? I know molten salt reactors would be capable but none actually exist as far as I can find.
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It's not that they are used for storage, but are able to be ramped up or down to meet demand at will., eliminating the need for storage. Kind of like a tankless water heater
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Even with massive overprovision and the rest of europe the inflexibility and geographic concentration of nuclear makes it unable to beat solar + wind with mere minutes of storage in terms of grid penetration.
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We need to do both. The amount of renewable energy that we need to decarbonize or economy is enormous.
Right now we don't have the industrial capacity to manufacture the amount of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries needed for the transition. We need to ramp up the production, it means new factories, new trained engineers and technicians, new mines for the ore... All of that takes years or even decades to setup. The estimates I saw for the amount of lithium needed implied that we need to multiply the production by a factor of 20 !! Renewables energy also requires a lot of copper. New mines can take decades to open.
We already have some industrial capacity for building nuclear reactors do we should use it. Same for renewables and ramp up as much as we can.
I'm 2020 this is the world primary energy mix :
- Coal: 27.6%
- Oil: 31.6%
- Gas: 25%
- Nuclear: 4.4%
- Hydropower: 7%
- Wind: 2.6%
- Solar: 1.4%
- Other renewables: 0.5%
Right now fossil fuel are still above 80%, it needs to be close to 0% in 25 years. We need to use all the tools we have available: nuclear, solar and wind.
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Diverting resources from solar and wind which are growing ~25-50% and currently 2EJ/yr per year to nuclear is a net loss given that a 20 year build up of the nuclear industry resulted in <1EJ/yr increase in the 80s. By the time any new reactor is online, the annual production of new PV will exceed the entire nuclear fleet builtnover 70 years.
Just the first fuel load for that much nuclear requires more than doubling uranium mining. Not to mention the iridium, gadolinium etc. or anything outside the core. And this is in uranium resources that are significantly worse than those currently being mined.
The "so much copper" for solar is about 0.4kg/kW for distributed (10% of current mining would cover all electricity in 2 years).
Similarly current lithium production is producing about 1TWh/yr of batteries. 10 years of that is overkill for lithium's role in grid storage (although about an order of magnitude more is needed if the goal is for everyone to have an EV and we ignore sodium ion, both unrelated to cancelling renewable projects and instead pretendingnto build a nuclear reactor).
You're also making fossil fuels seem like a bigger contributer than they are. 1J of electricity will provide 5J of space heating or the same travel distance as 5-8J burnt to refine petrol and make an ICE car go. 20% hydro/renewables/nuclear means that only 50% of the actual stuff done is via fossil fuels. Which is not to say heat pumps and electrified transport are trivial transitions, but they are necessary either way.
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Is lithium still that important with the new battery technologies emerging?
I've been reading that sodium based and even solid state batteries are making leaps and bounds while at the same time we are actively reducing the amount of lithium required to manufacture large capacity batteries, by introducing new formulas based with much cheaper and plentiful elements.
What I would like to see is a ramp up on recycling more and better.
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Sodium ion is commercial now and in the scale-up phase. It's usable for anything a lithium battery was usable for in 2015, but with some advantages (cheaper, longer lasting, shippable fully discharged, less fire-prone). Other grid scale technologies (ZnBr, Fe, NaS, V, Na-flow) are in the demo stage.
In either case the current scale of the lithium battery industry exceeds the scale needed for diurnal grid storage significantly. Mining a kg of lithium is both lower environmental impact and larger in scale of application (in terms of energy per year delivered by the associated system) than mining a kg of Uranium.
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yes qyron
lithium remains a crucial element in the realm of emerging battery technologies, despite the evolution and diversification of battery chemistries. Lithium-ion batteries, which utilize lithium as a core component, have dominated the energy storage landscape for decades due to their high energy density, reliability, and widespread use in various applications, including consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and renewable energy storage.
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I agree, especially with respect to batteries. It's not about nuclear vs renewables, it's about nuclear vs batteries. We can probably scale up energy storage to meet the world's baseload needs - but we haven't done that before. It might take a long time, we might hit some dead ends, and it might not end up being as cheap as we hope. But we have seen nuclear power on a large scale so we know what it takes. To be certain we can get zero carbon as soon as possible we should pursue every promising avenue.
Also note that the cost of, for example, solar energy has decreased 94% in the last 35 years because we have (rightly) put lots of resources into research and scaling up production. Meanwhile nuclear investment has been way down for decades. Maybe the cost of nuclear would come down with economies of scale, and newer designs.
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Energy storage is a really important piece of the puzzle that unfortunately gets often overlooked. We should be investing in it a lot more and try to find new solutions that don't involve mining all the lithium in the world.
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Is that counting the massive storage costs necessary for running a fully renewable grid? Including the low saturation point for cheap storage like pumped hydro and increasing costs with increasing scale due to material shortages? It is definitely cheaper per kwh right now, but we want to know the overall cost going forward.
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Are you counting the even higher storage costs for running an all nuclear grid?
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Why would an all nuclear grid need more than a day of storage? You just need to match constant supply with a 24 hour demand curve.
(And I doubt anyone's arguing for an all-nuclear grid, since renewables are so cheap when they're available. We just need enough dispatchable power on the grid to survive weather events without burning gas.)
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@pizzaiolo Even with the extreme subsidies given to nuclear, it still doesn't make money. Insurance payout cap, govt responsibility for cleanup, the fact most of the tech was paid for by public money, massive state and federal subsidies for plant operation... it still can't turn a profit. lmao. That's the real reason PGE was going to shut down Diablo. It's too expensive to operate, and it has unfunded maintenance liabilities that total near the original plant construction cost.
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You can’t infest every house on every street on every neighborhood with door to door nuclear power plant salespeople. Profitability is the least important metric in my mind for such a huge topic as energy production.
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You can’t infest every house on every street on every neighborhood with door to door nuclear power plant salespeople
God bless 'em though, they're trying,
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Remember that, capitalization is important for people looking for those nice profits. And earnings come from differential capitalization. The issue was never that they are or not profitable, but if the 'big capitalists' are even willing to participate in making 'abundance' even a possibility.
I'm pretty sure that if we put our time and effort in organize ourselves we can handle most of the problem with power, but trying to get them to work in the "green capitalist" way is just not understanding how capitalism works. Its about control of production, not some ambiguous idea of a free-market with god-like awareness.
Hope these technologies develop faster, yet, I know if they are even implemented around the world with the idea to improve peoples lives: will not be under the state of capital.
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New research has brought to light a significant shift in the energy landscape, indicating that renewable energy sources are now proving to be more profitable than nuclear power. This paradigm shift has far-reaching implications for the future of global energy production and sustainability efforts. The research underscores how advancements in technology, increased efficiency, and a rapidly evolving renewable energy sector are making wind, solar, and other clean energy sources not only environmentally responsible but also economically viable. This development not only reinforces the trend towards a greener and more sustainable energy future but also highlights the potential for substantial economic benefits associated with embracing renewables over traditional nuclear power options. As economies transition to cleaner energy alternatives, this research acts as a powerful catalyst for accelerating the adoption of renewable energy technologies on a global scale.
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...so?
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For the article, which you apparently didn't read:
“Given enough time, it may be possible to build a nuclear power plant to the highest safety standards and remain economically relevant, even taking into account the costs of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years,” the scientists concluded. “However, building nuclear power plants requires many years of planning and construction and is expensive, while the climate crisis demands urgency and requires such large investments that profitability is paramount.”
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“However, building nuclear power plants requires many years of planning and construction and is expensive, while the climate crisis demands urgency and requires such large investments that profitability is paramount.”
..they say as they ignore the glaring fact that prioritising profit over everything else is literally what got us in to this urgency-demanding mess in the first place, and that depending on the "good will" of people who will refuse to act until and unless something is proven to make them money is only ever going to continue serving them, not the rest of the planet.
I think the person you replied to is valid in wondering why anyone thinks this is a positive development when all it is is more fucking around within the rules of capitalism and somehow expecting capitalism to change..
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Pretty sure what he meant is that who cares about profit? Not a discussion we should be having when in a climate crisis brought about by chasing profits.
I say let's decarbonise ASAP, while looking into a long term zero GHG emissions power grid. There is no one-size fits all when it comes to energy generation and distribution.
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This article is a joke of renewable propaganda. It makes hypothesis on the worst nuclear trends, and project the renewable trends, ignoring that renewables need fossile to provide consistent output. They also question each and every analysis that pretend nuclear would be good.
This is an anti-nuclear shit post.
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renewables need fossile to provide consistent output
If only we had invented energy storage!
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Also not even an advantage.
France has nuclear capacity for 550TWh/yr at nameplate for a load of 420-500TWh/yr and several neighboring countries that let them use hydro for storage.
They still produce 40-50TWh from dispatchable sources.
If storage is impossible, then we better build more wind and solar instead of nuclear.
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Fiction land storage does not count.
Be specific and don’t lie with generalisations that don’t apply at scale for the grid. And don’t fan girl Lithium, it has no business case outside of extreme cases and more to the point the world does not remotely have enough.
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Yet studies show that renewables decarbonise faster and the only way for nuclear to complete is basically in a majority renewables grid. Oh, and also be 25% cheaper. Which is not ideal.
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64 comments
Yes, because profit is what's so important and not part of creating the problem, right?
Why not use both?
Because we only have limited resources and they have to be used wisely. So if it is cheaper to build solar, rather then nuclear, we should use our workers to build solar. The other problem is that nuclear reactors do not last forever, so over time, they will be phased out, just due to economics.
The problem is it's not that simple from a climate perspective. Solar and wind are great but are incredibly variable which is not good when you need a guaranteed baseline electricity production. There is no situation under which a large nation could reliably just use wind/solar to power the country. Currently nuclear is the only renewable, clean energy source that can produce a stable output.
No reason to fight the tide. Renewables and storage are enough.
People just say "storage" as if it's some simple solution. It's not. Pumped hydro can work in some places but it can also cause pretty impactful disturbances for the local ecosystem so it needs to be planned with care. Hydrogen storage is not a mature technology yet, it's still in the trial stage and has pretty poor performance (something like 35% round-trip efficiency), not to mention the issues with hydrogen gas leaking due to its small molecular size. Shouldn't even start discussing lithium ion, but the danger of thermal runaway should alone be enough of a reason to plan it very carefully.
Don't get me wrong, renewables + storage is the future, aside from eventual fusion power it's the cheapest and most environmentally friendly alternative. But a lot of people talk as if there aren't enormous technical challenges in stabilizing a power grid with renewables at the moment. Remember that precisely all of the power that is put into the grid has to be pulled out of the grid, every minute of every hour of every day of the year, as soon as that equilibrium is broken in either direction we experience significant issues.
Not everywhere, not all the time. Were that the case we'd be much farther ahead in getting rid of fossil fuels.
Profit is the only real problem with nuclear. The US navy has 7000+ years of operating nuclear reactors without a major incident, and with minimal enviromental impact.
Ok, they are a bit different in scale and construction.
Our government is busy to make people pay for owning solar panels. So yeah profit is always more important and literally no government or company gives a shit about the environment.
I'm pretty sure people will start removing their solar panels here soon since no one wants to pay more for doing good.