but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany).
And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy
They are trying to switch the conversation from electricity where renewables are making unmistakably swift progress, to all energy (e.g. gas for heat in homes and factories and oil for cars and trucks).
They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage.
In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation.
An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.
Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste.
I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail
Yes, but all that can be taken into account in the analysis, and renewables and storage have become so cheap they're now the superior option.
Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. I wonder if some of the reactionary takes trying to promote nuclear are a consequence of that. I think you're average far right type is not going to be comfortable living in a relative energy ghetto.
> Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations.
Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).
During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me
Have you done the math of how insufficient battery tech is, if we are to go 100% renewable? I'm so tired of renewable proponents just use the thought terminating cliche "BATTERIES!" when intermittency is brought up.
There are several factors, but the single biggest reason for nuclear's ever increasing cost is due to construction productivity.
All other forms of productivity have gone up drastically. However construction productivity remains stuck at a constant. And as other areas are more productive, we need to still pay those in construction competitive wages or else they would switch to more productive jobs with higher wages. (Let's just elide the disconnect between wages rising fully with productivity increases, but they do rise some!)
Despite being far more wealthy today than centuries ago, we don't build cathedrals with super intricate stonework, because labor is so much more expensive.
I fear that nuclear is like the gothic cathedral: something that was far easier to do when labor costs were low, but at wealth increases it becomes far more difficult to make economic sense.
This doesn't measure the cost of providing dispatchable electricity though. If I want 1MWh of electricity at night provided by solar, it's going to cost more than solar's LCoE because I will also need to pay for a way to store and dispatch it.
Which again does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.
Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.
You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.
Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany).
And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
A look at destatis tells me something else for Germany (in 2024): Solar has a share of 15 %, and wind 28 %. In total 57 % of the produced energy comes from renewable sources. (https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...)
They are trying to switch the conversation from electricity where renewables are making unmistakably swift progress, to all energy (e.g. gas for heat in homes and factories and oil for cars and trucks).
They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage.
In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation.
An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.
7 replies →
I think you're looking at electricity here, not energy. Energy is much more than electricity.
60% of that energy is lost as waste heat and doesn't need replaced as we decarbonise and electrify.
For already developed nations predictions are for electricity to double but energy use to halve at the same time as they electrify end uses.
Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste.
I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail
6 replies →
Yes, but all that can be taken into account in the analysis, and renewables and storage have become so cheap they're now the superior option.
Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. I wonder if some of the reactionary takes trying to promote nuclear are a consequence of that. I think you're average far right type is not going to be comfortable living in a relative energy ghetto.
> Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations.
Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).
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During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.
I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me
Existing nuclear, fine but new nuclear isn’t going to work, it takes way too long to build. Solar is just plug in and go.
Have you ever heard of batteries?
Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.
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Have you done the math of how insufficient battery tech is, if we are to go 100% renewable? I'm so tired of renewable proponents just use the thought terminating cliche "BATTERIES!" when intermittency is brought up.
6 replies →
Yep, the data suggests that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
And some of those data seems sane: the cost of solar panels reduces due to tech improvements: ok
The cost of coal increases a bit, maybe due to geopolicital issues: ok, seems legit
The cost of nuclear increases .. why ? Why the step between 2016 and 2017 ? Does tech "de-improved" ?
More insights would be interesting
There are several factors, but the single biggest reason for nuclear's ever increasing cost is due to construction productivity.
All other forms of productivity have gone up drastically. However construction productivity remains stuck at a constant. And as other areas are more productive, we need to still pay those in construction competitive wages or else they would switch to more productive jobs with higher wages. (Let's just elide the disconnect between wages rising fully with productivity increases, but they do rise some!)
Despite being far more wealthy today than centuries ago, we don't build cathedrals with super intricate stonework, because labor is so much more expensive.
I fear that nuclear is like the gothic cathedral: something that was far easier to do when labor costs were low, but at wealth increases it becomes far more difficult to make economic sense.
1 reply →
This doesn't measure the cost of providing dispatchable electricity though. If I want 1MWh of electricity at night provided by solar, it's going to cost more than solar's LCoE because I will also need to pay for a way to store and dispatch it.
Which again does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.
Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.
Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
2 replies →
Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.
> solar is now both cheaper and safer.
apples and oranges
Not at night