Comment by gpm
4 months ago
This is all true except for the fact that storage is not incredibly expensive anymore, which invalidates every single conclusion you reach. Storage is now reasonably affordable, and the trend suggests it will soon be incredibly cheap.
Not true.
The largest battery systems in operation are primarily designed for short-duration grid support rather than long-term, multi-day backup. They can even bridge a single windless night.
And this is talking about short term mismatch between supply and demand in a 24 hour cycle. If you consider the need to account for the yearly seasonal generation variation (which is far more dramatic as most of the developed world is situated on high latitudes) battery storage becomes even more problematic due to the absurd capital expenditures for a resource that you'd have to charge with a dramatic production supply during the summer months to slowly discharge during the winter.
People have been misled with the convenient lie of LCOE for too long, when what really matters are the true system costs. We don't even have in place the supply chain to sustain this, and I am not even talking about Lithium or Cobalt, I am talking about plain old Copper.
Then, there are the capital requirements for recycling and decommissioning, as the useful life of such systems is unfortunately not something to write home about.
Think about it. We have spent too much time and money on solar and wind, money that could have been spent on nuclear power. The clock is ticking, replacing our grid with solar may be the wet dream of big finance, but it is not a reasonable solution, it is about time we stop wasting our time with it.
Absolutely true.
I don't know why you're even talking about nuclear when that's not something an individual can do at their scale. It's not relevant to this conversation. But everything you've just said about it is wrong.
LCOE, when LCOE is calculated correctly, is absolutely the right measure and absolutely includes the true system cost including storage to bring it up to a similar level of availability and decommissioning (incidentally decommissioning is way higher cost for nuclear than batteries so it's weird that you try to cite it).
Even if we switch gears from talking about individual generation to grid scale generation nuclear done safely is simply too expensive. Solar and battery storage are cheaper than it in sunny places today, they were cheaper than it in sunny places a year ago, and their price is and has been consistently falling exponentially while nuclear's price stays about constant.
Those prices are including the absolutely massive subsidies that are given to nuclear, in every form from government investment in the technology to government absorbing the vast majority of the insurance cost by not requiring they are insured to anywhere close to even a small fraction of the full amount of damage they could cause in a worst case disaster.
The only fantasy here is that nuclear is somehow going to suddenly buck the trend of staying at about constant price and start falling in price even more exponentially than solar and batteries have been to catch up. Spending money on nuclear only serves to prolong the climate crisis by taking away money from actual scalable solutions like solar that can outcompete with fossil fuels on cost.
You don't build storage for yearly cycles, you build it for daily cycles (which is affordable today) and overbuild solar to account for seasonal variation in generation and demand. Note that even things like nuclear have to be overbuilt for seasonal variation in demand, and to account for the fact that there is maintenance and sometimes some of your plants are down.
I was obviously talking about grid scale, that's what matters.
I have solar Li-ion and hybrid inverters at my home, basically because I foresee more frequent blackouts in the future. Part of the cost of my system is generously paid by poorer consumers, because I still have net-metering in my country (talk about subsides).
Nuclear power is one of the most insanely regulated industries due to the misinformed work of science denier green militants and populist politics. Talking about subsides ignoring all the red tape nuclear is a common tactic behind the propaganda of big finance and big green corrupt interests.
LCOE is absolutely the right measure only in two cases:
1) You have a financial interest on selling intermittent power or/and 2) You're hopeless ignorant about both the physics and the economics of a power grid.
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Which will make the problems of the rich disappear and the problems of the poor and the state ... worse. (because the costs of the state are paying off loans for expensive generation, costs which they recover from the poor)
The state can default on the loans too. It sucks and it will make future financing more difficult. But it remains an option. No such thing as risk-free lending.
... which would cut off imports in a non-self-sufficient state (Pakistan is a country that if it ever were isolated internationally, the people would just start dieing). For the poor the situation is simple: either they pay the loans or they lose everything they have and probably even die of hunger.
A lot of muslim and African states are in that boat. If the US, yes, the international monetary system is under US control, frankly because nobody else will pay for it. If the US ever decides not to cover Pakistan's debts starvation is exactly what will happen in Pakistan.
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It’s not reasonably affordable by any real “middle class” metric and the impact a reliable grid has on the industrial and commercial base of an economy is being undervalued by an utterly laughable degree during these discussions. Westerners and rich folks take it for granted as a fact of life at this point.
The duck curve is a rounding error when discussing energy storage.
The storage needed to turn solar into a reliable (as any comparable fossil fuel power plant) dispatchable source of power, plus the cost of the solar in the first place, costs less than other sources of dispatch-able power (like gas) in sunny places per kwh.
It also scales down better (though not perfectly).
Either you can afford it (both storage and solar), or you can't afford power at all, or you don't live in a sunny place.
Ignoring sunk capital costs into other energy infrastructure of course. If you already have a working nuclear power plant you're not going to save money by randomly turning it off and switching to something else, for instance.
Well, I certainly can’t make a couple weeks of battery storage pencil out vs. a fossil fuel generator at this point.
The math actually gets worse once you get into combined cycle natural gas at scale.
You I suppose could make an argument that load curtailment is cheaper than planning for the current grid reliability everyone has gotten used to over the past 50 years, but it would be a societal shift.
Seasonal energy storage is what is interesting to discuss, and of course is where that last 2% of grid reliability comes from. It’s also the most expensive part of running a grid. The first watts are basically free, the last are very expensive.
I’d love to be proven wrong within the next decade though! I just personally don’t see the battery storage price going down at the same rates it has been simply due to structural raw material input cost reasons - short of a breakthrough in chemistry. I think we are getting close to the maximum savings achieved by economies of scale with current technology.
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