Comment by AnthonyMouse
10 hours ago
> The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.
The answer is obviously that it delivers when they don't.
Every power plant has to hit a certain average price per kWh, and the ones with a variable operating cost (fossil fuels) also need a minimum price in order to generate right now, since the cost of fuel is a significant part of their costs.
What this means is that nuclear does pretty well in a market with high volatility, because its fuel cost is negligible so it can sell for $0.04/kWh when other supply is available and $1/kWh when it isn't, and end up at a viable average. Meanwhile solar never gets the $1/kWh because the reason the price is that high then is that the sun is down and the batteries are low.
> We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants.
This is just putting a battery storage unit at the site of an existing power plant because it already has a stout grid connection.
> Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
Pushing the bottom up during the times when other generation methods have low output does help with the hard part.
Regardless of whether nuke fuel cost is negligible, nukes were already quite expensive even under the previous model where nukes were highly utilized (expensive due to the very expensive non-fuel parts of building/running nukes). (And I'm not even sure if those existing high costs assumed the government handled the costs of insuring (or otherwise paying) if the nuke plant has a disaster, or if it included decommissioning/safe nuke disposal costs?)
But if we're talking about moving from a model where nukes run ~100% of the time (excluding maintenance) to one where they just cover the 1/x portion of the time that zero-fuel-cost renewables (+ storage) can't, then wouldn't nuke's cost per kwh end up 'x' times higher than before as a result because we still have the same amortized costs split over fewer generating hours per year, and nuke fuel cost is negligible?
> But if we're talking about moving from a model where nukes run ~100% of the time (excluding maintenance) to one where they just cover the 1/x portion of the time that zero-fuel-cost renewables (+ storage) can't
Nobody is talking about doing that. Nuclear plants are baseload. They always run 100% of the time because even if the current price of electricity is low, their incremental cost savings from reducing output is basically zero, so any positive price means they remain at full output.
This means you don't want 100% nuclear generation, because you don't have constant load. If you have 10GW of demand at night and 20GW during the day then you don't want 20GW of nuclear and nothing to do with half of it at night. But having 5 to 10GW is good, because you never need less than that anyway.
The thing people don't seem to have caught onto yet is that the combination of solar being cheap and solar not generating anything at night means that the price at night is going to be higher not just than it is during the day, but than it has been historically, because now whatever you're using to supply power at night -- regardless of what it is -- has to recover most of its capex exclusively at night. That's not great for nuclear but it's even worse for most other things. On top of that, the most competitive real alternative to nuclear there is natural gas, which doesn't work if you want to stop emitting CO2.
The massive battery buildout in places like California and Australia are seriously eating into these night time windows already, and we’ve really just gotten started. California will exit 26 with roughly ~20% fossil, and still dropping fast every year as batteries move deeper into the night. The opportunity for nuke to sell at higher prices during the night is being eaten fast. Batteries filled with cheap excess daytime solar are cheaper than nukes already, and can be deployed instantly. The niche won’t exist soon, which is why noones building nukes.
(Yes there is a small amount of legacy nuke in California too.)
We’re already seeing prices approaching zero or even going negative due to renewable buildouts, and with storage we’re also already seeing solar cover significant demand even after sunset.
So it seems like even if you run nuclear 100% of the time, you’re not going to earn much of anything or may even need to pay the negative rates if you don’t stop feeding into the grid, for a number of hours per day, so I don’t see how you get around having fewer hours per day to cover nuclear’s existing (noticeable) amortized costs?
And the trend line of renewable and storage costs getting cheaper doesn’t seem to be stopping.
1 reply →
That’s not what we are seeing in reality. In Spain the nuclear plants massively load follow. Same as I just mentioned they do in Sweden.
Pretending they can just do “baseload” in 2026 doesn’t work. They can bid negative, but that’s just extending the life of the plant a few extra years.
And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available.
And this is today a purely physical problem. You only need to look to Australia to see grids where rooftop solar today crowds out all other sources, even utility scale renewables. How do you force them to buy ruinously expensive grid based nuclear?
A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels.
Gas turbines are cheap in CAPEX and expensive in OPEX. They can cope with it, although even they have trouble with the sliver of hours left after solar, wind and storage make up the bulk. Since that’s a far slimmer portion than their bread and butter peaking style of operation
1 reply →
In this kind of debates people often forget how far north Sweden just happens to be. Solar farms has their average production output down to single digit percent during the worst months. At the same time, those months also see an increase to around double consumption of electricity demand compared to the warmest months. Solar production has a negative correlation to electricity demand in Sweden.
Wind has a slight positive correlation to demand, but the storage requirement for wind can be calculated as weeks/months compared to hours for solar.
Sweden also has a free market for electricity without any price roofs. That mean prices can be zero for long periods during the summer when solar is overproducing, but it can also reach over €1 per kw/h during periods of supply shortage. Have the record price for 5 days and have the remaining 360 days free of charge, and you would still end up paying more than if you paid the average cost for a full year (to be fair, in the cheapest of the 4 energy regions).
To add some more aspect for the Swedish energy grid, currently the south of Sweden that is connected to the Danish and German grid are suffering from significant supply shortage. The main power plant to address this is an old Oil power plant that was supposed to exist only as reserve energy, but have since a few years now been running every day throughout the year.
There is construction of more new thermal power plants. The two main strategy to solve the shortage, split along the two political lines, is either nuclear or to combine wind power with power plants burning bio fuel and then carbon capture the emissions (both being technologies with absolutely zero controversies). The later is what is being constructed right now, while nuclear might see construction in the future.
This comment doesn’t seem aligned with reality?
System studies find that renewable energy systems are cheaper than involving new nuclear in both Denmark and Finland.
The thermal plant you are complain about mothballed one of its two burners last autumn when the contract for firm emergency reserve capacity ended.
The final burner stayed open only with a new emergency reserve contract. Last time I checked it has ran like 50-100 hours per year. Never being called in as emergency reserve, although stepping up to hot standby a few times.
They also reactivated a mothballed CCGT plant in the same region for emergency reserve duties. But that was based on the war in Ukraine and ensuring local preparedness rather than needing the electricity.
1 reply →
yeah the math doesnt work. On top of the running costs you mentioned, You are trying to pay back the ridiculous capex over a reasonable timeframe (say 30 years). Nukes already have trouble doing that at 100% high power price sales. Saying "oh they can keep selling power but at a fraction of price" is technically true but fatal to the economics of nukes.
If nuclear is too expensive why are French (~70% nuclear) electricity prices much lower compared to Germany (~60% renewables) ?
Because cost of production and the price being charged are two different things.
Because they aren’t when you look at wholesale costs?
Either way. France is wholly unable to build new nuclear given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and the ruinously expensive proposed subsides for the EPR2 fleet.
While Germany still pays for expensive early renewables. Back before the industry exploded in scale.
The relevant question is where to spend the next 100b to get the most decarbonization the fastest, today.
4 replies →