Guest Post By Willis Eschenbach
A company named Lazard puts out an annual report on something called the “Levelized Cost Of Energy” (LCOE). Here’s the April 2023 version. The LCOE estimates the total capital, operations, and maintenance costs for new electric power plants coming into service. People use the Lazard LCOE all the time to claim that renewable electricity sources are now cheaper than fossil fuel electricity. However, the Lazard data has a problem—it doesn’t include the cost of backup and other costs for renewable energy. These costs fall into four groups: backup costs, balancing costs, grid connection costs, and grid reinforcement/extension costs.
A few days ago, I posted the following tweet:
I am SOOO tired of people using the Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy to directly compare say solar vs gas or wind vs coal.
The Lazard folks themselves say (emphasis mine)
“Direct comparisons to “competing” renewable energy generation technologies must take into account issues such as dispatch characteristics (e.g., baseload and/or dispatchable intermediate capacity vs. those of peaking or intermittent technologies).”
It’s not optional, so unless you’re taking those issues into account, you are LYING ABOUT RENEWABLES.
w.
Fortunately for me, a user yclept @Roadshow11235 gave me a link to something I’d never seen, an analysis of those very costs. So let me lay them out for you.
I’ll start with the original Lazard data.
Figure 1. Original April 2023 Lazard Levelized Cost Of Energy (LCOE)
Looking at those Lazard LCOE numbers, you can see why people claim that renewables are cheaper than fossil or nuclear. It looks like solar and onshore wind are the clear winners.
However, and it’s a very big however, this does not include the other costs listed above which mostly affect renewables. Let me define each of them:
- BACKUP: All power sources require backup power for the times when they are not generating any or enough power. However, the amount of backup required is much larger for intermittent sources.
- GRID BALANCING: Extra equipment is required when you have intermittent sources, to keep their highly variable input to the grid from destabilizing it.
- GRID CONNECTION: Renewable wind and solar power is variable voltage direct current. Before it can be fed into the grid, it must be run through costly synchronous inverters to convert it to stable voltage, stable frequency alternating current.
- GRID REINFORCEMENT/EXTENSION: Unlike fossil or nuclear plants, which can generally be sited as required, renewable sources of energy are often located far from where the power is needed. As a result, the grid will generally need to be extended, strengthened, or both for such sources.
How large are these costs? Well, the source linked above gives values for five nations—Finland, France, South Korea, the US, and the UK. The amounts vary for each country. For this analysis I’ve used, not the average of these, but the average plus one standard deviation of the data.
Why not use just the average? Good question.
• These figures are all from developed, industrialized countries with extensive grids already in place. When applied to the whole world, the grid-related costs will be higher.
• The less developed a country is, the more it costs to do business there, because many of the ancillary businesses, supplies, and transportation systems we take for granted in developed nations simply don’t exist.
• The greed factor will come into play. Existing renewables often have cozy agreements to sell their power at prices well above the market, and they are exploiting every loophole to do so.
• Unplanned events. Hailstorms destroy solar panels but don’t bother fossil plants. Ocean waves break and damage power cables coming to land from offshore wind turbines. See my post “Blocking The Wind” for examples.
• Finally, there’s what I modestly call “Willis’s Recursive Rule Of Construction”, which states that “Everything takes longer and costs more, even when you take Willis’s Recursive Rule into account.
With those caveats, here are the extra renewable costs for each of the power sources.
Figure 2. Total of the extra costs for each energy source. Note that for each source, the costs increase in line with the percentage of the total electricity supplied by that source (“penetration”).
You can see why Lazard says their levelized costs for renewables are not directly comparable to dispatchable or baseload fuels like nuclear, coal, and gas.
(It’s worth noting here that in many US states, the amount paid to power producers for electricity is on the order of $0.05 to $0.07 per kilowatt-hour. So with regards to solar farms, even if land, panels, mounting structures, and all the rest of the solar setup were totally free, it would still cost more than current power prices … but I digress …)
So, what does the original Lazard data look like when we add in the extra costs for each of the various power sources? Here you go …
Figure 3. Original April 2023 Lazard Levelized Cost Of Energy (LCOE, yellow lines) and LCOE plus ancillary backup, balancing, grid connection, and grid reinforcement/extension costs (colored lines). Note that nuclear is high in part because of the insane regulatory bureaucratic hoops you need to jump through to build one. This can be fixed.
Solar and wind not looking so good once you include all the costs …
Figure 3 above makes it quite clear why there are 1,008 new coal-fired power plants either announced, in planning, permitted, or under construction around the world.
Figure 4. Locations of 1,008 new coal power plants either announced, in planning, or under construction. I note in passing that Australian politicians think closing their 6 existing coal plants will save the planet. SOURCE
The reason those countries are building coal plants is that, unlike climate alarmist politicians in the West, people in most sane countries are looking at the total costs of different sources, not just the Lazard LCOE numbers.
Further affiant sayeth naught.
[UPDATE] For those who think this is only theoretical, ignorance of these facts cost the UK £10 million one day recently …
UK ‘power dumping’ raises concerns over energy management – Energy Live News
Here on our green forested hillside near the ocean, after days of cold sea fog, we have sun today. Still no climate emergency, and I’m glad for the local warming. So I’m going outside to finish burying the Cat5e Ethernet cable to get internet over to the guest house … the work’s not fun, but the day is glorious.
With wishes that all of your days may be equally wonderful,
w.
As Always: I ask that when you comment, please quote the exact words you are discussing. This avoids endless misunderstandings.
I’m hoping NOT to get trite answers from nuke-fan commenters, with whom I might agree:
What makes nuclear most expensive?
Oh.. I just read “Note that nuclear is high in part because of the insane regulatory bureaucratic hoops you need to jump through to build one. This can be fixed.” Yeah. Anything else?
Why would you solicit non-trite answers from people with whom you don’t agree?
The regulatory/activist obstructionist burden is so high there is a negative learning curve on construction. That is, the more are built, the more rules will be demanded at higher and higher cost.
The general principle is that each reactor is a separate project, so design approvals on an earlier project do not count as precedent.
All construction projects, to a first approximation, are built with borrowed money, so dragging out construction times directly affects price.
As dear boys like Jerry Brown and Andrew Cuomo suffer no consequences for their playing demogue, they will continue. The legacy press is assured to be ignorant, as usual.
Well, as to your question, I observe that neither the Lazard LCOE accounting nor the additional cost factors identified in the above article mention anything about the cost of storing the long-life radioactive waste products produced by nuclear power plants.
There is no acceptable technology for disposing of these radionuclide wastes . . . they must be stored at facilities that have security to prevent theft of such for, oh, say, a terrorist “dirty bomb” to spread radioactive and toxic poisons.
The most problematic waste created by nuclear power plants are the transuranic elements that result from nuclear fissioning that creates the reactor power, such as plutonium-239 that decays to only half or its initial radioactivity in 24,000 years!
I wonder what’s the amortized cost-delta for this unaccounted-for fact, which I don’t believe can be “fixed”.
Nuclear power has been producing routine waste for about 70 years. I am unaware of anyone who has been injured in any way from exposure to it, but would be grateful if you can document any death, injury, disease, etc. (other than accidental).
If nuclear-power waste were a real problem, there are ample locations with controlled access underground and underwater that could have been storing it indefinitely.
it isn’t a problem and never has been. That’s why this shrieking antinuke is trying to make a big deal about a non-issue. I don’t notice this individual complaining about all the radioactivity in seawater. So he only wants to whine about things he defines as “dangerous”.
Denver has something like 2 to 3 times as much background radiation as does Miami.
My response only mentioned the cost of storing nuclear waste . . . it is you that introduced the topic of injury from such. Seems like a misdirection.
So far, of the “ample locations” you mention for “storing nuclear waste indefinitely”, it appears that the US Government (specifically, DOD and DOE) haven’t found any of them to be acceptable . . . reference the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site fiasco.
Yucca Mountain is technologically acceptable. What it is not is politically acceptable, thanks to ignorant “environmentalists.”
My former representative in Kansas voted against Yucca Mountain as a courtesy to Harry Reid, senator from Nevada, who decided 20 years into the project that he didn’t like it. So long as long term decisions can be second guessed after they are approved and permitted, things like this will happen. I note that not only is Yucca Mountain technologically acceptable, there is waste entombed there in the pilot project phase, and so it will remain a waste facility forever, anyway.
Well, it wasn’t just politics . . . there were basic science/technology/environmental issues concerning acceptability of the Yucca Mountain site for long-term nuclear waste storage.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository , among these were:
1) In September 2007, it was discovered that the Bow Ridge fault line ran underneath the facility, hundreds of feet east of where it was originally thought to be located, beneath a storage pad where spent radioactive fuel canisters would be cooled before being sealed in a maze of tunnels.
2) The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that EPA’s 10,000-year compliance period for isolation of radioactive waste was not consistent with National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommendations and was too short. The NAS report had recommended standards be set for the time of peak risk, which might approach a period of one million years. By limiting the compliance time to 10,000 years, EPA did not respect a statutory requirement that it develop standards consistent with NAS recommendations. {GD comment: just stop for one moment to consider that this is EPA and NAS arguing over facility “design lifes” of 10,000 to one million years . . . just ridiculous IMHO!}
3) The volcanic tuff at Yucca Mountain is appreciably fractured and movement of water through an aquifer below the waste repository is primarily through fractures . . . the faults extend from the planned storage area all the way to the water table 600 to 1,500 ft (180 to 460 m) below the surface. Future water transport from the surface to waste containers is likely to be dominated by fractures. There is evidence that surface water has been transported down through the 700 ft (210 m) of overburden to the exploratory tunnel at Yucca Mountain in less than 50 years. The aquifer of Yucca Mountain drains to Amargosa Valley, home to over 1400 people and a number of endangered species.
ToldYouSo, you don’t go to Wikipedia for a balanced account of as something as politically infested as nuclear power.
I will myself still use Wikipedia as quick and convenient source for some things. But you really do need to be aware that it is worse than useless on many ‘hot-topic’ subjects.
Salt mine would take care of the problem but they no money to made, storing it there.
and powerful politicians in that state who didn’t want it
Credit the crooked senator Harry Reid and the mob bosses who owned him.
“..it is you that introduced the topic of injury..”
Actually no you did introduce the topic of injury & I quote “…a terrorist “dirty bomb” to spread radioactive..”..with scare quotes and everything…presumably to frighten small children and school marms…
As for feasibility of long term storage, I think a 1.3 BILLION year demonstration project qualifies as demonstrating viability.
As for costs of long term storage, back in the day I had this stuff readily available off the top of my head, but it took me a while to do some research. While this link is ostensibly about the viability of a proposed solution for recycling CANDU reactor bundles it has a useful piece of data or two.
Specifically it mentions a cost of $300/kg for long term storage of waste from a CANDU reactor, at a mass of 16.9 kg per CANDU bundle (also in the link above) that’s $5700/bundle. 1 CANDU bundle provides 1 GWh of electricity. So…that’s a cost of ~$.006/kwh. An amount that wouldn’t show up in Willis’ graphs especially as my numbers here are in $CAD & Willis’ graphs are in $USD…but sure go ahead & add it.
As per your pseudonym, you can’t fix stupid.
You can’t refute him, so you are only left with lame attempts at insult.
You, of all commenters, should know about that!
Big difference, I refute, then insult. You just insult.
If that’s what it takes to feel good about yourself, then that’s what ya gotta do.
So you’re saying that you recognized that there’s no helping you out of your delusions so I shouldn’t even try…thanks for sharing…
Neurological damage, acid reflux in babies, loss of calcium from bones…
…but we are talking about radioactivity, not the fluoride byproducts hidden in our drinking water by misanthrope sciencers, so leave it at that.
Actually, there is, and Japan built a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility that uses it. Purex-MOX spent fuel reprocessing strips out all the radioactive byproduct chemically, then glassifies that small volume for long term safe and inexpensive deep burial.
US long ago decided to just bury spent nuc fuel rather than reprocess, then never completed the Yucca Mountain burial site.
The more radioactive a substance is, the quicker the problem goes away on it’s own.
The stuff that’s dangerous decays away on it’s own in a few years.
The stuff that last for 10’s of thousands of years, is not very radioactive in the first place.
“The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine remains one of the most radioactive areas of the world, following Earth’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986.
“Experts have said it will be at least 3,000 years for the area to become safe, while others believe this is too optimistic. It is thought that the reactor site will not become habitable again for at least 20,000 years, according to a 2016 report. . . . ‘Some areas largely escaped radioactive fallout and are not dangerous to visit or work in, while other areas remain heavily contaminated with a potpourri of radionuclides like cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-241 and will remain uninhabitable for centuries if not millennia’ “
— https://www.newsweek.com/chernobyl-aftermath-how-long-will-exclusion-zone-uninhabitable-1751834
“A large area around the Fukushima nuclear power plant will be uninhabitable for at least 100 years.”
— https://loe.org/blog/blogs.html?seriesID=30&blogID=7
These problems are not going away quickly . . . especially “on their own”.
There were old people did not leave the area and live long than those who did.
You really will believe any lie that agrees with what you want to believe.
They are already letting people back into the area around Chernobyl.
There were other people who never left.
There was never a need to evacuate anyone from Fukushima.
One problem never existed, the other problem is well on it’s way to solving itself.
So much for the lies of the anti-nuclear panic mongers.
“The Exclusion Zone covers an area of approximately 2,600 km2 (1,000 sq mi) in Ukraine immediately surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant where radioactive contamination is highest and public access and habitation are restricted. Other areas of compulsory resettlement and voluntary relocation not part of the restricted Exclusion Zone exist in the surrounding areas and throughout Ukraine. In February 2019 it was revealed that talks were underway to redraw the boundaries of the Exclusion Zone to reflect the declining radioactivity of the Zone’s outer areas . . . The Exclusion Zone’s purpose is to restrict access to hazardous areas, reduce the spread of radiological contamination, and conduct radiological and ecological monitoring activities.”
—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone
(my underlining emphasis added)
Did anyone ever state that the exclusion zones did not exist?
BTW, this post of yours refutes your previous post in which you quoted a Newsweek reporter stating that the area would be off limits for at least 3000 years.
Hmmmm . . . in the quoted text of my post of June 4, 2023, 8:57 am, I don’t find any mention of when there won’t any exclusion zone around Chernobyl.
Reading comprehension 101 (especially as regards text that is emphasized).
(Personal attack was removed) SUNMOD
No.
In spite of what alarmists have said, wildlife is thriving in Chernobyl and the big disaster at Fukushima was from the botched and overdone evacuation not from the actual incident – but good luck getting the politicians responsible to admit their stupidity.
The French do the same but for burial. Instead the glass is stored “in a room in Le Havre” as they say. The volume is quite small. Jimmy Carter shut down our development of such a practice because he was concerned that the the result, some Plutonium, useful isotopes, and the glass, would promote proliferation of nuclear weapons. I don’t know what the French do with their plutonium, use it for refueling their reactors perhaps. That was our plan.
MOX stands for mixed oxides. The plutonium is part of the mix—at least in Japan it is put into the recycled fuel rods.
Like nearly everything going on in the USA, “spent” reactor fuel is a political problem, not a technical problem. As for using plutonium in power reactors, every uranium reactor starts producing and using plutonium from the day it goes critical. By the end of the fuel cycle, plutonium contributes a significant (~30% by one source) amount to the reactor output. A US nuclear plant I was associated with shipped spent fuel to Canada in the early 1970s for reprocessing and conversion to MOX (U + Pu) fuel, which it loaded into the reactor. It’s my recollection that Commonwealth Edison (Illinois) which had grand plans for nuclear power in the 1960s was building a fuel reprocessing facility, or going to. Pres. Carter shut that down along with the West Valley, NY, reprocessing plant. France and other nuclear nations reprocess spent fuel, but not the USA. So, we end up with dry storage casks stored at the ~100 nuclear plants. Safe, but hardly optimum.
Plutonium is reactor fuel as well as good bomb material. It’s not very radioactive, like uranium, and so is easy to handle and fabricate new fuel and bombs out of. (Unlike Thorium waste, which is contaminated with U232, a massively radioactive waste product, which is why thorium is regarded as ‘unsuitable for bombs’)
The problem is, that right now, raw uranium ore is so cheap that recycled MOX (Mixed Oxide – Plutonium and Uranium) is not cost effective.
1) Not all radioactive waste from nuclear reactors can be reprocessed.
2) AFAIK, the US has no active plants for processing radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, nor does it ship such waste overseas for reprocessing.
3) “Japan built a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility . . . glassifies that small volume for long term safe and inexpensive deep burial.” Got any facts to support that term “safe and inexpensive” for, say, the next 24,000 or more years?
4) Your last sentence reinforces the existing problem.
As of 2001, “The DOE estimates that it has over 100 million U.S. gallons of highly radioactive waste and 2,500 metric tons (2,800 short tons) of spent fuel from the production of nuclear weapons and from research activities in temporary storage.”
Separately and for reference in the context of this post, according to https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal , as of Sept 2021, “The nation has over 85,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants.”
There is a reprocessing facility in Hobbs New Mexico run by a French company. In your case AFAIK, is about 2.6 millimeters +/- 0.2.
Web search doesn’t reveal such . . . please provide link to such.
Thanks! (+/- 3 dB)
Still waiting on that linked reference . . . assuming it exists, AFAIK.
And you will wait that way forever, troll.
Apparently so.
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” — Bible, Romans 1:22, King James Version (KJV)
Talking about yourself again?
1) The stuff that can’t be reprocessed decays away in a few years. It was never a problem
2) Easily solved, if the anti-nuclear nut jobs would just permit them to be built. There would be no need to ship overseas if we built our own reprocessing plants.
3) Do the math.
4) Using it for fuel makes the problem worse? Really?
In fact nuclear waste is not a catch all, but to simple minded Art Students its talked about as if it were.
In reality – a strange concept to Art Students, but it does exist – what comes out of a nuclear reactors falls into several different categories.
In short, once again, we see not rational criticism, but irrational fear mongering that again displays either utter ignorance, or deliberate manipulation of the narrative for commercial and political reasons.
Nuclear power is the cheapest form of energy there is. It represents a huge danger to existing oil and gas interests.
Go figure.
Brilliant summary Leo.
Outside of Las Vegas, NV (my home) there is a thing called the Nevada Test Site. Its called that because it was used for nuclear weapons testing, including many above-ground detonations (you know, mushroom clouds). Because of related radioactive contamination the Site will require monitoring, guarding and upkeep indefinitely (forever). Mainly because of that it was selected as the permanent underground storage location for U.S. nuclear wastes. After billions in wasted taxpayer dollars, politics killed it. But its associated hole in the ground (tunnels) is still there.
To oversimplify, my solution to nuclear waste is to vitrify (make into a glass) the waste products into small blocks, truck them to a fenced area out in the Test Site’s contaminated desert, kick the vitrified blocks off the back of the trucks and guard the area forever. If politicians ever get their heads out of their collective asses (I know … I know) grab the blocks and separate out the useable radioactive elements.
Any given group of politicians and Deep State actors can turn this simple idea into a horrendously complex and wildly expensive multi-decades-long make-work project for countless politicians, government employees, NGOs and crony capitalists. What’s not to like? It describes how we got to where we are with the current defunct storage facility collecting dust out in the contaminated desert still sucking up taxpayer dollars for no purpose.
And the amortized cost of guarding the area forever would be . . .
The amortized cost is zero, because it was already going to be guarded forever because of the nuclear testing that went on there.
Uhhh . . . there is no need to forever guard the ground areas where nuclear explosions occurred.
Case in point, there are no guards at the “ground zero point” or outward where the air bursts of the WWII Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bomb occurred.
Facts matter.
We are living in the U.S.; the land of Leftist hysteria, not facts. If you think nuclear activists and Nevada State politicians are ever going to let the Feds stop guarding the Test Site you need a remedial lesson in what we used to call little-old-ladies-in-tennis-shoes politics. Its now fat white girls with nose rings and blue hair.
Not to you.
Who cares? That’s the next guy’s problem. Then the next guy’s … then the …
Way outside of Las Vegas. I live in Henderson NV.
For readers from other countries, Nye County is bigger than many countries. For readers from the US, Nye County is bigger than some states.
For the record, I was one of 3 reviewers who signed off on the science of Yucca Mountain. To invalidate the science all you have to do is find that I made a mistake and provide the evidence that will stand up in court. That has not happened in 20 years.
The courts also told POTUS he must follow the laws of the US or get congress to change them.
For the record, US rate payers have paid for the work to store the waste. If I was paid by the goverment to do work and did not do it, I would go jail.
Our government says it will get around to it. That is ok because spent fuel is not a problem.
Thanks for the information, Kit. I’ve forgotten many of the particulars of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository fights. They are a testament to the disfunction and fecklessness of politicians and Deep State actors at all levels of government.
Was your last sentence sarcasm? Anyway, I don’t think it is a scientific or technical problem. Its a fat girls with blue hair problem.
If God/Gaia didn’t mean us to use nuclear energy then they wouldn’t have created a demonstration.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-two-billion-year-old-only-known-natural-nuclear-reactor
Then there’s the 2000+ crops genetically modified by ionising radiation crops being cultivated and eaten today.
There are benefits over and above reliable energy
There are massive uses of radioactive materials in the medical industry, and in the construction industry, that require some of the nuclear waste produced by reactors.
Some reactors are designed to produce useful ‘waste’ products. Like Cobalt 60.
I’ve been fed some for use as X ray contrast. The containers it comes in are treated as dangerous waste. I asked what happened to it in my body. “Oh don’t worry, you will pee it all out in a day or two”
Ho hum. Double standards.
Oh dear. Not all radioactive Uranium and Thorium in the world can be dug up or separated from seawater in order to reduce overall global radiation levels. Neither can we stop the bombardment of the Earth by cosmic rays that are continually producing radioactive carbon, from atmospheric nitrogen. Nor can we burn radioactive potassium that exists everywhere in the world.
You are such a Binary thinking ArtStudent. The world is, and always has been, massively radioactive – buy yourself a Geiger counter and go and check.
Furthermore, you will experience far far more radiation from a trans Atlantic flight, or from X-rays or CAT scans than you ever will from nuclear waste material.
The fact that you simply ignore this reality is a clear sign either of complete ignorance, or a clear political agenda.
85,000 tonnes? Literally a drop in the ocean, which contains 4 BILLION tonnes of radioactive uranium, that will take us 10,000 years to burn and get rid of in nuclear power stations.
Any Binary thinking ArtStudent, as well as any commenter here at WUWT is free to do such a simple thing as type into Wikipedia the following terms “Is radioactive waste from spent nuclear fuel a problem?”
Doing such, my very first hit links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste , which has this as its first paragraph:
“Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, nuclear decommissioning, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons reprocessing.[1] The storage and disposal of radioactive waste is regulated by government agencies in order to protect human health and the environment.”
I’m in no way implying that Wikipedia is the “be all and end all” of reference sources on various topics, but this widely-used, on-line encyclopedia seems to assert radioactive waste is distinct from naturally occurring radiation and thus merits the adjective “hazardous” and the sentence “The storage and disposal of radioactive waste is regulated by government agencies in order to protect human health and the environment.”
I love the way people rely on biased sources because real ones don’t tell them what they want to hear.
Anyone who relies on Wikipedia as a primary source has proven that they aren’t smart enough to be let outside without adult supervision.
You appear to be unaware that almost all Wikipedia articles cite numerous independent references—many science-based articles, papers and books—as part of their write-ups.
Most conscientious searchers of truth will go to the cited reference(s) to see if Wikipedia’s necessarily limited-scope- statements are correct and well-supported.
But please . . . feel free to mention an on-line encyclopedic resource that you believe to be better than Wikipedia, or that you use more often than Wikipedia . . . you know, considering bias and all that.
Hint: also try typing “Is radioactive waste from spent nuclear fuel a problem?” into any good Web search engine. I believe you’ll pretty much find the same answer as that summarized by the Wikipedia hit I mentioned above.
You seem to be unaware how easy it is to get a completely bogus study published.
Then again, you seem to be completely unaware of basic reality.
Please tell me how easy you found it to be.
I’m willing to bet you were giggling while you wrote that stinger.
Of course, as usual, your trite retort is not at all responsive to the point that I was making.
But then again, we both know why you are avoiding the issue.
Regarding “85,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants.”:
Sounds like a big number, but take the case of Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Georgia: reactor 1 has been in commercial operation since 1987 and reactor 2 since 1989 (36 and 34 years respectively). Each reactor refuels approximately 1/3 of the rods every 18 months, or a complete fuel replacement roughly every 13.5 years. So reactor 1 has had about 2.6 complete refuels to this point and reactor 2 has had 2.5. All the spent fuel for both reactors since start of operation is stored onsite in dry storage casks. If you follow this Google Earth link it shows the storage cask yard and the eastern edge of the plant, about 590 meters west of the Savannah River at the closest point. You can see the cooling tower for one of the operating reactors a bit to the northwest.
Zoom into the storage yard and count the the existing casks, which are obvious from the shadows. I get 38, sited on a rectangle marked out for a total of 100 (or possibly 104). So 34 + 36 years of reactor operation have generated 38 waste fuel casks, or just fractionally over one cask per two reactor years.
The existing fenced yard could easily accommodate a second pad for 100 casks and possibly a third if they relocate the building. And there is obviously a cleared area immediately adjacent to the north intended to expand the storage yard with two or thee more 100-cask pads.
The total cleared area of is less that 1 square kilometer, about the same size as the parking lot of my local Walmart Supercenter. By the calculations above, that’s enough to store at least 400 spent fuel casks, or about 800 reactor-years of waste. The total storage yard area is just a small fraction of the entire Vogtle complex.
Eventually, we will have to get into reprocessing and permanent storage, but there is no pressing need at the moment.
Stupid math error: complete refuel in 4.5 years instead of 13.5.
Thank you, Alan,
However, I never pointed out or even mentioned the amount of land area needed to “temporarily” store spent nuclear fuel from uranium-fueled US nuclear reactors. The US Government obviously owns enough land in locations far-removed from human habitation to store thousands of times the current mass of nuclear waste (including that DOD-originated, that DOE-originated and that originated in NRC-regulated commercial nuclear power plants).
No, a re-read of my posts will show that my focus was on the (largely unaccounted for) costs of storing such nuclear waste, and to see if anyone had/could state a cost estimate directly to power plant operators or, as is always the case indirectly to US taxpayers, for such secure storage for the next 20, 100, 500, ten thousand or more years.
It’s a simple ask . . . but nobody has yet stepped up with an answer.
The nearest thing to an answer I could find via Web search is this except from 2019, but it is wishy-washy since it only talks about what the Government paid then to commercial companies for nuclear waste storage (i.e., no estimate for Government-direct costs for monitoring, regulation, etc.):
“Almost 40 years after Congress decided the United States, and not private companies, would be responsible for storing radioactive waste, the cost of that effort has grown to $7.5 billion, and it’s about to get even pricier. With no place of its own to keep the waste, the government now says it expects to pay $35.5 billion to private companies as more and more nuclear plants shut down, unable to compete with cheaper natural gas and renewable energy sources.”
— https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-radioactive-nuclear-waste-storage-20190614-story.html
As you can see, even this article is pretty worthless as it does not specify if the stated $billions are per annum or spread over multiple years.
For sure, the numbers are now higher than they were 4 years ago due to inflation and other factors (e.g. increased safety measures) and when factoring in the additional accumulation of nuclear waste in the US since then.
What Alan proved, and you completely ignored was the fact that the storage of nuclear waste is not a problem out here in the real world.
What you consider to be a “proof” is far different from mine.
But carry on anyway.
Your definition of proof seems to be, agrees with what I want to believe.
ToldYouSo:
Decommissioning costs for commercial reactors are paid for from a fund maintained by a tax on each megawatt-hour sold from each reactor. IIRC the tax is about $1.00/MWh, but it is monitored and possibly adjusted based on recent actual decommissioning costs. Sort of like FDIC insurance.
The long-term storage of nuclear waste should have been provided for long ago; the federal government has this responsibility but corrupt/inept politicians, China Syndrome-infected activists and general NIMBYism have frustrated every attempt to do so. A permanent storage location (and ideally a reprocessing facility to reduce the amount needing storage) would cost less than was allocated for the deceptively named “green new deal” initiatives in the equally deceptively named “inflation reduction act”.
Activists believe they can use the lack of a permanent storage facility as a reason to stop building new reactors and prematurely shut down existing ones. This is delusional: having no operating nuclear reactors will make the waste storage problem far worse as there will be no revenue stream to pay for managing it.
What’s that, about 3000 truckloads? Enough to fit on one container ship? Hardly a storage nightmare – soon the waste from solar panels (lead and heavy metals!) and wind turbines will be greater, with much less electricity and mountains of dead flying animals to show for it.
Once again, my OP was solely about the long term cost of storage of nuclear waste, NOT about the land area, volume or location of such. Nor about how such other factors compare to those of other power sources used by mankind.
The spent fuel rods that are the high level waste. still contain 95% of their potential nuclear fission energy. The process you mention recovers a large percentage of that energy.
Your claim that there is no acceptable technology for disposing of nuclear waste is and has always been a complete lie.
There is no need to store it, after letting it cool for a year or so, reprocess it.
Problem solved.
Existing facts simply do not support your assertions.
Existing ignorant propaganda, you mean.
You are a tireless troll.
Your comment is worth exactly what I paid to get it.
Maybe so, however they are worth way more than the trash you post.
Actually they do. You just refuse to accept anything that doesn’t support your pre-existing paranoia.
And you know of such exactly how?
I read. I study. I make it a point to understand the issue.
You on the other hand just recite trite, disproven propaganda then get mad when nobody believes you.
Your remote, armchair psychoanalysis is worth exactly what I paid to get it.
And once again, the poor troll has to resort to trite insults.
Artificial stupidity algorithm— very convincing imitation of a cross between Izzy and the Rusty Nail.
It’s called a science education, which included things like Geiger counters and (unthinkable today) demonstrating a chain reaction with two uranium 235 pellets in a class room. And visiting nuclear power stations and understanding the nature and level of the risks.
You mean politics, not facts.
No, I meant facts, such as these I previously posted:
1) As of 2001, “The DOE estimates that it has over 100 million U.S. gallons of highly radioactive waste and 2,500 metric tons (2,800 short tons) of spent fuel from the production of nuclear weapons and from research activities in temporary storage.” (ref
2) According to https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal , as of Sept 2021, “The nation has over 85,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants.”
Two simple question to you, David:
— If, as MarkW asserts, “There is no need to store it, after letting it cool for a year or so, reprocess it”, why hasn’t this happened/isn’t this currently happening?
— What is the political advantage to the US continuing to store massive amounts of nuclear waste?
Sorry, cut and paste mistake lead to omission of reference for statement (1) in my post. Here it is:
“Nuclear Waste: Technical, Schedule, and Cost Uncertainties of the Yucca Mountain Repository Project”, United States General Accounting Office. December 2001.
Downloadable PDF version available as Reference 41 of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository
Another 22 years and it still means nothing. Politicians and entrenched bureaucrats will continue as usual.
Why hasn’t reprocessing happened in the USA? 2 main reasons – it’s more expensive to reprocess nuclear material than to buy new and the USA has been worried that reprocessing would lead to increased proliferation of weapons capable nuclear material. Globally, over 30% of all fuel is from reprocessed nuclear material.
What is the political advantage of the USA continuing to store massive amounts of nuclear waste? Next to none – it’s a very clear economic advantage. Reprocessing would cost vastly more than buying new, adding far more to the costs of running nuclear reactors and, hence, a greater cost to the consumer.
So, Richard, this brings us full circle to my OP, which raised the question of missing accounting for the cost of LONG TERM storage of nuclear waste (based on no reprocessing of such happening in the US). “Long term”, as in my post above of June 2, 2023 2:00 pm discussing the dust-up between the EPA and NAS as to the planned Yucca Mountain storage facility being designed for storage containment and radioactivity isolation for merely 10,000 years or, instead, for one million years.
Told:
You might find this book interesting: “The Power to Save the World” by Gwyenth Cravens. Its about nuclear energy issues in USA. It describes a proposal to bury [not dump] all the USA nuclear waste at 32N164W.
This is in the abysal plain of the Pacific Ocean, 4 miles deep in the 325 ft thick layer of clay. It will remian geologically stable for millions of years, no water table issues and no plant life to speak of. Would be impossible to access by terrorists.
btw 1 million years is probably excessive. Most of what I’ve read says 240,000 yrs at most [~10 half-lives of plutonium-239].
Again, we’ve come full circle . . . and the total cost of storing (sequestering) all USA nuclear waste at 32N164W will be?
N.B. I had a good laugh at your comment about there being “no water table issues” for storage 4 miles underwater.
Finally, I wholeheartedly agree with you that from today’s perspective there is little difference between planned storage (sequestering) for “just” 240,000 years as compared to 250,000 to 1,000,000 years.
My solution of just dumping it in the desert and guarding it sounds better and better.
“N.B. I had a good laugh at your comment about there being “no water table issues” for storage 4 miles underwater.”
When you’ve finished giggling, spend a bit of time educating yourself about water tables.
Like I said: Its a political issue. Leftist politics about storage of nuclear waste have never made any sense. Why should they now?
Anyway, who cares? The U.S. will stumble along rudderless until people throw up their hands and say any solution is OK with them.
“there is no acceptable technology for disposal” or reprocessing of nuclear waste… for antinuke bedwetters. That’s the problem. But once they absorb all the environmental damage from their pet solar panels and wind farms, they’ll come around to nuclear and natural gas – if the Germans can return to coal then anything can happen.
I only know what I read in articles, not from any directed study of the issues, but claims are that current commercial reactors extract less than 1% of the energy in their nuclear fuels. Newer technologies, not yet on line (and so not guaranteed to ever be on line but they are being worked on and much advancement has been claimed by some researchers) are supposedly able to use 50% to 99% of the potential energy. The point is that, while post reactor handling is important for safety, calling the “spent” fuel “waste” is very much untrue. These are valuable energy sources which most likely can be used eventually.
UK, France and Japan all reprocess used fuel and feed it back into reactors.
The GE-Hitachi PRISM reactor design can reduce the volume of fission byproducts by 80-90%. There are regulatory impediments to building these, which could be overcome given sufficient motivation and will.
Civilian uranium based fission reactors don’t generate ‘transuranic’ byproducts. The fission byproducts have smaller atomic numbers because they where split off of the uranium atoms.
Not so.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel :
1) “Nuclear fuel rods become progressively more radioactive (and less thermally useful) due to neutron activation as they are fissioned, or “burnt” in the reactor. A fresh rod of low enriched uranium pellets (which can be safely handled with gloved hands) will become a highly lethal gamma emitter after 1-2 years of core irradiation, unsafe to approach unless under many feet of water shielding. This makes their invariable accumulation and safe temporary storage in spent fuel pools a prime source of high level radioactive waste and a major ongoing issue for future permanent disposal.”
2) For the most common, U-238-fueled civilian nuclear reactors:
—3% of the mass of “spent” nuclear fuel consist of the fission products U-235 and Pu-239 (also indirect products in the decay chain),
— About 1% of the mass of “spent” nuclear fuel is Pu-239 and Pu-240 resulting from conversion of U-238,
— 96% of the mass of “spent” nuclear fuel is the remaining initial U-238 load (refined to have less than 0.8% U-235).
Transuranic elements are chemical elements with atomic number greater than 92. Therefore, all plutonium isotopes (atomic number = 94) are considered to be transuranic.
It really is amusing the way you go to such great lengths to highlight your ignorance.
Didn’t you mean to direct that comment to Wikipedia, the quoted source of “ignorance” . . . or did you just not understand what you read?
If you knew half what you thought you knew, you would know that the wikipedia entry you presented has nothing to do with the process James was talking about.
— JamesB_684, above post
You did not understand what you read. Transuranics decay rapidly. They are either a useful source of nuclear fuel or ‘gone in 30 seconds’
— JamesB_684, above post
No mention of decay time in that statement, and FYI the decay times for the major plutonium isotopes created in U-238-fueled* nuclear reactors are:
— Pu-238: 88 years
— Pu-239: 24,000 years
— Pu-240: 6,550 years
— Pu 241: 14.3 years
“gone in 30 seconds” . . . I think not.
Note this from https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/mixed-oxide-fuel-mox.aspx :
“In every nuclear reactor there is both fission of isotopes such as uranium-235, and the formation of new, heavier isotopes due to neutron capture, primarily by U-238. Most of the fuel mass in a reactor is U-238. This can become plutonium-239 and by successive neutron capture Pu-240, Pu-241 and Pu-242 as well as other transuranic isotopes”
I used the term “U-238-fueled” but this is somewhat misleading . . . it is only U-235 that is fissile and it is the “enrichment” of U-238 to a level of containing 3.5–4.5% U-235 that creates the “fuel” for typical commercial nuclear reactors. U-238 is fissionable, but not fissile. [ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium ]
Back in the 90s, long serving Aussie prime minister Bob Hawke floated the proposition that Australia could be the world’s one-stop-shop for nuclear power plants fuel and eventual storage of spent fuel.
Now, Hawkie was only a raging green-leftie when the real Greens threatened to steal votes from his Labor party base.
But his proposition for nuclear fuels was based in rationality –
Australia mines and ships about 10% of the world’s uranium.
But of all the supplier countries, Oz is by far the most geologically stable (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Namibia and Canada produce the bulk of supply, but are not what you’d call “geologically stable”).
So Hawkie’s proposition was that client countries to whom Oz exported the uranium could return spent fuels back to Oz for deep-storage burial in the remote vast central desert area of the continent.
(The usually-useless UN could also have a role in subsidizing the costs of fuel shipping & storage for developing countries.)
“There is no acceptable technology for disposing of these radionuclide wastes”
Nuclear ‘waste’ isn’t a problem; the energy-dense, compact material is a valuable store of future fuel containing 90-95% of initial potential energy.
Guided tours are available >>>
COVRA has realised a processing and storage facility in Nieuwdorp, in the municipality of Borsele. The 20-hectare grounds contain five storage buildings, a waste-processing building and an office building. The most striking building is the bright orange HABOG, the building for the storage of high-level radioactive waste. There are furthermore two storage buildings for depleted uranium, VOG and VOG-2, the LOG for the storage of low-level and intermediate-level radioactive waste and the COG for the storage of containers.
https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/storage/
“Storing” is not the same thing as “disposing”.
Disposing means “throwing away” – are recommending we just throw away nuclear waste???? I thought you wanted it stored properly and guarded, no?
Said waste from all the world would occupy a US foot ball field to a high 9 feet. The most radio reactive would only cover that one yard line. There is more than enough mined out salt mines to cover that storage problem many time over. It people like you that keep it from happening. Reprocessing would also cut down the waste, something the anti nuclear crowd shut down in the Carter administration.
Oh, you mean like when they make bullets of Uranium, and poison entire landscapes, what with babies born with their guts hanging outside their bodies? But you have nothing to say about that, because that Uranium has been Depleted, right?
If you want Dirty Bomb, have a train blown up on purpose in Palestine, Ohio, or acid added to water in lead pipes, like Flint Mi. Or, indeed any of the full range of childhood vaccines full of metals, cancer cells and Aspartame. Or how about the rubber preservative in your junk food, neurotoxins in your pain medication, libtard sexual perversion in primary school… all explosive issues with far-reaching damage and painful deaths.
But you keep right on worrying about spent nuclear fuel you obviously only heard of, never researched?
Hint: The more times a libtard Hollywood “star” mentions an existential problem, the more sure you can be; it’s a Hollywood show for stupid couch potatoes who can never get past the porn links to research real knowledge. Like the vast strides made in nuclear safety and byproduct re-use.
P.S. ALL politicians are now performers, mere actors, women, children and retards; the defenseless employed to execute the indefensible. And they hate you, do you understand that?
Dirty bombs indeed!
?
Pu239 is fuel not waste – the whole nuclear industry has been buggered by activists pretending to be regulators. Case in point the US not allowed to reprocess it’s spent fuel – how does recycling the fuel affect nonproliferation if the initial enrichment is ok? Reprocessing the spent fuel or reactor designs like molten salt reactirs that will be able to have online filtering and reprocessing will mean 1-2 orders of magnitude less waste and energy for millennia.
What’s wrong with buring the fuel from whence it came? From more secure than whence the original radioactive fuel came? And after sealed away or classified?
Just a bunch of FUD – if you believe in global warming catastrophes or the inflated risks due to pollution even from modern clean gas and coal plants – then YOU and your reflexive nuclear phobia is responsible for it because nuclear power could have easily been double or triple the share it currently is.
The US experience with nuclear energy followed in part by Canada and Japan, is an example of negative learning. Other countries have done better.
Source: Lovering, J.R., Yip, A. and Nordhaus, T., 2016. Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors. Energy policy, 91, pp.371-382.
Who knew they could be built that fast.
Industry standard terminology, not that you would know.
Whoosh . . . ruffled hair.
When presented with actual facts, you react like a vampire to sunlight.
You can add enormous decommissioning and/or refurbishing costs for nuclear.
Already included.
Yep, as Mark said, already included. It’s one reason nuclear costs are high.
w.
Looks like Kevin and his sock puppets are busy in mom’s basement again
Nuclear is one industry I don’t really want to trust companies to do the right thing without oversight.
Well its a good thing that it has more oversight and is far far safer than almost any other industry then
Leo that is a very bad thing. When it comes to industrial accidents nuclear does not make the list. When industries kill thousands, governments impose regulations that are like the good practices the nuclear industry adopted to protect people starting with the first navy and commercial reactors.
It works.
It’s a bad thing when excessive regulations make nuclear so expensive that technologies that end up killing way more people are used instead.
There is no industry that doesn’t have oversight.
We aren’t talking about no oversight, we are talking about reining in the ridiculous over kill in existing regulations.
You left out the lawfare. The regulatory burden – at least some of it is reasonable. But some of it exists exclusively to increase costs of building/permitting nuclear power plants.
Even despite the existing rules – every single nuclear power plant proposed or under construction is under constant legal attack. These introduce cost due to outright court costs but also delays imposed by injunctions, new studies, etc etc.
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Electricity-Prices-Plunge-By-75-As-Finland-Opens-New-Nuclear-Power-Plant.html
Figure 2 suggests the industry cannot mix the low-end of cost range (grid scale) solar and batteries with CCGT (?). It’s misleading as presented.
Say what? That makes no sense at all. The graph says nothing about that. No idea how you’re coming up with that idea, but it’s not in the graph.
w.
Fig 3
I mean Fig 2.
There are no ‘grid scale’ batteries, nor is there any technology that can reliably supply them
Willis:
In case you don’t already know, it is my understanding that a lot of renewable LCOE numbers come out of a model published by NREL called the System Advisor Model (SAM):
https://sam.nrel.gov/
Good work, WE. Here is some further support.
In 2015, the EIA put out a publication claiming that the LCOE of on shore wind was about equal to CCGT. In 2016 I posted ‘True Cost of Wind’ over at Judith’s. It is easy to retrieve there using her search tool. EIA made some egregiously bad underlying assumptions—the worst being 30 year plant lives when wind is at best about 20-25 while CCGT is warrantied for at least 40. Turns out, using the then about 10% wind penetration on the ERCOT grid, that the correct LCOE for CCGT was about $58/MWh, while the true LCOE of wind was $146/MWh—ignoring the additional cost of wind subsidies just like EIA did.
Renewables will always be at a severe cost disadvantage. They are intermittent, with capacity factor ranging from about 20 (solar) to about 30(wind)%. So at any significant grid penetration they require a second backup generating system that will by definition be underutilized. There is no escaping that inconvenient detail.
“So at any significant grid penetration they require a second backup generating system that will by definition be underutilized.”
And since there are many days or even weeks when the wind does not blow and every day a night when the sun does not shine, the backup needs to be capable of providing all of the electricity required by their associated grid. One generating system for the price of two?
Its worse than that. Where I am, 40N, there are 15 hours of daylight today, June 2. 6 month from now there will be 9 hours. Toss in clouds and sun angles solar producces about 2.25 times as much energy today than it will in January. Wind also has seasonal and diurnal factors.
You either have to have enough storage to have June energy in January or enough generating capacity to cover the worst days. In either event, the capital costs are unaffordable.
A few years ago, during a discussion of wind power with an Iowa resident advocate, I found a state website on their power system that, without much detail, provided statistics on wind capacity factor differences between “the 6 warmest month and the 6 coldest months” (months not otherwise identified). The numbers were 16% when warm, 48% when cold.
I haven’t looked at any information since then but iI would guess that difference could only change with a major “climate change” shift.
I think it’s even worse than that, Denis. The backup system is not just required, it is less efficient when used as intermittent backup rather than as primary, therefore more expensive than it would otherwise have been. So one generating system for the price of two and a half?
Thanks, Rud. Fact Check: 100% true.
w.
The so-called “missing costs” of LCOE also apply to all other power plants. No power plant operates 100% of the time at 100% of its rated power, thus back up production is necessary for every kind of power generation. All power plants are mechanical systems that require shutdowns for maintenance and repairs … nukes have the highest “up time” at around 93%, while other thermal power plants (coal, natural gas) are lower at around 70-80% up time. Hydro power plants also frequently operate at less than full capacity due to annual variations in stream flows, and also to accommodate maintenance shutdowns.
,
Ditto with grid connection costs – if LCOE is supposed to include those costs for renewables then they also need to include them for dispatchable conventional power plant. The point being to do apples to apples comparisons, not apples to oranges
And actually, going to the other side of the balance, most renewables produce most of their energy in the daytime (with solar it’s 100%), which is when power demand is always at its highest. Which is why most power utilities encourage at least their industrial customers to use more power at night vs. daytime using variable time-based rates.
Meaning that renewable sources actually provide peaking power when it is most needed, thus reducing the amount of peaking power capacity that is otherwise needed, so actually reduces the LCOE + that the author advocates that comes from fossil plants. Peaking power is expensive, because it is not a full time source – regardless of whether it is renewable or dispatchable power.
For apples to apples the intermittent sources like wind need to provide expected power 100% of the time they are not in maintenance. A conventional power source isn’t offline for maintenance every few hours, more like every few months.
Please go reread the recent post on California’s duck curve, then get back.
You beat me to it, Rud.
No use Rud. The ArtStudent mind simply operates solely in Boolean mode. Two legs bad, four legs good.
Nuclear power bad, renewable power good.
The concept of quantity is simply not present, having been utterly rejected as part of that ‘stupid nerdy maths stuff’, in favour of reading the right books, becoming a celebrity, and learning how to sound impressive by quoting the right books.
There is a distinct difference (in fact and in related costs) between FF power plants which generally have scheduled maintenance down-times (which grid-operators can cost-effectively adjust for) and solar and wind “renewable” power plants which can drop from nameplate capacity to zero output unexpectedly and in a matter of hours, if not minutes.
When “renewables” (excluding hydro) pass a certain percent of total power being supplied into a given grid, on-demand make-up power for “renewables” will ALWAYS be more expensive than having the equivalent already existing as dispatchable FF generation . . . see WUWT articles discussing the “Pollock limit”.
Had you actually read the article, you would have seen that everyone of your whines was addressed.
Fossil fuel plants are available better than 90% of the time, and most of the time when they are down, it is for maintenance and is scheduled well in advance.
The point as to grid costs, was also detailed in the article. Fossil fuel plants can be placed where needed, so the grid costs are low. Wind and solar have to be placed where the resource is, and that is usually far from where the demand is located. This means that grid costs are much, much higher.
I see you are still trying to claim that solar is a good match to demand. There have been many articles on this site refuting that claim. I guess you didn’t read them either.
Fossil fuel plants are often sited close to fuel sources, particularly for coal. Think of Four Corners, or Hazlewood and Loy Yang in Australia. It’s cheaper to build high utilisation transmission lines for baseload power than to rail or truck the coal to a local power station. Natural gas is more flexible, as it can share a pipeline with demand for the fuel other than for electricity generation – however some large CCGT plant is often located close to a major gas hub, such as Peterhead in Scotland or Pembroke in Wales, which also take advantage of coastal cooling water. Peaker plants are usually sited much closer to demand, partly because they are often needed to alleviate transmission constraints.
Drax was built on top of a very large coalfield, so it’s ironic that having been converted to renewable wood from the USA the owners are being investigated for rule breaking
https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/23561493.ofgem-investigates-drax-burning-wood-pellets-power/
It is fashionable to knock Drax, but they are only doing what the government told them to.
..and made it financially worthwhile for them to do.
And those grid connections are high density lines while many of the solar and wind connectors can’t utilize the lines very efficiently.
“Peaking power is expensive.” Usually provided by hydro. Missing in the charts.
Only if hydro is readily available to a particular grid. Here in the Southwest Power Pool, we don’t have much. Our peaking power is coal and natural gas units, even the baseload ones.
What Duane still ignores, is that his simplistic day/night division is meaningless.
There are 24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour. Unless his solar and wind plants are producing power at the exact hour and minute that it is needed, it is useless.
There have been several articles here recently regarding the so called duck curve. These demonstrate conclusively that solar does not produce power when it is needed.
Hydro contributes to flex power, and also to providing ancillary services for grid balancing and frequency control. The main source of peak power in areas that are not well blessed with hydro tends to be gas or diesel where gas is not readily available. In some cases, coal is run at reduced efficiency. Paradoxically the extreme example of that recently has been the UK, where paranoia about running coal has meant it is only called on when grid shortages are forecast, so it gets warmed up and may not even get used – no wonder they charge £4,000/MWh at times.
Reports on demand vs generation consistently show demand to be highest demand in early morning and evening. Solar, in particular, produces almost nothing at those times. Whether or not wind is available at peak demand times most likely varies considerably, location to location. Where do you get your data?
Duane sez:
Yes, Duane, and that is exactly what I said in the head post:
So I’m not clear what your objection is. Next, you say:
Please, learn to read. I have indeed included ALL those costs for conventional power. The point is, they are FAR less for conventional power.
Finally, you say:
Sorry, not true. It seems you’ve never heard of the “duck curve“, and you are unaware that peak demand is in the evening when solar is low, not during the day. From the article:
You also say:
Nope. Renewables are totally unpredictable, can go to basically zero in the amount of time it takes for the wind to die or a cloud bank to com over, and thus cannot be depended on to provide peaking power at any given time, much less “when it is most needed”.
Best regards,
w.
Currently the Southwest Power Pool is running about 40,000 MW, with about 13,500MW supplied by wind (out of a rated wind capacity of about 35,000 MW). Over the next several days, the peak is forecast to be around 40,000 MW, with wind contributing only 5000MW or less. Coal and natural gas will continue to make up the difference. Color me unimpressed, Duane. Thank you Willis.
“And actually, going to the other side of the balance, most renewables produce most of their energy in the daytime (with solar it’s 100%), which is when power demand is always at its highest.”
It’s true.
Here is a plot of the last week in the UK. Solar is in orange. It works very well as a peaker. Wind is steady.
Speaking of cherry picking, here comes Nick. He managed to find one week out of the year where solar came close to being actually useful.
It was the most recent week. Here are the two weeks before that
Do you realise winter is UK/GB’s period of greatest electricity demand?
Specifically January, the month solar is at its most pathetic, when it generates at just 4% capacity factor.
Ssshhh.
Solar performance in the long dark cold winter months is not discussed in “progressive” circles.
See, it can’t be a contributing cause of those high consumer electricity costs because, well – for ~ half the year,
IT JUST AIN’T THERE!
A few years ago when there were many rolling blackouts in CA, the governor announced that, contrary to skeptical rumors, gas, not solar, was responsible. Solar was producing exactly as expected, thank you.
While somewhat true, the fact was easily demonstrated from the data that, when solar started falling off sharply around 5 PM, demand was going up sharply, leading to the necessity of power cut starting in many locations because of lack of gas peaking capacity.
I believe CA has partially quietly solved this by building a number of large diesel powered backup plants, not unlike emergency generates for homes, hospitals, etc. except much larger and more expensive. Based on other uses of diesel fuel, real air pollution is most likely relatively high for these, as compared to the gas peaker plants.
Hmm, gas was responsible for not fixing the problems caused by solar? There, fixed it 🙂
So Andy, I am not going to tell you what I believe happened, I am going to tell you what did happen.
First it was a drought year reducing hydro. Then a nuke plant wiped a main turbine bearing. A coal plant in Utah blew a main transformer.
The issues with natural gas was because that governor delayed issuing permits to build the new generation that was needed. My company was blamed for withholding 2000 MWe the the CEC showed on paper. The state of the art CCGT plant was sitting in crates.
The idiot energy czar, S David Freeman was responsible for closing Rancho Seco 10 years before saying it was not needed.
There was also gas pipe line from New Mexico that had as spectacular problem.
It appears that the present governor has learned that maybe the last nuke plant needs to run a few years longer.
Neither this graph nor the previous one show anything about hour to hour supply. You’ll notice the solar/wind does supply a lot during the day (but not near what gas does) but it doesn’t show the supply during the duck curve when demand is high in the evening. Not even you can make solar work in the late afternoon and evening.
It does show hour by hour, and it does show the afternoon/evening peak. Britain does not have a midday dip.
Even at the best of times solar does not lend to peaking needs on the shoulder hours, therefore cannot be relied upon for peaking. Look at the shape of its generation pattern.
Now, I realize that my Mk1 eyeballs will turn 75 this month, Nick, but even they can see wind is not “steady.”
Nick makes a cherry-picked comment, as usual.
Ok, Nick, now give us a UK generation chart for January, and see how much solar there is then. And how much solar coincides with the winter 7am and 7pm demand peaks (when it is dark).
UK solar generators do absolutely nothing through the majority of the winter months (which is when we really need the energy most).
Here is Jan 22nd 2023. Where is the large well-timed contribution of solar here?
Ralph
Nick probably won’t, so here it is:
2 gw from 14 gw of capacity.
That is like a nuclear power station only working 60 days a year.
Useless.
RE
As I like to say, WORSE-THAN-USELESS.
It’s not true.
GB’s month of greatest electricity demand is January. January peak demands occur on weekdays 17:00 – 19:00.
Solar contributes sweet FA to our peak demands.
Here’s solar’s contribution in January:
PS: “Here is a plot of the last week in the UK.”
The chart you offered is for Gt Britain, not the UK.
You may be aware that in the UK, solar investment ground to a halt once solar subsidies were substantially downgraded and the export tariff for domestic solar reflected its low real value in the market place. But if you think solar is really that useful, perhaps you should ponder the South Australian backyard of yours.
For comparison here’s the picture for generation on an average summer day in South Australia – 5th Jan 2023.
The total generation potential is given by the area of the solid bars, and includes the blue amount of curtailment at the top of the heap. That curtailment was applied to wind and utility solar, which is fairly evident from the data of what they did produce. Some of the surplus was exported (shown negative below the line, and also as difference between local demand on the grid and total generation from the grid. A large chunk of demand was met by rooftop solar. The red line running through it shows that if the commercial generators were not curtailed, about half the rooftop solar would have had to be curtailed. The orange line above it removes the export volume to give total local demand met by grid and rooftop. The very puny contribution of the batteries to solving the problems is also evident: more detailed examination shows they were really mainly being used for grid stabilisation rather than serious storage.
With grid prices running negative for so much of the day it is hardly an incentive to invest in more renewables capacity. Backup generation from gas and diesel barely figures on this day, so must aim for high profits when it is run to cover its fixed costs. The crunch for rooftop solar will eventually be painful as the cost of the subsidies and all the necessary grid curtailment and extra transmission capacity and interconnector links it causes becomes unsustainable.
Here’s the flip side of the coin 5 months later.
Little wind, not much solar, no curtailment, but heavy dependence on gas and imports (effectively coal based) plus use of costly diesel.
Dang, Nick, miss the point much? Yes, solar peaks around midday … but what your cutesy graph doesn’t show is that demand peaks in the evening, when solar is low.
Nice try, though.
w.
You are missing the point. The problem with wind in the UK is that 28GW varies between delivering 0.5GW and 20GW. Unpredictably. You can and do have a week or more under 5GW, and you have whole days under 0.5GW.
Therefore if you count on (say) the average of about 8GW you have to provide that much gas generation for when it fails.
They are running a grid which demands constant frequency and constant power. No outages. LCOE leaves out the costs of delivering to these parameters from wind, in this case the duplicate generating system, so its not an adequate index of real costs of wind generation.
Wind actually reached a record 21GW in UK on 10th Jan 2023. Problem is it was only during the period 6.30pm – 7.00pm. But expect that 21GW figure to be trotted out by the unreliables brigade without qualification in the future.
Wrong Nick. Peak demand in the UK, is at sunset. When there is no solar power.. Those of us that can read graphs can see that clearly.
And of course in winter UK solar is simply irrelevant
And here is a plot for the month of May (+ two and a third days of June).
I’m in the north of France, which has had a “blocking high” keeping it sunny for the last 2 or 3 weeks. I believe it covered southern England as well.
Question to people in southern England : Was there a “notable” amount of rain, or at least cloud cover, on the 8th of May ?
Note that the total “nameplate” capacity for wind on the GB grid is now (just ?) over 27 GW, but BEIS numbers are only available up to Q4-2022
Still want to highlight just how “steady” the wind can be over the island of Great Britain (+ the North Sea) over periods longer than a (selected) week ?
My personal experience with baseload units is that baseload coal or gas could have a 90% capacity factor, but that they also cycle more easily than nuclear plants, so they tamp back at night, and are ready to ramp up in the morning when everybody gets up. Generally they are only out for routine maintenance a few weeks a year. Nuclear plants are less amenable to cycling.
Daytime is NOT peak demand, during a British winter (which is when demand is highest).
Peak morning demand is in the dark, and peak evening demand is in the dark. And guess what, there is no solar then. And during a winter anticyclone, there is no wind or solar at all….!!
Ralph
it isn’t even peak in the US, and that despite the fact that there is a big East-West skew in solar installations and output, with the Western peak output being better time matched to the Eastern demand peak when local Eastern solar is well on the way to sunset. See chart in my post below.
You are correct that because demand is not a constant asset utilisation is not going to be 100% in a fully dispatchable grid. That’s because demand patterns vary diurnally, weekly, and seasonally, and are subject to extremes that are weather and holiday driven. For example in the UK the ratio between average demand and peak grid demand is just over 60% (probably a bit lower after accounting for behind the meter peak shaving), while last year in the US Lower 48 it was 63.3%. However, your analysis after that breaks down.
Here’s the average monthly diurnal supply/demand pattern for the Lower 48 last year. You will see that nuclear shows essentially no intra day variation in generation: it operates as baseload, close to 100% of online capacity. However, there are two seasonal dips in output corresponding to the low demand shoulder seasons in spring and fall – April and October. That’s when plants shut down on rotation for scheduled maintenance and refuelling. Baseload generation makes an equally high utilisation of its transmission lines to centres of demand. The ratio between average and peak nuclear output is 87.5%.
Now compare with solar. Peak output is about 79% of nominal capacity (it’s always cloudy/hazy somewhere, and time zones mean that when the sun is at its zenith in the sunny SW it is already lower in the sky on the East coast). However, local grid capacity must deal with the local maximum output, not the instantaneous maximum output across the nation, so the grid must be sized to handle the sum of peak outputs. That takes the average grid utilisation from solar down to 24%. That makes the transmission grid cost about 3.65 times higher per delivered MWh. In practice it will vary geographically according to local average solar capacity factors.
“And actually, going to the other side of the balance, most renewables produce most of their energy in the daytime (with solar it’s 100%), which is when power demand is always at its highest.”
That depends where you are.
In the UK, “one of the darkest countries in the world” (©The late Prof Sir David MacKay), solar contributes NetZero to our peak electricity demands – which occur 17:00 – 19:00 January weekdays. In January, UK solar generates at a pathetic 4% Capacity Factor.
Many articles on power plants have pointed out that, from the many decades of data covering conventional power plants, construction has always been carefully matched to amount of base load and peaking requirements for maximum possible efficiency. Always, that is, until wind and solar came along.
Utility companies know this intrinsically. Once the regulators put their fingers on the scales, things changed a lot. We went from economic dispatch to environmental dispatch. In the beginning, environmental dispatch was close to economic dispatch, because the bigger newer plants were much more efficient, and that included air pollution control equipment. Now utilities/distributors are required to take renewables without regard to economics or environmental impact. We are suffering for this policy.
Duane,
Solar and wind cannot provide any meaningful amounts of REACTIVE POWER into the system being to far from where it is needed and not able to provide it on a continuous basis. It is vital for voltage control and enabling transformers to change voltage. Solar and wind being intermittent, put thermal stress on all power components because of continuing power changes.
One of the worst aspects of those forms of power is their postioning to be totally destroyed or damaged by big thunderstorm systems and other severe weather. The wind industry very carefully hide the real data on gear box and bearing failures and it is estimated most wind turbines will have these failures within ten years and many in as little as five years. It is easily above $600,000 to replace many gear boxs.
It is impossible to stop this because of violent wind changes and the impossibility of keeping the blades in balance once they are installed. There are up to 24 different bearings in many planetary arrangements. You wouldn’t be aware that in certain storm situations the wind can veer 180 degrees instantly with the passage of fronts and you cannot design against this form of insanity.
The inverters can actually provide voltage support/ reactive power. They just need a clean signal from the grid for grid following inverters. Grid forming ones don’t even need that. However, they produce a very noisey sinewave that need harmonic filters to clean up, and when a major event happens, the transients are rubbish.
Chris,
If the inverters are powered by solar or wind generators, one, they will not produce enough reactive power for a large power grid that is experiencing voltage drops through large power draws. They will generally be too far from where the big power users are situated and where the reactive power needs to be provided. Further if it is night, there are low or nil winds or very high winds there won’t be much power produced by them let alone reactive power.
Even at 4 AM on a winter morning most power grids around the world will need at least 80% of peak power to keep the system operating as CBDs and large industrial areas use a lot of power 24 hours a day and reactive power from solar and wind would be minimal if at all
RK
Depending on how the grid is managed, they usually seek to correct the pf on lines where the problem occurs – those long stringy lines in particular. If those lines at the other end are near unity, then it helps a lot. We often take 80MVAR out during night and put 30 in during day) into a grid on 160MW baseload generators to support a big substation 400km away. We do all our voltage support on the AVR, never using the tapchangers The problems in central switchyards is usually corrected by on-site stat and syncons and the transformer tapchangers, unless there are baseload stations nearby.
I agree that the stations have to be generating to provide support (which they often aren’t). However, that wasn’t the statement I was responding to.
Chris,
I agree with your comments and the last sentence is an important one. At night solar won’t be generating and wind is generally a lot lower at night – if they are even turning. I have flown over wind farms during the day where 21 out of 28 turbines were stationary with a 30 knot wind blowing. And the same day 350 klms away another wind farm had only half turning again with high winds. It has never been known for a large thermal power station to be destroyed by severe weather.
Photos of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria says it all
Although inverters can provide voltage support and reactive power, their distance from where these are needed limits their effectiveness. Coal and gas generators located closely to major power users are many times more effective than wind and solar located 100+ miles away over high voltage lines. Reactive power is especially ineffective at those distances. It is “built-in” because of transmission lines.
Jim The reactive power in a line varies with load. They nearly never run neutral (the SIL point). A lot of big coal fired power stations are a long way from loads. Where does Four Corners go to?
The main reason big steamers can do better VARs control is the AVRs. They are so much better than power electronics. And having 500MVAR from one site is a lot easier to get 50 each from 10.
Meantime between failure on wind turbines is not years, it’s weeks. On any given wind farm, even when the wind is blowing its normal to see about 10% of the units are stationary.
On a fairly recent trip, my wife admired the “design” (read:appearance) of three huge wind turbines we could see from the highway.
Being the practical one, I pointed out that all three were stationary – and that since they weren’t turning, there had to be something ELSE to keep the power on.
Mealy mouthed Art Student Boolean thinking
It’s not that other technologies dont exhibit the effect, its the amount they exhibit.
Amount is of course a mathematical concept, and therefore not accessible to the ArtStudent mind
Would you mind providing the solar output available at 5 pm or shortly thereafter when people arrive home and begin doing their nightly chores? Adding in additional transportation energy as we go forward will also increase by leaps and bounds the power needed to provide EV charging and will only make evening power needs worse.
Not sure what your source is but I’ve never seen ANYONE classify unreliable solar and wind power as “peaking” generators. As far as I know, unreliable wind and solar have preference for providing and receiving compensation whenever they can provide power. That is far from being a “peaking” generator that operates when needed!
Current thermal plants have scheduled downtime for maintenance. Current unreliable generators also have downtime for maintenance. But, most importantly, solar has downtime each and every night and when cloudy. Wind generators have downtime when the wind doesn’t blow thus unscheduled and unplanned for.
AND when the wind blows too hard and the generator is disconnected in order to protect it from damage.
Peak time in most places is the evening, coming home from school and work, cranking up the AC or heat, cooking dinner, entertainment, and soon a good deal of car charging. No solar then, sorry.
Excellent report Willis, this needs wide distribution.
What LCOE misses is that intermittent renewable energy is an inferior economic good relative to dispatchable conventional energy. As WE notes, once allowances are made for backup, grid connections, stability, etc., grid scale renewables become uneconomic.
The Book “The Unpopular Truth About Electricity and the Future of Power covers the issues of LCOE very well it is well beyond what Willis has written.
Actually nuclear is even unnecessarily burdened costwise by anti-nuclear/climateering wastrels. The Candu reactor in Canada is modular (not requiring lengthy obstruction by enviros). Half a dozen years ago a module took 3 years to build for 350 million $CDN with no delays or cost overruns! The amazing following features seem unknown to much of the world:
1) the world’s largest nuclear power plant until recently was the Bruce Point, Ontario Candu comprised of 8 modules.
2) the modules have 40yr proven life. After 27yrs, a planned upgrade kit is added to extend its life another 13yrs
3) the fuel is non-upgraded yellowcake, largely U²³⁸ with it’s small natural content of U²³⁵. This mix of isotopes synergistically captures extra neutrons causing the U²³⁸ to participate in the fission reaction!
4) recent tweaks in the system have knocked fuel costs down to below 3 cents Canadian per kWh, ~2.5 cents US.
5) the Candu does not require shutdown to refuel. It has a clever horizontal presentation of its fuel rods.
6) There have been no accidents of note with this tech
7) It was invented in the late 1950s at Chalk River Ontario (Oh, and the modular reactor using Thorium and nuclear wastes for fuel, all the rage these days, was invented and operated there in 1948. It was closed down in 1997)
Chauvinism and corrupt sales practices are rife in this industry so, except for China, which has a number of modules, Korea, Argentina, perhaps India, the Candu, the future of electric power, is largely a secret.
Forgot to mention that one of the plants was built at Pickering, Ontario, right in a suburb of Toronto in 1965, and renewed a couple of times
I recall that early CANDU designs were prone to vibration issues which caused several to be taken out of service after a few years. Doubtless since fixed.
The JP Morgan 2022 Energy Report also expressed doubt about the use of LCOE:
“levelized costs” comparing wind and solar power to fossil fuels are misleading barometers of the pace of change. Levelized cost estimates rarely include actual costs that high renewable grid penetration requires: (a) investment in transmission to create larger renewable coverage areas, (b) backup thermal power required for times when renewable generation is low, and (c) capital costs and maintenance of utility-scale battery storage. I am amazed at how much time is spent on this frankly questionable levelized cost statistic.
—-
You can get the report here:
https://irp.cdn-website.com/0bdd390b/files/uploaded/JPMorganElephants-in-the-room.pdf
The quote above is from page 4.
=====
There’s some other stuff at my Just Stop Net Zero site: https://juststopnetzero.com/
David Tallboys
“LCOE and LCOS by themselves do not capture all of the factors that contribute to investment decisions, making direct comparison of LCOE and LCOS across technologies problematic and misleading as a method to assess competitiveness of various generation alternatives” (LCOS- Levelised Cost of Storage)
‘Levelised Costs of New Generation Resources’ in ‘Annual Energy Outlook’ US Energy Information Administration, March 2022
The book “The Unpopular Truth About Electricity and the Future of Power” covers LCOE well beyond what Willis has documented.
Looked at back in the early 2000’s and the cheapest option for lowest CO2 is Nuclear load following with natural gas peakers. Make a template nuclear and make more of them, would be roughly 10 cents a kWh in my estimation. Solar and Wind are only an add-on cost to the load bearing generators with only a small reduction in fuel used, making them very expensive way to get things done. It’s pretty obvious this is the answer, if they cared about CO2, which they obviously don’t. But today I’m certain that CO2 isn’t a problem, so coal and gas is fine.
Make an emergency, paint the others as bad people because they don’t want to save the planet, and give political fellows and cohorts lots of money to keep winning. Everyone get poorer but they keep accumulating political power.
No surprise here – why else would Germans, Californians, New Englanders be paying 3X what the rest of Americans are paying
The graphs show costs for each type of generation extended have considerable variance. One might assume that this is because of some factors such as how much of such generation currently exists in various locations or how much corruption there is in the political system in various locations or where the resources come from for various locations or possibly other completely unrelated factors. Nothing in the presented data gives me a clue. Yes, I do see the explanation that it is an average of five countries’ cost plus the variance between the countries’ cost, but is there anything which tells why the costs vary so much for different countries?
Not mentioned anywhere are all the subsidies wind and solar receive, which certainly impacts the real cost society pays and probably often or always effects individuals life directly in higher electricity cost and/or higher most of everything costs. Are the subsides taken into account in producing the Lazard figures?
No. Nor are they in the EIA estimates.
I’m sure the mandates that the garbage intermittent electricity wind and solar get for preferential use over dispatcheable sources are not considered either. If not, the little that would get used would drive the costs even higher.
For renewables a major variable is the quality of the resource input – how sunny or windy is it? Solar costs are substantially affected by land costs: deploy in the desert and they are neglible, but deploy on quality arable land or land that might be used for a city extension and the cost becomes huge – especially if it’s also less sunny as in Europe.
For nuclear the regulatory regime has a huge impact. Contrast what the Koreans achieved with recent trends elsewhere, all driven by absurd “safety” concerns that are in fact impositions from an embedded anti nuclear lobby.
Coal is likewise affected by varying regulation – how tight are environmental standard for stack scrubbers to cut particulates and sulphur emissions for example. Also, (mainly overland) distance from mine and coal transport costs are important. I also suspect that carbon taxes are included in the LCOE analyses – and they vary enormously between Europe and elsewhere.
Lazard has both subsidized and unsubsidized figures. I used the unsubsidized values. Including the cost of the subsidies will only make them look worse.
w.
“Including the cost of the subsidies will only make them look worse.”
How so? It does make them even cheaper to the investor. But as you said, you used unsubsidised values.
Here is Lazard’s plot on subsidies. It does further reduce the cost, even to zero for wind in some cases:
Nick Stokes June 2, 2023 6:03 pm
Yes, and if the subsidies were large enough, it could drive wind into negative territory … but you misunderstand.
I don’t give a rats about the investor. I’m talking about the cost to the public, you know, us fools who actually have to pay the damn subsidy.
As an example, globally over the last two decades, wind/solar have gotten about $5 TRILLION in subsidies. That might be OK if we got value for our money, But given what wind/solar have generated, that works out to about $0.50 per kWh … and our idiot politicans just voted to give them another trillion over the next several years.
And if you think that $0.50 per kWh subsidy makes things better, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Here’s an example of how subsidies are wonderful for the investor and horrible for the public, especially the poor …
The investors are making 29% on their money. And after all that, care to guess how much the electricity is being sold to the suckers in California for?
50% above the market value, and that’s NOT counting the billions in tax money going into the subsidies … yeah, Nick, tell us again how subsidies make solar cheaper …
Are you really this out of touch, or are you just playing stupid to impress us here on WUWT?
w.
FYI Lazard is one of the oldest and most historic of the old line investment banks that specialized in financial advice and asset management without engaging in trading or financing on their own balance sheet.
Those of you who are old enough to remember the New York City bankruptcy of the mid 1970s may remember the name of Felix Rohatyn, who was a senior partner in Lazard’s NYC office. He was the chief negotiator between the city, the unions, and the banks in that crisis.
I haven’t had time to read Lazard’s report, but anything they publish is highly credible, and no doubt reflects deep research and financial acumen.
Not in this case, as WE has demonstrated.
Forbes was once a respectable magazine. As were The Economist and Lancet.
Just because someone was once respectable cannot be used as proof that those who came later were also respectable.
As Willis has demonstrated, their “report” leaves out more than it includes.
Walter, the issue is not with the accuracy of what they put in.
The issue is with the huge costs they left out.
w.
What’s the cost of solar and wind when nuclear and hydrocarbons are not allowed?
Zero. That’s because the system won’t be operating.
Dave:
No, infinite.
Because we all will shortly be dead without adequate energy.
From starvation, lack of heat/air conditioning/medical care, civil insurrection or
some combination of the above.
Willis,
I think you should have mentioned that the OECD nuclear agency source of your figures is from 2012.
“For this analysis I’ve used, not the average of these, but the average plus one standard deviation of the data.”
That’s really, er, biasing it a bit. But you’ve also added costs from various places to the US LCOE. US costs (apples apples) are in the following table
They are in $/MWh, so you need to divide by 1000. The costs of solar at 30% penetration is .028$/KWh, vs the value of 0.09 that you have used. Others similarly are much less. I couldn’t see any 50% data in the report.
The highest component by far is grid connection – converting variable DC to grid frequency AC. But is this not borne by the renewable company already? Home solar has to do that.
The point many of the rationalists here are trying to get across Nick, is that no matter how the performance numbers are shuffled, dressed up, tortured, denied or just ignored by we humans, the prevalence of sunshine and/or wind will always be just what natural forces want to serve up from time to time, and from place to place.
So if modern societies want / need to control the availability of reliable, affordable electricity to their households and industries, they have to adopt the most practical, constant, reliable “means of production”.
And that ain’t Ol’ Sol and Mr. Blowhard.
Nick Stokes June 2, 2023 1:52 pm
I linked to the source, so anyone can see that.
Yes, and I’ve given very valid reasons for using the higher figure. If you wish to argue that, point to which one of the reasons you think is wrong and tell us why. All you’re doing now is handwaving.
On second thought, don’t bother. Your endless vacuous naysaying has gotten old.
Yes, and I said in the post that’s what I did. Why are you pointing out what I did as though you just discovered it?
I spelled out that I averaged the five countries, and now you think I should have just used the US … why would I want to do that? The Lazard data is used by people all over the planet. You are advising throwing out perfectly good data simply because it doesn’t fit your fantasies … not gonna happen.
w.
“why would I want to do that?”
Because the Lazard LCOE figures are for the USA. It doesn’t help to add in the huge costs of solar in N Europe. That doesn’t represent anything. You should add in the corresponding costs for the USA.
LCOE grid-scale solar costs in Germany are only about $0.009 to $0.022 more per kilowatt-hour than in the US. Not “huge” on any planet.
And IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, puts the global average solar LCOE at about $0.01/kWh less than the Lazard figures.
Nice try. Do your homework.
w.
The figures from the 2012 source you cited, which I presume was the one you used in your average, was $0.083/KWh, almost 3 times the US cost.
I make the cost of wind much more than that.
Are they erroneously using name-plate power for wind?
In reality wind turbines only work at 30% of name-plate capacity, so you need 3x the number of turbines than their manufacturers imply. Plus you need another 15% on top of that, to charge up the backup system.
So if the UK grid needs 40 gw, and you want that to all be powered by wind, you would need to build about 140 gw of wind power to cover than 40 gw of consumption.
But remember that electricity is only 20% of total energy. So if all energy is to be electric, we would need 700 gw of wind energy to be built. How much will that cost, and where could we put it?
(Based upon present costings of Hornsea-3, this would cost £2.3 trillion, plus another £2.5 trillion for the stored backup system. So total costs, around £4.8 trillion.)
Ralph
“So if the UK grid needs 40 gw, and you want that to all be powered by wind, you would need to build about 140 gw of wind power to cover than 40 gw of consumption.”
Our wind is highly variable. During 2021, from the average metered capacity of 26GW, the minimum was 0.035GW.
I know.
Which is why we would need 3x the installed capacity, with the surplus charging up a storage system. Which also has to be costed for.
RE
But even that would not be enough. It doesn’t matter how many you build if none are turning.
That’s assuming that the wind turbines are consistently efficient at scale. Chances are that you’d achieve about 1/4 of the target capacity fairly easily, then it would get more and more difficult as you built more win