NYISO is the New York Independent System Operator — the not-for-profit entity created to manage New York State’s electrical grid. Their main job is assuring that there is sufficient electricity generated moment to moment to closely match customer demand. Neighboring states have multi-state ISOs (i.e., PJM and ISO-NE) to do the same job, but being New York, we have our own.
If there is any entity that ought to be loudly outspoken about New York’s ridiculous energy schemes, it is NYISO. After all, when generating most of our electricity from wind and sun proves not to work, as it will, and when the blackouts follow, as they will, NYISO stands to get a large share of the blame.
So where are they? The good news is that they are slowly waking up. The bad news is that even now they are not being nearly as outspoken or as loud as they should be. On October 6 they submitted a long (25 page) Comment on the State’s new Energy Plan. That Comment takes the level of their expressed alarm to a new, if still unjustifiably muted, level.
As background, in 2019 New York State enacted its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, mandating, among other things, 70% of electricity generation from “renewables” by 2030, and 100% from “zero emissions” sources by 2040. At the same time, New York City enacted its Local Law 97, mandating (via complex maximum emissions formulas) that most large buildings convert to electric heat by 2030. Supposedly, the State and City would enable fulfillment of these mandates through having developers construct large amounts of wind and solar generators. That process had barely gotten off the ground when, earlier this year, the federal government ended nearly all of the grants and subsidies that had made construction of wind and solar facilities at all feasible.
On July 25 the State’s Energy Planning Board came out with its self-described “Draft Energy Plan.” It’s a “draft” because they are taking comments, and may even make some revisions depending on those (don’t count on it). In a post on August 11 I described the so-called Plan as “hundreds of pages of fluff,” cheerleading for a supposed transition to a renewables-based electricity system, but lacking anything as basic as a feasibility study or a cost projection. I then submitted my own Comment on the Plan, and had a further post describing that on September 27. Key takeaway:
[T]he so-called “Energy Plan” is not an energy plan at all. It would more accurately be described as random musings and wishful thinking by some completely incompetent people who have no idea what they are doing.
So with that background, let’s take a look at NYISO’s newly-issued Comment. This sentence from page 1 is fairly representative of the overall tone:
The NYISO submits these comments to highlight electric system reliability concerns and to offer approaches that support ongoing electric system reliability through competitive markets for consideration as part of the final State Energy Plan.
They are submitting comments to “highlight . . . concerns.” Yes, I guess so, but I find that a wholly inadequate statement of the problem. In fact, the energy bureaucracies are driving the State down an impossible path from which it becomes increasingly difficult to exit before disaster strikes.
This from pages 2-3 is a little stronger, but still much less specific than it needs to be:
Large energy-intensive economic development projects, such as semiconductor manufacturing plants and data centers, are driving up demand for electricity significantly after relatively flat demand trends over the last decade. Collectively, all these elements create uncertain conditions today, in the near term, and in the longer term, and each uncertainty has the real potential to cause major impacts on electric system reliability. All electric industry stakeholders, including the state agencies involved, must be aware of and factor these concerns into their planning and strategy. Progress towards the CLCPA goals, other public policies, and supplying the electricity that New Yorkers demand requires the State Energy Plan to support a well-functioning, reliable electric power sector. Reliable electric power is the foundation of the State’s plans to electrify other aspects of the economy and to reduce emissions. The NYISO urges the Board and NYSERDA to consider these comments and prioritize electric system reliability in the final State Energy Plan.
They just can’t make themselves say out loud that wind and solar by themselves cannot provide reliable electricity to match demand.
As you move through the Comment, the statements get stronger, little by little. From page 6:
Fossil-fuel-based generation is and will continue to be necessary to meet consumer demand and to maintain electric system reliability. The final State Energy Plan must include a recommendation consistent with the Draft Plan observations that combustion generating units “remain essential parts of electric grid reliability and affordability, and retirement of these units will not be able to occur until resources that provide the same grid reliability attributes are put in place.”
From page 8:
Simply maintaining the existing fossil-fuel-based generation fleet and carefully managing the requirement of these resources over the next fifteen years is not enough to maintain electric system reliability. The electric system needs all existing generation resources and needs new generation resources before the current fleet suffers a catastrophic failure that jeopardizes the health, safety, and welfare of New Yorkers.
“New generation resources” are needed, but the State’s Climate Act requires those to be carbon-emissions-free. We are therefore talking about the magical “dispatchable emissions-free resources” (DEFRs) that will supposedly replace fossil fuel generation to meet the requirements of the CLCPA. Can we somehow get ourselves to say that those don’t exist and are not going to exist in any relevant time frame? We come to a discussion of that subject on page 14:
The NYISO fully supports identifying and developing technologies that have the greatest potential to support electric system reliability and the needs that will arise throughout this energy transition. As noted in the Draft Plan, many of the technologies necessary to meet system needs for firm, dispatchable capacity are not yet commercially available at scale. The development of these technologies must start now as these technologies need to be proven and deployed to the electric grid before the resources that currently supply the energy that consumers demand and the reliability attributes needed to support the grid can be retired.
The DEFRs “are not yet commercially available at scale” and therefore “development . . . must start now.” How lame is that? They just can’t bring themselves to say that “you must admit that this is not going to happen.” With a mandate for tens of thousands of megawatts of these mythical generators by 2030, and it’s almost 2026, we haven’t even started “development.”
At least you don’t need to read between the lines of this Comment to see that the NYISO is issuing a very explicit warning to the State’s energy planners. But still, with the planners offering no idea as to feasibility, cost, or time frame for availability of necessary new resources to support the energy transition, the best the NYISO can say is to “start development now”? What they should be saying is that this can’t work, it won’t work, and continuing further down this path is incompetent, irresponsible, and dangerous.
Unlike the people at the other State energy bureaucracies like NYSERDA and the Energy Planning Board, I’m not saying that the people at NYISO lack competence. However, it is a problem that the entity is organized as a not-for-profit. Nobody there has any skin in the game, and they are unlikely to be held accountable when there are catastrophic system failures. It’s just one more instance of a failed socialist-lite model.
Went to the agency’s page expecting to find a management board of retired politicians and energy execs – nope. One old white guy in the photos. When TSHTF they’ll still be there.
“combustion generating units”
“retirement of these units will not be able to occur”
“fully supports identifying and developing technologies”
The big fail is coming. Someone -must- be lining up a fall guy. Who is supposed to take the bullet?
My vote is with NYISO. Since their charge is to ensure “sufficient electricity [is} generated moment to moment to closely match customer demand,” they obviously would have failed in their duty
ifwhen blackouts occur, in spite of the idiotic regulations. So when the music stops, they won’t have a seat.I suggest that when they retire, they take their pension as a lump sum … assuming that the state hasn’t already run out of money.
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Let me fix that headline for you…
NYISO Weighs In On The New York State
DraftDaft Energy Plan.
Now that makes more sense
The fall guy – or, the person who gets the blame – is going to be Trump, because he killed all the wind projects that were going to provide low cost, carbon free emissions from wind turbines and solar panels. It won’t matter that the renewables were going to provide insufficient, intermittent power and be exorbitantly expensive. It won’t matter that he’s effectively saving them from their own folly.
It will work in a blue state like New York because that’s what people want to believe.
Trump will leave office in Jan 2029, and there will still be a whole year to make this pie-in-the-sky scenario happen. As a retired former president, he won’t take any blame, and if New York wants to complain, well, he lives in Florida.
They can still sue his him and his businesses and find more women who remember he raped them 50 years ago. New Yorkers require no evidence and will convict. And then pile on defamation suits. Rinse, repeat.
Announced in the Telegraph this morning – Dead’Ed Miliband has approved the development of solar generating facilities to be established on over 3,000 acres of some of the best farmland in the world.
Meanwhile, in the UK over the past 12 months, from an installed capacity of 20.99GW, solar generation provided 2.01GW. That means the 20.99GW of installed capacity operated at a load factor – efficiency – of . . . 9.57%!!
And where do the solar panels come from? Yeah, it’s China, where they’re constructed using coal-fired processes and energy, the UK producing not one tonne of the materials required to make solar panels. Energy security my rear end!!
This is the type of ignorant useless lying idiotic politician who doesn’t deserve removal by democratic process – it’s too damned slow. What he desperately needs – metaphorically speaking, of course – is to be hung-drawn-and-quartered . . . right now!!
Agree-too damned slow…maybe a more American “approach”?
KevinM: “Went to the agency’s page expecting to find a management board of retired politicians and energy execs – nope. One old white guy in the photos. When TSHTF they’ll still be there.”
Looking at the bio’s of the NYISO senior leadership team, the people who make the operational and planning decisions all have serious wind and solar credentials.
Just like the New York PSC, they will not be rocking the renewable energy and Climate Act boats too vigorously until some future series of blackout events leaves them no other choice but to do so.
In some sense, it is in their job descriptions to take the blame when TSHTF happens. For which they are well compensated.
So far, they’ve said just enough to cover their a$$es if the forthcoming blackouts happen sooner rather than later.
I was talking to my brother who lives in California and is a rare conservative, degreed engineer. He is in a variety of wind, solar and battery supporting on-line groups. When I explained to him that the amount of wind power, solar power and battery backup is so completely inadequate to meet demand, he literally could not believe this. His on-line groups are pie-in-the-sky academics, and he doesn’t look at any of the actual facts. My sense is NY is in the same boat.
“rare conservative, degreed engineer”
Rare according to the media, standard if you work in that world.
“my brother … degreed engineer … I explained to him”
There’s something(s) strange there.
Engineering:
1) Attracts people who don’t usually let others explain to them
2) Requires mathiness that shouldn’t allow that kind of ignorance
I have relatives in both New York state and in the Bay Area of California. All are highly educated people. But they are also deep into AGW and also into wind and solar as an energy policy religion.
Any discussion of the true facts regarding wind and solar’s actual costs — or that reaching Net Zero for the US requires a draconian government-enforced energy rationing scheme — all those facts slide off them like bacon bits off of teflon.
If DEFRs don’t exist today to begin build out and if DEFRs won’t exist tomorrow to plan funding for a build out than the NYISO Jas been huffing too many Unicorn Flatus. Or perhaps listening to too much Flattus
A DEFR is a nuclear reactor. Unfortunately, it is not cheap and takes a long to build.
Harold,
Why do you repeat this myth?
France built a fleet in not much time for not much money 40 years ago.
Surely the USA can do likewise!
If not, why not?
Geoff S
Well, as the saying goes, “times change”.
France’s most recent nuclear reactor, Flamanville 3, was connected to its electrical grid in December 2024, marking the first new reactor in 25 years.
Now catch this, construction of the Flamanville 3 nuclear plant began in 2007, so that’s 17 years to build a modern nuclear reactor.
I wonder what France learned in those intervening 25 years?
Oh, and this just might be relevant also: the final cost for France’s Flamanville 3 nuclear power plant is approximately $13.2 billion USD.
And stop calling me Shirley 🙂
And how many MWhs will Flamanville3 generate over its potential 80 year lifespan for that 13.2B U$D vs the cost of equivalent Solar and/or Wind to produce the same MWhs/80 years?
In 80 years which will produce more unrecoverable garbage in landfill??
Hint, it won’t be Nuclear
Production wind power is generally cheaper per kWh than production nuclear power. Cost for onshore wind ranges from approximately $40-$90 per MWh and the cost for offshore wind is about twice as expensive across this range. In comparison, nuclear production power is significantly higher, with some estimates reaching $175 per MWh for new plants.
Your question, as posed, cannot be answered. There are no facts to support that any nuclear power plant, such as Flamanaville 3, has an operational lifespan of 80 years. The oldest nuclear power plant operating today, Beznau I in Switzerland, has been in commercial operation for only 56 years and is scheduled for shutdown in the next 7 years.
Likewise, the are no reliable estimates for the operational lifespan of modern wind turbines, since the technology is so new.
Then too, answering your question would require projections for the relative cost differences between nuclear and wind over the next 80 years for things such as:
— operator labor,
— security force labor,
— maintenance/replacement labor and parts,
— nuclear fuel versus variability of wind speed at any given wind farm location,
— insurance,
— and the imputed cost of the money invested to construct the nuclear plant (extremely high, all up front) versus the wind farms (relatively very low, spread out over time of build-out).
Well, even if one takes into account that the radioactive spent nuclear fuel from operating nuclear power plants and the radioactive structures from a decommissioned and torn down nuclear power plant do not end up in landfills, your statement is not at all certain . . . there is a massive amount of concrete, asphalt, glass, electrical wiring/substations, and steel and aluminum piping and structures associated with the buildings and other infrastructure surrounding utility scale nuclear reactors, not all “recoverable”.
And how much does the price change when Subsidies are affecting pricing?
There’s also a massive amount of unrecovered concrete in each wind turbine footing that isn’t removed from the ground.
It takes 220 10MW wind turbines to produce the same MW as a 2-unit Nuclear facility 40% of the time. So it would take 550 footings to replace a 2-unit nuclear facility 100% of the time (with sufficient storage to hold the electrons until their needed).
However, wind turbines only last about 20 years and so would require replacement 3 times in 80 years so that 550 concrete footings becomes 2200 footings that will remain in the ground.
That’s upwards of 6,000 cubic meters of concrete or 400 concrete truck loads. Times 2200 footings is 13,200,000 cubic meters or 880,000 truck loads of concrete. (At 15,000 tons of concrete per footing it is 33,000,000 metric tons of concrete for 2200 footings)
A single 2.2GW Nuclear power plant only requires 220,000 cubic meters of concrete.
Wind requires 60 time as much concrete as Nuclear
Amazing . . . who knew that concrete footings (bases) emplaced in the ground couldn’t be used again for mounting replacement wind turbines and their support towers. Modern day concrete located in a benign environment, such as on land and remote from salt water, can easily serve 80 years or more as a reliable structure support.
After the wear and tear of 20 years worth of wind sheer stresses and 20 years worth of weathering and corrosion on the anchor bolts the old foundation bases are retired as it costs more to refurbished them than it does to replace them. Old Wind Turbine foundation bases aren’t reused. They’re merely abandoned in place and covered with additional soil. New footings are required to meet insurance and warranty requirements.
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Wind takes 60 times the amount of concrete that nuclear does to produce the same amount of electricity over the same period of time…the potential lifespan of a Nuclear Plant.
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According to Google AI…
Q) When a wind turbine is decommissioned do they reuse the concrete footing for the replacement?
A) No, the old concrete footing is typically not reused for a replacement because full repowering involves complete removal and replacement, and the concrete is difficult to excavate and reuse cost-effectively. Instead, the concrete is often left in place and buried
Does that statement regarding “repowering” a wind farm make any sense at all? I’d like to see an independent, credible engineering reference that confirms a properly designed and engineered anchor bolt installed and left in place in its original concrete cannot be reused.
But, hey, for sure a concrete bolt that was designed (or more likely, mis-designed) to allow for plastic yielding over its operating life as installed in a concrete foundation is going to eliminate reuse of that bolt and its anchoring hole.
Then too, nothing prohibits using a different mounting hole pattern in an existing concrete footing to allow drilling new holes for structural load bolts to be inserted (as long as they are positioned with proper clearance distance from the previous hole pattern).
Well, you are likely unaware that one has to be very specific when asking any AI bot, Including that of Google, a question.
Here’s is Google’s AI response to the specific question “Have any wind turbine towers anchored to offshore concrete support bases been replaced?” (with my bold emphasis added):
“While offshore wind turbine components are regularly replaced for maintenance and upgrades, the foundation is considered a permanent part of the infrastructure.
“Why offshore concrete foundations are designed to be permanent
Long service life: Concrete gravity base foundations (GBFs) are designed for a lifespan of 50 to 100 years, which can exceed the operational life of the wind turbine and tower itself.
High durability: Unlike steel structures, which require more frequent maintenance in the harsh marine environment, concrete is a robust and highly durable material that resists corrosion.
“Turbine replacement and repowering
While the foundations are permanent, the wind turbines are not. Repowering is the process of replacing older turbine components, or the entire turbine, with newer technology.
Partial repowering involves swapping out parts like the rotor, blades, or gearbox to increase energy output.
Full repowering can occur at the end of a project’s operational life, where the entire tower and turbine are replaced. An existing foundation is used, often requiring a new adapter plate to connect a new turbine to the old tower structure.”
Harold, it’s usually all the regulatory red tape these days that inflicts long delays on infrastructure developments.
For example, the 2,700 kms Alaska Highway took just 7 months to build in 1942.
Granted, the Pearl Harbour attack provided compelling defense reasons to just git ‘er done, but it shows that where there’s the will, the way will be cleared.
When I worked for a utility 40 years ago, our planning for future generating technologies set a 20 year timeline for a new nuclear plant, Much of that time was to be spent on siting, all the environmental studies, etc., before breaking ground. I am sure the timeline is longer now, since you could bet on lots of time in the courtroom. The projects most likely to succeed are proposed units to be sited with existing nuclear units.
Over regulation makes them more costly and environmentalists make them more time consuming.
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Relatively speaking , in the long run, they’re cheaper and less time consuming to build them Once every 80 years than to build Wind Turbines…and replace them…and replace them to generate an equal amount of MWh over that same 80 year period. Plus Nuclear is available 98% of the time while wind manages only 40%.
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Solar is even worse…it will be built initially at 4 times overcapacity to equal Nuclear output potential then replaced them…and replace them…and replace them…and replace them…and replace them…(and potentially replace much of them after Wind or Hail storms destroy them) numerous times in the same 80 year lifespan of Nuclear.
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Each successive replacement of Solar or Wind will be at ever increasing costs due to simple inflation and gradual wage increases.
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When I hired onto my current job (1984) I was making $28,000 a year ($14/hr)
Now (41 years later) I make $130,000 a year for the same job…inflation.
My electric bill was 9¢/KWh now it’s 54¢/KWh inflation. In 40 years those Wind Turbine and Solar Panel installers will also see an increase in wages equally reflected in costs.
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Building Nuclear NOW is cheaper than building equivalent wind or solar and constantly replacing then every 15 or 20 years at ever increasing costs.
Do they think the “Mr Fusion” in Back to the Future 2 is a real thing?
Or maybe matter – anti-matter reactors with dilithium crystals and warp drive?
Well, a fair number of people believe in the efficacy of homeopathy. Water has memory?
While not wishing to distract from Francis Menton’s serious point, this is funny. (Sadly the original seems to have disappeared from NewsBiscuit, so I have linked a complete quote.)
Homeopathic leak threatens catastrophe
“It’s a “draft” because”… there are so many holes in it, it will get real drafty.
Speaking of New York energy lunacy, let’s not forget that they’ve banned natural gas and propane as energy sources in new construction beginning in 2026:
https://www.goldhillbuilders.com/gold-hill-insights/new-yorks-2026-all-electric-rule-what-it-means-for-gas-amp-propane-in-new-construction
Is it a draft or a daft, my guess it is the latter.
Well, a draft gets my vote, as long as it is in my glass!
Are you daft . . . it’s much, much better when it reaches my stomach via my taste buds!
Very nice Francis. We don’t have an energy problem, we don’t have a climate problem. What we have is a government problem. They have no business in the energy production and energy transmission business. You don’t need any more proof than New York. Only government could screw things up this bad.
You mean that “we’re from the government and we’re here to help” is a bad idea? But, but-say it ain’t so, Joe.
And we just can’t wait for Mandami to be elected mayor. Cue up the popcorn.
If they have already realized that the DEFRs don’t exist then why haven’t they gone to the real answer “the plan is not feasible or realizable”. All I am getting is a group not wanting to rock the boat when they already know the plan is doomed.
Inverse soft frog boil?
I think they know that nothing they say will make any difference.
The report can be pointed too in the future, after the grid collapse, and they can say “but we warned you”. They are just covering theirs a****.
See above from Beta Blocker “Looking at the bio’s of the NYISO senior leadership team, the people who make the operational and planning decisions all have serious wind and solar credentials.” They’ve warned NY that the DEFRs won’t exist, thus it won’t be their fault when NY buys their products without it. DJT will be gone with only 1 term ending 2028. Who will they blame?
I don’t see where the problem is.
Mamdami will simply make it the law that the windmills must provide stable energy.
I just read that sentence, probably tooo complicated.
Mamdami will make the electricity free.
There ya go.
MadMani will drive NY City into the Minoan Era. (Stone age)
Just look at the fine clothes the emperor wears. The finest in all the land, spun of the finest silks and gold embroidery. Truly a sight to behold!
“dispatchable emissions-free resources” (DEFRs)
Two terms from early computer days are “bug” and “vaporware”.
Supposedly, “bug” was literally a thing, a moth, as I recall. Vaporware referred
to software (code) that was envisioned and promised but not written. Now we have
DEFRs that are vapor and figurately the bug in the plan.
Other metaphors that come to mind: “rapture” and Waiting for Godot.
As just I posted above, a DEFR is a nuclear reactor.
In NY! Maybe they’re in a race condition between 1970s activist life expectancy and green construction schedule extensions.
The cure for intentional failure is removal from office. Any person with eyes can plainly see the Marcellus and Utica Shales (attached map) underlie most of New York state. Even at this late date, highly efficient combined cycle gas fired turbines with co-generation could be built in time to save NY state from its own policy.
Only blind sycophancy has DEFR’d exploitation of the incredible good fortune of NY state with its world-class shale gas resource under its feet. Shame on the NY elite for allowing the state to decay! Given the infantile minds of the NY governor and other ‘elites’, there is little hope that the moronic policy will be reversed. The people of NY state’s only option is to throw the incompetents from office and do what works.
Can’t be built if the turbines are unavailable.
Never happen and you know it…politicians are like zits-they just keep coming.
Good map. Western Pennsylvania’s Clarion County is near the center – where I was raised and relatives made a living from the coal and gas. My father worked for a glass company that used gas. My great aunt had a gas well and tiny flame-lights burning on the walls. She was too old to clean the walls and they smelled. My sister and I reluctantly visited. In our own home we used Absorene Putty Magic Ball Cleaner (invented in 1891). Had we been a few years older we might have had the wherewithal to freshen her walls.
Sometime between 1864 and 1964 the US SE flipped D-to-R and its NE flipped R-to-D. It can happen, but I’ve never seen it. Texas might have flipped in this generation. Imagine if California…
Related: Climate lunatics in Hamburg pass referendum committing Germany’s leading industrial city to deindustrialise completely in 15 years
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/climate-lunatics-in-hamburg-pass
It begins thusly (and becomes harsher further on): Hamburg is German’s leading industrial city. Its companies add 20 billion Euros in gross value every year. Much of this economic output is related to Hamburg’s happy location on the Elbe and the fact that the city is home to Europe’s third-largest port. All of this has made Hamburg extremely prosperous, which prosperity has filled it with rafts of clueless virtue-signalling morons who have no idea how anything works, why they find Hamburg attractive in the first place or how their hip urban lifestyles are maintained.
…
Specifically, these dumba__s are celebrating because their completely insane popular referendum passed with 53.2% of the vote on Sunday. This referendum, the so-called Zukunftsentscheid (“future decision”), binds the Free and Hanseatic City to achieving total carbon neutrality by 2040, five years earlier than the 2045 goal set by the almost equally insane Germany-wide Climate Protection Law as emended in 2021, which is in turn five years earlier than the 2050 goal established by the selfsame law as it originally passed the Bundestag in the year of the child-
saintdemon Greta Thunberg 2019.This 5 year one-up-man-ship is an often-used technique of virtue signaling. Just wait, by 2030, they will have changed it to 2035! It only takes desire and will to overcome the laws of physics.
How hard do you have to pray to make water run uphill? …. Hard enough to make it run uphill.
“by 2040″ Meh, worry about it in 2039.
I wonder if any members of NYISO read WUWT?
Only on burner smartphones.
Excellent review here by Francis Menton. More power to you, sir.
About imaginary things like DEFR, the entire CLCPA program was imprudently justified by imaginary “Health Benefits” and “Avoided GHG Benefits” from the start. Pure speculation. This is Figure 48 from the draft Energy Plan.
There are no such “benefits.” The hard money expenditures are real. The train wreck will be real unless we here in NY manage somehow to repeal CLCPA and any related mandates about vehicles.
” … cheerleading for a supposed transition to a renewables-based electricity system but lacking anything as basic as a feasibility study or a cost projection.”
Sounds like something we would see on a fact-free pro-renewables green blog.
Harold Pierce, Jr. : “A DEFR is a nuclear reactor. Unfortunately, it is not cheap and takes a long time to build.”
The unfortunate reality here is that America’s nuclear construction industrial base is currently in such a withered state that whether the reactor design is a 300 Mw SMR or it is a 1,200 Mw AP1000-size design, the nominal capital cost per kw is now roughly $18,000.
This situation will not change until somewhere between ten and twenty firm orders for reactors are placed on the books and the nuclear industrial base can begin cranking out one reactor after another, year in and year out.
Enough firm orders must be on the books so that the capital cost eventually falls to a floor of roughly $7,000 per kw for that tenth or twentieth reactor — whichever of those two numbers is the actual number required to reach $7,000 per kw.
Only the federal and state governments have the financial resources needed to place ten or twenty firm orders for reactors initially on the books as a means of putting the nuclear construction industrial base back on its feet, paying for those new reactors directly with the taxpayer’s money.
Going with nuclear is strictly a public policy decision. Left to its own market decisions without government intervention, the electric power markets would move decisively towards gas-fired generation.
Yes, having the federal and state governments buy those first ten or twenty reactors is a socialized approach to implementing new-build nuclear power in this country. These are bitter words, for sure. No doubt about it. But in my humble opinion, it can’t be made to happen any other way.
Is the crippling cost that makes building plants a public policy decision itself a public policy decision? The answer is academic, it doesn’t change what would have to happen, I agree you are mostly right.
KevinM: “Is the crippling cost that makes building plants a public policy decision itself a public policy decision?”
Even thirty-five years ago in the early 1990’s, the basic economics of power generation, in the absence of other influential factors such as government intervention in the energy marketplace, began to favor gas-fired generation as being the cheapest means of producing electricity.
The inherent cost advantages of gas-fired generation beginning in the early 1990’s was the key development which put an end to new-build nuclear power in the US, not Three Mile Island and its associated regulatory fallout.
Here in the third decade of the 21st Century, the only currently valid argument for nuclear power is that it gives us long-term energy security and reliability — for which we are obliged to pay a premium over what gas-fired generation costs in order to get those two benefits.
How much of a cost premium should we be willing to pay for nuclear?
The largest single factor by far which has produced a crippling cost for nuclear power here in the third decade of the 21st Century was the decision made three decades ago in the 1990’s by our politicians and by our business leaders to send America’s industrial base offshore to China, to other parts of Asia, to parts of Europe, and to parts of Africa.
A public policy decision to start funding and building new reactors implies a corresponding public policy decision to spend whatever money is necessary to rebuild America’s industrial base onshore inside our own country. Not just our nuclear industrial base, but our larger general purpose industrial base as well.
“America’s nuclear construction industrial base is currently in such a withered state …”
I assume the knowledge is more easily assembled than will be the workers. A nephew worked in the industry (in CA) but had to transition to a different career. He has now been retired for 5 years.
The knowledge of how to build a nuclear power plant successfully on cost and on schedule is all there on paper.
But that knowledge is not currently present inside the heads of the American managers and skilled labor workers who will be needed to design, fabricate, construct and install all the systems which comprise a new-build nuclear power plant.
All the lessons learned from the nuclear cost and schedule overruns of the early 1980’s are fully documented in the historical archives from that period. We know in great detail why those overruns occurred and what was necessary to prevent them.
When the preliminary cost estimates for VC Summer, for Vogtle 3 & 4, and for US-DOE’s MOX plant were being done in the mid-2000’s, it was assumed that the managers of those three projects would fully implement the lessons learned from the 1980’s in managing their nuclear construction activities.
That did not happen. The managers of those three projects made every mistake it is possible to make in managing a complex nuclear project. Vogtle 3 & 4 survived only because Georgia’s politicians decided to continue with the project regardless of how long it would eventually take and regardless of what it would eventually cost.
Nevermind.
“the magical “dispatchable emissions-free resources” (DEFRs) that will supposedly replace fossil fuel generation to meet the requirements of the CLCPA. Can we somehow get ourselves to say that those don’t exist'”?
Of course they do. They’re called nuclear power plants.