Scale is the really important thing here. It's really easy and really cheap to build a small-business, or home scale generation system.
This is in contrast to nuclear, coal, gas turbine etc where you really need large plants to work efficiently. Small portable diesel generators exist, but they are expensive to run, need regular maintenance and refueling.
Once you can cost effectively generate real electricity for very little effort, and very low cost, then people do it. And when you distribute generation like this very large effects happen very qickly.
This is so funny to see, and great to see said, because for decades I ran into nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change (Edit: forgot a crucial clause: because "only" nuclear could scale). I would counter that nuclear does not scale in that it can't get small, and it takes forever to build or expand.
Whereas solar can go small, go big, go medium, and the same with storage these days.
Many in the nuclear world are currently hoping to scale to "modular" size, because it's become clear that with 1GW scale, in advanced economies, construction is too expensive (IMHO due to the high cost of labor compared to less advanced economies). So shifting to a more "factory" model like airplanes is the investment pitch: scale smaller and make each reactor like factory parts so that it gets cheap to build. We will see! It's got enough hype that even non-small non-modular designs are calling themselves SMRs in order to try to garner interest. And there is some interest in new nuclear these days, despite the extremely high cost, and its going towards the more expensive SMRs rather than 1GW scale reactors, because the risk of failure is on a smaller overall quantity of money.
> This is so funny to see, and great to see said, because for decades I ran into nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change
The argument that the grid should be 100% nuclear was never really viable. To make it work you would need nuclear to be cheap, so it could be overbuilt to cover hourly and seasonal variation in load.
That's theoretically possible, a nuclear reactor is basically a box of hot rocks used to make steam. Large reactors use turbines because they're more efficient, but you can also use steam to run a piston engine and then your cost is approximately the same as a diesel generator only you don't have to buy diesel, just exchange the box of hot rocks for a new one every decade or two. The regulatory environment is not such that this is a thing, however, and then overbuilding nuclear is too expensive.
But that's assuming you want to replace the whole grid with nuclear. Any proposal to replace the whole grid with a single generation technology is naive, because the premise would have to be that it's better than all other forms of generation in all contexts. Which isn't true for anything.
The big advantage of solar is that it's cheap, if you don't care about consistency -- and sometimes you don't. Solar is great for charging electric cars because they have built-in batteries and then the intermittency doesn't matter. It's pretty good for air conditioning load because that tracks solar output pretty closely. Nuclear is not going to be competitive for those things.
But the reverse is true as well. You want to use solar to drive heat pumps at night in winter in regions far from the equator? That's a bad fit, and so is anything else with intermittent power output because if the power goes out people freeze to death.
The answer is to build nuclear reactors to power heat pumps and provide cogeneration and build solar to charge electric cars and run air conditioners, instead of trying to do everything with one technology.
Passivhaus is probably a cheaper solution than nuclear-powered heat pumps for keeping people from freezing to death far from the equator. Outside of the Arctic Circle, passive solar gain is always a potential solution, though inside cities it may not be viable. And most of the Arctic and Antarctic have plenty of wind power available.
Nuclear reactors are steam engines. Steam engines used to be piston engines, but they switched to turbines because, as I understand it, turbines are cheaper. I'm not sure why piston engines are still used for internal combustion, but I suspect it may be a question of faster ramp rates — more important for peeling out of a stop light than for your power grid. But ships are commonly propelled by large two-stroke diesel engines, and ramp rates are not much of a concern there. Such engines made by Wärtsilä are reportedly comparable to turbines in their efficiency and priced competitively with turbine generators for small electric power plants.
However, neither turbine-powered generators nor piston-engine-powered generators are priced low enough to compete with solar or wind.
Even France didn't get to full replacement of the grid with nuclear, but they got 90% of the way their. Our current mix of tech, even without new nuclear, will get us to 90% decarbonized easily.
What we have now that we didn't have 50 years ago is super cheap storage. That's a complete revolution in how to manage grids, and I don't think that the current grid planners and ops know what to do with it yet. You can use storage to avoid transmission congestion, you can use it to time shift, you can use it to avoid distribution node upgrades when you deploy it behind the meter.
There are soooooo many ways that storage can reduce grid costs and make it more economically efficient. The challenge is that nearly all grid decisions are made by people that have incentive to keep grid costs as high as possible. We need a new economic and regulatory framework in order to see the benefits of this new technology.
I buy your argument absent innovations and cost reductions in the storage space.
Now granted most of the monthly articles we see on new battery technology don't come to anything, but there have been steady gains and its an area that is far from optimal yet. Sodium ion batteries for example could change the landscape a lot.
On the one hand we have nuclear, and that's technically possible today, but comes with significant political challenges.
I suspect that a game-changer in the storage game has more chance than nuclear actually being built.
I also think a more global grid is doable. That also has political implications, and its a large project, but the internet (ie a globally connected network) shows what can be done in relatively short order.
> I buy your argument absent innovations and cost reductions in the storage space.
Now consider the alternatives if we want to decarbonize heating. Nuclear -- really anything -- takes a while to build, so if we don't start building it now and then the storage technology doesn't materialize, we're screwed.
And what happens if we build new nuclear and then the storage technology does materialize? Well, it's not going to come at the expense of solar, because we'll have to build tons and tons of solar just in order to electrify transportation and apply it in the other contexts where it's the most advantageous. The nuclear plants would be in addition to that, and be replacing coal and natural gas to provide baseload and energy for heating. So the medium-term effect would just be to replace coal and gas faster.
Then if the storage technology does materialize, it would still take decades after it does to manufacture enough of it to replace the rest of the grid. So the new nuclear plants then operate for 30-50 years while that happens, instead of running for 50-100 years if it doesn't, and instead of coal and natural gas plants continuing to operate during that time if we don't build the nuclear plants. Which would be a big problem if that's 100 years and still no advantage even if it's 30.
There's a lot of forward looking in your assessment there. And clearly predicting the future is tricky.
Your argument makes sense if things happen on decade long timeliness. But solar rollout I'd happening at insane speeds already, and accelerating. The current storage using today's tech is growing on a steep curve. If sodium-ion becomes a thing it'll explode in production and demand. (The speed with which China and others can build factories will make your eyes water.)
So it all comes down to your personal fortune. Are you willing to take the economic bet, and spend your billions on nuclear? Or would you rather someone else go down that road, and you make the safer financial choice?
economically from a capital point of view, the goal is to get a return. Not generate 24x7 power. And the economics of nuclear are terrible.
The growth rate is high, but that's because the base is low. Moreover, it's barely replacing anything because demand is growing, and will grow even more as transportation and heating have to be electrified. So all the new solar is going to transportation, that's a good fit, but you still need something else to grow to satisfy heating demand, much less satisfy the existing load in the power grid currently being supplied by fossil fuels.
> If sodium-ion becomes a thing it'll explode in production and demand.
The if is the unknown. What if it doesn't, and then we're that many more years behind on building the known alternative that works?
> The speed with which China and others can build factories will make your eyes water.
If it's so fast then why hasn't it already happened? Why is only 4% of production from solar, instead of e.g. 40%? How far do we get on accelerating growth before it flattens out because the low-hanging fruit is picked and the remaining demand is a bad match for solar's generation profile?
> Are you willing to take the economic bet, and spend your billions on nuclear? Or would you rather someone else go down that road, and you make the safer financial choice?
There are plenty of people willing to invest in nuclear. The main problem is that other people (not least of which Russia, who has been caught doing this) keep trying to stop them through anti-nuclear propaganda, lobbying and litigation.
> economically from a capital point of view, the goal is to get a return.
> If it's so fast then why hasn't it already happened? Why is only 4% of production from solar, instead of e.g. 40%?
Basically because economic growth is exponential, and exponential growth starts slow. If a certain alga doubles its population every day and takes 30 days to cover a certain lake, how long does it take to cover half the lake?
29 days. On what day does it cover 4% of the lake?
Day 25.
Until about 8 years ago, solar was too expensive in most countries to compete with fossil fuels without subsidies, and then there was a period of four years when the Chinese cartel announced in https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-i... fixed prices to keep them artificially high, as you can see on https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis.... Since that cartel evidently collapsed in late 02022, the cost of "mainstream" solar panels in the Preisindex has gone from €0.34/Wp to €0.11/Wp, and the cost of "low cost" panels has dropped from €0.22/Wp to €0.065/Wp. This month, for the first time, the Preisindex is no longer rounding prices to the nearest €0.01/Wp.
A crucial question, then, is what the exponential growth rate is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics says that from 02016 to 02022 the growth rate was 26%. At that rate, growing from 4% to 100% would take 14 years; if 4% were now, that would mean producing more energy from solar than from all sources today in 02038.
That doesn't mean people will stop burning coal, of course. It just means it'll be a marginal activity.
> How far do we get on accelerating growth before it flattens out because the low-hanging fruit is picked and the remaining demand is a bad match for solar's generation profile?
That's another crucial question, and one that is very hard to predict, but most likely at a few orders of magnitude larger than current world marketed energy consumption.
Solar energy is cheap enough to be applied to many applications for which previous energy sources were too expensive. €0.065/Wp at a capacity factor of 20% is €0.33/W; financed forever at an interest rate of 5%/year that would be €0.016/W year. A watt year is 8.77 kilowatt hours, so that works out to be €0.0018 per kilowatt hour, or €0.51/GJ. This is 200× lower than what people in California are paying today. This is a rough estimate. You can figure in the panels' nominal 20-year lifetime to get a more precise figure, though the "low cost" category generally comes with no such warranty. Also, utility companies can usually get a better interest rate than 5%. But it's in the ballpark.
For many purposes, this works out to basically unlimited energy as long as you only need it when the sun is shining. Atmospheric carbon capture is a crucial one.
> What if [sodium-ion battery technology] doesn't [become a thing],
People will make do with lithium-ion and other forms of energy storage such as sensible heat energy storage, phase-change material energy storage, and TCES.
I'd add in that my solar panels aren't really all that valuable in themselves. They're bolted to my roof with little more than some bolts and nuts.
If I have a "Residential scale" nuclear plant in the basement, there are lots of people who would like to re-purpose my nuclear fuel in other ways. (And that's before we talk about how I purchase, and renew, that fuel to begin with.)
Ultimately even "small scale" nuclear comes with massive bureaucratic and security overheads that can't simply be wished away.
In closing I'll point out that my solar system _is_ nuclear. It uses fusion nuclear energy as it's fuel. But I've cunningly hidden the radioactive elements far far away....
It's a good line, but our sun is making nice clean helium out of hydrogen fusion, those nasty radioactive elements are associated with fission (of big unstable isotopes of uranium, plutonium, thorium etc.)
Yeah I know, but you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story. (And to be fair, all the heavy elements came from the sun (or other suns) to begin with :)
More seriously, solar is the closest we'll ever get to fusion power. Assuming we ever get the tech right, it'll simply be too expensive to roll out significant amounts of fusion production. It would require capital that will always give a better return elsewhere.
To put it another way, would you rather invest $100 billion in a fusion plant, that'll take 5 years to get permitted and 5 years to build, and require staffing by well trained expensive staff, or spend $10 billion on a solar farm in Africa selling electricity to the US at night which can be up and running in 2 years?
Would you be happy to commit your 100 billion today betting that when it comes online 10 to 15 years from now it'll make energy at prices comparable to the solar and storage tech available then?
Fusion may indeed be the future. But who's gonna spend the capital to find out?
The implicit assumption is that ginormous prototype/research reactors are the only possible way for fusion to work.
But if you fund the research, people come up with better lasers and magnets and things. Then you a) have better lasers and magnets and things, which are useful for more than just fusion in the same way that NASA inventions are useful for more than just space exploration; and b) allow the reactors to get smaller:
I've absolutely no objection to building new things. I'm not against fusion as a "thing we can do". I hope the project in France is successful.
What I'm saying though is that the economics of fusion don't work. The temperature range, magnetic fields etc won't ever be 'cheap'.
Look, going to the moon wasn't economic, but it got us GPS and satellite TV which definitely are. Fusion may give us other unexpected benefits. But it'll never be the 'energy too cheap to meter' that was envisaged in the 1950s.
> What I'm saying though is that the economics of fusion don't work. The temperature range, magnetic fields etc won't ever be 'cheap'.
This feels like arguing that computers will never be cheap, because look how much it costs to build a 1970s mainframe. How could anybody ever afford to have that in their house?
Meanwhile it turns out that EUV lithography requires some fancy equipment but when you mass produce it, the result is that everybody has one in their pocket.
"Small scale" nuclear that people talk about is around 10MW. It would power a handful of neighborhoods if the consumption wasn't concentrated in a short time. But can still power a dozen homes.
What is another problem of nuclear. It's more dependent on storage or alternative generation than solar.
Whether it's 10mw or 1gw, the fuel problems remain. Procuring, securing and disposing of waste gets harder, not easier, with the number of reactors, not their size.
Weapons proliferation is definitely a strike against nuclear. A few other strikes:
- It still requires mining, so is it any cleaner than solar + storage?
- Waste is significantly less recyclable than other green energy waste.
- High cost and long timelines to build.
- Major risks when damaged by weather, accidents, or damaged intentionally.
- The biggest proponents of nuclear seem to be the oil/gas industry, and politicians aligned with oil/gas. Hmm...
> nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change
You’re seeing the same nonsense with armchair solar + battery advocates today. The mistake is in assuming marginal advantages persist across scale, i.e. in ignoring the law of diminishing returns.
If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t. If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t. Most markets optimise heterogenously because that’s what makes sense.
Solar and batteries are exploding in production, and prices are falling (not increasing.) I mean, sure, there's a point of diminishing returns, but even at last year's prices I'm getting a 17.5% return on investment. Every year that goes by the investment gets cheaper, and the price of electricity goes up, so the savings just get better and better.
And this for a capital spend on equipment with no moving parts, no lubricants, no maintenance schedule (apart from a window-washer a couple times a year.)
It's a no brainer if you live anywhere the sun shines well - and LOTS of people have figured this out, so the amounts being installed are moving the needle.
> Solar and batteries are exploding in production, and prices are falling
Sure. Now look at the baseline. We’d need to 10x the growth rate for the numbers to rival the expected growth in power demand. The folks at the tech majors aren’t idiots. If they could buy this cheapest power at scale, they would. Everybody would. One can’t. The panels are easy, but the batteries are back ordered and getting the land and permitting takes years.
I’m in Wyoming. I have seen people spend more time and paperwork getting a wind farm and HVDC line up than an experimental (totally non-economic) nuclear reactor. That doesn’t apply if you’re putting up one windmill to power your off-grid house. But the economics present at that scale diminish when you’re building a fleet of data centre.
> US is installing solar at a rate of about 40GW per year so we need to 2X it, not 10X it
2x means no carbon reduction. 3x means we can close coal by 2040 and decarbonise by 2082 [1]. And “panels are easy.” (We’re not 2 or even 3x’ing deployment inside a decade [2].)
Now look at batteries. Assume we ban EVs and send 100% of production to utilities. 10x.
Solar + wind with batteries only means we burn natural gas. It’s based on the same faulty logic as the failed nuclear-only strategies of yesteryear. It’s what we’re doing right now, which is why we’re installing about 10 GWh a year of natural gas over the 40% it already commands and why trillions are being invested in new natural gas infrastructure [3].
> Solar + wind with batteries only means we burn natural gas.
For a while. And much less gas than without the renewables.
A lot of that load increase you are observing is about the change from fossil-fuel cars into electric ones. That one will stop eventually, and you don't want to delay it anyway.
Yes? The point is that we are currently committing ourselves to a fossil fuel energy system through at least the 2080s by not building all the non-emmitting power we can. Those investments not only put down emitting capital equipment, they capitalize a bloc of producers who will do what they must to protect their investment.
> that load increase you are observing is about the change from fossil-fuel cars into electric ones. That one will stop eventually, and you don't want to delay it anyway
No, it's AI. EVs are rolling out much more slowly.
What do you mean by 10x a growth rate? If it's at a CAGR of 15%, you think it needs to be 150%?
If so, I don't think you have the right numbers. We are on track to completely replace all current energy (not electricity, but final usable energy) uses with renewable electricity within 15 years at current growth rates.
Even the most rabid estimates of energy use growth rate are not more than a doubling of total energy services in that time period. And with the growth rate of renewables, we'd be able to adapt to that.
It is true that there is less paperwork for a new natural gas turbine than for most renewable energy, but you also have to get that pipeline of gas built too (which, again, has less paperwork than electric transmission, but you actually still have to do it). Other non-renewable energy isn't going to deploy any faster than renewable energy.
plus with every advancement in cost and efficiency the amount of sun needed reduces. If you're a bit more north you might just need a couple extra panels compared to really sunny places. Even if it's just to offset instead of completely replace other fuels
The viability of solar panels in the north depends on eye watering grid prices, which isn't the case everywhere or all of the year. Whenever it occurs it is generally during winter time when a roof worth of panels provides a mere trickle of energy.
I considered some small-medium batteries and panels but the calculation came out massively in favor of putting the same bundle of cash into a financial investment portfolio instead.
> If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t.
If we are talking about the US, the reason we couldn't deploy nuclear was that we vastly over-ordered the amount of reactors we needed, going into the 1980s, causing a glut then a drought. And then too many of them were financially disastrous construction projects. Some people say that we had too many different reactor designs, but I would point to France where they used the same reactor design but also did not see falling prices, and did not build nearly as many reactors as they had planned.
Certainly France has been much better off in terms of carbon emissions from electricity since the 1980s than most places in the world, but they were also going nuclear due to lack of cheap fossil fuels.
> If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying we aren't going all in on solar and storage, but I would argue that we are. Nearly all new generation capacity getting installed is solar, storage, and wind. THere's a few legacy projects for other technologies, but those natural gas plants will see little use, unless solar/storage/batteries are blocked from being deployed in the same area. EIA: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62864
This is happening in China too. They build coal plants, but they barely use them as they are just backups. Last I heard they are on track for 160GW of solar deployed this year alone, and it goes up every year.
So maybe put me into the bucket of people spouting nonsense about solar + batteries today, I could be wrong, but I really think it's the only tech stack that can and will make a big change in energy over the next 10 years.
> Certainly France has been much better off in terms of carbon emissions from electricity since the 1980s than most places in the world, but they were also going nuclear due to lack of cheap fossil fuels.
That's the point: 2024's solar is better than 1980's nuclear, but in the meantime we've pumped a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere we didn't have to.
It's difficult to see the relevance of your point. Are you saying we should build nuclear now because we didn't then? That would make no sense. This isn't some sort of arena where we have to be fair to inanimate objects.
> difficult to see the relevance of your point. Are you saying we should build nuclear now because we didn't then
The same statement will be true in twenty years. We’re not building gas generators because they’re pretty.
We have power demand growth well ahead of our solar and wind deployment potential, even assuming the rosiest production growth forecasts for the next ten years. That gap is being filled with natural gas, based on infrastructure with 20 to 40-year financing timelines. Not building a nuclear plant today means more gas generators burning through the 2060s. (I’m assuming we build and deploy solar and wind as quickly as possible, too.)
> Are you saying we should build nuclear now because we didn't then?
No, that would be a large comprehension error. I'm making the point because people seem to use what solar and wind can finally do now to justify us not having built nuclear 40 years ago.
Except if we had wanted to be green energy in the 1980s, we would have given Carter a second term which means we would have had investment in Solar panels too. We would have likely seen a similar level of massive decrease in cost (not as big though, no chinese manufacturing) to make it pretty competitive.
But America didn't want to do the hard work of spending a hundred billion dollars on infrastructure and investment to our country. We wanted the cocaine fueled orgy of capitalism that Reagan promised us. So we ripped the solar panels off of the whitehouse and shared a bed with Saudi Arabia. Now gas is cheap as chips so we can just burn as much as we want!
It's also due to technical and economic reasons. Tiny reactors require highly enriched fuel and have worse neutron economy and thermal efficiency. You can't use the same low-enriched fuel in a tiny reactor that you can in a typical (hundreds of megawatts or larger) commercial power reactor.
In a big commercial power reactor, fuel costs are tiny relative to the total system costs. If you used a tiny reactor like the Kilopower [1] to power a single home, the cost of the highly enriched fuel alone (upward of $50,000 per kilogram, 28 kg in a unit) would be orders of magnitude more expensive than grid-supplied electricity.
I've never heard that before. I don't think politics would stop a fleet of small 50-100MW replacing a 1GW reactor, and that's certainly not the opposition to SMRs now.
It's actually both economic and technical: the technical side makes smaller reactors less economic in terms of efficiency. Thermal generation benefits massively from being really really big.
I’d like to understand the economics of size in nuclear reactors better. It seems like there are almost irresistible forces pushing towards bigger reactors. I’m looking particularly at the newish Westinghouse designs. Back in the early 2000s, Westinghouse designed the AP600, 600 megawatts, and it was supposed to have a lot of modularity and factory construction. No one bought one though and so they came out with the AP1000, of which a number have been built. China has now extended the design to the CAP1400 and they’re working on a CAP1700, almost triple the original power.
> seems like there are almost irresistible forces pushing towards bigger reactors
Those advantages go down when you include construction and permitting time (billions of dollars) and transmission costs (billions more over the plant’s lifetime).
On SMRs: we don’t know their economics because they don’t practically exist yet. Certainly not in a mass-manufactured flavour.
SMRs still require construction, not just manufacturing. NuScale's abortive effort required 1/3rd more labor hours to build per MW than conventional large reactors. You can't pour large concrete structures in a factory.
Sorry, but the “nuclear is too expensive “ argument doesn’t hold up, considering cheap, modern reactors are being built as we speak in countries without a strong political resistance(EU, US).
Take the UAE for example, who are experts at large scale energy projects, they have constructed and commissioned 4 nuclear reactors, on time, on budget.
To say that it’s not possible, is not true.
Take the UAE for example, who are experts at large scale energy projects, they have constructed and commissioned 4 nuclear reactors, on time, on budget.
Your own link says that the first reactor was originally scheduled to start supplying electricity in 2017 but actually entered operation in 2020. It also says "As of 22 March 2018, the project's total cost was refined to $24.4 billion to complete. However, by April 9, 2020, Power Technology reported that the project cost was $32 billion."
3 years late and 30% over budget is OK by nuclear project standards, considering much greater delays and budget blowouts in recent US/EU projects. But it's not on time and on budget.
Ok, still, the plant now provides a substantial amount of energy to the region.
I suspect the pandemic might have provided a cause for the delay. I was myself involved in a large energy project in the UAE and remember the challenges caused by the lockdowns happening.
But probably with a 30% over budget bill, that is only partially an explanation.
Additionally, the UAE is big users of solar, also having been early adopters of the technology.
And like solar, you can build nuclear in small and large scale plants.
But my favourite contender for future, base energy source is fusion power,
It's a huge power plant. 5.6 giga watts. And they did ok with tineline and budget.
It did take 12 years of construction, and 32 billion in funding. And they project would have been in development long before construction started.
All in a regulatory environment which priorities "getting stuff done" and where there's plenty of capital to invest. (And investors who play a very long game.)
There might be conditions somewhere that are more favorable, but its not the US.
could it be done? Obviously yes. Will it be done in the US? Not a chance.
I think a few hundred purpose-built nuclear powered CO2 scrubbing plants could be an option. At 1,500 kWh/ton, a 1 GW nuclear plant could capture 5.8 million tons of CO₂ per year which is about 0.015% of global emissions. It would have to be coupled with emissions reductions and so on though.
Is there some advantage to powering this with nuclear rather than other cheaper energy sources? Using waste heat for desorption of amine scrubbers, perhaps?
In general we need to get smart and get good at bringing critical resources (energy, food/water production) reasonably local.
Climate, political, and economic disasters seem more frequent each decade, and it would be a shame to starve or melt/freeze ourselves just because our delivery systems failed us.
And as a Texan, it blows my mind that so many people reject local solar options. When the grid is having rolling blackouts, wouldn’t it be nice to still have power?
People tend to align their thoughts with what pays the mortgage.
Texas has a dominant ruling structure dominated by religious fanatics and resource extraction for now. Alot of the extremist nonsense is driven by the sense that demographics will drive power shifts, so cashing in is key. At some point, the “freedom” argument will flip — what is more in alignment with the cowboy myth than self-reliance where your rooftop or land provides?
Define "reasonably local" though, because Texas running on its own grid has been bad for almost all Texans (I'm sure a select few are benefiting greatly from it). Most places have reasonably locally resourced schools, but then again, the schools that cover people in the lower socio-economic classes just happen to be worse off. This tends to be the case for many locally distributed resources. Now, going even more local, at an individual house level, I wouldn't want to rely on a local handyman to fix my solar issues or have to do it myself. Home ownership is complex & expensive enough, and when there's an issue, a handyman is sometimes tough to get.
It's perfectly reasonable to think local in terms of redundancy, but the primary way of delivering power should be concern of as many people as possible. It's like having an insurance plan with a lot of members. Distributing the costs and risks across as many people as possible helps keep things cheaper and mitigates risk. No one is going to care if only your power is out, but when there are a lot more stakeholders, when the grid extends across city, county, state, even country lines, if there are issues, there's more pressure to get them fixed.
Texas can get away with this because only Texas has control. I addressed this. If they were hooked up through other states, there would be more external pressure to address these issues.
Agreed in general, but the question is what we give up in going to a more-resilient system. In particular, lots of things are the way they are because of cost. Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local? I don’t think I would.
> Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local?
Just pointing out that many people, including myself, intentionally buy groceries from farmers' markets and local food co-ops very specifically because we want our food to be local. Others will spend even more time and labor on vegetable gardens for the same reason.
It is unfortunate that the way we offer food production subsidies in many countries primarily benefit large, multinational conglomerates instead of funding healthier, more resilient, and more environmentally friendly local options. It is terrible that only those with means can afford to purchase local foods in many markets, but yes, plenty of us who are able to do so choose to.
That's nice, but that's not how economics or farming work.
There are a lot of factors limiting local farms' ability to deliver at a cheaper price point, like corporate consolidation, land being converted into suburban sprawl, a lack of local value add and processing infrastructure, huge subsidies (and water resources) being wasted on commodity growers, an aging farmer population, etc.
Do you really think that if a head of cabbage was fetching $150 a pop at my grocery store that Earl who owns the farm across the street from me is going to stubbornly continue to grow commodity tobacco at a profit of $2000 an ACRE? (About 35 cents a plant.)
Right the way economics works is I’m going to get my cabbage from a totally different part of the world depending on what time of year I buy it. And yes, when it’s in season, it’s nice to go to the local market. If cabbage was $150 a pop your neighbors biggest concerned would probably be the dead bodies in the streets
The questions actually are, what happens when we deplete the Ogallala aquifer? What happens when climate change, conflict or natural disaster impacts the Colorado watershed, the Central Valley, and/or the go to market infrastructure for that produce?
We’ve created a system where investments and massive subsidy made to turn the desert into a garden destroyed agriculture nationally. It’s a predictable black swan scenario that has impactful and broad implications.
Most humans think in "next paycheck" terms not "risk-adjusted" terms, but at the same time, the Covid supply chain issues whacked people in the head with "this is a black swan" and "fragility" sticks.
That's amazing - my first thought, after clicking your link, was that the satellite view was out of date, from before construction began: but no, I just needed to zoom out. And out. And out - still not all of it! - five clicks later, you can finally see that this solar park takes up as much space as a small city.
Except that is the opposite of reality in the USA. The fraction of energy generated from small scale PV generation in the USA has decreased as total PV generation has increased [1].
10 years ago, in 2014, utility scale PV generation was 57%. Over those 10 years, utility scale PV generation increased by ~10x, where as small scale PV generation only increased by ~6.5x. In spite of absolutely massive incentives, small scale PV generation has grown slower in absolute and percentage terms in nearly every single year of the last decade.
Scale is the really important thing here. It is really easy and really cheap to use economies of scale to purchase square kilometers of panels and plop them down in bulk over vast swathes of regular land in a assembly line fashion.
At least where I live, solar is still roughly break even cost-wise with not installing solar over 20 years -- but it increases your home's complexity and makes updating your roof more complicated and expensive.
The math varies a lot by location. In the US the costs of gear and install are typically higher (twice as high as here.)
It'll also obviously be a factor of electricity cost, sunny days, your residential consumption and so on.
Personally I get 17.5% return on capital spent (and ways to improve that further) so the math works out well. Ymmv.
Same here. I live where there’s ton of sun, but power is cheap and install is expensive and not subsidised. Dad lives in northern europe, power is 2x more and install is 2x and subsidised. In december he generates like 20kwh per month from 8kw array. Still already paid itself after few years.
Let's face it: electricity is dirt cheap in the US compared to other developed countries. If you have grid access you don't really benefit significantly from solar.
That both explains why it was adopted relatively early for private use cases as well as why it doesn't grow as much as commercial installations as equipment gets cheaper.
Competition is even more important than size. Only when there are a large number of suppliers at all processing stages will there be a boom in innovation. In China, this applies to both the PV industry and the wind industry.
In the case of PV, a large proportion of the primary products are traded via commodity exchanges. In the case of wind power, 12 manufacturers now offer systems larger than 16 MW.
perhaps we need to shift some of our habits to high sun hours where possible. Like run the washing machine and dishwasher at mid day. So you need less battery storage for the nights. And perhaps build houses that store thermal heat better so you can run the heater less aggressively in the evening.
Exactly. This is what the whole "iot" and "smart grid" were supposed to get us -- appliances and EVSEs that can be readied to start, and will then start themselves when the energy price is favorable.
We apparently have that for some EVSEs, but still not for my stupid dishwasher. (It uses electric heat to boost the water temperature, no matter how much I prime the hot water plumbing, and it's quite a pig energy-wise.)
Real energy has curves, and the sooner we embrace that, the better off we'll be.
Worse, my energy provider put me on a time-of-day rate that's _most_ expensive during peak sun hours, which seems backwards if they're supposed to be introducing more PV to the mix. I guess it's time to negotiate with the landlord and get some panels on the roof so I can start offsetting my own consumption at their so-called "peak" times.
Wind power has also become really cheap in China. Tenders are around 1100-1800 CNY/kW onshore and around 3000 CNY/kW offshore.
At the China Windpower 2024 trade fair held in October, 12 manufacturers presented wind turbines larger than 16MW, and 5 manufacturers are pushing into the 25MW range.
After wind and PV became cheaper than coal in China, subsidies for onshore wind and PV were largely canceled. Subsidies in the offshore sector serve to build up an export industry.
As a result, 2/3 of new PV and wind farms built worldwide are subsidy-free, most of them in China.
The problem in Europe with the construction of electricity grids is the lack of competition. An oligopoly of producers supply monopolies on the buyer side.
The price-driving monopoly/oligopoly problem also affects the US electricity market.
It depends where, in France we had only one state controled company that gave use the lowest prices in Europe and became an international leader in the domain, until under pressure from activists and Germany we introduced competition and cut EDF in small pieces.
I would say that competition is good for energy only if you depend on importation.
The very high experience rate of renewables is just as important as current low cost. It means anything trying to compete with them is facing a rapidly moving target, and has to aim at where renewables will be, not just where they are.
So basically their point is a major driver of solar installations is that in low-wage countries with unreliable electricity grids solar is now by far the cheapest backup power. And once they have it they use it.
That certainly sounds reasonable. In developed countries installation and mounting costs are a significant cost driver for solar installations, but in the third world you can do that a lot cheaper, and beating a diesel generator on cost isn't hard
It's not expensive in all developed countries though... In the US, we pay $3/W for residential installation, but in Australia it's literally 1/10th the cost at $0.3/W.
The $3/W is a choice that we made in our political system, by 1) keeping highly fractured and inconsistent local permitting processes rather than a more efficient higher-level rule making, 2) letting utilities exercise control over the process such that they can minimize installations (why isn't your electricity bill going down even though electricity generation is getting cheaper with the new technology? Same reason: regulatory capture of your Public Utilities Commission).
If you're prepared to deal with it's unreliability (when the sun is not shining), then it's by far the cheapest power full stop. In countries with unreliable grids that looks a lot more attractive. Especially as in many of those countries it is reliably sunny.
Even the cost of battery storage is getting ridiculously cheap, too. Small off-grid installations, even in the US, can be had for $200/kWh capacity, with lifetimes > 3000 cycles. So lets say <$0.07/kWh for storing it. That's about the average cost of transmission & distribution for a kWh across the US.
It comes up every day, but it also goes down every night. Of course you can solve this with storage, but then the solution is no longer the cheapest available energy source (yet).
I have solar panels and battery storage and have been very happy with them, but there are two aspects (in the area of the U.S. where I live) that made obtaining panels a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Around here, it's extremely common for homeowner associations to ban solar panels outright ("they're ugly", "nobody wants to look at that", etc.). Additionally, the local power utility has been granted the ability to limit how much solar capacity an individual homeowner can have. I would be more understanding of this second point but for the fact that very nearby, across a state line, solar capacity is not limited even though it's the same utility and the same power grid.
When looking for a home several years ago, we only had a couple of options because solar was a requirement for us, but we wouldn't be allowed to add solar at most of the properties that were on the market at the time. We ended up finding a place and adding solar, the largest array we were allowed by the utility. It's very beneficial and I'm still glad we did it, but with an electric car and all electric appliances, it's often not enough to supply our needs.
By allowing utilities to place such low capacity limits on solar generation, solar installation becomes less attractive, which I presume is what the utilities want and is the reason they lobby for such restrictions.
Getting rid of these outdated HOA rules and utility-imposed capacity limits (when there's no technical reason for them) are two things we'll need to overcome in order to make solar adoption more attractive and hopefully more affordable for everyone.
Why on earth would “governments need to regulate and subsidise” a solar boom that is already proceeding apace without them? The tail end of this article makes no sense…
> A world that mostly runs on solar power will also need something else—such as hydropower, nuclear, or geothermal—to generate energy when the sun isn’t shining in the evenings and winters. Jessika Trancik, an MIT professor who models clean-energy development, told me that governments need to steer investments toward storage and alternate forms of energy to compensate for that inherent downtime. That way, the world can have a reliable energy mix when 50 or 60 percent of electricity generation comes from solar and wind.
I'd expect that the solar subsidies mentioned by the last paragraph are for solar-adjacent technologies like energy storage, not the panels themselves.
In my view western economies are a ponzi scheme predicated on ever increasing cost of housing. Even a small erosion of the real economy has massive effects on the highly leveraged financial economy. This technology for cheaper goods already exists and I don’t think there is a way to stop it so my presumption is that eventually the real economy in the west will be undermined and the financialized economy will implode.
> "In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts"
This is annoyingly common with journalists and also a very clear tell that they don't have any idea what they are writing about.
Maybe in a few years the writer will understand that it's tricky to store energy in a cost-efficient way and that energy isn't the same as power.
Or perhaps they won't.
Either way, in late 2024, this low level of understanding is pretty tiring.
The writer "has been the the recipient of a 2017 National Association of Science Writers reporting award for coverage of air pollution in Detroit, and a finalist for the 2019 Livingston Award for a series on water politics at the Texas-Mexico border. At The Atlantic, she covers climate change."
The writer's CV doesn't mention any education at all.
500 megawatts would be 4.4 terawatt hours per year. That's in the ballpark of what they actually did produce in 02019, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Africa. So the journalist seems to have actually been correct in this case, although it's a bit like saying "the distance covered by the runner was 12 miles per hour", when it would perhaps be more appropriate to say that that was the runner's speed rather than the runner's distance.
Sometimes energy storage devices are surprisingly reported in terms of power (the installation’s power output ends up being more relevant for whatever reason). For grid stability, being able to meet demand is more important than having days of energy, inaccessible, in reserve. So, surprising units isn’t a 100% bulletproof heuristic.
But in this case yeah, there seems to be a mix-up.
There's no mixup. Solar electric energy production in South Africa in 02019 did indeed average about 500 megajoules per second throughout the year, totaling about 16 petajoules; which is to say, it was about 500 megawatts, or, in cursed units, 4 terawatt-hours per year.
Separately, it's true that peak power is often a very important criterion for energy storage systems.
There is a mix up. It might be that the journalist is correctly summarizing the person they interviewed, but that person is wrong, or it might be that the journalist messed it up. But,
> In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts, Nana said
This is a very explicit phrasing “the total amount of energy produced” and the units don’t work out. You can figure out what they meant by doing additional research, but that doesn’t make it a non-error.
That's exactly the same as zelos's example of "the total amount of rope produced in 2019 was thought to be about 500 meters per second". It's a little bit odd, but it's a perfectly correct way to describe the total amount of rope produced in 02019†. Multiplying by the number of seconds in a year isn't additional research. In the same way, you can validly say "the total temperature rise of the teakettle over a minute was thought to be about 1.5° per second" or "the total GDP of South Africa in the early 02020s was thought to be about US$6400 per person per year".
There's nothing incorrect about any of these; it's mostly just a question of which units are the most convenient or unambiguous in a given context. And, I guess, which units your audience is accustomed to seeing; the SI unit for liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers would be square meters, but if you say your new car's gas mileage is 7.8 × 10⁻⁸ m², a lot of people will think you're using the wrong units, and they will surely have a hard time interpreting it.
______
† Well, except that in this case the "500" is almost certainly made up; I don't think zelos was looking up South African rope production statistics!
You are mixing things up. On the one side there's the verbiage. On the other hand there's the units. You are mixing these things up in an extremely verbose way and I don't care for for it. Please just stop trying to actively mislead us all.
But hey, you reached your goal, killing the velocity of my comment way up there.
You planted the seed of "doubt". Congrats.
Because of behavior like this: HN is not a great place for discussing anything to do with energy. Fanaticism generally rules. The loudest person wins. This is sad.
Probably someone out there will be convinced by "the loudest person", but hopefully most people will instead be convinced by sound reasoning and evidence. That's my goal: understanding what is really true, rather than believing what you copy-paste the most times.
What, by giving the standard SI definitions of units so that people can see that the things you're saying are different are actually the same? You have a funny idea of what's muddy and what's clear.
You are mixing things up. On the one side there's the verbiage. On the other hand there's the units. You are mixing these things up in an extremely verbose way and I don't care for for it. Please just stop trying to actively mislead us all.
But hey, you reached your goal, killing the velocity of my comment way up there.
I was explaining why the misconception you were repeating was wrong. (It turned out to be a popular one.) I suppose that since you still haven't figured out that it was wrong, that looks like "misleading" to you, but actually you are the one doing the misleading. It's good to doubt your beliefs; that way you can abandon the false ones. Try it.
I think it is pretty common for reasoning to require a fairly long explanation to become clear. Hopefully I've achieved that for most readers, even if you are still struggling. But if you object to this thread being "extremely verbose", why are you copying and pasting the same comment into it here and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41998632?
The article explains that that number is "the total amount of energy produced" over the year, so it's averaged over the whole year including nights. The peak power is irrelevant to the total amount of energy produced except as an upper bound.
Power is king for commercial batteries. On whole sale energy markets you often see high prices in one 1/4 hour, and much lower prices 1 hour later.
You can than nicely make an arbitrage profit if you completely cycle the battery.
Also many such batteries have similar Max energy and power limits, e.g. 1.5MWh energy vs 1MW power.
Edit: noticed that HN user kragen has replaced the comment I replied to with a dot, for some reason. This doesn't seem civil to me.
You think it's clear tell that she knew what she was talking about when she wrote "the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts".
Similarly you think it's a clear tell that I don't know what I'm talking about when I say that this is an incorrect statement, and that this is a clear tell.
Yes, because, as I explained above, I checked Wikipedia, and that figure turns out to be correct to within at worst a factor of two. Power units such as megawatts measure the rate at which energy is produced, consumed, or otherwise converted, which is to say, the amount of energy used per unit of time. For example, per year. A watt is about 31.6 megajoules per year.
So there's nothing actually wrong with the reporter's statement, even though it would be more precise to say that the average power generated was thought to be around 500 megawatts.
No, I claim that you don't know what you're talking about because you think the units were wrong in the given context and that the arithmetic values were wrong, which they weren't.
You keep repeating that as if you think it's going to convince somebody, but, in fact, when you divide an amount of energy produced, such as 4 terawatt hours, by a length of time such as a year, you get a power, such as 500 megawatts, which does indeed tell you how much energy was produced over that length of time.
We normally use joules for energy, though sometimes people do unfortunately use cursed units such as foot-pounds, calories, BTUs, megawatt-hours, electron volts, and so on. My analogy of "the distance covered by the runner was 12 miles per hour" is quite precise here. Saying that we're talking about the total energy produced in 2019 clearly excludes your hypothetical interpretations of peak output or nameplate capacity, neither of which would tell you the energy produced in a year.
It's true that someone who didn't understand the area might say "500 megawatts" when they meant "500 megawatt-hours", but the reporter in this case didn't make that error, and anyway 500 megawatt-hours in a year would be 57 kilowatts, which is an implausibly small amount of solar power to be produced by an entire medium-income country. That's more like a single large commercial building.
Domestically the most common unit of energy is calories in the countries I'm familiar with, but households also frequently measure energy in gallons of gasoline, liters of gasoline, British Thermal Units, "therms", cubic feet of gas, cubic meters of gas, kilowatt hours, cords of wood, bushels of corn, joules, and "tons", meaning tons of ice (often abused as a measure of power, the implicit denominator being "per day"). Additional common units of energy rarely used in households include barrels of oil, "megatons" (this time of TNT rather than ice), toes (ton of oil equivalents), quads (quadrillion BTU), foot-pounds, and, implicitly, horsepower seconds. The vulgar news media often use the "household-day", which is roughly as well defined as the "heap".
This is like the seventeenth century situation where cloth was sold by the "ell", but each kind of cloth was measured by a different ell. The Flemish ell was a different length from the English ell or the Scottish ell. This nonsense survives today in the custom current in the less advanced countries of weighing gold and silver in "troy ounces" and other commodities such as pepper in a different "ounce" that is about 10% smaller.
But the situation with energy is much worse, because transmuting electrical energy into gasoline, or vice versa, is enormously less inefficient than transmuting pepper into gold. Different forms of energy are far more often equivalent than different forms of mass.
The insight underlying the SI system of units is that calculations become much easier if you use a consistent set of units derived in a simple way from a minimal set of base units such as the kilogram and meter. How much kinetic energy is going to kill a 100-kg man falling from a building at 10 meters per second? Trivially, 50 kilojoules. How much energy does a 10-watt lightbulb consume in 5000 seconds? 50 kilojoules. If you are paying US$0.02 per megajoule for gasoline, US$0.01 per megajoule for natural gas, and US$0.04 per megajoule for electrical energy, what's the cheapest way to heat your house? Gas, unless your electric heat pump has a coefficient of performance over 4.
By contrast, if the different prices are expressed in different units, it adds difficulty to every kind of reasoning, to the point that there seems to be a popular misconception that megawatts are not even the right unit for measuring the solar energy production of a country.
Kilowatt hours are an especially silly unit. A watt is by definition a joule per second, so measuring energy in kilowatt hours is similar to measuring distance in mph-minutes. An mph-minute works out to be exactly 88 feet, and a kilowatt hour is exactly 3.6 megajoules. Just use megajoules! Stop making everything more difficult.
Power is energy per unit time. The statement is like saying "the total amount of rope produced in SA is 500 meters per second". Being generous, you'd assume that's (total production per year) / (seconds in a year), I guess.
Yes, I think that's a perfectly reasonable way to describe the amount of rope produced in South Africa. It uses the correct units and therefore contains no ambiguity. Saying instead that the total amount of rope produced in South Africa was 16 billion meters, leaving the "per year" implied, would, by contrast, be ambiguous and open to misinterpretation; equally plausible interpretations would be "in all of history" (the literal interpretation) or "per month". Unless, as in this case, the statement was qualified with a particular year-long time period, such as "in 2019", in which case "500 meters per second" or "16 billion meters" would be equally unambiguous ways of describing the situation.
"500 meters per second" is not just (total production per year) / (seconds in a year) but also (total production in a day) / (seconds in a day) and (total production in a month) / (seconds in a month).
Meters per second, like watts, has the advantage of being an SI unit and therefore facilitating calculations with other SI units without requiring a bunch of numerical conversion factors.
So the average power produced by those plants was 500MW.
That phrase is still nonsense. The fact that if you go, do your research, get the real numbers, and interpret them you can discover that what the journalist is trying to say is correct is meaningless. You can still cut the journalist out from the process and lose nothing.
But in this case what was being discussed was the rate at which South Africa converted solar energy into electrical energy, which is a power, and the journalist correctly used units of power. Many journalists are indeed staggeringly incompetent, but in this case you are the one who is mistaken.
Agreed, it would be great if everything could always be technically accurate, but like fetch, it is never going to happen. It is wrong basically everywhere. Which is understandable as common vernacular readily interchanges energy and power.
If you map energy -> power the paragraph actually says something sensible.
It could have been worse: if they'd said something like "500 megawatts per week" it would be completely unclear what they even mean. Should you map it to megawatt-hours / week (around 3 MW), because that's a common (kind of goofy) unit to work in? Or does it mean they use (on average) 500 MW?
And MW wasn't even the unit used in the source, the SAPVIA Solar PV Dashboard[1], which shows Megawatt Peak. MWp is a unit that refers to the theoretical maximum power output of a solar PV system (e.g. under ideal conditions.)
These data accord with the article's thesis, but it doesn't inspire confidence that units were conflated. They're not the same thing as megawatts, they don't measure energy, etc.
i think a more useful correction for people whose day to day lives don't require them to keep track of the difference is
MW is rate of energy use with respect to time, not total energy. The rate of energy in science is called "power"
because they both are measures of energy, and the energy/power distinction in science co-opted preexisting words that didn't have those precise meanings. Total energy is the integral of power over time, so it's not really wrong to say "this higher energy battery contains more power" in everyday speech.
Solar where I live is very scammy. Salespeople who sell you the world and then your panels don't deliver, and the company is impossible to contact (or gone) [0]
Then there is the issue that there is no battery mandate, which to me is insane.
In sunny, warmer states we have an oversupply of energy during the day, and then when the sun sets we have a shortage as everybody comes home, and their AC needs to work harder, and people start cooking with electricity.
So basically when you put on panels without a battery you're making it harder for everybody. You're using the grid as a battery.
The more solar surplus we create, the more incentive there is to build battery storage. You can see it happening in California, where storage has grown massively year over year, to the point where it's now displacing natural gas peaker plants as a primary source of meeting after-sunset evening energy demand.
I thought utilities were starting to install battery farms these days? If the technology is there, I'd much rather the utility own, operate, maintain them. In most residences, I see a big battery strapped to a house as something of a liability.
with all that output during the day, we might be able to revisit less "efficient" uses of energy like desalination plants that only make sense during the hours when energy is "free" because of overabundance.
Can you elaborate what you mean by that? The grid is a battery on a scale of one household connecting to this infinite supply or infinite sink of electricity, but on a wider scale (and physical world as opposed to accounting) , you generate energy during the day and someone else needs to generate it at night, so it's in no way a battery.
Unfortunately due to tariffs, p.v. systems for private people are still not cheap at all compared to other countries... Tariffs to protect... Nothing, because we produce essentially nothing, just some inverters.
If we’re talking “world,” global coal usage is predicted to increase, much of it in China and India, before declining later. Apparently with electricity usage going up, there’s more of every kind of power generation?
Also, cheap solar seems to be running into something like Amdahl’s law, where the solar panel cost is a small part of total cost. Hard to say what the trend will be for non-panel costs. How cheaply can they be installed and maintained?
Panel cost? The floor is the limit. [1]
Installation cost? Depends on local labor wages but the skill is easy to learn. I'd recommend to DIY a couple 500 Wh panels just as an experiment.
Yeah i'd be nice to have the other two datapoints.
Production cost per PV watt was around 15 cents at the end of 2023 [1]. Some claim that by the end of 2024 this figure will reach 10 cents per watt. [2]
One of the things that I'm optimistic about is the way solar and wind have become so cheap that they're being installed on their own merits. You will find no shortage of people online bemoaning the woke energy that is going to ruin the economy, but their complaints can't stop people from installing more and more renewable energy every year. Even in places like Texas where the oil and gas industry is practically a religion.
Ironically the only place that has seen effective pushback is California, where the legislature structured the system such that solar installs are basically just a gift to their corrupt energy companies.
I've never once seen solar being called "woke energy", is that a thing?
Either way, everyone's realigning now that Elon is MAGA, solar and EVs are out, they're MAGA now. Now it's all about degrowth and going back to our roots, there is no energy that is clean now.
You probably don't hang out on too many right wing communities. This is good for your mental health, but it does mean you miss out on big trends that 40% of the population ends up getting behind.
I admit the phrase "woke energy" isn't commonly used, but the sentiment is there. If you think backing Elon would lead to cognitive dissonance you have to remember that you can avoid the issue entirely by just not thinking about it.
degrowth is trendy and fashionable online in certain communities, but from what I've seen the vast majority of democrats don't agree with it, if they've even heard of it. Most of the democrats I know are big fans of solar, and would be derided online as "neoliberal" or "centrist".
I've never met a degrowth advocate in real life. I think it's one of those communities that only exists online because the proponents are too geographically scattered to form local communities.
The bemoaning of woke politics has some merit in California where they are shutting down power plants and just hoping that renewables take hold. It seems like they are trying to manufacture a crisis. Whether that's true or not, I'm not taking a side, just explaining that there are valid criticisms beyond's just
hating on it because the energy is "clean".
Can you elaborate a bit here? Neglecting _detailed_ info about storage conversion costs, etc, it's tough to understand the "all-in" cost for storage over time.
At home, I'm fanatical about using bog-standard AA/AAA rechargeable batteries for as many things as possible (anything with a micro-USB charger is basically "e-waste waiting to happen"), and thinking through any kind of home-supplement for solar, batteries, etc. makes me think that the "waste" of house-scale / grid-scale batteries for storage makes the math not work out.
Rough googling puts ~30kWh batteries at ~$15-30k, which: even if you think of it as having a 30-year service life, still works out to ~$50-100/mo in just battery depreciation.
Similarly with cars (eg: PHEV). First 5 years? Great! Next 10 years? ...a ticking time bomb of "must be replaced" with the battery representing an exorbitant percentage of the vehicle value. $500 of tires on a $5000 car is one thing, but a $5000 battery on a car seems like a net negative environmentally and financially?
Solar PV operates 10-30% of the time (depending on location). Without storage, this naturally limits direct solar contribution to about 20% of energy demand. Going beyond requires expensive storage solutions.
Your argument mixes "easy" and "cheap". Storage can be "easy" and you have plenty of choice: batteries, pumped, thermal, chemical, name it. If you have a large enough east-west country (hint), you might also invest in transport infrastructure to move energy where it is required so you don't have to store as much. This is also "easy", maybe moreso than storage because we've been doing it for so long. As to whether these easy things are cost effective when compared to other solutions is a completely different issue.
none of those storage solutions are easy for grid scale. For batteries you need whole factories, pumped requires permits and tone of cement, chemical is like hydrogen with low efficiency. All of those are expensive which for government is synonymous with difficult.
Being expensive is the _easiest_ thing for most governments. It's often a requirement! i.e. As a contractor, bid too cheaply and you will not be taken seriously.
This doesn't apply to energy grid scale projects. Also that is why energy sector in most countries is privatized. Take Germany with total energy costs that would be like ~10% of the federal budget (about 40 billion euros). Making energy even more expensive would only lead to further deindustrialization and lower gdp making it politically non viable. Also, you can't just throw money and buy storage like with typical government contracts - it requires building entire new industries (like Germany's struggles with hydrogen infrastructure).
Depending on your energy mix, you can go much further than 20% solar before needing storage. What's actually necessary is not storage, but generation which can ramp down and ramp up fast enough to compensate for the predictable daily ramps of solar generation (on top of the daily power use ramps). AFAIK, hydroelectric is one of the fastest (so much that pumped hydroelectric power plants can be used as storage), while coal and nuclear are among the slowest.
For cooling (datacenters and other) you can chill water when the sun is out. And mostly passively cool the heated water when the sun is down if water is scarce. Plumbing and insulation for cooling reservoirs probably degrades a lot slower than batteries. I'm not sure about chiller plant wear and tear vs battery degradation
Scale is the really important thing here. It's really easy and really cheap to build a small-business, or home scale generation system.
This is in contrast to nuclear, coal, gas turbine etc where you really need large plants to work efficiently. Small portable diesel generators exist, but they are expensive to run, need regular maintenance and refueling.
Once you can cost effectively generate real electricity for very little effort, and very low cost, then people do it. And when you distribute generation like this very large effects happen very qickly.
>scale
This is so funny to see, and great to see said, because for decades I ran into nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change (Edit: forgot a crucial clause: because "only" nuclear could scale). I would counter that nuclear does not scale in that it can't get small, and it takes forever to build or expand.
Whereas solar can go small, go big, go medium, and the same with storage these days.
Many in the nuclear world are currently hoping to scale to "modular" size, because it's become clear that with 1GW scale, in advanced economies, construction is too expensive (IMHO due to the high cost of labor compared to less advanced economies). So shifting to a more "factory" model like airplanes is the investment pitch: scale smaller and make each reactor like factory parts so that it gets cheap to build. We will see! It's got enough hype that even non-small non-modular designs are calling themselves SMRs in order to try to garner interest. And there is some interest in new nuclear these days, despite the extremely high cost, and its going towards the more expensive SMRs rather than 1GW scale reactors, because the risk of failure is on a smaller overall quantity of money.
> This is so funny to see, and great to see said, because for decades I ran into nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change
The argument that the grid should be 100% nuclear was never really viable. To make it work you would need nuclear to be cheap, so it could be overbuilt to cover hourly and seasonal variation in load.
That's theoretically possible, a nuclear reactor is basically a box of hot rocks used to make steam. Large reactors use turbines because they're more efficient, but you can also use steam to run a piston engine and then your cost is approximately the same as a diesel generator only you don't have to buy diesel, just exchange the box of hot rocks for a new one every decade or two. The regulatory environment is not such that this is a thing, however, and then overbuilding nuclear is too expensive.
But that's assuming you want to replace the whole grid with nuclear. Any proposal to replace the whole grid with a single generation technology is naive, because the premise would have to be that it's better than all other forms of generation in all contexts. Which isn't true for anything.
The big advantage of solar is that it's cheap, if you don't care about consistency -- and sometimes you don't. Solar is great for charging electric cars because they have built-in batteries and then the intermittency doesn't matter. It's pretty good for air conditioning load because that tracks solar output pretty closely. Nuclear is not going to be competitive for those things.
But the reverse is true as well. You want to use solar to drive heat pumps at night in winter in regions far from the equator? That's a bad fit, and so is anything else with intermittent power output because if the power goes out people freeze to death.
The answer is to build nuclear reactors to power heat pumps and provide cogeneration and build solar to charge electric cars and run air conditioners, instead of trying to do everything with one technology.
Passivhaus is probably a cheaper solution than nuclear-powered heat pumps for keeping people from freezing to death far from the equator. Outside of the Arctic Circle, passive solar gain is always a potential solution, though inside cities it may not be viable. And most of the Arctic and Antarctic have plenty of wind power available.
Nuclear reactors are steam engines. Steam engines used to be piston engines, but they switched to turbines because, as I understand it, turbines are cheaper. I'm not sure why piston engines are still used for internal combustion, but I suspect it may be a question of faster ramp rates — more important for peeling out of a stop light than for your power grid. But ships are commonly propelled by large two-stroke diesel engines, and ramp rates are not much of a concern there. Such engines made by Wärtsilä are reportedly comparable to turbines in their efficiency and priced competitively with turbine generators for small electric power plants.
However, neither turbine-powered generators nor piston-engine-powered generators are priced low enough to compete with solar or wind.
Even France didn't get to full replacement of the grid with nuclear, but they got 90% of the way their. Our current mix of tech, even without new nuclear, will get us to 90% decarbonized easily.
What we have now that we didn't have 50 years ago is super cheap storage. That's a complete revolution in how to manage grids, and I don't think that the current grid planners and ops know what to do with it yet. You can use storage to avoid transmission congestion, you can use it to time shift, you can use it to avoid distribution node upgrades when you deploy it behind the meter.
There are soooooo many ways that storage can reduce grid costs and make it more economically efficient. The challenge is that nearly all grid decisions are made by people that have incentive to keep grid costs as high as possible. We need a new economic and regulatory framework in order to see the benefits of this new technology.
France is 70% nuclear, not 90.
I buy your argument absent innovations and cost reductions in the storage space.
Now granted most of the monthly articles we see on new battery technology don't come to anything, but there have been steady gains and its an area that is far from optimal yet. Sodium ion batteries for example could change the landscape a lot.
On the one hand we have nuclear, and that's technically possible today, but comes with significant political challenges.
I suspect that a game-changer in the storage game has more chance than nuclear actually being built.
I also think a more global grid is doable. That also has political implications, and its a large project, but the internet (ie a globally connected network) shows what can be done in relatively short order.
> I buy your argument absent innovations and cost reductions in the storage space.
Now consider the alternatives if we want to decarbonize heating. Nuclear -- really anything -- takes a while to build, so if we don't start building it now and then the storage technology doesn't materialize, we're screwed.
And what happens if we build new nuclear and then the storage technology does materialize? Well, it's not going to come at the expense of solar, because we'll have to build tons and tons of solar just in order to electrify transportation and apply it in the other contexts where it's the most advantageous. The nuclear plants would be in addition to that, and be replacing coal and natural gas to provide baseload and energy for heating. So the medium-term effect would just be to replace coal and gas faster.
Then if the storage technology does materialize, it would still take decades after it does to manufacture enough of it to replace the rest of the grid. So the new nuclear plants then operate for 30-50 years while that happens, instead of running for 50-100 years if it doesn't, and instead of coal and natural gas plants continuing to operate during that time if we don't build the nuclear plants. Which would be a big problem if that's 100 years and still no advantage even if it's 30.
There's a lot of forward looking in your assessment there. And clearly predicting the future is tricky.
Your argument makes sense if things happen on decade long timeliness. But solar rollout I'd happening at insane speeds already, and accelerating. The current storage using today's tech is growing on a steep curve. If sodium-ion becomes a thing it'll explode in production and demand. (The speed with which China and others can build factories will make your eyes water.)
So it all comes down to your personal fortune. Are you willing to take the economic bet, and spend your billions on nuclear? Or would you rather someone else go down that road, and you make the safer financial choice?
economically from a capital point of view, the goal is to get a return. Not generate 24x7 power. And the economics of nuclear are terrible.
> solar rollout I'd happening at insane speeds already
It's kind of not. Solar still represents <4% of generation in the US:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427
The growth rate is high, but that's because the base is low. Moreover, it's barely replacing anything because demand is growing, and will grow even more as transportation and heating have to be electrified. So all the new solar is going to transportation, that's a good fit, but you still need something else to grow to satisfy heating demand, much less satisfy the existing load in the power grid currently being supplied by fossil fuels.
> If sodium-ion becomes a thing it'll explode in production and demand.
The if is the unknown. What if it doesn't, and then we're that many more years behind on building the known alternative that works?
> The speed with which China and others can build factories will make your eyes water.
If it's so fast then why hasn't it already happened? Why is only 4% of production from solar, instead of e.g. 40%? How far do we get on accelerating growth before it flattens out because the low-hanging fruit is picked and the remaining demand is a bad match for solar's generation profile?
> Are you willing to take the economic bet, and spend your billions on nuclear? Or would you rather someone else go down that road, and you make the safer financial choice?
There are plenty of people willing to invest in nuclear. The main problem is that other people (not least of which Russia, who has been caught doing this) keep trying to stop them through anti-nuclear propaganda, lobbying and litigation.
> economically from a capital point of view, the goal is to get a return.
The goal is to stop burning coal.
> If it's so fast then why hasn't it already happened? Why is only 4% of production from solar, instead of e.g. 40%?
Basically because economic growth is exponential, and exponential growth starts slow. If a certain alga doubles its population every day and takes 30 days to cover a certain lake, how long does it take to cover half the lake?
29 days. On what day does it cover 4% of the lake?
Day 25.
Until about 8 years ago, solar was too expensive in most countries to compete with fossil fuels without subsidies, and then there was a period of four years when the Chinese cartel announced in https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-i... fixed prices to keep them artificially high, as you can see on https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis.... Since that cartel evidently collapsed in late 02022, the cost of "mainstream" solar panels in the Preisindex has gone from €0.34/Wp to €0.11/Wp, and the cost of "low cost" panels has dropped from €0.22/Wp to €0.065/Wp. This month, for the first time, the Preisindex is no longer rounding prices to the nearest €0.01/Wp.
A crucial question, then, is what the exponential growth rate is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics says that from 02016 to 02022 the growth rate was 26%. At that rate, growing from 4% to 100% would take 14 years; if 4% were now, that would mean producing more energy from solar than from all sources today in 02038.
That doesn't mean people will stop burning coal, of course. It just means it'll be a marginal activity.
> How far do we get on accelerating growth before it flattens out because the low-hanging fruit is picked and the remaining demand is a bad match for solar's generation profile?
That's another crucial question, and one that is very hard to predict, but most likely at a few orders of magnitude larger than current world marketed energy consumption.
Solar energy is cheap enough to be applied to many applications for which previous energy sources were too expensive. €0.065/Wp at a capacity factor of 20% is €0.33/W; financed forever at an interest rate of 5%/year that would be €0.016/W year. A watt year is 8.77 kilowatt hours, so that works out to be €0.0018 per kilowatt hour, or €0.51/GJ. This is 200× lower than what people in California are paying today. This is a rough estimate. You can figure in the panels' nominal 20-year lifetime to get a more precise figure, though the "low cost" category generally comes with no such warranty. Also, utility companies can usually get a better interest rate than 5%. But it's in the ballpark.
For many purposes, this works out to basically unlimited energy as long as you only need it when the sun is shining. Atmospheric carbon capture is a crucial one.
> What if [sodium-ion battery technology] doesn't [become a thing],
People will make do with lithium-ion and other forms of energy storage such as sensible heat energy storage, phase-change material energy storage, and TCES.
I'd add in that my solar panels aren't really all that valuable in themselves. They're bolted to my roof with little more than some bolts and nuts.
If I have a "Residential scale" nuclear plant in the basement, there are lots of people who would like to re-purpose my nuclear fuel in other ways. (And that's before we talk about how I purchase, and renew, that fuel to begin with.)
Ultimately even "small scale" nuclear comes with massive bureaucratic and security overheads that can't simply be wished away.
In closing I'll point out that my solar system _is_ nuclear. It uses fusion nuclear energy as it's fuel. But I've cunningly hidden the radioactive elements far far away....
It's a good line, but our sun is making nice clean helium out of hydrogen fusion, those nasty radioactive elements are associated with fission (of big unstable isotopes of uranium, plutonium, thorium etc.)
Yeah I know, but you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story. (And to be fair, all the heavy elements came from the sun (or other suns) to begin with :)
More seriously, solar is the closest we'll ever get to fusion power. Assuming we ever get the tech right, it'll simply be too expensive to roll out significant amounts of fusion production. It would require capital that will always give a better return elsewhere.
To put it another way, would you rather invest $100 billion in a fusion plant, that'll take 5 years to get permitted and 5 years to build, and require staffing by well trained expensive staff, or spend $10 billion on a solar farm in Africa selling electricity to the US at night which can be up and running in 2 years?
Would you be happy to commit your 100 billion today betting that when it comes online 10 to 15 years from now it'll make energy at prices comparable to the solar and storage tech available then?
Fusion may indeed be the future. But who's gonna spend the capital to find out?
The implicit assumption is that ginormous prototype/research reactors are the only possible way for fusion to work.
But if you fund the research, people come up with better lasers and magnets and things. Then you a) have better lasers and magnets and things, which are useful for more than just fusion in the same way that NASA inventions are useful for more than just space exploration; and b) allow the reactors to get smaller:
https://www.iflscience.com/baby-fusion-reactor-less-than-a-m...
I've absolutely no objection to building new things. I'm not against fusion as a "thing we can do". I hope the project in France is successful.
What I'm saying though is that the economics of fusion don't work. The temperature range, magnetic fields etc won't ever be 'cheap'.
Look, going to the moon wasn't economic, but it got us GPS and satellite TV which definitely are. Fusion may give us other unexpected benefits. But it'll never be the 'energy too cheap to meter' that was envisaged in the 1950s.
> What I'm saying though is that the economics of fusion don't work. The temperature range, magnetic fields etc won't ever be 'cheap'.
This feels like arguing that computers will never be cheap, because look how much it costs to build a 1970s mainframe. How could anybody ever afford to have that in their house?
Meanwhile it turns out that EUV lithography requires some fancy equipment but when you mass produce it, the result is that everybody has one in their pocket.
"Small scale" nuclear that people talk about is around 10MW. It would power a handful of neighborhoods if the consumption wasn't concentrated in a short time. But can still power a dozen homes.
What is another problem of nuclear. It's more dependent on storage or alternative generation than solar.
Whether it's 10mw or 1gw, the fuel problems remain. Procuring, securing and disposing of waste gets harder, not easier, with the number of reactors, not their size.
Weapons proliferation is definitely a strike against nuclear. A few other strikes:
What, you mean you can't go and buy plutonium at any corner store?
> nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change
You’re seeing the same nonsense with armchair solar + battery advocates today. The mistake is in assuming marginal advantages persist across scale, i.e. in ignoring the law of diminishing returns.
If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t. If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t. Most markets optimise heterogenously because that’s what makes sense.
Solar and batteries are exploding in production, and prices are falling (not increasing.) I mean, sure, there's a point of diminishing returns, but even at last year's prices I'm getting a 17.5% return on investment. Every year that goes by the investment gets cheaper, and the price of electricity goes up, so the savings just get better and better.
And this for a capital spend on equipment with no moving parts, no lubricants, no maintenance schedule (apart from a window-washer a couple times a year.)
It's a no brainer if you live anywhere the sun shines well - and LOTS of people have figured this out, so the amounts being installed are moving the needle.
> Solar and batteries are exploding in production, and prices are falling
Sure. Now look at the baseline. We’d need to 10x the growth rate for the numbers to rival the expected growth in power demand. The folks at the tech majors aren’t idiots. If they could buy this cheapest power at scale, they would. Everybody would. One can’t. The panels are easy, but the batteries are back ordered and getting the land and permitting takes years.
I’m in Wyoming. I have seen people spend more time and paperwork getting a wind farm and HVDC line up than an experimental (totally non-economic) nuclear reactor. That doesn’t apply if you’re putting up one windmill to power your off-grid house. But the economics present at that scale diminish when you’re building a fleet of data centre.
In the US, power growth rate is about 1% per annum or about 40GW. AI&crypto is doubling that number to about 2% per annum.
The US is installing solar at a rate of about 40GW per year so we need to 2X it, not 10X it.
China is installing it at a rate of about 10GW per month, so capacity is certainly not the constraint.
> US is installing solar at a rate of about 40GW per year so we need to 2X it, not 10X it
2x means no carbon reduction. 3x means we can close coal by 2040 and decarbonise by 2082 [1]. And “panels are easy.” (We’re not 2 or even 3x’ing deployment inside a decade [2].)
Now look at batteries. Assume we ban EVs and send 100% of production to utilities. 10x.
Solar + wind with batteries only means we burn natural gas. It’s based on the same faulty logic as the failed nuclear-only strategies of yesteryear. It’s what we’re doing right now, which is why we’re installing about 10 GWh a year of natural gas over the 40% it already commands and why trillions are being invested in new natural gas infrastructure [3].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Un...
[2] https://seia.org/research-resources/us-solar-market-insight/
[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
> Solar + wind with batteries only means we burn natural gas.
For a while. And much less gas than without the renewables.
A lot of that load increase you are observing is about the change from fossil-fuel cars into electric ones. That one will stop eventually, and you don't want to delay it anyway.
> much less gas than without the renewables
Yes? The point is that we are currently committing ourselves to a fossil fuel energy system through at least the 2080s by not building all the non-emmitting power we can. Those investments not only put down emitting capital equipment, they capitalize a bloc of producers who will do what they must to protect their investment.
> that load increase you are observing is about the change from fossil-fuel cars into electric ones. That one will stop eventually, and you don't want to delay it anyway
No, it's AI. EVs are rolling out much more slowly.
What do you mean by 10x a growth rate? If it's at a CAGR of 15%, you think it needs to be 150%?
If so, I don't think you have the right numbers. We are on track to completely replace all current energy (not electricity, but final usable energy) uses with renewable electricity within 15 years at current growth rates.
Even the most rabid estimates of energy use growth rate are not more than a doubling of total energy services in that time period. And with the growth rate of renewables, we'd be able to adapt to that.
It is true that there is less paperwork for a new natural gas turbine than for most renewable energy, but you also have to get that pipeline of gas built too (which, again, has less paperwork than electric transmission, but you actually still have to do it). Other non-renewable energy isn't going to deploy any faster than renewable energy.
plus with every advancement in cost and efficiency the amount of sun needed reduces. If you're a bit more north you might just need a couple extra panels compared to really sunny places. Even if it's just to offset instead of completely replace other fuels
The viability of solar panels in the north depends on eye watering grid prices, which isn't the case everywhere or all of the year. Whenever it occurs it is generally during winter time when a roof worth of panels provides a mere trickle of energy.
I considered some small-medium batteries and panels but the calculation came out massively in favor of putting the same bundle of cash into a financial investment portfolio instead.
I'm 100% with you here (see my comment above about fusion economics.)
But solar doesn't have to be local. Upgrading the grid to move large volumes of electricity from mid to high latitudes changes your equation somewhat.
> If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t.
If we are talking about the US, the reason we couldn't deploy nuclear was that we vastly over-ordered the amount of reactors we needed, going into the 1980s, causing a glut then a drought. And then too many of them were financially disastrous construction projects. Some people say that we had too many different reactor designs, but I would point to France where they used the same reactor design but also did not see falling prices, and did not build nearly as many reactors as they had planned.
Certainly France has been much better off in terms of carbon emissions from electricity since the 1980s than most places in the world, but they were also going nuclear due to lack of cheap fossil fuels.
> If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying we aren't going all in on solar and storage, but I would argue that we are. Nearly all new generation capacity getting installed is solar, storage, and wind. THere's a few legacy projects for other technologies, but those natural gas plants will see little use, unless solar/storage/batteries are blocked from being deployed in the same area. EIA: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62864
This is happening in China too. They build coal plants, but they barely use them as they are just backups. Last I heard they are on track for 160GW of solar deployed this year alone, and it goes up every year.
So maybe put me into the bucket of people spouting nonsense about solar + batteries today, I could be wrong, but I really think it's the only tech stack that can and will make a big change in energy over the next 10 years.
> Certainly France has been much better off in terms of carbon emissions from electricity since the 1980s than most places in the world, but they were also going nuclear due to lack of cheap fossil fuels.
That's the point: 2024's solar is better than 1980's nuclear, but in the meantime we've pumped a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere we didn't have to.
It's difficult to see the relevance of your point. Are you saying we should build nuclear now because we didn't then? That would make no sense. This isn't some sort of arena where we have to be fair to inanimate objects.
> difficult to see the relevance of your point. Are you saying we should build nuclear now because we didn't then
The same statement will be true in twenty years. We’re not building gas generators because they’re pretty.
We have power demand growth well ahead of our solar and wind deployment potential, even assuming the rosiest production growth forecasts for the next ten years. That gap is being filled with natural gas, based on infrastructure with 20 to 40-year financing timelines. Not building a nuclear plant today means more gas generators burning through the 2060s. (I’m assuming we build and deploy solar and wind as quickly as possible, too.)
> We have power demand growth well ahead of our solar and wind deployment potential
Justify that statement, please. What is preventing us from installing that much wind and solar?
If anything, nuclear's deployment potential is much more limited.
> Are you saying we should build nuclear now because we didn't then?
No, that would be a large comprehension error. I'm making the point because people seem to use what solar and wind can finally do now to justify us not having built nuclear 40 years ago.
I haven't seen anyone do that.
Except if we had wanted to be green energy in the 1980s, we would have given Carter a second term which means we would have had investment in Solar panels too. We would have likely seen a similar level of massive decrease in cost (not as big though, no chinese manufacturing) to make it pretty competitive.
But America didn't want to do the hard work of spending a hundred billion dollars on infrastructure and investment to our country. We wanted the cocaine fueled orgy of capitalism that Reagan promised us. So we ripped the solar panels off of the whitehouse and shared a bed with Saudi Arabia. Now gas is cheap as chips so we can just burn as much as we want!
>I would counter that nuclear does not scale in that it can't get small
Nuclear can't get small because of social and political reasons, not technical or economics reasons.
If you could put a small nuclear reactor in your backyard and it was assured to be safe, would you?
It's also due to technical and economic reasons. Tiny reactors require highly enriched fuel and have worse neutron economy and thermal efficiency. You can't use the same low-enriched fuel in a tiny reactor that you can in a typical (hundreds of megawatts or larger) commercial power reactor.
In a big commercial power reactor, fuel costs are tiny relative to the total system costs. If you used a tiny reactor like the Kilopower [1] to power a single home, the cost of the highly enriched fuel alone (upward of $50,000 per kilogram, 28 kg in a unit) would be orders of magnitude more expensive than grid-supplied electricity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilopower
I've never heard that before. I don't think politics would stop a fleet of small 50-100MW replacing a 1GW reactor, and that's certainly not the opposition to SMRs now.
It's actually both economic and technical: the technical side makes smaller reactors less economic in terms of efficiency. Thermal generation benefits massively from being really really big.
Yes, especially if I could get heating(winter + hot water) out of the exchange loop.
At today’s prices, a Tesla Megapack is estimated to cost about $1 million for 3.9 MWh, or $1 billion for 3.9 GWh.
Based on that, my back-of-the-napkin math says the cost of charging and discharging the pack every day for 7+ years would be about $0.10/kWh.
That’s at today’s prices, but prices are still falling an average of 12-15% per year.
And I’m not convinced that even small-scale nuclear will be cost-competitive in the future, but time will tell.
I’d like to understand the economics of size in nuclear reactors better. It seems like there are almost irresistible forces pushing towards bigger reactors. I’m looking particularly at the newish Westinghouse designs. Back in the early 2000s, Westinghouse designed the AP600, 600 megawatts, and it was supposed to have a lot of modularity and factory construction. No one bought one though and so they came out with the AP1000, of which a number have been built. China has now extended the design to the CAP1400 and they’re working on a CAP1700, almost triple the original power.
> seems like there are almost irresistible forces pushing towards bigger reactors
Those advantages go down when you include construction and permitting time (billions of dollars) and transmission costs (billions more over the plant’s lifetime).
On SMRs: we don’t know their economics because they don’t practically exist yet. Certainly not in a mass-manufactured flavour.
SMRs still require construction, not just manufacturing. NuScale's abortive effort required 1/3rd more labor hours to build per MW than conventional large reactors. You can't pour large concrete structures in a factory.
Sorry, but the “nuclear is too expensive “ argument doesn’t hold up, considering cheap, modern reactors are being built as we speak in countries without a strong political resistance(EU, US).
Take the UAE for example, who are experts at large scale energy projects, they have constructed and commissioned 4 nuclear reactors, on time, on budget. To say that it’s not possible, is not true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
Full disclosure, I work in the energy sector, world wide, including the UAE.
I am also a proponent of solar. Cheap energy replaces the need for manpower.
Take the UAE for example, who are experts at large scale energy projects, they have constructed and commissioned 4 nuclear reactors, on time, on budget.
Your own link says that the first reactor was originally scheduled to start supplying electricity in 2017 but actually entered operation in 2020. It also says "As of 22 March 2018, the project's total cost was refined to $24.4 billion to complete. However, by April 9, 2020, Power Technology reported that the project cost was $32 billion."
3 years late and 30% over budget is OK by nuclear project standards, considering much greater delays and budget blowouts in recent US/EU projects. But it's not on time and on budget.
Ok, still, the plant now provides a substantial amount of energy to the region.
I suspect the pandemic might have provided a cause for the delay. I was myself involved in a large energy project in the UAE and remember the challenges caused by the lockdowns happening.
But probably with a 30% over budget bill, that is only partially an explanation.
Additionally, the UAE is big users of solar, also having been early adopters of the technology.
And like solar, you can build nuclear in small and large scale plants.
But my favourite contender for future, base energy source is fusion power,
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/31/1106384/inside-a...
It's a huge power plant. 5.6 giga watts. And they did ok with tineline and budget.
It did take 12 years of construction, and 32 billion in funding. And they project would have been in development long before construction started.
All in a regulatory environment which priorities "getting stuff done" and where there's plenty of capital to invest. (And investors who play a very long game.)
There might be conditions somewhere that are more favorable, but its not the US.
could it be done? Obviously yes. Will it be done in the US? Not a chance.
I think a few hundred purpose-built nuclear powered CO2 scrubbing plants could be an option. At 1,500 kWh/ton, a 1 GW nuclear plant could capture 5.8 million tons of CO₂ per year which is about 0.015% of global emissions. It would have to be coupled with emissions reductions and so on though.
Is there some advantage to powering this with nuclear rather than other cheaper energy sources? Using waste heat for desorption of amine scrubbers, perhaps?
Or hear me out use the 100 GW of clean energy so that you don’t have to use 100 GW of dirty energy
In general we need to get smart and get good at bringing critical resources (energy, food/water production) reasonably local.
Climate, political, and economic disasters seem more frequent each decade, and it would be a shame to starve or melt/freeze ourselves just because our delivery systems failed us.
And as a Texan, it blows my mind that so many people reject local solar options. When the grid is having rolling blackouts, wouldn’t it be nice to still have power?
People tend to align their thoughts with what pays the mortgage.
Texas has a dominant ruling structure dominated by religious fanatics and resource extraction for now. Alot of the extremist nonsense is driven by the sense that demographics will drive power shifts, so cashing in is key. At some point, the “freedom” argument will flip — what is more in alignment with the cowboy myth than self-reliance where your rooftop or land provides?
Define "reasonably local" though, because Texas running on its own grid has been bad for almost all Texans (I'm sure a select few are benefiting greatly from it). Most places have reasonably locally resourced schools, but then again, the schools that cover people in the lower socio-economic classes just happen to be worse off. This tends to be the case for many locally distributed resources. Now, going even more local, at an individual house level, I wouldn't want to rely on a local handyman to fix my solar issues or have to do it myself. Home ownership is complex & expensive enough, and when there's an issue, a handyman is sometimes tough to get.
It's perfectly reasonable to think local in terms of redundancy, but the primary way of delivering power should be concern of as many people as possible. It's like having an insurance plan with a lot of members. Distributing the costs and risks across as many people as possible helps keep things cheaper and mitigates risk. No one is going to care if only your power is out, but when there are a lot more stakeholders, when the grid extends across city, county, state, even country lines, if there are issues, there's more pressure to get them fixed.
Texas running it's own grid isn't that bad because Texas is too small, it's mostly just bad because it's criminally underfunded and underregulated.
Texas can get away with this because only Texas has control. I addressed this. If they were hooked up through other states, there would be more external pressure to address these issues.
Agreed in general, but the question is what we give up in going to a more-resilient system. In particular, lots of things are the way they are because of cost. Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local? I don’t think I would.
> Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local?
Just pointing out that many people, including myself, intentionally buy groceries from farmers' markets and local food co-ops very specifically because we want our food to be local. Others will spend even more time and labor on vegetable gardens for the same reason.
It is unfortunate that the way we offer food production subsidies in many countries primarily benefit large, multinational conglomerates instead of funding healthier, more resilient, and more environmentally friendly local options. It is terrible that only those with means can afford to purchase local foods in many markets, but yes, plenty of us who are able to do so choose to.
That’s nice, but if we all did that, the price would be 100 times
That's nice, but that's not how economics or farming work.
There are a lot of factors limiting local farms' ability to deliver at a cheaper price point, like corporate consolidation, land being converted into suburban sprawl, a lack of local value add and processing infrastructure, huge subsidies (and water resources) being wasted on commodity growers, an aging farmer population, etc.
Do you really think that if a head of cabbage was fetching $150 a pop at my grocery store that Earl who owns the farm across the street from me is going to stubbornly continue to grow commodity tobacco at a profit of $2000 an ACRE? (About 35 cents a plant.)
Right the way economics works is I’m going to get my cabbage from a totally different part of the world depending on what time of year I buy it. And yes, when it’s in season, it’s nice to go to the local market. If cabbage was $150 a pop your neighbors biggest concerned would probably be the dead bodies in the streets
That's a fair point, but let's frame that in a resiliency context, where the choice becomes:
* Cheap food most of the time, no food occasionally
* More expensive food most of the time, imported food occasionally
That decision is not one I'm particularly equipped to comment on.
The questions actually are, what happens when we deplete the Ogallala aquifer? What happens when climate change, conflict or natural disaster impacts the Colorado watershed, the Central Valley, and/or the go to market infrastructure for that produce?
We’ve created a system where investments and massive subsidy made to turn the desert into a garden destroyed agriculture nationally. It’s a predictable black swan scenario that has impactful and broad implications.
Are we talking about risk-adjusted cost doubling?
Most humans think in "next paycheck" terms not "risk-adjusted" terms, but at the same time, the Covid supply chain issues whacked people in the head with "this is a black swan" and "fragility" sticks.
On the flip side the biggest power plants in the world are the new massive solar installations, eg. Gonghe Talatan Solar Park.
It's fun to view these large solar plants on satellite view. Absolutely massive. https://www.google.com/maps/place/36%C2%B010'54.0%22N+100%C2... and with the nearby pumped hydro that is itself in the gigawatt range and growing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longyangxia_Dam ) removes the concerns of "how do you store the power!".
I'm not convinced small scale solar is the future when large integrated hydro+solar like this has such huge advantages.
I drove through a solar cluster in India this year. https://earth.google.com/web/@27.45264286,72.06288954,225.16... I couldn't fathom the scale when I looked at it later in Google Earth. It's a good use of the arid land where few things grow.
That's amazing - my first thought, after clicking your link, was that the satellite view was out of date, from before construction began: but no, I just needed to zoom out. And out. And out - still not all of it! - five clicks later, you can finally see that this solar park takes up as much space as a small city.
it's almost like zooming in on a fractal
Except that is the opposite of reality in the USA. The fraction of energy generated from small scale PV generation in the USA has decreased as total PV generation has increased [1].
10 years ago, in 2014, utility scale PV generation was 57%. Over those 10 years, utility scale PV generation increased by ~10x, where as small scale PV generation only increased by ~6.5x. In spite of absolutely massive incentives, small scale PV generation has grown slower in absolute and percentage terms in nearly every single year of the last decade.
Scale is the really important thing here. It is really easy and really cheap to use economies of scale to purchase square kilometers of panels and plop them down in bulk over vast swathes of regular land in a assembly line fashion.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_b.html
> absolutely massive incentives
At least where I live, solar is still roughly break even cost-wise with not installing solar over 20 years -- but it increases your home's complexity and makes updating your roof more complicated and expensive.
The math varies a lot by location. In the US the costs of gear and install are typically higher (twice as high as here.) It'll also obviously be a factor of electricity cost, sunny days, your residential consumption and so on.
Personally I get 17.5% return on capital spent (and ways to improve that further) so the math works out well. Ymmv.
Same here. I live where there’s ton of sun, but power is cheap and install is expensive and not subsidised. Dad lives in northern europe, power is 2x more and install is 2x and subsidised. In december he generates like 20kwh per month from 8kw array. Still already paid itself after few years.
Let's face it: electricity is dirt cheap in the US compared to other developed countries. If you have grid access you don't really benefit significantly from solar.
That both explains why it was adopted relatively early for private use cases as well as why it doesn't grow as much as commercial installations as equipment gets cheaper.
Competition is even more important than size. Only when there are a large number of suppliers at all processing stages will there be a boom in innovation. In China, this applies to both the PV industry and the wind industry.
In the case of PV, a large proportion of the primary products are traded via commodity exchanges. In the case of wind power, 12 manufacturers now offer systems larger than 16 MW.
The diesel generator will provide power at night however. Or for a week of cloudy winter days (assuming you have that much fuel).
perhaps we need to shift some of our habits to high sun hours where possible. Like run the washing machine and dishwasher at mid day. So you need less battery storage for the nights. And perhaps build houses that store thermal heat better so you can run the heater less aggressively in the evening.
Exactly. This is what the whole "iot" and "smart grid" were supposed to get us -- appliances and EVSEs that can be readied to start, and will then start themselves when the energy price is favorable.
We apparently have that for some EVSEs, but still not for my stupid dishwasher. (It uses electric heat to boost the water temperature, no matter how much I prime the hot water plumbing, and it's quite a pig energy-wise.)
Real energy has curves, and the sooner we embrace that, the better off we'll be.
Worse, my energy provider put me on a time-of-day rate that's _most_ expensive during peak sun hours, which seems backwards if they're supposed to be introducing more PV to the mix. I guess it's time to negotiate with the landlord and get some panels on the roof so I can start offsetting my own consumption at their so-called "peak" times.
In a lot of places, your local electric utility is nudging you towards Time-of-Use rates to encourage exactly this.
so we can save daylight? some sort of time where we save the light of day? Possibly by shift our clocks? I wonder what we'd call such an arrangement.
Saving 1.5kWh is not going to be impactful.
what about pocket nuclear reactors? when are we getting them?
Wind power has also become really cheap in China. Tenders are around 1100-1800 CNY/kW onshore and around 3000 CNY/kW offshore.
At the China Windpower 2024 trade fair held in October, 12 manufacturers presented wind turbines larger than 16MW, and 5 manufacturers are pushing into the 25MW range.
After wind and PV became cheaper than coal in China, subsidies for onshore wind and PV were largely canceled. Subsidies in the offshore sector serve to build up an export industry.
As a result, 2/3 of new PV and wind farms built worldwide are subsidy-free, most of them in China.
Meanwhile in Belgium, we have to spend (literal) billions on power cable projects so we can connect offshire windfarms to our grid.
I assume this is a typo but I did imagine a Belgian shire.
The problem in Europe with the construction of electricity grids is the lack of competition. An oligopoly of producers supply monopolies on the buyer side.
The price-driving monopoly/oligopoly problem also affects the US electricity market.
It depends where, in France we had only one state controled company that gave use the lowest prices in Europe and became an international leader in the domain, until under pressure from activists and Germany we introduced competition and cut EDF in small pieces. I would say that competition is good for energy only if you depend on importation.
monopsony = monopoly on the buyer side
How rapidly the economics of renewable energy are shifting
The very high experience rate of renewables is just as important as current low cost. It means anything trying to compete with them is facing a rapidly moving target, and has to aim at where renewables will be, not just where they are.
I think renewables also continuously lowering costs as they scale
So basically their point is a major driver of solar installations is that in low-wage countries with unreliable electricity grids solar is now by far the cheapest backup power. And once they have it they use it.
That certainly sounds reasonable. In developed countries installation and mounting costs are a significant cost driver for solar installations, but in the third world you can do that a lot cheaper, and beating a diesel generator on cost isn't hard
It's not expensive in all developed countries though... In the US, we pay $3/W for residential installation, but in Australia it's literally 1/10th the cost at $0.3/W.
The $3/W is a choice that we made in our political system, by 1) keeping highly fractured and inconsistent local permitting processes rather than a more efficient higher-level rule making, 2) letting utilities exercise control over the process such that they can minimize installations (why isn't your electricity bill going down even though electricity generation is getting cheaper with the new technology? Same reason: regulatory capture of your Public Utilities Commission).
> solar is now by far the cheapest backup power
If you're prepared to deal with it's unreliability (when the sun is not shining), then it's by far the cheapest power full stop. In countries with unreliable grids that looks a lot more attractive. Especially as in many of those countries it is reliably sunny.
Even the cost of battery storage is getting ridiculously cheap, too. Small off-grid installations, even in the US, can be had for $200/kWh capacity, with lifetimes > 3000 cycles. So lets say <$0.07/kWh for storing it. That's about the average cost of transmission & distribution for a kWh across the US.
The sun comes up every day. If it doesn’t we’ve got bigger problems.
Britain and Svalbard would like a word with you.
Sure above/below 66 degrees. That’s are edge cases.
I can assure you the sun comes up every day in Britain.
It comes up every day, but it also goes down every night. Of course you can solve this with storage, but then the solution is no longer the cheapest available energy source (yet).
I have solar panels and battery storage and have been very happy with them, but there are two aspects (in the area of the U.S. where I live) that made obtaining panels a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Around here, it's extremely common for homeowner associations to ban solar panels outright ("they're ugly", "nobody wants to look at that", etc.). Additionally, the local power utility has been granted the ability to limit how much solar capacity an individual homeowner can have. I would be more understanding of this second point but for the fact that very nearby, across a state line, solar capacity is not limited even though it's the same utility and the same power grid.
When looking for a home several years ago, we only had a couple of options because solar was a requirement for us, but we wouldn't be allowed to add solar at most of the properties that were on the market at the time. We ended up finding a place and adding solar, the largest array we were allowed by the utility. It's very beneficial and I'm still glad we did it, but with an electric car and all electric appliances, it's often not enough to supply our needs.
By allowing utilities to place such low capacity limits on solar generation, solar installation becomes less attractive, which I presume is what the utilities want and is the reason they lobby for such restrictions.
Getting rid of these outdated HOA rules and utility-imposed capacity limits (when there's no technical reason for them) are two things we'll need to overcome in order to make solar adoption more attractive and hopefully more affordable for everyone.
Why on earth would “governments need to regulate and subsidise” a solar boom that is already proceeding apace without them? The tail end of this article makes no sense…
Previous paragraph has more info:
> A world that mostly runs on solar power will also need something else—such as hydropower, nuclear, or geothermal—to generate energy when the sun isn’t shining in the evenings and winters. Jessika Trancik, an MIT professor who models clean-energy development, told me that governments need to steer investments toward storage and alternate forms of energy to compensate for that inherent downtime. That way, the world can have a reliable energy mix when 50 or 60 percent of electricity generation comes from solar and wind.
I'd expect that the solar subsidies mentioned by the last paragraph are for solar-adjacent technologies like energy storage, not the panels themselves.
Because the current deployment is already the result of subsidies and that it wouldn't have happened without?
Among other things it beats handing the treasury to oligarchs.
But is Janet Yellen still throwing a tantrum and telling anyone who will listen that China is building solar panels too efficiently? https://apnews.com/article/china-yellen-manufacturing-treasu...
In my view western economies are a ponzi scheme predicated on ever increasing cost of housing. Even a small erosion of the real economy has massive effects on the highly leveraged financial economy. This technology for cheaper goods already exists and I don’t think there is a way to stop it so my presumption is that eventually the real economy in the west will be undermined and the financialized economy will implode.
MW is power, not energy
> "In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts"
This is annoyingly common with journalists and also a very clear tell that they don't have any idea what they are writing about.
Maybe in a few years the writer will understand that it's tricky to store energy in a cost-efficient way and that energy isn't the same as power.
Or perhaps they won't.
Either way, in late 2024, this low level of understanding is pretty tiring.
The writer "has been the the recipient of a 2017 National Association of Science Writers reporting award for coverage of air pollution in Detroit, and a finalist for the 2019 Livingston Award for a series on water politics at the Texas-Mexico border. At The Atlantic, she covers climate change."
The writer's CV doesn't mention any education at all.
500 megawatts would be 4.4 terawatt hours per year. That's in the ballpark of what they actually did produce in 02019, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Africa. So the journalist seems to have actually been correct in this case, although it's a bit like saying "the distance covered by the runner was 12 miles per hour", when it would perhaps be more appropriate to say that that was the runner's speed rather than the runner's distance.
No-one claimed that any numbers were made up. Just that this was a very frequent and clear tell.
Sometimes energy storage devices are surprisingly reported in terms of power (the installation’s power output ends up being more relevant for whatever reason). For grid stability, being able to meet demand is more important than having days of energy, inaccessible, in reserve. So, surprising units isn’t a 100% bulletproof heuristic.
But in this case yeah, there seems to be a mix-up.
There's no mixup. Solar electric energy production in South Africa in 02019 did indeed average about 500 megajoules per second throughout the year, totaling about 16 petajoules; which is to say, it was about 500 megawatts, or, in cursed units, 4 terawatt-hours per year.
Separately, it's true that peak power is often a very important criterion for energy storage systems.
There is a mix up. It might be that the journalist is correctly summarizing the person they interviewed, but that person is wrong, or it might be that the journalist messed it up. But,
> In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts, Nana said
This is a very explicit phrasing “the total amount of energy produced” and the units don’t work out. You can figure out what they meant by doing additional research, but that doesn’t make it a non-error.
That's exactly the same as zelos's example of "the total amount of rope produced in 2019 was thought to be about 500 meters per second". It's a little bit odd, but it's a perfectly correct way to describe the total amount of rope produced in 02019†. Multiplying by the number of seconds in a year isn't additional research. In the same way, you can validly say "the total temperature rise of the teakettle over a minute was thought to be about 1.5° per second" or "the total GDP of South Africa in the early 02020s was thought to be about US$6400 per person per year".
There's nothing incorrect about any of these; it's mostly just a question of which units are the most convenient or unambiguous in a given context. And, I guess, which units your audience is accustomed to seeing; the SI unit for liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers would be square meters, but if you say your new car's gas mileage is 7.8 × 10⁻⁸ m², a lot of people will think you're using the wrong units, and they will surely have a hard time interpreting it.
______
† Well, except that in this case the "500" is almost certainly made up; I don't think zelos was looking up South African rope production statistics!
You are mixing things up. On the one side there's the verbiage. On the other hand there's the units. You are mixing these things up in an extremely verbose way and I don't care for for it. Please just stop trying to actively mislead us all.
But hey, you reached your goal, killing the velocity of my comment way up there.
You planted the seed of "doubt". Congrats.
Because of behavior like this: HN is not a great place for discussing anything to do with energy. Fanaticism generally rules. The loudest person wins. This is sad.
You seem to have copied and pasted your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41998629, where I responded to it.
Probably someone out there will be convinced by "the loudest person", but hopefully most people will instead be convinced by sound reasoning and evidence. That's my goal: understanding what is really true, rather than believing what you copy-paste the most times.
> Solar electric energy production in South Africa in 02019 did indeed average about 500 megajoules per second throughout the year,
Except that isn't what the article says:
"In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts"
500 megawatts is literally defined as 500 megajoules per second.
I'm sorry to say that I think you are muddying the waters. Competently, too. Kudos.
What, by giving the standard SI definitions of units so that people can see that the things you're saying are different are actually the same? You have a funny idea of what's muddy and what's clear.
You are mixing things up. On the one side there's the verbiage. On the other hand there's the units. You are mixing these things up in an extremely verbose way and I don't care for for it. Please just stop trying to actively mislead us all.
But hey, you reached your goal, killing the velocity of my comment way up there.
You planted the seed of "doubt".
I was explaining why the misconception you were repeating was wrong. (It turned out to be a popular one.) I suppose that since you still haven't figured out that it was wrong, that looks like "misleading" to you, but actually you are the one doing the misleading. It's good to doubt your beliefs; that way you can abandon the false ones. Try it.
I think it is pretty common for reasoning to require a fairly long explanation to become clear. Hopefully I've achieved that for most readers, even if you are still struggling. But if you object to this thread being "extremely verbose", why are you copying and pasting the same comment into it here and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41998632?
I still don't get it. Is it 500MW averaged over the _whole_ year including nights, or 500MWp?
The article explains that that number is "the total amount of energy produced" over the year, so it's averaged over the whole year including nights. The peak power is irrelevant to the total amount of energy produced except as an upper bound.
Power is king for commercial batteries. On whole sale energy markets you often see high prices in one 1/4 hour, and much lower prices 1 hour later. You can than nicely make an arbitrage profit if you completely cycle the battery. Also many such batteries have similar Max energy and power limits, e.g. 1.5MWh energy vs 1MW power.
.
Edit: noticed that HN user kragen has replaced the comment I replied to with a dot, for some reason. This doesn't seem civil to me.
You think it's clear tell that she knew what she was talking about when she wrote "the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts".
Similarly you think it's a clear tell that I don't know what I'm talking about when I say that this is an incorrect statement, and that this is a clear tell.
Yes, because, as I explained above, I checked Wikipedia, and that figure turns out to be correct to within at worst a factor of two. Power units such as megawatts measure the rate at which energy is produced, consumed, or otherwise converted, which is to say, the amount of energy used per unit of time. For example, per year. A watt is about 31.6 megajoules per year.
So there's nothing actually wrong with the reporter's statement, even though it would be more precise to say that the average power generated was thought to be around 500 megawatts.
To summarize:
The arithmetic number wasn't made up out of thin air. The unit (and arithmetic number) were wrong in the given context (energy).
I claim that the latter is a common tell of a lack of understanding.
You claim that I don't know what I'm talking about since the number wasn't made up.
No, I claim that you don't know what you're talking about because you think the units were wrong in the given context and that the arithmetic values were wrong, which they weren't.
"energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts"
You keep repeating that as if you think it's going to convince somebody, but, in fact, when you divide an amount of energy produced, such as 4 terawatt hours, by a length of time such as a year, you get a power, such as 500 megawatts, which does indeed tell you how much energy was produced over that length of time.
Had it said “500MW-years” it would have been accurate (well maybe, I don’t know). Weird as we normally use MW-hours for energy, but accurate.
They said “500MW”
Is that peak output? Nameplate capacity? 500MWh?
Who knows.
We normally use joules for energy, though sometimes people do unfortunately use cursed units such as foot-pounds, calories, BTUs, megawatt-hours, electron volts, and so on. My analogy of "the distance covered by the runner was 12 miles per hour" is quite precise here. Saying that we're talking about the total energy produced in 2019 clearly excludes your hypothetical interpretations of peak output or nameplate capacity, neither of which would tell you the energy produced in a year.
It's true that someone who didn't understand the area might say "500 megawatts" when they meant "500 megawatt-hours", but the reporter in this case didn't make that error, and anyway 500 megawatt-hours in a year would be 57 kilowatts, which is an implausibly small amount of solar power to be produced by an entire medium-income country. That's more like a single large commercial building.
Domestically people deal with kWh, not joules. That seems a far more useful unit to convey information
Domestically the most common unit of energy is calories in the countries I'm familiar with, but households also frequently measure energy in gallons of gasoline, liters of gasoline, British Thermal Units, "therms", cubic feet of gas, cubic meters of gas, kilowatt hours, cords of wood, bushels of corn, joules, and "tons", meaning tons of ice (often abused as a measure of power, the implicit denominator being "per day"). Additional common units of energy rarely used in households include barrels of oil, "megatons" (this time of TNT rather than ice), toes (ton of oil equivalents), quads (quadrillion BTU), foot-pounds, and, implicitly, horsepower seconds. The vulgar news media often use the "household-day", which is roughly as well defined as the "heap".
This is like the seventeenth century situation where cloth was sold by the "ell", but each kind of cloth was measured by a different ell. The Flemish ell was a different length from the English ell or the Scottish ell. This nonsense survives today in the custom current in the less advanced countries of weighing gold and silver in "troy ounces" and other commodities such as pepper in a different "ounce" that is about 10% smaller.
But the situation with energy is much worse, because transmuting electrical energy into gasoline, or vice versa, is enormously less inefficient than transmuting pepper into gold. Different forms of energy are far more often equivalent than different forms of mass.
The insight underlying the SI system of units is that calculations become much easier if you use a consistent set of units derived in a simple way from a minimal set of base units such as the kilogram and meter. How much kinetic energy is going to kill a 100-kg man falling from a building at 10 meters per second? Trivially, 50 kilojoules. How much energy does a 10-watt lightbulb consume in 5000 seconds? 50 kilojoules. If you are paying US$0.02 per megajoule for gasoline, US$0.01 per megajoule for natural gas, and US$0.04 per megajoule for electrical energy, what's the cheapest way to heat your house? Gas, unless your electric heat pump has a coefficient of performance over 4.
By contrast, if the different prices are expressed in different units, it adds difficulty to every kind of reasoning, to the point that there seems to be a popular misconception that megawatts are not even the right unit for measuring the solar energy production of a country.
Kilowatt hours are an especially silly unit. A watt is by definition a joule per second, so measuring energy in kilowatt hours is similar to measuring distance in mph-minutes. An mph-minute works out to be exactly 88 feet, and a kilowatt hour is exactly 3.6 megajoules. Just use megajoules! Stop making everything more difficult.
Apparently other people didn't think the pre-replacement comment was civil, so I've censored it.
That is not what happened.
What's your alternative hypothesis? I'm open to the possibility that I could be mistaken.
Seems like lysace was just trolling; thus their copy-and-paste comments elsewhere in the thread.
Power is energy per unit time. The statement is like saying "the total amount of rope produced in SA is 500 meters per second". Being generous, you'd assume that's (total production per year) / (seconds in a year), I guess.
Yes, I think that's a perfectly reasonable way to describe the amount of rope produced in South Africa. It uses the correct units and therefore contains no ambiguity. Saying instead that the total amount of rope produced in South Africa was 16 billion meters, leaving the "per year" implied, would, by contrast, be ambiguous and open to misinterpretation; equally plausible interpretations would be "in all of history" (the literal interpretation) or "per month". Unless, as in this case, the statement was qualified with a particular year-long time period, such as "in 2019", in which case "500 meters per second" or "16 billion meters" would be equally unambiguous ways of describing the situation.
"500 meters per second" is not just (total production per year) / (seconds in a year) but also (total production in a day) / (seconds in a day) and (total production in a month) / (seconds in a month).
Meters per second, like watts, has the advantage of being an SI unit and therefore facilitating calculations with other SI units without requiring a bunch of numerical conversion factors.
So the average power produced by those plants was 500MW.
That phrase is still nonsense. The fact that if you go, do your research, get the real numbers, and interpret them you can discover that what the journalist is trying to say is correct is meaningless. You can still cut the journalist out from the process and lose nothing.
Writers, and 99% of the people they write for, don't care about the difference between MW and MWh, bit and byte, or million and billion.
I kind of want a "science journalist" "specializing in the climate change field" to understand the difference.
Understanding the difference between power and energy is really the most crucial aspect you can imagine, here. Still they keep failing at this.
But in this case what was being discussed was the rate at which South Africa converted solar energy into electrical energy, which is a power, and the journalist correctly used units of power. Many journalists are indeed staggeringly incompetent, but in this case you are the one who is mistaken.
Agreed, it would be great if everything could always be technically accurate, but like fetch, it is never going to happen. It is wrong basically everywhere. Which is understandable as common vernacular readily interchanges energy and power.
It might not be complete nonsense.
If you map energy -> power the paragraph actually says something sensible.
It could have been worse: if they'd said something like "500 megawatts per week" it would be completely unclear what they even mean. Should you map it to megawatt-hours / week (around 3 MW), because that's a common (kind of goofy) unit to work in? Or does it mean they use (on average) 500 MW?
I admire your creativity/positivity!
And MW wasn't even the unit used in the source, the SAPVIA Solar PV Dashboard[1], which shows Megawatt Peak. MWp is a unit that refers to the theoretical maximum power output of a solar PV system (e.g. under ideal conditions.)
These data accord with the article's thesis, but it doesn't inspire confidence that units were conflated. They're not the same thing as megawatts, they don't measure energy, etc.
[1] https://sapvia.co.za/dataportal/dataportal-public
>MW is power, not energy
i think a more useful correction for people whose day to day lives don't require them to keep track of the difference is
MW is rate of energy use with respect to time, not total energy. The rate of energy in science is called "power"
because they both are measures of energy, and the energy/power distinction in science co-opted preexisting words that didn't have those precise meanings. Total energy is the integral of power over time, so it's not really wrong to say "this higher energy battery contains more power" in everyday speech.
Solar where I live is very scammy. Salespeople who sell you the world and then your panels don't deliver, and the company is impossible to contact (or gone) [0]
Then there is the issue that there is no battery mandate, which to me is insane.
In sunny, warmer states we have an oversupply of energy during the day, and then when the sun sets we have a shortage as everybody comes home, and their AC needs to work harder, and people start cooking with electricity.
So basically when you put on panels without a battery you're making it harder for everybody. You're using the grid as a battery.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/08/14/1244330369/solar-rooftop-pane...
The more solar surplus we create, the more incentive there is to build battery storage. You can see it happening in California, where storage has grown massively year over year, to the point where it's now displacing natural gas peaker plants as a primary source of meeting after-sunset evening energy demand.
I thought utilities were starting to install battery farms these days? If the technology is there, I'd much rather the utility own, operate, maintain them. In most residences, I see a big battery strapped to a house as something of a liability.
with all that output during the day, we might be able to revisit less "efficient" uses of energy like desalination plants that only make sense during the hours when energy is "free" because of overabundance.
The grid is a battery. That's one of the benefits of going solar. It's not making anything harder for anyone.
Can you elaborate what you mean by that? The grid is a battery on a scale of one household connecting to this infinite supply or infinite sink of electricity, but on a wider scale (and physical world as opposed to accounting) , you generate energy during the day and someone else needs to generate it at night, so it's in no way a battery.
some politicians: "lets ruin this with some tariffs"!
- "Won't somebody please think of the oligarchy?"
Unfortunately due to tariffs, p.v. systems for private people are still not cheap at all compared to other countries... Tariffs to protect... Nothing, because we produce essentially nothing, just some inverters.
Paywall-free archive link: https://archive.is/K0q90
If we’re talking “world,” global coal usage is predicted to increase, much of it in China and India, before declining later. Apparently with electricity usage going up, there’s more of every kind of power generation?
https://tildes.net/~enviro/1jqy/coal_is_powering_the_energy_...
Also, cheap solar seems to be running into something like Amdahl’s law, where the solar panel cost is a small part of total cost. Hard to say what the trend will be for non-panel costs. How cheaply can they be installed and maintained?
Panel cost? The floor is the limit. [1] Installation cost? Depends on local labor wages but the skill is easy to learn. I'd recommend to DIY a couple 500 Wh panels just as an experiment.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
That site is kinda bad. They show the same number for '21/'22 and don't have any data for '23/'24
Yeah i'd be nice to have the other two datapoints.
Production cost per PV watt was around 15 cents at the end of 2023 [1]. Some claim that by the end of 2024 this figure will reach 10 cents per watt. [2]
[1]. https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-solar-panel-costs-plunge....
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/23/solar-module-prices-m....
Solar is transforming energy landscapes worldwide
One of the things that I'm optimistic about is the way solar and wind have become so cheap that they're being installed on their own merits. You will find no shortage of people online bemoaning the woke energy that is going to ruin the economy, but their complaints can't stop people from installing more and more renewable energy every year. Even in places like Texas where the oil and gas industry is practically a religion.
Ironically the only place that has seen effective pushback is California, where the legislature structured the system such that solar installs are basically just a gift to their corrupt energy companies.
I've never once seen solar being called "woke energy", is that a thing?
Either way, everyone's realigning now that Elon is MAGA, solar and EVs are out, they're MAGA now. Now it's all about degrowth and going back to our roots, there is no energy that is clean now.
You probably don't hang out on too many right wing communities. This is good for your mental health, but it does mean you miss out on big trends that 40% of the population ends up getting behind.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/01/bidens-woke-green-energy-makes...
I admit the phrase "woke energy" isn't commonly used, but the sentiment is there. If you think backing Elon would lead to cognitive dissonance you have to remember that you can avoid the issue entirely by just not thinking about it.
degrowth is trendy and fashionable online in certain communities, but from what I've seen the vast majority of democrats don't agree with it, if they've even heard of it. Most of the democrats I know are big fans of solar, and would be derided online as "neoliberal" or "centrist".
I've never met a degrowth advocate in real life. I think it's one of those communities that only exists online because the proponents are too geographically scattered to form local communities.
It has taken root in Germany and EU as a whole. Why do you think they shut down their nuclear power plants while in an energy crisis?
I thought that was a gift to Putin? Shut down the nuclear to insure they need a steady supply of Russian natural gas. Oligarch solidarity.
De-escalate by shutting down your own industry!
The bemoaning of woke politics has some merit in California where they are shutting down power plants and just hoping that renewables take hold. It seems like they are trying to manufacture a crisis. Whether that's true or not, I'm not taking a side, just explaining that there are valid criticisms beyond's just hating on it because the energy is "clean".
It is too bad that Biden is not letting Americans benefit from cheap solar panels and electric cars¹
¹ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
It's harder to believe in free markets when you're not the one selling.
A solar punk utopia is near.
Achieving the first 20% of solar in an energy mix is relatively easy. Beyond that costs increase 3-5 times per energy unit mainly due to storage.
Can you elaborate a bit here? Neglecting _detailed_ info about storage conversion costs, etc, it's tough to understand the "all-in" cost for storage over time.
At home, I'm fanatical about using bog-standard AA/AAA rechargeable batteries for as many things as possible (anything with a micro-USB charger is basically "e-waste waiting to happen"), and thinking through any kind of home-supplement for solar, batteries, etc. makes me think that the "waste" of house-scale / grid-scale batteries for storage makes the math not work out.
Rough googling puts ~30kWh batteries at ~$15-30k, which: even if you think of it as having a 30-year service life, still works out to ~$50-100/mo in just battery depreciation.
Similarly with cars (eg: PHEV). First 5 years? Great! Next 10 years? ...a ticking time bomb of "must be replaced" with the battery representing an exorbitant percentage of the vehicle value. $500 of tires on a $5000 car is one thing, but a $5000 battery on a car seems like a net negative environmentally and financially?
Solar PV operates 10-30% of the time (depending on location). Without storage, this naturally limits direct solar contribution to about 20% of energy demand. Going beyond requires expensive storage solutions.
Your argument mixes "easy" and "cheap". Storage can be "easy" and you have plenty of choice: batteries, pumped, thermal, chemical, name it. If you have a large enough east-west country (hint), you might also invest in transport infrastructure to move energy where it is required so you don't have to store as much. This is also "easy", maybe moreso than storage because we've been doing it for so long. As to whether these easy things are cost effective when compared to other solutions is a completely different issue.
none of those storage solutions are easy for grid scale. For batteries you need whole factories, pumped requires permits and tone of cement, chemical is like hydrogen with low efficiency. All of those are expensive which for government is synonymous with difficult.
Being expensive is the _easiest_ thing for most governments. It's often a requirement! i.e. As a contractor, bid too cheaply and you will not be taken seriously.
This doesn't apply to energy grid scale projects. Also that is why energy sector in most countries is privatized. Take Germany with total energy costs that would be like ~10% of the federal budget (about 40 billion euros). Making energy even more expensive would only lead to further deindustrialization and lower gdp making it politically non viable. Also, you can't just throw money and buy storage like with typical government contracts - it requires building entire new industries (like Germany's struggles with hydrogen infrastructure).
Depending on your energy mix, you can go much further than 20% solar before needing storage. What's actually necessary is not storage, but generation which can ramp down and ramp up fast enough to compensate for the predictable daily ramps of solar generation (on top of the daily power use ramps). AFAIK, hydroelectric is one of the fastest (so much that pumped hydroelectric power plants can be used as storage), while coal and nuclear are among the slowest.
pumped hydroelectric is storage; right now it is like 99% of world storage capacity.
Since intermittent solar by itself is 10% the cost of alternatives, a 3-5X increase in price for solar+storage is still a fabulous deal.
For cooling (datacenters and other) you can chill water when the sun is out. And mostly passively cool the heated water when the sun is down if water is scarce. Plumbing and insulation for cooling reservoirs probably degrades a lot slower than batteries. I'm not sure about chiller plant wear and tear vs battery degradation
The opposite works for heating as well: heating up sand during the day for use at night.