It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
It’s a poor solution for what people like to call “baseline power”.
The argument goes: solar and wind don’t provide consistent power, so there has to be some power generation that doesn’t fluctuate so we always have X amount of power to make up for when solar/wind don’t suffice. Nuclear is consistent and high-output, so it’s perfect for this.
Unfortunately, reality is a little different. First problem is that solar/wind at scale don’t fluctuate as much. The sun always shines somewhere, and the wind always blows somewhere. You have to aggregate a large area together, but that already exists with the European energy market.
Second issue is that solar/wind at scale regularly (or will regularly) produce more than 100% of the demand. This gives you two options: either spend the excess energy, or stop generating so much of it. Spending the excess requires negative energy prices so people will use it, causing profitability issues for large power plants. As nuclear is one of the most expensive sources of energy, this requires hefty subsidies which need to be paid for by taxpayers. The alternative is shutting the power plant down, but nuclear plants in particular aren’t able to quickly shut off and on on demand. And as long as they’re not turned on they’re losing money, again requiring hefty subsidies. You could try turning off renewable power generation, but that just causes energy prices to rise due to a forced market intervention. Basically, unless your baseline power generator is able to switch off and on easily and can economically survive a bit of downtime, it’s not very viable.
Nuclear is safe. It produces a lot of power, the waste problem is perfectly manageable and the tech has that cool-factor. But with the rapid rise of solar and wind, which are becoming cheaper every day, it’s economic viability is under strong pressure. It just costs too much, and all that money could have been spent investing into clean and above all cheap energy instead. I used to be pro-nuclear, but after seeing the actual cost calculations for these things I think it’s not worth doing at the moment.
As for what I think a good baseline power source would be: I think we have to settle for (bio-)gas. It’s super quick to turn off and on and still fairly cheap. And certainly not as polluting as coal. We keep the gas generators open until we have enough solar/wind/battery/hydrogen going, as backup. If nuclear gets some kind of breakthrough that allows them to be cheaper then great! Until then we should use the better solutions we have available right now (and no, SMRs are not the breakthrough you might think it is. They’re still massively more expensive than the alternatives and so far have not really managed to reduce either costs or buils times by any significant margin).
Maybe fusion in the future manages to be economically viable. Fingers crossed!
What’s your opinion on smaller scale power plants? It seems like a decent way to cut the costs and still get that extra power in those seasonal low power periods. Or do you think it’s not worth pursuing at all?
I’m in the US which is quite large. I’ve always thought small scale power plants in conjunction with solar and wind would be good.
Especially since a lot of states turn the land surrounding the power plant into wildlife sanctuaries since nothing can be built in the safety zone anyway.
It’s like bird watching heaven at the power plant near me. I guess I just really like the idea of a power source that also incidentally protects forested areas.
In Finland they’ve been developing small scale reactors about the size of a shipping container but they’re not intented to produce electricity but instead just heat water and then push it into the district heating grid. This way the powerplant would also be much simplier to produce and maintain as well as safer due to the lower pressures and temperatures it operates at. Basically a nuclear powered kettle.
That really fucking cool! Whoever came up with that application for nuclear power is a genius.
SMRs (or small-scale nuclear plants in general) solve some problems with nuclear power. If you were to build a single design very often, the principles of economies at scale would apply and drive down costs.
I like the theory. But in practice there’s a couple problems that so far I’ve not seen addressed very often. First is the issue that not all costs of building a nuclear power plant can be brought down by simply having more of them. Particularly infrastructure costs can rise significantly, because instead of building one large plant with a connection to the grid, necessary buildings for operational control, infrastructure for the coolant water, roads, security etc… you have to build several instead, which multiplies the costs of these.
Then there’s the issue of personnel. You need people to operate and maintain the plant, security, management, etc… Per reactor you may need less people, but because you have so many reactors you end up needing more people overall. Most countries have a hard enough time as it is to get enough qualified staff, you’d also need to heavily invest in education for the next generation of nuclear engineers.
You also have these container-sized reactor concepts that basically promise to run themselves, requiring almost no maintenance other than the occasional refueling. But those are very much still in the concept-stage and also need to address the security issue. An unmanned container with nuclear fuel and expensive equipment inside could very well make a worthwhile target for criminals.
I like the utopian vision that nuclear promises but I worry the path to get there is full of pitfalls. I also don’t see the cost of nuclear coming down any time soon, and if we want to remain competitive in manufacturing for example, cheap energy is absolutely key.
Personally, I prefer investments in renewables and battery tech. Particularly battery tech I’m hopeful about. In theory there’s so much to gain still on that front, and it has the potential to improve so much other technology, from phones to drones to pacemakers to reliable, decentralised power. Nuclear tech is cool, but it only really promises to result in more nuclear power, rather than improvements in other areas as well. Fusion is interesting (and almost worth investing in just for the cool “it can be done”-factor) but at the same time still so far away. Too risky to rely on for now.
Haha, I can see why that makes you more inclined to support nuclear! Though it does make me a little sad that in order to protect our forests and wildlife we first need to build a nuclear reactor next to it. Can’t we just designate them wildlife sanctuaries regardless of that power plant being there or not?
That was a wonderfully in depth explanation! Thank you! I have a lot to think about(in a good way)
I also wish we could have more wildlife sanctuaries without the power plants basically forcing them into existence, but I guess I’m at the point where I’ll take what we can get. However, I shouldn’t forget that we can do better too.
Hopefully we as a species can figure out our energy problems globally… and work together on it instead of fighting each other over which one is best.
Thank you again for your really informative answer! I really appreciate it!!
Hey thanks! I certainly don’t claim to know everything here, but I mostly dislike how the discourse regarding clean energy, nuclear etc… has… devolved so much. You always hear the same fairly boring catchphrases, arguments and rebuttals, but there’s genuine issues and questions that need all of us to come together and find the answers to. It’s developed its own little “politics” almost.
I hope we can breathe some new life into the discussions, as it’s a super-interesting problem to think about and I certainly hope we as a species find a solution.
The sun always shines somewhere and wind always blows somewhere. Now we just have to install x-times the global energy demand in production capacity and also the infrastructure to distribute it around the world and also make sure that this hyper centralized system is not used against us and then already we have a perfect solution without nuclear. Ez pz, no more CO2 in 500 years.
You don’t need to install X-amount of global demand. Battery/hydrogen storage can solve the issue as has been demonstrated repeatedly in various research. And with home battery solutions you can even fully decentralise it.
I don’t understand your centralisation argument, nuclear is about the most centralised power source there is. And it can be threatened, as seen in the current Ukraine-Russia war.
Solar and wind can scale up to the demand. Nuclear actually has a much harder time doing that, as materials are far more rare and expensive, and it takes much longer to build. If anything, the time argument works against nuclear, not in favour of it.
Hydrogen storage, you have got to be kidding me. It is abysmally inefficient and the same kind of FUD spread by the fossile industry.
Batteries are so extremely expensive that also has to be a joke. How much does a battery for a single day cost? Say, relative to the GDP?
Nuclear is far more local than solar and wind transfer in-between continents, obviously.
Batteries are becoming less expensive every day. The market doubles almost every year, which is impressively high-paced.
You also don’t need battery storage to last a day. Most places only need approx. 6 hours, with particularly sunny countries being able to get away with having only 4 hours.
You maybe also be confusing local generation with centralised power generation. Nuclear is local, but also extremely centralised. Solar/wind transfer is very decentralised, same goes for battery storage.
Hydrogen is in its infancy. The tech is promising but whether or not it will prove its worth is still to be seen.
There are about 2 weeks without sun and wind in the whole EU every once in a while (don’t remember, like every 3 years?). How are 6 hours supposed to help? How much would these only 6 hours of storage capacity cost (pick some country, perhaps not Norway or Iceland).
I doubt that’s true. Especially no sun sounds highly dubious, I don’t think the Earth stops spinning every now and then. Oh, and do note that solar panels are still producing even in cloudy conditions.
There’s no period during which renewables stop producing. “6 hours” refers to the capacity if renewables stopped producing entirely, but in reality this never happens. At worst efficiency drops far enough to dip below demand, at which point the storage would have to kick in to make up the difference.
Building that much storage still costs a lot of money. I haven’t seen many cost estimates actually, probably because the market is developing at a very quick pace at the moment, driving costs down. A decent home battery solution costs 4000-10000 euros per household, but doing it at a larger scale may be cheaper.
Why would you even say something so stupid? I highly doubt that you are interested in a discussion.
But just in case, it is called “Dunkelflaute”. And no, we do not constantly produce so much more energy that losing a lot of capacity makes us “dip below demand”. We constantly only produce as much as we need. But why even discuss this here? People spend their whole career figuring this out, it is obviously not as simple as you make it out to be. Here a report from the EU. Just to show the scale of the project:
Please keep it civil. You provided very little context in your original argument, which made it very hard to give you a meaningful response.
Your link regarding Dunkelflaute helps to provide context, thanks for that. I had not heard of this phenomenon before. The research paper in the citations does mention that while it occurs somewhat regularly for an area e.g. the size of a country, it rarely happens simultaneously for say the EU-11 mentioned (most of northern Europe). The page also mentions importing power during these periods from other regions would mostly resolve this problem. Seems important to take into account, but not an impossible problem to deal with, especially given that it already happens and we already use inter-grid connections to handle it? What’s your perspective on this?
I certainly don’t mean to pretend this is a simple problem by any means. Conceptually, sure, it’s “simple”, but bringing it to practice is much harder. It’s also why I’m perhaps more pessimistic about the timeframe in which we can execute these plans, particularly also because we need to scale up battery production by a factor of at least 10. It’s why I think we also need to invest in research regarding higher-capacity batteries made from easier to procure materials. Certainly a difficult endeavor by the way, but absolutely necessary. We’ve made promising progress on that front at least, but we’ve got a long way to go still.
In my opinion, focusing on renewables + storage has the highest long-term chance of success combined with manageable costs. If you’re willing to up the chance of success offset by incurring higher costs, adding nuclear to the mix is perfectly acceptable to me. But even longer-term (especially post net-zero) I think it’s almost inevitable that fission reactors will end up not economically competing with alternatives.
Weird, I’ve never seen these magical two weeks.