I think looking at power purely from the perspective of RoI in a highly gamified environment is misleading.
For one, the immediate economic profit does not reflect long term economic utility. There's factors such as availability, sovereignty, security etc. which are not reflected in hourly electricity prices.
Similarly, we don't look at immediate RoI of other key infrastructure investments: roads, hospitals, military. You sort of can of course, but the calculation isn't as simple as immediate economic benefit. You may finance some expensive preventative treatments which aren't strictly necessary (thus "loss making") but which prevent more expensive treatments down the line.
Finally, the environment is, effectively, gamified. Wholesale prices, retail prices, base load, storage... And it's all interacting with each other. A sceptical take would be that solar compete for a relatively fixed-sized pie of power generation (what they can displace from dispatchable power). But if battery storage doesn't become cheap enough, this will get saturated, and more solar will simply compete for the same finite demand, whereas a dispatchable or base load power plant, like nuclear, will continue to have marketable "goods". Maybe. Maybe not. But my point is, immediate RoI of solar tells you nothing about it.
You may of course arrive at the same conclusion with a better metric (I'm not sure) but that's a separate question. I'm saying the metric is flawed instead.
>or base load power plant, like nuclear, will continue to have marketable "goods".
Nuclear hasnt been marketable for a long time without massive indirect and direct subsidies.
The reason it gets built in spite of its demand for lavish subsidies is because it shares a supply chain and skills base with the military industrial complex.
Countries that have a nuclear military want to share some of the costs with the civilian sector although they typically arent up front about it, preferring to declare that it's because they're environmentalists.
NPT signatories that dont have nuclear weapons but take a strong interest in building civilian nuclear power typically see some sort of potential existential risk on the horizon. Again, officially it's because theyre green hippies.
My point is that immediate profitability (eg nuclear being expensive) is not the right metric. It matters and it's a part of the equation, but overall, it's a bit meaningless to say solar is more profitable to a capital investor than eg nuclear, therefore let's base a country's grid on solar power alone.
Your link to Poland is one of my key counterexamples to a full renewables grid. Northern Europe absolutely sees long periods with little sunshine and wind, and that's also when its energy requirements are highest (winter heating). Much of it is flat, too, and seasonal battery storage exists nowhere right now.
So... If not solar or wind or hydro, and want it to be low-CO2, then you're short on options. So exorcising nuclear seems a bad idea.
Can't access the article without some other browser, however keep in mind that business risk is in essence a completely different factor than potential return on investment, or what turns out to be actual return. Three fundamentally different things each composed of way different variables.
Regardless, they go hand-in-hand when investment is involved, the attitude at one extreme is to avoid risk as much as possible, while the other extreme will tolerate or even seek out the riskiest of ventures when they feel they will have good fortune in pursuit of unpredictably better returns which sometimes can not be achieved any other way.
One thing that influences relative cost that doesn't seem to be well-represented by those using equations, is what is the source of the energy to begin with?
It's too obvious.
In one respect, nuclear and solar are at the same end of the spectrum where the "fuel" is so long-lasting that it virtually drops out of the equations compared to so many other things.
But virtually zero may not be close enough to true zero when you consider the cost of the fuel itself plus costs to get that fuel ready for harvesting the energy it has to offer.
Once everything else is in place except for actually getting the fuel into a state of readiness from how it is found in nature, few other options compare to the zero cost that solar, wind and a few others will always have in their equations. This number for solar will never go up regardless of scale, and fuel is such a major consideration it is completely tied to production as strongly as anything can be.
IIRC, zero is quite a number.
In a simplified way there are a lot of businesses that don't actually make money until after the initial capital expenditure has been recovered, a point of zero debt is achieved, and until another capital expenditure occurs, performance results from profits in excess of ongoing expenses.
Surely the most convincing financial structures would be dependent on the most dis-similar accounting tactics, since diverse fuel sources can be nothing like each other even though they will always be tied to production, so it must not become possible to do anything but compare apples to oranges :\
The book "How big things get done" [1] has tables listing the historical cost overruns of construction projects.
It's worth keeping in mind that solar and wind farms start generating revenue as soon as the first panel or turbine is connected. This make financing much easier and derisks the whole project. Nuclear has to wait the whole ~10 years for the entire station to be finished before the investors get anything back.
Social licensing risk is a big one that gets swept under the rug. While both solar and nuclear has to face off NIMBYs, once those NIMBYs are defeated then the solar project is in the clear basically forever. But nuclear has no such assurances that there won't be an irrational fear-based anti-nuclear craze like what happened in Germany which leads to early plant closures.
irrational eh?, three mile Island, Chernoble, Fukeshema, litteral mountains of the most toxic and poisionous waste generated by all of the operational nukes, spead out, semi abandoned everywhere, go ahead
One of the reasons for this is that every new nuclear power plant is a little bit different from all the previous ones - 'better', safer, more efficient etc., but different with more risk and expense.
A Solar plant is (very crudely) just purchasing panels from a factory that's already produced millions of them and installing them in a frame so they're pointing at the sun.
I suppose, as a nuclear fan, if someone messes up solar panels really badly, the societal impact is low. If you mess up a nuclear power plant, it's pretty bad.
Small, modular reactors [1] have been the dream of nuclear energy for a long time. The technology was proven a long time ago with nuclear submarines which have an outstanding safety track record. What’s stopping them from entering full scale production is a horrible mix of regulatory red tape and political opposition. Chief among the issues is a regulatory framework which is not designed to certify mass-produced reactors.
No one wants to invest the capital to get a manufacturing plant up and running if regulators aren’t willing to allow completed reactors to be commissioned and begin producing energy at a rate that matches the manufacturing rate. The insistence on treating every nuclear site as a unique project subject to years of environmental surveys and extensive, bespoke planning makes modular reactor designs moot as a technology. This is why every reactor gets a new design: they have to go through the process anyway so they might as well try to max out the production they can achieve at that site.
If you deviate from the plan then you have to get approval for that deviation. Apparently this was part of the problem with Vogtle (Unit 3): they had a design and got it approved, but because the hands-on knowledge of building had atrophied, they found complications in construction in the drawings, and wanted to make change to simplify things. These changes then had to be approved, which add to delays.
There is another regulatory process where you get approval in phases, and this would have been better for Vogtle. The Decouple podcast has a four-part series on Vogtle that goes into a lot of detail about Vogtle:
The article equated "investment risk" to cost overruns, not ROI. It's like a forgone conclusion. If you have to build something, you have to pay construction costs and those can vary. If you can buy most of the stuff you need on Amazon (ok, supplier X), you can predict the cost better.
If you look at ROI, which looks at the demand side risk as well (perhaps transient demand, need for quick build out), and assume utilities are in the business of profit maximization, natural gas wins.
This is why carbon tax is so important. The moment you tax carbon emissions, natural gas no longer wins.
Assessing the right amount of tax is non-trivial, but approximations for the costs of carbon emissions exist, and even conservative estimates push natural gas out of the profitability zone.
I disagree. The "right amount" is pretty trivial. Structuring it such that it's politically favorable, precise, and robust is the actual issue.
There's a general tension between precision and robustness in law, and finding that tradeoff is often the difficult part once public opinion is secured.
The relative cheapness (as opposed to feasibility) of storage tech vs natgas is the main reason why storage tech hasnt really taken off.
Natural gas is just too cheap as a battery (i.e. peaking).
Nuclear power, batteries and pumped storage all require subsidies to be cost competitive and while nuclear power has a powerful champion in the military industrial complex to offset its ridiculous expense, storage tech has no such champion.
Storage tech has China, which is massively installing it and promoting it for export. I think you’re focused on the US, but in terms of new energy construction the US is like a small rural province.
"By contrast, solar energy and electricity grid transmission projects have the best construction track record and are often completed ahead of schedule or below expected cost"
"For Sovacool, the evidence is clear: “Low-carbon sources of energy such as wind and solar not only have huge climatic and energy security benefits, but also financial advantages related to less construction risk and less chance of delays,” he says"
Of course, when you compare electric transportation with nuclear plant, the results are not the same ..
No need to green-wash what is already green. You could label it "hippie propaganda" or something the like though.
I think TFA just reiterates that we can no longer build complex stuff within a reasonable timeframe and budget. Nuclear reactors just happen to be super complex. Nothing nefarious going on.
Yeah I mean Solar itself seems to be generally considered low tech by now.
Also the failure modes of Nuclear involve some sort of "real time response". In a classic reactor when the power goes off unexpectedly, one needs to make sure that it receives cooling to not risk a meltdown.
The only open problem is storage but I guess there are also reasonably low complexity options like hydrogen or water pumps.
For context, nuclear and peaker natural gas are the two most expensive sources of electricity in overall lifetime cost per energy output nowadays. It's not clear what exactly he's comparing there on the natural gas side.
LCOE assumes that electricity generation is comparable. However, renewables have a high variability, which puts a much higher load on the grid.
The grid investments are sizeable. You not only need to add a lot of batteries, you also have to make other investments, for example to add moment to the grid, because unlike big turbines like nuclear, water or gas, solar or small wind turbines have almost no moment of inertia, which was one of the problems behind Spain's power outage.
This isn't new stuff, it's all solvable and countries already do this; the power outage of Spain would've been impossible in Germany for example. It's just important to highlight that with old-school power plants, you don't need a lot of that stuff to stabilise the grid. You need to include the grid costs when calculating the true LCOE, which most of these charts, including the Wikipedia one, don't do. Wikipedia isn't lying about that; they outline this very fact as one of the key weaknesses of the LCOE metric.
I see this sort of thing so much. Renewable and storage costs have changed so fast that using numbers from even a few years ago gives misleading results. Going back 12 years you might as well be using numbers from another world.
but LCOE is price only for WATTS, not for watts at specified time!!! you need watts at night too. so be careful about that, this mistake can make shareholders loose interest in your point...
but yes, LCOE of PV+12hour battery was lower then nuclear, even before 2020/2019 saga...
What about the winter? I have solar on my house in the UK and it generates enough power to be off-grid from about March to October, but November - February it would be impossible. There are way too many cloudy days. There was a whole week in February where it didn't generate more than 2 kWh on any day.
At more equatorial latitudes you could definitely rely on it more. And it's not really an issue for grid solar yet because we're far from the point where there's more solar power than we need, even in the middle of summer. But eventually winter will be an issue.
Yeah up north like that winter is hard and I'd imagine it wouldn't work well. It's a little funny to hear places like Canada and the UK talking about solar. Even here (I'm at the same latitude as Syria) you have to avoid some things in the winter to keep everything on line.
Having to ration power like that is part of the reason I don't think grid solar makes sense anywhere. To get the behavior you need You'd have expose consumers to the fluctuating prices and most people find that extremely unpleasant (many probably more than just maintaining their own array and infrastructure.)
On a boat one option is to follow the sun. We make 100% of our electrical consumption from solar, though we are considering to add a small wind turbine to the mix.
In Wales I've seen things like speed warning signs have a combined small solar panel and wind turbine -- I'm assuming they also have a small battery as well. This makes sense as it is expensive running power to remote areas, whereas these are self-contained.
> The researchers compiled data on 662 energy infrastructure projects covering a diverse spectrum of technology classes and capacities, built between 1936 and 2024 across 83 countries, representing $1.358 trillion in investment.
This is quite a lot if we consider that net zero expenditures until 2050 only are expected to amount to 100 trillion.
GDP is PER year metric. so world generates 105T every year...
so you're saying that 4% of gdp every year until 2050... it is peanuts.
so for example if every household ! ! ! !ONLY IN USA ! ! ! lives in passive house, that alone will save more on utility bills, insurance, then your net zero expenditure requires to add. so im not sure if that net zero expenditure is world wide or just USAs, but USA can pay it by themselves, if they were not scammed by building bad buildings for last 20 years.... just for comparison.
also previous powerplants price has to be converted to today's dollars, and inflation metric basket is flawed because it does not consist of building materials, which powerplants are build from. but it contains bread, clothing etc.
so 1.358 T is not todays money that means comparation / ratio is better then you/them suggest.
also NET zero expenditures means, less inputs afterwards, i.e. no/less money sent to canada, mexico, venezuela, africa, persian gulf for oil...... so more money for homeland. which most people forget about to even calculate impact of... positive for usa.
so yes we can do this, but every smartass in TV is saying we can not....
germany tried germany failed. people will protest, because it makes them poor. grand ideas will make people poor. because they would have to invest to make their house passive. and its a lot.
Readit News
For one, the immediate economic profit does not reflect long term economic utility. There's factors such as availability, sovereignty, security etc. which are not reflected in hourly electricity prices.
Similarly, we don't look at immediate RoI of other key infrastructure investments: roads, hospitals, military. You sort of can of course, but the calculation isn't as simple as immediate economic benefit. You may finance some expensive preventative treatments which aren't strictly necessary (thus "loss making") but which prevent more expensive treatments down the line.
Finally, the environment is, effectively, gamified. Wholesale prices, retail prices, base load, storage... And it's all interacting with each other. A sceptical take would be that solar compete for a relatively fixed-sized pie of power generation (what they can displace from dispatchable power). But if battery storage doesn't become cheap enough, this will get saturated, and more solar will simply compete for the same finite demand, whereas a dispatchable or base load power plant, like nuclear, will continue to have marketable "goods". Maybe. Maybe not. But my point is, immediate RoI of solar tells you nothing about it.
You may of course arrive at the same conclusion with a better metric (I'm not sure) but that's a separate question. I'm saying the metric is flawed instead.
Nuclear hasnt been marketable for a long time without massive indirect and direct subsidies.
The reason it gets built in spite of its demand for lavish subsidies is because it shares a supply chain and skills base with the military industrial complex.
Countries that have a nuclear military want to share some of the costs with the civilian sector although they typically arent up front about it, preferring to declare that it's because they're environmentalists.
NPT signatories that dont have nuclear weapons but take a strong interest in building civilian nuclear power typically see some sort of potential existential risk on the horizon. Again, officially it's because theyre green hippies.
In unrelated news, after decades of being by far the most coal addicted country in Europe: https://apnews.com/article/poland-us-nuclear-energy-power-pl...
Your link to Poland is one of my key counterexamples to a full renewables grid. Northern Europe absolutely sees long periods with little sunshine and wind, and that's also when its energy requirements are highest (winter heating). Much of it is flat, too, and seasonal battery storage exists nowhere right now.
So... If not solar or wind or hydro, and want it to be low-CO2, then you're short on options. So exorcising nuclear seems a bad idea.
Can't access the article without some other browser, however keep in mind that business risk is in essence a completely different factor than potential return on investment, or what turns out to be actual return. Three fundamentally different things each composed of way different variables.
Regardless, they go hand-in-hand when investment is involved, the attitude at one extreme is to avoid risk as much as possible, while the other extreme will tolerate or even seek out the riskiest of ventures when they feel they will have good fortune in pursuit of unpredictably better returns which sometimes can not be achieved any other way.
One thing that influences relative cost that doesn't seem to be well-represented by those using equations, is what is the source of the energy to begin with?
It's too obvious.
In one respect, nuclear and solar are at the same end of the spectrum where the "fuel" is so long-lasting that it virtually drops out of the equations compared to so many other things.
But virtually zero may not be close enough to true zero when you consider the cost of the fuel itself plus costs to get that fuel ready for harvesting the energy it has to offer.
Once everything else is in place except for actually getting the fuel into a state of readiness from how it is found in nature, few other options compare to the zero cost that solar, wind and a few others will always have in their equations. This number for solar will never go up regardless of scale, and fuel is such a major consideration it is completely tied to production as strongly as anything can be.
IIRC, zero is quite a number.
In a simplified way there are a lot of businesses that don't actually make money until after the initial capital expenditure has been recovered, a point of zero debt is achieved, and until another capital expenditure occurs, performance results from profits in excess of ongoing expenses.
Surely the most convincing financial structures would be dependent on the most dis-similar accounting tactics, since diverse fuel sources can be nothing like each other even though they will always be tied to production, so it must not become possible to do anything but compare apples to oranges :\
It's worth keeping in mind that solar and wind farms start generating revenue as soon as the first panel or turbine is connected. This make financing much easier and derisks the whole project. Nuclear has to wait the whole ~10 years for the entire station to be finished before the investors get anything back.
[1] https://biblio.co.uk/9780593239513:1681820911
rationalise it then
A Solar plant is (very crudely) just purchasing panels from a factory that's already produced millions of them and installing them in a frame so they're pointing at the sun.
No one wants to invest the capital to get a manufacturing plant up and running if regulators aren’t willing to allow completed reactors to be commissioned and begin producing energy at a rate that matches the manufacturing rate. The insistence on treating every nuclear site as a unique project subject to years of environmental surveys and extensive, bespoke planning makes modular reactor designs moot as a technology. This is why every reactor gets a new design: they have to go through the process anyway so they might as well try to max out the production they can achieve at that site.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
They unfortunately haven't held that promise up.
There are already-approved designs that are pre-approved can can be constructed without review:
* https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/design-c...
AIUI, one can get approval from the NRC (under Part 52?) by building a plant as-drawn with a pre-approved design:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Construction_and_Oper...
* https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part052/f...
If you deviate from the plan then you have to get approval for that deviation. Apparently this was part of the problem with Vogtle (Unit 3): they had a design and got it approved, but because the hands-on knowledge of building had atrophied, they found complications in construction in the drawings, and wanted to make change to simplify things. These changes then had to be approved, which add to delays.
There is another regulatory process where you get approval in phases, and this would have been better for Vogtle. The Decouple podcast has a four-part series on Vogtle that goes into a lot of detail about Vogtle:
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyouH0mkPJXHR0hKW_iLk...
One can get an initial site license without actually picking a particular design, so the process can start with decisions are being made:
* https://wyoleg.gov/InterimCommittee/2023/09-2023071715-03Nuc...
If you look at ROI, which looks at the demand side risk as well (perhaps transient demand, need for quick build out), and assume utilities are in the business of profit maximization, natural gas wins.
Assessing the right amount of tax is non-trivial, but approximations for the costs of carbon emissions exist, and even conservative estimates push natural gas out of the profitability zone.
I disagree. The "right amount" is pretty trivial. Structuring it such that it's politically favorable, precise, and robust is the actual issue.
There's a general tension between precision and robustness in law, and finding that tradeoff is often the difficult part once public opinion is secured.
Well kinda compared to nuclear yes, but compared to coal/oil/incinerator it wins still.
Natural gas is just too cheap as a battery (i.e. peaking).
Nuclear power, batteries and pumped storage all require subsidies to be cost competitive and while nuclear power has a powerful champion in the military industrial complex to offset its ridiculous expense, storage tech has no such champion.
"For Sovacool, the evidence is clear: “Low-carbon sources of energy such as wind and solar not only have huge climatic and energy security benefits, but also financial advantages related to less construction risk and less chance of delays,” he says"
Of course, when you compare electric transportation with nuclear plant, the results are not the same ..
This paper is green washing;
I think TFA just reiterates that we can no longer build complex stuff within a reasonable timeframe and budget. Nuclear reactors just happen to be super complex. Nothing nefarious going on.
Also the failure modes of Nuclear involve some sort of "real time response". In a classic reactor when the power goes off unexpectedly, one needs to make sure that it receives cooling to not risk a meltdown.
The only open problem is storage but I guess there are also reasonably low complexity options like hydrogen or water pumps.
You're comparing a nuclear plant to e.g. an electric car? Why? Aren't we comparing power generation methods?
The article spoke of the grid;
The article does not have anything about transportation.
Also, his data is from 2013.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
(warning: the graph on that wikipedia page has a really poorly cut Y-axis.)
The grid investments are sizeable. You not only need to add a lot of batteries, you also have to make other investments, for example to add moment to the grid, because unlike big turbines like nuclear, water or gas, solar or small wind turbines have almost no moment of inertia, which was one of the problems behind Spain's power outage.
This isn't new stuff, it's all solvable and countries already do this; the power outage of Spain would've been impossible in Germany for example. It's just important to highlight that with old-school power plants, you don't need a lot of that stuff to stabilise the grid. You need to include the grid costs when calculating the true LCOE, which most of these charts, including the Wikipedia one, don't do. Wikipedia isn't lying about that; they outline this very fact as one of the key weaknesses of the LCOE metric.
I see this sort of thing so much. Renewable and storage costs have changed so fast that using numbers from even a few years ago gives misleading results. Going back 12 years you might as well be using numbers from another world.
but yes, LCOE of PV+12hour battery was lower then nuclear, even before 2020/2019 saga...
Nuclear makes sense for grid power, solar makes sense for distributed/point power.
At more equatorial latitudes you could definitely rely on it more. And it's not really an issue for grid solar yet because we're far from the point where there's more solar power than we need, even in the middle of summer. But eventually winter will be an issue.
Having to ration power like that is part of the reason I don't think grid solar makes sense anywhere. To get the behavior you need You'd have expose consumers to the fluctuating prices and most people find that extremely unpleasant (many probably more than just maintaining their own array and infrastructure.)
London here, energy independent march-october, with peak grid dependecy in january of about 50ish percent.
If I doubled the array from 5 to 10 kwhr, I _probably_ could remain independent most of the year.
This is quite a lot if we consider that net zero expenditures until 2050 only are expected to amount to 100 trillion.
World GDP was 105 trillion USD in 2024.
so you're saying that 4% of gdp every year until 2050... it is peanuts.
so for example if every household ! ! ! !ONLY IN USA ! ! ! lives in passive house, that alone will save more on utility bills, insurance, then your net zero expenditure requires to add. so im not sure if that net zero expenditure is world wide or just USAs, but USA can pay it by themselves, if they were not scammed by building bad buildings for last 20 years.... just for comparison.
also previous powerplants price has to be converted to today's dollars, and inflation metric basket is flawed because it does not consist of building materials, which powerplants are build from. but it contains bread, clothing etc.
so 1.358 T is not todays money that means comparation / ratio is better then you/them suggest.
also NET zero expenditures means, less inputs afterwards, i.e. no/less money sent to canada, mexico, venezuela, africa, persian gulf for oil...... so more money for homeland. which most people forget about to even calculate impact of... positive for usa.
so yes we can do this, but every smartass in TV is saying we can not....
What’s a passive house?
but sure, try it out. :)
Which would make the year over year investment about 3.8%.