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Power Company Kills Nuclear Plant, Plans $6 Billion In Solar, Battery Investment (arstechnica.com)
Socguy writes: After being unable to complete the Levy County Nuclear Plant a few years ago, Duke energy abandoned it, leaving rate payers on the hook. Duke is now in the process of settling legal action as a result. As part of the settlement Duke will construct or acquire 700MW of solar capacity over four years in the western Florida area, construct 50MW of battery storage, undertake grid modernizations and install 530 electric car charging stations. "The Levy nuclear plant was proposed in 2008 and ran into hurdles early on," reports Ars Technica. "With cheap natural gas in 2013, Duke Energy Florida became nervous that it might not recuperate costs spent on the nuclear plant, especially with regulatory delays. The company cancelled its engineering and construction agreements in 2013 but said that it was holding open the possibility of returning to Levy someday. Over nine years, about $800 million had been spent on preparatory work for the plant. With Tuesday's announcement, those costs are sunk costs now. But overall, the changes will save residential customers future nuclear-related rate increases. Those customers will see a cost reduction of $2.50 per megawatt-hour (MWh) 'through the removal of unrecovered Levy Nuclear Project costs,' the utility said. The 700MW of solar won't exactly cover the nameplate capacity of the Levy plant, which was supposed to deliver 2.2 gigawatts to the region. But the Tampa Bay Times wrote that Duke 'is effectively giving up its long-held belief that nuclear power is a key component to its Florida future and, instead, making a dramatic shift toward more solar power.'"
Florida seems like a good site for a solar plant with battery storage. This might actually make sense.
That's the most impractical idea I've heard since I last read a tweet from Donald Trump.
They don't call it the Sunshine State, not even on the license plates. And they wouldn't need so many oranges if they weren't vitamin deficient from too little sun. And let's face it, they should just use the same generator powered by the soul of a Forsaken child as is used to keep Disneyworld operational.
that is all.
75% of Duke's generation mix is coal or natural gas. So, rather than offset any of that base load with a 2.2 GW nuclear facility, they'll supplement demand growth and cover peaks with solar and keep burning the coal and gas. It's cheaper and they get to wave the green flag etc.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Westinghouse, AREVA (Olkilouto 3), and now Duke Energy... More and more players seem to have trouble when trying to to re-start building new nuclear plants...
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Was it with a candlestick in the study? Or lead pipe in the dining room?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Sunk costs are costs that are already spent. The $800 million was a sunk cost long before this announcement. What you mean is those costs are now a write off due to obsolescence.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
They'll use 6 billion money to build 700 MW? AFAIK you could have between 2x and 4x the same generating capacity with nuclear with the same amount of money. And it would work rain or shine.
So instead of 2,200 MW base-load with a 94% capacity factor (uptime), we get 700 MW of intermittent gen with a 27% avg capacity factor, and a 12.5 MWh battery posing as a 50 MW injector for 15 minutes. All to save 2Â/kWh. What a steal of a deal.
It's a good thing that Florida doesn't have storms like every day that would make solar intermittency a real liability for the local grid. Oh wait...
... the Levy plant, which was supposed to deliver 2.2 gigawatts to the region ...
I don't know why they keep messing with nuclear power. They showed how to create 1.21 jigawatts of electricity way back in 1984... Why that research was discontinued? Who really shot such emmetinent scientists? Libyan terrorists? Or merceneries of the Big Power companies? I wonder...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
But, they are not going to build large plants like this where the builders gouge the company. Once SMRs are going, Duke will jump all over them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In this thread /. "nuclear experts" will decry just how costly all this solar stuff is and how great and awesome and cheap nuclear power is.
/. in order to save their project.
All that on a story about how a multi billion dollar energy company couldn't get a nuclear power plant off the ground even after $800 million dollars. I'm sure all Duke needed to do was consult such expert
Fukishama was a result of 2 things; a management that cut corners by doing the least possible, AND a major slowdown in building new reactors that are much safer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The fundamental problem with this whole scenario is that Duke charged a fee to all it's customers to pay for the nuclear plant it never will build. Now that it is officially cancelled after several years of waste they will remove the fee from future bills. So Duke faces no consequences for mismanaging it's customer's money and gets approval for another rate hike.
When this plant was proposed in 2006 nuclear was the most cost effective energy out there. Fracking drove the cost of natural gas into the basement and has remained there ever since. So nuclear is no longer the best bag for your buck in the energy industry and it comes with the NIMBY stigma associated with radiation. Duke probably ran the numbers and decided it was cheaper to take the hit and pay a fine rather than complete the project and be straddled with it for years to come.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
F'n slashdot, the only site on the web without auto Linking http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41122104
"Government strangles a nuclear plant, plans to bribe the company with billions of tax money to build solar instead."
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
I wouldn't trust anyone in Florida to build Legos let alone nuclear reactors.
The idea of solar being environmentally friendly is a joke. Ever look at the materials that go into solar panels, and the amount of electronic waste this will produce? Also consider the possible wildlife loss due to the amount of acreage this is going to take. Due to the fact Florida has many endangered ecosystems already due to overdevelopment and it hosting a high biodensity, its actually a pretty poor place for solar. Out west in the desert areas where you have low biodensity would be the least impact. Florida also does have rain and a lot of rain days.
I'd hate to think about what goes into the batteries, the heavy metals and the environmental damage it will cause to mine it all out of the earth to extract these finite resources. The way these things use up rare earth metals its really hard to see how its sustainable.
It seems as though China is Westinghouse's main customer now for AP1000 reactor, with this Levy plant being scrapped.
$6 billion worth of solar panels on their way to Mexico.
So the solar initiative.. that would replace 24x7 power is suddenly dropped in favor of hopefully sunny skies 12 hours a day?
When will the madness end?
Here we see the effect of dismantling the Public Utility Companies Holding Act (PUCHA deregulation) in action. This 'New Deal' act to prevent a re-occurrence of the 1929 depression by Utility companies scamming taxpayers.
Duke received subsidies and tax incentives under provisions to build a nuclear reactor (that's the $2.50 per MWh they charged) and will now be able to activate cost recovery under "SEC. 638. STANDBY SUPPORT FOR CERTAIN NUCLEAR PLANT DELAYS" of the 2005 US energy policy act to the tune of half a billion dollars for these two 'proposed' nuclear reactors. Not a bad return on sunk costs of $65 million. Specifically SEC. 638, (d)(2)(A,B).
To those that cite NIMBYs, NIMBYs didn't make Westinghouse Nuclear go bankrupt and Duke is blaming the NRC for delays issuing the Combined License for the construction and operation of Levy, this is SEC. 638, (c)(1)(A). It would be interesting to know what Duke claims those delays were and US tax and ratepayers should be concerned that this isn't actually covered by SEC. 638, (c)(2)(C), i.e a normal business risk because Westinghouse can't build them a pair of AP1000s anymore and even if they could they can't pass the NRC regulations that make them safe in a hurricane.
Of interest is a 2011 Tampa Bay Times article which aired complaints that Duke have been scamming their customers $2.50 per Mwh since they proposed Levy probably under SEC. 638, (d)(4)(B). This clumsy episode shows exactly how the scam works. It's difficult to believe there was an intention to build a nuclear power plant and that the entire nuclear renaissance was a way for oil and coal companies to use the nuclear industry to plunder the taxpayer.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Capacity factor for nuclear tend to be around 90%, for solar it's location-dependent but in California it may go as high as 25%.
It varies with climate, season, latitude, and topography. But a quick rule of thumb is that a good solar location in the continental US (little cloud cover, midlatitude, not too close to a mountain, etc.) averages about 5 solar hours per day - about 21% of nameplate power.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It is quite a different picture with industrial which , while peaking during the day, still needs a lot at night for 24/7 plants. That is why base load is important and why nuclear plant even have their baseload at night. Your residential and commercial capacity can probably be covered by renewable. Your industrial needs ? Not so much.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
It's the other way around: nuclear/coal power plants need base-load customers, not the other way around, because those power plants are cheap per kWh delivered, but cannot adapt to demand.
Power sources should really be categorized in one of three classes: 1. Flexible on-demand (natural gas, hydro, battery storage); 2. Base load (nuclear, coal); 3. Uncontrolled generation power (wind, solar).
If you add #3 to the net, you should add #1 to balance. Or do cross-continental balancing of #3 to make it behave like #2, but it requires expensive investments in long-distance transmission capacity.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
"50MW of battery storage". How can a watt be a unit of storage?
Too bad we're not in China where we might have a large demand for 24/7 industrial power. Perhaps when the factories are automated enough to not require workers willing to work those shifts it will return.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know what percentage of the nuclear waste we've already generated has reached final disposal and will never cost us another penny?
>it requires expensive investments in long-distance transmission
I doubt it costs as much as you think it does. It's certainly not more than a percentage point of the cost of the installed generation capacity.
I can't be bothered to look up the last major study on the subject again, but while it's a lot more than "a percentage point" of the cost, nationwide HVDC links do indeed pay for themselves, whether compared to the cost of more fossil peaking, or when compared to the cost of more renewable generation to help compensate for fluctuating output. A geographically high-renewables + HVDC grid is actually more stable than a low-renewables local-only grid because of the stabilization effects of HVDC and the reduction in the effects of single-point-of-failure generation / transmission issues.
Storage is also an option, although $50m for a 700 MW solar plant is not so much long-term storage as just buying you time to ramp up/down other sources (and eliminating the significance of random cloud banks drifting over the plant). Which should be obvious when you compare prices - they'll probably pay $1,5B or so for that solar plant; the battery buffer will be only 3% of that cost.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
Whenever a business blames government regulation they are always telling half or less the truth - usually 100% bullshit - so to obfuscate their profiteering at public expense.
And of course much of the gullible public falls for the evil government picking on those poor defenseless multi-billion dollar corporations. Because those multi-billion dollar corporations only have the public's interest at heart!
Flooding is likely to be a problem in Florida going forward, and if there's one thing a nuke station doesn't like in a big way, it's flooding. Solar panels just need hosing down if the floodwater gets high enough to submerge,otherwise it's mostly the batteries that hate water. Batteries all power stations have, if to a lesser extent, to allow for safe shut down in emergencies.
What you get is a new plant and the old one left waiting for decommissioning. What that link is talking about is a design that would never be used due to the expense of both building and operating, for a power source that already costs the most.
You see those people with homes and need power? They need it unpredictably and variably, and the grid has to be built so as to allow that variation without crapping out.
Adding in solar will do fuck all about variability except reduce the peak load. Which will reduce variability most of the time, therefore reducing average variability.
Who told you that wind was uncontrolled? They lied to you, and you're a tool for repeating it. Essentially all wind turbines can either be braked, or their blades pitched so that the wind doesn't turn them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
tell australia that, wind and solar fucked their grid, when an inter link fucked.
eco-loons are not fucking engineers.
a 700MW solar panel farm with 50MW of batteries will be able to store 50MW of production in those batteries and then supply those later.
Duh.
It makes no sense to claim so many GWh of storage since hydro is measured in that but their power production is massively high, meaning they either run slowly and last long or run out quickly. Because they can release water at a given rate. Running a solar power battery backup like that would be ridiculous, since we know night time is nonproductive for solar.
Properly designed, the batteries should supply a certain rate for the entire night. Surely that makes a better figure than how many electrons it can store.
Batteries run out at a rate dependent on their design and the inductive load it releases too. And therefore they run out at a much more limited rate. So if you have 50MW of batteries, you can supply 50MW out of them. Adding more batteries in series increases the storage but not the output. To change the output you have to redesign the inductive load.
It says there they're spending on infrastructure modernisation, electric car charging locations, and several other things along with the solar plant and batteries (and the batteries will not be selected for the sole use of solar: whatever is cheapest will be put into those batteries)
So where do you get they're spending 6 billion on 700MW?
It is fake battery investment. They need to invest in battery science instead of production because battery capacity sucks. Look how difficult it was to wean off incandescent light bulbs and that even though LED research and investment was higher than what is being spent currently to invent higher capacity batteries.
It makes even less sense for solar; if you simply disconnect load from a PV junction, the PV junction doesn't magically blow up.
Ezekiel 23:20
Now try make a wind turbine generate power when you feel like it. That is the tricky bit
Power sources should really be categorized in one of three classes: 1. Flexible on-demand (natural gas, hydro, battery storage); 2. Base load (nuclear, coal); 3. Uncontrolled generation power (wind, solar).
They already are: Baseload - plants that you run full bore 24x7 Mid - cover the fluctuations between base and below peak Peakers - plants that can come online quickly to satisfy demand during peak hours.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
It is time to consider nuclear power generation using molten-salt thorium. The design of such things is vastly easier to make safe against basically any observed problems. Also the decay products of the reactions follow paths that avoid the long lived isotopes that uranium based reactors generate.
For the US at least, the major limitation seems to be regulations designed for uranium based systems which don't apply (and too much tolerance for NIMBY objections by folks who don't know the science). Other countries are moving forward on some of these designs, but the US, where they were invented many years ago, is getting left behind.
Aside from the greater safety of the thorium cycle, it is vastly more abundant than uranium and requires no isotopic separation: all the thorium can be used. Granted the eventual waste does need to be stored awhile, but it takes ~300 years only to drop to the level it has as dirt pre mining...not hundreds of thousands of years. That's because the reaction is starting from a slightly smaller nucleus which has different decay products.
Solar? Battery "storage"? Can we do the math on this one?
The cancelled reactors would have produced an average of 47.5 GWh per day @ 90% cap factor.
If the 700 MW of added solar uses modest DC overbuild, it will achieve something like a 25% cap factor, as a seasonal average.
That's 4.2 GWh per day, replacing just 9% of the foregone nuclear gen.
Most grid battery "storage" systems run for less than a couple of hours @ rated power (50 MW in this case) per day; many only have 10 minutes of rated runtime, just enough to allow paralleled quick-dispatch gas turbines (burning natural gas) time to spin-up.
So that's less than 0.1 GWh per day. The reactors would do nearly 500x times that.
Duke is planning to replace up to 90% of the nuclear with NATURAL GAS, mostly burned in high-efficiency combined-cycle turbines plus some in quick-dispatch simple-cycle turbines. The rest of the story is window-dressing.
I hope the "environmentalists" don't mind the GHG impact of this decision.
-- Mike Greaves
Sorry but 90% is not correct because of the inabiltiy to throttle down.
I would accept between 70% and 80%, but not 90%. The consumer
must always be drawing all or dumping some of the power which is
the issue. If there is ever a significant mismatch the reactor system
will trip and it will go offline for a month or so. It's the difference between
peak power and average.
Now try make a wind turbine generate power when you feel like it. That is the tricky bit
There's always wind someplace. Our grid is BS. Let's upgrade the grid, which we should do no matter what kind of power we use. Also, more storage is coming, period. It's the recycling plan for most EV packs, and EV sales are rising over time even though fuel prices are low.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
did the same thing in Nawth Ca'lina years ago, and we're STILL paying for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
1) There is only a single HVDC interlink in South Australia (where the electricity problems have been) - Murraylink. It's old (26 years), short (180km), and has never been a problem (although since it's aging and not up to modern standards it's going to need some upgrades soon - in particular bushfire suppression systems, but also replacing some old equipment at the terminals)
2) South Australia's problems are because they started taking power plants offline with inadequate peaking or interlinks to replace it. They are preparing to fix it with 129 MWh / 100MW of battery storage.
South Australia is a perfect example of precisely the opposite of your point: what happens when you neglect your distribution infrastructure. Now they're considering (too late) building a new HVDC line ("Murraylink 2") to more than double the connection with Victoria - something that should have been in place years ago.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
Because Industrial users require a different kind of electricity that can't be used by consumers? LOL.
Peak loads are during the day. The fact that some industrial users require electricity 24/7 doesn't change that.
Even in the UK, which is further north than anywhere in the USA except Alaska, peak loads are during the day. That's why the utilities sell electricity cheaply at night.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If you build solar panels in a hurricane area without considering the fucking hurricanes you are going to shoot yourself in the foot.
If you are the idiot tepco management and build an unsafe nuclear plant in an earthquake area you are going to shoot the foot of a fourth of the hemisphere.
This is the fucking difference but you Bloomberg twats cannot understand it.
My proposed category #3 is missing from that list.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Wind is only "controlled" in that it has means to turn it down when there is too much. There is no way to turn it up if there is not enough.
That's like calling a bobsled a "controlled" means of transportation. It only works when you have a downhill slope, and even then you can only turn slightly, slow down, or accelerate at the rate gravity allows. To get to the top of the hill you need a snowmachine, or get off and push it back up the hill, or wait until a new valley appears below your feet.
Who told me that wind power is uncontrolled? I was told this by the people that build, operate, and install them.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
50MW is not how you would measure battery capacity. Is it 50MW/h?
Who told you that wind was uncontrolled? They lied to you, and you're a tool for repeating it. Essentially all wind turbines can either be braked, or their blades pitched so that the wind doesn't turn them.
I think it is obvious that the implication was that you cannot make solar/wind produce on demand, therefore uncontrollable; especially within context of the other two categories.
Unreliable, or intermittent, may have been a less ambiguous choice of words. However, nothing will stop blind zealots from foaming at the mouth :)
My proposed category #3 is missing from that list.
Yes, because you can't have uncontrolled generation; load dispatchers need to be able to properly balance land to keep the grid working.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Good choice.
What most people don't get is that even in Canada (which if you weren't American, you'd realize is the country to America's north), solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear energy.
Economics cares nothing for your failed ideology. It won't save fossil fuels. It won't save fission nuclear energy.
Fusion will mostly be used by the military for the next 20 years, of course. We're not supposed to talk about it, but it was developed here.
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