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.'"

Comments

Cost per KW

[ArhcAngel]

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.

Re:Cost per KW

[drinkypoo]

When this plant was proposed in 2006 nuclear was the most cost effective energy out there.

Only if you ignore decommissioning and waste management, which you don't get to do unless you're one of the assholes actually building the plant.

Re:6 billion?

[dabadab]

and was planned to produce 2200 MW, just a bit more than 3x 700 MW

Do not make the error of comparing nameplate capacities ignoring capacity factors (i.e. how much of the nominal power is actually produced). 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%.
If you take that into consideration then the difference between 2200 MV nuclear and 700 MW solar is almost ten-fold.

Re: regulatory delays

[Anonymous Coward]

Uthats a regulatory delay. The solution has been well understood and planned for decades, but shot down by judges and politicians.

Re:Seems a good site

[RhettLivingston]

You would think. But...

We would likely have a solar adoption rate higher than all but a few other states if it wasn't for whacked laws put in place to defend the utilities. A homeowner here can't sell energy back to the utility. Only those who can produce 24 hours a day on-demand can do so. Because of this, our solar penetration is lower than many northeastern states.

Until we either get a change in the law or the cost of battery storage drops enough to make solar + battery much less than utility provided electric, Florida will lag the developed world in solar (and some of the third world).

Re:In this thread /. experts will...

[Solandri]

I wouldn't, except the renewables proponents keep making fundamental engineering errors which indicate they're clueless about power generation and are unqualified to be making decisions concerning it.

• 700 MW of nameplate solar capacity multiplied by Levy County's solar capacity factor of 0.161 yields an average annual production of just 112.7 MW.
• By comparison, the scrapped nuclear plant's 2.2 GW multiplied by nuclear's capacity factor of 0.9 yields an average annual production of 1980 MW.

So this 700 MW of solar power represents just 5.7% the capacity of the scrapped nuclear plant. Guess where the other 94.3% of energy production is going to come from (hint: its initials are FF)?

To replace the nuclear plant entirely with solar, they'd have to build (1980 MW / 0.161) = 12,300 MW of panels. That's more than 8x larger than the largest existing solar plant in the world, more than 20x larger than the largest existing solar plant in the U.S. At the optimistic cost of $1/Watt, those solar panels (never mind the supporting infrastructure) would cost $12.3 billion. The nuclear plant was only going to cost $7.65 billion. They killed it because of regulatory delays.

Re: Seems a good site

[whoever57]

It's no way to finance a grid when the lights have to stay on at night.

Yeah, it's not like the peak demand is close the same time that solar panels produce peak output. Oh, wait, it is.

Most of the USA experiences peak demand mid-afternoon, when A/C units are cranking away.

Re:Seems a good site

[Firethorn]

It works out fine until over a third of homes have panels. This is because power usage is also higher during the day.

Re:Not really

[Chas]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Fukushima...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A number of nuclear reactor safety system lessons emerged from the incident. The most obvious was that in tsunami-prone areas, a power station's sea wall must be adequately tall and robust.[6] At the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant, closer to the epicenter of 11 March earthquake and tsunami,[289] the sea wall was 14 meters tall and successfully withstood the tsunami, preventing serious damage and radioactivity releases.

https://www.theguardian.com/en...

The report noted that Tepco had not made any safety improvements to the Fukushima Daiichi plant since 2002, and had dismissed the possibility of it being hit by a massive tsunami, even though it could not produce supporting data.

It had, for example, insisted that Fukushima Daiichi's 5.7m seawall was high enough to withstand a tsunami generated by a large quake in the area, despite a warning in 2008 by its own engineers that much bigger waves were possible.

Re: Seems a good site

[dunkelfalke]

Have you actually tried to read what you have posted?
"A prototype was scheduled for manufacture in 2015. However its development seems to have ended."

That's the problem with you atomic fanbois - you don't know much about the topic you wank on.
The Soviets have built a couple of these (TES-3 mobile nuclear power plant), but even they have recognised that the idea is not as great as it appears to be.

Re:Not really

[Rei]

Not exactly; the Guardian is messing up the sourcing a bit. First we have "a warning in 2008 by its own engineers". When you follow the link, it's simply "an internal report" - the source cited to Kyodo. Kyodo however says the report wasn't from Tepco - it was from a Tepco subsidiary (and thus Tepco's engineers weren't involved in drafting it - they would have, however, been involved in evaluating it).

It's also worth noting that the report talked about stopping waves 10,2m high coming in from the south side by reinforcing the south side sea wall. What actually happened was waves 14-15 meters high came in from the east side. So even if they had followed up on the report's suggestion, it would have done nothing to prevent the disaster.

Lastly: your notion that building a sea wall to stop 15 meter waves costs "a couple thousand bucks" is remains absurd.