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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.'"
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!
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
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.
Real life is overrated.
With a spreadsheet in the boardroom.
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).
Unless of course the solar has an energy storage system then combined capacity rates are near 60-70% and present a power prices that's 1/3rd nuclear's cost.
I like nuclear as much as you but the simple fact is it's been priced out of the market and that's not likely to change without massive tax payer subsidies. Solar costs have fallen 99.99% since 1970. You can now purchase solar panels at a price that's orders of magnitudes smaller than other sources and the only reason it's not taken over completely is the storage issue. Once the storage problem is solved Wind and Solar will be the only two power sources as wind will be cheaper than dirt cheap gas without subsidy by 2020 at current price trends. Solar is following the same track but is a little bit more expensive upfront but has lower maintenance costs long term.
I like how you try to make it sound saner to have stuck with the original plan to build another nuclear power plant in the middle of hurricane territory instead.
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.
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.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Until a hurricane rolls over it and sends the solar panels out to sea in many small chunks, maybe....
The irony that this is the reason that Duke cites Levy being cancelled. Westinghouse couldn't make an AP1000 that can pass NRC hurricane regulations, here is a transcript of the radio program.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.