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Relying on Renewables Alone Significantly Inflates the Cost of Overhauling Energy (technologyreview.com)
A growing number of US cities and states have proposed or even passed legislation that would require producing all electricity from renewable energy sources like solar and wind within a few decades. That might sound like a great idea. But a growing body of evidence shows it's not. From a report: It increasingly appears that insisting on 100 percent renewable sources -- and disdaining others that don't produce greenhouse gases, such as nuclear power and fossil-fuel plants with carbon-capture technology -- is wastefully expensive and needlessly difficult. In the latest piece of evidence, a study published in Energy & Environmental Science determined that solar and wind energy alone could reliably meet about 80 percent of recent US annual electricity demand, but massive investments in energy storage and transmission would be needed to avoid major blackouts. Pushing to meet 100 percent of demand with these resources would require building a huge number of additional wind and solar farms -- or expanding electricity storage to an extent that would be prohibitively expensive at current prices. Or some of both.
Renewables are always cheaper. The price of fuel for fossil fuels will go up. The price of decomishing a nuclear site will double again in the next 10 years.
What makes renewables bad is that we don't have reliable storage.
Long term is every home can cover 75% of their bas usage with solar and batteries then the need for large grid scale systems shrinks. The large grid is fragile and a mistake in Ohio, can wipe out new York City for 12 hours. (2003 blackout)
More distributed renewables and smaller but numerous storage. Would strengthen the grid with excess.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Because some countries over here in Europe have already switched to renewables long ago, starting with hydro power for instance, wtf is this about solar and wind? Every major river has a dam. They are necessary for agriculture, not just electricity. And yeah some days per year we hit 100% renewable energy.
Gee, it's as if overhauling an infrastructure which was built predominantly on oil might cost a lot of money to retrofit to handle solar, wind, water, and nuclear!
No fucking duh. However, once you've got the renewable energy sources in place and harvested, the cost will die out, quickly. It's called ROI, and the smart people have obtained almost insane ROI (on the order of 3 months in some related techs like LEDs powered by renewable resources up to 5 years for full solar+wind-powered farms) so they really don't have to worry about this.
Which means Americans have this problem, and not many other people.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm about as much of a greenie as you are likely to run across. I'm strongly of the opinion that we cannot get solar and wind power to be major parts of the grid fast enough. We also need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels (which we do globally to the tune of about $5 Trillion annually) and force them to cost the full economic value of the pollution they cause. That said, the notion that we can rely solely on wind and solar (and hydro where available) in the near future is preposterous. Doing that in a rational way would take a century just due to the cost alone. Fossil fuels simply aren't going away for many decades at minimum no matter what. Fortunately we don't need to get carbon emitting energy sources to zero. We need to get them to a level that the ecosystem can handle which is obviously much lower than it is today. Use nuclear to replace fossil fuels where possible and solar and wind for most of the rest. Yes we will need batteries too. The grid WILL need to be updated no matter what so I don't see that as a bad thing. But if we need to spend the money to keep the planet habitable then no real benefit to waiting.
One beef with the summary is that there currently is no such thing as fossil fuels with carbon capture technology. There is NO industrial scale carbon capture or carbon sequestration technology available nor any reasonable prospect of such technology in the near future. So take that off the table as an option until such time as it becomes a real thing.
SJW world cannot exist on logic and reasoning.
Solution - adapt devices to power output. Use them only when electricity is available.
aka "Clean Coal". There's a reason there hasn't been much traction here. Yes, you can make a zero emission coal or gas fired plant. It's just not economical when compared to wind & solar.
The costs get inflated only if you ignore cost externalization (subsidies for one, but medical costs due to dirty air are pretty massive too). Nuclear would be fine if we could trust it to stay safe. But until you can convince Americans to stop privatizing everything or make a nuke plant that's cheaper to run safely than to run dangerously then nuke's a non-starter. Sooner or later we'll privatize it to save money and those savings will come at the cost of safety like they did over in Fukushima. Meanwhile the folks responsible for the inevitable disaster get off scott free.
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The demand curve is really the important part of the equation; to make renewables effective you really need to minimize load when the sources are not available. That is a challenge with current technology in the winter, because you intrinsically have a large demand block between sunset and 9PM. In the summer you can have plenty of excess capacity from PV, but hot late-autumn days are a challenge.
So, what can you do?
It isn't that hard to make things work on renewables only if you have plenty of wind energy, but you need to reduce expectations of central grid reliability. Inter-connected microgrids have a lot of promise for being the prime source of end-user reliability and economic viability.
And, if you don't have the wind resources and have high heat and electric loads in the winter, what the hell... put in some gas recip engines with district heating.
...adapt devices to power output. Use them only when electricity is available.
What are the odds that a whole town would decide to run their AC on the same day?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The alternatives are just kicking-the-can-down-the-road... How much will it cost to retrofit or decommission that nuclear plant in 15 or 20 years? How much will it cost to get the carbon out of the atmosphere after it messes up our weather to the point where the growing season is unstable and it's hard to grow crops reliably?
There's an old saying... You can pay now or you can pay later, but it usually costs more later.
"that would be prohibitively expensive at current prices."
That's one of the good things of 'the future'. I doesn't have to pay 'current' prices.
Also, wind energy doesn't need any subsidies anymore, unlike coal, gas, oil and nukes.
The need for renewable is a separate issue from the need for green energy.
The former is about the running out of fossil fuels, and the latter, pollution, and, specifically, greenhouse gases.
The latter has value, but the former not so much anymore as Julian Simon's undefeated predictive capability has shown a relatively free economic society can adapt to shortage stressors faster then they become the prognosticated problem, and prices continue to drop.
This is counter-intuitive, but makes successful predictions again and again and again since the shortage scares of the 1970s. Peak Oil, a reskin of such fears, predictably fell.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There are two sides of such an argument.
1. Just because it works in Europe it doesn't mean it will work in the USA.
2. Just because it works in Europe it doesn't mean it will not work in the USA.
We were able in the past make a trans-continental railroad, an Interstate system, That connects every state together. Nearly every home has access to Clean Water, Electricity, Telephone... These improvements while cost a lot, helped build the United States into an Economic Power house. Because the 325Million people have access to a wider infrastructure and be part of society, while having the property and space to utilize their own means.
This was all fine and good until the stupid Abortion Debates, where peoples view on the topic, painted the other side as morally deficient. Calling the Other side Misogynists or Baby Killers. Which after a few generations of this, has created a polarized society where working with the other side is considered bad. Even if it for all best interests.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Coal should have died in the 60s but groups like Green Peace saved it by driving the cost of nuclear through the roof. 60s nuclear technology was safe, we even knew how to safely dispose of waste in the 60s. We couldn't dispose of it with zero radiation leak but guess what the world is mildly radio active anyway and coal, that thing that replace nuclear, spreads radio active material more than nuclear does.
Ten years ago we solved a lot of the problems with renewables, it was called variable pricing for electricity. People and their appliances can be incentivized to use electricity when it is produced by changing less when the wind blows or the sun is shinning and charging over $0.70/kwh when it isn't. This saved consumers money and saved the utilities even more. Unfortunately the utilities that took a risk and tried this got fucked over by their public utility commissions. (Oklahoma public utility commission almost single handedly set back renewable energy by 5 years)
Last it will never make sense for urban homes to have battery back up. It is always better to share your capacity among several houses, or several thousand houses. Like maybe make it a public utility to store and deliver electricity
Also get white roof shingles!!!
These are all easy things, things that could have already done with a little leadership and maybe getting some of these Green groups to actually think instead of parade around trying to get attention for themselves.
Lastly fuck the pro-rail crude oil transportation advocates. They often go by the anti pipeline crusade.
It has also become clear that renewables are an equally poor tool for full power satisfaction.
Except actual studies show that grids get *more* reliable when renewables are added. Funny thing about the sun, it doesn't go out all at once the way a 500MW coal plant does when a turbine overheats. Tesla's Big Battery in South Australia has compensated for several fossil-plant shutdowns much quicker than spinning reserve can--eventually they will be able to reduce the amount of spinning reserve in favor of batteries. But you're absolutely right, we don't have anything to worry about until we actually hit that 80% mark, and by that time we're likely to have even more solutions available.
this, 90% this (not sure on the genesis, but the out come is very real).
Now both sides on every single debate in politics see those who disagree with them as morally deficient and evil. :(
Do modern nuclear plants *really* melt down that often or at all? CA is ~20% nuke powered and it has, to my knowledge, never experienced a meltdown. The only meltdowns that have happened are due to negligence and a natural disaster happening all at once.
And really, if you're that NIMBY about it, just put the plant in the middle of nowhere and run a giant superconductor to the nearest power hub.
I think too many people played Sim City and thought it was a reality simulator.
Wrong: Coal power is. It's destroying the planet, and yet we're still using a lot of it.
You have price confused with "cost"-- our energy markets are no where near sane about capturing externalities (with the possible exception of nuclear, where we insist on paying full-life cycle charges up front, including waste handling).
... (the rich, the Pelosi supporters, etc.) will be assigned July and August while the "bad" families (Trump supporters, NRA members, etc.)...
You have strange fantasies.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.
Come on, man, this is just blatant FUD. "Periodically" meaning 3 real incidents, EVER. Compare deaths from nuclear to constant deaths from solar (workers falling off roofs), wind (workers falling of turbines), hydroelectric (workers falling off dams, dams failing and wiping out entire towns), natural gas (workers dying in fires), coal (workers dying in fires AND dying in mines AND bystanders dying from lung disease), and you see that nuclear is far and away the safest energy source out there. Three completely separate references for you, all of which concur:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
There are a few good reasons to be wary of nuclear - frequent schedule/budget overruns being chief among them. There's also a huge cost for facility decommissioning that hasn't really been handled adequately. But safety concerns are outright lies - nuclear energy is literally and provably the safest form of energy that exists. That argument is bad and you should feel bad for making it.
The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.
They do? Periodically? Like continuously every couple of years or something? To date there has been one meltdown due to insanity, one due to equipment failure, and one due to a natural disaster.
Interestingly 2 of the 3 scenarios are not possible with any Gen III reactor design let alone Gen IV and the third one isn't possible with most reactors.
I think you need to look up the word "periodically" in the dictionary. ... Or look up how nuclear disasters happen and why your comment is silly.
played Sim City and thought it was a reality simulator.
Aliens won't come and destroy my lovely city? My whole life is a lie.
It might be inconvenient, but it removes problems and gets the job done so that the technology is much cheaper much more quickly. I'm actually a little disappointed to read this on Slashdot without some acknowledgement that nuclear and fossil fuels, though currently used and useful, aren't really needed if we CAN get everything from renewable sources. It's as if the poster or author is saying that we shouldn't update to the latest computers or other technology when it's still cheaper and more convenient to use old technology, even if old technology is inconvenient and expensive longterm and switching to the latest technology will introduce far greater efficiencies that everyone will be ready to enjoy. It's not like everyone is trying to use the latest smartphone here. It's more like they're switching from alkaline batteries to lithium. Or nuclear and fossil fuels to wind and solar. THAT'S WHY. And while old technologies SHOULD be used where needed and practical, switching to renewables should DEFINITELY be encouraged and even demanded where the pain of switching is WORTH IT.
Coal, NatGas, thermal solar, and offshore wind seem to be quite a bit more expensive than nuclear...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.
The US has had exactly one reactor undergo partial meltdown since nuclear power became a thing roughly fifty years ago. To say you "know" nuclear plants experience meltdown "periodically" is utter nonsense and unsupported by any facts you can cite.
Or perhaps you want to cite Chernobyl? Gee, what happens when you turn off all the safeties and try to run a reactor with a positive void coefficient in a haphazard manner? Never mind that no reactor currently in operation in the US has such a design. Never mind Chernobyl operators purposefully disregarded every rule in the book. Nah, let's blame new-kew-lar powar for it!
Or perhaps you want to cite Fukushima? Yeah, the reactor built last century that survived an earthquake and tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people around it and was put in situations it was never designed to withstand in the first place. Yeah, let's use that as an example of how unsafe them nukes are! That'll show 'em your mastery of statistical analysis!
And while you're at it, completely ignore the fact that Fukushima has not one single fatality attributable to any radioactive release from the plant despite what happened to it. Just kinda sweep that under the rug the same way you ignore the 15,894 people who were killed, the 6,156 injured, and the 2,546 people missing due to the quake and tsunami...none of which had anything to do with a meltdown.
And will do it more often as they age.
Again, a supposition unsupported by any facts. Reactors are routinely inspected and have licensed lifetimes. Their license to operate can and will be revoked if they're run haphazardly. They must renew the license periodically and have set lifetimes that can only be extended if safety checks show it to be safe to do so.
But sure, let's just go with your idea and say they're gonna kill us all anyway. Probably spawn a wave of incredible hulks while they're at it. Or Godzilla.
The model does not include the cost of the damage done by global warming.
Perhaps because such quantification is impossible given the ridiculous number of variables involved. Nah, never mind that! That's just crazy talk!
Or rather, it assigns that cost to renewables by failing to credit them for saving the Earth.
"saving the Earth"??? Hyperbole much?
The model does not consider the effect that radical energy use reductions would have on the overall cost.
Nor does your pie-in-the-sky "idea" consider the radical effects on society and economies that "radical energy use reductions" would impose. Nah, let's forget even thinking about the consequences of what you propose. Just gloss right over that. Nothing to see here.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Not to mention that Germany pays about 2 to 4 times for power what the US pays...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
a. Privatization in America is pretty much inevitable because Americans do not trust government. It's cultural. It's hammered into you when you're young and impressionable.
b. Nuclear disasters are much, much worse and they affect everyone around for miles, not just the people in the immediate vicinity of the disaster.
There's a reason NIMBYism exists. It's irrational rationality. Running an unsafe nuclear power plant because you don't like paying taxes and don't trust the government is irrational. But if you've already accepted that level of irrationality then the next rational thing to do is not run the plant in the first place.
It's a catch 22 in the literal sense of the word. You'd have to be crazy to do it but you'd have to be crazy to not do it.
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Possibly, but that maxes
out at around 40 percent of our current electical power
needs (not including HVAC and transportation, even). So what else do we do?
The second step is to cover the parking lot, especially where I work. As an added source of revenue, I would PAY to park my car in the shade of the panel.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
nuclear is safer than coal. there is more energy in the radioactivity of coal ash than was gotten by burning the coal...
nuclear. modern reactors could burn the current "waste" from which only 10% of the energy has been extracted.
the lighter radioactive products of alternate designs besides the one from the navy currently used are shorter lived and useful in medicine and other applications.
nuclear.
-pyrrho
>What to do with spent fuel
We solved that almost immediately, we just abandoned it in the face of more cost-effective options: reprocessing.
Basically you have two kinds of "leftovers" from a reactor - unspent fuel (not appreciably radioactive) and fission byproducts (very radioactive). The beauty is that the byproducts, being very radioactive, will decay quite rapidly and mostly stop being dangerously radioactive within a few centuries. The problem is that they're all mixed up with the unspent fuel, which will continue fissioning in the presence of the radiation, producing new byproducts to keep the chain reaction going for many thousands of years.
Reprocessing solves that by separating the fuel, which can be reused, from the byproducts, which can then be stored in a vault that only needs to contain things for centuries. Combine that with any of the many forms of mineralization / vitrification to dreamt up to physically stabilize the waste so that groundwater, etc. can't erode it away quickly, and you've got a recipe for realistically safe storage.
The problem is that the early reprocessing plants were extremely hazardous (you are dealing with high-level nuclear waste after all), and the entire idea was mostly scrapped with the invention of much more cost-effective uranium mining, which made "fresh" uranium considerably cheaper than reprocessed. Of course, mining fresh uranium doesn't actually address the waste problem.
There's also potential to make reactors that simply "burn" far more of their fuel in the first place - the more fuel gets consumed the less there is to prolong the radioactivity of unprocessed waste. A "traditional" reactor only consumes 5-10% of its fuel before the byproducts starve the reaction, some alternate designs can consume as much as 90% or more. The biggest problem is that the more efficient reactor designs are generally also considerably more conductive to producing and harvesting plutonium and other useful weapons-grade materials.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
>Please identify any actual gas subsidies
Every war in the Middle East for the last century? We weren't there for the weather.
Every tax credit given to fossil fuel companies? Sure some will argue "tax credits aren't subsidies", but at the end of the day they give the same economic advantage to a particular business as they would get by leaving the taxes in place and adding a subsidy, so the end result is pretty much the same.
Every environmental impact indemnification we give to fossil fuel companies? Oil spill cleanup and recovery, especially from something like a deep-sea well failure, is outrageously expensive, and yet the cost is born almost entirely by the government rather than the companies that caused the problem. Coal is mining and waste is hideously bad as well, but has been grandfathered in so that none of the industries involved have to pay the environmental remediation costs, nor even manage their waste in a safe manner. Nuclear actually has the same problem - if a company had to pay for waste storage/reprocessing "until harmless" there would be no profit to be had in the industry.
Meanwhile your tax issue is disingenuous - mileage taxes are already being experimented with in several areas, specifically to address the fact that a gas tax promises to stop being a an indirect substitute as EVs become more common.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
They are economical and they are safe.
The problem with nuclear power is hippies. Yup, hippies, you can blame it all the smelly hippies from the 1960s. Actually, if you take it to the extreme you can blame just about every problem we have today from world hunger to climate issues on a pack of smelly hippies.
You see hippies started protesting nuclear weapons, which is good. But being the uneducated lot they are they didn't just stop there, they also protested peaceful development of nuclear power. They bitched about nuclear medicine, research, and every fucking thing that had anything to do with "nuclear" in the name.
Did it stop nuclear weapons development? Fuck no. But it did grind everything else to a halt. And because of fucking hippies we are stuck with nuclear power plants designed in the '60 and built in the '70s. It is why there has been no new ones built in 40 years and why it is so expensive to build one.
Hippies are the reason why we can't ship nuclear waste to be reprocessed and we still have coal plants polluting the planet. If the hippies had put down the bong and picked up a science book they might have solved the problem instead of causing it..
But the hippies didn't just kill fission research, no they had to keep bitching about fusion too. Something that has nothing to do with splitting atom the smelly hippie couldn't keep his uneducated yap shut. So thanks to this line of bullshit all research in fusion was all so ground to a halt.
So next time you see a hippie thank him for pollution, food shortages around the world, wars in middle east and africa, and plastics in the drinking water. Thank you smelly hippies.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Definitely much less carbon intensive, but it's not zero by a long shot.
Nuclear power is as close to zero emissions as solar, wind, and hydro.
Nuclear: 28 tonnes CO2/GWh
Wind: 26
Hydro: 26
Solar PV: 85
I'm not a fan of solar PV because it produces three times the CO2 per energy produced than wind, hydro, or nuclear. Solar is also expensive, and unreliable. Still far better than natural gas at 500 tonnes of CO2/GWh, or coal which can vary from 700 to over 1000 depending on the coal quality and the plant efficiency. Using solar when better options exist is nonsensical.
I see nothing wrong with the increasing use of natural gas because it cuts CO2 output in half from coal, it's cheap, it's reliable, and it's plentiful. Solar is not cheap, it's not reliable, and in many places not so plentiful. If we are going to go through the expense of reducing our CO2 output beyond that of natural gas then the smart money is on wind and nuclear. We're out of rivers to dam up so hydro is not really an option for any significant growth. Wind is not particularly reliable but it is cheap, or at least cheaper than solar and about the same price as nuclear and natural gas. I'll hear complaints on how nuclear is so expensive but it's half the price of solar for the same energy. If you live in a place that is lacking in sunshine then the price difference gets much larger. I'm sure there are places where solar is cheaper than nuclear, in which case solar might make sense, so long as there is sufficient wind, hydro, and natural gas to make up for when the sun doesn't shine.
Oh, but solar will get cheaper, you say? When it gets cheaper than nuclear then I'll change my tune. Until then we should invest in nuclear. Also, it's quite possible nuclear could get cheaper too. This is a moving target, and now that we've actually started building new nuclear plants I do expect nuclear to get cheaper.
Anyone want to complain about the safety of nuclear power? Nuclear power is ten times safer than solar power, based on deaths per energy produced. Go look it up. Yes, this does include the deaths from the meltdowns at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. Nuclear power is also safer than wind but by a smaller margin.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It's kind of amusing how so many people think the left own the mainstream media, and others believe just as fervently that it's the right.
It's pretty obvious that the large media outlets tend to be run by people who are left of center. Even just taking population statistics into account, most of them are based out of large cities, and large cities contain populations which are more left-leaning than the nation as a whole. Ergo, unless the outlet is intentionally looking to hire conservatives (fox news), or unless some other factor results in conservatives disproportionally getting those jobs, the networks are going to end up being managed and staffed by people who are further left than the national average.
News networks also tend to hire people who have some type of university education (usually in "soft" fields) which, again, is going to select for left-leaning people.
Those who think the media is "controlled by the right" are so far on the fringes of the left wing that, to them, even Bill Clinton looks like a right-wing white supremacist. It's a similar situation with those on the far-right who think the media is some communist plot to take over America. In reality most of the large outlets end up being slightly left of centre.
As mentioned I'm well aware this isn't rational behavior. But that's the point. None of this is rational. If human beings were rational we'd stop making tanks and build solar farms & desalination plants instead.
Can I just say, as someone who is generally allied with liberals, that this kind of shit is why you guys get a bad rap? Your argument is LITERALLY: "People are doing irrational things, so I will embrace my own variety of irrationality."
To paraphrase: A stupidity for a stupidity makes the whole world stupid. This is the postmodernist trash-thought that has systematically rotted (some pieces of) academia and totally eaten away at the soul of America. Demand EVIDENCE! Go to the data FIRST, BEFORE you make your opinions. Truth DOES exist in the world, and reality does not bend to our political whims. Seek out opportunities to PROVE YOURSELF WRONG. We need to appreciate the complexity of policy, and seek to understand and react appropriately, rather than just impulsively pushing stuff that feels good.
At a time when the GOP is going Full Retard, the left has an opportunity to be the adults in the room, and advocate evidence-driven policy based on cold, hard facts. But we're all doomed if the Democrats try to beat the GOP at the stupidity game.