Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint. That doesn’t make it true.
>I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissionsduring the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited. Plus, many countries have already done it.
>I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillionsof dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
We increased global generating capacity from 15,000 to 26,000 TWh. So green energy has supported economic and social development through electrification without adding new pollution sources.
>I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safestand most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.
Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity, but that safety comes at a financial cost. Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.
But solar and wind are no where near sustainable, or efficient. They are extremely fragile and have serious detrimental effects on their local environment. Nuclear is the best option and gas is a massive improvement. The whole point of this article is that we are chasing a utopian ideal instead of actually fixing the problems. Once again, perfect is being the enemy of improvement.
Sure, some days they'll be covered by snow. But in industrial systems that can easily be melted / brushed off. Obviously they don't generate as much in winter as in summer. But cool bright winter days are surprisingly plentiful.
Alaskan here; it doesn’t work so hot in the winter months. Even if they are kept clear by maintenance workers (not that hard or expensive to hire someone to clear snow from a panel) the sun’s azimuth is so low in the winter that there is hardly any energy produced.
Small correction: you mean altitude, not azimuth. Altitude is how far you need to tilt your head vertically to look at an object. Azimuth is the compass direction.
Very well. Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years, and we have the least sunlight and cheapest grid power of almost any place in the continental US.
> Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years
Can you show me the arithmetic for that? I understand rooftop solar to cost $20,000 - $25,000. Is your non-solar electric bill over 7-9 years really more expensive than that? Seems impossible.
Victoria BC area here (practically next door), it wouldn't work for us.
My annual hydro bill was $2400 in 2018 with baseboard heating, and $2050 for 16,500kWh in 2021 after we put in a heat pump. 3 bedroom detached.
A recent article suggested a typical 4 kW system around here would cost $10k for 3261 kWh a year, or about $405 in credit at a blended rate. Another suggests an 11 kW system at $27,500, which could maybe hit 9000 kWh - about $1100 in credit. We do have net metering with BC Hydro so it'll just wash through, but that's still a 25 year payback horizon.
Meanwhile a relatives system failed before 2 and is now a pile of panels leaning on the side of their house. No way these things are actually lasting 20 years. Or if they are, it's by dint of enough repair & maint to destroy the math even more.
What does seem to be true though is that it's getting better/closer. As the panels get both more efficient and cheaper, it becomes less of a waste of motion.
Like anything else you can buy quality components and install them correctly or you can buy poor quality components and install them poorly. If a solar system fails after 2 years there were defects in materials or worksmanship. A solar setup is a pretty robust thing when done right.
I'm afraid I don't have the exact numbers anymore, but I determined that the 2700W solar panel array installed on my Seattle house for about $14k in 2013 (including a new breaker panel) had paid for itself before the end of 2019. The system worked really well.
People often think that solar won't work well in Seattle because it's cloudy so often, but light still comes in through the overcast, and solar panels don't care which angle the photons hit them from. Meanwhile, lower ambient temperatures mean the panels work more efficiently.
Solar won’t work on new townhomes in Seattle with rooftop decks (since we don’t have to worry about snow so much?). There is simply no place to put them unless you give up your deck.
Alas, indeed. I'd have installed solar panels on the townhouse I bought in 2020 if there were anywhere to put them, but there would only be room for 800 watts, at most - not really worth it.
It depends on the house, the occupants, and lifestyle. 25k is the cost of a 9kWh PV array today, which will produce maybe 11GWh/year in Seattle.
$230/month is about 1700kWh/month at Seattle electricity price of .13/kWh.
That usage could easily be the amount of electricity used for an average efficiency 3000sqft house with 4 occupants and a couple EVs driving the median American commute. Add an electric hot tub, and $230/month isnt so crazy.
Yes, it's very high, but not crazy high considering the typical upper middle class American home and lifestyle.
In contrast, my home and lifestyle transplanted to Seattle would be 1/4 the usage and cost, but different preferences and all.
In the example above the PV array would provide about 50% of usage, so about $115/month in bill reduction. The 25k is 18,500 after the Federal tax credit, which puts the payback at 13 years.
Always shocked by the labor component of PV arrays. I did my own 6.6kW array (split into two physical arrays, thus increasing the parts costs a bit), and it came out to around $13k. I don't mean I don't want to pay people a living wage, just always hard to remember (when you're used to doing stuff yourself) what fraction of the total cost that will be when you do pay them.
Most of the planet, most of the people are not in the Arctic. Brief search indicates 4 million, globally. You could have people in the Arctic powering their homes with peat or lignite and it wouldn't be a huge problem. Happily NG is better for this, and the rest of the world has fewer problems with solar seasonality.
They're not efficient at turning sunlight into power - somewhere around 20% depending on the technology, which continues to improve albeit slowly. This efficiency goes down about 2.5% in the first year and another [edit](0.5%-1%) in each subsequent year [1]. These numbers are all at 25C, which is significantly lower than a black solar panel is going to be out in the sun - which reduces its efficiency a further 10-25%. [2]
So typical 20% efficiency solar panel at 45C in year 2 is already starting at 17.5% efficiency, and by year 10 is down to just [edit](15%) efficiency.
And then while lower temperatures do improve efficiency, they tend to happen in higher latitudes which get less sunlight to begin with.
60% of Ontario's power (about half of Canada by population) comes from just 3 nuclear plants (Bruce, Darlington and Pickering). Replacing them with solar panels would cover an area the size of the entire greater Toronto area in silicon and plastic, give or take. [3] And it would need to be replaced every 20 years.
This is some bad reasoning. Solar efficiency is very different from say engine efficiency. A very efficient combustion engine is 35% efficient meaning it wastes 65% of the energy in the input fuel. Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs. Rooftop solar turns 20% of something that would have been 100% wasted into high grade energy. A very efficient coal power plant is 45% efficient before transmission losses. That means more than half the energy in the coal is wasted. Solar wastes nothing.
Your numbers on solar panel degradation are also incorrect based on my experience in the industry. They do degrade but not at that at 7+% per year for ten years.
> Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs.
Not exactly, the point is that building and installing solar panels consumes resources and physical space. A solar plant with 100% efficient panels is 1/10th the size of today's solar plant, and as I mentioned, to generate comparable amounts of power to conventional sources requires huge amounts of landmass. Plus input materials. And it has to be replaced every 20 years.
> Rooftop solar turns 20% of something that would have been 100% wasted into high grade energy.
Not 20%, right, closer to 15%. Rooftop solar also kills about 10X as many people per generated TWh (0.44-0.83 people per TWh) as compared to nuclear power (0.04 people per TWh) - due to installation. [1]
I'm not advocating for coal of course, but it's wrong to say solar wastes nothing. There's input materials, plastics, silicon - all sorts of toxic chemicals - and generates tons and tons of e-waste that we don't really have a plan for right now. [2]
> Your numbers on solar panel degradation are also incorrect based on my experience in the industry. They do degrade but not at that at 2% per year for ten years.
As I mentioned, the degradation rate is highest in the first year, I said 2.5%, but then it drops off to about 0.5% in subsequent years. The data comes from an NREL analytical review. [3]
NOTE: I edited the number to more generously assume the 0.5%-1% degradation was not in percent efficiency but rather in percent capacity - which is 1/5th as much, to your point.
Not sure why I am responding since you moved the goal posts from operating efficiency to lifecycle efficiency but even there you are wrong.
To your point re: land use, this is why I said rooftop solar. The roof is already there, the structure is already there, there is zero additional land use and very little opportunity cost for the space. Further, the land use for coal is much broader than the plant area because of mining, transit, and waste heat management. There was a recent post on HN comparing total land usage by prime mover.
Solar is only deadlier per unit than coal if you ignore substantial local health effects that aren’t priced in.[0]
Your implied rate of degradation to go from 20-10 is more than 7%. Even 15-10 is more than 2.5% and again that is an absurd number that contradicts observed performance. You misunderstand what degradation means in this context, to your point.
I never said anything about coal, and I updated the degradation numbers per your suggestion, but the degradation numbers themselves come from NREL. I think you're confusing the derating due to temperature with degradation. They are additive.
Panel temps go up and down depending on time, date, location, and weather. On cool, sunny spring days you can see panels produce more than they are rated. You can’t simply apply a fixed worst-case derate for all time to all panels regardless of installation details.
Further, the derates are not additive, they are multiplicative. (A a 20% panel which has degraded in lab efficiency by 10% operating at 90% thermal efficiency is running at 16.2% efficient compared to 18% for a non-degraded panel).
Nothing you have said, however, addresses my first and principal point which is that operational efficiency has a different meaning for solar when compared to anything that has non-free inputs. Efficiency is outputs/inputs. One way to look at it is [energy out]/[energy hitting panel]. That is 20% for a solar plant, 45% for an nuclear analogue. Another, financial way is [value of output]/[cost of inputs]. This is infinity for solar setting aside fixed/financing costs and quite finite for nuclear using the same assumptions.
A device that's 15% efficient is inherently more wasteful than a device that's 100% efficient, right? Therefore we're wasting something. That thing isn't input fuel, it's the materials used to build the device, and manage its lifecycle. That doesn't mean it's free - it just means we're considering different inputs.
Total efficiency here is the sum of all inputs over outputs. For solar panels that's land use, that's glass, silicon, plastic, PCBs, etc - in addition to the sun.
Otherwise, in your model, a panel that's 100% efficient is inherently the same as one 15% efficient.
In your model, a battery is infinitely efficient - after all it has no inputs, only outputs! Once you get to that point your model needs to be adjusted.
A nuclear plant that is 100% efficient would be better than the current ~40% units but it is thermodynamically impossible. Thanks Carnot.
You are confusing operating/marginal efficiency with lifetime efficiency. Think about a power plant as a series of payments. You have one big up front payment to build the thing and a series of smaller payments to buy fuel and run it.
For solar, those smaller payments are zero. There is still the fixed upfront payment and that is why you would prefer 40% efficient panels to 20% efficient panels everything else being equal.
The marginal cost of rooftop solar is zero. Nothing is wasted. Really! No fuel is bought, the roof underneath is cooler and lasts longer, there are systemic benefits, etc. There is virtually no maintenance. No land is used (Solar land use is complicated but most places you can put solar wouldn’t support a nuclear plant). Light which would have bounced back into space or turned into infrared is instead made into usable, high grade energy. Land/build area that would otherwise do nothing is made useful. It is literally close to economic and physical magic. It is true that panels break, inverters die, upgrading is compelling, etc. However, most components are silicon, glass, copper, and aluminum. These are some of the most recyclable materials on earth. There are plenty of analyses of lifecycle energy and material costs and it is generally pretty favorable (1-2 year operating recovery time). The panels are warrantied in many cases for 25 years so idk where your 20 year then scrap lifespan comes from. Inverters tend to be the weaker link.
Finally batteries have marginal round trip efficiency because what you put in doesn’t come back out 1-1 so I am not sure I follow your point.
> The marginal cost of rooftop solar is zero. Nothing is wasted. Really!
No, it isn't. There's literally materials consumed to build the solar panels, and a 0.4-0.8 deaths per TWh generated. To your own point a 1-2 year recovery period on panels that last 20 is 5-10% loss in energy off the mark. We don't really have a recycling plan, but we better get one, because solar generates a ton of waste materials. To power the entire United States, we'd need 20,000 square miles of solar panel - the entire landmass of West Virginia. Replaced every 20 years, we'd need almost 100,000 square miles of solar panel in my lifetime. That's the entire surface area of Colorado.
But that's ok because I'm not arguing against rooftop solar lol. I never was. That doesn't change the fact they're not particularly efficient, and there's a lot of room to improve. I was arguing in favor of nuclear, which, with seawater extraction, can be completely renewable.
MARGINAL. I will try one more time because a stranger is wrong on the internet. It is the difference between how much a car costs and how many miles per gallon it gets. Once you have paid for the car, the only thing that matters with respect to fuel efficiency is MPG. The MPG of solar is infinity because there are no gallons to buy/use once you have bought the car. You are confusing purchase price with MPG for some reason. There is no additional material used once the panels are installed and nothing wasted. For a car, 65% or more of every gallon you buy is wasted.
There isn’t a lot of demand for panel recycling because most panels have been installed in the last 10-15 years are not end of life. When there is demand there will be recyclers, you don’t need to centrally plan it.
There actually is NOT a lot of room to improve with monocrystalline silicon and other single band panels. The theoretical max efficiency on them is 40% so they are currently more than 50% of their max, room but not a lot. The technical efficiency (how much of the energy hitting the panel is turned in to electricity) is subsumed by the economics. For ROOFTOP, small systems can offset residential load 100%. I am not sure what is inefficient about that on any definition.
> to generate comparable amounts of power to conventional sources requires huge amounts of landmass.
It would take about 0.01% of the US land area to generate all the electricity we need. Meanwhile we use 30% (over 1000x) to grow food. And if we prioritize solar on rooftops and deserts, we really are not using any useful land.
>Solar efficiency is very different from say engine efficiency. A very efficient combustion engine is 35% efficient meaning it wastes 65% of the energy in the input fuel. Solar panels don’t waste sunlight and have no input costs.
They're exactly the same kinds of waste. A 35% efficient IC engine wastes 65% of the energy in the fuel heating itself up. A 20% efficient photovoltaic cell wastes 80% of the energy in the light heating itself up.
This argument only stood if the fuel for the IC engine were raining from heaven for free and would go 100% to waste if not burned, and if the combustion process itself produced no other waste than heat, both of which are obviously not true.
You have to consider /all/ inputs and outputs for any honest assessment of efficiency.
Yes, I am aware solar cells need to be manufactured, producing waste in the process. Still, the same applies for all alternatives, neither fossil nor nuclear plants grow on trees.
That's not what "efficiency" means, though. The efficiency of a power source is the ratio between the actually generated work and the work that could theoretically be generated. I don't know if the metric you're referencing has a name but let's call it "greenness". arcticbull's argument was that solar panels are inefficient at converting light into electricity, not that they're ungreen. dpierce9 tried to reframe the discussion from efficiency into greenness for no apparent reason.
My argument has nothing to do with ‘greenness’. What I am talking about already has a name: marginal productivity or marginal efficiency.
My point is if you have to dig and burn 2.5 rocks to get 1 rocks worth of energy you are really concerned with that ratio for a whole host of reasons and affects everything you do (it is one reason why coal plants are huge for instance).
Now say you can get a rocks worth of energy with no rocks to dig and burn. Of course you still want to get the most amount of energy and there is an upper limit to how much you can collect but you no longer think about it in terms of the number of rocks you have to dig out and burn. That is a huge difference.
That's fine, and that's a metric that's worth considering, but you're not talking about the same kind of efficiency arcticbull was talking about. When someone says that "a solar panel is 20% efficient" what they mean is that, of the energy contained in the light that hits it, 20% of it is converted into electricity and the rest is converted into waste heat stored in the panel. Yes, if the panel hadn't been there 100% of that energy would have gone unused, but that's a different discussion. It doesn't make what arcticbull said false. Optimistically a new solar panel is 20% efficient, and that efficiency becomes worse with age.
Articbull is saying nuclear is better than solar for the energy system. He bases this on a claim that solar panels are inefficient along a number of dimensions. Look at his actual comments, they aren’t narrowly related to lab or theoretical efficiency (he is making points about land use, death, etc). There is no real concept of physical inefficiency there is only relative efficiency. And relative efficiency of Rankine cycle prime movers vs semiconductors is not a strictly easy comparison. 20% of something free that would have been entirely wasted is different than 40% of something you have to find, dig out, transport, crush, then filter. I also didn’t say what he said about theoretical panel efficiency is wrong (except all his actual numbers were wrong until he edited them). I am broadly saying this point doesn’t support his conclusion.
Edit: you are also wrong about what happens to the energy that hits the panel. Some light is reflected, a lot of light passes right through the panel. Further, panels are designed for particular wavelengths which is why multi gap panels have theoretical efficiencies higher than any thermal plant. And some is turned into heat. All of this would have happened had the panel not been there too except no usable electricity would be created.
> Look at his actual comments, they aren’t narrowly related to lab or theoretical efficiency (he is making points about land use, death, etc).
I don't know about deaths, but the point about land use is related to theoretical efficiency. If an existing solar plant that is 20% was 100% efficient it could generate five times as much power in the same space, or generate the same power in a fifth of the land it currently uses. The land used by solar power plants is very relevant when considering its practical utility.
> 20% of something free that would have been entirely wasted is different than 40% of something you have to find, dig out, transport, crush, then filter.
It's not free, though, because those rooftop panels will lose efficiency over time. Eventually they will need to be replaced or they will generate so little power that they may as well not be there. Since they need to be replaced over time then harvesting that 20% of sunlight is no longer free, but carries an ongoing resource cost. Is that more or less than the cost of getting the same total energy from a nuclear power plant?
> I am broadly saying this point doesn’t support his conclusion.
The conclusion is that solar and wind can at best only complement nuclear, and this is supported by various points about the inefficiency of solar panels. Setting wind aside for the moment, why do you think the fact that solar panels are inefficient and degrade over time doesn't affect their viability as an alternative to nuclear power?
Response to edit: I don't know whether the 20% figure counts in the theoretical 100% light that is reflected or unabsorbed. It seems to me that it shouldn't be counted, since if you're going to count light that couldn't have interacted with the cells anyway, then you may as well count light that hits the ground next to the panel, which would mean the panel is 0% efficient.
If nuclear plants were twice as efficient that would be great too. They aren’t.
Land use isn’t relevant for rooftop solar. There is basically no opportunity cost.
Everything becomes less efficient over time. Sunpower warranties their panels for a 20% decline in performance over 25 years. That means a 20% efficient panel is warrantied to be 16% efficient after 25 years in the field. To put that in perspective, panels made 15 years ago were around 16% efficient. There isn’t a cliff and they are still useful.
Suppose you abandon the system for whatever reason. You go back to the steady state of not producing power on that site. There is again no cost.
I am not saying nuclear is bad. I am outright rejecting the claim that solar panels are inefficient on any dimension that counts. I think this argument about degradation is beyond silly. I also think you are an astroturfing troll.
>Eventually they will need to be replaced or they will generate so little power that they may as well not be there. Since they need to be replaced over time then harvesting that 20% of sunlight is no longer free, but carries an ongoing resource cost. Is that more or less than the cost of getting the same total energy from a nuclear power plant?
Yeah, is it more or less? I don't know either. But finally we're getting to the core of the question instead of debating about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
So at the end of its lifetime, be that 50 or 100 years in, a nuclear plant will have to be replaced, too. Basically a sudden 100% degradation. What is the resource cost for that, why are we not talking about that in this context? Because it's not "ongoing"? What's the resource cost for cooling with increasingly sparse water bodies that due to climate change will be less and less suited for it over the lifespan of the plant, BTW degrading its efficiency? What's the resource cost of plant dismantling and disposal, which goes on for decades after a plant has ceased to produce power? Would you like to include nuclear waste disposal as an ongoing resource cost in the consideration? Where do you draw the line? Are there any reliable estimates about these externalities that don't range wildly depending on which faction informed them? Do we want go down that rabbit hole?
If not, then what's the point of fixating on this single aspect with regards to solar and solar only? Just because this one is a figure that's easy to quote out of context and sounds kinda bad? Can I make you realize that in this light it's hard to not think of this as deliberately cherry-picking an argument for argument's sake?
These are all retorical questions, of course. FWIW, I don't claim to have any definite answers on the topic, and actually I do think that nuclear and renewables will have to complement each other to varying degrees around the globe, depending on many factors. I'm just trying to get across why the specific point your're clinging to seems so extremely moot to me.
>Setting wind aside for the moment, why do you think the fact that solar panels are inefficient and degrade over time doesn't affect their viability as an alternative to nuclear power?
Because it's already correctly priced into the running costs, just as - I suppose its proponents will claim - the corresponding facts above are for nuclear. Also, as has been pointed out, the ever repeated claim of solar inefficiency is baseless in the most literal sense, due to the lack of a comparable reference point for nuclear. 20% is an entirely meaningless number as long as the system boundaries are drawn so arbitrarily that it's impossible to benchmark. To put it bluntly, what would be sufficiently efficient for your taste? 30%? 60? 90? Can you explain why? It's just apples and pears on this level, the only reasonable comparison could come from a much broader view that you're explicitly not interested in.
Anyway this discussion is going in circles. I'm not assuming bad faith on your side, but I don't think we'll come to an agreement either.
>What is the resource cost for that, why are we not talking about that in this context?
Presumably because nobody knows it. Personally, I'm not aware of any nuclear power plant that has been replaced. I also don't know why one would need to replace the entire plant and not just the core and possibly surrounding structures.
>Would you like to include nuclear waste disposal as an ongoing resource cost in the consideration? Where do you draw the line?
I don't think a line should be drawn anywhere. If we're talking about sustainability and total impact, we should look at all the facts, otherwise we're drawing conclusions off incomplete data. It should be possible to reduce the entire situation down to a single "impact per Joule" value that's comparable between any two power production systems, and every impact that's caused in order to produce that Joule (mining, land use, pollution, etc.).
>If not, then what's the point of fixating on this single aspect with regards to solar and solar only? Just because this one is a figure that's easy to quote out of context and sounds kinda bad? Can I make you realize that in this light it's hard to not think of this as deliberately cherry-picking an argument for argument's sake?
The point is that treating rooftop solar as "free" because it's supposedly a one-time cost is at best naive, at worst disingenuous. I have no interest in making nuclear look good or solar look bad, but let's call a spade a spade. Neither of them has zero impact on the environment. Pretending that they do means we're not making rational decisions.
>Also, as has been pointed out, the ever repeated claim of solar inefficiency is baseless in the most literal sense, due to the lack of a comparable reference point for nuclear.
I wouldn't say it's baseless. The figures on efficiency by themselves are measurable and true. It is true, though, that nothing can be said to be (in)efficient in an absolute sense, for the reasons you say. That's why I never said "solar panels are inefficient". All I said on the matter was that efficiency in this sense is exactly the same kind of efficiency that an IC engine has, because, as I said, dpierce9 was trying to reframe the discussion for no reason. Well, I don't think it was for no reason.
>Because it's already correctly priced into the running costs, just as - I suppose its proponents will claim - the corresponding facts above are for nuclear.
I'm not sure either are. Is the pollution caused by semiconductor production, or as you mentioned the warming of natural waters used as coolant, priced into the corresponding products?
>the only reasonable comparison could come from a much broader view that you're explicitly not interested in.
Yes, I agree, that's the only reasonable comparison. I would be interested in that if anyone came forward with an actual analysis from which we could derive a figure like the one I mentioned above.
Nuclear is an option but it's not a fast option. The newest reactor designs from Westinghouse and EPR have taken 9 years at the fastest to complete in China and much longer everywhere else. You can say the regulations or NIMBYs are slowing down construction, but those aren't an issue in China.
I know that China has a rampant corruption problem, and very poor safety track records, but Westinghouse's reputation is very much on the line here, and not even China can afford to invoke the stigma of a nuclear accident. You can't deny a meltdown the way that you can deny, say, a virus leaked from a lab.
Solar + wind are actually fixing problems. They are not perfect, but as you said, perfect is the enemy of improvement. Solar + wind are cheaper than almost anything else, specially nuclear. They have much less detrimental effects to the local environment than fossile fuels (specially coal). Yes, they are not guaranteed, so you need a grid (which you have), and some batteries (for short-term storage; like batteries of electric cars) + pumped storage (for medium term storage) + maybe some other storage like hydrogen / ammonia.
Nuclear is way too expensive, specially if you account for risks of disasters (no insurance company will insure them, so the risk is on the population).
>Nuclear is way too expensive, specially if you account for risks of disasters (no insurance company will insure them, so the risk is on the population).
This is CATO propaganda. All power generation is subsidized by our incredibly relaxed attitude towards externalities in general. Of the reliable sources of energy, nuclear is safest and the least subsidized.
> Of the reliable sources of energy, nuclear is safest and the least subsidized.
How do you evaluate this? Do you have a summary of estimated subsidies per MWh for different generators?
My understanding is the same as the comment you are responding to, that nuclear subsidies are significant, ~6-10USD/MWh on insurance alone. I would be happy to be wrong on this. On a good day we pay ~EUR25/MWh for nuke electricity in EU day-ahead markets, as a scale point; 8EUR/MWh is a significant subsidy.
First, I want to make it clear that my claims are about relative subsidy, rather than absolute subsidy.
Second, the nuclear insurance subsidy is not really a subsidy, since the taxpayer is only on the hook in the case of an accident, which is not only extraordinarily unlikely, but also mitigated many times over. The calculation of the implicit subsidy to nuclear power comes from highly motivated speculative accounting by CATO, whom you should generally think of as playing the role of a law firm working for oil and gas and against alternative forms of energy production. There are a range of values which could be assigned to the "implicit subsidy of nuclear insurance", and the opposition lawyer has obviously chosen the absolute highest end of that range.
It is difficult enough to calculate the probability of a nuclear reactor meltdown, but we have observational evidence that it is at least many dozens of times less likely than say, a hurricane, and each of those is generally more costly than even the worst nuclear disaster in history. The damage wrought by the tsunami at fukushima, for instance, was many times greater than the damage wrought by the meltdown at fukushima.
There is a private component to nuclear insurance, as well, paid by the operators, which totals, across all nuclear plants, approximately 10 times the total damages incurred by the three mile island incident every year. It is extremely unlikely that a nuclear accident will ever exceed these damages.
This is in stark contrast to other historical insurance requirements. As a case study, I recommend learning about the early history of oil spills starting with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Torrey_Canyon and the subsequent founding of TOVALOP in 1968. Up until that point, oil transport insurance was implicitly subsidized by the nature of a limited liability corporation. Note that this was not an artefact of the times, since insurance requirements for the nuclear industry were implemented by congress a decade earlier, in 1957.
On the other hand, we subsidize coal and natural gas implicitly by not charging them for the use of their exhaust channels and also not structurally supporting torts for worse health outcomes with no easily identified proximate cause. For a concrete example, I think we have a pretty good idea of the number of additional hurricanes per year we can expect as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, but we do not require oil and gas to pay for marginal additional hurricane insurance, despite that doing demonstrably more damage than even very bad nuclear meltdowns. The unsuitability of tort as an avenue of collecting externalities is an enormous implicit subsidy for the fossil fuel industry.
We are 100% in agreement that societies subsidies of fossil generation far outstrip anything else.
My question was about your claim that nuclear has the lowest subsidy of any generator.
> It is extremely unlikely that a nuclear accident will ever exceed these damages.
I mean, the Fukushima cleanup (~$500B) is costing about three orders of magnitude above the liability ceiling ($450M) of the private insurance component of US nuke liability.
First of all, these numbers for the Fukushima cleanup don't make sense. 500B is the annual budget of medicare, or roughly the market cap of a FAANG. Your source appears to be wikipedia, so I looked into it, and their figure is from a scientific american article in which the Japanese government is quoted as saying 15 billion USD for the cleanup and 60 billion USD for relocation damages. Quite a lot of money, but definitely an order of magnitude less than the cost of the earthquake and tsunami themselves. A "private think tank" in Japan then wildly conjectured this number to actually be between 400 billion and 700 billion USD, and for some reason, this is the figure that Wikipedia uses. So, interestingly, I am claiming that this is the same phenomenon as before. This think tank might even be the CATO institute, for all we know.
Second, I said for reliable power. That was sneaky of me, but gas, coal, nuclear, and to some extent hydro, are the only reliable power sources I am aware of. Wind is not completely random, but cannot be relied upon, and solar cannot be run at night. Hydro is reliable, but represents a much bigger population risk than nuclear, with no real possibility of safe failure. I like hydroelectric power, I think it's neat, but it's definitely a sleeping dragon.
Assuming your lower estimate of 15B + 60B, that remains two orders of magnitude above the insurance policy you claim "is extremely unlikely" to be exceeded, so arguably my point stands.
"Reliable power" is well.. this keeps coming up, and it's always this black-and-white thing; sometimes the wind doesn't blow, so you can't rely on it.
And then the other side will counter that the downtime of wind is predictable, unlike that of nuclear (see the need to raise the price ceiling in EU day-ahead markets to deal with the unplanned nuke outages in France going on right now). This side will say the predictable 45% capacity factor of wind is preferable to the unpredictable 90% capacity factor of nukes.
In reality, a stable energy system is built by combining energy sources of different strengths. Wind and solar provides bulk cheap power most of the time, with hydro and nukes ramping to match production changes. This is identical to how the grid is already ramping to match demand changes every day.
We see this dynamic every day in EU markets, with wind+hydro slotting together, hydro flexing up and down as wind ebbs and flows. You can see this live in the "Origin of Electricity" charts on electricitymap: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/SE
Honestly curious about how you come to the conclusion that the risk of hydro is that much bigger than nuclear. One would assume that this is a pure engineering problem and therefore "mitigated many times over" just as well as in nuclear?
My point is, the combination of wind, solar, storage is orders of magnitude less subsidized. If you account for risks (nuclear) and externalities (fossil fuel). This is not propaganda. But your claims about nuclear are.
Solar and wind are just fine as generation sources, provided that you consider solar / wind + storage as the whole generation system and base your arguments and costs on that number. When you consider both together solar and wind are pretty expensive but have nice properties as far as carbon generation. Solar and wind by themselves are somewhere between mildly useful and actively very bad in terms of grid stability.
> Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint. That doesn’t make it true.
If you lead with this, I expect a refutation of the points in the article. But in each of the statements you take issue with, I don't see any refutation, just additional data.
> However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited.
Does the article claim that it is a long term solution?
> So green energy has supported economic and social development through electrification without adding new pollution sources.
How does that conflict with what the article said?
> Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity, but that safety comes at a financial cost. Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.
Again, does this conflict with anything in the article?
Do you think anything in the article is untrue, as you implied?
Unless you are being extremelly pedantic than I would agree with the parent. The thesis of the article is essentially "Solar and Wind aren't the way forward, Nuclear is the way". While it is reasonable to acknowledge the solar and wind still face many challenges, the parent is pointing out that they are already doing a good job in accelerating decarbonization and Nuclear, while appealing, isn't the clear cut winner the article is saying it is.
I agree with your criticisms and support of the parent, but the thesis also included a chunk of "here is why I switched from a purely clean energy perspective to one that tolerates a bunch more nuclear."
I have in the past year undergone a similar shift, so perhaps I felt more tolerant of some of the article's slickness. A few centuries of "financially expensive" nuclear energy feels like it could provide a longer runway for science to figure out some alternatives.
It's really strange for me to hear people saying that. I was pro-nuclear a decade ago and thought solar/wind were pipe dreams. The cost situation is now so much in favor of solar/wind now that I no longer really see the point in nuclear. We should be subsidizing scaling up of storage technologies, not nuclear plants.
If the cost of storage gets cut in half in the next 10 years, we won't need subsidies, nuclear plants will simply be boondoggles. I really don't think we should invest in nuclear until we're sure the cleaner alternatives can't scale.
Here's a question for the group:
Regardless of whether you advocate for green energy or not, do you think that it's a wise strategy to create an artificial scarcity of fossil fuels to force a transition to green energy? After decades of green energy adoption, the world is still (conservatively) 84% reliant on fossil fuels. Without them, many people would freeze and/or starve, and whole economies would collapse.
I think we should be focusing on creating abundance of clean fuels. I do think it's worthwhile to tax fossil fuels to make people less likely to use them. Probably with dramatic taxes. But really there's no such thing as "natural scarcity" or "natural abundance" these things are all based on our choices. 30 years ago we could have created an abundance of nuclear power and we would be better off. Today it seems like creating abundance of other things is a superior option. We knew that persisting in leaving fossil fuels as the abundant option was a mistake but we did it anyway and continue to do it.
Focusing on clean fuels is just fine. My question had to do with a highly destructive national policy that is doing tremendous damage to the US/world economies (except for Russia and China).
I'm not sure we're the pure antinuclear stand would even come from
He clearly can't build a nuclear power plant so what he can do is build solar and wind.
And sure nuclear has plenty of problems like amount of uran, cooling water in the summer etc.
Independent of this, we have not even seen yet how a real solar society would look like because while we installed plenty, we have not really started to install what would be possible.
It should be a total no brainer for everyone to want to leverage their roof real estate by investing in solar.
> Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity, but that safety comes at a financial cost. Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.
If fossil fuel use was burdened with the level of safety regulations that nuclear fission is, sufficient enough to make it as safe and clean as nuclear, we might suddenly find that nuclear is actually very cheap.
To me it seems like a false dichotomy to suggest that nuclear is competing with solar/wind. At best it's competing with solar/wind + batteries, but in reality it's competing with natural gas and coal. And natural gas & coal have an unfair advantage because society and our governments have drastically more tolerance for it's absurdly greater lethality and pollution compared to nuclear.
Fun fact, since the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was founded in the US in 1975, they have not approved ANY new nuclear sites, only a few expansions of existing sites. I honestly wonder how many deaths the NRC is responsible for by beating down nuclear development to the benefit of the fossil fuel industry.
My quick glance impression was that the author seems to dismiss renewables based on their low fraction of total energy use (including direct use that doesn't go through electricity as an intermediate step when served by fossils, e.g. transport, metallurgy and so on) but ignores that nuclear has never substituted those energy use case either (ignoring a few aircraft carriers and subs)
Yes, a future with enough renewables to also substitute direct fossil use is quite hard to imagine. But a future with that much nuclear would be no less crazy.
Yeah, I thought this point in the article was off target:
> Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
Isn't this because we are at the beginning of an exponential curve? Or at least a sigmoid curve. That money wasn't wasted. A growth curve will look like nothing much until suddenly one day it takes over.
Also let's compare apples to apples and check how much money was spent to generate the 87% of energy... I'm guessing it's much higher than the trillions
Edit: and let's not forget that the capital spent on moving the needle to 84% will keep generating energy at marginal cost.
It’s by no means a given that wind/solar will be a major source of energy for the long term. If we’re lucky advancements in wind/solar and energy storage will make it a big part of our future energy supply. If we’re unlucky we’ve spent many trillions and made very little headway towards a more sustainable future.
Maybe the solution will turn out to be molten salt nuclear along with synthetic oil and carbon capture. Maybe something else altogether. Who knows, it’s still early.
I don’t think we should presume solar/wind will someday take over, and I’d like to see an “all of the above” energy strategy instead.
I went to work in construction to build energy-efficient homes, and I started a company that built composting systems for cities and businesses. I became executive director of an organization that championed green building policies and became CEO of a consulting firm that commercialized clean energy technologies and ran energy-efficiency programs. I then founded a software startup to help promote green home upgrades, and I led business development for a company making wireless power technology.
This is more than "clever writing" to me and you are just adding more data that do not invalidate his points.
I think it seems like yet another environmentalist that’s realized they were wrong on nukes and is now overcorrecting.
This is a “yes, and”, not an “or”. Yes we should build nukes and we should continue the massive ongoing deployment of renewables.
Recall the IEA estimates at current rates of consumption, we will be out of nuclear fuel in 200 years. Replacing fossil plants with nukes would mean accelerating that consumption rate such that we will be out of fuel in 25 years or so. Yes, there are non-commercial and experimental systems to run on other fuels and extract uranium from other places, but we should not bet the planet on them panning out. We should invest in all available options.
Why do you trust him about his credentials? Who is paying him now? He has no articles older than 2020 on his website, and the same is true of his podcasts. Where are his thoughts prior to that?
> Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited. Plus, many countries have already done it.
I don't see the author as arguing that we should all switch to natural gas.
Rather, I believe that they're trying to illustrate what they view to be a idealistic flawed thinking pattern ("utopian energy" or "green energy maximalism" or whatever you want to call it) and calling for a more rigorous and empirical engineering-like approach where a much larger trade-space is considered - even if that new approach leads to exactly the same conclusion/solution.
> Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint.
More people should participate in a debate club. A common assignment is to argue eloquently for a position you don't believe in, allowing you to see how eloquent sophistry can be placed in service of any position.
When it comes to technical questions like energy it should be logic, math, and real data or go home.
The source article here uses the rhetorical method of 'once I was a true believer in X, but then I saw the light about Y, let me share the revelation with you' and then tosses out a few highly questionable stats. It's a pretty tedious PR-centric approach.
More people should participate in a debate club. A common assignment is to argue eloquently for a position you don't believe in, allowing you to see how eloquent sophistry can be placed in service of any position.
I believe the opportunity for that has passed. Every debate competition I've watched in the last decade was just people trying to be as emotive and loud as humanly possible.
Ignoring the "technicals" when considering questions that have real implications for human beings is usually an rhetorical excuse given to focus on particular implications and ignore other, less favorable ones.
This is a huge problem for humanity to solve. We're more afraid of acute horrors that are statistically insignificant than we are of diffuse, but statistically horrifying dangers.
Would you rather live near a nuclear accident or a solar farm/wind turbine accident?
A simple consideration shows nuclear accidents are above and beyond the worst humans have ever experienced. There is no comparison, not even a close second.
It depends on the reactor type. High pressure and plutonium fuel? Sure! Low pressure and natural uranium is much safer. Thorium and molten salt reactors may be better still.
People have been claiming peak oil since the 1930's. Yawn.
> So green energy has supported economic and social development through electrification without adding new pollution sources.
Except for the manufacture and disposal of these "green" sources.
> Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.
Solar and wind are cheaper? Ha! We already have problems recycling blades from wind turbines and most are still not at the end of their lifespan. Same for solar - what do you do with all this crap a the end of it's 20 year lifespan?
*Total* cost of ownership. And never mind solar and wind still suck for base load management since we still lack cost effective energy storage that can scale at the grid level.
If the cost of extraction rises due to oil and gas being more and more difficult to access (because it's limited, obviously), you could claim demand has peaked but it would still be due to production cost (i.e production peaking). "The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil" (Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former SA Minister of Oil)
> We already have problems recycling blades from wind turbines and most are still not at the end of their lifespan.
> And never mind solar and wind still suck for base load management since we still lack cost effective energy storage that can scale at the grid level.
There have been articles for many decades now that we are reaching the peak of what can be pulled out of the ground. That we will simply run out of oil.
This is a lie. There is plenty of supply.
This is the argument op is making.
Whether to burn it or not is a different question.
The war may force Russia to sell their oil to non-Western countries but the crisis helped support oil price and made global investments in O&G profitable for them again (and for every other producers too). Just like with the war in Iraq - which explains why Putin did not oppose the US invasion for long after they realized it would bring enormous profits to Russia.
The peak oil producing month so far is November 2018. With COVID-19, and now war in Ukraine and an impending global recession combined with the progress of electric vehicles and solar production, it is entirely possible that this record will stand.
>I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissionsduring the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited. Plus, many countries have already done it.
>I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillionsof dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
We increased global generating capacity from 15,000 to 26,000 TWh. So green energy has supported economic and social development through electrification without adding new pollution sources.
>I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safestand most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.
Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity, but that safety comes at a financial cost. Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.