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Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

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Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#211

Post by jakewins »

ouid wrote: post #178
thomasmg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#212

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #184
0x53 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$25k / 12months / 9 years = $230. Which seems reasonable.

a $230 monthly electricity bill in Seattle is a lot

...which argues that it takes longer than 9 years to break-even. The panels lose a little bit of life each year, too.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#213

Post by anonymousiam »

xbar wrote: post #201
lukeschlather wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am not convinced of the spending priority today, but I am convinced that figuring out clean energy is the most important goal to achieve. I am mostly worried that a fossil-fueled extinction beats science to the storage solution of your dreams. Why risk that when nuclear is available?

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.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#214

Post by danans »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #184
0x53 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$25k / 12months / 9 years = $230. Which seems reasonable.

a $230 monthly electricity bill in Seattle is a lot

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.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#215

Post by nightski »

pfdietz wrote: post #204
77pt77 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> waste isn't really the issue with nuclear power either. So what is? Because you're working overtime here against it without giving any reasons whatsoever.

> So what is? Cost. It's the reason few nuclear plants are being built. No other reason is needed.

I'm not buying that all the solar panels, batteries, and grid infrastructure will produce little waste. Do you have any references to studies this or are you just going by gut feeling?

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#216

Post by Brian_K_White »

efields wrote: post #205
jamie_ca wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

20 year payback horizon for us in MD, USA. And that's still would only covering 20-40% of our annual electric usage. We have a fully electric house. It doesn't take more than a couple trees in the wrong place to make you a lousy candidate for solar.

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.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#217

Post by idiotsecant »

ShockTohp wrote: post #115
elil17 wrote: post #26

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…

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.

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.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#218

Post by dpierce9 »

arcticbull wrote: post #199
dpierce9 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#219

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

danans wrote: post #214
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a $230 monthly electricity bill in Seattle is a lot

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 $…

Forgot about the EVs. Excellent point there.

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.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#220

Post by michaelbarton »

anonporridge wrote: post #202
RobertRoberts wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity Until there is an accident, then it's literally the worst.

Nuclear is still the safest, even including Chernobyl and Fukishima. An equivalent number of people die from solar and wind, independently. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy 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.

Completely agree. There’s a very digestible video on why this is true as well.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ

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