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Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

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Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#191

Post by pinkgolem »

passwordoops wrote: post #185
throwaway2037 wrote: post #67

> Nuclear. Start-up of the fourth reactor (1.1 GW) at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear power plant I checked the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... > Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed in July 2023.[9][10][11] This last report blames the latest increase in costs on the contractor not completing wor…

Regulation plays a significant role in cost overruns. Also we (should) expect the nuclear plants to work for at least a century while the panels and wind turbines last what, 5-15 years assuming no major storms damage them?

Check your data, newish solar is expected to have less then 20% degradation for 30+ years, afterwards its still usable.. but an exchange might be financially beneficial.

Windturbines are rated for 20+ and can be extended.. current generation are usally changed as there are bigger models available, with higher profit margins

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#192

Post by Zanfa »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #125
Zanfa wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I ran the numbers for this, price arbitrage alone using lithium batteries is not gonna be profitable. Current lithium batteries are just too expensive, store too little energy and degrade too quickly for true grid-scale storage. That’s why they typically offer services, other than price arbitrage, that actually makes building them make sense. There’s still no equivalent of a peaker plant using non-hydro sto…

Lots of energy companies across the globe seem to be disagreeing with you and are installing massive amounts of battery storage. Gas peaker plants are getting used a lot less on grids where this happens. Reason: your numbers and assumptions are probably wrong.

Or, like I mentioned in my comment, price arbitrage is not the primary source of profit.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#193

Post by mbgerring »

Maakuth wrote: post #85
why_only_15 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, PV solar capacity factor is about 0.24 (partly because lots of people live near very sunny regions like California and Texas). The National Renewable Energy Laboratory claims that in some parts of the US utility-scale solar capacity factors are 0.33 [0]. Wind is about 0.36, Hydro also 0.36, Nuclear about 0.93 [1]. If you apply these capacity factors to the nameplate capacities (ignoring batteries), you get…

Of course those capacity factors hide one important bit, the dispatchability. While the capacity factor is the same in this list for wind and hydro, the wind and solar generation are naturally capped by nature. When demand exceeds the natural availability of these, you need to dispatch some extra generation. Hydro and natural gas are well suited for this, coal can do it even if dirtily. Nuclear generation could be ma…

More on-site batteries can fix the need for dispatchable power on the grid side, and the cheaper batteries get, the more attractive such solutions start to look.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#194

Post by seiferteric »

oezi wrote: post #171
MagnumOpus wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French nuclear power has a levelized cost of about $70/MWh - which is about the same cost as the levelized cost of solar or wind in France, without most the headaches of intermittency. (Remember the average French person lives further north than the average Canadian...)

> which is about the same cost as the levelized cost of solar or wind in France As of 2024. Remember that solar and wind are still on a downward price trajectory and the reduced investment in Nuclear has meant that the prices to up. So if you have a figure for example of $70/MWh for PV and wind in mind from a couple of years ago, then this figure might be slightly outdated now and more slightly outdated tomorrow. PV…

> PV might go under $20/MWh at the end of the decade

It's never clear to me when these numbers are cited, clearly you must be talking about PV + battery right? Otherwise it would not be a fair comparison.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#195

Post by lucioperca »

hef19898 wrote: post #161
lucioperca wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is still plenty of water, the problem is that you have to limit heating the river. With a cooling tower can cool with or without evaporating water depending on the design but always without heating the river. But it is cheaper to directly dump the heat into the water.

And you cannot empty the river neither, especially during a drought, can you?

Dry cooling tower exists but they are more expensive. Natural cooling with the evaporation eventually runs into the problem due to built-up of salts which forces you to replace non-evaporated cooling water with fresh river water and lets you dump the heated water into the river (which is limiting factor due to environmental concerns). The less water is flowing and the higher the temperature of the river are the sooner this point is reached

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#196

Post by guappa »

Reason077 wrote: post #162
hef19898 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you saying? That Earth's rotation axis is, what, tilted? Outragious! Herasy!

Wait, Chicago is colder than Barcelona because of the Earth's tilt?!

No. Since the earth spins they both get the same solar energy.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#197

Post by hazmazlaz »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #67

> Nuclear. Start-up of the fourth reactor (1.1 GW) at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear power plant I checked the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... > Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed in July 2023.[9][10][11] This last report blames the latest increase in costs on the contractor not completing wor…

According to the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) in 2022 it cost approximately $1.06 per watt to install utility scale solar. So for the cost of the 1.1 GW Vogtle 4 reactor, utilities could have installed approximately 32 GW of utility scale solar. Obviously this is an extremely simplified and naive calculation that doesn't account for cost or availability of land, transmission infrastructure, battery or other energy storage, etc.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#198

Post by Angostura »

TomK32 wrote: post #107
littlestymaar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how many nuclear reactors does one worker build in their lifetime? 2? 4? That's not a lot of opportunity for process improvement. France built 58 over 20 years, that's how you make it economical. India says they want to do one a year IIRC, which is probably good enough too.

Wikipedia writes: "As of early September 2022, 32 of France's 56 nuclear reactors were shut down due to maintenance or technical problems" and "In 2022, Europe's driest summer in 500 years had serious consequences for power plant cooling systems, as the drought reduced the amount of river water available for cooling."

What proportion of wind turbines were off-line for maintenance over a similar period?

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#199

Post by wcoenen »

luizfwolf wrote: post #178
throwaway2037 wrote: post #67

> Nuclear. Start-up of the fourth reactor (1.1 GW) at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear power plant I checked the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... > Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed in July 2023.[9][10][11] This last report blames the latest increase in costs on the contractor not completing wor…

Nuclear is the most clean energy that can be generated on-demand, solar and wind can only generate energy depending on the external conditions. Batteries until today are not a viable solution. When talking about the electrical grid you have to be able to generate energy in any amount whenever you want.

> When talking about the electrical grid you have to be able to generate energy in any amount whenever you want.

Not exactly. It is possible to manage the demand side to some degree.

For example, Octopus Energy in the UK has a "Intelligent Octopus Go" contract which offers much cheaper night rates, in exchange for giving up control over when and at what rate your EV charges. You just tell them what battery percentage you need by what time in the morning. They plan the charging within this constraint and get paid by the grid operator to balance the grid.

Another example are dynamically priced contracts where the prices vary hour by hour based on the day-ahead market prices. I have such a contract and I charge my EV only during the cheapest hours when other demand is low. Sometimes I postpone charging for a day or more because I have sufficient charge for my needs and I expect lower prices later, e.g. based on weather or upcoming weekend.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#200

Post by mdorazio »

Zanfa wrote: post #117
nekoashide wrote: post #29

The cool thing about batteries is that they are great as an investment. You can charge them when power is cheap and sell back power when you have high demand and market prices for power. Typically Peaker Plants fill this role but at much higher cost for electricity and emissions. Batteries just make much more sense for this kind of power.

Last time I ran the numbers for this, price arbitrage alone using lithium batteries is not gonna be profitable. Current lithium batteries are just too expensive, store too little energy and degrade too quickly for true grid-scale storage. That’s why they typically offer services, other than price arbitrage, that actually makes building them make sense. There’s still no equivalent of a peaker plant using non-hydro sto…

Your numbers are likely outdated. The Tesla grid battery installation in Australia was so profitable that Neoen is building more as fast as it can: https://reneweconomy.com.au/neoen-aims-for-big-batteries-in-...
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