Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

eia.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 276 posts

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

#211

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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.

> to be able to generate energy in any amount whenever you want.

This isn't true. Demand is predictable to some degree on multiple timescales.

But if it was true, why would that help nuclear? It is most suited to the role of producing a set amount of power continuously.

Why are so many people fans of this mythical nuclear power they've invented inside their own head? (or had fed to them)?

It all just seems like lazy, second-hand, anti-renewable propaganda.

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

#212

Post by doikor »

Reason077 wrote: post #166
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...)

> "French nuclear power has a levelized cost of about $70/MWh" That may be true for the existing nuclear fleet, but the cost of new-build nuclear is significantly higher. Flamanville 3, which is expected to finally come online in mid-2024 after 17 years of construction, was estimated at €125/MWh in 2022.

This is in large part because they are not building a bit over 2 reactors per year anymore.

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

#213

Post by doikor »

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 for instance. Nobody will be able to compete with that.

Except places where the sun doesn't shine much long periods of time (far north/south).

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

#214

Post by passwordoops »

pinkgolem wrote: post #191
passwordoops wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So still 1/3 and 1/5 expected lifetime for nuclear

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

#215

Post by jacquesm »

audunw wrote: post #182
jacquesm wrote: post #9

That's nice, but there is a long way to go, also it would probably be better to see batteries as a part of the 'storage' bracket, after all the batteries don't generate electricity, they store it. It's a bit like lumping fields of grain in with bags for grain. The one is useful all by itself, the other can't function without some other generator doing its job first. Typically the use for storage in the form of batter…

I think it's actually brilliant to include battery together with energy generation. We know that when renewables become more than 20% of power generation, every GW of renewables you add should be matched by a similar order of magnitude of batteries. So if we start reporting this way, you can immediately see if we're building enough energy storage or not. If you wanted to make the amount of power actually produced com…

Sure, but batteries simply don't generate power: you store an X number of KWh in them based on the rate of your charger and the rate-of-charge of your battery and you can discharge them using an inverter (which again, has a nameplate rating) limited by the rate of discharge of the batteries (usually pretty close to the charging rate so this tends to be symmetrical).

You could have a massive storage with a relatively small inverter for discharge but a large charging capacity, the reverse and so on all highly dependent on the intended use case. So battery capacity doesn't say anything about the eventual grid capacity of the setup, for that you need to take into account all of the components (charger, battery size + charge/discharge rate + inverter). Only then you can put it into perspective.

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

#216

Post by Alpha3031 »

Maakuth wrote: post #123
randunel wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of batteries in the US are built out of water. They pump the water up during the day and it generates electricity at night. No lithium involved. > Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, the United States Department of Energy Global Energy Storage Database reports that PSH accounts for around 95% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide…

Pumped storage is a type of grid storage, but I don't think TFA includes it in battery storage. Pumped storage is a fine technology, but is there a lot of build potential left for it?

> Pumped storage is a fine technology, but is there a lot of build potential left for it?

"A lot" is probably subjective, but the two best known global estimates are Hunt et al. (2020) [1] from IIASA and Stocks et al. from ANU re100 (who incidentally also have some interactive maps [3]) which with different cost targets put potential at 17.3 and 23 PWh respectively, which works out to about 2 MWh per person. For comparison, for the past decade, the US ahs consumed about 13 MWh of electricity per person per year, down from a peak of slightly under 14 in 2000 and 2005. With very high levels of electrification, that could potentially rise to 24 to 28 MWh per person per year, or 8 or 9 PWh/yr for the whole country. Total primary energy use is a lot higher, around 90 MWh per person–year or 30 PWh total, this is because both not everything could be practically electrified and the things that could easily be electrified tend to be much more efficient when done electrically. Energy efficiency is also usually assumed to increase slightly in general.

The US specifically is actually above the world average at about 4.5 MWh per capita according to the ANU team's estimates. That's 1.5 PWh per year roughly. In any case, I would expect that there is likely to very likely sufficient potential in most (if not all) grids for pumped hydro to be a significant part of medium duration energy storage (if not all of it), though whether it actually would depends on the costs of other technologies as well.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14555-y

[2]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2020.11.015

[3]: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/

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

#217

Post by epistasis »

hazmazlaz wrote: post #197
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…

That number does include the cost of land for the solar, which is fairly insignificant.

For the cost of batteries, NREL published this review of reviews, and lands at ~480/kWh of capacity:

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf

So split the $35B (there's a recent $3B that hasn't made it wikipedia, as I understand it) half and half, and you get 17GW of solar, and 36GWh of storage.

As far as translating this into per-kWh costs, most estimates I have seen put Vogtle at $0.17-$0.18/kWh. The equivalent for solar is $0.04/kWh. To charge a battery with that same solar, and then deliver it later, it's $0.13/kWh, when doing the napkin math with those NREL numbers up there.

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

#218

Post by sokoloff »

okeuro49 wrote: post #186
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...)

> Remember the average French person lives further north than the average Canadian The opposite is true, I think.

Did you try to find data? Or just reporting on your intuition about this thing that someone else thought might be surprising and turned out to be surprising?

It seems like half of Canada's populations lives south of 45.5°N. [1]

Someone else calculated the mean population latitude of France to be just over 47°N [2]

Mean and median aren't the same, but in this case, the measures are far enough apart that it does seem like the average (however reasonably defined) French resident lives north of the average (same defined) Canadian resident.

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50122/do-50-of-...

[2] https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/1125

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

#219

Post by pinkgolem »

passwordoops wrote: post #214
pinkgolem wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So still 1/3 and 1/5 expected lifetime for nuclear

Wich nuclear reactor has a planned lifetime of 100+ years without expensive rebuild?

That seems very far fetched

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

#220

Post by cma »

epistasis wrote: post #217
hazmazlaz wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That number does include the cost of land for the solar, which is fairly insignificant. For the cost of batteries, NREL published this review of reviews, and lands at ~480/kWh of capacity: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf So split the $35B (there's a recent $3B that hasn't made it wikipedia, as I understand it) half and half, and you get 17GW of solar, and 36GWh of storage. As far as translating this into…

Lifetime of panels and batteries vs modern nuclear plant? I guess also do the nuclear numbers use the real liability and disposal costs, or subsidized ones?
Post reply on HN