191–200 of 361 posts
“seven years late and $17 billion over budget. At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity” Ignoring interest for those 7 years and all other costs just the overage is insane. 17 billion / ( 1,100,000 kW * 90% capacity factor * 24 hour * 365 days * 50 years) = 4 cents per kWh. Add interest etc and someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Since then, no plant license that was initially submitted to the NRC has started operations. Plant Vogtle was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor to the NRC). Their license was grandfathered in. Building this reactor required a new reactor license (not plant license). Shortly after the reactor design was approved and construction started…
If the NRC is the problem, then why do we see identical cost overruns and schedule delays for France, Finland, and the UK? I don't think we can blame the NRC for this. There's something deeper.
We could do similar things to renewables by simply mandating that they have carbon free backup sources sufficient to guarantee four of five nines of reliability.
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Those high points are better addressed by such things as hydrogen-burning turbines. Hydrogen produced from excess renewables during the price troughs, stored underground, then burned at the peaks. Because the capacity factor of these turbines would be low the cost of fuel would be acceptable, and their capital cost would be an order of magnitude below what a nuclear plant would cost, per unit of power output. Europe…
People are naturally allowed to invest in what ever technology they think will fit the role best, such as green hydrogen. No one is investing in that, there exist no hydrogen-burning turbines that burn green hydrogen, but someone could become the first and do that. Producers of green hydrogen are currently more interested in delivering green steel, which pays much better than hydrogen-burning turbines. The general id…
https://www.deseret.com/2022/5/9/23046910/green-hydrogen-ene...
The project will take that excess solar and wind capacity and through a process called alkaline electrolysis it will separate oxygen and hydrogen from water through 220 megawatt electrolyzers, producing up to 110 tons of hydrogen a day.
It is called green hydrogen because it is derived from renewable power sources.
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The other “wow” factor of the project is the salt cavern storage reservoirs.
“Those salt caverns will be the largest single storage site for hydrogen, globally,” Ducker said.
He pointed out that the battery storage capacity across the United States sits at two gigawatt hours via lithium ion batteries. The Utah project will have storage for 300 gigawatt hours of energy.
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The salt domes for storing the hydrogen will be 3,500 feet underground and will be as deep as the Empire State building is tall — about 1,500 feet.
Ducker said the caverns will enable long duration storage of energy and prevent monthly curtailments of solar and wind energy.
Mitsubishi delivered the gas turbine generators for the project a few days ago:
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That is true when the market price is fairly static and doesn't change much. This is how it used to be when fossil fueled power dominated the grid, since the biggest cost is the fuel and that could scale based on demand. For EU this is no longer the case. The difference in market price between low and high can be above 100x. In theory a power plant could earn as much in 4 days as an other plant earn in a year worth o…
Those high points are better addressed by such things as hydrogen-burning turbines. Hydrogen produced from excess renewables during the price troughs, stored underground, then burned at the peaks. Because the capacity factor of these turbines would be low the cost of fuel would be acceptable, and their capital cost would be an order of magnitude below what a nuclear plant would cost, per unit of power output. Europe…
“seven years late and $17 billion over budget. At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity” Ignoring interest for those 7 years and all other costs just the overage is insane. 17 billion / ( 1,100,000 kW * 90% capacity factor * 24 hour * 365 days * 50 years) = 4 cents per kWh. Add interest etc and someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project.
> 4 cents per kWh. For comparison: I live in SF Bay Area and pay 42 cents per kWh.
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Your own math points out that this is a cost effective technology. 4 cents per kWh is quite cheap electricity.
That's an additional flat charge, _in addition to_ the cost it was last month.
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You’re calculating that storage number as if the solar power plant would have produced power for 24 hours. To simplify if you have 8 hours of power and you store 1/2 of it you need 4h of storage. So our hypothetical 4GW solar power plant produces 2GW for 8 hours and 1 GW for 16. That already batter fits the demand curve than steady state output. However things get better if you instead consider real world demand and…
Again, the demand curve is the opposite of what you claim: peak production happens during the night, at around 9 pm, not during the day. You'd need to supply more energy during periods of non-production, not less. You can't get away with 50% output at night, unless you have some other energy source picking up the slack. And remember, during the winter you're getting less than 12 hours of sunlight, maybe even less tha…
If you really want to model things you need to consider the vast drop off between midnight and 5 am in which that steady state I talked about would be wasted. Batteries don’t really care about when the peak is just the total demand minus power production. And again steady state like nuclear looks terrible by comparison.
Running summer numbers you see an extension in the number of hours the panels are producing which then reduced the gap you need to fill with batteries. Winter sees the reverse as average output drops but conversely batteries are storing a higher percentage of total energy produced. Sizing is further adjusted based on expectations for daily output not hypothetical maximums.
Which of those is more critical depends on local conditions but the grid is always sized for absolute worst case not the average one. There’s lots of micro optimization such as aiming panels East or West to shift production, local hydropower and wind resources etc etc.
None of which is that important compared to the overall effect I was describing where batteries are sized to the daily output not the peak output. The important number is the cost which is running 60$/MWh vs the daily demand not whatsoever the nameplate numbers people love to talk about to make projects seem more important.
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Non-interment kilowatt hours are actually less valuable. Demand dips at night, the weekend, spring and fall etc. So when negotiating power purchase agreements grid operators are pricing most of that production when it’s least valuable. Battery backed solar is becoming really popular with grid operators because you get the upsides of load following without the overhead of mostly idle production. The economics get inte…
Incorrect, demand peaks right as night starts and the sun goes down. See that peak [1] at 9pm? Battery backed solar is not even remotely feasible. To put this in perspective, the USA alone uses ~11.5 TWh of electricty each day. A battery to last through the night is over 5,000 GWh. 1. https://b698061.smushcdn.com/698061/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
You can see the difference here for today (choose a previous day if it's near the start of the day in California):
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx#secti...
The non-grid PV and wind peak is lowered, and shifted a couple of hours later.
And that graph still doesn't show consumer and behind the meter commercial PV impact. Historically there was a double peak, one of which has been wiped out entirely.
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Fossil fuel companies are those mustache-twirling profit optimization villains, and there is demonstrated evidence that they have run a decades long campaign against any form of energy that is not fossil fuel... 10-25% short fall doesn't require 10x over capacity, it requires a mix of overcapacity + storage + energy conservation measures.
The energy storage at relevant scale is nowhere near feasible as other comment chains explain. "Energy conservation" is just an admission that these sources can't generate enough energy.
Energy conservation is probably a better payback than either nuclear or renewables and better resilience for people infrastructure. For example, better insulation reduces energy costs in both cold winters and heat waves, and reduces the impact if there are grid/source failures by any technology. It also doesn't have a big crossover on the logistics tail of either nuclear or renewables, and so is a great thing to do in parallel to address climate change in general.
"Conservation is an admission of failure" is a purely ridiculous position.
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The sad part is, this is a solvable problem. If the nation really wanted to build a large number of safe, effective nuclear power plant, we could, and probably in a time frame of months, not years. But entrenched interest from natural gas and coal producers combined with anti-nuclear sentiment practically guarantee that will never happen. Nuclear power is held to too high of a standard to really be a viable source of…
None of that is the root problem. Nuclear plants are too big, and we can't build big things cheaply in this country. The idle corruption of middle managers is what kills these kinds of projects.
The USA can move mountains if it really wants to. But as it stands, the country is doing everything it can to keep that mountain right where it is.