591–600 of 632 posts
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One larger cost you might think of with solar is land - but even in the U.K. where land isn’t exactly cheap leasing prices are about £1k an acre per year, and an acre will generate about 350MWh a year, so that’s well under 1 cent per kWh, so it’s lost in the noise. https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/alternative-land-uses-leasing...
Yea and that 0.3c/kWh land cost is in the UK which is a terrible fit for nuclear.
I spend four months of the year traveling in an RV. Two years ago, I budgeted over $6000 for my desired solar setup (at least 1200Ah of battery, at least 2400W of solar, plus various controllers and other components). It was expensive enough for me to hold off, and more importantly, I didn't have the space on my current RV for the solar panels. In just the two years since then, prices on batteries and panels have dro…
If you're looking for some inexpensive land that can be fairly remote you might do worse than Cochise county AZ. The county has an opt out permit program as long as you have at least 4 rural acres. You can build whatever you want, no permits, no inspections. There are some restrictions. No bank will give you a mortgage, can't sell or rent it out within 2 years. You can live in your RV while you build, for 2 years I t…
The worst part about any long-term RV situation is the tanks. Full hookup is great, but generally only existed at the kind of campgrounds I try to avoid, where everyone is crammed together. I spent most of my time at state park campgrounds, which usually have decently-large sites, but rarely have sewer hookups (even when they do have water and electric). I got a Rhino tote to empty my tanks without moving the trailer. That helped a lot. It's still both tedious and gross, but it's a lot less time and hassle than moving the trailer. That's only really viable if there's a dump station in the campground, though. I've used it while boondocking, putting the tank in the bed of my pickup, but that sucks a million ways.
I'll probably get sick of full-timing pretty quickly. I'm already sick of it this summer. The past two summers, I wasn't working, and it was a lot less stressful.
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> If you're looking for some inexpensive land that can be fairly remote you might do worse than Cochise county AZ It's pretty hard to do worse than "the very small amount of water is being sucked dry because there are no regulations around water use." Once the water table compacts, it never comes back... > Rooftop water collection for water. It's one of the dries parts of the country. Good fucking luck. A growing num…
I'm not endorsing it as a sane idea, but for people who think the idea of living on Mars is cool, living in areas like this could push forward development of compatible technologies- like retaining and recycling all water. Like right now my mind is trying to imagine a solar powered desiccator and water recollection device that could dehydrate all compost and bodily excretions.
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But sometime in the 90’s if not sooner a lot of us started valuing items that had a lower embodied energy as a ratio of the usefulness of the product. We want things that are the same but less intense, or that are much better at a fractional increase in input. And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous.
> And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous. We just need to use nuclear power.
If you had a magic wand and created 100 TW of nuclear power tomorrow then the papers would fill with stories about Heat Pollution.
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>Solar input in orbit is higher than what is received at ground, but similar order of magnitude. On a sunny day, it's only something like 30% brighter above the atmosphere IIRC. I guess you beat cloud cover (assuming you can deliver it to ground through the clouds efficienly), but I agree it doesn't seem worth it.
9X brighter
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I was going off 100 gallons per day per person, which is typical, but can obviously be improved upon. But that said, I don’t want to pay $7000 per year just for water. Plus living remotely like that is just terribly inefficient in general: food, trash, heating/cooling, transportation, water, and just everything all take much more effort/resources to produce in a solo venture like that. I’m not saying I don’t see the…
Net zero living looks a lot more like the Upper West Side than a cabin in the woods.
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Also, if you need a doctor or ambulance to come to you it first needs to drive the hour up and then another hour to an hospital. But maybe that type of care works differently when distances are so large. Are helicopters used? Large distances for planned care is probably manageable. For urgent care not so much. Living alone also means not having someone else that can signal the emergency services when something is wro…
We have http://lifeflight.org in the Rocky Mountain West. $85 a year. I wish they would expand into ground service in my area so I didn't have to worry about ambulance bills. Maybe pick up a personal anti choking device ( https://www.amazon.com/anti-choking-device/s?k=anti+choking+... ) as well.
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> Pure PV farms have minimal operational costs, nuclear has huge ongoing costs. https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... page 59 table 3.13a puts O&M for nuclear in the USA at about 12 USD/MWh plus just over 9 USD/MWh for fuel, and table 3.14 puts O&M for utility scale solar at around 6 USD/MWh or so. As for batteries, I think a few hundred USD/kWh is a reasonable guesstimate of cost (raw LiFeP…
I disagree with your quoted numbers. They aren’t current or inflation adjust to the same year, they also exclude several costs associated with nuclear such as insurance and setting money aside for decommissioning. Ex: Your quoted fuel costs would be 0.9c/kWh in (2020 publish date) = 1.3c/kWh in 2024. O&M is often quoted as 4x fuel costs so 5.2kWh. “Fuel costs account for about 28% of a nuclear plant's operating expen…
Page 41 states
All costs are reported here in 2018 USD terms.
Insurance is required for any industrial facility. The IEA report does not mention insurance. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec... puts insurance costs at around 1M USD/year (and separate conditional payments if an accident does happen), which divided by 9M MWh/reactor does not work out to much.
> setting money aside for decommissioning
For nuclear between 0.01 and 0.39 USD/MWh, and solar between 0.03 and 0.58 USD/MWh (depending on discounting).
> O&M is often quoted as 4x fuel costs
The data in the IEA report differs; it is somewhere between the fuel costs and twice the fuel costs.
> Not every kWh from a solar farm needs to be stored
Rooftop solar will cannibalise the utility solar's daytime market. The demand for utility solar's energy will for the most part occur when the sun does not shine.
> a state with peak demand of 6GW is going to have transmission lines setup for 6GW.
But this ignores the physicality of the grid; power stations are dispatched based on location as well as availability because transmission is expensive to build and limited in capacity.
> you have nuclear with 4x 1.5GW reactors averaging ~40% utilization
So your demand model is 2GW for 22 hours and 6GW for 2 hours, right? Are there many places which exhibit such wild swings? Dynamic pricing/load shifting, pumped hydro and OCGTs would be the traditional solutions.
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I disagree with your quoted numbers. They aren’t current or inflation adjust to the same year, they also exclude several costs associated with nuclear such as insurance and setting money aside for decommissioning. Ex: Your quoted fuel costs would be 0.9c/kWh in (2020 publish date) = 1.3c/kWh in 2024. O&M is often quoted as 4x fuel costs so 5.2kWh. “Fuel costs account for about 28% of a nuclear plant's operating expen…
> They aren’t current or inflation adjust to the same year Page 41 states All costs are reported here in 2018 USD terms. > several costs associated with nuclear such as insurance Insurance is required for any industrial facility. The IEA report does not mention insurance. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec... puts insurance costs at around 1M USD/year (and separate conditional payments if an…
So even further out of date.
> O&M is often quoted as 4x fuel costs The data in the IEA report differs; it is somewhere between the fuel costs and twice the fuel costs.
Operations & Maintenance must include fuel costs… They are doing the thing where they break actual costs into several buckets to make actual operational costs seem lower. Refurbishment isn’t maintenance yadda yadda.
Same deal is going on with insurance. That 1.1 M / year covers some nuclear accidents, but the self insurance risk is quite significant even if you exclude the risk subsidy assumed by governments. IE: In the event of a large scale disaster insurance doesn’t make the reactor owner whole meaning their out the value of 1 or more nuclear reactors.
So yea 1.1M / year only works out to 0.01c/kWh but that’s an underestimate.
> Rooftop solar will cannibalise the utility solar's daytime market. The demand for utility solar's energy will for the most part occur when the sun does not shine.
Even assuming vastly more rooftop solar… PV panels produce power on a long tail curve not just at peak hours. Rooftop solar however only supplies the grid with power after the houses needs are met which is a significantly narrower area.