If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive?

[bilby]

Quote Originally Posted by Sarpedon View Post
We should adjust pricing and usage to coincide with peak generation times. Personally, I think a lifestyle that is more in line with natural rhythms would be healthier as well as save energy.
Personally I think that civilisation has been a continuing struggle to overcome 'natural rhythms', and that that struggle is an overall good thing, that we shouldn't abandon so casually.

What you describe is called 'energy poverty', and people who live with it - whose power supply is intermittently available and who have to adjust their life's to fit in with its availability, absolutely fucking hate it.

Only someone who has never needed to worry that they might not have access to electricity whenever they want it could seriously entertain such a foolish and regressive notion.

Personally, I think civilization is the march of the empowered classes finding new ways to exploit ordinary people. Clocks: Now we can measure and assert ownership over people's time! Electric light: Now we can make people work at night! Telephones: Now we can summon people to work whenever we want! etc. There are a myriad studies to show that being forced to adopt unnatural behavior patterns adds stress, reduces life satisfaction, and causes health problems.

I am not suggesting the same thing as you are asserting: the electricity only works when the power station decides to send it to your zone, so you have to work like a maniac to make use of it, whatever time of day that is. Rather, especially with things like solar power and natural light, we will go back to something more resembling a pre-industrial life, where people are most active during the day, and asleep or engaging in less power related activities at night.

People already ARE most active during the day, and asleep or engaging in less power related activities at night. But power is still required 24 hours a day. Hospitals can't shut down at night; Street lighting saves huge numbers of lives; And large industrial plants that are major users of power need to run 24x7 - you can't run a smelter eight hours a day if it takes 10 hours to reach operating temperature once it has cooled down - and that's just three quick examples. People are not using power at nighttime because they feel like squandering a bit of energy; They have good reasons to be doing it.

 

[lpetrich]

About 1.8 million lives have already been saved by nuclear power; and another 7 million could be saved in the next forty years. (source) That's not something we should delay.

But from that article, "Of course, some or most of this hypothetically canceled nuclear power could be replaced by power from renewables, which have generally similar impact factors as nuclear." then citing a figure in a reference. Meaning that wind and solar could do just as well in saving lives.

 

[barbos]

About 1.8 million lives have already been saved by nuclear power; and another 7 million could be saved in the next forty years. (source) That's not something we should delay.

But from that article, "Of course, some or most of this hypothetically canceled nuclear power could be replaced by power from renewables, which have generally similar impact factors as nuclear." then citing a figure in a reference. Meaning that wind and solar could do just as well in saving lives.

They claim amount of deaths per kwh in solar power industry is much higher than in nuclear. Of course that statistics is BS because it's mostly due to their their math in which number of people is simply lower for nukes hence number of accidents is lower.

 

[bilby]

About 1.8 million lives have already been saved by nuclear power; and another 7 million could be saved in the next forty years. (source) That's not something we should delay.

But from that article, "Of course, some or most of this hypothetically canceled nuclear power could be replaced by power from renewables, which have generally similar impact factors as nuclear." then citing a figure in a reference. Meaning that wind and solar could do just as well in saving lives.

Sure. But not as well at providing reliable and continuous power.

There's nothing wrong with a small amount of wind or solar power; But they are no good as a large fraction of your generating capacity, unless you want to build massively more capacity than average demand, and then spend a HUGE amount of money and resources on storage. Or unless you are happy to burn a lot of gas to fill in for the large gaps in availability of power from wind and solar.

 

[steve_bank]

GenIV reactors don't exist yet. They are merely research proposals.

FYI: Generation IV reactor -

The majority of the 6 designs are generally not expected to be available for commercial construction until 2020–30.

Does it make sense to start the process of building lots of the old style reactors when these are so close to being available? Will they burn the spent fuel from the older reactors?

Two problems. Investment expects as short as possible time to return on investment. Congress and primarily conservatives reject any idea of long term planning. Any coherent long term energy plan would be considered interference in the free market economy, where market forces make the choices. It is a fundamental weakness in our political system.

China has learned to develop 5 year plans and effectively execute them. It is why they made such rapid progress on infrastructure.

 

[barbos]

FYI: Generation IV reactor -


Does it make sense to start the process of building lots of the old style reactors when these are so close to being available? Will they burn the spent fuel from the older reactors?

Two problems. Investment expects as short as possible time to return on investment. Congress and primarily conservatives reject any idea of long term planning. Any coherent long term energy plan would be considered interference in the free market economy, where market forces make the choices. It is a fundamental weakness in our political system.

China has learned to develop 5 year plans and effectively execute them. It is why they made such rapid progress on infrastructure.

True, but with all their planning they ended up with a bunch empty malls and even whole cities.
New nuke designs have been researched for a long while, yet no commercial designs were suggested for some reasons.
But you are right, nukes are expensive and it takes very long time to return investment. With that in mind, can anyone guarantee that solar does not kill these nukes before they return money spent on them? We are talking about 20-40 years period, it's a long time as far as battery research concerned. Once they get get cheap battery all these new shiny nuclear reactor you just built become obsolete and would have to be decommissioned

 

[steve_bank]

The investment for a new nuke plant is far higher than solar. You also need a source of water.

I read China is developing solar powered transit systems. I expect they want to get off of dependence on foreign coal and oil.

As to malls, on the contrary China has been building malls and the like to serve their new middle class. There have been large scale displacements for infrastructure like their massive hydro and lock system project on a river. It flooded a large area contain a lot of historic buildings and other things.

 

[bilby]

The investment for a new nuke plant is far higher than solar. You also need a source of water.

I read China is developing solar powered transit systems. I expect they want to get off of dependence on foreign coal and oil.

As to malls, on the contrary China has been building malls and the like to serve their new middle class. There have been large scale displacements for infrastructure like their massive hydro and lock system project on a river. It flooded a large area contain a lot of historic buildings and other things.

Solar power is very expensive - particularly given its woeful capacity factor, leading to the requirement for expensive backup power or storage; And the large environmental externalities due to the very toxic waste materials produced in the manufactiuring process for PV panels.

An EU-funded research study known as ExternE, or Externalities of Energy, undertaken from 1995 to 2005, found that the cost of producing electricity from coal or oil would double, and the cost of electricity production from gas would increase by 30% if external costs such as damage to the environment and to human health, from the particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, chromium VI, river water alkalinity, mercury poisoning and arsenic emissions produced by these sources, were taken into account. It was estimated in the study that these external, downstream, fossil fuel costs amount up to 1–2% of the EU's Gross Domestic Product, and this was before the external cost of global warming from these sources was included. The study also found that the environmental and health costs of nuclear power, per unit of energy delivered, was lower than many renewable sources, including that caused by biomass and photovoltaic solar panels, but was higher than the external costs associated with wind power and alpine hydropower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants
http://www.externe.info/externe_2006/exterpols.html

Unlike solar power, which is best sited in deserts, nuclear plants need water - and most humans live near water. So the transmission costs for nuclear can be far smaller. Solar power uses a LOT of land, and cannot cost effectively be sited near cities, where land prices are high. Nuclear power plants can be built in or near cities - unlike solar power plants, the cost of the land they sit on is rarely a significant fraction of the total construction cost.

 

[barbos]

Nonsense, Solar is being put on the house roofs, you can't get closer than that.
And nukes still have longer payback time than solar.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

About 1.8 million lives have already been saved by nuclear power; and another 7 million could be saved in the next forty years. (source) That's not something we should delay.

But from that article, "Of course, some or most of this hypothetically canceled nuclear power could be replaced by power from renewables, which have generally similar impact factors as nuclear." then citing a figure in a reference. Meaning that wind and solar could do just as well in saving lives.

No, because something has to back that solar and wind.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

About 1.8 million lives have already been saved by nuclear power; and another 7 million could be saved in the next forty years. (source) That's not something we should delay.

But from that article, "Of course, some or most of this hypothetically canceled nuclear power could be replaced by power from renewables, which have generally similar impact factors as nuclear." then citing a figure in a reference. Meaning that wind and solar could do just as well in saving lives.

They claim amount of deaths per kwh in solar power industry is much higher than in nuclear. Of course that statistics is BS because it's mostly due to their their math in which number of people is simply lower for nukes hence number of accidents is lower.

Your understanding of statistics is BS.

Once you've scaled it per kwh (or, more reasonably, per twh) you're using the right scale. It's how many people die in making power. How many people are exposed to the risk to get that value is irrelevant to anyone but the workers in the field.

Nuke does have fewer workers, but they're also in far safer conditions. Those solar workers tend to be up on roofs that don't have industrial-level safety precautions built in--lots of falls. Also, the production of those solar cells involves some pretty nasty chemicals. We think of water as something that puts out fires--but in the semiconductor industry they routinely use a solvent that will actually burn water.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

About 1.8 million lives have already been saved by nuclear power; and another 7 million could be saved in the next forty years. (source) That's not something we should delay.

But from that article, "Of course, some or most of this hypothetically canceled nuclear power could be replaced by power from renewables, which have generally similar impact factors as nuclear." then citing a figure in a reference. Meaning that wind and solar could do just as well in saving lives.

Sure. But not as well at providing reliable and continuous power.

There's nothing wrong with a small amount of wind or solar power; But they are no good as a large fraction of your generating capacity, unless you want to build massively more capacity than average demand, and then spend a HUGE amount of money and resources on storage. Or unless you are happy to burn a lot of gas to fill in for the large gaps in availability of power from wind and solar.

Actually, there's sort of an answer here:

There are things that are done where much of the cost is power, but the nature of the job is that it can be done start-stop. The prime example of this is desalinization. The world is running out of fresh water. A lot of that excess capacity can be directed to producing fresh water, recharging pumped hydro etc. A cloud comes along and the power is cut to such uses. Big transmission lines will average thigns out pretty well, so local weather won't be a big problem.

You still need nuke for night, though.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As to malls, on the contrary China has been building malls and the like to serve their new middle class. There have been large scale displacements for infrastructure like their massive hydro and lock system project on a river. It flooded a large area contain a lot of historic buildings and other things.

They have been overbuilding. The malls sit empty or nearly empty (I've been in one that I don't think had better than 20% occupancy, there are some that are far worse.)

I do agree they built a truly massive dam, although that's as much a flood control project as a power project.

 

[bilby]

Sure. But not as well at providing reliable and continuous power.

There's nothing wrong with a small amount of wind or solar power; But they are no good as a large fraction of your generating capacity, unless you want to build massively more capacity than average demand, and then spend a HUGE amount of money and resources on storage. Or unless you are happy to burn a lot of gas to fill in for the large gaps in availability of power from wind and solar.

Actually, there's sort of an answer here:

There are things that are done where much of the cost is power, but the nature of the job is that it can be done start-stop. The prime example of this is desalinization. The world is running out of fresh water. A lot of that excess capacity can be directed to producing fresh water, recharging pumped hydro etc. A cloud comes along and the power is cut to such uses. Big transmission lines will average thigns out pretty well, so local weather won't be a big problem.

You still need nuke for night, though.

If you are going to use stuff like desalination for load balancing, you are better off running nuclear flat out 24x7, and desalinating, (or filling pumped-storage facilities, or other industrial processes that can handle intermittent power) with the 'spare' power at night when total demand falls off. Running solar for ~6 to 8 hours a day for desalination would work, but it doesn't leave a lot of electricity left over for industrial, commercial or domestic daytime use - and as you say, you STILL need something else to make electricity at night (or in the case of wind, on calm days).

Desalination can help to smooth the demand curve. But that only helps match demand to supply if you have a smooth-ish supply curve - which wind and solar most certainly do not.

Any generator with a supply curve that can't meet or exceed it's share of base load 24x7 is going to cause problems, unless you can rapidly control the supply curve from that generator (eg with highly dispatchable CCGTs). Wind and solar have fluctuating supply curves that are completely uncontrolled, with long periods of zero generation. That's pretty unhelpful - and if it constitutes more than a small percentage of power generation, it's a total disaster.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Nonsense, Solar is being put on the house roofs, you can't get closer than that.
And nukes still have longer payback time than solar.

Putting solar on the roof has some big problems, though. I can't understand why it's even legal to feed power back onto the grid--it's a violation of one of the basic electrical safety rules. (Normally you must never use a wire that is not rated for at least as much current as the circuit breaker or fuse protecting it. However, grid-tied solar violates this. It's routine to see electrical feeds where the various outputs have a higher total rating than the input. Just go look in your breaker box to see this in action--add up all your small breakers and compare them to the big breaker. Now, the distribution grid works the same way, a grid segment isn't rated to deliver the maximum that the houses on it could draw. Put solar on the roofs and you can be pushing more power than the segment is rated for. So far this has been stopped by the utilities but the customers understandably hate it--"too many of your neighbors have solar, you can't have it.")

 

[bilby]

Nonsense, Solar is being put on the house roofs, you can't get closer than that.
And nukes still have longer payback time than solar.

Putting solar on the roof has some big problems, though. I can't understand why it's even legal to feed power back onto the grid--it's a violation of one of the basic electrical safety rules. (Normally you must never use a wire that is not rated for at least as much current as the circuit breaker or fuse protecting it. However, grid-tied solar violates this. It's routine to see electrical feeds where the various outputs have a higher total rating than the input. Just go look in your breaker box to see this in action--add up all your small breakers and compare them to the big breaker. Now, the distribution grid works the same way, a grid segment isn't rated to deliver the maximum that the houses on it could draw. Put solar on the roofs and you can be pushing more power than the segment is rated for. So far this has been stopped by the utilities but the customers understandably hate it--"too many of your neighbors have solar, you can't have it.")

Solar on the roof might work for places with low power demand to roofsize ratios, like domestic homes - although as you say, it has real problems.

It's completely impractical for factories, or even commercial premises, though. And they are about two thirds of your demand. So you need stuff like this:



or this:



In remote desert locations, where land is cheap, and clouds are rare. (And you STILL struggle to get better than 25% capacity factor out of them. So for every installed MW, you only get about 6MWh/day of electricity - compared with about 22MWh/day from each MW of installed nuclear capacity).

 

[fromderinside]

I find it interesting that a technology the has had a 70 year roadblock against radical innovation is being compared with a technology in its infancy that is showing productivity improvements of about 60% per decade.

Sometimes it is best to let a negatively politicized technology just go away rather than try to push it in any wild way one can. We don't use DDT any more do we?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead and throw batteries at me.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Sometimes it is best to let a negatively politicized technology just go away rather than try to push it in any wild way one can. We don't use DDT any more do we?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead and throw batteries at me.

It's not going away, and it's not negatively politicized everywhere (not in a significant fashion, anyway; there are at least a few people who oppose nuclear in any country, but then, the same goes for solar, wind, etc.). If the West moves away from nuclear, China, Russia and many other countries will still use it, develop it further, etc., in some cases acquiring power stations designed in the West - and eventually improving them domestically -, in others with their own designs.

 

[bilby]

I find it interesting that a technology the has had a 70 year roadblock against radical innovation is being compared with a technology in its infancy that is showing productivity improvements of about 60% per decade.

Sometimes it is best to let a negatively politicized technology just go away rather than try to push it in any wild way one can. We don't use DDT any more do we?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead and throw batteries at me.

It's an interesting result of the propaganda machine that you imagine that solar power is new, while nuclear power you consider to be dated.

Solar panels date from 1876. Nuclear fission from 1942.

There's nothing novel and modern about solar power; if novel and modern floats your boat, nuclear power wins hands down.

If you think solar power is in its infancy, you are badly mistaken. If you think nuclear power isn't, you are even more mistaken.

Oh, and it's probably a bad thing that we don't still use DDT. The number of deaths from Malaria alone due to its discontinuation is almost certainly high enough to more than offset any benefits from banning it.

The DDT ban was a benefit to rich Americans. Not so much to poor Africans.

 

[fromderinside]

Oh, and it's probably a bad thing that we don't still use DDT. The number of deaths from Malaria alone due to its discontinuation is almost certainly high enough to more than offset any benefits from banning it.

The DDT ban was a benefit to rich Americans. Not so much to poor Africans.

Mission accomplished. Rattled cage got overreach.

What makes mosquitoes unique with respect to developing resistance to DDT/DDE? Try nothing.

You have got to be a pelican hater.

How's this for overreach. When it comes to stuff doing harm using malaria incidence as a defense rates right up there with blaming lessening of effectiveness of antibiotics on the use of bleach for keeping counters clean.

I don't see you coming over here to the States to save Salmon on the Columbia.