Interesting that even on the yearly chart almost all green and greenish areas get their 'green' power from hydro and nuclear by large. If only wind and solar produced as much power as they do talk.
The renewables buildout is still ongoing, while the nuclear and hydro areas were built decades ago. The hydro areas are also mostly former glaciated areas, which is a great advantage in terms of suitable sites.
The post-first-oil-crash nuclear buildout might have continued if it hadn't been for the combination of fossil fuel becoming cheap again and Chernobyl fallout covering the entirety of northern Europe. The symbolism of Reagan taking Carter's solar panels off the White House made it clear that wasn't going to be the path.
The initial nuclear rollout ran into capacity factor issues. They barely broke even at 90+% capacity factors with subsidies and would have needed increasing subsidies to become as common as coal. Ultra cheap energy storage would have fixed the issue, but nothing was viable at the time.
Unfortunately, renewables cause similar issues. If solar tanks wholesale prices for 8 hours a day nuclear needs to make that up on the other 16. Meanwhile Solar hits the same wall once it needs energy storage.
Hydro ran out of ideal locations in most countries etc which is why we have so many different energy sources. The only way things hangs is if the underlying economics does. Nuclear with an 80% reduction in operating and decommissioned costs would largely take over the world.
Australia is already on track to have half of that already with snowy 2 (350Gwh).
This also doesn't take into account stuff like https://octopus.energy/agile/ that can use pricing to adjust demand to supply. Heating, car battery charging, industrial processes like aluminum smelting - lots of demand can be time shifted easily.
I am specifically referring to a nuclear power plant’s income here. If they averaged 10c per kWh over a year that’s X$/year. To make that same X$/year when wholesale prices are 2c/kWh for 8 hours a day they would need to be average 14c/kWh for 16 hours to average 10c/kWh over a full day. Aka (8 * 2c + 16 * 14c)/24 = 10c
The above is of course a simplification of a complex market, but illustrates a real effect related to the “duck curve.”
Of course, this is why markets where everyone is forced to sell into a single pool don't work. If you let them sign a PPA for baseload electricity with a consumer who values that certainty (and there are many) for the whole year at 10c/kWh then there is no issue.
Yes and no, PPA don’t change the underlying economics. In the above model, of batteries added 20c/kWh then Nuclear averages cheaper over a full day. If batteries added 10c/kWh then Solar ends up cheaper over a full day.
The underlying issue is nobody wants a PPA that lasts for the full 40+ year lifespan of a new nuclear reactor and battery prices are still falling. Enough subsides can make anything viable, but western governments have largely lost interest in doing so.
I don't understand this line of argument - that's a high capacity factor! And it's not a dirunal or annual one either, it's a predictable "we need to shut down to refuel" one. It sounds like it wouldn't have broken even, even at 100% capacity factor? At which point it's no longer "too cheap to meter" but "nuclear power is too expensive". And that's before we even dig into capex vs opex vs decommissioning vs disaster insurance.
Hinkley point C is guaranteed a price of £92 per megawatt hour (or 9.2p/kWh), when it finally comes online.
A high capacity factor sounds like a benefit, however demand isn’t a constant. The perfect power source would be capable of running 24/7 but be profitable if run for 1 hour a year.
In the electrical industry a base load generation has historically been the least valuable electricity and it’s the only way Nuclear can operate.
Nuclear requires 90%+ of utilization to be competitive. They reached a wall once they provide enough power that they would have to be cut down for 10% of the time.
What is completely different from solar, that is outcompeting everything with ~20% utilization, and making the alternatives more expensive on the process... What is a problem because it can't provide more than ~20% utilization.
The negative externalities of fossil fuels justified some level of relative subsidies. Either by taxing pollution or direct subsidies of nuclear power.
Even ignoring global warming smog and acid rain have been known issues for a very long time. On top of this many countries lacked domestic supplies of fossil fuels.
Apparently they were not taken down just because Reagan didn't want them. The roof needed work and they were in the way. They were just not put back up.
Notably, GHWBush's mansion in Texas, shortly after, had solar water heating.
If I need (for my small European country) 15 TWh of electricity per year, and my typical rainfall onto catchment area for hydro is enough to do maybe 10 TWh per year, I'm 5 TWh short. In the 1980s you'd have probably solved that with CCGT, but that means finding or importing methane (natural gas). If I also build 10 TWh of wind production, even though I can't tell you a year in advance which days it will blow hardest, it will blow, and now my total capacity is enough to run solid green, because when the wind blows the hydro schemes save water to use another day.
Wind production varies year on year, but only maybe 10% where the variation day to day is almost 100%. So wind + hydro should pair nicely because the hydro plant can ramp up or down production as appropriate.
In the 1980s they solved it they solved it with coal. Or, occasionally, oil or simple (open cycle) gas turbines. CCGTs didn't really become popular until the 1990s.
At least in the UK, wind right now is over 30% of our power generation [0]. I don't have links handy but wind regularly exceeds most other sources here. How much more do you want it to provide before you'd consider it not just talk?
It does, sometimes, causing electricity price to go negative.
This summer our local Hydro dam was full. But instead of generating electricity at full capacity they had to open the overflow valves because it was windy and the local wind farm was producing at full capacity and the transmission lines does not have capacity to handle both wind and hydro at full capacity.
Renewable energy installation has broken records for newly-installed capacity every year, even during the pandemic-induced supply chain chaos and material price instability, and is projected to do so this year as well. However, we're still quite early into the curve, and even with the accelerating rate of growth it will be many years before most people are using mostly-renewable power.
I find your statement is slightly misleading, when there are just barely two handful green countries over the whole year and half of them have wind energy with at least 30% share, a few even as primary source.
Wind & solar are still in their infancy in much of the world, but are growing very quickly.
In the UK, wind will overtake natural gas as the largest source of electricity in the next few years. It’s already producing more than 2.5x as much as all the UK’s nuclear plants combined.
By 2025, more than half of all UK electricity will be renewable, and by 2030, 95% will be from low-carbon sources (including nuclear).
There's several places where you can see the UK's power generation live. Right this second we're running on 31% wind power. We're just rolling into peak power usage times so probably different when you click the link.
This one is not the full picture of UK generation, however, as Elexon's data only includes generators that are connected to the National Grid.
Many smaller generators, including all(?) UK solar farms, smaller wind farms, W2E plants, etc, are connected to the distribution networks (DSOs), not directly to the National Grid. These can account for a significant percentage of UK generation at times!
Most of the other websites displaying UK generation include additional data sources so that things like solar are accounted for.
Some grids are more open than others. ElectricityMap scrapes public system operator websites (“ISOs”) or government data aggregators (US EIA balancing areas or ENTSOE in Europe) for their data.
To my knowledge, outside of Europe, there is no data reporting requirement, so this is all best effort (but it’s pretty good for best effort imho).
Not "just" - that's not painting the whole picture.
Go to NSW (Australia) on the map. Look at the left hand side panel. Look at production during midday - it says 55-60% of power comes from solar energy for that time of day.
If you look at the snapshot at the current time (of this posting), the sun has gone down and there's less solar power.
Australia has the most installed solar capacity per capita in the world, and has installed nearly 4GW of solar in the last 12 months alone. They're also making strong moves on battery storage
They started behind the curve, but they're moving quickly, relatively at least
Australia has the 3rd largest coal reserves in the world, and relatively small population, so economically it makes sense for them as upfront investment is lower for coal compared to renewables, as a lot of the cost of coal power is in the extraction.
Obviously not good for the long-term, nor good for the planet, but this is the same driver for coal power also (which we indirectly contribute to due to the sheer amount of goods they export to the advanced economies).
It's nighttime and there is no wind. That's the downside of extrapolating from real-time data.
A couple of highlights from Australia's energy transition story in the last few days, which show some of the work being done at state level in spite of a largely renewables-hostile federal government over the last several years:
> the Western Australia grid ... reached 82 per cent renewables for a half-hour period on October 30 ... and it is likely that new peak is the highest for any gigawatt-scale grid in the world.
> South Australia ... has established the world’s highest share of renewables – as a percentage of demand – in any gigawatt scale grid in the world, when it reached 146 per cent on September 14. The excess is, of course, exported to the neighbouring state, in this case Victoria.
> [NSW is seeking] solutions on replacing 10GW of coal capacity that is likely to leave the grid within the next decade.
> Those plans are being accelerated by fast-tracked closures of the main coal generators, including Liddell early next year, Eraring in 2025, and Bayswater as early as 2030. Vales Point is expected to close by 2029, leaving Mt Piper with the only uncertain closure time.
We had ~10 years of a government in the pocket of fossil fuel companies. It’s that simple. Our last PM brought a piece of coal into parliament as a prop, telling everyone that they shouldn’t be afraid of it. The bloke genuinely took the “let God deal with it” strategy, which is more palatable or at least common in the US, but was quite jarring here.
With a new government and increased market pressures, the tides are turning, quite erratically though, because of time/market pressure, mismanagement, incompetence, opportunistic capitalists, and whatever else.
Worked in energy as a quant a few years back: the current 'greening' of the grid is nothing of the sort. It's just a cash grab by creating extreme volatility in energy prices. On the right (wrong) days you had swings of $10,000 USD within 5 minutes of each other.
The net result was the grid being taken over by the government after a series of rolling blackouts in a number of states and letting everything rip. All this is was directly attributed to _one_ coal station going offline unexpectedly and losing the baseload it generated.
I can write a book on how fucked the market here is.
Solar has a much higher upfront cost than coal, so it's much easier to finance a coal plant than solar one. That said, this is a better excuse for poorer, developing countries than Australia.
Yes, the WACC (Weighted Average Cost of Capital) explains why it made financial sense to roll out solar PV in northern European countries before many sunnier areas.
But as you say, Australia has no such excuse, having both the geography and the cost of capital to be a world leader in this, way beyond what they are now, which is okay but could have been much, much better.
Also points to an easy way to provide assistance to any country that is trapped into this financial dead-end.
The chart Figure 2-1 Comparison of current cost estimates with previous work also has wind power, which is also cheaper than coal, and has been for longer than solar has.
Plus, Australia has hydro, which can be varied to fill the gaps.
> Greater confidence in role of wind and solar PV: GenCost previously included a Diverse
technology scenario which explored the case where deployment of variable renewables was more
limited and other technologies played a larger role. Stakeholder feedback received during AEMO’s
2020-21 Australian scenario development process found that it was unlikely that alternative
technologies will be able to compete in a significant way with renewables. This reflects relatively
uncompetitive gas prices, a lack of confidence in the future cost competitiveness of CCS
technologies and abundant low-cost renewable resources.
Their 2030 forcasts also include costs for grid integration for different percentages of variable renewable.
It's simply not true we cannot store energy. We can produce hydrogen, methane, methanol, ethanol, biomass, steel, aluminum, cement, sillicon.. These are all energy intense processes that can help store energy.
In fact, when it comes to food production (which is really just a form of energy), there are 3 major strategies how we deal with winter: storage (e.g. granary), shifting production (e.g. eating a pig you raised during the year), and trade (e.g. buying oranges from a tropical country).
This is partly because massive energy storage (on the order of weeks) isn't really needed until you hit around 75% intermittent renewables (wind and solar), which is not yet the case anywhere in the world.
But the technology does exist, and it's gonna be deployed eventually.
This is indeed the big issue we need to solve: how to store enough energy to make it through the night. Of course we can already store energy, but to do it at that scale, it needs to be a lot cheaper.
Let me explain my point: power is not energy and energy is not power.
Renewable power is cheap in the same way someone whose head is dipped in liquid nitrogen and whose feet are in molten lead in over all pretty comfortable.
There will be no civil fusion power, as it would cost >10x as much as fission, and fission is not now competitive, and gets less so with each passing day.
Each dollar diverted to fusion or fission from build-out of wind and solar brings climate catastrophe nearer.
France decarbonized (up to 90% ish) their electricity generation in the span of 10 years, back in 1985. Unfortunately they've been sabotaging their nuclear power plants for years now, in favor of renewable energy.
Essentially these plants are forced to be unprofitable via energy laws.
For example, the nuclear plants are forced to sell their energy to energy traders at unprofitable low rates but those traders are never required to buy the energy and if the price of energy drops below this rate (AFTER it was bought) then the traders can just "return" the energy and the operators have to eat it. This happened during covid when energy prices collapsed due to lack of demand. These middlemen profit off of cheap nuclear energy instead of rate payers.
In addition, the nuclear plants must pay a 23 euro per MWh tax that subsidizes the operation of renewable energy. Since the plants are forced to sell their energy below cost and subsidize renewable generation, they are not profitable and aren't given the proper funds to maintain/improve these plants. So then these plants look bad/expensive and the ministers in charge demand that these plants are closed down before the end of their life. Even though the upfront costs have already been paid and the electricity they make are far cheaper than renewable generation if you don't force these crazy disadvantages on them.
> For example, the nuclear plants are forced to sell their energy to energy traders at unprofitable low rates but those traders are never required to buy the energy and if the price of energy drops below this rate (AFTER it was bought) then the traders can just "return" the energy and the operators have to eat it. This happened during covid when energy prices collapsed due to lack of demand. These middlemen profit off of cheap nuclear energy instead of rate payers.
Is this just nuclear or does it apply to other generation?
> In addition, the nuclear plants must pay a 23 euro per MWh tax that subsidizes the operation of renewable energy.
Source? One that isn't an hour long video and actually has a primary source.
I was technically mistaken about the 23 eu/MWh tax. The amount seems to be correct but it is charged to the ratepayer (not EDF) and is meant to help EDF cover the cost of the renewable energy they are forced to buy. But it does not actually cover the amount of renewable energy they are forced to buy, hence the debt.
So they were complaining about being held to an agreement to priority (essentially a price cap) for 25% of power they made in exchange for being handed a monopoly on power generation with infrastructure paid for by the public?
And the feed in tarriff acumulated a quarter of a nuclear reactor's worth of extra liability which they are now being paid?
You seem to be really reaching to claim this is somehow unfair. Especially considering the other side of the deal where taxpayers or utility customers who are victims of new nuclear plants are just told 'fuck you, you're paying the price we made up even if we don't generate any power' or 'we made one in another country and failed really bad so you get to pay half' or 'whoops, we only put aside 1/4th of the money needed to decomission...have fun paying another billionperGWbyeeee' or 'we racked up a quarter trillion dollar cleanup bill but we made you sign a treaty saying we only have to pay 0.5%, have fun'.
EDF is 85% owned by the French government. They were forced to "privatize" by the EU but are now planning to be nationalized again.
Nuclear infrastructure that is already paid for is being neglected and paracitized to pay for new solar/wind generation. The government has mandated that they will shut down perfectly good plants, taking nuclear from 75% of generation to 50%. The grid was already largely decarbonized! They are throwing away reliable cheap energy in order to pay for new intermittent energy. The result is increased cost, decreased reliability, and more emissions when the renewables aren't available. Fossil fuel use has stayed the same or even increased since renewables started being added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:F...
> Especially considering the other side of the deal where taxpayers or utility customers who are victims of new nuclear plants are just told 'fuck you, you're paying the price we made up even if we don't generate any power' or 'we made one in another country and failed really bad so you get to pay half' or 'whoops, we only put aside 1/4th of the money needed to decomission...have fun paying another billionperGWbyeeee' or 'we racked up a quarter trillion dollar cleanup bill but we made you sign a treaty saying we only have to pay 0.5%, have fun'.
Hmm, maybe they'd have more money to fund things properly if they were allowed to charge the true rate for electricity (instead of letting other companies arbitrage for free), and weren't forced to buy renewable electricity at high prices?
> The government has mandated that they will shut down perfectly good plants, taking nuclear from 75% of generation to 50%.
A plant that is aging out or reaching the stage in its lifetime when it needs a $1.5/W refurb isn't 'perfectly good'. Nor is a much newer one that is corroding due to major design faults and is off half of the time.
Replacing them with energy sources where total costs are lower than running costs is just financial sanity. At least until there is a large enough renewables fraction that storage is a concern.
> Hmm, maybe they'd have more money to fund things properly if they were allowed to charge the true rate for electricity (instead of letting other companies arbitrage for free), and weren't forced to buy renewable electricity at high prices?
You misspelled 'fully exploit their monopoly rather than have a price cap at their claimed true cost of generation for 25% of it'. If €48/MWh isn't enough to pay for the upkeep then maybe don't claim it's cheap?
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