Nuclear builds in the west right now have been boondoggles; the nuclear industry must regain its ability to build effectively to play a role here. This has been done before through standardization of design and serialization of production. This could conceivably be scaled back up if we were serious about decarbonization, with high likelihood of success given previous successes (e.g. France decarbonized 80% of its electricity grid in 15 years by building 58 standardized nuclear plants).
Current prices for variable renewables and batteries are mostly on the current margin. Everyone agrees that costs of variable sources skyrocket as penetration increases due to curtailment and overbuilding. When you get 100% of your electricity on a sunny day (including from storage through the night) from solar, the next solar plant you build will have to be curtailed. Seasonal and crazy-weather variations are much harder and more expensive to fill with variable sources than the daily fluctuations.
These lowlow prices we see headlines about today are about building renewables in a world alongside hilariously cheap fracked natural gas plants that can pick up the slack.
Nuclear is unique in that it's the only low-carbon energy source that can run 24/7 for years at a time (followed by a month outage, then 2 more years, etc.). Hydro can kind of do this in certain geographies, but is very hard to scale to the point we need. Nuclear also uses far less land and raw materials than the variable renewables, especially when chemical battery storage is included.
But yeah unless nuclear folks can get costs back down soon, no one is going to be interested. If in the end variable stuff is indeed hard at massive scale (I strongly believe this will be the case), then if we don't have nuclear, fracked and high-carbon natural gas and oil (for transportation) will be around at 50% of our total energy for a long time.
Interesting coincidence that France stopped at 80%. That's the same amount that widely touted as being straightforward with current renewable tech.
I'd guess it's for the same reason, after that you're dealing with seasonal variations that would leave nuclear or renewables unused for most of the year.
Yet in practice let's take a look at France (nuclear) vs Germany (leading solar/wind):
"French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. As such, according to the prevailing economic wisdom, French electricity should be far more carbon intensive than German's. And yet the opposite is the case. France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity.
Why? Because France generates 72% of its electricity from nuclear, and just 6% from solar and wind."
France is cheaper and produces 2x more electricity from clean sources compared to Germany, where costs keep going up.
And yet both France and Germany plan to move to mostly renewable. Which the French government thinks will save them money. Something that probably wouldn't have been possible without Germany's far sighted leadership on this issue.
I wonder how you could attribute the carbon saved by all the people choosing solar and wind as the current cheapest options to the people who put their money where their mouth was when that was just a projection.
Right. Far sighted leadership of shutting down perfectly good, clean, nuclear power plants, and trying to replace them with intermittent renewables. That need to be backed up by more reliable alternatives, like strip mining old-growth forests for dirty brown coal to burn in steam generators, or importing electricity from France's nuke plants.
Climate change and deforestation are global problems, and Germany has helped fund a global solution.
Solar and wind are growing rapidly, they're currently passing the total yearly generation of nuclear but with 30% yearly growth will soon be adding the equivalent of the total nuclear fleet every year.
It is actually brilliant.
If Germany has sacrificed some of their own woodlands to make that happen then that's just more impressive.
Avoiding nuclear power is just stupid, and shutting down functioning plants is cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you actually care about net effects on the environment, anyway.
I don't know, but I suspect the French government isn't shutting down perfectly good, economical nuclear plants just to spite themselves.
I imagine that the nuclear plants are expensive to maintain since they're getting old. So rather than maintain them, they're probably going to just shut them down. And since new ones are so insanely expensive to build (again, don't know why), it's probably more feasible short term to invest in renewables.
But that's just my suspicion. I know nothing of French politics and very little about energy generation, but a little about finance, politics, and human psychology.
I'd love to know what it costs to maintain the nuclear plants they're shutting down, how much they're spending on renewables, and I'd love to look at it finacially. It's possible it doesn't make sense, and they just want the "green jobs". It's possible none of it makes sense! But I suspect there's some sense in this somewhere.
As far as I know, the French are not shutting down nuclear plants.
The Germans did shut down operating plants, for political reasons, with the excuse that the capacity would be made up in solar and wind. When that fantasy failed to materialize, they had to fall back on burning more dirty coal.
You're just pulling that out of your ass now. Germany already had enough renewables to compensate for the loss of the nuclear energy. The problem with shutting down nuclear instead of coal is that it canceled out the emission reductions of deploying renewables. The amount of energy being produced by coal remained unchanged for 5 years and so did the emissions but they never added more coal capacity.
The currently announced policy is to reduce nuclear to 50% (from 75%) by 2035 as nuclear plants age out because it's cheaper and easier to replace with renewables. But within the last week they've been saying they haven't made a final decision on building any new plants and still could go 100% non-nuclear renewable if they don't get an explanation of the current cost overruns and are sure it won't happen again.
And those are still (non-household) consumer prices. That means they don't just reflect the cost of generation, but also what consumers are able and willing to pay. Unfortunately I didn't find any information on generation costs.
The problem is that the cost of elecricity in germany is going down but industry is excempt from the EEG fee which is used to pay for the renewable energy plants. The end result is that households end up paying the electricity bills of industrial companies and so the retail price rises as the renewable share goes up.
Huh? Germany leading? Their fabled Energiewende was about moving away from nuclear. It had the unfortunate effect of moving to more coal plants to ensure base load is met.
One problem with wind power in Germany is that they don't have sufficient capacity for north-south power transmission. They've got wind in the north, they need it in the south... problem solved, you'd think. Alas! They need far, far more capacity over very long distances (1000km).
Anyway, I would not have called Germany leading in solar xor wind, but i didn't look into this. Perhaps the rest of the world is even worse? Seems unlikely though.
Germany never added coal, the amount of power being generated by coal remained unchanged from 2010 to 2014. Of course one should asking oneself what the point of renewable energy is if it isn't being used to reduce dependence on fossil fuel but that is a different topic. The problem with the Energiewende is that the lazy government isn't deploying renewables fast enough. The renewable technologies that are available are more than sufficient until Germany hits 80% renewables.
I don’t know how they compare these costs, the document doesn’t say. Battery storage doesn’t generate power after all. Nuclear power’s great feature is that all the externalities tend to be included in the price. This is also makes it look more expensive than almost anything else. Do these wind/solar prices include decommissioning and full life cycle maintenance costs?
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