Lots of big jumps in the article and the devil is in the details. Solar panels have seen a lot of innovation in the last few decades. Simply pumping out tons of 30 year old technology may have stunted that progress or even created so much waste that solar could have been deemed as non-viable. Some panel technologies are really hard to recycle but have held a performance edge at different times in solar tech development. Sometimes going all-in on mass production of something is not worth the short-term savings.
Simply pumping out tons of 30 year old technology may have stunted that progress or even created so much waste that solar could have been deemed as non-viable.
When has ramping up an industry from expensive luxury to commodity ever stunted the progress? Lithium ion batteries, liquid crystal displays, oled displays, integrated components, computer memory, the list where exactly the opposite happened is enormous.
This seems like a 'everything happens for a reason' rationalization. Solar panels even more than everything else have just been about cost effectiveness over their life span.
> This seems like a 'everything happens for a reason' rationalization
I do believe in a rational universe but I think that's not your connotation here.
> When has ramping up an industry from expensive luxury to commodity ever stunted the progress?
Progress can be easily stunted by poor initial standards that get cemented into place. Solar panels are still a young technology and are still being proven out in a lot of ways. eg: bi-facial panels may be a game-changer in terms of how we think about mounting panels.
As another response at the same level as yours suggested, poor initial quality panels created a bad name for themselves where they live. In their region, getting panels is not seen as a wise move despite the technology moving on significantly from the initial mass-experience.
There are plenty of examples of superior technology being beaten out by popularity of an inferior technology. Even our current electric grids (which are at capacity and having trouble globally dealing with solar capacity) are an example of this. It seems as though you are willing to ignore those things given your selective hindsight and wish of even more pervasive solar photovoltaic technology.
You can't change the past, but you can learn from it to try and make better decisions for the future.
There are plenty of examples of superior technology being beaten out by popularity of an inferior technology.
This is not the same as a luxury being commoditization and has nothing to do with it. It is a diversion by pretending you said something different initially.
Even our current electric grids (which are at capacity and having trouble globally dealing with solar capacity)
Says who? Your evidence of nothing? For starters rooftop solar means less electricity going over the grid to a house as well as less electricity used for air conditioning due to shading the roof.
Worldwide solar is a small percentage of electricity, so who is "our" when you say "our electrical grids are at capacity" and why would electricity from solar have anything to do with it?
Here is some actual information since you don't have any:
What is false? Where is any evidence for anything you've said? All you've done is make claims and be patronizing but you never backed up a single thing you said in any post you made.
You may be putting the cart before the horse. Wouldnt pumping out tons of anything create forcing functions for efficiency, as in, exactly what happened but on a longer timeframe?
Building external combustion cars in the 1880s might have given Britain an economic edge over the US in the period, but the market would have still collapsed when internal combustion matured enough. And being a specialist in one technology usually means you're not able to move to a different one when it becomes obsolete.
Those are not the same kind of subsidy. there is quite a lot more ambiguity and uncertainty in the type of subsidy because it is claiming mispricing of externalities (i.e your usage caused x harm and you didnt pay for x harm) rather than the variety the renewables industry mostly gets which is a direct injection of cash through grants and various price supports.
Much of the forced and child labor used in solar panel production, mining, and transport, as with everything else in China's production systems, goes completely unacknowledged and unaccounted for in these navel gazing expeditions.
With all those corners cut to mass produce cheap materials like batteries and solar panels and computers and so forth, China is able to undercut production that utilizes ethical and sustainable production. I don't think you can look at China's production "costs" as legitimate data, and the problem doesn't seem to be one that anyone outside of China will ever fix. The extent of the influence the rest of the world has over the problem lies entirely in our ability to not do business with China.
When you look at all the savings you get when buying electronics and solar panels and infrastructure related products coming out of China, you're getting a human suffering discount. I don't think it's a good thing to include those numbers when considering long term things like fossil fuel dependencies and so forth - let's not bake in the human suffering discounts and at least try to price in human rights and humane labor practices.
It turns out a lot of things are way more expensive when factory workers and shippers and everyone in a supply chain get paid fair wages and work fair hours.
This isn't to say anything in favor of fossil fuels, I just think the immediate plight of China's factory workers might be an important factor relevant to the actual costs in play.
Do you know of any credible sources/references that have attempted to quantify that "human suffering discount?" I'm genuinely curious.
My impression is that China simply has the Solar industry established. It's a bit like semi-conductors in Taiwan, the knowledge, practice, and facilities are present. It takes a significant investment to build factories. To that extent, it also raises the question what percentage of solar panel costs is labor, vs capital investments, vs raw material.
I do not discount the statement/concern. At the same time, I don't think the other end of the spectrum is true where we could say "we could do it too if we also used child labor." I do think it's the case where Chinese manufacturing capacity of solar panels is simply superior compared to any other country. It's a massive capital investment and commitment to enable that much production capacity. At 80% the global production of all solar panels, China has an army of solar production factories.
From what I could find (none of which was satisfying conclusive), it looks like there is a very considerable raw material cost for solar panels, and the manufacturing process is also complicated. [1][2]
Yes, things would be more expensive if workers had more rights. I don’t see how that is an argument against or in favor of any particular energy source.
Further, if workers’ well-being are your main consideration (admirable), we should be moving away from coal as quickly as possible.
> if workers’ well-being are your main consideration (admirable), we should be moving away from coal as quickly as possible.
I'm pro renewables and I'm happy to see the back of coal . . .
however ...
Australia is the second biggest biggest exporter of coal, uses no child labour, is heavily mechanised with a small number of workers compared to tonnage moved, has excellent worker conditions in terms of safety, paid overtime, holidays, etc.
You point appears to be based in some Appalachian romance notion of tunneling out coal with pickaxes and coal carts pulled by children.
I find this an interesting statistics, in 2023 there were 36.5k total people employed in the US coal industry. [1] It's simply just not a lot of people in the grand scheme. That speaks to how industrialized coal production is in the US - it doesn't take that many people to do mountain top removal and drive heavy machinery.
FWIW & for comparison, Circuit city at its peak employed 40k people, that's more people than the US Coal industry employs today [2]
Proponents of renewables often cite the price and use it as an argument against nuclear energy. Nuclear energetics uses highly regulated local labor, giving it an inherent disadvantage against unregulated foreign labor. If renewables rely on underpaid or even child labor, it's not sustainable nor realistic, the numbers in that calculation have to be updated and the decisions reconsidered.
The entire U.S. tax code is one big Central Planning committee. Who should get subsidies? Who should get taxed? The capitalists who celebrated the luxury of American supermarkets over Soviet grocery stores failed to mention the significant farm subsidies given then (and still given).
There’s an old joke of a woman who agrees to sleep with a man for a million dollars but refuses for a dollar (“what kind of woman do you take me for?”), the punchline being that it’s no longer a question of principles but of price.
I guess the point here is that as soon as some amount of subsidies is acceptable, it’s no longer a showdown between unbridled capitalism and a command economy. The question really just becomes one of degree.
Climate change itself is an unintended consequence of pricing the well-being of the commons at zero.
There is a fair discussion regarding regulated vs free market to be had, but people at least need to understand market failures first (externalities being one of them).
Of course there is. The subsidy would be on watts output, not on number if panels. Therefore any way to make the panels cheaper to produce and/or more efficient brings more revenue and more profit margin.
There was something of a solar power winter in the late 70s/early 80s. Professors were often not getting tenure in that area. Research funding was thin. Etc.
As an intermediate step to electric, I don't know why we couldn't have gotten by with smaller, less powerful engines. Our huge vehicles are so wasteful. Simply putting vehicles (across the board) on a massive diet in a short span of time would have made a huge reduction in fossil fuel use for transportation.
>I don't know why we couldn't have gotten by with smaller, less powerful engines.
CAFE standards made cheap light trucks illegal; to a point, they also make cheap small cars illegal (ignoring the absurd collision standards- 2005 cars and 2020 cars are not meaningfully different; but in 2005 the average car on the road was still under 3000 pounds).
As always, power without accountability. No bureaucrat or lawmaker is getting fined or voted out for these stupid standards that have done untold economic damage, and this crap will continue until they are.
Speaking based on a part of south India, almost ever medium to large size house had a solar panel in the 90s. They were however horrible and could barely power a few lights so fell out of favor and never used. I think if we had current 250W panels up, people there would think differently about them.
I would put it as follows: in the last 30 years there have been real advances in practical nanotechnology.
Not Drexlerian nanomachine fantasies, but nanometre scale control of the surface geometry of materials. Controlling surface geometries at these small scales is what has powered the advance of solar PV since 1990.
This would not have been possible without the continually increasing computer simulation power that has been available since the 1990s.
>>Solar panels have seen a lot of innovation in the last few decades.
Yes. And the reason that innovation happened is because of the combination of people seeing the importance and potential profits, policy drivers, and funding and interest (it became cool, not just niche) in the field of solar.
When people see that there is money and fame to be made, they get motivated, reallocate resources, which attracts researchers, which make discoveries, which generates an accelerating pace of discovery as more new available knowledge forms the base of exponentially more new connections/discoveries.
It is a feed-forward system, and all it takes is a close-to-ready field of study and the pump being primed. This could definitely have happened earlier.
The elephant in the room to answer the 'why' is that fossil fuels were already working and it took vision to see beyond them and the massive subsidies they get. When vision was available (Jimmy Carter and solar panels on the White House comes to mind) the people without vision, or people that understood how to make a buck today at the expense of tomorrow, put up roadblocks (Regan tearing them down...). The technology, because it is massively better, eventually caught up and passed fossil fuels (yes I am talking in the past tense) which has finally made it easy to see even without vision and finally made it able for people to make a buck today. Nothing has structurally changed that would have allowed us to make different choices in the 70s. We are only, finally, now seeing the solar wave because the same forces are at play now as then. This means we haven't learned anything and will do (are doing?) this again with other technologies and issues.
The real question we should be asking ourselves is how to prevent this disastrous pattern from happening again and again. There is no point moaning that solar took so long to happen and there isn't a point to blaming 'big oil' since they will soon be replaced with ? (Big Tech? Big Solar? Big Ag? Big Space?). What are -actual- concrete changes can be made to avoid this type of mess in the future?
>When vision was available (Jimmy Carter and solar panels on the White House comes to mind) ...
The panels installed on the White House were not photovoltaic solar panels - they were solar water heater panels.
>...(Regan tearing them down...).
The panels had to be removed due to roof repairs that had to be made. Solar water heaters were probably never a good match for the needs of the west wing. I think the Bush administration added solar water heaters for a pool, which seems more reasonable.
This article[1] is like a bit biased, but I think it adds the right context with quotes from those involved. The key paragraph here:
Curiously — and this may say it all — the Reagan administration also allowed Carter’s financial incentives promoting renewables to expire around the time that the panels were removed. Tax credits established in 1977 for homeowners installing solar water heaters ended Dec. 31, 1985, just months before the White House roof coup d’état.
I think ideas like campaign finance reform are in the right direction, but how do we actually accomplish that? The people that can do it are the people blocking it because it isn't in their interests. How do you get the country to a place where this is possible? My top 'if only' (after you remove campaign finance reform) are:
- Some form of ranked choice voting.
- Fixing gerrymandering.
Of those I think ranked choice has some momentum and could lead to positive change. Gerrymandering is, again, an issue with the people that can change it won't because it is against their interests.
> If you really want to scare yourself, read this.
That kind of alarmism (in this case about the CDC failing during the pandemic) is scary, but needlessly so, and best avoided. In contrast, according to:
If America had the same covid death rate as Canada, nearly 700,000 less Americans would have died of covid.
Alarm by the Epidemic Intelligence Service officers is not "alarmism." It was an accurate forecast that the system was going to fail, which it did, then killing roughly 10 times as many Americans as the Vietnam War did.
Every single person has to start taking as much responsibility and ownership for the communities that they live and work in as they can and support others who are doing the same
It’s exceptionally simple and it’s exceptionally difficult to the same time. It’s up to you and your mental state and how you view the world, and your ability to overcome your own fears
The question of "how do we deal with lobbying from people whose preferences are reactionary / opposed to human progress", cannot be answered by telling those same people to "take responsibility." In their minds, they are taking responsibility — their vision of a perfect world is just antithetical to ours.
The answer to such a question, needs necessarily to be an answer for what we, the people who prefer to have nice things, can do — to work around these people, or to achieve in spite of them, etc.
No, what I’m trying to say is that in fact, the majority of the population is disengaged politically, to the point where they do not even engage in their local civic processes
So they are not creating their own lobby groups, putting additional effort into countering these other groups, preventing them from forming in the first place, or any number of things that a community who is engaged does
But listen, there’s any number of excuses or reasons why people can’t - despite example, after example of poor uneducated or otherwise downtrodden people becoming community leaders.
again that’s why I say it is a matter of whether you have the fortitude to deal with what seems like an insurmountable problem, which is the alignment of human action within a semi closed political system
I would have half-agreed with you if you didn't use a such a victim-blaming expression like "excuses".
Nobody is "excusing" themselves. People are busy, life is not easy for most of them and they are VERY "excused" to just want to have some chill and relax after their work is done. That's all there is to it, the rest is you trying to paint stuff as black-and-white.
I also have to remind you that plenty of countries photograph and make dossiers of people who protest.
Clearly, modern forms of protest are needed. "Taking responsibility" is such a hand-wavy thing to say that offers zero courses of action.
At the end of the day, people make whatever choice they’re gonna make for how they spend their time
If they spend their time entertaining themselves, then they’re not going to spend their time shaping the world into what they think it should be
So the people who are going to shape it the way that they want it, are going to continue to do what they want and you’re gonna have to deal with that
So you can take it however you like, but the functional fact is that people are choosing not to spend their time shaping the environmental regulations, the types of social structures that are going to prevent these anthropogenic traps like we’re starting to see
So the only thing I would say is, great do whatever you gotta do but then don’t complain when things aren’t the way you want them at the macro scale and you’ve got testicles full of plastics, live in ongoing genocide, and have no clean drinking water
But don’t worry, there’s always Hans Rosling and his soothing balm of misleading statistics and folk “science” to make you feel like everything‘s going just fine
Yeah sure, so people should not raise kids or have any leisure ever. OK.
I'll complain as much as I like, thank you very much, because your rhetoric does not work -- you are outraged and that's visible in your comments, which robs them of objectivity.
Paying taxes should lead to my interests being protected. That's the social contract. If that's not happening then history knows of many examples where the leaders were completely blind of the interests of their subjects and received a rough wake-up call (often lynching resulting in death even). It will happen again, it seems.
Also nobody thinks everything's going just fine. That's your faulty assumption. It's just that most of us haven't gotten to the point of starting to curse and grab a shotgun to make ourselves heard... yet.
Specifically, I mean, is this a is this a real question?
Are you unaware of the processes of community organization and lobbying?
Do you know how canvassing and petitioning work?
This is precisely my point, is that these are all thoroughly documented, easy to understand and easy to implement technically, things that you do in order to be part of the community as a group of people who have a voice
The key thing lacking is people who give a shit about results that don’t only benefit them and take a lot of work and coordination to do
So as a result, people throw their hands up and say it’s too hard. It takes too long. It’s too complicated. The results are too obscure. It’s too unlikely… whatever whatever you can continue to come up with whatever excuses you want to not engage in your community but at the end of the day, it’s up to whether or not you care.
I'd argue you are both right and wrong here. What are constructive ways to get people to join in the process. Telling them to do it doesn't work, so how do we influence them to increase that participation? I have a kid, telling him X, Y or Z is the fastest way to get him to avoid those solutions. The only thing I have found that works is to get the real world to tell him or to have his piers tell him. It sounds ridiculous but what about a reality tv show where the contestants try to rally their neighborhoods to effect the most positive change and along the way they show how they did it. A big part of throwing your hands up is not knowing where to put them.
Like this is literally the first step in the process.
You’re supposed to be able to go to your congressional representative and local councils for your specific input. They have a entire staff and they have a process to do this. I have regularly engaged with my elected congressional representatives and my local city Council members at every step along my life to lobby them for things I want.
When I was in high school, I lobbied the Webster, TX city Council to build a skate park because we didn’t have one in the 90s. Now there’s a Webster skate park
I was elected to the planning board for the city of Cheverly, Maryland where we took citizen input every month and then at our quarterly review meeting so that we could determine what kind of new development would happen in our town
I did all of this while raising three kids and having a full-time job, including getting up at night to change diapers and all of that and I even ran ultramarathons in there too, and started a business
The fact that you think that it takes some huge effort shows how broken our system is
Not to be a complete pessimist, but there was an active disinformation campaign, not dissimilar to the tobacco companies lying about cancer rates going on. Mix in useful idiots and as Upton Sinclair pointed out, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," and you've got decades of outright denial and obstruction.
The only choice is out organize and take direct action, because elections simply aren't enough.
This is basically a fiction put out by green types who aren't good at accounting, if by subsidy you mean money going from the government of the country to the fuel industries.
I mean you can argue they are undertaxed and don't pay enough to cover their externalities but still the cash flows from oil companies to the government, not the other way.
Oil industries are popular with politicians because they fill their coffers with cash. Solar electric on the other hand usually requires money to go the other way to subsidise your roof panels or what have you.
Hence the popularity of oil and gas with some politicians and voters who pay the taxes.
A few years ago there were memes about how the problem with zombie movies is that they never showed people running out to get zombified.
Whatever kind of big mess we create in the future I guarantee we will find ways to make it worse rather than better. The US is preparing to elect a climate denialist to its highest office.
This can't be fixed. It's not just some big corporate culprit. It's us. It's not all of us, but it's enough.
Article misses the fact that a lot of governments in the 70s and 80s (shoutout to Germany especially) put a lot of investment into solar panel adoption, which is part of why the cost dropped so much in the 80s and 90s and 2000s.
Even if it wasn't the case that PV's could have replaced fossil fuels back then because they weren't advanced enough nuclear was more than capable of doing so and readily available. Indeed investing in various different types of reactors might very well have produced a similar curve of progress and finding ways to make them less dangerous and requiring less regulation all of which would have sped up deployment and reduced the cost.
We will never know, we just know now that its cheaper to do solar and power storage than nuclear.
I doubt it. Even if the ORNL MSR reactor got maximum funding, we averted the safety panic from three mile island, and were effectively making no nuclear waste the economics still probably can't compete with current wind/solar.
The scary prospect for all forms of energy is that wind and solar likely have a lot of runway, as does grid storage. Combined wind/solar + grid storage will fall under combined cycle natural gas this year.
Just to emphasize, combined cycle natural gas exceeds the carnot efficiency of a single stage combustion with additional heat cycles. That means it basically has maximized the physics of extracting energy from using natural gas. In the US natural gas is also basically as low as can practically be priced because it is a waste byproduct of the bakken shale in the Dakotas.
Natural gas beats all other fossil fuels and nuclear by quite a lot. And it CANNOT compete with wind/solar.
Solar still has numerous opportunities to drop between perovskites and some theoretical cheap multijunction manufacutring. Grid storage will see sodium-sulfur or some other cheap/dense battery tech in the next 10 years in addition to the steady improvement of sodium-ion and LFP chemistries already in mass production.
I would really really like to see a scalable cheap nuke plant that is only twice as expensive as solar/wind. But that massive 10s of billions in research and investment would have needed to start in the 1990s. And IMO would have been shunted to the same failed solid fuel rod designs rather than MSR or some other "radical" reactor design.
Nuclear will simply never be economically viable in the foreseeable 30 years. And neither will fusion.
Very very little is made/manufactured on site. You do not make turbines, computers, pipes, or much at all, on a construction site. You form, weld, pour, and assemble. The goal would be a standard design, to cut those giant engineering and custom fabrication costs to a small fraction.
You don't need to deliver a completed factory on a pallet to save costs (although that's possible with distributed small module reactors, as Asia is ramping up for).
But the "negative learning" was exactly because they abandoned the standardized approach.
"Conversely, the gradual erosion of EDF’s determination to
standardize (caving in to proposals of numerous design changes
in the wake of the ‘‘frenchifying’’ of the Westinghouse de-
sign—the P’4 reactor series—and above all to the new N4 reactor
design pushed by the CEA), as well as the abrupt slowdown of the
expansion program after 1981, paved the way towards a gradual
demise of the French success model, as borne out in lengthened
construction times and ever higher cost escalation towards the
end of the program (cf. Section 4 below)."
As a result, France's electricity grid is almost fully decarbonized (and we'd be in a better state if we didn't shut down one reactor for political reasons) while industrialized countries betting only on NREs are still counting the days they don't need to burn coal. So there are good things about it.
It’s a little more complicated as they’re importing and exporting a great deal of electricity. But overall yea it’s been good for the environment, just expensive.
It's not subsidized. In fact, cheap nuclear electricity is used to subsidize other industries.
The entire nuclear industry (construction, operation, support) cost France € 228 billion and produce 11000 TWh (by 2012). That's 2,07 cents/kWh. Not too shabby.
Your numbers are wildly off and not just from ignoring inflation when using poorly sourced numbers from 2012. Quick, how much did they spend on fuel over that timeframe? Well according to that estimate it was 0, so it’s hardly including the operating costs.
To give some perspective: “In March 2023 France's Parliament formally approved the government's nuclear investment plan – by 402 votes in favor and 130 against – which considers the €52 billion construction of six new EPR-2 PWRs at three sites.” That’s not operations that’s just for construction of 6 reactors when they have 56 in operation and that’s interest free unlike US reactor where interest is included with construction costs. One year later that’s already been increased to 67.4 billion euros: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l....
France operated as a pay as you go system so they didn’t set money aside for the full cost of decommissioning their reactors etc. Last I checked there was some talk in 2017 of them setting aside 27 billion based on some ridiculously optimistic estimates but mostly the plan is just foist the costs onto future taxpayers.
The article explicitly says "overall cost" and "including all expenditures."
"Following the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, the French government requested that the Court of Accounts prepare a report on the overall cost of both public and private investment in the French nuclear power industry from its beginning, including all expenditures.[225] The report estimates that the industry has cost around 228 billion euros for a yearly production of roughly 400 TWh, with a cumulative production of approximately 11,000 TWh. Among the expenses, the Court of Accounts differentiates €55 billion spent on research since 1950 (equivalent to approximately a billion dollars annually) and €121 billion spent on construction, which includes €96 billion on the 58 reactors."
Your quoting estimated future prices does not contradict what has already happened. The new reactors both have higher rated output than what is currently installed and higher capacity factors. Operating costs are small compared to initial investment, and fuel costs are a small part of the operating costs.
Let's math the shit out of this!
Assuming the 1.5 GW output for the EPR2 that's quoted in Wikipedia and a conservative 90% capacity factor, each of these reactors will produce 1.5 * 24 * 365 * 0.9 = 11826 GWh of electricity per year.
80 year running life makes that 11826 * 80 = 946080 GWh of electricity over the lifetime of the plant. Or 946 TWh. That's 946 Trillion Wh, or 946 Billion kWh. If I can sell these 948 Billion kWh for 1 cent / kWh, that's 948 billion cents or € 9.48 billion so close to the estimated cost of constructing each of these plants. So let's assume an extremely unlikely ~100% cost overrun and operating costs that are the same as originally estimated construction costs and we have 3 cents / kWh. Everything after that is profit, even with 100% cost overruns for construction.
Which maybe gives you an idea why, though the French government almost certainly does not like the cost overruns, they don't seem to be nearly as perturbed by them as the anti-nuclear activists.
And neither is the UK government. So nobody is going to claim that Hinkley Point C is going well. Nevertheless, the UK is proceeding with Sizewell C, have just selected a site for an additional pair of reactors and have made it policy to quadruple nuclear output.
Just like neither the Poles nor the Ukrainians let the problems at Vogtle-3/4 keep them from selecting the Westinghouse AP-1000 for 4 reactors each, with site-prep work having started in both countries earlier this year.
From that same Wikipedia article: “The actual cost of generating electricity by nuclear power is not published by EDF or the French government but is estimated to be between €59/MWh and €83/MWh.” that’s using numbers from 2012 in todays money €73/MWh and €103/MWh. What you were quoting was counting “investments” not total costs on an inflation adjusted basis.
In 2012 published results for ongoing costs at “The court expects EDF's projected investment programme in existing plant, including post Fukushima safety improvements, will add between 9.5% and 14.5% to generation costs, taking costs to between 37.9 and 54.2 EUR/MWh” (Note that’s annual costs excluding construction and decommissioning.) Your investment number included R&D subsidies that aren’t part of that 47 to 67 EUR/MWh in today’s money. If you wonder how these could be so wildly different it’s because France isn’t just adding up total costs and adjusting for inflation they simply don’t want to admit how large the subsidies have been because it’s so dam expensive.
France nuclear power plants don’t hit 90% capacity factors. If your generate 30% of power from nuclear you can have capacity factors that high but France ran past that and ran into the fundamental issue that people want less power on nights, weekends, and spring/fall when they don’t need heat or AC.
How about some real world numbers. From 61.4 GW of generating capacity In 2022 France produced 282 TWh, in 2023 it hit 320 TWh that’s (282 + 320)/2 / 365 / 24 * 1000 / 61.4 = 56% capacity factor.
“80 year running life” you know France is having troubles keeping a ~40 year old fleet operating, I’m sure they will have zero problems trying to hit 80 years.
There’s an art to it, but civility isn’t about avoiding all conflict. A prosecutor can have a perfectly civil conversation where they threaten someone with execution if they don’t accept a plea deal. A few mocking jabs about how incorrect someone’s statement was is fine as long as you’re mocking what was said and not their person, manor of speech, accent, speech impediment, etc.
Operating costs for nuclear power plants are low and consistent over time. The bulk of the cost is the initial investment, and of that the bulk is financing, i.e. interest.
This has a graph of operating costs for French nuclear plants over time on page 10. After an initial high cost of 40 centimes / kWh it settles down to slightly above 10 centimes / kWh in around 1984 and then stays flat until 2000, where the graph ends. Let's call that 12 centimes. The French franc was converted to € at a rate of 6.55 : 1 so that's slightly less than 2 euro-cents per kWh.
2. Capacity factors
Current French nuclear plants are old designs and there was significant overbuild. Modern plants easily hit > 90% capacity factors, heck, the EPR even has 4 independent cooling systems so that they can keep the plant running while doing maintenance on the cooling system! Alas, that's one of the reasons it is so difficult to build.
For the US: "Nuclear has the highest capacity factor of any other energy source—producing reliable, carbon-free power more than 92% of the time in 2021."
France is also adding renewables so the nuclear plants don't have to buffer all the variability in demand. Right now they have nuclear plants that they just shut down on weekends.
So let's low-ball this and say the capacity factor of these new plants will only be 80%. How much does this affect the calculations?
1.5 * 24 * 365 * 0.8 * 80 = 840960
So instead of producing 946 TWh over its lifetime, the plant will produce 840 TWh or 840 billion kWh. That doesn't really affect the calculations much. At 1 cent / kWh that's € 8.4 billion, which is still pretty close to the construction costs. At 2 cents / kWh we are looking at € 16.8 billion. Add another 2 cents for operating costs and we are at a total of 4 cents / kWh.
4 cents / kWh.
Now this is obviously not a perfect calculation, if such a thing can even be made. But it is very much in the right ballpark.
The claims of 20 cents / kWh or more by anti-nuclear lobbyists are not in the right ballpark. And unsurprisingly, their source for those kinds of numbers is "trust me, bro". Or Lazard, which is arguably worse than "trust me, bro".
3. Lifetime
Yes, I believe 80 years is extremely realistic, particularly for these newer reactors that were specifically designed for long operation, with lessons learned from older designs. Probably more of a lower bound than an upper bound.
"There are no technical barriers to running some nuclear plants for up to 80 years, ..."
"There are two research programs addressing the five main challenges to long-term operation: primary system metals and piping; concrete and containment structures; electrical cables; reactor pressure vessel and buried piping. “These programs have not uncovered any technical show-stoppers that would prevent the renewal of licenses from 60 to 80 years,” the study authors wrote, adding that more research is needed."
"... a majority of executives say that it is very likely their plants will operate for 80 years or longer. It is a fairly natural progression, according to Was.
"If they last till 60, maybe they can last to 80," Was said. "Heck, maybe 100?"
> Operating costs for nuclear power plants are low and consistent over time.
CRE‘s current cost estimates for operating existing nuclear reactors (Ie zero profit, and excluding all costs associated with construction, risk, and decommissioning) is ~€57.8/MWh. Some of that is age, but even with an already paid off power plant, and zero money set aside for decommissioning, and the government talking 100% of the risks of a major accident, and no need for profit, it’s still 3x the current total cost of solar per kWh.
Further that’s their optimistic estimate. I get you want to crunch some numbers here, but they just aren’t matching up.
> 2. Capacity factors
> Modern plants easily hit > 90% capacity factors
In other countries sure, in France reactors are more limited by Curtailment than just technical issues.
If nobody wants to use electricity from your reactor you must shut it down or damage the electric grid. If France had 32 GW of Nuclear they could have ~90% capacity factors but they have 62 GW and nobody wants that much power on nights and weekends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtailment_(electricity)
Now if you’re projecting France to have far less nuclear in 2070 then at first 90% seems reasonable. Except ultra cheap wind and solar is what’s going to replace nuclear and that makes things worse for nuclear with regular oversupply at zero marginal costs vs nuclear non zero fuel costs.
CRE is also having other issues, but I don’t think we can know there will be equal levels of mismanagement and incompetence in 70 years. So I’m mostly ignoring their recent issues.
> 3. Lifetime
Again not purely a technical issue. Power plants cost more to maintain over time and increased maintenance means lower capacity factors. You still pay ~€10/MWh for enriched uranium, and you still need a huge workforce, but most pumps etc last 10+ years, they don’t last 80. And you can’t replace a critical pump during normal operations so you end up with more downtime. Eventually concrete and steal will fail and there’s no cheap way to replace a steel pipe embedded in several feet of concrete.
Thus the 40-50 year lifespan, roughly when replacement + decomisioning costs less than maintenance. Ideally you line things need replacing on different years so you can fix em during refueling, and then have a bunch of equipment need replacing right after you shut things down. However France extended the plants lifespans so in effect they were hit with a maintenance backlog.
> own cost estimates for operating existing nuclear reactors (Ie zero profit, and excluding all costs associated with construction, risk, and decommissioning) is ~€57.8/MWh.
You are 100% incorrect. This is "the complete production cost of France’s existing nuclear fleet". And yes, I put that in quotes because it is a direct quote from the article you cite to claim the opposite. It's in the first sentence, difficult to miss. Furthermore, this is an estimate for the future total cost between 2026-2040.
And 5.7 Cents / kWh total cost for dispatchable, reliable and CO₂ free energy is very good.
Which is why France is investing heavily in nuclear again.
> Curtailment
"Nuclear power in France has a total capacity factor of around 77%, which is low compared to nuclear power plants in other countries due to load following."
So 77%, not the 50% you wrote. And they are increasing the share of other electricity sources therefore lowering the total share of nuclear (which was overbuilt during the time of the Messmer Plan). So curtailment of nuclear will decrease and capacity factors can only go up from the 77% they have.
Unless you give priority to variable renewables. Which you can do, but it's a stupid idea.
Given that, 80% total seems entirely realistic for France, and for the new plants they can go higher than that. Curtail the older plants that are already paid off. However, the key point is that this is a choice they can make. With variable renewables, you get average capacity factors in the 20-30% range, if you're lucky, and you do not get to choose.
Anyway, even at the completely unrealistic 50% you assume, the cost would be around 6-7 cents per kWh, which still seems fine given retail electricity prices of around 25 cents / kWh in France and above 35 cent / kWh in Germany. And of course it is nowhere near the 20+ cents anti-nuclear lobbyists claim with no evidence whatsoever.
> Thus the 40-50 year lifespan, roughly when a replacement costs less than maintenance.
Sorry, the actual experts on this + the owners of the plants disagree with your off-the-cuff speculation, and they are extending the lifetime even of their existing plants to 80 years and possibly beyond.
All nuclear power plants made since around 1980s or so have been made in factories. The US (and other nations) use them all the time for their submarines- defense concerns correctly override environmentalists (and the oil companies backing them financially).
The problem is a solved one. We're rich enough to afford to tilt at windmills instead- for now, anyway.
If they really work in this factory like shown in that video, handling radioactive material in the production process with little personal protection (especially against airborne dust), then at least I for one would not like to work for them, ever. The safety of "final" product notwithstanding (that's fine), the shaping, size sorting and sintering processes create dust and really, you don't want to get that into yourself.
Both France and Germany figured out how to do this.
And then stopped building.
<facepalm>
You build a standardized design, and you build a bunch of them, and you overlap the construction.
Germany's Konvoi reactors were built for DM 4 billion a piece in the late 80s. At the same time, non-Konvoi reactors cost more than twice as much, DM 9.5 billion.
Apply the 88% cumulative inflation between then and now and you'd be at DM 7,52 billion, or € 3.9 billion.
Fortunately we are starting to build more again, so prices should begin to fall.
Last I checked, Moore's Law simply does not apply to photovoltaics.
The exponential increase in computing comes from being able to make smaller transistors, and the fact that a smaller transistor is able to perform the same computation as a bigger transistor.
A smaller solar cell is not capable of converting the same amount of power as a larger cell, because its power output depends on the area. (Also on the efficiency, but that's a separate issue, and not subject to exponentials).
It was also always something that was driven by demand, as you need ever more expensive fabs to create the smaller feature sizes. It is most definitely not something that happened just due to time passing.
In Spain in 2007, the Government asked people to invest in solar panels guaranteeing a price that was outrageously high for a long time. Of course then it changed the price and 60.000 families were bankrrupted.
Solar panel were ultra expensive and could not compete with other types of energy.
Of course lots of the people in Government became rich as a result of the operation.
Today we are having problems with solar panels network instability. Yesterday there was a 3 hour blackout in big parts of Spain because solar unbalance.
The author makes some big leaps, both in logic and execution, including the fact that you need some level of concensus to go "all in" on anything new - or to be an autocratic dictator who "knows best".
Think about what we could do with nuclear power if we had spent decades designing and building cheaper reactors. Small Modular Reactors out of a factory could solve the biggest problem of nuclear, that it's expensive and takes a long time to build.
We already have small modular energy producing units called photovoltaic cells. They can be installed anywhere with sun by anyone who knows how to use a screwdriver, don’t explode, and don’t contain a highly regulated material.
In other words, even if we grant that nuclear is a good idea in the U.S. is it also a good idea in Mexico? What about Guatemala?
You missed the part where your “small modular energy producing unit” only works during the day and when it doesn't rain though.
That's true you cannot spread nuclear everywhere in the world due to political instability constraints. But at the same time, the majority of CO2 emissions come from countries which have access to nuclear technology already…
The US government has already spent massive amounts of money subsidizing nuclear science programs, because much of the technology is dual-use for weapons. The same is true of every nuclear armed nation in the world.
We subsidized the nuclear power industry for many decades. We also perversely spent $trillions subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.
What the author and others point out is solar lacked those massive subsidies. Had we spent the same amount on subsidies for solar power, as we spent on nuclear or fossil fuels, solar power technology would have advanced much faster.
Yeah, maybe if we dumped even more cash in to nuclear, we might have those cost efficient reactors people keep dreaming about. Or maybe not, because there are compelling arguments that nuclear power will never be able to compete against solar on price. Yes, I am aware that the sun isn't always shining...
Smart people's disease: "I read about Wright's Law, which says the more $X you make the cheaper it gets. Therefore for all manufactured products $X, the more we make, the cheaper they'll get."
STEM helped me a ton in college, when I move from physics to economics, everything was "just a curve" instead of something that needed to be approached and memorized individually
Here, instead of feeling put out that ex. government won't just throw more money at carbon capture, I can say "well, we're just describing a power curve, which is not a law"
Solar panels and batteries getting cheaper already happened. It's not hypothetical. It's a pretty small leap to say that it would have gotten cheaper earlier if we started earlier.
Because Wrights Law, it may have gotten cheaper earlier is true, but not illuminating, is the way I'd put it concisely.
We're saying "what if power curve was evaluated at f(x + N) instead of f(X), where N is govt expenditure."
I'm listening, but not learning, and am just left with questions, because it begs questions.
N wasn't and isn't 0, so there's innumerable questions about N and it's magnitude relative to X, and Fs change.
"This is myopic solar propaganda, Wrights Law means we should have put every dollar into fusion"
is similarly, true, but not illuminating, perhaps even shading.
I'm not sure what you mean by my point, I'll assume you're referring to the STEM reference.
I need more from an argument than "Here is a synonym for a power law function. If a power function has different parameters, it has a different output".
I would be more easily blinded if I was encountering Wright's Law - spending more on things make things insanely cheap insanely quick - without knowing what a power law is and knowing it was just arguing from that.
I will put it as simple as I can: I have read your comment. Multiple times. I have no idea what you are saying.
> I need more from an argument than "Here is a synonym for a power law function. If a power function has different parameters, it has a different output".
That's your re-phrasing, and I don't find it accurate. What the article questions is what is the parameter of the power function. If it is merely time, you can sit on your hands and solar panels get magically cheaper. You can't make the clock tick faster, therefore it would be foolish to want to speed the process up.
But if the input to the function is "cumulative production" rather than time (as the article argues it is) then by sitting on your hands you slooow the function down.
I’m terribly sorry if it came through as hurtfull. Was not my intention.
> dang puts it as "coming with curiosity"
I believe i lived up to that ethos on this occasion. I gave multiple reading to your comment. And when I concluded that I do not understand your thesis I wrote a very carefully worded message to let you know.
In fact it seems someone else already wrote you a comment with the same message. They told you that they don’t understand you, and you responded as if they disagreed with some detail of your point. When I would have expected that you either ignore them (as is your right) or that you clarify your overall thought.
> ELI5 accent you used is even helpful
I did that perhaps unintentionally. I hope you don’t mind me asking: is English your native language?
> I'm not sure why you're down on yourself.
I assure you I’m not down on myself. Not sure what gave you that impression.
> Yes, it's a function. Yes, it has parameters. Yes, the parameters can be adjusted.
> And?
And you overgeneralised the article and lost their point in the meantime. “If You Open Your Mind Too Much Your Brain Will Fall Out” as the song says.
> I also recommend the more constructive reply to my post, from an hour before you posted.
For electricity generation alone (which is also what TFA talks about) we could even have done it 30 years ago. In fact France did, so this is not pure speculation, it's just a terrible missed opportunity.
France's nuclear industry is a key economic sector, which represents 6.7% of the job market (220 000 people) for 2 600 companies and a turnover of €50 billion per year
What is interesting is that the article says other countries should use "France as blueprint".
- to have a state-owned electricity generation monopolist ?
- to use demand-based price increases to push down demand ?
- to provide half the funding for generating plants from taxpayers' coffers?
France's example in nuclear is, if you like to phrase it like that, one of "socialistic infrastructure policies that have proven to work well".
Quoth Lenin, "Communism is the Soviet state plus electrification of the country", https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO - I would like to see a comparative essay on France's nuclear push of 60s/70s/80s and the USSR's 20s/30s/40s. And/or, in fact, later; the number two nuclear power generating country in Europe behind France is, after all, Ukraine.
It decarbonized its electricity production by building a lot of nuclear (eg. left fossil fuels in the dust). Of course only partly, as the nuclear fleet still depends on fossil fuels, but still a great achievement.
An aside: Tim Harford presents one of the very best programmes on BBC Radio 4: More or Less [1].
Each programme investigates the reality behind statistics used in the media and by politicians. It's quite UK-centric, of course, but simply one of the most informative shows there is.
Imho the real problem that will be harder to reverse on is the city planning. Car-oriented cities will be intrinsically far more difficult to green than urban density.
Late 20th and early 21st century city planners will be remembered as an entire profession of Thomas Midgley Juniors.
Agreed, cities oriented around the car can't be saved. The cost of maintaining 12, 16 lane highways is so exorbitant that they'll have to maintain the sprawl ponzi scheme or go bankrupt.
This is obviously true but so could many of humanity's worst practices and behaviors. The problem is no one wants to make the various sacrifices that come with changing status quo. Debating what could have been done is silly. The only interesting question really is whether this inherent reticence will cause a civilizational collapse, human extinction, planetary obsolescence or perhaps only something of a temporary dark ages for humans and life on earth.
> Gordon Moore’s famous prediction about computing power must count as one of the most astonishingly accurate forecasts in history
IMHO, because it's been used as a road map, not due anything else. Like a drop-by-drop commercial service.
On free will, by how the techniques advance, the computer power would experience abruptly high computing increases, with undetermined development periods occurring in between.
We cannot because of big oil's buying of politicians and its merchants of doubt. They must be destroyed politically and economically, but XR ain't helping this cause. PV and onshore wind are so cheap (LACE or LCOE), they make nuclear and SMRs essentially moot. Economics will somewhat displace big oil, but it will take leadership to destroy this industry that is killing us and causing insurance losses.
And the one big thing that prevented this from happening was that fossil fuel companies gas lit is for years pretending that climate change wasn’t real.
Saying that some law or principle works in one context, so it can probably work here or that some country did X so we can do it too doesn't really account for many of the nuances.
Solar panels aren't equally effective everywhere on Earth and some countries or parts of countries are just in different places on Earth. They're also not equally effective in all kinds of weather and some places just have worse weather.
You would need a huge oversupply to be able to reliably redirect energy to areas that are underproducing through long distance high voltage transfer lines, which are not perfectly efficient and lose energy along the way.
What if night time comes, as it tends to? What if a huge weather event blankets a lot of the country for a day or a few days? What if a volcano erupts somewhere and darkens the sky for a while?
Batteries, you say! Batteries have their limits too, and they were even worse 25 years ago.
Solar panels and batteries weren't simply about reducing costs and increasing supply, they were also about performance, how much land you need, where the land would be, managing adverse events, handling dips, efficiencies, creating jobs, projected innovations (where are we relative to where we can be), etc.
In another context, if you send food to poor countries that can't produce as much of their own food and the population starts increasing far beyond the resources of the land, you have a country that's even more dependent than it was before and risk terrible famine if a supply chain breaks down.
If the government had artificially pushed for the production of massive amounts of solar panels and batteries, it could make too many people dependent on something less reliable. When the government funding dries up for it, much of the demand and jobs can dry up too if the demand isn't naturally coming from the market.
You could also make the argument that if we had pushed so hard for crappy solar panels back then, it could have failed and soured interest in it even a few decades later. This could apply in the political sphere or even among the population who have memories of being stuck with crappy panels and all the problems they experienced. So if you really believe in and want solar panels to succeed, being too extreme about it too early can potentially be worse rather than better regardless of these cost principles.
The question has to be asked if something is truly effective altruism when assessed across the full cycle and span of the problem. I don't even know the full cycle or span of the problem, these are just outside observations. It's probably even more complicated than this.
Just another spin on communism and central planning. Why don’t we let the market decide? Why don’t we let people decide what is best for them instead of forcing one technology or another? Inflation is ultra high yet we are ignoring the root cause: increasing cost of inputs due to new taxes and tariffs, and instead hoping that by also increasing the cost of capital all will be good again.
I can't tell if you're serious or not. We can't let "the market" decide on things like this because the market is a small number of very large companies that have natural monopolies and also doesn't care whether or not it completely consumes the planet for profit.
Even libertarians understand that the atmosphere and its heat trapping properties are a public good. I'd be fine with letting the market decide if we simply banned carbon emissions entirely.
Do you have citations for how Chinese solar panel production causes undo environmental damage?
My impression is that China subsidized their solar panel industry and gave that industry grants. Basically they did "Solyndra" a couple dozen times over and then found some winners. The US instead took the Solyndra example and divested. I don't think lax environmental laws was the difference, but instead government investment.
governments should have been falling over themselves to buy or otherwise subsidise expensive solar PV, because the more we bought, the faster the price would fall
That's quite a stretch, especially considering that there are plenty of examples where government subsidies and intervention distorts markets and makes them less efficient and more dysfunctional. I don't disagree with the general premise of the article: more could have been done to transition to renewable energy sooner. But it's really simplistic to say there was a clear, easy answer to this, and it simply involved more government spending on solar energy.
