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Comment by rwcarlsen | Hacker News Reader

Low/negative prices (caused largely by various regulation/policies) have been putting a lot of economic pressure on existing nuclear power generation - sometimes causing it to close [1]. Generation that is largely replaced by natural gas plants. So maybe this very non-free-market state is actually not helping make forward progress on what many would consider to be one of the most important issues relating to energy - climate change.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/05/16/natural-g...

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An energy industry where the bulk of energy production is wind & solar with natural gas plants to handle peak demand spikes is significantly more environmentally friendly than an industry where the bulk of production is oil & coal with a few nuclear plants thrown in.

Yes, but we want the coal to be displaced. Not the nuclear.

Coal already has been displaced. The reason there's less of a downturn is because there's a lot less of it to begin with:

https://www.iso-ne.com/about/key-stats/resource-mix/

There's 20x more nuclear than coal energy in New England. Proportionally, the drop in coal energy (~50%) was a lot more than the drop in nuclear energy (~15%).

Neither of the alternatives you propose are what we currently have or are where we are currently heading (IMO). As long as we are speculating - I think a future with good storage tech and 100% solar+wind would be better than one with gas plants thrown in the mix. If climate change is as big a deal as people claim, than why would we sacrifice existing non-carbon-emitting capacity for natural gas? We don't currently have anything remotely resembling a largely renewable grid nor the technology to even accomplish it at scale.

The article suggests that solar + wind with natgas for peaks is exactly where we're headed. At least in the regions being talked about (mostly Europe + California).

The Forbes article you linked is about New England. New England will probably be the last region to get decent renewable adoption. Solar panels don't work as well because they're far north and get a number of cloudy days, the winds are not that strong outside of the Cape Cod and certain parts of the Maine shoreline, and there are few rivers that are suitable for hydro.

Natural Gas "Peaker" plants are VERY expensive to run. (Mainly because of their low utilization compared to high costs). In many cases, battery storage is already cheaper than peaker plants.

Regarding the cloudyness... Has anyone ever tried to levitate photovoltaics into the stratosphere? Blimpy-space-elevator kinda thing? Is such a thing even possible?

I feel like it's far easier just to transmit it 1000 miles or so from a sunnier place.

Not necessarily, because 1000 miles of a transmission line is a lot of metal, land, construction, and electricity losses.

Unfortunately, a power station at 100-200 miles above Earth, where sunshine is eternal, and which is relatively accessible, will not stay above the same spot, and GEO is way high (22k miles) and thus even more expensive to build at (and already pretty crowded nevertheless).

I looked into this in a lot of detail about 5 years ago. There were a couple of studies, and one somewhat-active company I saw (Stratosolar - didn't seem to be very well resourced/capable).

My main focus was on aerodynamic modelling and panel positioning methods for various structure sizes, and the resulting LCOE. Main issues I found were: - Weather conditions in the stratosphere aren't well understood; most of the time pretty benign, but there are a bunch of extremes which could have a significant impact on the structural requirements. - It's basically a tradeoff of panel-cost/conventional-installation-cost vs aerostat-cost/non-conventional-installation-cost. The aerostat is definitely not going to be cheap, so having your panels on an aerostat has to result in a bunch more energy per PV-element than having them on the ground. - Having the aerostat option come out on top gets more difficult as PV gets cheaper. Let's say you get 2x energy from PV on an aerostat vs installed on the ground. That means the aerostat option will be competitive with the ground option as long as the total installed cost (per watt) is less than 2x the terrestrial installed cost. If the terrestrial installed cost reduces by a factor of two (and it's reduced by more than that since I did the analysis!), you suddenly have to reduce the marginal cost of your aerostat option by 50% just to remain competitive! - To be economic and sufficiently robust to expected weather, these structures have to be enormous; the architecture that seemed most promising to me (from memory) was cylinders of length 4km and diameter 1km (roughly 1GW electrical output peak, more like 500-600MW annualised). They're at least semi opaque, and are tethered around 20km altitude (and can drift within a ~10km radius around the tether point). At that altitude they're visible from several hundred kilometers away, and they look huge - 15x the width and length of the largest cruise ships. - It doesn't help THAT much with seasonal variation away from the equator. Summer output in northern europe is still 2-3x winter output, so you need long term storage or an energy dump.

So... I think it's super interesting, but I don't think it'll ever be commercially attractive vs either terrestrial installations, or space. The main nice thing is that it's still pretty easy to get the power back down to earth with high efficiency... in contrast to orbital solar.

Gah, what a formatting train wreck :-/ sorry...

Don’t apologize, this is super informative! :)

I cited natural gas being used for baseload power. In the last several years, gas has been installed frequently as baseload generation.

All I'm saying is that I think governments' approaches to incentivizing energy production are very suboptimal for mitigating (negative) effects of climate change. And negative energy prices are one of the red flags that this is the case.

FWIW, my understanding is that the bulk of the baseload natural gas plants are being installed as replacements for older coal plants that are being decommissioned.

Considering that the latest project to construct new nuclear plants in the USA nearly put Toshiba - like, the whole company, not just their power plant division - into bankruptcy, I'm not certain, on purely economic grounds, how realistic an option "more nuclear" is.

Toshiba was hit because they acquired Westinghouse, I remember reading that Westinghouse had some accounting irregularities before the acquisition that then Toshiba continued until recently.

I don't think it was the projects and the cost of them themselves but previous underlying problems in the companies.

The big problem was that Westinghouse signed a contract that put them pretty much exclusively on the hook for cost overruns, without any good way to get out of it. That explains why it hit them so hard, but it doesn't necessarily explain the cost overruns in the first place. A lot of that can at least be partially explained by other, deeper problems. For example, they kept reworking the design even after breaking ground, which seems symptomatic of the loss of engineering expertise in the field over the past few decades.

The whole saga has also led to two major manufacturers - Toshiba and Westinghouse - exiting the market, which I'm inclined to take as an omen that, at least in the North American energy market, a lot of these deeper problems can be expected to worsen instead of getting better.

I think battery storage peaker plants are where we are going, like the one in australia that tesla built.

> New England will probably be the last region to get decent renewable adoption. Solar panels don't work as well because they're far north and get a number of cloudy days...

Wrong. Most of Europe (especially Germany) is actually at a higher latitude than New England.

...but tends to be windier. My understanding is that renewable use in Germany is largely driven by wind power.

Germany has 5 times as much solar capacity as wind power, and the highest PV watts-per-capita in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country

The chart you linked to shows wind at 45GW in 2015 and solar at 41GW in 2016, and this page [1] shows net generated energy in 2016 at 77TWh for wind and 37.5TWh for solar. Are you sure you weren't looking at the "New installed capacity" for wind and comparing it to the total capacity for solar? (The solar numbers are admittedly bigger than I expected to see, though it appears that wind is growing 4x faster than solar, which is the opposite from the U.S, where the installed wind base in greater but solar is growing 2x faster.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

I'd much rather have solar/wind/nuclear than solar/wind/gas.

I would too, but that's not a possible combination. The issue is that at any given moment, the amount of electricity produced must equal the amount consumed. Solar and wind have production curves that are defined by the sun and wind, and typically peak early morning (for wind) and mid-day (for solar), which are often not the times of peak demand. So when everyone turns on their lights, TVs, stoves, and laptops in the evenings, there needs to be a quick-responding power plant to meet the excess demand. By far the preferred technology for this is a natural gas turbine, because it's one of the few technologies that can adjust its output within seconds. Nuclear power plants take several hours to days to respond to shifts in demand, because the control rods must be moved, the nuclear chain reaction must speed up, it needs to generate more heat, that heat needs to boil water, and the steam needs to make its way to the turbines.

There's more information in the wikipedia pages for "base load", "load following", and "peaking" power plants:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant

Interestingly, solar-thermal is apparently coming online as a potential technology for peaking power plants, which could reduce the need for natural gas.

Afaik the problem is that the currently installed nuclear generators cannot stop their operation in the middle of a fuel cycle.

The green fantasy of renewables + nuclear doesn't work with the current generation of nuclear power plants. US nuclear plants either run at 100% power, or they are shutdown for refueling. That's pretty much the only way they are economical.

If negative externalities such as carbon were properly priced, the dynamics could possibly change (guessing, I'm not quite sure what a fair price on carbon would be, and what the difference in price between nuclear and natural gas is)

HN seems to have some macho fascination with nuclear power. Or at least that's the only reason I can think of why people would advocate for it, considering nuclear power is simply far too expensive.

Yes, maybe the population at large lacks statistical understanding and needlessly fears nuclear power[0]. But it's still too expensive, as demonstrated by the complete lack of new construction. It'd be rather strange for every single energy company and government to succumb to irrationality, simultaneously.

Even solar + storage has now crossed nuclear's costs. I

[0] And they may just have all read 'Black Swan'

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, it’s 100% about cost. It’s far too expensive, and the ROI horizons are far too long (multiple decades)

Edit: and that’s only if you cut a nice deal where the state picks up the insurance tab, because private insurance markets aren’t going to.

> I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted

Probably the oddly aggressive "macho fascination" bit.

> macho fascination

What does this mean?

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