Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gwypaas | Hacker News Reader

> 3. Power extraction from a bundle of hot material is not a particularly unknown problem. It's in fact how every power plant on the planet works.

Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free energy and it still makes a loss.

Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants gets around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required scale.

Unless you can step around the steam turbine I do not see this becoming anything outside of incredibly small niches.

View on HN

I reckon solar is competitive in the day time without storage or peaker plants to support low generation time. I’d love to see the analysis of solar with the built in assumption of burdening the hourly cost with the infrastructure required to generate the required power at 10pm.

The generation during the day will not be burdened by that infrastructure. The night time generation will simply be day time cost + infrastructure.

Theoretically, you can bet that your traditional power plant only runs at night. But now your capacity factor is less than half the available hours for the same capital investment and it looks even bleaker.

This is where I think it probably should be. Solar w/o another generation or storage source doesn't accurately represent the full picture of what is really required to support the a whole day of electricity. So the combined total cost is probably what should be shown to represent the costs of a full day cycle of solar, or a rainy day.

Neither coal nor nuclear are uncompetitive.

Compare newly built renewables with all costs included to the marginal cost of paid of coal and nuclear. [1] Today it is often better to simply shut down your existing nuclear plant and build a renewable instead. For a more comprehensive look see [2].

[1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/451885/grphx_lcoe-07.png

[2]: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Looks like you'll pay the same price if you shut down an existing nuclear plant for wind/solar, unless you can bag some subsidies.

>...Today it is often better to simply shut down your existing nuclear plant and build a renewable instead.

That is ignoring capacity factor.

From your link we see that the most expensive power generation of all is residential rooftop solar. If cost is the concern, why support the most expensive option that also has a low capacity factor?

This always makes me laugh.

What other power source is accessible to the home owner?

If we are going nuclear and it’s so efficient and cost effective, why is it always subsidised so heavily? Its full cost has never been paid anywhere, as storage etc stretch off way into the future.

It seems eternally close to being cheap and reliable, but we keep screwing it up.

Meanwhile what’s left of European nuclear industry is keeping the lights on

You mean half the French nuclear fleet which is out of commission causing much of the current problems?

France has gone from the largest electricity exporter in Europe to an importer.

Which is due to the irrational fear caused by Harrisburg. The required production of new plants was halted, and now we are stuck with these aging plants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com