Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear

Good luck with running industries on decentralized energy production. That's how things started during the industrial revolution, and the grid was a net upgrade. Reason for that is building a factory is much cheaper when you don't need to also build the adjoined power plant.

Decentralized production works well with residential or low consumption tertiary sector, but not much else. Even then, a working grid will have better quality of service and economies of scale on equipment. The issue with developing countries is that their grid typically is dysfunctional.

> The outcome is a much more resilient grid energy system.

That claim depends a lot on the threat model you're looking at. If your goal is to still have some energy under coordinated attack, sure. If your goal is to maximmize uptime for critical services, not so much. Backup generators, inverters, etc. typically have a higher rate of failure than a well-performing grid.

At 10m the only thing you can reliably detect is large scale deployments. If you want to do better than that you need paid data which is prohibitively expensive at large scales.

Also doable maybe a bit less reliably with high res satellite (30cm res).

Depending on how remote the area the data can be a bit out of date (years even)

A popular misconception. Solar panels can generate significant power during overcast clouds (~15% of rated capacity). I have seen panels generate power in overcast conditions when they would otherwise lack any direct line to the sun (high latitude, winter, forest/mountains).

https://bsky.app/profile/solarchase.bsky.social/post/3mxjkhs...

People putting a couple panels up on their patio or whatever and having it charge one of those cooler sized batteries that they then run a few of their devices off of.

I've been thinking about a similar situation for my shed as I'd realized that the entire system would be cheaper than getting a line trenched to it.

My sister got it installed, about €15k worth, of which about a third was covered by grants and she's been selling enough back to the grid that she doesn't pay much bill at all for about 6 months of the year.

Unless she was some kind of off the grid absolutist, why wouldn't she have registered?

I disagree with it and a lot of other stuff but yeah...

For balcony panels you only have to do a very small registration, but no large bureaucratic process or getting a permit.

For larger ones you still must get a permit for a very simple reason: even if you don't get your power into the general network, you still affect it by using less, which might cause issues with grid stability.

We have so much power on sunny days now that we can barely deal with it. Which in turn occasionally even causes power prices to go negative - you can get paid for drawing power.

I remember in past people would make small wind turbines for their own use and would get fined in Europe. Because they expect you to sell the electricity and then buy it back - like you can’t use it directly as far as I remember, without paying taxes and stuff.

You also need to meet NEC for all the wiring and if you put any on your roof, it will have to be approved by the building inspector.

Lastly, for firefighter safety you also need to have functioning and clearly accessible and labeled emergency shutoff inspected and approved.

To be honest upgrading the meter and applying for net metering was maybe 5% of the red tape hassle for my install.

Ha! They won't even consult you.

What they'll do is they'll fund useful idiot do-gooder advocacy groups and academia and get them to produce a bunch of whining and papers about how the runoff from your panels is bad for some endangered slug or maybe it'll be some supply chain mumbo jumbo about not buying lithium from sources that might fund terrorists or something. In any case, they'll use that as plausible deniability to get some federal rules tweaked and of course your state (because it loves grant money) already has a law saying that municipalities must enforce whatever the fed recommendations are.....blah...blah...blah...several layers of regulatory cause and effect later you will be disallowed from putting up panels without permits which won't be issued unless you bend over and take a bunch of costs that make it a complete non starter.... or unless you connect to the grid.

But don't worry, maybe if your panels and battery are small and useless enough you'll qualify for some tiny homeowner exemption like how you don't need a building permit for a shed so long as it's too small to be useful. Gotta shield the useful idiots from the brunt of the regulatory capture lest they learn how they system works and cease to go to bat for it or starts demanding more than whatever scant shred of a benefit they get out of the whole rotten thing.

Sorry not sorry for being jaded. I work in the sausage factory so I know how it's made.

I wonder if as panel costs goes down, will people start to wire their homes again for 48V DC? You could conceivably run your HVAC and fridges at least off of it, this would negate the need for a larger (more costly) inverter.

It's already getting close to "not really economic" to buy second-hand panels, because people have slightly inflated prices for them, but the way I look at it I get a nice run out to somewhere, have a nice lunch in a cafe, and come back with a couple of kW of panels for about as much as a tank of fuel.

New panels just get cheaper and cheaper and better and better, and you can often find clearance deals on 400W-ish panels for ridiculously low prices.

I've been pricing a PV system recently, and I was surprised at how low the price of panels already is. In most estimates I received the panels itself were less than 20% of the total installation costs. Granted, I am looking at a 3-phase system with plenty of battery capacity. For a more typical household setup with 1-phase and moderate battery capacity that percentage will shift a bit.

In my case the quotes are roughly: 40x430Wp panels (~€4000), 3x (3-phase) inverter/chargers (~€5000), batteries (~€5000), auxiliaries (~€1500), cabling (~€2000), mounting hardware (~€2500), labor (~€5000), planning/permissions (~€1000). So total project price is ~25k, of which the panels are only ~€4000. And that doesn't even count the construction of a utility building to house the batteries and inverters, the EV chargers, etc.

On a side note: I found that battery prices have also dropped significantly already. If you're willing to do some assembly yourself you can get ~15kWh of LiFePO4 for just over €1k.

Also, for those wondering: for my situation the ROI of this setup is expected to be about 5 years. This will be quicker if I get an EV, which I am planning on.

I said ~20% because that's the minimum required to bring it to commercial market while being competitive. If they go more, great, bonus.

And usually (I did not read into detail here) the total cost of energy is never calculated.

In Europe, nuclear power plants usually don't have an insurance. It's the state that pays of the cleanup after an aftermath. So total cost is socialized.

Few countries have final deposits. With current technology, you need to operate them for thousands of years (e.g. guard them, so that no terrorists can get the material for "dirty bombs"). None of these total-cost studies calculates this in.

Many countries don't have their own source of uranium or the fabs to bring it up for usage in power plants. So it happens that by betting on solar, you bet on the goodwill of some external country. Did you know that most nuclear related companies worldwide used to be owned by the russian RosAtom? I have no idea if that is still true now after 5 years of war against Ukraine, so maybe the odd country seized mines or enrichment plants. But RosAtom owned stuff abroad, like Canada or Australia. Finding new ways if some terrorist country like russia suddenly ceases to supply you (like they did with gas) has a very high oppertunity cost. These studies usually don't plan in "second source" economic calculations.

In Germany, the four big electric power companies (e.g. Vattenfall, EON etc) say since decades that they don't want to open new nuclear power plants. Since it is not economically feasible. If the TCO would really be spectacular, then they would say differently. In those places, where they still open nuclear plants, like France, even a single block costs billions. I mean, one block estimated to cost 3 billion euro was costing 27 billion. Do these fabricated studies calculate in this grave error of factor 12? In France, EDF only works because it is state backed. If the TCO would be any good, they would swim in money like the senior Uncle Duck.

Then again, I'm basing this opinion on a recent-ish video from NightHawkInLight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw

We can get to 95% using just short term storage. I suspect that most jurisdictions will just say "95% is good enough" rather than paying for ridiculously expensive long term storage.

We've got the nat gas capability already; keeping it around for the 5% is quite inexpensive, making the massive investment in long term storage for marginal benefit hard to justify.

OTOH, while the premium for e-fuels seems excessive, if you're only running that nat gas plant 2 days a year that premium is not so scary.

LiFePo4 however is excellent and reasonably low cost these days

LiFePO4 is probably the chemistry best suited to it ATM. Lasts a long time, more stable, pretty cheap, and just a bit less energy density than other lithium ion options. Sodium-ion is looking promising but only just entering the market AFAIK.

I have a 5 kWp solar plant that produces ~25kWh per day, but it is grid-tied. I considered a hybrid setup with LFP battery back up, but decided to separate the two systems to avoid a single point of failure.

Solar is never gonna be a complete solution. At the end of the day, we could do it more efficiently by just building suns here on earth for the panels, but of course then you've achieved fusion and you're already generating more than solar could ever hope to. We shouldn't hinge our future on half of a technology.

Other countries are better positioned. e.g. UK has really spiky wind energy. Right this second more than half the grid is wind. Which is both cool and problematic for managing the grid.

Grid scale cheap storage would dramatic help manage that chaos

only natural gas plants can do this. a coal plant cannot spin up just for the night and turn back off when the sun comes up - it's incredibly inefficient and probably causes more premature wear/tear too.

A decade or so behind, in the US.

If the US didn't block import of Chinese tech, we could have electrified a decade ago.

The tech available at the current moment, is even more capable of replacing petroleum based electricity.

But our government is banning Chinese tech to serve our outdated industries instead of importing it to serve the population.

As any wise country would do when faced with superior technology, we should import it with the condition of technology exchange. Chinese manufacturers should be training US workers and industrial ownership how to produce cheap, efficient, sodium batteries.

This benefits the populous immediately, and the industries are able to advance into the current century's tech.

Solar has the advantage that it can be widely distributed on buildings rather than in just a few centralized locations.

There are legit reasons to push back against “solar and batteries everywhere” but I find it hard to credit resilience in a conflict situation as one of them.

(Diesel power generators also work, but they require constant fuel supply, which can be complicated in a war zone)

The costs of large number long distance HVDC lines with accompaning invertor stations would be as expensive as a electric generation based on nuclear power.

In an ideal world no one would bother where power comes from. From "the grid" or "from local". Why should "the grid" get some benefit? Over local production? IMHO such a thinking artificially limits competition.

What should still bother the law makers is the impact "grid power" vs. "local power". E.g. if AI computing centers build gas turbines for local power, but that creates noise and air pollution.

"Balcony solar"'s idea is to get solar into the hand of people without almost no extra cost. By design, you can plug it in into a normal socket. So you don't even need to call an electrician. No new power cable needs to be installed. And the basic idea of this ("make it so simple that even 85 year old Aunt Mary can do it") is IMHO worthwhile.

For a regular solar, you need to check if your roof can withstand the weight and wind forces. You need to install electric lines, circuit breakers etc etc. All of this costs several factors more than the pure voltaic panels.

I wish someone would pay me to supply inertia. I'm quite good at it too.

Obviously as a country with nuclear weapons that's an ingredient.

However Hinkley C's strike price £2012 92.50 is lower than was renegotiated for Drax £2012 109.90. Those are £2012 which means they're inflation adjusted as if you were being paid in the year 2012 not in current pounds. For a real world comparison, AR6 Solar got a strike price of about £2012 50 and that translates into about £75 right now today. Inflation is a hell of a thing.

Drax burns imported trees ("waste wood") so it requires some creative Green accounting to come up with the idea that this is carbon neutral so even if it's not quite as trivially friendly as a solar panel Hinkley is obviously less stupid. Both Hinkley and Drax run happily in the still dark, so to compare solar or wind you need to factor in a lot of storage. Today the government does not fund storage, that's a free market opportunity, so we can interpret the significant discount from Hinkley or Drax to a solar farm as a sign that the market thinks storing enough power is quite expensive actually.

First, you for decades pay 5-10 times more for energy to subsidize every single green energy project... and then oopsie woopsie you still buy Russian gas and dependent on the evil coutries.

So IMO we don’t need all the expensive options, when the cheap ones are already viable.

In the same time frame you can build out enough solar, wind and battery storage that you can supply the same amount of continuous power, have money left over and not need worry about nuclear waste and a hefty teardown bill to the tune of billions of dollars.

Nuclear power is on its way out, all you need it for is deep space, marine military applications (i.e. aircraft carriers and submarines that stay submerged for months at a time) and as a byproduct of reactors used for radiotherapy.

I'm not even sure if it is worth it to keep chasing the fusion dream. Sure, as a foundation research into nuclear physics and chemistry (i.e. creating new elements), or for powering interplanetary space travel, it still makes sense, but by the time nuclear fusion can generate power... renewables will have long since taken over.

There was a German one too:

>constructed in 1960, grid connected in 1967 and shut down in 1988. It was a 15 MWe, 46 MWt test reactor used to develop and test a variety of fuels and machinery. ... Over its lifetime the reactor had many accidents, earning it the name "Shipwreck".

Not quite sure what goes wrong but they seem problematic.

In 2010 Hinkley C was the right choice. But if starting today, that £48 billion could buy you a whole lot of wind, solar, and batteries.

So even if a place like the US goes lighter on solar that is reasonable, Places like Spain, Italy or Morocco will go all in just to minimize dependence on a resource a third party can control. It's the ultimate counter to the Hormuz situation. Squeeze access to oil for long enough, and you accelerate the move away from it.

Instead we have a captured system where it's cheaper to buy the politics of wealth extraction. Historically speaking this has always led to increasing wealth inequality that is ultimately resolved by war or revolution.

If the ultra-wealthy were smart, they'd declare victory because they've never had it so good and they'd seek to give back a little to placate the populace and stave off that war and revolution. But they don't. Greed has no bounds. So at some points, the guillotines are probably making a comeback. And a lot of people are going to die as climate refugees in the coming decades.

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

It’s also much more effective to grow support across the spectrum then to have an extremely polarised issue where one side gets power and just overpowers the other. Then you get the insane back and forth tug of war when they get in power and just undo everything you did. It’s pointless.

Climate change:

> By increasing our American energy supply and decreasing the long term demand for oil, we will be well positioned to address the challenge of climate change and continue our longstanding responsibility for stewardship over the environment.

...

> As part of a global climate change strategy, Republicans support technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions, reduce excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, increase energy efficiency, mitigate the impact of climate change where it occurs, and maximize any ancillary benefits climate change might offer for the economy.

...

> Because Republicans believe that solutions to the risk of global climate change will be found in the ingenuity of the American people, we propose a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change. Honoraria of many millions of dollars would be a small price for technological developments that eliminate our need for gas-powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.

Clean energy:

> Alternate power sources must enter the mainstream. The technology behind solar energy has improved significantly in recent years, and the commercial development of wind power promises major benefits both in costs and in environmental protection. Republicans support these and other alternative energy sources, including geothermal and hydropower, and anticipate technological developments that will increase their economic viability. We therefore advocate a long-term energy tax credit equally applicable to all renewable power sources.

Reducing demand for fossil fuels:

> Conservation does not mean deprivation; it means efficiency and achieving more with less. Most Americans today endeavor to conserve fossil fuels, whether in their cars or in their home heating, but we can do better. We can construct better and smarter buildings, use smarter thermostats and transmission grids, increase recycling, and make energy-efficient consumer purchases. Wireless communications, for example, can increase telecommuting options and cut back on business travel. The Republican goal is to ensure that Americans have more conservation options that will enable them to make the best choices for their families.

...

> We must also produce more vehicles that operate on electricity and natural gas, both to reduce demand for oil and to cut CO2 emissions.

> Given that fully 97 percent of our current transportation vehicles rely on oil, we will aggressively support technological advances to reduce our petroleum dependence. For example, lightweight composites could halve the weight and double the gas mileage of cars and trucks, and together with flex-fuel and electric vehicles, could usher in a renaissance in the American auto industry.

[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2008-republican-pa...

That baseload capacity comes from natural gas power plants. By building solar and wind you are guaranteeing a market for their products in the future.

Not sure what religious fundamentalism has to do with any of this.

The Eastern Bloc in the Cold War was extremely keen on fossil fuels (and nuclear power) and very poor at dealing with pollution. As is the PRC.

In Western Europe, coal miners were the backbone of the far left in places like Germany and the UK including Communist parties. The British Labour Party's vote was traditionally strongest in coal mining areas.

I don't know so much about the US situation, but I am aware that some American coal miners were involved in socialist movements there many decades ago.

I think in that case industries that will became most economical or practical way to generate electricity simply will start funding the right.

Obvious counterpoints: Trump's $700m "clean, beautiful coal" handouts, or Trump's $2B buyback of wind farm leases.

Maybe the voters don't, but the businessmen and politicians definitely do, maybe more so than democrats. Just in different sectors (military).

Good luck storing that energy in batteries through the winter. Having a portion of $50/kWh batteries that cycle once a year results in pretty high energy costs. At some point non-battery storage (e.g. generators running on diesel) take over.

Of course, if people are willing to go totally off-grid then good luck to them.

I agree with your post, but the above statement is not technically accurate.

Panels do drop in production over time; A very rough rule-of-thumb is around 1% loss per year.

So after 20 years production is at like 80%. (Ymmv)

Of course this isn't really a big deal. The panels themselves are cheap and can be replaced very easily. Equally there is a market for 2nd hand panels as they still produce, and are ideal for places that are not space constrained.

Only if the oil price remains high. If the world, um, situation stabilizes we will go back to having a glut of oil and hence low prices. Lower than ever I would guess because of the current massive transition to EVs.

A bit of realism would help here. Yes, there's a left/NIMBY overlap to some degree, but the forces from the non-right camp seeking to limit power development comes from the NIMBY elements, not the left elements.

1. Then you need small scale transformers 2. Lots of roofs have shadows on them a lot of the time, like from trees or other nearby buildings 3. Most roofs have to get replaced every 15 years 4. Roof installed solar is fixed in place

I think parking lots, rural empty land and the like are a better starting point that avoids all 4 of these issues.

I have solar on my roof btw.

Currently Solar PV output is incredibly unbalancing but hopefully batteries will offset that in the coming years

https://www.elevenenergy.co.uk/#sodium-ion

They are larger than lithium batteries, but potentially cheaper and better performing around temperature extremes.

Wait, you can schedule price drops?

https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2017110 / https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(18)30583-X make the battery takeover look like a foregone conclusion, but past performance is no indication of future performance.

Also what about the systems to turn the batteries into something useable? It is telling how cheap lead-acid batteries looked on the first paper's Figure 2, yet overall system costs were vastly higher.

https://gravity-storage.com/technical-concept/

But battery storage is a proven technology now and the cost trends with such bespoke megaprojects are not looking promising, so I'm not holding my breath.

Burning (regenerable) metal fuel in old coal power plants is also an interesting approach:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666352X2...

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

>No we don't. Battery systems can stabilize the grid. You need inverters that are designed for this, but it isn't hard to make an inverter that will set then grid frequency and force it correct.

I know in theory we don't, but in practice there is no such real grid anywhere in the world that would run on large percentage of solar. So it seems we do.

I'm talking about real grid as something that powers at least thousands of households. Not a compound with a dozen buildings.

Take Canary Islands for example. They are an ideal environment to setup a 90% solar and battery grid. They have a great climate and size well suited to this. But they still run thermal plants.

Why? Because no one has successfully showed a largish scale frequency regulation/stabilisation with inverters.

See a writeup about the Texas outage a year or two ago to understand how fragile grids with too large percentage of semiconductor sources are compared with rotating masses.

Finally, some much needed progress towards Sagan's apple pie.

https://youtu.be/9Ry4QBQejFU?is=3AXWnkcqHGx01j6e

It's from 2022, so probably outdated.

> According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), about 12% of all silicon metal produced worldwide (also known as “metallurgical-grade silicon” or MGS) is turned into polysilicon for solar panel production. China produces about 70% of the world’s MGS and 77% of the world’s polysilicon. Converting silicon to polysilicon requires very high temperatures, and in China it’s coal that largely fuels these plants. Xinjiang—a region in China of abundant coal and low electricity prices—produces 45% of the world’s polysilicon.

> Reports indicate that some Xinjiang polysilicon plants have employed forced labor of Uyghurs, an intensely persecuted Muslim ethnic minority.

[0] https://blog.ucs.org/charlie-hoffs/mining-raw-materials-for-...

I think there was some ex-French colony government that demanded France disclose details of nuclear waste burial sites for "safety" reasons, which France rejected. Which means it happens. That kind of thing is why nuclear wastes are supposedly and actually so "dangerous" and small private owned generators get "complicated".

To borrow the meme about LISP [1], if nuclear was so good, it would've caught on at any point in the last 80 years. And it hasn't for some good reasons:

- It's too expensive. As an example, Hinkley Point-C in the UK has a super high negotiated rate that only lasts 35 years for a plant that still needs a lifetime of 60 to justify the investment so who knows how expensive the power will be for those last 25 years;

- It takes too long to build, typically ~20 years;

- Fuel processing (to create the fuel rods) creates a lot of harmful waste (eg UF6) and it is not a solved problem;

- Processing of spent fuel is not a solved problem. There's this idea that you just stick it in a barrel and leave it for a thousand years doesn't match the reality. It typically needs active cooling for possibly decades, for a start;

- Failure modes for a single plant dwarf any other alternative. The standard counterpoint is global warming from fossil fuels but that's for the entire fossil fuel ecosystem. The clean up for Fukushima, for example, will likely take over a century and cost over $1 trillion;

- The taxpayer bears the burden for these failures because, in the US for example, the industry self-insurance fund is a couple of orders magnitude too small to cover it;

- Nuclear requires liability limits well below any such failure mode to make it remotely economical (eg the Price-Anderson Act liability limits);

- The ecosystem of building, maintaining, repairing, servicing, monitoring and regulating nuclear power plants as well as all the supply chains (eg transporting and storing fuel) takes a long time to scale up.

I really wish I understood why nuclear has this cult-like following. It's completely irrational.

[1]: https://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html

Solar seems to be working just fine in Spain, a place where almost nobody lives in a stand alone house, or even a row house. You still put solar in the building, but then you have industrial solar in places wi5 little agricultural value, and wind turbines installed on top of hills. All of this could work just fine in any sim city I remember, as you are just dedicating space to power, which is fine.

Plus below a certain cost threshold, the risk of damage still means the overall cost is lower.

In short, yes, France was able to build a lot of nuclear in the 80s, but the plans were made in the 70s and, to some extend, reused design and research from the 60s.

Mostly, they benefited from pre-Tchernobyl regulations, and a standardized design that would not be accepted anywhere in the world today if you started from scratch.

After a long hiatus, we sort of managed to build an over engineered post-Fukushima reactor (EPR) in about 20 years, and hopefully learnt lessons so that the next version of the new thing (EPR2) is less of a disaster - but still, you're talking about a decade and a half from presidential ink on paper to electron in the grid if everything goes well - and nuclear is one of those industries where things never go well. Mesmer plan is the exception, not the rule (except if you're Chinese, of course...)

Yea, if you go to an installer instead of buying from the OEM and installing yourself. I likely made your panels at SunSpark (We made panels for everyone, Renogy, Juinko Solar, Samsung, etc.) They were sold for $80 at 330w - 4.125 watts per dollar, or a quarter per watt.

Solar isn't expensive - you are.

I would guess this varies by locale, and people usually assume the time value of money to be zero when they make the claim. In much of the US, I think the payback time is more realistically in the 15-20 year range, which means you really only want to install panels when you install a new roof. Otherwise the lifetime of the roof will happen before break even on the panels.

I am with you, this would be better on a town or regional basis instead of on everyone’s roof. Our houses already have wires going to them and I can’t imagine my particular roof or garage is the best place to put panels and batteries. But I understand it’s a political / administrative issue which may well be not solvable easily in many places.

Home circuitry, load center need to be redesigned for V2X (vehicle to grid, home, load, etc), plug-in solar and batteries, solar/batteries replacing generators, etc. You seem to have thoughtful ideas about these and it would help to have someone knowledgable articulate how it should be done.

[1]The idea is that they can change the world right now by understanding what they want in their world (clean and free energy) and that they need to ask for those changes because buildings last ~100 years. The lowest hanging fruit is future-proof all construction and have it be ready for incremental changes without needing any labor or permitting work.

With more panels my setup will be more of an eye-sore, require more and longer cables, combiner boxes and the setup becomes a bigger project. So I am just being a selfish ass but I had to ask where we are.