> “Australia […] depends on coal”
About 60% of Australia’s electricity came from coal over the last 12-months, but this proportion is rapidly declining and all the large coal plants are losing money and slated for closure.
436 karma · joined September 7, 2010
About 60% of Australia’s electricity came from coal over the last 12-months, but this proportion is rapidly declining and all the large coal plants are losing money and slated for closure.
1. Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives (uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel)
2. Nuclear isn't commercially viable in energy markets with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal plants are all closing for this reason)
There are already places where locally generated energy is cheaper than utility-supplied energy, and this will only increase over time as the costs of solar and storage continue to decline.
Where I live in Western Australia the local utility is trying to get ahead of this trend by cutting the network and deploying stand-alone power systems to customers on the edge of the power grid.
And even if it was nuclear is not a viable response with new projects taking decades to develop. Todays nuclear industry is delivering warmed-up 1970s technology that is expensive, slow, and inflexible.
Solar/wind/batteries with a small amount of backup capacity from hydro, power-to-gas/fuel, biofuels, or new long-duration storage is cheaper and faster to deploy.
Maybe we just get on with decarbonizing the energy system, make sure everyone is paying for the energy they use, and then we don't have to worry about making moral judgements.
There are different kinds of power companies.
Utilities with a regulated asset base that get to socialize all of their costs across rate payers aren’t screwed.
Asset-light energy suppliers/retailers in competitive deregulated markets aren’t screwed.
Asset-heavy power generators in competitive deregulated markets might be screwed .. if they have a large portfolio of legacy assets.
Solar PV creates two problems for them.
Firstly, distributed solar reduces the load available to them to serve.
Secondly, centralized and distributed solar depress wholesale energy prices in the middle of the day (and causes increasing frequency of negative-price events).
Together these reduce the volume of sales, reduce profitability, and can increase running costs, because many legacy generators weren’t originally designed to be flexible with the ability to ramp up and down every day.
While solar PV isn’t good for some power companies, it’s generally good for consumers.
That's a strong claim. Wholesale electricity prices in South Australia are currently around USD$45/MWh.
My understanding is that South Australia has historically always had the highest electricity prices in Australia due to dependence on gas generation within a small market controlled by two players who took advantage of their market power, but that this is starting to reverse now due to the shift to more renewables over the last decade, and South Australia may now be on track to have the cheapest electricity in Australia.
Hydrogen can be used to smelt steel, and hydrogen can be produced from renewable energy.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/thyssenkrupp-tests-use-...
It’s not that electricity will be free when we get there, it’s just that consumers will stop paying for volume (how much energy did you use) and start paying for capacity / maximum demand (how much generation and network infrastructure was required to serve you).
New build nuclear is not cost competitive with new build wind and solar (even when you account for firming costs), and the cost of wind and solar is still falling at an astonishing rate.
How is Facebook the FCC and not the broadcaster in this metaphor?