David Wallace-Wells claims solar energy is getting so cheap it could be “effectively free.” But solar prices aren’t falling, they’re rising. And solar’s being left in the shade by natty.
Nuclear fuel is today an obstacle to increasing power. Why is that? We use, and plan to build, the wrong kind of reactors. Today's reactors use 0.6% of the energy in mined uranium before the 5%-used enriched fuel is discarded as "nuclear waste," not valuable 5%-used fuel. Would it make sense to go to a gas station and pump twenty gallons into your car, then drive thirty miles to where the government requires you to pump the other nineteen into storage, never to be used? We have at least 90,000 tonnes of spent fuel, and about 900,000 tonnes of depleted uranium, above ground, mined, milled, refined. In breeder reactors, those amounts could power an all-nuclear all-electric American energy economy with a 1,700 GWe appetite for more than 500 years. Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so you can check that I didn't just make up stuff. For a really deep dig, read "Plentiful Energy: The IFR Story" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, for which Dr. Chang has generously given permission to link a PDF from http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Nuclear.html if you don't want to buy it on paper from Amazon.
Good points. Until the IFR is implemented, the U.S. could choose to close the nuclear fuel cycle as France has done for decades.. This is a political problem which is exacerbated by entrenched special interests such as fossil energy suppliers that perceive nuclear power as competition.
California has added solar rapidly, but more panels don't make the sun shine at night or under clouds, and don't solve the storage problem. A California all-renewable energy economy would need 1,200 hours of storage. Details at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Worse.html
Sufficiently large subsidies do make the sun (or something like it) shine at night. A company in Spain found it profitable to run Diesel generators to power lights to make electricity from its solar panels.
The contribution of the cost of uranium, as it comes out of the ground, to the price of electricity delivered by a nuclear power plant, is 0.001¢/kWh. That was the origin of AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss's hope that nuclear-generated electricity would be "too cheap to meter." 0.001¢/kWh is essentially free. Why isn't Wallace-Wells also claiming that nuclear power will soon be free? Of course, just like Strauss (a shoe salesman but an able wartime Navy administrator), he's not a system engineer, and ignores the rest of the system. Strauss didn't actually say "free," he said "too cheap to meter." That is, customers ought to pay a fixed monthly fee, like they pay to their mortgage company, to cover capital costs and operating costs that are independent of fuel costs.
Excellent article, as usual. Furthermore, the geopolitical aspect should be emphasized even more (the subjugation and slave labor exploitation of the Uyghurs is bad enough) as the wily Chinese aim at total domination of the world market for solar panels. This can never be in the interest of any Western country. Ironically, boosted by American tax payers through the RRHI (Reverse Robin Hood Insanity).
The cheapest power plant makes and sells power 24/7/365. What solar does is make all power plants into peaker plants, flipping on and off. The cheapest power isn't based on LCOE, it is based on how much you run the plant. Energy sources that make electricity 24/7/365 are cheap. Those that don't are wildly expensive.
Nuclear is expensive if you are stupid enough to use it to load follow, it's cheap as baseload. Using it less costs you more. Imagine a taxi. If I have 10 customers in one day, or just one customer, which can charge LESS for a ride? Obviously, if I'm getting 10 customers, I can make just as much money charging less. Nuclear, gas and coal plants are the same - you need to spread the fixed costs over as many customers as possible.
Base load might cost $30/Mwh. Peaker plants charge $100/MWh to the $1,000s/Mwh. That is what is driving cost - if I say solar is half the cost of natural gas, so what? If I have to pay 4, 8 or 10X to balance and back it up it is going to be very expensive energy.
Free solar will be the most expensive power on Earth.
I will say again, the way forward is Gravity Windmills. We will innovate past traditional nuclear reactors to passive “Cool Nuclear” as these crises worsen. Electromagnetic Gravity Harvesting will certainly be one of the key Harvest class technologies that will emerge and compete for market share. Bridging the consumption gap between the responsible use of fossil fuels and the severe limitations of wind and solar. Search my name on YouTube, Hubert Gillespie. We spent $7k on our short animated video depicting the revolutionary concept. I will say again, “We seek no funding, we are merely the messengers “. Our responsibility is to build public support while working with industry leaders to develop these technologies. Harvest Class Technologies and Modular Grids are the future for the American People and the world at large. The powers that be will no longer sell us electricity, they will sell us the Equipment to harvest our own. hughgillespie@wowway.com
According to a Zillow study, a solar installation can increase a home's resale value by about 4%, or up to $6,000 for each kilowatt of electricity you have installed.
“For the record, I’m opposed to all energy subsidies unless I’m the one getting them. But I digress.” I had to chuckle at that! Yes, just like those of us who sent back our free Corona checks from the government! Ha! I know you didn’t get solar panels to virtue signal, but so many people believe they are actually effectively reducing their carbon footprint. Never mind the energy used in mining and manufacturing of the panels, but the big kicker is disposal of “retired” panels. 9 out of 10 panels in CA are not recycled (too expensive) and thus pollute the land and watershed.
I have neighbors who are so eager to signal their virtue that they've mounted panels on the north side of their roofs. Or they were bamboozled by a charlatan. Or both.
Should a surcharge be put on the purchase of solar panels until appropriate recycling procedures are achieved? The surcharge should be invested in developing the solar panel recycling methods. Nothing should be landfilled!
Solar panel recycling costs fifty times more than the value of the materials recovered. It won't happen without a subsidy. Subsidies don't reduce costs. They hide them in your tax bill where the government hopes you won't notice they're transferring your wealth to influential and already-wealthy people, also known as "campaign donors."
Excellent point, much like what many States do with drilling/oil producing companies when a well is permitted-they pay a fee or into a fund for the future cost of capping a non-producing well.
Didn't know that. Thanks. My reference was sort of based on the deposit on soda bottles before they became plastic, or disposable...yes, I'm old...ish.
There are purported recycling methods for solar panels that can recover metals and Silicon. Not sure of the sustainability/profitability, but deficiencies should be covered by the fund. Need to keep as much out of landfills as possible without that material becoming "construction fill".
The cost of solar and wind goes up per kWh, the more you have of it- although admittedly the threshold on wind is significantly higher than that of solar.
Your quip about being against any subsidy of which your are not a beneficiary reminds me somewhat of an old Rupert Murdoch quote, from around the time Tim Berners-Lee was ruminating about inventing something for everyone...
"I'm against every monopoly other than my own." - Rupert Murdoch.
My takeaways are, zero cost inputs and subsidies are compelling enough for the author to buy it. That comment favorably changed the tone of piece, I think. Concise, well sourced, good writing. A pleasure to read!
What’s it like, being a rational thinker, living in Austin?
I have friends in Denver.
That loss should be covered by the fee charged on the purchase of the solar panels. I don8aant to see solar panels go to landfills.
Nuclear fuel is today an obstacle to increasing power. Why is that? We use, and plan to build, the wrong kind of reactors. Today's reactors use 0.6% of the energy in mined uranium before the 5%-used enriched fuel is discarded as "nuclear waste," not valuable 5%-used fuel. Would it make sense to go to a gas station and pump twenty gallons into your car, then drive thirty miles to where the government requires you to pump the other nineteen into storage, never to be used? We have at least 90,000 tonnes of spent fuel, and about 900,000 tonnes of depleted uranium, above ground, mined, milled, refined. In breeder reactors, those amounts could power an all-nuclear all-electric American energy economy with a 1,700 GWe appetite for more than 500 years. Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so you can check that I didn't just make up stuff. For a really deep dig, read "Plentiful Energy: The IFR Story" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, for which Dr. Chang has generously given permission to link a PDF from http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Nuclear.html if you don't want to buy it on paper from Amazon.
Good points. Until the IFR is implemented, the U.S. could choose to close the nuclear fuel cycle as France has done for decades.. This is a political problem which is exacerbated by entrenched special interests such as fossil energy suppliers that perceive nuclear power as competition.
California has added solar rapidly, but more panels don't make the sun shine at night or under clouds, and don't solve the storage problem. A California all-renewable energy economy would need 1,200 hours of storage. Details at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Worse.html
Sufficiently large subsidies do make the sun (or something like it) shine at night. A company in Spain found it profitable to run Diesel generators to power lights to make electricity from its solar panels.
The contribution of the cost of uranium, as it comes out of the ground, to the price of electricity delivered by a nuclear power plant, is 0.001¢/kWh. That was the origin of AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss's hope that nuclear-generated electricity would be "too cheap to meter." 0.001¢/kWh is essentially free. Why isn't Wallace-Wells also claiming that nuclear power will soon be free? Of course, just like Strauss (a shoe salesman but an able wartime Navy administrator), he's not a system engineer, and ignores the rest of the system. Strauss didn't actually say "free," he said "too cheap to meter." That is, customers ought to pay a fixed monthly fee, like they pay to their mortgage company, to cover capital costs and operating costs that are independent of fuel costs.
If it needs a subsidy to persuade people to use it it is either more expensive, crap ir both.
Robert, you will get a kick out of this conversation.....
https://www.quora.com/Is-everyone-amused-by-the-epic-failure-of-NOAAs-hurricane-prediction-models-this-year-Six-weeks-of-the-height-of-the-season-and-not-a-single-hurricane/answer/Paul-Noel-5?__filter__=all&__nsrc__=notif_page&__sncid__=56697103185&__snid3__=76191113169
Excellent article, as usual. Furthermore, the geopolitical aspect should be emphasized even more (the subjugation and slave labor exploitation of the Uyghurs is bad enough) as the wily Chinese aim at total domination of the world market for solar panels. This can never be in the interest of any Western country. Ironically, boosted by American tax payers through the RRHI (Reverse Robin Hood Insanity).
If Californians can't generate solar electricity economically...
The cheapest power plant makes and sells power 24/7/365. What solar does is make all power plants into peaker plants, flipping on and off. The cheapest power isn't based on LCOE, it is based on how much you run the plant. Energy sources that make electricity 24/7/365 are cheap. Those that don't are wildly expensive.
Nuclear is expensive if you are stupid enough to use it to load follow, it's cheap as baseload. Using it less costs you more. Imagine a taxi. If I have 10 customers in one day, or just one customer, which can charge LESS for a ride? Obviously, if I'm getting 10 customers, I can make just as much money charging less. Nuclear, gas and coal plants are the same - you need to spread the fixed costs over as many customers as possible.
Base load might cost $30/Mwh. Peaker plants charge $100/MWh to the $1,000s/Mwh. That is what is driving cost - if I say solar is half the cost of natural gas, so what? If I have to pay 4, 8 or 10X to balance and back it up it is going to be very expensive energy.
Free solar will be the most expensive power on Earth.
I will say again, the way forward is Gravity Windmills. We will innovate past traditional nuclear reactors to passive “Cool Nuclear” as these crises worsen. Electromagnetic Gravity Harvesting will certainly be one of the key Harvest class technologies that will emerge and compete for market share. Bridging the consumption gap between the responsible use of fossil fuels and the severe limitations of wind and solar. Search my name on YouTube, Hubert Gillespie. We spent $7k on our short animated video depicting the revolutionary concept. I will say again, “We seek no funding, we are merely the messengers “. Our responsibility is to build public support while working with industry leaders to develop these technologies. Harvest Class Technologies and Modular Grids are the future for the American People and the world at large. The powers that be will no longer sell us electricity, they will sell us the Equipment to harvest our own. hughgillespie@wowway.com
According to a Zillow study, a solar installation can increase a home's resale value by about 4%, or up to $6,000 for each kilowatt of electricity you have installed.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06062024/inside-clean-energy-solar-panel-price-drop/
“For the record, I’m opposed to all energy subsidies unless I’m the one getting them. But I digress.” I had to chuckle at that! Yes, just like those of us who sent back our free Corona checks from the government! Ha! I know you didn’t get solar panels to virtue signal, but so many people believe they are actually effectively reducing their carbon footprint. Never mind the energy used in mining and manufacturing of the panels, but the big kicker is disposal of “retired” panels. 9 out of 10 panels in CA are not recycled (too expensive) and thus pollute the land and watershed.
I have neighbors who are so eager to signal their virtue that they've mounted panels on the north side of their roofs. Or they were bamboozled by a charlatan. Or both.
Should a surcharge be put on the purchase of solar panels until appropriate recycling procedures are achieved? The surcharge should be invested in developing the solar panel recycling methods. Nothing should be landfilled!
Solar panel recycling costs fifty times more than the value of the materials recovered. It won't happen without a subsidy. Subsidies don't reduce costs. They hide them in your tax bill where the government hopes you won't notice they're transferring your wealth to influential and already-wealthy people, also known as "campaign donors."
Excellent point, much like what many States do with drilling/oil producing companies when a well is permitted-they pay a fee or into a fund for the future cost of capping a non-producing well.
Didn't know that. Thanks. My reference was sort of based on the deposit on soda bottles before they became plastic, or disposable...yes, I'm old...ish.
There are purported recycling methods for solar panels that can recover metals and Silicon. Not sure of the sustainability/profitability, but deficiencies should be covered by the fund. Need to keep as much out of landfills as possible without that material becoming "construction fill".
The cost of solar and wind goes up per kWh, the more you have of it- although admittedly the threshold on wind is significantly higher than that of solar.
Your quip about being against any subsidy of which your are not a beneficiary reminds me somewhat of an old Rupert Murdoch quote, from around the time Tim Berners-Lee was ruminating about inventing something for everyone...
"I'm against every monopoly other than my own." - Rupert Murdoch.
My takeaways are, zero cost inputs and subsidies are compelling enough for the author to buy it. That comment favorably changed the tone of piece, I think. Concise, well sourced, good writing. A pleasure to read!