I see an overwhelming interest in Nuclear power in our media and in online articles posted to reddit and HN. In many discussions I have had online and in person most people are significantly misinformed in that they think that Nuclear power is playing a larger role than it is currently or that we can not scale EVs/heat pumps/AI Datacenters without building a lot more Nuclear power plants. Most people scoff at the idea that wind power, solar power and hydro power with batteries could ever totally meet our needs.
Above I linked live ERCOT data which you can investigate. Another high penetration renewable to investigate is California ISO.
In both cases yes, I do see that Nuclear power is providing a steady baseload of roughly 10% of power generation throughout the day. But Nuclear power as we currently implement it is:
* Very inflexible.
* Very expensive to build.
* Very time consuming to build.
* Still incurs significant downtime for refueling and ends up producing spent fuel which we don't have a great solution for.
I understand research is going into technologies which may address all of those things and that is interesting and exciting. However is it really a blocker for the future?
Just in Texas they have recently peaked at 32GW of solar generation, 47GW of solar+hydro+wind generation, 10GW of batteries discharging, and 79% of demand supported by renewables. In terms of battery storage they have grown from almost nothing 2 years ago: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Tot...
So the question is, why not just build more solar, wind, hydro and batteries? Why is there so much attention on Nuclear power being the only answer?
I am not advocating stopping research on Nuclear power, or shutting down current plants. I actually think we should just naturally follow the technology cost curve and the market forces.
Some people will invest in the most non-promising things just because they are such a long-shot :\
The numbers speak for themselves.
This is not an opinionated article, just plain data, and just for the Texas grid, so it is only representative to a certain degree.
But very concise. And easy to visualize from the graphs.
The top graph says a lot on its own, look at the last few full 24-hour periods 12-14 MAR, when there have been clear sunny skies, as a best-current-performance solar measure for this time of year.
It's not even summer, when skies may not be as consistently clear, but it can be seen that total non-nuclear drops to about twice what nuclear steadily provides as a baseline. And nuclear has about 10% of today's market with its unwavering output. Possibly only competitive at all because the nuclear generation facilities are so old they are all theoretically "paid for" a long time ago. Except in practice under some accounting methods ratepayers could actually still be paying for them decades later, that tendency says even more about overall viability.
Yes, these are all dollars, not just gigawatts.
In the daytime, solar pinches down on everything at this point and almost all the wide open spaces of Texas still remain completely untapped.
Even wind power is curtailed when solar is available, these costs are highly managed from the get-go to fully gouge all ratepayers at all times :\ With that as an underlying foundation, then all apparent activity can be exactly the opposite, which is to minimize the gouging !
So within the accepted limitation that ratepayers will never be able to afford deregulation without all being robbed blind ever since, that bonanza is being competed for by the private companies. ERCOT puts tons of effort into managing the physical grid which represents their market.
"Dynamically bringing the lowest-cost electricity available to ratepayers at all times, to actively reduce the possibility of skyrocketing rate excursions due to shortages."
With future growth, solar will eventually want to pinch down all the way to nuclear. There won't be dollar pressures that make nuclear want to grow, just the opposite, owners of these stranded assets will wish they had never been built even if they are "already paid for", and that was a long time ago for wishes not to come true.
Now to put in perspective the way solar's worst shortcoming is the way it doesn't work at night, the trend is for nuclear to be the most useful at night only where it's non-intermittent nature could be more of a drawback than an advantage. Battery storage growth also appears capable of continually outpacing nuclear construction.
Now the different color bands on the gigawatt/dollar graph all represent different participants in what are now competitive business interests in the "mature" deregulated system. Like any other trading scheme, different players have different advantages at different times, and here you can clearly see their various ups & downs as they all contribute to the overall load on any given trading day.
Each of the different colors actually has an executive "or two" whose bonuses depend entirely on that one type of energy prevailing to whatever degree it can.
If the only bonus you're ever going to get is from nuclear, it's like looking at every problem like a nail because your only tool is a hammer. All you can do is pound away for what it's worth. Under the kind of pressure that is mounting, nothing is ever going to have the fundamental ability to provide as steady a bonus stream as nuclear ever again. That's the remaining financial advantage that is actually what keeps being hammered home, cost is a lost cause for all to see if they can focus through the noise.
At least 90% are not in this boat, and with the downward dollar pressure nuclear may actually be over-represented as it is, lingering as more of an overdone boomer technology than increasingly viable solution on the grid/market of the future.
Win8 was a disaster. Hard to understand what Steven is even saying or his point about the Macbook Neo.
The Neo is enabled by the increasing capability of the phone chips and the pre-existing completed move to ARM for MacOS that happened over a 5 year span. Critically the entire app ecosystem quickly embraced the new architecture and there were some nice fallbacks for legacy apps. The sheer scale of the phone chips allows them to be priced to where the Neo becomes doable, especially when using the previous generation of chip.
Windows 8 and Surface RT had no such advantages. Windows was always going to stay primarily an x86 operating system at the time those products hit. There was no obvious chip that had a scale of the iPhone chips. Windows RT was without many apps (chicken/egg problem).
I disagree about window 8. I quite liked it. I honestly think that it was a better OS than win 10, from an user point of view. But maybe I am biased, as I was using a laptop with a touchscreen at this time.
Yes, you can clearly see the yearly patterns in the graph where brighter weather reveals the continual build out that is masked by lower seasonal output.
It's flipped in the southern hemisphere so you get a year round drumbeat of records being broken if you look globally.
edit: it's even starker for the max renewable, presumably because of high air con load in summer so spring gets a high ratio of solar and wind to demand:
Robert has a whole set of youtube channels on electric vehicles and other renewable technology. It’s quite impressive what he does now but I always see Kryten in him, strange.
He's done a lot of things, but for my money the "Scrapheap Challenge" show was his best.
(This is a show where two teams are left inside a scrapheap and given a day, or so, to build a contraption/device.)
He was just so enthusiastic about all the teams, and seemed genuinely interested in both the design, the building, and the performance of whatever it was they were being challenged to build.
But I can't say I've ever heard of that before, or seen any. I used to watch the UK series while having lazy breakfasts every Sunday morning with my then-partner.
I find it’s best to use it to actually give context. Like prompted with a peice of information that the LLM doesn’t know how to look up (such as a link to the status or logs for an internal system), give it a tool to perform the lookup.
I’ve just done a legtimate 425 mile solar powered round trip which is the culmination of many things I will explain below. I can now effectively drive anywhere in a 225 mile radius and back for about $10 total cost and on 100% solar power.
I have a two complete solar systems on my house the first one was 10.98kW AC installed 4 years ago with the panels facing south. The second was just installed a few days ago and is a 9.9kW AC with the panels facing east/west. Combined the system will produce over 20MWh of power per year. Both systems are grid tied used EnPhase microinverters and are now combined together for monitoring in one site.
I have an EnPhase IQ EV Charger. This has a mode where it communicates with the solar system, understands how much power is being produced and consumed in the house and then adjusts the EV charger output to match the excess solar production.
I have an EV with the largest battery that is available. The Chevy Silverado EV truck has 24 battery modules with a total gross capacity of slightly over 200kWh. The efficiency on road trips at high speeds is about 2.1miles per kWh. I have verified this with a real world road trip of over 400 miles.
The cost of the solar is around 5 cents per kWh over the 25+ year lifespan of the system.
Another less commonly discussed option is community solar (also called offsite solar). It's especially attractive if the roof line of your house isn't ideal for solar panels or if you expect to be replacing your roof within the lifespan of your panels. (Or if you have a historic association like I do that makes almost every home project impossible.)
You still purchase and own the panels, but often a third party maintains them for you and they are installed as part of a large, offsite array. Since they're usually installed at ground level, they can also do more interesting things like follow the sun. The way it works is the power your panels produce is subtracted from your energy usage via an arrangement made with your utility provider.
Like any solar purchase, the cost of your panels can be financed over time and charged against your energy production. So the net effect is your power bill just goes down until the panels are paid for. At that point all the power you generate is deducted from your power bill. To me, it's most all the upside of owning panels on my roof.
The described version of community solar is nice. How it is usually implemented like in Maine ends up sucking.
The root cause is that they wanted community solar customers to be able to opt-in and opt-out any time. As such it isn’t really what you describe which is owning panels offsite, you are more or less doing a short term rental on them. As such you don’t get the full benefit from them but simply a 15% discount on the current residential rate.
I very much think that proper community solar would be a larger upfront investment just like panels on your roof are. With a small monthly cost to maintain the grounds and pay taxes on the real estate where the panels exist. All power generated would be metered for the specific panels you own using microinverters.
I don't understand the purpose of consumers owning individual solar panels in a large array. How is that better than a single entity owning the whole array, and what function does the consumer provide?
> I don't understand the purpose of consumers owning individual solar panels in a large array. How is that better than a single entity owning the whole array, and what function does the consumer provide?
I don't now if it's better, but it is different.
The benefit to the utility in this case is much lower capex - it's basically like the restaurant franchise model, but for power.
But like you imply, there's a tradeoff that can be made between capex and opex - in this case, the utility could own everything and consumers could pay for electricity on an ongoing basis. IMO, this model is superior due to reduced principal-agent problems.
Just to be clear you're talking about variable costs not total costs. Total costing include time value of money, amortization etc. (I'm no hater I also drive an EV).
> I have an EV with the largest battery that is available. The Chevy Silverado EV truck has 24 battery modules with a total gross capacity of slightly over 200kWh. The efficiency on road trips at high speeds is about 2.1miles per kWh. I have verified this with a real world road trip of over 400 miles.
This is interesting. While it has the most storage capacity, the range is not good for that much battery.
I don’t think the Silverado is optimized for driving range, but rather - can it do typical “truck” stuff. For example hauling and/or towing. For this workload, having more towing capacity in a slightly less aerodynamic package is probably a good trade off. You don’t get a truck for the efficiency, you get one so you can do stuff with it.
Still, having a 400 mile range also makes this more useful for the middle of the country where there are wide open spaces between towns for charging. Also, having a legitimate truck EV makes it more likely for traditional truck buyers to think of getting an EV.
I'm looking at doing similar stuff right now. I already have a house battery.
However, looking at getting an EV - were you able to get bidirectional charging going?
I saw a few places mentioning demos of it over the past 5 years, but I can't find any v2x charger/car configurations I can buy and use in the UK.
Before looking at any of this stuff, I didn't realise how large and cheap the battery in an EV is compared to house batteries. Now I'm struggling to justify getting an EV if I can't do at least V2H bidirectional charging.
Interesting thanks! It looks like most of the GM vehicles that v2x works with are... uh... not really something a European would consider an option (not even sure if some of them will fit on our roads). Ford UK makes no mention anywhere of anything to do with v2x though.
There's a few places that apparently offered it here, but when I've contacted them, they've all explained it was a tech demo, or trial, or some other PR type thing which means they didn't take it any further and regular humans can't buy it. I think there's some nuance or regulation around the UK power network which is stopping any progress with bidirectional charging here.
Over here though, if you don't have old electric heating, or an electric shower, 9.6kw is very much more than enough for the average household. I have a relatively high usage, and a 6kw inverter can power my house in a powercut, as long as I don't use the electric shower. The various retired people in my life tend to use 2 - 4kwh /day, the peak draw is the kettle which uses 3kw for a minute or so.
> Thier max output is only 9.6kW so it can’t do a whole home backup and the car can only run in backup mode when the grid is out.
9.6kW should be enough to backup your entire house, that's 87A... Lots of people only have a 100A supply in general. Depending on your setup you may have to limit what you use at one time but even in a large house that will be more than enough for AC, lights and electronic devices.
9.6kW is 40A at 240V, and a 240V 100A single-phase residential service is 24kW.
Still, 9.6kW should be more than enough to run a fridge, lights, receptacles, sump pump, a 2-3 ton A/C unit, and a furnace fan. It would be challenging to impossible to back up a home with electric (resistive) furnace and electric (resistive) water heater with only 9.6kW.
That’s peak production, without battery storage the fluctuation during the year will likely be too much to keep the “lights on”. Would be cool to have a smart home that prioritizes the electricity supply to different systems based on how much is available.
>This has a mode where it communicates with the solar system,
I just find this so cool. We have projects like SETI where the solar system tries to communicate with us. Here, you, just one person, have set up a machine talking with outer space and the solar system. Space is talking and we are listening. Amazing. Rock on space cowboy.
I assume you're on a pretty attractive net metering agreement? That's a huge system.
Unless you're consuming a significant portion of that, the payback rate is going to be pretty badly impacted by having such a large system for most people.
I consume about 17MWh a year between two EVs and a large heat pump for winter heating.
I will have overproduction now with the 2nd array. We do have net metering at about 80% of the cost on NEM 2.0. Our bill is split by transmission, generation, distribution and fees. We get 100% on transmission and generation and 25% on distribution.
$0.05 is the rate we pay in BC at night. I was still debating whether to add solar or not, I guess your post answers the question.
Until we can get to $0.01 there is no point in solar in BC at least.
From an efficiency standpoint, we should probably be building grid-scale solar in Alberta and pumped storage in BC. There's more sunshine on the east side of the Rockies.
As a resident of Alberta, I pay $0.205/kWh for energy and delivery, which I largely attribute to bad decisions made by our provincial government. Even still, my 10 kW rooftop solar install is barely financially viable at those rates.
With that said, it would help if the Canadian government didn't have enormous tariffs on solar panels. Canada levies taxes such that solar panels here cost nearly triple what they cost elsewhere.
The article is about installing solar panels on vehicles. Your truck has no solar panels installed on it. What is the relevance of your anecdote to this discussion?
Dropbox does have a terminal level which I think was IC4 when I was there.
On the other hand they have recently done a layoff round every 1-2 years and if you are not a growing employee with a higher salary you could be at risk.
It should be funded by a carbon tax… the root cause of the more rapid and intense climate change.
Gas and carbon emitting electricity sources should be a LOT more expensive than they are. That would then push more people to EVs and renewables even faster and if there is demand than economies of scale will be reached and the prices of EVs and renewables will fall even further.
Ah yes, people who are currently struggling with the prices of eggs and other necessities will run out and buy an EV tomorrow (absent infrastructure improvements of course) if only we increase their electricity bill too as a form of punitive social tax. Let's also not forget to twist whilst squeezing their testicles.
Compare: "How dare you start fining anybody who poops in the local water supply! Some poor villagers can't afford to dig their own latrines! You monster!"
You're presenting a false dilemma: We can have laws against inflicting harm on other people through pollution and do more to help the poor. Granting a special license to pollute is not a reasonable way to fix chronic poverty anyway.
Above I linked live ERCOT data which you can investigate. Another high penetration renewable to investigate is California ISO.
https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
In both cases yes, I do see that Nuclear power is providing a steady baseload of roughly 10% of power generation throughout the day. But Nuclear power as we currently implement it is:
* Very inflexible. * Very expensive to build. * Very time consuming to build. * Still incurs significant downtime for refueling and ends up producing spent fuel which we don't have a great solution for.
I understand research is going into technologies which may address all of those things and that is interesting and exciting. However is it really a blocker for the future?
Just in Texas they have recently peaked at 32GW of solar generation, 47GW of solar+hydro+wind generation, 10GW of batteries discharging, and 79% of demand supported by renewables. In terms of battery storage they have grown from almost nothing 2 years ago: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Tot...
Solar has tripled in 4 years: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Sol...
So the question is, why not just build more solar, wind, hydro and batteries? Why is there so much attention on Nuclear power being the only answer?
I am not advocating stopping research on Nuclear power, or shutting down current plants. I actually think we should just naturally follow the technology cost curve and the market forces.
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