It's expected to generate 6.09 TWh per year, for a capacity factor of 19.8%. That's equivalent to $3.07 per real annualized watt. For rough comparison purposes, last year's contract for China to build a 1.2 GW nuclear reactor in Pakistan was for $4.8 billion [1] (4 dollars per watt, $4.44 per real annualized watt assuming a 90% capacity factor [2]).
Don't know how it is for Chinese projects, but in the west you should not compare actual cost of A with projected cost of B, because with such projects we repeatedly see that the actual cost can be a multiple of the projected costs, especially for nuclear power.
For Chinese projects we can assume that the price tag also doesn't match the actual costs (similar to French nuclear projects) due to heavy government subsidies.
> For Chinese projects we can assume that the price tag also doesn't match the actual costs (similar to French nuclear projects) due to heavy government subsidies.
Why would China subsidize a $5 billion reactor in Pakistan? That's not their MO with the Belt and Road initiative - China prefers to inflate sticker prices and loan more money to the buyer, building more economic influence.
The project certainly benefits from the economies of scale thanks to all the reactors China builds, but it hardly helps to conflate that with actual subsidies.
Once the central government has decided what they want, China absolutely has a track record of extremely heavy subsidies, both for domestic market and for export. Like you say, it is to get to that sweet 'economies of scale' (or to say it more honestly, pricing others out of the market).
There is one other interesting tidbit about the pricing of energy projects. Renewables have been scrutinized about their price to an unprecendented extent. Before renewables, costs were usually a minor concern in the public debate when it came to build-out of energy infrastructure.
In the nuclear heavy country like France (which did benefit from the so called 'economy of scale' most, in their case it was more the will for nuclear armament), the government decides the prices for households. They had to increase it steeply in the last decade, and a government commission suggested to further increase it by 74% this year. The government decided to only increase it by 10%. I guess they are a bit afraid of the protest-loving population. Nobody cares for costs, if they don't see it.
In Germany meanwhile the subsidies (for renewables mind you, not for all the other forms of energy) actually work in a way that they are added to the price of all electricity. So while German and French prices get closer and closer now, the German household electricity prices reflect the total cost much better than the French prices.
Now we have enough data to not just project costs, but also we know what we actually pay. And contrary to what everyone believed, renewables are actually the cheapest form of energy we can get. And when you look at the fundamental physical process, it even makes sense. No need to dig anything out of the ground, because the source that put all this into the ground actually is accessible on the surface. No need to create a process that biological beings never used for energy. Wind and solar are just technological variations on the theme that evolution put into live and proven for billions of years. It just makes sense to leverage for the bulk of our energy needs until such time when our energy needs overtake what is accessible so easily. That may be a century from now or even farther in the future.
The battery packs in my local hardware store are all close to €1/Wh ($1.09/Wh but I'm rounding more than that anyway), so they'd have to last a mere 265 cycles to be as expensive as $1.50/Wh for every day of a year.
I don't think that's correct because of battery only makes one round trip a day while the other numbers are for continuous production. To compare units Apples to Apples I believe you'd have to multiply the battery cost by a factor of 24.
>Aside: assuming your point, it would be 12, not 24, as the batteries only shift from day to night and not vice versa)
I think you are still missing the point. you will use the battery exactly once per day and it provides 1 watt-hour each time. It isnt providing 1 watt-hour every hour of the day, nor is it providing 1 watt-hour every 12 hours. you discharge it once every 24 hours, or 365 times in a year.
Compare this to nuclear, which is providing 1 watt-hour every single hour in a day. (1 watt-day = 24 watt-hours.
My use of "aside" was supposed to indicate that it was not critical to your core point that you re-emphasise here.
Going through the numbers one step at a time and keeping track of the units, I believe the core problem is that the original was a meaningless unit in the first place, taking the total system construction cost and dividing by the power output (but expressing things in the middle in terms of energy produced over the whole year).
(Not that it matters except to help me avoid such mistakes later, but because the numbers which are important are in units of $/Wh not $/W, I just assumed and that assumption led to me doing the thing I did).
So, we have: PV for $3.06/W, nuclear for $4.34/W
But that's not what energy is normally priced in, energy is normally priced in [money]/[energy] rather than [money]/[power], to convert between them I have to account for system lifetimes.
The IAEA says nuclear plants have a lifetime of "between 20 and 40 years"[0], so I'll pick the half way value of 30. PV is generally guaranteed to last at least 20, but expected to last 30; as very few have been around that long and the tech is rapidly changing, I'll be pessimistic for that and pick 20.
With those assumptions, this gives nuclear a cost per unit of energy of $16.5 / MWh (which is extremely cheap, so much so it's outright suspicious!); and PV a cost per unit of energy of $17.49 / MWh (which would also be extremely cheap, bordering suspicious, though by a smaller margin as the normal LCOE is lower anyway).
Now, with these numbers, you don't really need to ask about the cost of storage, the nuclear option is just directly cheaper than the PV. I assume the surprise here is that maintenance costs are not included in construction costs? But then I'd be going down a completely different rabbit hole trying to dig into how Lazard reached those numbers.
Would be good for everyone if China's actually done what people keep asking for with cheap nuclear power.
>My use of "aside" was supposed to indicate that it was not critical to your core point that you re-emphasise here.
Your aside, while not critical, was also no true. The time between sequential discharging of a battery is 24 hours, not 12. The time between charging and discharging is irrelevant, just how many times you do it a year.
I think you are also misinterpreting the parent post. I think they are intentionally providing [money]/[power]. This is a common format when talking about the cost of installed grid capacity.
I should have converted your watt-hour numbers to [money]/[power] and used to for better comparison.
>For comparison, this graph suggests PV is usually about 3 times that and nuclear usually around 10-11 times that:
LCOE is a radically different form of calculation than what you used, and not comparable. It takes into account many other factors, most notably the time value of money.
That is equally terrible comparison. It is the first new reactor in US in 30 plus years , the experience and expertise is simply not there to do it cheaply and on time .
France , India and some other countries regularly builds reactors and they don’t cost anywhere close to the cost GA had
That is the first next generation EPR reactor, the second one of its kind in Europe and first in France. This is just reinforcing my point the first one is hard to predict the cost and timeline for.
France built 20 P4/P'4 reactors, most were built on time and at reasonable costs.
The last gen N4 had only 4 units, even then the second batch at CIVAUX costed only $4B.1[2] i.e. $1,349/ kWe overnight costs
Vogtle(GA) 3/4 is expected to cost ~ $8,000 /kWe [3] [4] and the EPR is at Flamanville 3(France) is expected to come in at $6,500 kWe [5].
France projects to achieve 40% cost reduction and faster commisioning for EPR designs over next few being built to achieve $ 3800 /kWe overnight costs [5]. The report details on how they this is achieved and gains already seen at Taishan(China) ( partly owned by EDF)
OECD Nuclear Energy Agency reports in the modern era the overnight costs to be between $2,157 kWe [South Korea] to $6,900 kWe [Slovakia] [6]
Reduction in time and cost is normal to expect in any repeated project development. The first one is path finder, next few should benefit from them, however if we do just built only a few then costs or timeline shouldn't be an objective to compare.
Moving goal posts? Your assertion was "France and India regularly build cheap reactors quickly".
With nuclear power is always "is expected...", "projections are...", "it's hard...", "the next one would be...". You know what is delivering in time and costs right now? Solar and wind.
I made two consecutive comments in the thread . My point was split between the two comments and i replied was in combination of both. Comments and timestamp are available for you to see
I realize that from this thread point of view it seems I am changing the argument, that’s on me . It is not always the commenter is trying to the move the goal post sometimes things to do happen .
—-
To the actual point, It is not about whether nuclear is best option, I never compared it with any other option. It was not defense of nuclear , it was of project and costs management .
Nuclear’s costs cannot be baselined by costs at GA , every developed country is doing it half the costs or less.
With respect to “projected” gains are already realized in Taishan, yes it is china but that does not make EDF components being built in Europe faster or, state subsidies can make projects cheaper not faster .
France and other countries have proven track record of building plants . Citing one outlier with brand new tech plant whose costs and time have ballooned is not valid argument .
Reject or dislike nuclear for any number of reasons ideological, economic or environmental, but building a single plant after 40 years and saying it is too costly and slow is a dishonest argument .
90% capacity factor is possible but quite generous, France is below 70%. As nuclear penetration goes up it becomes impossible to sustain high capacity because demand itself is variable, so you either need to overbuild nuclear and run nuclear at low capacity factors, or you need to build storage.
I'm very shocked to see that China's utility scale solar project is $600 per kwp. I almost want to say something must be wrong with that number. It's higher than retail rooftop PV costs which is $450 per kwp.
It's higher than retail rooftop PV costs which is $450 per kwp.
Which country is that in? I don't know of any country where you can get e.g. a 5 kilowatt rooftop system installed for $2250 (except perhaps with special government tax credits/incentives). The costs for this Chinese project include not just the PV modules but the land, racking, inverters, transformers, grid connection, and installation labor.
Any developing country that has cheap labor costs and no tariffs. The retail cost for panels is $205 per kW, inverter $115 per kW, then add another 30-40% for labor, cables and mounts.
Presumably for rooftop costing you regard the roof itself and the land it sits on as being "free", whereas for a power plant you have to account for everything? Still seems a bit of a stretch for it to make that much difference but... possible?
That cost and time is less about nuclear and more about this being bespoke one-off for US with little recent experience in building new reactors.
It is like saying designing and building a single new car is costing few millions and taking years when a Corolla is 20,000 and you drive off the plot today .
As you comment the same, I respond the same: the nuclear behemoth that is France is also burning (public) money to build nuclear reactors with worse delays than GA.
Please allow me to go political for a second: both US and EU have an insane amount of politicians who support backing down on green energy and going back to coal mining, oil drilling and the like. I hope that at least the people who are intelligent enough to see the progress of green energy won't support that through their votes. We can literally have "free" energy coming from this star around us but instead of using it we're coming up with excuses that keep us from progressing.
I'm not talking about what's happening now (even though there's plenty of criticism to be said about the programs that we run). I'm talking about a new wave of politicians that's coming up in both regions, and they want this to stop.
The thing about money is that energy is a critical sector of the economy of each region, so governments push a lot of public funding towards it. That's why I'm bringing up politics here, otherwise the free market would take care of the issue as always.
If you have a better source of energy then build it. If it's better than the other ones will cease to exist. The "mental model" is entirely immaterial to the "market reality."
Only 1 coal plant in the US is economical to run, and yet an entire industry continues to desperately attempt to continue to exist through various appeals. The market is made up by human rules, they are not physical laws, nor are they a reasonable final arbiter to what is rational.
So it’s not always just simple humans, but also malevolent ones too creating the uphill climb. Such is life.
Coal was being displaced by Natural Gas well before Solar added to the fight. Is the issue that Coal didn't just stop existing one day immediately? With power plant lifetimes of 50 to 100 years why would anyone rationally expect this outcome?
This is not a change you will see in your lifetime clearly. This is clearly a change that _is_ occurring during your life time.
We agree change is occurring. Do we agree there are significant forces intentionally attempting to restrict the rate of change to be slower than it needs to be to achieve a favorable outcome for humanity?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/09/foss... ("Far-right fossil fuel allies have launched a stunning and unprecedented campaign pressuring the supreme court to shield fossil fuel companies from litigation that could cost them billions of dollars.")
“Our investigation revealed how Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, API, and the Chamber worked in concert to mislead the public, policymakers, and investors with public promises to reduce emissions and meaningfully contribute to the transition away from oil and gas, while privately seeking to lock in continued fossil fuel production for decades into the future,” wrote Whitehouse and Raskin. “The investigation also demonstrated that the fossil fuel industry continues to knowingly obfuscate the dangers of natural gas, which they have billed as a clean and green fuel. This evidence, combined with the entities’ failure to comply fully with validly issued congressional subpoenas, suggests that further investigation by the executive branch is warranted.”
“Our investigation into the fossil fuel industry calls to mind the historic congressional investigation into deceptive practices of the tobacco industry and its trade associations, which led to investigations and litigation by several state attorneys general and the Department of Justice (DOJ),” they continued. “DOJ is well situated to pursue further investigation and take any appropriate legal action, as it has in similar cases involving the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries.”
Perhaps we disagree about the definition of the word "significantly"?
If you built solar and energy storage that was capable of powering an entire house for less expense than the grid can do it, people will buy that, subsidies won't matter.
There is a lot of "green washing" that intentionally ignores this outcome because what it really wants to do is capture the subsidies for itself. Which is what I was alluding to originally.
What transition plans do you recommend for coal producing counties? The issue is that these coal counties get fucked (for a lack of a better words) with coal and without coal. With coal every family suffer generational health problems. But atleast they get to eat and live. Without coal they do not have an economic system to make a living out of it. During the colonial times (here we go) the Bri'ish forced Bengal farmers [0] to cultivate indigo which caused literal famines. They could not produce food crops and colonialist didn't bother to compensate the farmer obviously. Then the farmers got "fucked" over again, when industrial revolution resulted in creation of artificial indigo and farmers struggled to make a transition to another crop. Now, your average WV native is far from a Bengal peasant but idea of policy based restrictions on making a living can be compared. My argument is that broad sweeping policies about establishing how people in particular regions make a living needs to carefully evaluated. Now, I am not for or against coal at all. Coal producing counties are always marginalized and politicians rarely care about them except for election times. For/against coal does very little in terms of coming up with a solution. If you are against coal present a solution on how these counties can transition to making a living without being relocated.
There are only 12,000 coal miners in WV. Only 45,000 in the whole US. Obviously there are a large cast of others supporting the miners directly and indirectly (e.g. truck drivers, manufacturers of mining equipment, etc).
There are 341 million other Americans that have an interest in where our energy comes from (and what goes into our atmosphere).
(I'm all for generous support for any American facing major disruption because of macroeconomic changes btw. Getting rural places a fair share of national prosperity is a national problem)
This is a great argument and perhaps the best argument to support the idea of going back to coal. I don't know how to answer this because I'm not an economist, but I'd suggest subsidizing such people from taxation until we reach a green energy goal. Sadly though, politicians don't address this at all.
> both US and EU have an insane amount of politicians who support backing down on green energy and going back to coal mining, oil drilling and the like.
What is an "insane amount?" Is there a spreadsheet or scorecard somewhere that quantifies this?
Kind of. According to polls there are 52% of Americans supporting this. In the EU we have elections this weekend so there's no reason to come up with polls, just follow the results!
If one is the threshold that we're talking about, then no one should care that there is an insane number opposed. It is a useless statement with no relevance on the world outcomes
You talk about intelligence but then act like a zealot. Don't get me wrong, I have solar panels myself in Spain, but is not Utopia.
Solar panels use a lot of space that could be used for other things like growing food. They make the earth extremely hot as they absorb so much heat from the sun. The political zealots talk about climate change but avoid to talk about that.
It is not excuses, there is very intelligent people working on those problems. Natural gas makes a lot of sense combined with solar and wind because solar only works when the sun is above and wind when the wind blows. You need something for winter and nights. Energy storage is very expensive, and also require lots of energy and raw materials for manufacturing.
For wind mills to make sense you need wind. Lots of countries do not have wind, and also produce heat an noise and kill birds.
In Spain, when the price of the panels and inverters go down, if you have users nearby, it makes sense. In Germany, with half the insolation, it does not.
There is no "free" anything. Everything has its ups and downs.
We need less politicians, lawyers without knowledge of science and engineering.
> They make the earth extremely hot as they absorb so much heat from the sun
What are you smoking? The sun is not sending more light to the places with solar panels. It just absorbs light that is already hitting earth. If anything it makes earth cooler as it absorbs light that would otherwise just hit the ground and make ground hotter.
If the solar panel reflects less sunlight than what would otherwise be there (which seems likely to me) then grandparent is (technically) correct. The energy the panel absorbs eventually turns into heat (although before it becomes heat, it might in the form of electricity be transmitted far away) just like the sunlight energy that a rock absorbs also turns into heat.
The correct response to grandparent is that the magnitude of the increase in heat is small enough to be safely ignored.
Essentially all of it turns into heat except the part that is (immediately) reflected back into space -- and solar panels are darker than most of the (non-grassy or only sparsely grassy, and the grass is golden, not dark green or on the roof of a building) sites where solar panels are typically sited, which means they reflect less back into space. Ergo, erecting a solar panel adds heat (but again it is negligible compared to the reduction in co2 emissions).
At least in the US, the arguments against solar and wind are usually not out of concern for land area needed for food growth. The opponents tend to use unsubstantiated FUD.
China is running circles around the rest of the world in the push for electrification. Sure, it's not a free market, but their government policies are making it an economic powerhouse. The world will look very different in 50, 100 years if that keeps up / if the rest of the world doesn't keep up.
The US is installing roughly 3 times as much solar at the utility level, each quarter[1]. We aren't building quite as many of these megafarms as China, but the US's solar numbers are actually pretty dramatic[2].
(Or by another metric: China has about twice as much solar production capacity as the US, but a much smaller fraction per-capita[3].)
The point wasn't that the US is winning in terms of net solar capacity, but that the US's own growth is independently admirable. China has and will continue to win in terms of absolute capacity, in a large part because they're still urbanizing, industrializing, and increasing their overall demand for power.
(By contrast, US electricity use has been almost stagnant for 2 decades[1]. This informs the country's relationship with newer generation techniques.)
I'm not sure what the value of a per-capita measure is, or why it's worth making a distinction at "utility" (I'm assuming this means consumer) level.
Wouldn't the most relevant measure, at least as far as emissions go, be the ratio of energy coming from renewables / solar vs. total energy consumption? Or something similar?
Yeah there are lots of ways to normalize that might be better, but per capita isn’t uninteresting per se:
US uses roughly 2.5-3x the energy per capita compared to china fwiw [1]. The energy use per capita can be influenced by all sorts of things, including climate - for instance, SGP will always be in the top few spots on this sort of list due to the space conditioning needs. Could also be due to lots of heavy industry. Could also be due to lots of inefficient homes or high consumer demand. So it can also be interesting to look at energy use per person plotted against GDP per capita, where as expected higher energy use per capita typically also means higher GDP per capita [2]. US has significantly higher GDP per capita.
Anyways, at the end of the day, in this kind of head-to-head energy technology race, the only thing I care about really at the end of the day is decarbonization. The US has been falling each year (not fast enough though, and much of it does not actually come from renewable adoption but instead other changes like natural gas replacing coal over the last decade and changes in mfg capacity etc) while China is still rapidly increasing. Both countries need to be doing more, way more (well really the whole world).
Quite right. This mistake also seems to occur when comparing California and Texas. Texas has a ton of renewable sources, but its extremely energy intensive economy consumes disproportionately more. So it seems to make more sense to normalize by load than by person.
> world will look very different in 50, 100 years if that keeps up
It can’t. Besides demography, Xi has wiped out his political competition. The history of what comes after a long-serving dictator who purged his generation’s political braintrust is unidirectional.
> USSR didn't terminally stagnate until 20, 25 years after Stalin died, though. They still looked pretty capable under Kruschev
True, and Kruschev is 20 years Stalin’s junior. I’m inclined to regard him as a fluke; the wheels of power replaced him with the far-less competent Brezhnev after ten years, at which point the Soviets’ fate was sealed.
It’s an open question: if the ISSR could have both beaten the U.S. and remained intact following Stalin’s death. I don’t think they could have. Insisting on not just parity, but supremacy, may have doomed them.
The ability for Beijing is Taiwan. They really shouldn’t obsess over it. But Xi has done so, and likely can’t retreat. Which means his successor is similarly damned, and with him, his nation.
Biden's chips sanctions are also hurting them. They only just figured out how to make 7nm chips. They'll struggle to assemble the compute to keep up in AI. Now, if only we didn't insist on publishing all our trade secrets in the geopolitically naive pursuit of open source, which spits on the reality of the security competition we are currently engaged in, we'd be even more ahead.
Trump is anti green energy. What good is a damn dictator if they can’t do infrastructure and energy well, atleast modi is killing that part of his mandate.
And if you have a "free market" the big utility companies are going to eat each other over time until you end up with de-facto regional monopolies which are then systematically run into the ground, extracting all inherent value, until it's no longer functional and has to be taken over by the government to ensure people can still take hot showers and use their computers. You can't make this shit up.
> The world’s largest solar farm in Xinjiang is part of China’s megabase project, a plan to install 455 GW of wind and solar.
China now boasts the three largest solar farms in the world by capacity. The Ningxia Tenggeli and Golmud Wutumeiren solar farms, each with a capacity of 3 MW, are already online.
Very, very cool. I’m so happy the future is being built while I am alive to see it.
"However, reports and allegations regarding the treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the region have led to calls for more transparency and ethical considerations in the supply chain."
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/06/06/worlds-largest-solar-...
It's expected to generate 6.09 TWh per year, for a capacity factor of 19.8%. That's equivalent to $3.07 per real annualized watt. For rough comparison purposes, last year's contract for China to build a 1.2 GW nuclear reactor in Pakistan was for $4.8 billion [1] (4 dollars per watt, $4.44 per real annualized watt assuming a 90% capacity factor [2]).
[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/pakistan-signs-4-8-billion-nuclear...
[2] https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....