Submitted by TurretLauncher t3_10z9ngv in newhampshire
Reply to comment by magellanNH in It's increasingly economical to install large solar facilities in states that don't get as much sun, like NH; DoE says it's competitive with "the cost of burning fuel in existing gas-fired generators." Use the $ you'd spend on a nat-gas plant's fuel to install a solar farm instead! by TurretLauncher
But they're only interment power sources.
And if they were so economical and profitable there would be no need for subsidies.
First, the fact that renewables produce variable amounts of power intermittently creates engineering and grid planning challenges, but it doesn't change the end game.
Most grids use something called merit order scheduling to decide which combination of available generation resources will run during each time slot of each day (slots can be hourly, 15 minute, or more granular). Whenever renewables are available to power the grid, they're generally the cheapest to run so they get scheduled first, before more expensive generators that have to burn fuel to make power.
The subsidies will speed up the transition and whether you think they're needed/good depends on how you view climate change risk. But without the subsidies, we still get to the same place eventually, just maybe 10-20 years later. This is because renewables are the lowest cost way to make power and whenever they have power to "sell" someone will show up to buy it because it'll be cheaper than all the other alternatives. Again, basic economics.
When fracking changed the relative costs of generating power with coal and natural gas, it took 10-20 years for natural gas plants to drive most coal plants out of business.
The latest price drops in renewables and utility scale battery storage are causing an even bigger disruption that is happening as we speak. Grids are in the middle of a once-in-a-hundred-year transformation that hardly anyone realizes is happening and it's being driven primarily by economics, with some strong tail winds from climate activism.
It does change the end game in that it can't just be continually more intermittent sources...
That is without some other energy storage solution which negatively impacts the economics and most of which have their own environmental issues.
Meanwhile nuclear works day or night regardless of weather conditions...
The Lazard paper has solar with battery storage at around 6 or 7 cents per kilowatt hour all in, while nuclear power comes in around 14 to 20 cents all in. So even when paired with batteries, renewables are cheaper than nuclear power by a lot.
Also, we're a long way away from a mostly renewable grid and for the next decade or two, using some natural gas when we need to support intermittent renewables will give us a relatively clean grid at a very reasonable cost.
The other challenge for nuclear power is that it's not flexible enough to economically follow load. That means it can only satisfy around 50% or so of a grid's total daily load. So at most it can provide half the solution, and for around 2 or three times the cost of better alternatives.
I'm not anti nuclear and strongly support the generous funding for research on advanced designs that was included in the bills signed by President Trump and also President Biden in the past few years. I also support the new production tax credit for nuclear power that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act. Nuclear power should get credit for its carbon free output just like other clean energy sources.
It'd be great if one of the promising next-gen technologies works out. The trouble is that we don't have anything cost competitive right now and the promising designs on the drawing board are at least 2 decades away from mass deployment.
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