Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently.
So, what did you want me to do? Post the same graph, but black out the nuclear line, so no one can see it going upwards? I do find that data point interesting, too, but I would have posted this, even if it was just the solar dropping as it does.
Let’s add in the cost of batteries as their own thing, because they can be charged from anything and are far cheaper than other sources promoted as covering for gaps in renewables.
Let’s add in the cost of batteries as their own thing
I don’t know if this is a fair thing to do. Yes, we could charge it from any other source, but we aren’t (intentionally) overgenerating power from sources like coal, gas, etc. Thus, the need for implementing that storage largely depends on renewables.
I also feel like factoring out the costs of storage implementation leaves more gaps for combustion generation supporters to criticize renewables. I would rather be honest about the upfront costs and instead emphasize the long term benefits of renewables, both in cost and cleanliness.
As far as I understand the description at the top of the image, no, storage is not included. But if production costs are insanely low, that of course does leave plenty room for storage or redundancy. In particular, personally I believe the costs will continue on a logarithmic drop and we’re at the steep part of that, so even if it really is not the case today, I do expect solar production + storage to become cheaper in a not too distant future.
Also, as another graphic from the source article illustrates, battery costs are rapidly dropping, too:
We had a solar salesman come by once and told us he could lower our electricity bill the same amount as it would cost us to install the solar panels.
I knew there was something up with this but I decided to let him continue to talk anyways. He does this whole presentation with solar panels and how great they are for a good 30 minutes.
Finally we get to the money part and he keeps emphasizing that they will lower my electricity bill so the cost of them will be made up there. I push him for the total cost of them plus installation and I about died.
$30,000??? They literally wanted me to pay for these for 30 years. As long as my mortgage! Aaaaah!!!
That’s about 10 times the price it costs to have a full system installed in other parts of the USA.
I put in a small solar backup power system myself for $1500. It’s not enough to power HVAC or any big appliances but it is enough that I can have my fridge, freezer, TV, and Internet going off the grid whenever there’s a power outage.
But they will still have to make the monthly payments for the solar panels. So, their real savings will only start after they paid off the loan in 30 years. lol
Similar here, got a quote from a company that wanted $45,000 to only cut my bill in half. Said my roof having so many levels due to being a 1.5 story made it hard to install and get good coverage. Guess I get to just burn coal power then because that price is ridiculous
I had a few come over and I was already in the market for solar so I entertained them for a minute. I told them “OK, give me some invoices for your other customers so I know what you charge. Black out the names, I dont care - I just want the prices of your services and materials”. These idiots would not stop calling me or coming over to my house for months. I kept telling them “Unless you give me actual, real world dollar amounts, I won’t consider it”.
Those solar sales guys are worse than used car salesmen.
Further lowering panel cost isn’t going to significantly cut that price. Cost of labor is the major part of that.
People always focus on rooftop solar, but it’s horribly expensive compared to a field of panels. The economics of scale will almost certainly keep it that way.
What we should be looking at is community solar, where neighborhoods invest in a solar field together.
I guess maybe not if we are talking tall building, where the roof surface area may not be sufficient for the entire building. But it would be a waste not to make use of all the unused rooftops
I’ve always thought that in the neighborhoods where everyone lives in townhomes and mini apartments a shared multi floor parkade with solar and maybe also wind on top should be a thing. Even if the solar is just covering the parkade’s power usage.
Government subsidies work for getting new technologies out of the prototype stage and into practical deployment. Solar and wind are both good demonstrations.
There’s a lot more nuance to this than most people will admit.
Net metering is 100% unsustainable, when renewables become a big enough chunk of the grid generation mix, they often generate when no one needs the power. Forcing the grid to accept that power and even pay the homeowner a premium for it is a perverse incentive. Effectively what it does is allow solar array owners to avoid paying to maintain a grid they still use, and since the rich trend to go solar first, the poor are left holding the bag to maintain the grid for everyone.
Dang, it’s almost like it was worth all the research money the government crammed into it in the long run, unlike what my dad said to me a million times.
And it is always a question how they calculated handling of nuclear waste.
There are options, we can use coal and natural gas for on demand power to fill the gaps in renewables, we don’t have to quit all at once. New ideas for energy storage and comming around, some of them might be useful for small towns, others for remote places.
I was considering whether this is just a shitpost, but your other comments suggest that you’re completely serious. It does not go away. Radioactive decay causes multiple transitions between radioactive elements until it ends up as lead, which does not decay further.
Of course, it should also be said that it’s better to have no waste than waste that eventually turns into lead.
And that it’s still better to have waste than waste which also happens to be toxic.
right, but when it lands at lead it’s no longer radioactive waste, which is the part everyone’s scared of. chemical waste doesn’t just go away like that.
Worth noting that solar panels are not without toxic waste. If left in landfills they risk leaching lead, cadmium and other toxic chemicals. The issue of recycling them at scale is not being seriously tackled.
there is very very very little nuclear waste.this is complete handwringing. it can be buried and forgotten.
Bigger issue is the carbon costs and pay back periods. Nuclear (unless you’ve got sources otherwise stating) is green in it’s planning phase but not as often in execution. A shit ton of concrete is used, and the plants rarely operate at the capacity they are expected to (or have in the past). Open to revision but that’s my current understanding.
They are a massive upfront carbon cost and only become carbon neutral or negative relative to fossil fuels 20+ years down the line.
Do you have data on that? A modern nuclear power plant is going to be in the 500-1000+ MW range. I have a hard time imagining that even operating at half capacity that they do not offset the carbon used for concrete within a relatively short order. But if that is in fact the case I’d love to see data saying so, so that I can correct my thinking.
I think that’s too simplistic of a view. Part of the high cost of nuclear is because of the somewhat niche use. As with everything, economies of scale makes things cheaper. Supporting one nuclear plant with specialized labor, parts, fuel, etc is much more expensive then supporting 100 plants, per Watt.
I can’t say more plants would drastically reduce costs. But it would definitely help.
If you are hired to do a task and then overrun the budget by 14B$ I wouldn’t exactly call it furthering the cause. More like incompetence and/or trying to detail the project.
The source article actually talks about this and measured data suggests nuclear cost actually went up, despite more capacity being built.
This is the first time, I’ve read this anywhere. More sources/studies would be really important. And there is lots of interpretations to be had on the why, but assuming the article isn’t completely off the mark, that’s cold, hard data suggesting that your (perfectly reasonable) assumption is actually wrong, after all.
Interesting, I’ll have to look at the source article.
But as far as I’m aware the total amount of nuclear power has been decreasing in recent years. This might change with China’s future plants.
I’ve also read about small modular reactor designs gaining traction, which would help alleviate the heavy costs of one off plants we currently design and build.
Not saying the source is wrong, just saying that’s what I used to form my opinion.
bullshit regulatory costs can increase infinitely without nay change to the underlying engineering or economics. that’s 100% the cause of the price increses
Possible. But well, whether these regulations actually are bullshit or not, kind of doesn’t matter. A dumb solar panel won’t ever need to be regulated as much. If that’s what makes it cheaper, it still is cheaper.
This is always a weird take to me because it always ignores the fact that nuclear has been screwed continuously for decades. If any other tecbology, renewable energy or not, had the same public and private blockers did it would also have no future.
it always ignores the fact that nuclear has been screwed continuously for decades
On the contrary: I’d say it implicitly relies on that fact, which is why the argument that it takes 15 years to build is valid. Because nuclear has been screwed, there’s no pipeline of under-construction plants coming online any sooner than that.
It may not be fair that nuclear’s been screwed, but that doesn’t change history. The only thing that matters is what’s better when construction is starting in 2023.
Fukushima happened in “smart” Japan because it was cheaper to put the backup generators in the basement than to build a concrete podium taller than the tsunamis that previously hit the site.
Capitalism will always choose cost over safety. Even then nuclear ends up going way over budget.
Has there been a scenario where the technology itself is to blame? The contamination aspect of nuclear waste is well known and preventable, if costs are being cut on radioactive waste disposal (or in the case of a certain Japanese power company, ignoring warnings from the government on how to reduce ocean contamination in the event of an earthquake) a nuclear installation’s fate is sealed…
As far as I can see, the only downsides with nuclear IMO is that it takes multiple decades to decommission a single plant, the environmental impact on that plant’s land in the interim, and the initial cost to build the plant.
In comparison to Solar it sounds awful, but before solar, nuclear honestly would have made a lot of sense. I think it may even still be worth it in places that have a high demand for constant power generation, since Solar only generates while the sun’s about, and then you’re looking at overnight energy storage with lithium-based batteries, which have their own environmental and humanitarian challenges
yeah you can do throium, and there are some compelling reasons to, but uranium is fine enough. anti-nuke isn’t about actual technical enlargements. the anti nukes hate nuclear fusion too
Actually I do. I was a nuclear booster in the 1990’s because it means cheap limitless pollution free power.
Except that they don’t actually deliver on that promise. You can have safe nuclear or cheap nuclear, but if it’s safe it’s not cheap, and the public rightfully won’t accept something that can require evacuating hundreds of square miles for decades.
So wise one, where are those cheap safe nuclear power plants we keep hearing about since 1950?
So the user above me actually gave the the answer so kudos to them but to further answer your question, there are no actually cheap reactors because the fight to actually build one is so insanely expensive. Where I live they’d been trying to build a reactor for over a decade. Constant lawsuits and legal battles after already obtaining permits and everything. Its ballooned the cost by tenfold. Why? Because of constant NGO pressure from the likes of greenpeace. So congrats, you win. They aren’t cheap cause of the hell we’ve made for ourselves.
“Today there are about 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries plus Taiwan, with a combined capacity of about 390 GWe. In 2022 these provided 2545 TWh, about 10% of the world’s electricity.”
There have been two major reactor accidents in the history of civil nuclear power – Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. Chernobyl involved an intense fire without provision for containment, and Fukushima Daiichi severely tested the containment, allowing some release of radioactivity.
Yes- a track record of one plant failing due to Soviet incompetence and political blunders; and the second failing due to checks notes a 9.0 magnitude almost direct earthquake and ensuing 133 ft tsunami.
Worth noting that the Fukushima disaster would have been prevented if they heeded warnings in a 2008 report that said their sea walls were too short, so again incompetence.
the earthquake didn’t even damage the plant, they thought of that. the tsunami knocked out the power lines and bad generator placement led to loss of power for cooling. build reactors to passively cool themselves (which should just be a mandatory safety feature on new reactors tbh, it’s not a big ask and improves safety a lot) and fukushima type accidents become impossible. that plant was so old that the original operating license was going to expire a week after the quake and the only guy who died had a heart attack. fukushima-sized death tolls happen in the rooftop solar installation industry every year, totally unreported.
you mean the part where it generated a shit ton of carbon free reliable power while killing fewer people per watt-hour what any other method? with outdated 60’s technology too? yeah sure sounds like a failure
It’s frustrating seeing a graph showing the price of electricity going down while my utility prices go up. Does this take into account infrastructure cost?
The data stops in 2019. It’s completely outdated. The world is in chaos since covid. But anti nuke propagandists don’t care much about these “details”.
Covid actually had almost no impact on the prices and they continued to level off a little lower. The surprising one is the onshore wind remaining on par with solar and continues to drop (albeit slowely).
Hi, I’m a human being, not an “anti nuke propagandist”. I just checked, if there’s newer data, and well, there is, but no one seems to have formatted that in a way yet, which you or me would be willing to digest.
Personally, my impression has been that the solar industry was one of the industries that was pretty much completely unaffected by COVID, so I felt this graph was still perfectly relevant.
But even if it were strongly affected, I do not see why our technological progress in manufacturing, that we had in 2019, should evaporate with COVID.
There is inflation and a rise in natural catastrophes, but I feel like those would affect nuclear and others roughly proportional.
Well, if you omit batteries then you are mostly true, although with covid there was a huge shortage of electronic components that would affect solar a lot, at least depending on where you live. Batteries is a big unknown now, because with all the demand for it, we simply can’t build enough batteries to feed all the grids with it.
Alright, yeah, good point with the batteries. I’m hoping the batteries in electric cars will double up as storage for the grid (already happening today), but also that there’s just enough redundancy with other renewables.
What surprises me, in a way, is that photovoltaics are literally 3,5 times cheaper than just mirrors reflecting light onto a tower.
It got REAL cheap.
Wish it’d go further!
I know it’s not ideal, but a bar chart design could either focus on the difference over time for each source, or the difference between sources at each time. This plot gives a good representation of both the differences between sources and the change in time for each source. It really drives home how far solar prices have fallen relative to other sources and in absolute terms.
OP’s data is LCOE, which takes into account much more than $/MW. Rather importantly, expected operating liftetime is a major component (and historically THE major economic downside of PV).
IIRC, LCOE is calculated for utility-scale solar, which has seen a 500% decrease according to your chart.
Finally, Neither chart specifies, but if OP’s is in constant dollars and yours isn’t that would explain a lot as well.
I for one think this is much better than using a bar chart for this use case, as the angled arrows make it immediately obvious the information that matters the most here (the rate of change) while still keeping it contextualized (by relative positions). The bar chart version of this would inevitably look more cluttered and would not be more effective in conveying the incredible progress in solar costs.
It’s wild to me that 19% difference between the drop of on shore wind and solar to the same price point is massive, like that extra 19% drop in solar is quite literally more than half of the solar previous cost, about $230.
The price of electricity produced is an interesting metric to look at but can be very misguiding alone without more data around it.
It like comparing the price of rain water compared to well water.
The same way that solar is cheaper than nuclear, rain water is much cheaper than well water, you just need a roof with a gutter to get rain water.
Does it means that we should stop using wells and rely only on rain water and use water only when it rains ? Or do we also want to have tanks, do we need a backup for when the tanks are empty ? …
Yeah, there may be situations/regions where even the cheapest solar isn’t good enough. But at some point, the cost difference does become an oppressive argument. Even at that price in 2019 already, you can use around 75% of your money to build storage or redundancy in multiple regions / with alternative renewables.
And this trend of cost reduction for solar will very likely continue, even if it might start levelling off at some point.
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Are the renewables including cost of storage in this graphic? Batteries are a lot more needed with wind and solar since they aren’t always available.
Also, I’d imagine nuclear would enjoy a similar level of success if there were more countries willing to invest in nuclear.
They are aren’t. This is anti nuclear propaganda. It’s a waste of screen place. The data is outdated and completely manipulated.
So, what did you want me to do? Post the same graph, but black out the nuclear line, so no one can see it going upwards? I do find that data point interesting, too, but I would have posted this, even if it was just the solar dropping as it does.
Let’s add in the cost of batteries as their own thing, because they can be charged from anything and are far cheaper than other sources promoted as covering for gaps in renewables.
I don’t know if this is a fair thing to do. Yes, we could charge it from any other source, but we aren’t (intentionally) overgenerating power from sources like coal, gas, etc. Thus, the need for implementing that storage largely depends on renewables.
I also feel like factoring out the costs of storage implementation leaves more gaps for combustion generation supporters to criticize renewables. I would rather be honest about the upfront costs and instead emphasize the long term benefits of renewables, both in cost and cleanliness.
As far as I understand the description at the top of the image, no, storage is not included. But if production costs are insanely low, that of course does leave plenty room for storage or redundancy. In particular, personally I believe the costs will continue on a logarithmic drop and we’re at the steep part of that, so even if it really is not the case today, I do expect solar production + storage to become cheaper in a not too distant future.
Also, as another graphic from the source article illustrates, battery costs are rapidly dropping, too:
Sweet, now get the panels and installation cheaper so I can afford to put it on my house
We had a solar salesman come by once and told us he could lower our electricity bill the same amount as it would cost us to install the solar panels.
I knew there was something up with this but I decided to let him continue to talk anyways. He does this whole presentation with solar panels and how great they are for a good 30 minutes.
Finally we get to the money part and he keeps emphasizing that they will lower my electricity bill so the cost of them will be made up there. I push him for the total cost of them plus installation and I about died.
$30,000??? They literally wanted me to pay for these for 30 years. As long as my mortgage! Aaaaah!!!
That’s about 10 times the price it costs to have a full system installed in other parts of the USA.
I put in a small solar backup power system myself for $1500. It’s not enough to power HVAC or any big appliances but it is enough that I can have my fridge, freezer, TV, and Internet going off the grid whenever there’s a power outage.
Just to save $100 a month.
100x12x30
If I save 100$ a month, sign me up
But they will still have to make the monthly payments for the solar panels. So, their real savings will only start after they paid off the loan in 30 years. lol
Similar here, got a quote from a company that wanted $45,000 to only cut my bill in half. Said my roof having so many levels due to being a 1.5 story made it hard to install and get good coverage. Guess I get to just burn coal power then because that price is ridiculous
Some companies in my area are installing them for free, and taking the utility difference. It’s a novel approach.
I want a discount on my electricity if I have to have a solar array on my land. Even if it were otherwise free.
I had a few come over and I was already in the market for solar so I entertained them for a minute. I told them “OK, give me some invoices for your other customers so I know what you charge. Black out the names, I dont care - I just want the prices of your services and materials”. These idiots would not stop calling me or coming over to my house for months. I kept telling them “Unless you give me actual, real world dollar amounts, I won’t consider it”.
Those solar sales guys are worse than used car salesmen.
Further lowering panel cost isn’t going to significantly cut that price. Cost of labor is the major part of that.
People always focus on rooftop solar, but it’s horribly expensive compared to a field of panels. The economics of scale will almost certainly keep it that way.
What we should be looking at is community solar, where neighborhoods invest in a solar field together.
Wouldn’t that be a less sustainable use of land?
I guess maybe not if we are talking tall building, where the roof surface area may not be sufficient for the entire building. But it would be a waste not to make use of all the unused rooftops
Yeah, in some countries, land is at a premium. No way would it be wasted on just solar panels. Rooftop installations make the most sense.
They are even testing putting them afloat on dam reservoirs.
I’ve always thought that in the neighborhoods where everyone lives in townhomes and mini apartments a shared multi floor parkade with solar and maybe also wind on top should be a thing. Even if the solar is just covering the parkade’s power usage.
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As far offgrid as fiber will go!
Government subsidies work for getting new technologies out of the prototype stage and into practical deployment. Solar and wind are both good demonstrations.
Then there’s California where NEM 3.0 makes it less than worth while to install or upgrade your existing solar installation.
There’s a lot more nuance to this than most people will admit.
Net metering is 100% unsustainable, when renewables become a big enough chunk of the grid generation mix, they often generate when no one needs the power. Forcing the grid to accept that power and even pay the homeowner a premium for it is a perverse incentive. Effectively what it does is allow solar array owners to avoid paying to maintain a grid they still use, and since the rich trend to go solar first, the poor are left holding the bag to maintain the grid for everyone.
Dang, it’s almost like it was worth all the research money the government crammed into it in the long run, unlike what my dad said to me a million times.
Pretty clearly shows why there’s no future for nuclear power.
Even for filling gaps in renewables, peaker plants are getting cheaper and don’t take 15 years to build.
And it is always a question how they calculated handling of nuclear waste.
There are options, we can use coal and natural gas for on demand power to fill the gaps in renewables, we don’t have to quit all at once. New ideas for energy storage and comming around, some of them might be useful for small towns, others for remote places.
nuclear waste, by definition of being radioactive, is the only wast that goes away on it’s own if you leave it sit for long enough
I was considering whether this is just a shitpost, but your other comments suggest that you’re completely serious. It does not go away. Radioactive decay causes multiple transitions between radioactive elements until it ends up as lead, which does not decay further.
Of course, it should also be said that it’s better to have no waste than waste that eventually turns into lead.
And that it’s still better to have waste than waste which also happens to be toxic.
right, but when it lands at lead it’s no longer radioactive waste, which is the part everyone’s scared of. chemical waste doesn’t just go away like that.
Worth noting that solar panels are not without toxic waste. If left in landfills they risk leaching lead, cadmium and other toxic chemicals. The issue of recycling them at scale is not being seriously tackled.
there is very very very little nuclear waste.this is complete handwringing. it can be buried and forgotten.
Bigger issue is the carbon costs and pay back periods. Nuclear (unless you’ve got sources otherwise stating) is green in it’s planning phase but not as often in execution. A shit ton of concrete is used, and the plants rarely operate at the capacity they are expected to (or have in the past). Open to revision but that’s my current understanding.
They are a massive upfront carbon cost and only become carbon neutral or negative relative to fossil fuels 20+ years down the line.
Do you have data on that? A modern nuclear power plant is going to be in the 500-1000+ MW range. I have a hard time imagining that even operating at half capacity that they do not offset the carbon used for concrete within a relatively short order. But if that is in fact the case I’d love to see data saying so, so that I can correct my thinking.
Kyle Hill has a nice video about power plants waste disposal, one of cleanest methods there is.
edit: he actually went to the plant and showed how it’s done
He literally hugged and kissed a canister of nuclear waste to show how safe it is. Kyle Hill is my hero
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indeed. when you kill nuclear, the reality is natural gas and sometimes coal is the real replacement
I think that’s too simplistic of a view. Part of the high cost of nuclear is because of the somewhat niche use. As with everything, economies of scale makes things cheaper. Supporting one nuclear plant with specialized labor, parts, fuel, etc is much more expensive then supporting 100 plants, per Watt.
I can’t say more plants would drastically reduce costs. But it would definitely help.
The last nuclear power plant built in the US bankrupted Westinghouse, was 7 years late, $14 billion over budget, and is set to raise electricity rates in Georgia.
Nuclear is not a solution.
Of course It is, the incompetent and ignorant people that try to hinder it’s use is the problem
So the people who built that reactor were incompetent and ignorant?
Reading comprehension isn’t really your strong suit, eh? “The incompetent and ignorant people that try to hinder it’s use is the problem”
If you are hired to do a task and then overrun the budget by 14B$ I wouldn’t exactly call it furthering the cause. More like incompetence and/or trying to detail the project.
the most dangerous part of nuclear power is not using enough
The nuclear industry is 100% responsible for the operational record of the nuclear industry.
The source article actually talks about this and measured data suggests nuclear cost actually went up, despite more capacity being built.
This is the first time, I’ve read this anywhere. More sources/studies would be really important. And there is lots of interpretations to be had on the why, but assuming the article isn’t completely off the mark, that’s cold, hard data suggesting that your (perfectly reasonable) assumption is actually wrong, after all.
Interesting, I’ll have to look at the source article.
But as far as I’m aware the total amount of nuclear power has been decreasing in recent years. This might change with China’s future plants.
I’ve also read about small modular reactor designs gaining traction, which would help alleviate the heavy costs of one off plants we currently design and build.
Not saying the source is wrong, just saying that’s what I used to form my opinion.
china’s been building dozens of reactors, all of a common design which is the correct way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
bullshit regulatory costs can increase infinitely without nay change to the underlying engineering or economics. that’s 100% the cause of the price increses
Possible. But well, whether these regulations actually are bullshit or not, kind of doesn’t matter. A dumb solar panel won’t ever need to be regulated as much. If that’s what makes it cheaper, it still is cheaper.
They’ve had 75 years to get the cost down. It’s still going up.
because of oil funded fear pushing pseudoscience based restrictions
Congratulate yourself then. The propaganda you and your ilk continue to spew is the reason for this.
big oil pushes this stuff, by the way. because they know the reality that when nuclear plants get shut down, natural gas replaces it
Oh it’s just the meanies keeping the poor nuclear industry down! 😆
This is always a weird take to me because it always ignores the fact that nuclear has been screwed continuously for decades. If any other tecbology, renewable energy or not, had the same public and private blockers did it would also have no future.
On the contrary: I’d say it implicitly relies on that fact, which is why the argument that it takes 15 years to build is valid. Because nuclear has been screwed, there’s no pipeline of under-construction plants coming online any sooner than that.
It may not be fair that nuclear’s been screwed, but that doesn’t change history. The only thing that matters is what’s better when construction is starting in 2023.
While I don’t think it relies on that fact, you are correct with the rest.
Nuclear has been screwed by its own track record.
Why do you think its had such a wide coalition of public and private opponents?
“I’ve ignored and circumvented every known safety measure, and everything went wrong” - Whoever the fuck said that, 2023
Making up straw men to defeat?
if you cite chernobyl that’s exactly what you’re saying. it’ll never happen again because no one’s that dumb
Fukushima happened in “smart” Japan because it was cheaper to put the backup generators in the basement than to build a concrete podium taller than the tsunamis that previously hit the site.
Capitalism will always choose cost over safety. Even then nuclear ends up going way over budget.
Then we shouldn’t leave energy security and the climate in the hands of capital. Energy should be nationalised.
We have extensively documented history supporting exactly what you’re trying to argue against
Has there been a scenario where the technology itself is to blame? The contamination aspect of nuclear waste is well known and preventable, if costs are being cut on radioactive waste disposal (or in the case of a certain Japanese power company, ignoring warnings from the government on how to reduce ocean contamination in the event of an earthquake) a nuclear installation’s fate is sealed…
As far as I can see, the only downsides with nuclear IMO is that it takes multiple decades to decommission a single plant, the environmental impact on that plant’s land in the interim, and the initial cost to build the plant.
In comparison to Solar it sounds awful, but before solar, nuclear honestly would have made a lot of sense. I think it may even still be worth it in places that have a high demand for constant power generation, since Solar only generates while the sun’s about, and then you’re looking at overnight energy storage with lithium-based batteries, which have their own environmental and humanitarian challenges
Uranium powered fission technology, not all nuclear. Look into Thorium
yeah you can do throium, and there are some compelling reasons to, but uranium is fine enough. anti-nuke isn’t about actual technical enlargements. the anti nukes hate nuclear fusion too
Well that’s simply false. Its been screwed by ignorance propaganda and fear mongering.
You clearly don’t understand the other side.
the other side is big oil
LOL. It’s “big solar” that’s eating their lunch.
yeah but I want the power to work between 4 pm and 8 am
Sure buddy. And you clearly do.
Actually I do. I was a nuclear booster in the 1990’s because it means cheap limitless pollution free power.
Except that they don’t actually deliver on that promise. You can have safe nuclear or cheap nuclear, but if it’s safe it’s not cheap, and the public rightfully won’t accept something that can require evacuating hundreds of square miles for decades.
So wise one, where are those cheap safe nuclear power plants we keep hearing about since 1950?
So the user above me actually gave the the answer so kudos to them but to further answer your question, there are no actually cheap reactors because the fight to actually build one is so insanely expensive. Where I live they’d been trying to build a reactor for over a decade. Constant lawsuits and legal battles after already obtaining permits and everything. Its ballooned the cost by tenfold. Why? Because of constant NGO pressure from the likes of greenpeace. So congrats, you win. They aren’t cheap cause of the hell we’ve made for ourselves.
In France. They standardized the designs so each one isn’t a one-off and they trained more people to work in the field.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx
“Today there are about 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries plus Taiwan, with a combined capacity of about 390 GWe. In 2022 these provided 2545 TWh, about 10% of the world’s electricity.”
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/safety-of-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx
There have been two major reactor accidents in the history of civil nuclear power – Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. Chernobyl involved an intense fire without provision for containment, and Fukushima Daiichi severely tested the containment, allowing some release of radioactivity.
Yes- a track record of one plant failing due to Soviet incompetence and political blunders; and the second failing due to checks notes a 9.0 magnitude almost direct earthquake and ensuing 133 ft tsunami.
Worth noting that the Fukushima disaster would have been prevented if they heeded warnings in a 2008 report that said their sea walls were too short, so again incompetence.
the earthquake didn’t even damage the plant, they thought of that. the tsunami knocked out the power lines and bad generator placement led to loss of power for cooling. build reactors to passively cool themselves (which should just be a mandatory safety feature on new reactors tbh, it’s not a big ask and improves safety a lot) and fukushima type accidents become impossible. that plant was so old that the original operating license was going to expire a week after the quake and the only guy who died had a heart attack. fukushima-sized death tolls happen in the rooftop solar installation industry every year, totally unreported.
you mean the part where it generated a shit ton of carbon free reliable power while killing fewer people per watt-hour what any other method? with outdated 60’s technology too? yeah sure sounds like a failure
This.
This chart is worthless, so it doesn’t show anything. Like 2 data points for this? Seriously? And there was a pandemic and a war since then…
I wish hydroelectricity was there.
It’s frustrating seeing a graph showing the price of electricity going down while my utility prices go up. Does this take into account infrastructure cost?
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The data stops in 2019. It’s completely outdated. The world is in chaos since covid. But anti nuke propagandists don’t care much about these “details”.
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/renewables/lcoe-for-offshore-wind-now-on-par-with-coal-bnef/amp/
Covid actually had almost no impact on the prices and they continued to level off a little lower. The surprising one is the onshore wind remaining on par with solar and continues to drop (albeit slowely).
Gas skyrocketed in Europe. Oil is going yo-yo. How does this have no impact on the price?
Hi, I’m a human being, not an “anti nuke propagandist”. I just checked, if there’s newer data, and well, there is, but no one seems to have formatted that in a way yet, which you or me would be willing to digest.
Personally, my impression has been that the solar industry was one of the industries that was pretty much completely unaffected by COVID, so I felt this graph was still perfectly relevant.
But even if it were strongly affected, I do not see why our technological progress in manufacturing, that we had in 2019, should evaporate with COVID.
There is inflation and a rise in natural catastrophes, but I feel like those would affect nuclear and others roughly proportional.
Well, if you omit batteries then you are mostly true, although with covid there was a huge shortage of electronic components that would affect solar a lot, at least depending on where you live. Batteries is a big unknown now, because with all the demand for it, we simply can’t build enough batteries to feed all the grids with it.
Alright, yeah, good point with the batteries. I’m hoping the batteries in electric cars will double up as storage for the grid (already happening today), but also that there’s just enough redundancy with other renewables.
Yeah energy prices have gone through the roof but apparently it’s cheaper in every way except nuclear - and we don’t even have nuclear around here
What surprises me, in a way, is that photovoltaics are literally 3,5 times cheaper than just mirrors reflecting light onto a tower. It got REAL cheap. Wish it’d go further!
The mirrors are the not the expensive part.
What is? Thermal to electricity conversion?
Yup. Steam turbine generators have a lot of moving parts, and moving parts break
Got it, thanks
Without saying anything about politics, environment, or source:
Why, for the love of Satan, does this graph have only 2 data points per source?
Why use a line chart 📉 for that?
This is clear bar chart territory 📊.
I know it’s not ideal, but a bar chart design could either focus on the difference over time for each source, or the difference between sources at each time. This plot gives a good representation of both the differences between sources and the change in time for each source. It really drives home how far solar prices have fallen relative to other sources and in absolute terms.
The cost of the panels themselves doesn’t seem to have gone down nearly that much.
OP’s data is LCOE, which takes into account much more than $/MW. Rather importantly, expected operating liftetime is a major component (and historically THE major economic downside of PV).
IIRC, LCOE is calculated for utility-scale solar, which has seen a 500% decrease according to your chart.
Finally, Neither chart specifies, but if OP’s is in constant dollars and yours isn’t that would explain a lot as well.
It’s called a slope chart and it has several benefits compared to bar charts:
I for one think this is much better than using a bar chart for this use case, as the angled arrows make it immediately obvious the information that matters the most here (the rate of change) while still keeping it contextualized (by relative positions). The bar chart version of this would inevitably look more cluttered and would not be more effective in conveying the incredible progress in solar costs.
It’s wild to me that 19% difference between the drop of on shore wind and solar to the same price point is massive, like that extra 19% drop in solar is quite literally more than half of the solar previous cost, about $230.
I know it’s basically a physical impossibility but here hoping to another 89% in the next 10 years (compared to today)
The price of electricity produced is an interesting metric to look at but can be very misguiding alone without more data around it.
It like comparing the price of rain water compared to well water.
The same way that solar is cheaper than nuclear, rain water is much cheaper than well water, you just need a roof with a gutter to get rain water.
Does it means that we should stop using wells and rely only on rain water and use water only when it rains ? Or do we also want to have tanks, do we need a backup for when the tanks are empty ? …
Yeah, there may be situations/regions where even the cheapest solar isn’t good enough. But at some point, the cost difference does become an oppressive argument. Even at that price in 2019 already, you can use around 75% of your money to build storage or redundancy in multiple regions / with alternative renewables.
And this trend of cost reduction for solar will very likely continue, even if it might start levelling off at some point.
Data stops in 2019. It’s completely outdated. Good try.
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/renewables/lcoe-for-offshore-wind-now-on-par-with-coal-bnef/amp/