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Article states 93% of new generation capacity was renewable which is good, but I can sense that nimbyism is growing towards wind and solar. Not to mention the animus towards China who has wisely cornered manufacturing of these.
The US has shot itself in the foot because of its energy dependence on its own energy source. The resource curse strikes again.
Given this is the top comment on the article at the moment, I thought it was worth at least pushing back on this sentiment at least a little bit.
[0]https://us.qcells.com/blog/qcells-north-america-completes-da...
[1] https://futurism.com/science-energy/solar-energy-china-produ...
The way a traditional grid works is that you have baseload plants (nuclear, coal) that generate all the time and peaker plants (hydro, natural gas) that make up the difference between the baseload generation and the current demand by varying the amount they generate to match demand in real time.
The higher demand periods when you're not using electricity to heat buildings are typically daytime and early evening. Solar generates power during daytime. That makes "use solar instead of natural gas during daytime" an easy win. You can also do things like "charge electric vehicles mostly during daytime" and use solar again. Then you're still using natural gas in the early evening but you save a lot of fuel (and CO2) by not having to use them during the day. Meanwhile the gas plants are still there to use in the evening and then you can use them on a day when it's cloudy.
That's still where we are in most places. There isn't enough solar in the grid yet to completely replace natural gas during most of the solar generation window, and we could add even more by electrifying transportation, so we can still add a lot more solar before we have to really deal with intermittency at all.
Optimists would then like to extrapolate the economics of doing that to doing 100% of generation from renewables, which would require actually dealing with it.
I think you're giving the US Universities far too much credence, and the US myopic political situation far too little scrutiny.
That isn't how that works. Domestic students are just as cheap.
You may have seen the famous test of ramming a F4 Phantom into a reinforced concrete walls without much effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ
It's certainly possible to blow them up, but they very unlikely to melt down like Chernobyl did anymore due to all the effort put into preventing that. Easier to just launch radioactive materials at your enemy if that's the result you want.
Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW.
(See: Fukushima and Chernobyl.)
The same holds for hydro. Even worse, there would be no time for evacuation. Yet nobody is considering banning dams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
"After the disaster, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government remained silent to the public, while no media were allowed to make reports."
"The official documents of this disaster were considered a state secret until 2005 when they were declassified."
If Ukraine didn't have nuclear energy they would be blacked out now.
Russia has bombed the switchyards and trandformers of other NPPs though.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...
Eve China, the best nuclear power builders out there, are shifting away from massive nuclear to storage and wind and solar.
Without a major technological innovation in the nuclear power space, I don't see how it can compete, except at the poles and in niches with very poor renewable resources.
If you use electricity to synthesize gas and then burn that later to generate electricity that is still cheaper than nuclear power.
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
Nobody builds nuclear power because it's cost effective or green. They either have nukes like China or have purchased an option on nukes (like Iran or Poland).
The problem with nuclear today is just that it simply hasn't kept pace with the lowering cost of alternatives.
its really not. The new(ie 90s) french reactors are about as fast as Combined cycle gas turbines. Even if its not, it works well enough, spain has shit all battery capacity and manages well enough
but if you have lots of renewables you need batteries ideally, which means the hypothetical argument of "its too slow" goes away because batteries are there to even out the supply.
It's actually more diverse than I thought.
It's never an economic decision to build nuclear power stations. They're 5x the cost of solar and wind.
Currently their liability is capped at $300 million. Fukushima cleanup cost $800 billion.
End the insurance free ride first and then maybe lets talk about deregulation.
Ahem, have I missed something? Do you know more then the rest of us? I mean, has the nuclear waste problem actually been solved?
Climate change is a problem for 50 years ago. And now. Very, very much now.
Having to, in the worst case, designate some small areas that we choose as uninhabitable "nuclear waste zones" in a few decades is vastly preferable to having to designate entire regions of the world as uninhabitable "too hot to live" zones around the same time. And that's if we don't find some better way to handle the nuclear waste.
* Not in the sense of "a permanent and comprehensive solution". However, the actual spent nuclear fuel can now be reprocessed and reused in newer reactor designs, down to a tiny fraction of what we would have considered "nuclear waste" with the earliest designs in the mid-20th century.
Seeing that already here in Canada. All parties (except one) seem united in their newfound aspiration to just mine and ship more of the stuff.
Talking about transition is politically toxic here right now.
I strongly suspect it was primarily created by the US threatening to annex us via "economic force" and thus creating a need to prioritize our short term economic strength over longer term charity things like climate change.
I also think that there's a bigger force at work which is that despite actually being only 2nd or 3rd in Canada's GDP by percentage, energy sector is basically the majority of what's on the TSX and a key driver in equity growth in Canada. And so, the old maxim applies in regards to climate change and Canadians generally: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I'm from Alberta originally and talking to extended family etc about this topic is just painful. Not officially climate change denying, but in practice fully actually
So if you look at new resources being added to the grid, it's all solar, wind, storage, and a tiny bit of new fossil gas generation.
The biggest impediment to more renewables is no longer cost, it's politics and regulations. We have a president that has torpedoes one of the best new sources of wind, offshore wind, just as it's becoming super economical, and all the rest of the world is going to get the benefit of that cheap energy while the US falls behind. Floating offshore wind in the Pacific, based on the same type of tech as floating oil platforms, could provide a hugely beneficial amount of electricity at night and in winter, to balance out solar with less storage and less overbuilding.
Meanwhile on land, transmission line are a huge bottleneck towards more solar and wind, and the interconnection queue for the grid is backed out to hell in most places.
The technology and economics are there, but the humans and their bureaucracy is not ready to fully jump on board.
its bottlenecked by price. The reason why the UK's electricity is so fucking expensive is because its pegged to international gas prices
I'd totally agree for UK and continental Europe. The difference between oil and gas is massive on the distribution angle, oil moves easily as long as there's not a naval blockade, but fossil gas requires super super expensive infrastructure either via pipeline or LNG. And with nearly all fossil fuel companies in the last stages of their life, trying to maximize profits on existing capital, it's hard to get investor support to buy infrastructure that costs multiple billions and has limited lifetime. I don't know the details in Europe, but it seems like this phasing out of infrastructure as the transition happens is a major hassle... I'd love any links on that sort of info about Europe.
"I wonder how good it could be"
It's already here, solar is already dramatically cheaper and has none of the risk profile a global energy market produces. You install solar and you have that energy for decades.
Solar is here and its cheaper, batteries are good enough for utility scale. Now its simply an adoption curve.
Moralizing or bringing up silly arguments about how cost ought to be accounted should be considered harmful to the progress away from fossil fuels. Unless it's your intent to start pointless arguments.
But I do think I get your point - the subsidies are there so we should compare the costs as they are.
It’s quite intriguing that we haven’t been able to come up with solid energy policies in the recent decades and it’s all about rent seeking behavior of existing providers that’s holding us back. I don’t understand why we can enable things like Uber/Lyft to disrupt the taxi madalyon system, but become very protective about certain industries, even when it’s in our best interest to explore those areas in detail (regardless of the result).
But, the other practical effect is that if you use less fossil fuels you're making the climate worse more slowly. Now, given we'd like it to stop getting worse just making it worse more slowly isn't the whole answer but it does at least help.
> Nine coal power plants that were set for retirement last year have had their operating lives extended, including five in response to emergency orders from the Department of Energy.
Maybe the other 4 still stay open without the bullshit DoE order keeping the 5 open, but who knows.
On the other hand for House reps the elections are every two years like clockwork, "after they win election" is in effect never because they will already be thinking about re-election, so if that's what they're asking for they mean never.
Apparently they are failing to attain traction because despite the promise of lower cost reactors due to them no longer being bespoke, their LCOE cannot compete with renewables.
I'd argue that we should subsidize those and help make them happen NOW even if the cost is not as low as it should be, as we need all the energy we can get and we need to get off of fossil fuels NOW to try to mitigate global warming.
They might be a good option for remote sites off the grid where physical security isn't a concern.
Tell someone over 60 or 70 that Poland has better modular reactors than us, and they'll suddenly care.
Total U.S. energy use: about 27.6 million GWh/yr
From renewables: about 2.5 million GWh/yr
Renewables’ share of total energy: about 9%
This includes the total energy usage, including cars and buses and propane for heating homes and like just about everything else. This is the number we need to maximize.