Some key insights from the article:
Basically, what they did was to look at how much batteries would be needed in a given area to provide constant power supply at least 97% of the time, and the calculate the costs of that solar+battery setup compared to coal and nuclear.
As others have said this is for Las Vegas which receives wayyy more sun than the average place. But the other misleading part is they looked at 20 years which is close to the life cycle for solar/batteries and not even half the life of nuclear
Brother, with some luck a nuclear plant is in construction stage after those 20 years
China has been doing them in around 7 years from groundbreaking to grid connection and is trying to get that down to 5 years with their bailong power plant as they are developing an experienced work force and actually have experience making the parts
I think Lazard’s LCOE methodology looks at the entire life cycle of the power plant, specific to that power plant. So they amortize solar startup/decommissioning costs across the 20 year life cycle of solar, but when calculating LCOE for nuclear, they spread the costs across the 80 year life cycle of a nuclear plant.
Nuclear is just really, really expensive. Even if plants required no operating costs, the up front costs are so high that it represents a significant portion of the overall operating costs for any given year.
The Vogtle debacle in Georgia cost $35 billion to add
2 MW2GW (edit to fix error) of capacity. They’re now projecting that over the entire 75 year lifespan the cost of the electricity will come out to be about $0.17 to $0.18 per kilowatt hour.Subsidize it like you do oil, there, solved.
And do the same for solar and batteries, so we can stop using fossil fuels for electricity ASAP.
2gw, but yes, before any operational/maintenance costs that is $17.5/watt. Solar is under $1/watt, and GA is sunny AF.
Vogtle’s numbers are incredibly biased considering they made an entire design and then had to redo it halfway through that’s not a realistic cost that can be expected for future projects. We also have vogtles design be approved now so that new plants can be built for a fraction of the cost. Also where did you see they did amortization of solar?
I’m just familiar with Lazard’s LCOE methodology. The linked paper talks about LCOE, so that’s just how that particular cost analysis works.
Fair point but nuclear will probably always have the disadvantage of initial cost and time to market. It’s a huge risk for investors and public officials.
That is the main criticism of nuclear, it should hopefully get better with Westinghouse’s AP1000 receiving full approval and being built all across China so as long as we continue to use the same design it can start to be mass produced instead of making all the parts as one offs that are much more expensive and time consuming
Vogtle added 2 AP1000 reactors for $35 billion. Future deployments might be cheaper, but there’s a long way to go before it can compete with pretty much any other type of power generation.
They had to switch halfway through which is what added the cost that’s not a realistic cost per reactor
Ok, current projections are still for the next two AP1000s at Vogtle to be something like $10 billion. That’s just not cost competitive with solar/wind. And it’s also not very realistic to assume that there won’t be cost overruns on the next one, either. Complex engineering projects tend to run over.
Next two? After you mentioned it I tried googling and can’t find anything about current projections for new AP1000s at vogtle.
This paper lays out the cost projections that one could expect with the lessons learned from Vogtle Units 3 & 4, with the tax credits and government guarantees available as of 2024:
https://web.mit.edu/kshirvan/www/research/ANP201 TR CANES.pdf
According to the link you listed an AP1000 costs $66/MWh where as from the ember report that’s linked in this article solar plus storage for 97% uptime cost $104/MWh in a sunny city. In Washington DC it would cost $124 and only be able to maintain 81%. I still stand by even with the higher cost that solar + storage is a better option in places like Arizona, Nevada, Southern California ,etc. but nuclear is not as much of the high cost boogeyman as you are making it out to be
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/