First off depending on where you put your wind you're going to have different capacity factors. In Ontario Canada you're looking at like 25% capacity factor. Many places in the world are going to be similar.
Secondly, and this is the big one. As soon as you average out an intermittent source of energy you've lost the plot. You've taken something incompatiable with being averaged and then averaged it. Think of this way. Say you're designing a building code for houses to withstand earthquakes. During an earthquake the house will be accellerate by 5G for 1 minute. This happens once a year. But for some reason you average it out. Now it's that 5g for 1 minute per 512,640 minutes (1 year). So on average the house will shake 0.0000097G per minute for a year and you will now base your building code on that. It's silly and doesn't make sense to do this.
So again, as soon as you average out an intermittent source you're screwed. Frequently the source isn't producing energy, in which case you need another source to back it up. OR if you install to much of it you're now producing too much energy and you need to curtail.
To get the same service as a nuclear plant, you in addition need a lot of storage and overbuild (to compensate for below average wind years) and/or backup powerplants fuelled by (expensive) carbon neutral fuel or using CCS technology.
For the sake of fairness one should add that nuclear power only achieves your quoted capital costs with repeat build, while FOAK is a lot more expensive. So the first few reactors will have significantly higher capital costs than you assumed here. But we know nuclear projects can be done fast and on time and on budget with experience, as China and Russia are demonstrating again and again.
You are living in a dream world. Vogtle 3/4 came in at something over $15,000/kW, not the $5,000 to $7,000/kW you are using. The Koreans arent coming. They signed a fixed price contarct withthe UAE with penalties/bonuses for meeting the schedule. But they wouldnever do that with the NRC in control. Neither would Westinghouse. And under cost plus, Colorado will see a repeat of Vogtle. There is no big learning curve in building power plants,
We need to radically rethink the way we regulate nuclear ii we are to achieve the numbers you are using. But if we do we can beat those numbers by a factor of 2.
With respect to costing out grids using intermittent sourcesof course you cant use average capacity factors.
The key question is: what the longest dunkelflaute your grid can handle. To answer that you must grind thru the hourly demand and wind and sun time series to findout how much wind, solar, storage, over-capacity, and backup is optimal, which will depend on your social cost of
There is little question that your Colorado 1 GW plant will cost well north of 10 billion dollars under curretn rules.
The real question is why does nuclear in the West cost 5 or more times its should-cost. In the 1960's when nuclear was just getting started we built plants for less than $2K/kW intoday's money and in 4 years. Thanks to technological progress, the real cost should ahve gone down in the intervening 60 years.
First off depending on where you put your wind you're going to have different capacity factors. In Ontario Canada you're looking at like 25% capacity factor. Many places in the world are going to be similar.
Secondly, and this is the big one. As soon as you average out an intermittent source of energy you've lost the plot. You've taken something incompatiable with being averaged and then averaged it. Think of this way. Say you're designing a building code for houses to withstand earthquakes. During an earthquake the house will be accellerate by 5G for 1 minute. This happens once a year. But for some reason you average it out. Now it's that 5g for 1 minute per 512,640 minutes (1 year). So on average the house will shake 0.0000097G per minute for a year and you will now base your building code on that. It's silly and doesn't make sense to do this.
So again, as soon as you average out an intermittent source you're screwed. Frequently the source isn't producing energy, in which case you need another source to back it up. OR if you install to much of it you're now producing too much energy and you need to curtail.
To get the same service as a nuclear plant, you in addition need a lot of storage and overbuild (to compensate for below average wind years) and/or backup powerplants fuelled by (expensive) carbon neutral fuel or using CCS technology.
For the sake of fairness one should add that nuclear power only achieves your quoted capital costs with repeat build, while FOAK is a lot more expensive. So the first few reactors will have significantly higher capital costs than you assumed here. But we know nuclear projects can be done fast and on time and on budget with experience, as China and Russia are demonstrating again and again.
David,
You are living in a dream world. Vogtle 3/4 came in at something over $15,000/kW, not the $5,000 to $7,000/kW you are using. The Koreans arent coming. They signed a fixed price contarct withthe UAE with penalties/bonuses for meeting the schedule. But they wouldnever do that with the NRC in control. Neither would Westinghouse. And under cost plus, Colorado will see a repeat of Vogtle. There is no big learning curve in building power plants,
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-slow
We need to radically rethink the way we regulate nuclear ii we are to achieve the numbers you are using. But if we do we can beat those numbers by a factor of 2.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-not-only-should-be
With respect to costing out grids using intermittent sourcesof course you cant use average capacity factors.
The key question is: what the longest dunkelflaute your grid can handle. To answer that you must grind thru the hourly demand and wind and sun time series to findout how much wind, solar, storage, over-capacity, and backup is optimal, which will depend on your social cost of
CO2. See
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-and-windsolar
The cost to build a plant is the 10 billion dollar question.
There is little question that your Colorado 1 GW plant will cost well north of 10 billion dollars under curretn rules.
The real question is why does nuclear in the West cost 5 or more times its should-cost. In the 1960's when nuclear was just getting started we built plants for less than $2K/kW intoday's money and in 4 years. Thanks to technological progress, the real cost should ahve gone down in the intervening 60 years.
I think you may be right. But to have legislators consider this I have to go with the published range. And nuclear is still superior even with this.
thanks