“Hidden” Cost of Renewables and the Need for Nuclear

 

The “Hidden” Cost of Renewables and the Need for Nuclear

While on an incremental basis the cost of solar and wind have reached levels that are low enough to compete with natural gas and nuclear, the real cost is still much higher because the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow in the evenings when people come home turn on their lights and air conditioners. This means that sun and wind require additional duplicative gas generating capacity or expensive battery storage.

If you really care about carbon dioxide and its effect on global warming and you care about economic consequences you should support nuclear.

Levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is the cost of electricity including all capital and operating costs over the lifetime of a generating plant.

 As many claim that wind and solar costs have reached the point that they are competitive with other sources, it is important to understand what they are talking about. While it is true that on a $/MWh (mega watt hour) that the incremental cost of generating electricity from wind (onshore) and solar have become competitive with natural gas generation, it is important to understand that at some point you cannot look at the incremental cost, but instead have to look at overall cost because with wind and solar power you need significant  additional capacity to make up for the time that solar and wind do not produce electricity.

Nuclear and combined cycle natural gas electrical generation stations operate with a 90% capacity factor, which essentially means they operate 90% of the time.  Wind and solar electrical generation operate with a 40% and 30% capacity factor, respectively, as the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind isn’t always blowing (or sometimes it is blowing too hard.)  This means that as long as there is excess capacity to generate electricity, we can add incremental wind and solar at the relatively low incremental LCOE.  However, once there is no excess capacity and as electricity demand increases and additional capacity is required, you will have to also install non-renewable generating capacity as a secondary generating source/back-up or install additional capacity and electrical storage to go along with solar and wind generation.  When this cost of additional capacity or storage required for wind and solar, the “hidden cost”, is included you see that wind and solar are significantly more expensive than either gas or small modular reactor (SMR, a newly developed nuclear generating technology that greatly reduces capital costs.)

What this means is that while we can add and utilize some level of renewable energy, we cannot add new capacity that is solely wind and solar without significantly increasing the LCOE.  Further, if one wants to use only renewables and get to zero carbon emissions you have to add the very expensive storage option.

The conclusion seems obvious to me.  It’s not solar and wind.  It’s nuclear.

Another important note. If/as we move to more more electric cars we will need new electrical generating capacity that around 50% of current capacity. That means we either go with nuclear, with gas and not help CO2 problems, or we all pay a lot more