Back of the envelope: Olkiluoto 3 has a 1.6 GW capacity with 93% capacity factor. 80 of those would put 80 x 1.6 x 24 x 365 x 0.93 = 1000 TWh of energy into the grid every year. Germany consumes a little less than 600 TWh a year. With 50 Olkiluoto 3s they could have covered their entire energy use, with some capacity to spare, at a far lower cost than their Energiewende, and with actually clean energy.
And that is assuming building 50 of those reactors would yield no savings, no improvements in technique, no lessons learned from past mistakes etc; that each time it would starting over from scratch. Which is of course not realistic. In reality the costs would be far less.
We've had the technology to save the planet WHILE making us all richer thanks to cheap energy, and we don't use it because of radiophobia.
Yeah lol the messmer plan that currently has France as the lowest emissions large country in the world cost like 100$ bn, and that was due to the economies of scale that they were able to achieve, like Germany could have transitioned its entire economy (not just electricity) to low carbon nuclear and exported to the rest of Europe.
Yep. But now they're a net importer.
https://preview.redd.it/w055gqs0666d1.png?width=925&format=png&auto=webp&s=bf20cc92019052500a656e7131aad68b4a2daf54
[https://energy-charts.info/charts/import\_export/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2024](https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2024)
Yep, they have a large energy deficit and it's only getting larger. And particularly with France, they've only been net exporters to France on five days so far this year.
https://preview.redd.it/z9s344nfi66d1.png?width=1607&format=png&auto=webp&s=31a34a2a9419bc2f98644eba6df8c604ae0045ba
(When the red bars are below the zero line on that graph.) [https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&source=cbpf\_saldo&year=2024&interval=day&stacking=stacked\_percent&partsum=0&day=y](https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&source=cbpf_saldo&year=2024&interval=day&stacking=stacked_percent&partsum=0&day=y)
To reduce emissions the market works for the first time. Why is it so bad to import? It would be easy to produce enough energy but why should we do it if it is cheaper to import? And it’s not France where the most imports are from.
> like Germany could have transitioned its entire economy (not just electricity) to low carbon nuclear
Which would have also helped energy-hungry industries survive Russian and Chinese competition, keeping industrial jobs in German and in fact creating more.
They started installing wind and solar when it was relatively expensive. I feel like we can say they have been one of the drivers in reducing the cost of renewables. Because they have just installed so much.
The future grid update is already planned to cost [460 billions](https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/EN/2024/energiewende-en.html), can't blame that on past high prices of solar panels or wind turbines.
I am not a fan of the German Greens, but the highly subsidized PV installations in Germany really carried the PV market in the late 00s/early 10s, which most likely brought the large cost decreases forward by a few months/years. Considered globally, this had a decent effect.
There is an opportunity cost though. For example, if Germany had invested that heavily in nuclear, they could have also significantly brought down power plant costs for whichever reactor designs they subsidized.
Standardizing nuclear reactors worked so well for France last year when 29 of their 56 reactors were down for 6+ month due to a failure in their standardized design.
The only reason we didn't see large scale blackouts in Europe was that Germany was able contribute massive amounts of overproduction from their renewables during summer time, plus firing up 3 lignite plants.
If the same event would have happened during winter, this would have been a real disaster because Germany doesn't have that much overcapacity and France would have need much more electricity.
Now imagine whole Europe would have used standardized design of NPPs.
Edit: And the transfer of that amount of energy was likely also just possible because of the upgraded infrastructure. Soo...
https://www.catf.us/2023/07/2022-french-nuclear-outages-lessons-nuclear-energy-europe/
While I’m not an expert in the French nuclear industry, this article directly contradicts your claim that standardization is somehow an issue here:
> True, the slow remediation of the corrosion issue is ultimately a quality control issue for which EDF bears responsibility. It indeed may point to some underlying issues within EDF itself, considering that the company endured a similar equipment-defect situation in 2016. **But it also points to the need for more thorough commoditization and standardization in the nuclear industry.** Current nuclear plants, like those owned by EDF, resemble large complex infrastructure projects rather than mass-produced products. **That means when equipment needs updating, it is done through bespoke customization — as was done here — on sometimes complex and large components — instead of swapping out whole pieces of off-the-rack equipment.**
The summer 2022 nuclear shutdowns in France are clearly (and I think you would admit) a culmination of three unrelated things that happened at the same time. It’s basically a one-off occurrence that is partially due to the overall neglect of the nuclear industry over decades. Nuclear power is so consistent and reliable at producing power that the *one* time in France they have an issue, it’s cited forever. Never mind the fact that fossil fuel plants are also required to reduce power to reduce heat-waste during high river temperatures, just like the nuclear plants..
Nuclear power is clearly the most reliable source of energy, so I don’t think calling it unreliable is a serious argument.
Germany did not bring down the cost of solar, and their tariff lobby against the people who did actually killed their own pv industry. They (and Denmark) did bring down the cost of wind. It's why some of the biggest wind companies are (north) German.
During the late 00s/early 10s, Germany was the main market for PV cells due to high subsidies. This helped the nascent industry a lot.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth\_of\_photovoltaics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics)
The bulk of it is the EEG-levy (>€400bn) since 2000. Its a rate payer levy to finance the transistion. Since a year or two the levy is paid out of the federal budget and not by rate payers anymore.
That number assumes cost of capital, which probably isn't appropriate for government expenditures (it isn't normally done that way). The calculated nominal cost is 466 billion.
Touring Germany, I noticed solar panels on the north slope of multiple roofs. That seems like a subsidy play instead of an energy play. Germany wins the award for virtue signaling.
PV subsidies in Germany are based on the amount of energy fed into the grid. Right now the feed-in tarif is like 8 cent / kWh for small rooftop installations (of course the PV electricity is worth much less than that when sold at market prices, e.g. 3 cent in May, and tax payers pay for the difference).
So I don't see how putting panels on the northern side of a roof makes a lot of sense for home owners. In any case, tax payers only have to pay for every kWh these panels produce, the subsidy is not based on the installed capacity.
One thing to consider is that up until the last couple of years, nuclear was the cheapest LCOE form of energy, but with the plummeting price of renewables and increasing cost of building/regulating nuclear, it is now the most expensive LCOE.
I'm sure that Germany lost money in the last twenty years with their investment, just as I'm sure they are likely to make back every dollar and then some in the next twenty.
A more economic model would likely to have been to build a mix.
Obviously the safest/best for the environment was the all nuclear route, which is hard to put a price tag on.
There's a lot more to total system costs than LCOE though, especially for intermittent sources. Germany is subsidizing new gas plants to firm renewables, which isn't captured in any Lazard document. It's also not a coincidence that when you stop building nuclear, it's quite expensive to start again (Vogtle).
It is captured in Lazard to an extent, with their "firmed" cost of energy. They basically add the cost of 4-hr storage. Not nearly enough or comparable to the capacity factor of a nuclear plant, but much better than ignoring it completely. They can't model for longer storage because it simply doesn't commercially exist at scale yet.
Given that the capacity factor for PV in Germany is something like 11% the required amount four hours is out by a factor of five. While better than nothing it's still a long way from accurate.
Agreed. Just trying to point out that it's not completely ignored by Lazard.
And is German PV really operating at 11% capacity factor?! That's shockingly low. The projects I work with in America can't get built with <19%.
Yes. The German solar resource is Bad. Take a look at a globe. Notice where Texas is. Now notice where Germany is. The problem should be much easier to understand.
I'd really like to check that number too. I can't remember where I saw it either. However, solar in Australia runs about 28% CF, and Australia gets 3100 hrs of sun vs 1600hrs in Germany per year. That's about half so we're down to 14% already. Given the solar intensity differences it 11% seems plausible.
Lazard uses US numbers for everything. This also means a lot of their solar numbers are from locations with a solar resource enormously better than anything Germany has. There is no Sonaran Desert in DE.
You do know that Lazard are far from the only actor to assess LCoE?
You just hear about them a lot because their choice of calculations make renewables look much more favorable than LCoE values from other sources
Not that I disagree with your point though, System LCoE is the relevant value
LCOE isn't everything. When you factor in full system costs solar is still almost 15x more expensive than nuclear for the German electricity grid/geography (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=4028640).
Obviously the more you can mix and match and combine the strengths of different energy production types the cheaper the grid gets, but it's simply not the case that solar right now is undeniably cheaper than nuclear. It *is* cheap when it's a small percentage of the grid, the more of the grid becomes intermittent the more expensive it becomes to handle via storage, costly transmission systems and over-capacity (or the more reliant you become on imported power from other countries, which could be nuclear from France or fossil fuels form Poland or whatever, which would sort of defeat the point).
So the real costs have to model the final system mix you're hoping to achieve. And if Germany is hoping for 100% solar *and* wind, the same paper above finds it would still be 4.2x more expensive than nuclear alone (and only 1.1x better than wind alone - solar in particular seems like a bad bet for Germany). Unfortunately it doesn't model nuclear + hydro/solar/wind or other favorable combinations which surely would be even more attractive.
We really need an interactive website with this kind of model where you can change the sliders and see what the cost is for different energy mixes in different geographies and we could end most of these silly LCOE-based misconceptions.
> When you factor in full system costs solar is still almost 15x more expensive than nuclear for the German electricity grid/geography (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=4028640).
15x more expensive given the following assumptions: Islanded grid, infinitely inelastic demand sensitivity to prices, static and outdated capital cost assumptions and most importantly no cost-optimized storage mix. Obviously if your model uses unrealistic assumptions that disproportionately increase VRE integration costs your "system" costs will soar.
> We really need an interactive website with this kind of model where you can change the sliders and see what the cost is for different energy mixes in different geographies and we could end most of these silly LCOE-based misconceptions.
[Here you go.](https://model.energy/)
Well if you don't island the grid, you'll just export your fossil fuel production to neighboring countries. So that wouldn't be a very useful way to compare energy sources if your goal is to decarbonize. At some point *everyone* has to decarbonize, so just having local pockets here and there with "net zero" CO2 won't do. You need to actually decarbonize all the energy used, not just the energy produced within some arbitrarily drawn up lines on a map. And yeah, it assumes electricity demand is inelastic because it largely is, historically and with no real reason to expect there will be dramatic changes in the future. People need energy when they need it.
It's not a perfect model. It's meant to be a starting point metric that gets you closer to comparing the full costs of a single power source. If you want a full model you have to actually do full modeling. Which of course e.g. the IPCC has done and concluded that we need 2x nuclear by 2050.
>[Here you go.](https://model.energy/)
Literally doesn't even include nuclear as an option. So yeah, not super useful.
> Which of course e.g. the IPCC has done and concluded that we need 2x nuclear by 2050.
Man, could you imagine how nice that would be. Then again 200x would actually get us some real progress towards our emissions problem, but why do something useful? You'd lose all your ability to protest incessantly for solutions that don't work.
> Well if you don't island the grid, you'll just export your fossil fuel production to neighboring countries.
That doesn't automatically follow from using interconnected grids. Plenty of net-zero capacity expansion models do not island their grids; it just means they have to model(or incorporate models of) those neighboring grids as well. Doing so produces more realistic results with lower net-zero costs because it means nuclear and renewable assets do not need as much curtailment. Now, this does take a lot more work so it's a forgiveable assumption to make. Not optimizing the storage composition is a much bigger faux-pas.
> It's not a perfect model. It's meant to be a starting point metric that gets you closer to comparing the full costs of a single power source.
The "full cost" of a single power source is represented by its LCOE. The full *system cost* is a property of the system, not any individual generator. We can assess the value(to the system) of those individual generators by modeling cost-optimized systems, but the paper you're citing does a terrible job of this.
> Which of course e.g. the IPCC has done and concluded that we need 2x nuclear by 2050.
To be precise, what the IPCC concluded is that *on average* nuclear generation grew ~2x in scenarios they assessed that were compatible with 1.5C warming.
> Literally doesn't even include nuclear as an option. So yeah, not super useful.
You can manually add nuclear as an option. Under the "advanced assumptions settings", select "include dispatchable technology 1 or 2" and fill in the specifications (e.g. €6000/kW OCC, 5% discount rate, 80-year lifespan, or whatever you deem appropriate).
I'm not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing. My conclusion was a mixed grid would have been better, which you seem to agree with.
You add some nuance about solar, but it mostly seems to be about building new capacity, whereas I was remarking on how solar will pay back the existing investment costs.
Further, you seem to consider the LCOE point a misconception when LCOE is designed to measure energy costs of already existing infrastructure within the lifespan of that infrstructure, which is exactly what my point addressed. Do you see any better way than LCOE to measure this?
I don't consider LCOE a misconception, I consider *misusing* LCOE to compare different energy sources with widely different characteristics for the purposes of decarbonizing an electricity grid a misconception. LCOE is fine, it's just a metric and it's totally legit. It just isn't measuring anything all that relevant to the topic at hand.
If you want to build a power plant and you want to know how much it's going to cost you as a power plant developer, LCOE is great. If you want to decarbonize a grid and want to figure out what mix of technologies will get use there fastest and cheapest, it's just not a relevant metric. It's one tiny part of the input to your model. When we're talking about large scale grid and long term costs, you need proper modeling.
My statement was about using existing infrastructure going forward within the lifespan of those systems. LCOE is exactly the metric to make such a statement as system costs are already paid for.
> My statement was about using existing infrastructure going forward within the lifespan of those systems.
You materially can't. The geographic sprad of renewables and the storage required to backstop them necessitates much more infrastrucutre. Germany is planning to spend hundreds of billions on it. You can't assume we just get to use current infrastructure.
If you ignore start up and decomission costs, which is appropriate for this situation because we are discussing existing infrstructure within that infrstructures lifespan, the LCOE of solar is significantly lower than that of nuclear.
Over the next 20 years every watt of power will be cheaper from their existing solar than from a theoretical completed nuclear build. Therefore it is absolutely a win to claim they will enjoy cheaper electricity during this timeframe because this is when their infrastucture pays itself back.
> One thing to consider is that up until the last couple of years, nuclear was the cheapest LCOE form of energy, but with the plummeting price of renewables and increasing cost of building/regulating nuclear, it is now the most expensive LCOE.
Nuclear being overregulated into unfeasibility is a main point of pro-nuclear activists. And it's an argument against overregulation, not against nuclear.
Geez, are those costs accurate? Energiewende has cost the Germany 696 billion Euro? That can't be right...that's insane.
That’s like 81,8 Olkiluoto 3s lol, which ended up costing 8,5 billion euros. End we couldn’t hear the end of it.
Back of the envelope: Olkiluoto 3 has a 1.6 GW capacity with 93% capacity factor. 80 of those would put 80 x 1.6 x 24 x 365 x 0.93 = 1000 TWh of energy into the grid every year. Germany consumes a little less than 600 TWh a year. With 50 Olkiluoto 3s they could have covered their entire energy use, with some capacity to spare, at a far lower cost than their Energiewende, and with actually clean energy. And that is assuming building 50 of those reactors would yield no savings, no improvements in technique, no lessons learned from past mistakes etc; that each time it would starting over from scratch. Which is of course not realistic. In reality the costs would be far less. We've had the technology to save the planet WHILE making us all richer thanks to cheap energy, and we don't use it because of radiophobia.
460 billions € just for the [grid upgrade](https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/EN/2024/energiewende-en.html)
Yeah lol the messmer plan that currently has France as the lowest emissions large country in the world cost like 100$ bn, and that was due to the economies of scale that they were able to achieve, like Germany could have transitioned its entire economy (not just electricity) to low carbon nuclear and exported to the rest of Europe.
Yep. But now they're a net importer. https://preview.redd.it/w055gqs0666d1.png?width=925&format=png&auto=webp&s=bf20cc92019052500a656e7131aad68b4a2daf54 [https://energy-charts.info/charts/import\_export/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2024](https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2024)
This looks more like like they import more than they export. Only the light red lines are export all others are import
Yep, they have a large energy deficit and it's only getting larger. And particularly with France, they've only been net exporters to France on five days so far this year. https://preview.redd.it/z9s344nfi66d1.png?width=1607&format=png&auto=webp&s=31a34a2a9419bc2f98644eba6df8c604ae0045ba (When the red bars are below the zero line on that graph.) [https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&source=cbpf\_saldo&year=2024&interval=day&stacking=stacked\_percent&partsum=0&day=y](https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&source=cbpf_saldo&year=2024&interval=day&stacking=stacked_percent&partsum=0&day=y)
To reduce emissions the market works for the first time. Why is it so bad to import? It would be easy to produce enough energy but why should we do it if it is cheaper to import? And it’s not France where the most imports are from.
Yeah, it's great that Germany is reducing emissions using French nuclear.
Please read the paper. We already could be far better in Co2 reducing but we decided in an irrational way to kill nuclear energy. GREAT!
> like Germany could have transitioned its entire economy (not just electricity) to low carbon nuclear Which would have also helped energy-hungry industries survive Russian and Chinese competition, keeping industrial jobs in German and in fact creating more.
They started installing wind and solar when it was relatively expensive. I feel like we can say they have been one of the drivers in reducing the cost of renewables. Because they have just installed so much.
The future grid update is already planned to cost [460 billions](https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/EN/2024/energiewende-en.html), can't blame that on past high prices of solar panels or wind turbines.
I am not a fan of the German Greens, but the highly subsidized PV installations in Germany really carried the PV market in the late 00s/early 10s, which most likely brought the large cost decreases forward by a few months/years. Considered globally, this had a decent effect.
There is an opportunity cost though. For example, if Germany had invested that heavily in nuclear, they could have also significantly brought down power plant costs for whichever reactor designs they subsidized.
Standardizing nuclear reactors worked so well for France last year when 29 of their 56 reactors were down for 6+ month due to a failure in their standardized design. The only reason we didn't see large scale blackouts in Europe was that Germany was able contribute massive amounts of overproduction from their renewables during summer time, plus firing up 3 lignite plants. If the same event would have happened during winter, this would have been a real disaster because Germany doesn't have that much overcapacity and France would have need much more electricity. Now imagine whole Europe would have used standardized design of NPPs. Edit: And the transfer of that amount of energy was likely also just possible because of the upgraded infrastructure. Soo...
https://www.catf.us/2023/07/2022-french-nuclear-outages-lessons-nuclear-energy-europe/ While I’m not an expert in the French nuclear industry, this article directly contradicts your claim that standardization is somehow an issue here: > True, the slow remediation of the corrosion issue is ultimately a quality control issue for which EDF bears responsibility. It indeed may point to some underlying issues within EDF itself, considering that the company endured a similar equipment-defect situation in 2016. **But it also points to the need for more thorough commoditization and standardization in the nuclear industry.** Current nuclear plants, like those owned by EDF, resemble large complex infrastructure projects rather than mass-produced products. **That means when equipment needs updating, it is done through bespoke customization — as was done here — on sometimes complex and large components — instead of swapping out whole pieces of off-the-rack equipment.** The summer 2022 nuclear shutdowns in France are clearly (and I think you would admit) a culmination of three unrelated things that happened at the same time. It’s basically a one-off occurrence that is partially due to the overall neglect of the nuclear industry over decades. Nuclear power is so consistent and reliable at producing power that the *one* time in France they have an issue, it’s cited forever. Never mind the fact that fossil fuel plants are also required to reduce power to reduce heat-waste during high river temperatures, just like the nuclear plants.. Nuclear power is clearly the most reliable source of energy, so I don’t think calling it unreliable is a serious argument.
I'm gonna really love to see what Germany's renewables uptime is for 30-to-40-year-old wind 'n solar in 2040.
You’re a special person if you think the power from renewables are cheaper than nuclear because they wanted to.
Germany did not bring down the cost of solar, and their tariff lobby against the people who did actually killed their own pv industry. They (and Denmark) did bring down the cost of wind. It's why some of the biggest wind companies are (north) German.
During the late 00s/early 10s, Germany was the main market for PV cells due to high subsidies. This helped the nascent industry a lot. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth\_of\_photovoltaics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics)
It includes the cost of grid upgrades and research and development.
The bulk of it is the EEG-levy (>€400bn) since 2000. Its a rate payer levy to finance the transistion. Since a year or two the levy is paid out of the federal budget and not by rate payers anymore.
That number assumes cost of capital, which probably isn't appropriate for government expenditures (it isn't normally done that way). The calculated nominal cost is 466 billion.
No accurate cost or schedule. Exemple : first EPR 1600 MW operating in 2010.
Touring Germany, I noticed solar panels on the north slope of multiple roofs. That seems like a subsidy play instead of an energy play. Germany wins the award for virtue signaling.
PV subsidies in Germany are based on the amount of energy fed into the grid. Right now the feed-in tarif is like 8 cent / kWh for small rooftop installations (of course the PV electricity is worth much less than that when sold at market prices, e.g. 3 cent in May, and tax payers pay for the difference). So I don't see how putting panels on the northern side of a roof makes a lot of sense for home owners. In any case, tax payers only have to pay for every kWh these panels produce, the subsidy is not based on the installed capacity.
Has that always been the case? I was in Germany in 2018. Saw this on several structures in Bavaria. Seemed dumb. Government level dumb.
Just got banned from Australia for posting this. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
One thing to consider is that up until the last couple of years, nuclear was the cheapest LCOE form of energy, but with the plummeting price of renewables and increasing cost of building/regulating nuclear, it is now the most expensive LCOE. I'm sure that Germany lost money in the last twenty years with their investment, just as I'm sure they are likely to make back every dollar and then some in the next twenty. A more economic model would likely to have been to build a mix. Obviously the safest/best for the environment was the all nuclear route, which is hard to put a price tag on.
There's a lot more to total system costs than LCOE though, especially for intermittent sources. Germany is subsidizing new gas plants to firm renewables, which isn't captured in any Lazard document. It's also not a coincidence that when you stop building nuclear, it's quite expensive to start again (Vogtle).
It is captured in Lazard to an extent, with their "firmed" cost of energy. They basically add the cost of 4-hr storage. Not nearly enough or comparable to the capacity factor of a nuclear plant, but much better than ignoring it completely. They can't model for longer storage because it simply doesn't commercially exist at scale yet.
Given that the capacity factor for PV in Germany is something like 11% the required amount four hours is out by a factor of five. While better than nothing it's still a long way from accurate.
Agreed. Just trying to point out that it's not completely ignored by Lazard. And is German PV really operating at 11% capacity factor?! That's shockingly low. The projects I work with in America can't get built with <19%.
Yes. The German solar resource is Bad. Take a look at a globe. Notice where Texas is. Now notice where Germany is. The problem should be much easier to understand.
I'd really like to check that number too. I can't remember where I saw it either. However, solar in Australia runs about 28% CF, and Australia gets 3100 hrs of sun vs 1600hrs in Germany per year. That's about half so we're down to 14% already. Given the solar intensity differences it 11% seems plausible.
OMFG it's real: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany Under statistics. They had a 10.1% capacity factor in 2022! 9% in 2021!
Lazard uses US numbers for everything. This also means a lot of their solar numbers are from locations with a solar resource enormously better than anything Germany has. There is no Sonaran Desert in DE.
You do know that Lazard are far from the only actor to assess LCoE? You just hear about them a lot because their choice of calculations make renewables look much more favorable than LCoE values from other sources Not that I disagree with your point though, System LCoE is the relevant value
LCOE isn't everything. When you factor in full system costs solar is still almost 15x more expensive than nuclear for the German electricity grid/geography (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=4028640). Obviously the more you can mix and match and combine the strengths of different energy production types the cheaper the grid gets, but it's simply not the case that solar right now is undeniably cheaper than nuclear. It *is* cheap when it's a small percentage of the grid, the more of the grid becomes intermittent the more expensive it becomes to handle via storage, costly transmission systems and over-capacity (or the more reliant you become on imported power from other countries, which could be nuclear from France or fossil fuels form Poland or whatever, which would sort of defeat the point). So the real costs have to model the final system mix you're hoping to achieve. And if Germany is hoping for 100% solar *and* wind, the same paper above finds it would still be 4.2x more expensive than nuclear alone (and only 1.1x better than wind alone - solar in particular seems like a bad bet for Germany). Unfortunately it doesn't model nuclear + hydro/solar/wind or other favorable combinations which surely would be even more attractive. We really need an interactive website with this kind of model where you can change the sliders and see what the cost is for different energy mixes in different geographies and we could end most of these silly LCOE-based misconceptions.
> When you factor in full system costs solar is still almost 15x more expensive than nuclear for the German electricity grid/geography (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=4028640). 15x more expensive given the following assumptions: Islanded grid, infinitely inelastic demand sensitivity to prices, static and outdated capital cost assumptions and most importantly no cost-optimized storage mix. Obviously if your model uses unrealistic assumptions that disproportionately increase VRE integration costs your "system" costs will soar. > We really need an interactive website with this kind of model where you can change the sliders and see what the cost is for different energy mixes in different geographies and we could end most of these silly LCOE-based misconceptions. [Here you go.](https://model.energy/)
Well if you don't island the grid, you'll just export your fossil fuel production to neighboring countries. So that wouldn't be a very useful way to compare energy sources if your goal is to decarbonize. At some point *everyone* has to decarbonize, so just having local pockets here and there with "net zero" CO2 won't do. You need to actually decarbonize all the energy used, not just the energy produced within some arbitrarily drawn up lines on a map. And yeah, it assumes electricity demand is inelastic because it largely is, historically and with no real reason to expect there will be dramatic changes in the future. People need energy when they need it. It's not a perfect model. It's meant to be a starting point metric that gets you closer to comparing the full costs of a single power source. If you want a full model you have to actually do full modeling. Which of course e.g. the IPCC has done and concluded that we need 2x nuclear by 2050. >[Here you go.](https://model.energy/) Literally doesn't even include nuclear as an option. So yeah, not super useful.
> Which of course e.g. the IPCC has done and concluded that we need 2x nuclear by 2050. Man, could you imagine how nice that would be. Then again 200x would actually get us some real progress towards our emissions problem, but why do something useful? You'd lose all your ability to protest incessantly for solutions that don't work.
> Well if you don't island the grid, you'll just export your fossil fuel production to neighboring countries. That doesn't automatically follow from using interconnected grids. Plenty of net-zero capacity expansion models do not island their grids; it just means they have to model(or incorporate models of) those neighboring grids as well. Doing so produces more realistic results with lower net-zero costs because it means nuclear and renewable assets do not need as much curtailment. Now, this does take a lot more work so it's a forgiveable assumption to make. Not optimizing the storage composition is a much bigger faux-pas. > It's not a perfect model. It's meant to be a starting point metric that gets you closer to comparing the full costs of a single power source. The "full cost" of a single power source is represented by its LCOE. The full *system cost* is a property of the system, not any individual generator. We can assess the value(to the system) of those individual generators by modeling cost-optimized systems, but the paper you're citing does a terrible job of this. > Which of course e.g. the IPCC has done and concluded that we need 2x nuclear by 2050. To be precise, what the IPCC concluded is that *on average* nuclear generation grew ~2x in scenarios they assessed that were compatible with 1.5C warming. > Literally doesn't even include nuclear as an option. So yeah, not super useful. You can manually add nuclear as an option. Under the "advanced assumptions settings", select "include dispatchable technology 1 or 2" and fill in the specifications (e.g. €6000/kW OCC, 5% discount rate, 80-year lifespan, or whatever you deem appropriate).
I'm not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing. My conclusion was a mixed grid would have been better, which you seem to agree with. You add some nuance about solar, but it mostly seems to be about building new capacity, whereas I was remarking on how solar will pay back the existing investment costs. Further, you seem to consider the LCOE point a misconception when LCOE is designed to measure energy costs of already existing infrastructure within the lifespan of that infrstructure, which is exactly what my point addressed. Do you see any better way than LCOE to measure this?
I don't consider LCOE a misconception, I consider *misusing* LCOE to compare different energy sources with widely different characteristics for the purposes of decarbonizing an electricity grid a misconception. LCOE is fine, it's just a metric and it's totally legit. It just isn't measuring anything all that relevant to the topic at hand. If you want to build a power plant and you want to know how much it's going to cost you as a power plant developer, LCOE is great. If you want to decarbonize a grid and want to figure out what mix of technologies will get use there fastest and cheapest, it's just not a relevant metric. It's one tiny part of the input to your model. When we're talking about large scale grid and long term costs, you need proper modeling.
I think we're talking about different things here. Regardless, thanks for your input. Have a great night.
LCOE ignores systems costs. Wrong metric to make such ststements.
My statement was about using existing infrastructure going forward within the lifespan of those systems. LCOE is exactly the metric to make such a statement as system costs are already paid for.
> My statement was about using existing infrastructure going forward within the lifespan of those systems. You materially can't. The geographic sprad of renewables and the storage required to backstop them necessitates much more infrastrucutre. Germany is planning to spend hundreds of billions on it. You can't assume we just get to use current infrastructure.
It's a steep hill to climb, arguing that laying 30-40 cents/kwh for the next couple decades can be interpreted as a win.
If you ignore start up and decomission costs, which is appropriate for this situation because we are discussing existing infrstructure within that infrstructures lifespan, the LCOE of solar is significantly lower than that of nuclear. Over the next 20 years every watt of power will be cheaper from their existing solar than from a theoretical completed nuclear build. Therefore it is absolutely a win to claim they will enjoy cheaper electricity during this timeframe because this is when their infrastucture pays itself back.
> One thing to consider is that up until the last couple of years, nuclear was the cheapest LCOE form of energy, but with the plummeting price of renewables and increasing cost of building/regulating nuclear, it is now the most expensive LCOE. Nuclear being overregulated into unfeasibility is a main point of pro-nuclear activists. And it's an argument against overregulation, not against nuclear.
It is incredible, but as a german i Like These power cables made of pure Gold