@kravietz
Even if someone cut down the trees in their yard, PV is still one of the best sources of energy:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/16/mediocrity-is-the-enemy-of-the-solution/
@mithrandir @kravietz
Definitely worth investigating to some extent. Scaling properties on solar are hard to beat, but small self-contained nuclear batteries could be competitive.
@mithrandir @kravietz
Per the link I dropped, problem with NEW nuclear is it takes like 15 years to bring it to completion. So shutting down nuclear prematurely is probably a bad plan, but spinning it up right now is kind of a case of too-little-too-late. New solar deployment is up within a year.
Also scaling properties. Every solar panel built makes building the next one cheaper. True too of reactors but not many of them are (ever) made so scale doesn't happen.
>New solar deployment is up within a year.
Indeed, it is quicker to build the plant, but the plant also takes up more space (with exceptions -- those towers outside Vegas are wonderfully compact, idk how much power they put out though), and you have to build it somewhere where you get sunlight/wind reliably enough that the plant is worth building. For a lot of cities that means the plant has to be far away, which leads to high line loss.
OTOH solar and wind are eminently the best strategy for power in rural and low-density urban areas, where the cost of land is cheaper and also it makes more sense to spread out power production. A small town would probably be better served by nearby solar and wind farms than a faraway nuclear plant.
The article you linked seems to be making an argument that *nothing* besides wind, solar, and waves should be invested in. That just seems shortsighted to me, especially when so many proposed power sources are still in their infancy.
>Every solar panel built makes building the next one cheaper.
Huh? You mean that it's easy to mass produce them, right? There is not an infinite supply of silicon, and the fixed marginal cost of the production process remains the same until you change the production process.
@mithrandir @kravietz
1. "Naive" economies of scale, bigger more efficient factories, better processes.
2. R&D-based economies of scale: more people buy PV, more competition, more R&D investment --> higher efficiency, longer lasting PV made with cheaper materials and processes.
Same story as batteries. It's not govt research that's driving these curves, it's competition.
Interesting that the second graph you're referencing is not energy price - it's LCOE, or levelized cost of energy. It's an more of an estimation of profitability that very strongly depends on discount rate which is chosen more or less arbitrarily. Lazard for example chooses it at around 10% which basically means each year the energy from given facility is 10% worth less - which makes no sense for an power plant that can work for 50 years... but makes sense for investors.
The question is not use or not, but what discount rate to assume. See https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-social-cost-carbon#discount for discussion in regard to CO2 and this OECD NEA publication for explanation how massive impact discount rate has on LCOE
https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2018/7441-full-costs-2018-es.pdf
@kravietz @cjd @mithrandir What metric would you propose besides LCOE, the metric decided upon as being relevant by the actual industry that operates the grid, who does extensive studies into the supply chain, technology development, and costs.
And explain why you don't think including "discount rate" is valid in economic models . It's a basic concept used in 1st engineering economics class and used throughout industry for planning.