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Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035, Study Says
By 2035, it will be more expensive to run 90% of gas plants being proposed in the U.S. than it will be to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems, according to the report Monday from the Rocky Mountain Institute. It will happen so quickly that gas plants now on the drawing boards will become uneconomical before their owners finish paying for them, the study said.
The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable.
As gas plants lose their edge in power markets, the economics of pipelines will suffer, too, RMI said in a separate study Monday. Even lines now in the planning stages could soon be out of the money, the report found.
Hopefully our electrical distribution grid will still work.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday September 11 2019, @09:51PM (1 child)
With Fukushima and Chernobyl however, as I have previously mentioned, we were dealing with early 1960's era technology. Very primitive by todays standards. Neither plant can be held up as an example of the safety record of modern designs. Even Three Mile Island, which was designed in the 70's, proved to be safe in even the most convoluted and catastrophic of failure modes. In that instance, no one was hurt, no one was irradiated, the surrounding area was untouched. TMI-1 continued generating power and is still running today.
I don't deny that radiation from those accidents can result in a shortening of lifespan. But the studies from Fukushima at least indicate even the worst civilian exposure would result in only a loss of 3 months of lifespan for the population and even that is hard to measure statistically because so many other non nuclear related environmental factors have a much greater effect. And this was a worst case scenario. As I mentioned, TMI-2 had a meltdown and no one was exposed, no one died, the surrounding area was not contaminated.
The bottom line however is that you can't replace the 80% of the power generated by fossil fuels with solar and wind. You just can't do it. There's not enough open land or production capability to deploy enough solar to cover what fossil fuels are generating today. And it scales horribly. But nuclear scales exceptionally well, runs 24/7, and with enough national support could easily be built out to supply the hole that killing fossil fuels would leave.
I'm not saying stop deploying solar or wind or even wave. But I am saying that those will always be niche power generation programs. Only nuclear can scale up to generate the kind of electrical demand the future holds.
I would further say that the New Mexico facility for storing spent fuel is moving ahead. That will help enormously with the waste issue, though most plant designs provide enough water cooled storage for their own waste. I'm also a big fan of getting in there and solving the problems associated with LFTR's. Those have the capability of literally burning the nuclear waste of other plants while producing virtually no actinide waste of their own.
Just drives me crazy - the answer to our power generation problem, and perhaps that of climate change, is right in front of us. The only thing stopping it from becoming a reality is the irrational fears and the lack of political backbone. The boilerplate plant designs are already done, the uranium fuel has already been mined and processed. All we need to do is build them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:18PM
OK, but 3 months loss of lifespan for how many people? If it's only 1200 that's (arguably) equivalent to 400 years of lifespan. If you guess that otherwise people would live to be 80, and that everyone affected was an infant, that's 50 deaths. (And that's using "spherical cow" figuring.)
But a lot more than 1200 people were affected, and of that number some were affected more than others, and... Basically, there's no defensible number. You can say "it's got to be more than 50" and "it's got to be less than 100,000", but defending any particular number is not defensible. (With more information I could probably whittle that "100,000" number down a lot, but how much?)
So it's somewhere between "lost in the noise" and "an immense tragedy".
OTOH, and as you said, that was old technology. But the people who are promising that the new plants are totally safe are the same (kind of) people who were saying the exact same thing about the prior generations of nuclear plants. That doesn't mean that they're wrong this time, but it means that there's little reason to believe them. This is extremely annoying, because I *want* to believe them.
This isn't all because of the nuclear industry. The media deserves at least as much blame. But look at the management practices of Tokyo Electric, shaving safety to get a slightly better return. And look at the recent US practice when operating plants nearing the end of their estimated useful life are suddenly given the go ahead to operate years (decades?) longer at higher power generation levels, and tell me why I should think that safety was why that happened.
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