I don’t know how much to attribute to the war in Iran. The Chinese government ended a tax rebate program for exported solar panels effective April 1, so all the producers rushed their capacity to get as many as they could out the door.
Now that production costs are 10-15% higher for panels exported in April than the panels exported in March, we’d want to see how April’s numbers compare, once that data is published in about a month.
being an insignificant player in the broader Geo space.
The broader geo space is insignificant right now. We have about 4.0 GW of capacity nationwide.
But people are excited about the future. USGS and the Department of Energy estimate that about 90GW of capacity is achievable by 2050.
Fervo’s IPO filing claims that it will have 100 MW online next year, with up to 400 MW from the Cape Station site targeted for 2028.
The pace of development (with techniques learned from oil and gas fracking and horizontal drilling) means that we’ll know soon just how feasible this will be. I think it’s almost certainly going to be more cost effective than nuclear, and has the best prospects of providing dispatchable carbon-free energy around the clock in the near future.
If you don’t like oilprice (and I don’t love their reporting generally), you can read more from Canary Media.
If you were already going to use the heat later in the day when fossil fuels are burning again, then whatever you can do to reduce that future consumption, through storing some thermal heat produced now, can still reduce that fossil fuel consumption overall. Water heaters, warming any living spaces that might need to be heated at night, etc.
It doesn’t even have to be efficient when prices are literally negative. All it has to do is be somewhat effective at reducing later consumption.
Other ideas we’ve tossed around are refrigeration and food preservation, but the problem with those is that they need the power when they need the power, and so it’s not exactly a way to sink excess supply.
It can still be a useful sink at small scales. You could make ice at those times of day if you’re eventually going to need that ice later. It takes a lot more energy to chill something (especially water with its high specific heat and latent heat of fusion) that it takes to hold something at temperature in an insulated space. And then go on and use the ice later so that the need to chill something doesn’t have to be synchronized with the exact moment in time you’re drawing energy from the grid to run a refrigeration compressor.
Same with heating. Some smart water heaters can store thermal energy for later, too, and top off their energy usage for some times of day.
I’m not sure if the scale you’re imagining makes these ideas too small to be worth pursuing.
Solar needs active maintenance, including personnel of varying skills. All projects have ongoing costs, especially if they’re gonna sit outside in the weather.
Better to just compare all costs, across the projected lifespan, and compare replacement costs if one source lasts longer than the other.
Doing all that tends to show that building new nuclear isn’t cost competitive. Not big reactors, not small reactors.
nuclear does better for utilities level power than solar.
Define “better.” Personally, I think nuclear is too expensive to be a current solution. Let all the existing nuclear plants continue out their useful lives, and extend them as feasible, but constructing new nuclear plants is probably not worth the cost, even compared to solar + enough grid scale storage to cover multiple nights of demand even when days are cloudy.
Terrapower just got approval to build their $4 billion, 345-MW reactor. That’s $11.6 million per MW.
NuScale canceled their 462 MW project in Utah when it became clear that the total cost was going to exceed $9 billion. That’s $19.5 million per MW.
Solar plants are about $1 million per MW. Grid scale 4-hour batteries are about $750,000 per MW.
And the costs of solar/batteries keep dropping, while nuclear tends to increase in cost over time.
We’re already starting to see it:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-battery-manufacturing-capacity-2022-2030
Global manufacturing capacity is growing so fast that we’ll likely see a huge expansion in batteries installed in lots of different places where it’s not currently economical: larger batteries in cars, grid scale storage, home storage, emergency backup solutions, etc.
What is this source?
It basically restates the content of this original article, but stated less clearly, in a way that apparently confuses GW with GWh, and blends demand for batteries themselves versus demand for grid power from batteries.
The original reporting from Julian Spector at Canary deserves to be linked. This summary, less so.
As a result, all the benefit of wind and solar goes to the people owning the generation capacity, rather than retail utility customers.
Building out solar/wind still helps the consumer, because reducing the number of days or the number of hours per day the price is set by the marginal fossil fuel kWh will still bring down monthly averages.
And even for the hours where the price is set by a fossil fuel producer, it’s still generally better for the consumer when that particular hour needs to bid for the cheapest 100 MWh versus 500 MWh that may include even more expensive sources.
First time with this publication, Interesting Engineering?