Some thoughts as we get closer to a new energy policy. Our total U.S. electric grid has a peak capacity of just over 1,000 GW. (That’s 1 billion kilowatts or, if you prefer, enough to power 10 billion hundred-watt light bulbs.)
Of that total, here’s what we’ve installed just since 1995:
~200 MW of solar PV
~10,000 MW of wind
~45,000 MW of combined heat & power
~200,000 MW of natural gas (about half of which was combined cycle, which runs at almost 2x the fuel efficiency of the U.S. grid)
I take this as cause for great optimism. In just over 10 years, we have installed almost 25 percent of the entire capacity on the U.S. grid, all of which represented an environmental and economic step forward relative to the generation mix that came before.
As for the other stuff? During the same period, we’ve installed:
0 MW of coal-fired generation
0 MW of nuclear power
That’s in spite of the fact that we subsidize the hell out of coal and nuke.
We’re not out of the woods yet, and we still have massive barriers to clean technologies. (After all, just because you’re driving the car forward doesn’t mean that you remembered to take off the emergency brake.) But this all seems promising to me. When you tilt the playing field as far as we currently tilt it and the market still favors cleaner technology, it may just become obvious to everyone that the solution isn’t to subsidize the dirty stuff harder.
No wonder ACCCE is working so hard.
(Note: All values shown are net of retirements.)
Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7
Comments
View as Flat
GreyFlcn Posted 4:36 am
24 Dec 2008
Yeap.
http://greyfalcon.net/subs.png
http://greyfalcon.net/coalptc.png
http://greyfalcon.net/nuclear
-David Ahlport
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Max8806 Posted 5:31 am
24 Dec 2008
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mer/pdf/pages/sec8_3.pdf
In fact, from just 2006 to 2007 (lest it seem all this progress is historical) nuclear production increased from 787,219 Million KWh to 806,487 Million KWh, an increase of 19,268 Million KWh. Divide that by the number of hours in a year (8760) and you get a de facto capacity increase of 2.2 (2.1995) Million KW, or 2.2 Thousand MW, or 2.2 GW. Or two new big power plants, in just one year.
The reports of nuclear's death have been greatly exaggerated. We constantly hear about the lack of new plants being built, but nothing runs on "power plants." Things run on electrons, and so by this most obvious and fair metric nuclear continues to grow.
Max Epstein
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JMG Posted 5:40 am
24 Dec 2008
========
Our total U.S. electric grid has a peak capacity of just over 1,000 GW <ital> with an average output of __ for a net average capacity factor of __.</ital>
Of that total, here's what we've installed just since 1995:
~200 MW of solar PV, <ital>with a capacity factor of __ </ital>
~10,000 MW of wind <ital>with a capacity factor of __ </ital>
~45,000 MW of combined heat & power <ital>with a capacity factor of __ </ital>
~200,000 MW of natural gas (about half of which was combined cycle, which runs at almost 2x the fuel efficiency of the U.S. grid) <ital>with a capacity factor of ___ </ital>
The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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David Roberts Posted 5:44 am
24 Dec 2008
You don't think that latter fact is notable? After all, increasing existing nuke plant capacity is a fairly limited strategy.
grist.org
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amazingdrx Posted 5:46 am
24 Dec 2008
Very efficient utility scale storage, like smart grid heat/cold storage, and superconducting electromagnetic energy storage, and millions of plugin hybrids connected to the grid, are just around the next techno-bend.
That should boost wind and solar growth exponentially, with any intermittency problems a thing of the past.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Karen Street Posted 5:59 am
24 Dec 2008
What is the source for combined heat and power? Ah, fossil fuels. CHP can suffer from being smaller power plants, and more locally polluting.
Capacity is not so interesting to me, compared to share of the contribution. Wind is the biggie in your pile, now at 1%. Well, that and natural gas and other fossil fuels.
As I remember it, several coal power plants were "rebuilt" so they could be grandfathered in under older pollution regulations.
Nuclear power plants were upgraded, so some MW were added there. Coal power plants were used more often (greater capacity factor).
Oh, and one reason for greater efficiency of new natural gas plants is just plain improvement, but another is the shift in California at least to using expensive natural gas as baseload power, which justifies building the more expensive efficient plant.
Worldwide coal use increased from 5.1 billion American tons in 1995 to 6.5 billion tons in 2005, a 27% increase, 2.4%/year (coal used for electricity and industry so value given in btu). Hydro increased by 1.7%/year, or 443 billion kilowatt hours (kWh). Nuclear power increased 1.7%/year, or 416 billion kWh. Solar, wind, geothermal, and wood and waste increased at a rate of 7.9%/year, or 197 billion kWh. Greenhouse gas production increased.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/overview.html
In the US, coal use increased by 300 billion kWh between 1995 and 2006, nuclear by 100 billion, natural gas by 300 billion, other renewables (besides hydro) by 12 billion. Hydro declined by 20 billion kWh (dryer weather in the west? it coincided with the onset of what may be a permanent drought) and petroleum by 10 billion.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html ...
The increase in renewables, particularly wind and geothermal, is good, but looking at capacity alones exaggerates their contribution.
Karen Street
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:09 am
24 Dec 2008
The thing nearly had a meltdown in the 1970's, and it was only recently brought back on line.
-David Ahlport
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BILL HANNAHAN Posted 6:12 am
24 Dec 2008
~200 MW of solar PV
~10,000 MW of wind
The increase in annual energy production for wind, solar and nuclear from 1995 to 2007 was;
Solar... 109 Gigawatt hours, equal to 4.36 minutes of output from a 1500 MW plant
Wind... 28,980 gigawatt hours, equal to 19.3 hours of output from a 1500 MW plant
Nuclear... 133,100 gigawatt hours, equal to 88.7hours of output from a 1500 MW plant
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1_a.h ...
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.htm ...
The increase in nuclear output is the result of power uprating of existing plants combined with increasing capacity factor despite the handicap of a decaying grid producing occasional outages forcing nuclear plants to throttle back or shutdown.
Since 1995 nuclear power increased output 4.6 times that of wind and solar combined. When the Browns Ferry data come it it will blow these numbers away. Data plates do not keep the lights on. If we ever get serious about closing coal plants we will build nuclear plants.
The nuclear subsidy per kWh is a small fraction of the income local state and federal government make from taxes on the sale of nuclear power, not so for wind and solar.
we obviously haven't figured out cost-effective ways of building new nuclear plants, even with ginormous subsidies.
How did we do it when fossil fuel was abundant and cheap, and most people never heard of global warming? Streamline the regulatory process and build new plants the way Boeing builds airplanes.
http://www.nuscalepower.com/pdf/NRC_preapp_mtg_072408_DES ...
http://www.atomicinsights.com/aug96/Offshore.html
Things Everybody Should Know About Energy
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:26 am
24 Dec 2008
So you're saying, the bigger an industry gets, the more it deserves federal subsidies?
Also, can we be serious about that?
Nuclear power has gotten more than half of all R&D subsidies for the past half century, and individually for each year for the past decade.
And yet it still can't even provide it's own private capital financing. Much less private R&D financing.
-David Ahlport
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:32 am
24 Dec 2008
Getting both a PTC, a cost overrun fund, and 100% capital financing.
http://greyfalcon.net/nuclear
-David Ahlport
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:36 am
24 Dec 2008
Who's going to pick up the bill on that?
http://grist.org/news/2008/08/05/yucca/index.html
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/6/18/161052/155
http://nytimes.com/2008/02/17/us/17nuke.html
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/10/10/fina ...
-David Ahlport
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BILL HANNAHAN Posted 6:39 am
24 Dec 2008
The increase in annual energy production for wind, solar and nuclear from 1995 to 2007 was;
Solar... 109 Gigawatt hours, equal to 7.3 hours of output from a 1500 MW plant
Wind... 28,980 gigawatt hours, equal to 19,300 hours of output from a 1500 MW plant
Nuclear... 133,100 gigawatt hours, equal to 88,700 hours of output from a 1500 MW plant
Things Everybody Should Know About Energy
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BILL HANNAHAN Posted 7:24 am
24 Dec 2008
It had a fire, not a meltdowm.
So you're saying, the bigger an industry gets, the more it deserves federal subsidies?
No, my recommendation is to level the playing field and eliminate all subsidies.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/10/8/163812/742#com ...
Do we have some common ground Gray?
Waste/Decommissioning finance issue.
Who's going to pick up the bill on that?
Nuclear waste, subsidies, accidents, R&D, cost overruns, what's next, the spotted owl? Changing the subject is a time proven debating tactic when you loosing on the subject at hand.
Write a story on each issue and we can talk.
Things Everybody Should Know About Energy
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GreyFlcn Posted 10:37 am
24 Dec 2008
New Nuclear power plants will be getting far more Federal Support than New Solar/Wind/Geo projects.
Older Nuclear power plants have gotten plenty of help with bankruptcies, financing, and power purchase agreements.
The argument that we should be accounting for per-kwh subsidies towards fully amortized power plants of any sort, is entirely dumbfounding to me.
The R&D budget for solar/wind/geo relative to Nuclear speaks for itself.
If the Nuclear industry isn't going to fully pay for the real costs of dealing with Waste and Decommissioning, then the US Taxpayer is going to be the one that would end up paying for it.
And as of yet, they've gambled away their decommissioning fund, and sued to avoid paying into the waste fund, and aren't even close to the cost of opening even one repository, much less dozens, or possibly hundreds.
_
All in all, the usual strawman of comparing annual subsidies to total capacity just bugs the hell out of me.
Because it's simply dishonest.
-David Ahlport
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BILL HANNAHAN Posted 3:48 am
25 Dec 2008
Had you looked at my recommendation you would know that I support massive R&D of all technologies and the selection of the best performers on a level playing field, and zero subsidies. Do you disagree with this recommendation?
Things Everybody Should Know About Energy
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Atomicrod Posted 8:47 pm
25 Dec 2008
Nuclear power has gotten more than half of all R&D subsidies for the past half century, and individually for each year for the past decade.
And yet it still can't even provide it's own private capital financing. Much less private R&D financing.
There is no doubt in my military mind that it is easier to finance a natural gas plant than it is to finance a nuclear plant. I ought to know; I have been trying to obtain financing for moderate sized, passively safe atomic turbines for more than 15 years. (Google Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. for more details.)
The difficulty of financing atomic combined cycle turbines has nothing to do with a computation that they are too expensive to be competitive; the real reason is that the machines have the potential to be disruptively competitive, turning gas from a wonderful profit center for major oil companies back into an expensive liability. They also have the potential to overturn a number of other apple carts pushed by powerful people.
Just imagine for a moment that it is possible to take the best characteristics of a combined cycle gas turbine and mash it together with the best characteristics of a nuclear steam plant. The combination would provide a reliable, low capital cost, rapid construction, thermally efficient machine along with a zero emission, energy dense, low cost fuel source that could operate for years to decades without being connected to a fuel pipeline.
Who loses in such a scenario? The very first losers would be the people who normally capture about 93% of the cash flow from a natural gas fired power plant - the companies that supply the natural gas. (Names of such suppliers include ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, Chesapeake Energy, Anadarko, Gazprom, Aramaco, Petrobras, etc.) The next losers would be the companies that finance those major fossil fuel suppliers - mostly Wall Street and City of London financial institutions. The next losers would be coal producers. Next would be equipment suppliers for items like scrubbers, locomotives, coal cars, pipeline, tankers, barges, crushers, drilling equipment, wind turbines, steam turbines, cooling towers, and off-shore service vessels.
Who would win - everyone who buys electrical power and everyone who breathes the air.
In my discussions with venture capitalists, bankers, and angel investors over the past 15 years, the real stumbling block has been the fact that the potential losers are very knowledgeable about the energy industry. They are focused on protecting their current wealth and power.
In contrast, the potential winners are a much more diffuse bunch of people focused on many other activities and industries other than energy. The serious potential investors have asked how we can protect ourselves against destruction by the powerful players and how we can assure a steady source of revenue akin to that captured by fuel suppliers in conventional plants when our plants will not need much new fuel.
Hard questions to answer, but they are not the obstacles that professional anti-nukes often pose as being a problem. We have good solutions to all of those issues (used fuel, safety, operator training, containment, security, etc.).
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
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dwalters Posted 2:37 am
26 Dec 2008
The fact that there is private financing for wind and solar is based NOT on some sort of 'market capable' pentration but is based, 100% of the PTC. Without the PTC, ever wind farm (all built and run by the same big utilities that are building nuclear, BTW) the entire wind industry would DIE.
I'm not against the PTC. We have to put things on an equal level...clean energy (not the fake label of 'renewables') and they can compete together on the MW hour basis. But they don't compete as the numbers in the other posts reveal: there is FAR more nuclear, and totally unsubsidized, to 'compete' against because there are so many more nuclear MW hours than there are the so called renewable MW hours.
I'm not against the PTC. Again. The idea of 'market competitiveness' is just a cave-in too the Reaganesque 'free Market religion'. This has to end. Nothing in terms of grand planned public works: canals, hydro power, power grids, scientific advances, etc were ever developed with an eye on the 'Market'. It's a-historical and reactionary. If you are for wind, then lobby the gov't to pay for it (which is what has happened with every wind farm in the world, bar none). If you support nuclear, then the same applies, after all, this is exactly how they build nuclear in every country in the world.
The biggest fallacy in this blog is the 'good new' aspect. What is "good" about building natural gas fired plants? This is why those of us who are pro-nuclear often seen the anti-nuclear side as shilling for fossil fuel interests. Natural gas is getting greenwashed, perhaps inadvertently by the blogger(s) but it is. T. Boone Pickens is doing it ("mining subsidies" as his investors know it and are open about it).
Natural Gas is really the ONLY growth industry in the last 10 years in the US. This is why nuclear's share has been slipping as an overall % of the whole: the massive building of natural gas fired combustion gas turbines. And they are extremely expensive to run, with rates passed on to the consumer. Congrats on that.
David
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Max8806 Posted 6:11 am
27 Dec 2008
You say that improving operating output of the existing fleet is a "fairly limited" strategy. I'm guessing you would have said that in 1990 also, and the equivalent of over 24 GW (of 100% capacity factor capacity) was added by the nuclear fleet by 2006. And then another 2.2GW from 2006 to 2007. (For those who missed my first post, I calculate this capacity by dividing KWh's of annual energy output from nuclear by hours in a year (8760) to get KW capacity.) Somehow "limited" is not the word that comes to mind to describe this growth. More like "incredible, steady and reliable."
David Ahlport,
Subsidies per kwh are an important indicator not because bigger industries deserve more, but because spending $X on several GWh of energy is a much better investment than spending the same $X and getting a few MWh. I am continually amazed at your constant opposition to considering per/kwh subsidies in assessing underlying economic competitiveness.
The issues of waste and decommissioning you bring up have been addressed here before. New nuclear plants are required to pay into a fund to cover decommissioning costs at shutdown. The discounted cost 60 years down the line is trivial and so covering decommissioning costs does not materially affect the cost of nuclear energy. All nuclear reactors pay a tenth of a cent per kwh sold into a nuclear waste fund to fund Yucca. The fund has already raised over $27billion.
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/about/budget/index.shtml
Finally, its worth mentioning that "subsidies" for nuclear are almost exclusively federal R&D. No nuclear power plants currently receive anything like the PTC all renewables get, and only the first 8GW of new nuclear capacity will. That federal research has yielded huge dividends, namely the huge improvement in reactor performance mentioned above. Additionally, it has contributed to many Generation IV designs that will undoubtedly be a crucial part of our energy future (as well as the Generation III+'s that are under construction in US and abroad now). Hyperion's big splash with its new passively safe modular reactor (with a moderator of uranium hydride that dissociates at high temperatures, so the reaction inherently cannot be sustained if it overheats) uses a design invented at Los Alamos National Lab.
Wind and solar get far more federal support relative to the amount of power they produce than nuclear. Nuclear's subsidies are always exaggerated here by assuming some astronomical value for P-A even though it has never lead to the taxpayers paying a cent and never will, because it mandates an unsubsidized private insurance liability of over $10 billion for dealing with nuclear accidents. TMI didn't even come close. And, these discussions never even include non-federal support, which includes very significant state and even local subsidies for wind/solar et al. but not nuclear.
Max Epstein
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:04 am
28 Dec 2008
I still completely disagree with this.
It's absolute madness to compare 1 years worth of subsidies, towards the total generating capacity built up over half a century.
The only reason you would do that is if you want to be intentionally misleading.
-David Ahlport
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:25 am
28 Dec 2008
Nor should any power plant, of any type, that's fully amortized it's capital costs.
Nuclear annually gets more money in R&D than all other electric R&D subsidies combined...
First the 8GW limit used to be 6GW. What's more, the PTC can be transferred to other future plants. So it's not actually "the first 8GW".
-David Ahlport
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:26 am
28 Dec 2008
-David Ahlport
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:08 am
31 Dec 2008
Wind gets a Production Tax Credit (PTC)
Solar gets an Investment Tax Credit (ITC)
_
But Nuclear, gets a PTC AND an ITC.
Their profits are entirely tax free, as long as they "set it aside" to invest in decommissioning the plant. Catch being the company is still allowed to play with the money as they see fit for investment capital.
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/10/10/fina ...
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear ...
(On top of the 100% capital financing, the multibillion cost overrun fund, more R&D money than the entire rest of the electricity sector, and are being allowed to near completely avoid paying into the waste fund.)
-David Ahlport
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Max8806 Posted 3:14 pm
01 Jan 2009
Max Epstein
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Max8806 Posted 2:59 am
02 Jan 2009
And I won't even guess what you mean by almost completely avoid paying into the waste fund. They have been paying .1 cents per kwh sold and have been for over 2 decades. Since Yucca's been stonewalled they are currently loaning the government money at zero interest to mitigate the debt. That's a subsidy nuclear provides to the American government.
Max Epstein
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Sean Casten Posted 3:10 am
06 Jan 2009
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Sean Casten Posted 3:24 am
06 Jan 2009
Clearly, wind and solar are not baseload technologies - amongst renewables, only biomass and geothermal have the size and operating characteristics to even begin to make a dent in coal/nuclear hegemony. CHP is though, whether fossil or renewable fueled (typically, but not exclusively with biomass).
Is this the death knell of existing nuke and coal assets? No. But it certainly suggests the beginning of the end in investment in new facilities.
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Sean Casten Posted 3:28 am
06 Jan 2009
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Sean Casten Posted 3:55 am
06 Jan 2009
Taking your 1990 point as a bogey, in that year, the entire US nuke fleet had a capacity factor of 60.4%. Today it is 90%. During the same period, we've gone from 99 GW of total installed nuclear capacity to 100 GW of total installed nuclear capacity - essentially flat. So have we generated a lot more MWh from nuclear during that period? You bet. Have we built any more nuclear? No. And as a result, it is not possible to repeat the growth in MWh from nuclear in the future that we have in the past simply by running old plants harder - we'd have to build new plants. And we haven't, which means that we won't have that option going forward, no matter how steady and reliable it may have been in the past.
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Max8806 Posted 5:17 am
06 Jan 2009
"In fact, from just 2006 to 2007 (lest it seem all this progress is historical) nuclear production increased from 787,219 Million KWh to 806,487 Million KWh, an increase of 19,268 Million KWh. Divide that by the number of hours in a year (8760) and you get a de facto capacity increase of 2.2 (2.1995) Million KW, or 2.2 Thousand MW, or 2.2 GW. Or two new big power plants, in just one year."
Somehow I feel like if 2.2GW of 100% capacity factor (since that's 2.2GWx8760hours) of wind or solar thermal, it would have made bigger waves on grist. The 1990 capacity factor (listed at 66.0% according to my EIA numbers - http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec9_5.pdf ) is not a "bogey," because it was 62.2% the year before. And 57.4% two years before that. You're only calling it a bogey because of the incredible growth in nuclear power production since then. Which it should get credit for, because my laptop is running on electrons not power plants. It would be a bogey if it were unrepresentative, but its not. The fact is the numbers show a very significant and steady over time (despite a generally decreasing rate of growth) growth over the years, which is continuing.
Fleet capacity factor in 2007 was 91.5, so there's still plenty of room left for improvement, even up to just 59 or 96%. You might say 91.5% is about as high as it can get, but you might have said that in 2006 about 89.6% (I'm sure David and Lovins would have) and of course been spectacularly wrong, as 2.2GW went up in just the next year.
And to be clear, its not just capacity factor increases. There have also been uprates to capacity. These added .39GW on average every year from 1998-2007. That's 390MW every year of 90%+ new capacity. Which is of course equivalent to over a Gigawatt (by power production) of new solar or wind farms, with storage, every year.
Am I saying this will go on forever? Of course not. But its not all played out, and will in all likelihood continue to provide significant power, until or almost until the new nuclear buildout.
Max Epstein
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Sean Casten Posted 6:17 am
06 Jan 2009
Note in particular Figure 5 that shows the total installed nuke fleet over the last 30 years, with a curve that leveled off in 1990 and then Figure 6 showing nuke fleet capacity factor leveling off in 2003. Could you get another percent or two out? Undoubtedly. The best case of what's possible is seen if you look at nuke fleet capacity factor on a state level, where the best states have gotten as high as 92 - 93%. Note that this implies a total downtime of 25 days/year, which is pretty damn good given as you're inevitably going to have a couple weeks of planned outages anyway, so this doesn't leave much additional room for unplanned outages and periodic partial curtailments. (That said, the fact that the worst states are still <70% suggests that there is room locally.) But none of that changes that the remaining room to increase nuke MWh is pretty small absent new construction.
96% is impractical though for any steam-driven power plant, as that implies only 14 days offline per year (with 100% operation for the remaining 351). The practical issues associated with the need to periodically replace boiler tubes, pumps, etc. in any steam-driven power plant make that really hard - for biomass, coal and nuke plants, 92 - 94% is pretty damn good. You might get to 96% for one plant and/or for one year, but it's impractical to sustain on an on-going basis for an entire fleet. (This isn't a nuke issue per se, simply the reality of thermal power cycles.)
Re: 1990 as a bogey, I agree you could pick any year, although that's actually a pretty interesting one to use since that is the year in which we stopped adding any significant new capacity - as a practical matter, we stopped building new plants after 3 Mile Island, but it took until 1990 for all the existing permitted pipeline to be built out. As you note, what little addition there has been since has been from modest uprating (offset by the occasional retirement).
All in all though, these are somewhat semantic points. Whether one gets to 92% capacity factor or even 100% capacity factor in the next 5 years doesn't change the fact that (a) no new plants are being built and (b) absent new plants being built, the share of nuclear - and coal - mathematically must fall so long as load continues to grow.
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Karen Street Posted 8:56 am
06 Jan 2009
On the other hand, International Energy Agency (http://www.iea.org/textbase/techno/essentials4.pdf) says, "In the absence of a carbon price,nuclear power costs are comparable with coal- or natural gas-based power at current price, or slightly higher. A carbon price of between $10 and $25/tCO2 makes nuclear power economically competitive." One assuption is an economic lifetime of 25 - 40 years for the plant, though Chu and the other 11 directors of the national labs are suggesting that we look into extending lifetime to 80 years.
Several minor points:
It may be more economical to shut down coal--but it still has to be replaced with something. The decisions to finish Watts Barr and Browns Ferry were made recently. Also refueling is more typically once every 18 months, a truck load of fuel, while coal plants can use a mile long train of coal, or more, each day.
And contracts have been signed (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/newsarticle.aspx?id=242 ...): "A construction contract has been signed for a new nuclear power plant in the USA. The deal between Progress Energy and the Westinghouse and Shaw consortium is the third so far."
While NRC has not yet approved any new nuclear power plants in the US, excepting Watts Barr and Browns Ferry, quite a few companies are assuming it will happen.
Sean, all 12 US national lab directors say that expanded nuclear power will be necessary past 2100. It's a good bet that they looked into the issues before making a public statement.
Karen Street
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Max8806 Posted 8:58 am
06 Jan 2009
As I mentioned before, just from 2006 to 2007 (although the numbers from 2004-2007 are virtually identical because output in 2006 was actually a shade less than 2004 output) nuclear added 19.3 Billion KWh of sales, or >2.2GW of virtual (100% capacity factor) capacity (KWh divided by hours in a year).
From 2006 to 2007 wind added ~5.6 Billion KWh (EIA) of sales, or about .634 GW (634 MW) of virtual (100% capacity factor) capacity. Over 2004 to 2007 wind added just under 21 Billion KWh of sales, or 2.392 GW of virtual capacity. So slightly more over that time period, but hardly enough to justify this ongoing argument that wind is booming and nuclear is dead. And this doesn't even include the relative values of 100% available capacity (nuclear) relative to variable (wind). And to be charitable to solar pushers I won't even go into solar's numbers.
On whether nuclear's plateaued, in 4 years from 1995 to 1998, nuclear capacity increased from 77.4% to only 78.2%. I'm sure plenty of people around then also claimed it had plateaued. They were of course wrong. Over the next four years, if capacity factor increased just 1% to 92.5%, and capacity installed increased by just 1.1Gig (this is less than trend of .3-.4Gigs increase per year from uprates) that would again be another >2 Gigawatts of virtual 100% capacity factor reliable baseload capacity.
Max Epstein
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Sean Casten Posted 9:10 am
06 Jan 2009
I wouldn't make too much of peer-reviewed papers when it comes to major capital allocation. (After all, a luxury of writing research reports is - usually - that you don't have to actually make the billion dollar equity bet.) The much more convincing point to me about the economics is where investors are putting their money and - with the exception of those few cases where utilities were able to get ratepayers to guarantee all their capital costs - they aren't building nuclear plants, even while they are building cleaner alternatives. That seems a bit of good news, no? My personal feeling, looking only at the economics is that $10 - 25/t CO2 probably does make nuke competitive with coal, but don't bring either down far enough to the point where they can compete with efficiency, CHP and wind. Ergo, I wouldn't bet that people will build those plants absent a much bigger regulatory stimulus. I might be wrong, but again, I'd watch capital investments to see where the truth lies rather than research papers.
Fundamentally, I agree with the need for nuke in the long-term at some level. Not because I like the risks, but simply because I see global warming as a big near term threat and waste disposal as a big medium-long term threat. Both are legitimately hard, but if you've got to pick one, I think AGW trumps. That said, what I think on that front - or the lab directors - ultimately doesn't matter. What matters is what will get built and at least so far, both coal and nuke are getting trumped by Other. To the extent that one believes that this means that nuke, coal (or anything else not currently getting built) deserves more subsidy is entirely separate from this discussion, but wasn't really the point of my initial post.
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