A more useful comparison might be to compare the cost that it takes to meet a realistic power demand curve for a certain geographical area using a certain power source or combination of sources. Ideally, the demand curve spans enough time to include rare events such as heat waves or winter storms where peak demand is much higher than the average daily peak.
Concentrated Solar Power towers have thermal storage built in, sometimes for up to 15 hours. Could you do an episode on why CSP towers are around as expensive today as they were ten years ago? Thanks for your work :)
Simply because there is really no new technology in the process to drive the costs down with scale. And the fact that it is very limited in locations where it can operate.
With CSP you run into hard material limits, physical limits. There simply is no material that's able to reliably handle the temperatures generated with CSP over a long time. Also cooling, it's extremely difficult and questionable if it's worth it in general.
@@oldrageface8706you're right, this is exactly what is happening now in the largest CSP plant in the world here in Morocco, they've run into multitudes of structural problems, the latest of which is leaking, the plant has stopped for maintenance for at least 6 months. And even when the plant was working at capacity it was very costly, more than double of its sister photovoltaic plant in the same location. CSP is a flop for now.
Some reasons I don't like renewables. 1. Short service life. 2. Unreliability (low capacity factor) 3. Vulnerability to natural disasters 4. Need for expensive power connections, which usually isn't talked about 5. need for expensive energy storage 6. poor recyclability and disposal options at end of life 7. social and environmental costs of raw materials 8. Land use and NIMBY issues 9. Grid instability due to lack of predictability 10. Difficulty of maintenance for offshore wind and wave power 11. stubbornness of renewable zealots and their dislike of nuclear
Energy use avoidance usually trumps any other form of investment in terms of returns. Window and wall shading, or insulation are simple examples. Modifying zoning to allow residents to access services without cars is another at a larger, though still very human scale.
Poor zoning is one of the biggest climate issues that few talk about. Forcing huge numbers of people to drive an hour or more every day and doubling the amount of infrastructure we need to serve the same people is not good climate policy. Super low densities require lots of cars and lots of roads and lots of parking which leads to even lower density. It's not a great cycle.
I wonder how diminishing returns factor into this- I am an architect in Germany and it seems like we are at least close to getting tiny improvements for massive efforts. New buildings are insulated so well, the biggest energy loss comes from ventilation- so we need automatic ventilation systems because you technically can't open the windows anymore. I could be wrong on the scale here, maybe we are still far from diminishing returns, but it seems like the building sector is already pretty "optimized" while other sectors are still in the "small changes would do much" zone. Building has gotten so expensive, that money has to be earned somehow, and earning money also costs energy and has a hard do calculate CO2 footprint associated with it.
@@cadekachelmeier7251 The zoning a lot of cities in the US practice is not only an ecological nightmare, I think it deteriorates quality of live as well. I live in a European town built for pedestrians 1000 years ago (at least the center). Public transport is good, you can get everywhere by bicycle as fast or even faster than by car. There is a lot of mixed zoning, allowing I commute by train or bicycle, depending on weather, season and my mood. My wife walks to her work of place in 5min. When we prepare dinner and miss some ingredients I walk 3min to the grocery to get it. There are restaurants in the area, and sometimes we order food - full meals from restaurants - which is delivered by bicycle. My children walked to primary school themselves starting at an age of 6 years, it is just 5min, no need to escort or even drive them. Later they used public transport. Now they study in other cities/towns, they get there by train, no need to buy a car. We do have a family car, but it is more a nice-to-have than a real need, we use it in particular for leisure time activities (going hiking or skiing, vacation ...).
@@olik136 Totally agree, number of passive built million dollar mega homes here in Australia is pretty insane and many of them are backed by things like Bitcoin or other things that might as well just be diesel truck racing when you consider how efficiently their business model works in terms of emissions to how it could be done.
It would be really good if you could go a follow-up on the relative price of energy storage with different systems for example battery storage, pumped hydro or something simple as heating sand or bricks??
We have a current example in Austria. The existing pump power station in Kaprun is getting reworked - was originally from 1955 - into a 833 MW electric power, 610 MW charge power, 742 GWh yearly capacity @ 405 million Euros. The existing power plant and storage adds around 300 million Euros. For a total of 700 million without the need for buying the land! Because it was state owned. And without discussion with the BUND or the Grüne Liga because: 1955! A battery with the same capacity and a daily recharge@600MW would need at least 600MWh x 365 = 219GWh - not enough. It would have to be at least 3,4 GWh or around 900 million Euros to reach similar yearly capacity. With much lass landuse! Fact: Battery storage is about the same startup cost as a pump hydro power plant in the same dimension. BUT: A hydro power plant lasts at least 50 years. A battery of course not. In 50 years a hydro powerr plant will be about 50% - including manpower for repairs, new turbines etc. of the cost of battery storage BUT Again: Battery storage can react in 20 Milliseconds. A Pump Storage needs a few minutes to turn around the flow of water. Verdict: Battery storage is better used with small decentralized solutions everywhere. Every village and community should have thier own megapack or something similar. Pump hydro is of course only usabele if you have the mountains. And can sacrifice them for energy storage.
That storage can come from policies that encourages purchase of EVs and using part of its battery capacity for a distributed grid. The average commute in the USA is something like 30 miles per day.
@@gr8bkset-524 If you can and are allowed to connect your cars to the grid and have the software that the grid can use your battery to store short time electric energy. Neither is the case and will not be for a long time in Europe. Maybe in the US or Australia they will start to do just that. But in Europe it takes a very long time before something like that is permitted.
@@elephantintheroom5678 Depending on the area in every house locally, in every community e.g. one megapack for our village would be perfect. Or a few strategically placed megapacks or something similar in and aorund bigger cities. They got enough space. Batteries can e.g. be stored underground and most european cities have many and big places under ground.
Thank you for the video (s). I’m one of the tiny fraction of your viewers who is not a fan of formulas. My formal education was too brief. So thanks for including me.
Brilliant simple explanation! Great too that you went beyond LCOE to explain why that's only the start. I like to remember that LCOE is an investment metric, to inform investors in energy projects how much money they can make. So it only has a loose relevance to the total final price of retail electricity that we all pay. I do also think costs are still most important even if you care more about climate change or other impacts. If we properly internalize all the costs like CO2 this will help us find the cheapest, and therefore easiest, ways to address these important issues. And because that makes it good business, investors will then put their finance into the projects that are needed to deliver whats needed, and just as importantly won't invest into the ones we don't want. I realize that fully internalizing costs is a big 'if' but many governments are now moving policy for things like CO2 and social benefits in the right direction.
This was very interesting and helped put the economics in perspective as well as the differences. I would be interested to see a video about how nuclear energy compares to renewables and fossil fuels.
OMG, you don't need her to tell you that nuclear power is way way the most costly way to produce electricity and also who would want a nuke power station next door, just will not happen.
@George Simmons with Electric vehicles, EV, tripling electrical supply demand, the home plus 2 EVs, the grid has to triple in capacity. Nuclear is a concentrated supply reflecting the existing privately owned power plants. If BWRX300, a small 300Mw nuclear power plant, and at a $1billion each and replacing 3x existing fossil fueled power plants capacity the financial burden will be locked into power costs for 60 to 100years. If every building has rooftop solar PV then every EV can be topped up daily. Every building is connected to the grid. Every EV will be trading power for money with the grid. I am talking about a dispersed power supply with the grid concentrating power from the ends of the grid. No need to expand the grid capacity. No need for nuclear. No need for huge monopoly investments and monopoly political donations. Renewables technology can continue to push efficiency and lower prices. We will pay to connect to the grid. Do the numbers.
Given that they enable a 100% renewable system to be 100% available, shouldn’t the cost of batteries (not just e.g. LiFePO, but e.g. liquid air, etc.) should play a greater part in these calculations.
You do need to factor in energy storage technology costs (battery, flywheel, ect) that solar and wind do require if you are going to count them as totally green. Alternatively, lacking some sort of storage method, there is the fossil fuel approach to backup power (coal and natural gas). Add in these factors and you will get a much more realistic and accurate cost of renewables. Most analysis of renewables seem to always leave these factors out for some reason, as if they do not matter, but the reality is they do represent a very major part of the equation and any discussion that leaves them out is useless.
This has been my comment on renewables for a long time. In the UK we have an almost completely untapped renewable that does not have a huge storage problem, tidal turbines. The coastal tide flow phasing around the islands gives a very good and predictable output over time. Little has been invested as the politicians do not see it as politically "sexy".
That is not calculated in because it is just the cost of energy. And if you want to include that you also need to include transportation cost, because transporting energy from a handful centralized coal plants needs far more infrastructure and has a lot more losses than using local small renewable plants. Then you also can include health costs with fossil plants and the costs of the damage the failure of those plants produce, as fossil fuel plants don't have a naturally redundancy.
Just like you can have solar panels on your house without a battery to store it - IE, use whatever is generated and sell excess to the grid, you can also have the exact same thing in principle, the point of this wasn't to discuss 'the energy problem' in terms of how we go about the whole issue, but specifically the cost of building, generating and maintaining these energy sources. You could use coal or gas to charge batteries too. Even if it's not a smart thing to do, it could be done. Read the description. Rosie specifically questions "What happens when the sun goes down and we still want to use electricity?" - not as a "this is in the video" but as a food for thought comment.
I Own and build small hydro and noticed you didn't include it in your race ...WHY. Bizarrely hydro is the most expensive technology and the cheapest so it would have been good to include especially as its the largest source of renewable electricity in the world. Currently we are building 4 schemes subsidy free and its quite a challenge to raise the large amount of cash required for a UK (Scottish) build, Great video... Thank you for taking the time to do it so well.
Rosie, I really enjoy your videos. I know there are a lot of people calling for more depth, but from what I've seen you tend to get to the depth by creating follow on videos on topics. I think it's a good approach because it keeps your video length reasonable and I share your videos because I think they don't overwhelm people. That's important for those strange people who aren't energy nerds. BTW, speaking of strange people, what kind of person is it who doesn't love a good equation? Thanks for all you do.
The tools we are going to balance the renewables grid with are as you mentioned storage, transmission, demand/load shifting, overbuild, and maybe a little dispatchable generation, like gas, which could be bio gas if it's used very little. My problem is, I have a dumb meter that can't measure when I produce or consume electricity. I should be charging my car when it's cheap. Some thermal storage is really cheap, like having a smart thermostat lower the temperature in your home in hot weather 2 extra degrees when the sun is up, then turn it up 4 degrees during the evening peak. Overbuild will compete with storage some, particularly with wind. If there are large swaths of time, somebody might find something with low capital costs, that can do something useful with cheap electricity. Also, have you ever watched Tony Seba?
@@foley.elec.services I don't know whether people will want to do that a lot, but California was in danger of rolling blackouts for like 3 hours in the last year. If a million BEVs put 7kw on the wire for those 3 hours, that's 7GW extra, which is a huge amount of power when you are a little short, but building anything for 3 hours of use is stupid expensive.
"Renewable Energy" -- a kid's-lemonade-stand business model, "batteries not included". * * * I don't care about global warming. I'm not going to impoverish myself by 25% in order to "fight global warming"? What are the consequences of global warming? 1) A 1-2 degree increase in average temperature: I don't care. I can deal with that by turning down the temperature on the AC thermostat (and I prefer milder winters). 2) A 1.2 inches per decade rise in sea level: again, I don't care becuase: a) Most people live well enough above that for that to be of any concern to anyone alive today. b) In 100 years time, this may be a concern for people living on beachfront property, but they are the most wealthy people among us and I'm not impoverishing myself by 25% to preserve their vacation homes. Coastal cities that haven't already built their waterfronts to handle a 1.2 foot rise in sea level have 100 years to deal with the problem. c) Poor and low lying subsistence agricultural lands have a tough row to hoe, but sea levels have been rising for more than 100 years, and their circumstances would be better improved by moving out of subsistence agriculture and into higher value added (and mobile) occupations. 3) Oceans becoming less basic (currently 8.1 pH; 7.0 is neutral, i.e. tap water): again, I don't care. a) I don't care if clam shells become more fragile at this level of pH. b) I find it preposterous to hear that clams, with billions of years of evolution behind them in a hostile environment (sea water), can't handle a 0.1 decrease in basic ("alkaline", not "acidic") pH -- which is a movement toward neutral, i.e. "fresh" water. [The term "ocean ACIDITY" is used by climate hustlers to incite fear for political and personal gain.] Have I missed anything? Melting glaciers? Sorry, I'm not impoverishing myself by 25% over receding glaciers. Sorry, but I don't care. The costs and power grabs behind this issue are astounding. So are the lottery-ticket benefits, unless you are in on the scam: the politicians, enforcers, and renewable energy opportunists. If you feel so strongly about global warming, you should lobby for THORIUM MOLTEN SALT REACTORS -- not only for electricity, but for manufacturing synthetic gasoline -- all carbon neutral. If not already familiar with it, here is a playlist for it: th-cam.com/play/PL6JjafE5gsb9nSmudoj5MUKxX8LTKO0-J.html Here is a list of Australia's green energy fiascos: th-cam.com/video/HWRyVemsTvs/w-d-xo.html Big Trouble in the Tropical Troposphere (Aug 27, 2021) John Robson/CDN - Climate Discussion Nexus th-cam.com/video/n6VM41-v2gg/w-d-xo.html Min 16:30 What we found (is) the amount of heat that is being retained by THE MODELS is much greater than what we actually see in the real world. So this is important in the sense that it's a test metric. In other words all the models show this should be happening when you increase greenhouse gases -- when you increase that heating amount, and it's something we don't find, which means the real atmosphere evidently has ways to expel that heat that the models don't allow. It turns out that the models that agree most with the actual observations -- you know, they're still too warm but they're closer to it -- are the ones that are LEAST SENSITIVE TO CARBON DIOXIDE -- the ones that have the lowest warming rate at the surface. Scientifically it's just uh amazing or almost incomprehensible because in in the scientific method we make a claim and then we test that claim against independent data. - John Cristy, professor of atmospheric science. Vs. Min 4:00 to 11:00 1. Climate Change -- the scientific debate (Sep 21, 2008) Source: Potholer54 th-cam.com/video/52KLGqDSAjo/w-d-xo.html
@@EngineeringwithRosie i believe that, even including storage and transmission upgrade costs, solar still has a lower lcoe than new fossil build-out. i'm keen for a video on this, yo! show the australian public how it is really not impossible
Considering that the program ignores the fact that solar and wind have a heavy material demand that our mines today cannot meet....and therefore material prices will skyrocket and be another factor.
This was a great video, it laid out the various factors very clearly! A big missing piece though, is the value of grid stability and the cost of maintaining it in the face of the wide swings in the availability of renewable energy, and the potential for low periods coinciding with each other (no wind and no solar at the same time). Rather than looking at the expense per KWh of gas generation on its own, some amount (I suspect a fair bit) of the cost of gas peaker plants should be tallied on the renewables side of the ledger. Without the extreme variability of renewables, I doubt the Aussie government would have needed to build a gas peaker plant with a projected 2% capacity factor. Another cost that’s not accounted for is that for transmission. While solar can be distributed fairly easily, in practice it usually isn’t, so transmission capacity may need to be added to accommodate it. This is a much bigger issue for wind power, because wind farms must typically be located far from population centers. (Everyone loves cheap wind power, as long as the windmill is in someone else’s back yard :-) I also question the assumed lifetime of wind generators. I haven’t made a study of the area like you have, but my impression is that wind turbines have been experiencing much shorter lifetimes than initially projected. What’s the most recent data looking like on thar? Finally, there’s the financial and environmental cost of decommissioning. Again I don’t know the specifics, but wind turbine components (especially the blades) are troublesome to dispose of in an environmentally responsible manner, and solar panels have toxicity issues when consigned to landfills as well. I don’t want to seem too negative though; this was an excellent and very clear presentation of a lot of complicated concepts; well done!
The short life of wind turbines is simply opportunity cost. If you had a 0.5MW built 10 years ago, then there is the cost of land rent, tower, site access, network access, engineering and operations. So if you are replacing an old one with a new say 4.5MW or 15MW, you have the wind data, you have grid connection, road access, & rental of land and maintenance. So you increase wind production by maybe 10 times, for just the cost of the turbines. And reduce maintenance with the latest gear.
@@HughButler35 That's a very good point; a lot of the site-prep/access/network and operations infrastructure will be substantially amortized, so upgrading the generating capacity will have a different cost basis than the initial turbine. But the short life does still affect the cost justification for the first turbine. Its LCOE will be a good bit higher than initially calculated. It'd be interesting to see a full analysis that calculates the overall LCOE, assuming shorter life spans and lower going-forward site costs, across 2 or 3 generations of turbines. Decommissioning and disposal costs do need to be included though; my impression is they're substantial, and I haven't yet seen any analysis that includes them. (These costs may vary a lot by location, depending on local regulations for waste disposal, so it could be difficult to come up with universally-applicable figures. Still, it would be good to see at least *some* analysis of the issue, even if it were just a single data point for a single location.)
@@DEtchells I don't see in any LCOE the cost of end of life, value of recycled products. EVs case in point. What's a 70kW battery value to home storage? Would a wind farm simply be upgraded for decades or hundreds of years?
I agree. Comparing the cost of producing electricity is not complete if the source that you are evaluating cannot practically perform the task without additional power sources to solve the intermittency issue. The costs of these additional sources, whether they be peaking gas fired plants or something else (grid storage plus additional quantities of renewables to cover the demand peaks or some other source) should be included for a fair comparison. The truth is that coal or gas fired power plants can satisfy a realistic power demand on their own, while solar or wind can not.
@@HughButler35 (Sorry for long-delayed reply) Yeah, decommissioning/recycling costs aren’t usually included in LCOE, probably because it’s hard to get a handle on them. My general concern is that there are significant costs of wind and solar that aren’t being considered in many starry-eyed assessments of their value. Ditto various negative externalities. I was actually a huge fan of wind power a few years ago, but as I learned more about life cycles, disposal issues and grid stability, my view shifted. Currently, I favor solar as a renewable, although grid stability is a major overlooked problem with current storage tech, and as noted above, the costs of peaker plants aren’t being properly included in the LCOE calculations. Solar does have the advantage of a much longer life when recycling is considered. Output efficiency declines through poorly-understood aging processes, but decommissioned commercial/industrial panels will doubtless find their way into secondary markets as less-efficient but much cheaper products.
This is just the kind of analysis that Logan Power and Light of Logan, Utah, along with every other electric utility in the world, needs to make in shopping for new capacity. I see a time when the role of the electric utility will be less of a service of connecting many consumers to a few big produces and more of a brokerage service and a smart grid that will connect multiple producer/consumers with other producer/consumers.
First time watching your channel - superb video, and by far the happiest presenter of this type of content! Speaking as someone who has worked in renewables for quite some time, it is very encouraging to see this type of analysis given an engaging and accessible makeover. I'll be back for sure.
Thanks! I have been surprised how many people are interested in this topic! But that's great because it makes me feel like I can tackle some other challenging topics and hopefully get a good response.
Great video and content! As a generation resource engineer for a utility, this is extremely helpful. I like that you touched on VALCOE, but I would like to see this exact analysis, but include storage (12 hour?) with the wind and solar. Use something like ESS or EOS as storage products because I see those as leaders in non-Li-Ion technology, where Li-Ion isn't typically economical for over 4 hour durations.
Your video title is wrong. The video is all about True Cost of *Electricity*. Unfortunately the two often get confused. Most countries already produce a lot of their electricity from renewable sources. However it looks a lot worse when we also consider heating and transportation.
Nice video, thank you! There’s also a geo-political dimension to the equation, especially here in Europe. Our reliance on oil and gas has created a dependancy on Russia, which is being exploited for political purposes. And Russia is financing much of its military power using the income it generates from selling fossil fuels. In other regions (the Middle East, Nigeria, Venzuela), other factors come into play, but it safe to say that oil and gas do have a negative impact on political stability and, indirectly, on our ability to combat climate- and environmental crises.
@@durwoodmaccool890 Yes we need to become independent from fossil fuels asap. That alone is a reason to invest massively in solar and wind, the energy grid and storage solutions.
@@EngineeringwithRosieYes, sadly so. People have been (and still are ) naive, to a point that it is threatening our future. We have allowed big oil to take over, economically and politically. Right now, Exxon Mobile is taking the EU commission to court to fight its plans to stop fossil fuel investments. The fight is not yet over.
Very interesting video, thank you so much. Regretfully the orientation seems somewhat Australian oriented, and as such has left out hydroelectricity and nuclear. The latter has huge advantages, namely very low variable cost, just like solar, wind and hydro, it basically can operate 24/7 all 365 days of the year, thus being an excellent base source of energy, rather than a subsidiary peak source for the high evening demand, which commands the highest prices per MWh. Disadvantages are that it is not scalable, that is to say that of necessity they must be big, starting at 500-1,000 MW (technology has not come up with 50-100 MW reactors), very high initial costs, a nuclear generator may set you back to the tune of 5-8 mln USD per MW, vs maybe 1-1.5 for natural gas (higher for combined cycles), extended building time, 6-8 years for nuclear vs less than 2 for gas, and the unquantifiable cost of storing radioactive waste byproduct for the next 100,000 years. Hydro has many things in common with nuclear, namely high building costs, namely 3-5 mln USD per MW, close to zero variable costs, and reasonable availability, maybe 25-30% for small rivers, but it can be as high as 60-70% for the big rivers. Plus a small handicap, usually these dams are not necessarily close to consumption centres, so that entails the additional cost of transmission lines and some energy loss in the process. Greetings from Down Under (I'm from Argentina!).
Nuclear energy has a truckload of problems. For starters, no one wants to store the toxic waste in their backyard. And that's if the reactors work 100% without a hitch. On top of that (as seen in Canada), if the government wasn't investing and intervening on behalf of the nuclear industry, it would be impossible for it to get a loan or insurance (for years in Canada a nuclear reactor would have a limited responsibility of 75 millions $CA in case of an accident). Lastly, even with molten salts and thorium, all these nuclear reactors require uranium isotopes (yes Thorium decomposes to U-232 and requires uranium to start the process). If you ask me, the only proper place for nuclear energy is in space.
@@obiwanceleri indeed nuclear technology does have problems and drawbacks, and I mentioned the most serious one. Besides the real ones there are imaginary ones as well. Like thinking that somehow an uncontained reaction would take place, which is altogether impossible. Explosive devices require fissile material enriched to 95%, commercial generators operate with a 5% concentration. Others associate the technology with death, which again os unsubstantiated. In 70 years there have been 3 major accidents: Three Mile Island (nobody died), Fukushima (a couple died, and indirectly, not directly from radiation) and Chernobyl where the toll was higher, but resulting from the crude Soviet technology used. The reactor was not even contained in a dome. Today no plant on earth is designed like that. In all three cases radiation escaped to the atmosphere in different amounts, but let me tell you that even the worst pales in comparison to the radiation released by coal powered plants. Coal, like everything else does contain minute doses of radioactive isotopes, which when burned go to the atmosphere. Plus the huge amounts of CO2, P and S impurities that we get to breathe as a byproduct. These are carcinogenic. Plus global warming. Indeed, no technology is perfect or without drawbacks. Financing is costlier simply because building time is 6-8 years v less than 2 for a plant that runs on gas, hence it is considered a higher risk.
Adding nuclear would not be towing the company line. Plant life of over 60 years and nearly free (extremely cheap, even able to run on its own waste) fuel and an up time of 50 to 51 weeks a year.
@Hels Miäs totally true. The flooded area will greatly depend on local topography. In flat plains to can be considerable to reach a minimum water head to make the dam economically viable. No electricity source is problem free
One very important cost factor that should have been included is the end-of-life. This is particularly true for the latest technology in solar panels and the wind turbines have their own special difficulties. Also, nuclear should’ve been included in order to show the full picture of electrical energy generation.
It's telling that no insurance company will cover decommissioning costs for nuclear. So the overruns (up to an order of magnitude higher) go on tax payers who are not even born yet.
@@macmcleod1188 No argument here. “Order of magnitude...”? Throw it in there. Let’s see the full picture. You never see a full reconciliation of costs and benefits. Gasohol is a good example. When you do a complete analysis you find that the cost per mile amounts to paying for the unleaded gas plus the alcohol. The whole thing is just a subsidy for corporate agriculture paid for by the general population.
My energy bills have dropped 80% since my move to solar and geothermal. Its absolutely amazing and I cant believe the negative info. I was getting killed yearly with $5k oil bills and my AC/electric bill was over $500 a month. Last month my electric bill was $58. My break even point will be five year or less depending on the price of oil. No turning back here.
Rosie, enjoyed your analysis in this video. And while I'm a proponent of renewable energy, I haven't seen an honest in-depth look at the the dis-advantages of wind or solar. Considering the perplexing problems of eWaste and current status of recycling for solar power alone is worthy of your attention. Toxic chemicals and elements built into them as well as used in their manufacturing, needs an honest look.
I have done a few videos on wind turbine blade recycling, and I'll do more next year since a lot has happened since I made those. And I toured a solar panel recycling facility recently so will have a video on that topic out in the new year 😀
Renewable projects rarely (if ever) publish the additional required to keep a gas power station on standby to fill in their unreliable output. The price of electricity has certainly not come down in the UK. I support clean energy but the elephant in the room is lack of grid storage and I don't see that being solved in the near future.
A fair analysis as far as it goes, but the environmental impacts, and therefore the costs, of continuing to use natural gas are not negligible. In their sixth assessment report, the IPCC demonstrates that perhaps the only viable emissions pathway consistent with limiting global heating to the critical +1.5 Celsius threshold requires immediate and rapid reductions in anthropogenic methane emissions. The problem with burning natural gas lies not just with its combustion emissions but also substantial fugitive emissions from extraction and transport.
Ignore the IPCC and Climate Alarmism... The Neo-Globalist Fake-Greens are owned by multinational industrialists that are no better than the fossil fuel companies. They want to replace a mostly Iron + Carbs based economy with a million complicated to make neo-materials that are equally difficult to recycle more often than not.. -- CO2 is demonised like Jews were (like Covidiots and White Male English-speakers are too by The Neo-Left that is owned by uber-right factions).. It's a SCAPEGOAT SMOKESCREEN for their Neo World Order and Industrial Revolution 2 that will do to the 3rd world what it did to the 2nd world in the last 50 years of Liberal Global Investment, trick-all-downed from The West, to our cultural enemies, TIRPLING THEIR POPULATIONS... -- Africa will see the NEO-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 2... It too will be utterly environmentally raped, this time for 2nd World Mass Consumption, not just 1st world.... It's already happening.. -- The one tech. that suits all and offers by far the HIGHEST POTENTIAL BANG PER BUCK, with lowest impact and high safety for the most number of nations is BREEDER REACTORS... This tech. has been looked into a few times since the 1950s, always deemed a great idea, then buried by other interests that corrupt the system.. Trillions wasted on Fusion R & D globally and expensive renewable fake-green solutions that either rot in the sea or oppress and ruin the feel of the countryside, whilst killing 1000s of birds a year.. -- Russia has finally started working on this tech properly and China plans to (Thorium Solid Fuel Breeder reactors and Molten Salt Reactor research), but the West could have rolled it out globally by the 1970s if it had got its shit together and stopped listening to Fake Greens and the concentrated Enriched Uranium power and nuclear weapons industries, not just the fossil fuel lobby... -- Russia's plant already sustains fission for longer and longer runs while using 100x LESS ENRICHED URANIUM... Some breeder designs only need Enriched uranium to get the thing lit.. Breeder reactors run on mostly non-fissile, cheap as dirt, radioactive waste products. Their own waste is FAR, FAR less radioactive than current best Western solutions. There are many designs that run on (some of) our nuclear waste stockpiles. -- Your sprawling solutions are suitable for some places but breeder reactors are suitable for nearly all... SMALL MODULAR REACTORS and a few medium sized plants.. Nuclear has the best safety record bar wind and solar (though on some metrics they are worse due to a few accidents, including those at chemical plants needed for the vital neo-materials.... and all the bird deaths).. It's waste is a problem - but not with Breeder Reactors.. The half life of their waste is way shorter... Doesn't need to be buried for eternity.
@@JoeZorzin easy - get rid of animal agriculture and use the massive amounts of freed land for agrophotovoltaics (combined solar and farming activities underneath) or solar + insect sanctuaries.
I appreciate the effort in the video notwithstanding the off-topic editorializing at the end. I remain amazed at how much time is devoted to Lazard's flawed levelized cost statistic that is ostensibly used to justify wind and solar brought into an energy grid these days. I am not against "renewable" power generation ( which I put in quotes because it is narrowly defined as wind and solar these days). I am for it. But, any honest grid operator will state the wind and solar power is disruptive. Wind operates against a production tax credit that subsidizes its operation. The economics for putting power into the market are different than they are for a conventional generator and the spill over is that it affects the economics of independent power producers (IPPs). IPPs are designed to produce non-intermittent power but I acknowledge that is (by necessity of accommodating wind and solar) is changing with synchronous condensers permitting better grid stability. Grid scale battery storage, added redundancy, and the requirement of natural gas to come in when wind + solar isn't available are discounted with LCOE.
Good video! Funny/depressing how many comments are about complications you mention in the last half of the video -_- Anyways keep up the good work. Worth noting that governments can influence (mostly reduce) the financing cost part for particular sources if they want to. That's really their main lever for shaping energy policy.
Great video Rosie, do the build and fuel input prices include the subsidies provided by Governments (or an averaged factor) for each generation type. There are some subsidies going in to building generation as well as significant subsidies going in to the fossil fuels industry. I also think an extended model for true cost of operation should be developed to include the carbon costs as well as the costs of health impacts, as these are real factors in a true cost of operation model.
I'm always opposed to "subsidies" of any kind (The government putting its fat ugly thumb on the scales of economic justice) Here is what a subsidy is: Payments to the government minus payments from the government. For instance when I send the government $15,000 in quarterly tax payments and I get $1,000 back at the end of the year I am not being subsidized, am I. How much cash does Exxon send to the government and how much cash does the government send to Exxon? Similarly how much cash does the government send to solar panel manufacturers and how much cash do solar panel manufactures send to the government? Exxon paid $20.176 billion in direct taxes before profits. After tax profits are taxed individually by Exxon's owners though their individual tax rates. Since there are some 4,097,000,000 owner shares that pay individual taxes on Exxon profits annually if we assume a dividend rate of $3.60 per share the annual taxable dividends would be just shy of $15 billion and the tax rate would be 20% so that's another 2.9 billion per year in taxes for a total of around 23 billion in taxes before their product is taxed again at the pump. Does anyone have good data on what US solar panel manufactures receive in taxpayer cash vs what they pay in annual taxes. The last one I heard of was Solyndra that received 500 million in taxpayer subsidies before Democrat party kickback payments and executive million dollar golden parachutes before declaring bankruptcy and closing their doors leaving creditors and employees high and dry.
Yes, and the expected casualty rate from accidents per unit of total energy over the lifetime of the equipment is another cost. For renewables, especially hydro, it is very high; for nuclear is is nearly zero. Fossil fuels are somewhere in between.
Could we add costs of long distance transport of energy to this? I imagine that while the wind doesn't blow all the time in each place, it can be blowing enough somewhere else where the energy can be transported more efficiently with high voltage DC lines. That may be cheaper than storage.
High voltage DC lines? - how do you drop the voltage to a usable level at the end point? The reason 3 phase, 3 wire, AC high voltage power distribution, is the norm across the globe, is because it is the most efficient by far. (Thomas Eddison lost this argument more than120 years ago).
Thank you Rosie for such a clear & concise explanation of the cost of various alternatives. I loved the racing car analogy & think it is so simple even Scott Morrison could understand it & might even like it given his recent Bathurst stunt. It would have been interesting to see Nuclear included as well as it seems to be the latest delaying tactic employed by the fossil fuel lobby.
this video is Lazard's LCoE analysis for people who don't want to read. I had checked the numbers previously, but I still loved the "LCoE by car analogy" explanation. :-)
I like this race analogy, but I would approach it from a different angle. Currently we three types of electricity: intermittent (wind, solar), baseload (coal, nuclear) and fully flexible (gas, battery with baseload or intermittent). Comparison would make sense within categories, not between. My second thought that I fully agree with Rosie that cost and CO2 emissions are not the only factors to consider. In renewables, there are two elements, which we tend to forget time to time. First is the land use, which can be enormous in case of renewables, second is the grid, which we can (theoretically) can avoid in case of a household with renewable plus battery setup. In Hungary I saw already solar farms to be built on first class land, where I think the value of land was not taken into the consideration, when the investment decision was made.
One of the ways I think of solar panels is "farming" but without having to worry about irrigation, plowing, pesticides, or harvesting, just simply harvesting the sun's energy. Obviously you're right that solar shouldn't go on good farming land, but it's great for drier places
@@theelectricwalrus Actually some farming land is a great place for solar; it provides well needed shade for some types of crops. Look up Agrivoltaics to learn more. It is not a silver bullet though!
All generation is intermittent. The difference is that we know when the wind will blow and the sun will shine, while we don't know when a nuke plant will drop off line until it and it's 1.2 GW leaves the grid.
@@RechargeableLithium We know when nuclear plants leave the grid - it is called scheduled maintenance. What we don't know is what next season's weather is going to be like - natural gas isn't at an all-time high in Europe 'just because' - low wind and solar output throughout 2021 (at a time when wind and solar installation are at historic highs) were made up with natural gas and coal - raising those prices, and lowering winter stocks to the lowest level in 30 years. Hopefully it will be a mild winter. Conflating a single power-plant's potential for tripping off the grid with the complete and utter failure of a entire sector of the power grid requires quite the moxie.
@@factnotfiction5915 Nice try. I live in Texas. Last winter we lost a full 1/4 of our nuclear generation, plus about 60% of our gas generation due to a deep freeze - none of those were 'scheduled maintenance'. We lost about 700 people because of the grid failure. Our wind and solar kept running.
Hiya 🤚 Tony Seba's analyse of levelized cost pokes à lot of holes in industry future assumptions. I can't help feeling that the fossil fuel industry subsities are not taken into account in the calulations (never mind à carbon tax)
Yea, the subsidies are hundreds of billions of dollars. and they are slowly becoming more visible. The International Monetary Fund estimated that the costs to the U.S. government from climate change, local air pollution impacts, and infrastructure damage not captured by energy taxes totaled $686 billion in 2015. That's on top of over 20 billion dollars in direct subsidies (and doesn't include favorable tax treatment amounting to billions more).
@@macmcleod1188 Can you provide a breakdown of the $20 B in direct subsidies or a source for that. I find that regardless of the industry subsidies is a meaningless term as it is a catch all. Therefore I would like to look into it to see exactly what it means.
@@zmavrick after 2 weeks? nope. my search history is gone. but if you start with these quotes, you may have more luck finding the data/ studies/ articles. "IMF: fossil fuel industry the recipient of subsidies of $5.9tn per year Analysis by the IMF has found that fossil fuels are still receiving subsidies of $5.9tn, equating to $11m per minute." "The Environmental and Energy Study Institute reported that direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry totaled $20 billion per year, with 80% going toward oil and gas. In addition, from 2019 to 2023, tax subsidies are expected to reduce federal revenue by around $11.5 billion.Jul 14, 2021"
Seems two costs are missing (I could have missed them), the cost of decommissioning should be included, and the cost of energy storage so the wind and solar can function on an equivalent basis to nuclear, gas, oil, coal, etc.
This is amazing! So well presented, and a great analogy. I see mostly renewables + storage as the eventual destination, with fossil fuels on standby for extreme hot or cold. Workplace smart charging of consumer EVs would make solar more valuable, e.g. charge your EV at a fixed $0.05/kWh if it's linked to solar or wind generation. With EVs that have 500km range, and 50km/day the average driving, most consumers would be happy to wait a day or two before filling up if it costs them less than the regular rate - people queuing for 30 minutes at the cheapest gas station in town already proves this.
This morning here in west central Alberta Canada, the temperature is -38 C. There is little to no wind and it is overcast with ice fog. It has been similar weather for the last few days and will be for the next week(a little warmer). There is around 50mm of fresh snow on everything, around 250mm of settled snow. And the worst winter weather is yet to come with January and February being traditionally the coldest snowiest months with the least sunshine(7.5 hrs a day right now). So far, renewables are absolutely useless here. That makes fossil fuelled energy indispensable no matter all the graphs and cost analyses and theoretic thinking you can display.
But West Central Alberta Canada is only 500 miles from the North Pacific Ocean, which if filled with offshore windfarms like we have in the UK, could power all your needs many times over. This is just one of many possible ways of making renewables work. Just look at the complexity and innovation we have developed over the last 100 years to mine fossil fuels, if the same effort and energy is applied to renewables it would be possible nearly everywhere including Alberta!
@@stevetaylor2818 It took ten years to try get a piece of infrastructure OK'd from Alberta to the BC coast, then it was still cancelled, ok'd,cancelled, protested, ok'd,cancelled again, bought by the federal gov and ok'd again, still being protested and held up by the BC provincial gov., natives and protestors, still not finished 15 years later. And you think we'll just throw up some equally unwanted windmills and run a massive power line through BC into Alberta, nice try. We will still need 50 more years of fossil fuels.
@@gabrielback5615 I only said was physically possible, I did no talk about the political mess. And the corruption of the Oil and gas to block everything else. Canada and the US are littered with Oil and gas infrastructure (I know I helped build much of it over the last 30 years) Here in the UK we just finished constructing a 1.2 GW offshore windfarm (biggest in the world) and have even bigger under construction. And you wont be burning fossil fuels for 50 years, one day in the not so distant future any dirty country burning fossil fuels will be sanctioned by the rest of the world, imports blocked and carbon fines applied, so get your political mess sorted and build alternatives to fossil fuels or your country will go bankrupt!!!
@@stevetaylor2818 Wind isn't all that green when you factor in concrete and recycling problems and is an ugly blight on the landscape. As for corruption, do you believe the big businesses behind so-called green energy will be any more honest? Come on. Environmental groups are the most dishonest orgs I've ever seen...they lie continuously but you're expecting something different from green energy companies?
And as per usual, no mention of storage costs for renewables and how to balance grid supply - the elephant in the room. No mention either of nuclear? A decent attempt but the Lazard report had so many errors and assumption errors.
Very pessimistic. There is many solutions for energy storage and some are already in place and many are being developed. There is plenty of videos of that here on YT. Unless you are only here to complain.
@@erikkovacs3097 not at all. Thermal storage is the best. In Denmark we just open the world's first thermal storage in MW seize for our windmill power. This means that we completely removed the reliability issue with windmills. It opened in Esbjerg the 25th of April, if you want to fund info on it. This will run for a while and then we will open them up all around Denmark. This is a part of the solution for Denmark to reach our goal to reach 100% renewable energy. These thermal storage of energy with salt or sand is currently the best solution. Both sand and salt os very easy and very cheap and very good for the environment.
Very clear and well described comparison, Is there any data to compare cost with nuclear also? It feels like nuclear would be the best comparison for Wind/Solar 2021?
Thanks for introducing me to the VALCOE concept! Seeing this and the duck curve pushes me towards realizing that besides seasonal energy storage, daily and weekly arbitrage of solar energy with plain old lithium ion batteries will systemically improve solar VALCOE!
How to calculate/ compare the cost of storage between different techs is a really important topic and more tricky than LCOE and VALCOE, because there are dozens of different ways you can use energy storage. I will tackle that topic some time next year!
@@EngineeringwithRosie Wow, that would be wonderful! I've been wondering about exactly these questions ever since I heard about LCOE, and even this video brought me something new since I did not know about VALCOE! My pondering went something like this: If/when LCOE + storage (installation+upkeep, TCO, or a similar measure, or LCOES = Levelized cost of energy storage if there is such a concept?) costs together also dip below LCOE of non-renewables, that would be a point when renewables really become inevitable. I wonder when that might happen, if ever. Phrased another way: what would the yearly total cost of ownership of renewables + storage be if we would want to serve the exact same kind of demand that we already have today (for a single country or globally), without ifs and buts. And this calculation could be very interesting over different configurations, e.g. just PV + just li-ion, or PV+wind and peaker gas plants, etc. And also how these costs have already changed over the years and what trajectory they are on.
Christopher, I hate to tell you, but long-term arbitrage will reduce solar VALCOE. If you have a $100 worth of Li-ion battery that you cycle every day (i.e. nighttime discharge) you get a lot more worth out of that asset than if you cycle 1x per week (i.e. discharge on Sunday). Long-term storage beyond a few hours makes battery storage value drop while the costs stay the same. To put it differently, you could have a smaller system if you're not storing up a week's worth of energy (or a day's worth stored for a week) to discharge later. The sticky problem then becomes what is the energy worth after a cloudy week? How often does a cloudy week occur? What are the chances of 2 cloudy weeks back-to-back? etc.
I was a bit surprised that hydroelectricity didn't show up in the Lazard slides. It's renewable, cheap, clean and includes its own storage, it's just not universally available.
No matter how cheap solar panels and wind turbines get, they make the actual electricity more expensive, because you have to keep underutilized fossil fuel plants for backup. Plus you also need more land and transmission. There is no practical or economical solution to the intermittency problem. Another pernicious effect of renewables is that they congest the grid and make it harder to build nuclear plants, which unlike renewables can actually replace coal plants as they've done in France.
You must have your head buried in the sand ! Your parochial little observations are ignoring the Sum Total of Global Temperature and shift in Planet Wide damage caused. I weep for the world you are wishing on your grandchildren and the whole human population! Not to mention our Bio Ecology and living creatures ! I just bet you are celebrating how your lifestyle is junking the only Planet we will inhabit in the next million years !
Those rounded earings at the end of the video are so beautiful. your channel , your "not verbal comunication" , your direct and clear content transmision, are beautiful too, but the best is your smile , which is is the most incredible energy source in the technical side of internet, to me, thanks
This LCOE comparison is too simple. Many engineers realize solar is the most expensive generating source, followed by onshore wind. The simple reason is that both require wasteful back-up to provide stable power 24 hours per day. In your calculations you omit this cost of fossil diversity to supplement these renewables. Experience in Europe suggests that both solar and wind must be backed-up for periods up to 3-4 days. (Note: recent weather event caused wind to be low for 7 days) This has nothing to do with peak suppression. Grid availability is achieved using supply diversity but you 'must' include this in the LCOE calculation. Your video paints an unrealistic picture of true costs and explains the thinking behind the present high cost of electricity in Australia and Germany.
Including storage is an important calculation (she already said there is a video in the works doing that), but it isn't a 'must' for LCOE... It is just a different calculation with slightly different applicability. Chill a bit BTW: Speaking of chill... Variability in fuel markets, especially demand and disruption induced, are a further complication leading to another different and arguably more applicable comparison. Availability for fossil fuel sources isn't as great as some folks appear to assume. Yeah, this stuff does get a wee bit complicated ;)
Completely brilliant. You said almost everything I think is relevant, and in a way easy for anyone to understand! Could you simply add the price of LFP storage into the capex number?
@@4drops No they are not, they fail to take in to account the reliability of the output and thus fail to account for the cost of transmission, the backup needed and that the backup needs to run in a highly variable mode, which increases their costs and reduces their fuel efficiency. It is not an appropriate metric to judge energy systems, though intermittent advocates constantly use it because it makes them look better by hiding so much detail.
@@4drops Probably not. Does the LCOE factor in all subsidies? Just because the cost is spread amongst many people doesn't mean the cost doesn't exist. And more importantly, what the LCOE does not factor in is life and safety, both during and after generation. Amongst the 3 major nuclear disasters globally (Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima), the death toll is 32. 31 of which were a result of Chernobyl, which was entirely avoidable. In the U.S. alone, solar and wind have more deaths on their hands in a few years than Nuclear has in about 70 years. In that time it has created an amount of waste that would fit in a standard American football field at a depth of 10 yards. As she said in the video, these are some of the costs the LCOE does not factor in. And they are vastly important.
How about cost and risk of storing/managing Nuclear Waste for 100,000+ years.... and who "pays up" for damage done say... 50,000 years down the road...
@@AjayAjay-gz3oz Nuclear waste is perhaps the most widely misunderstood issue, and this is a shame because it is one of nuclear's biggest strengths. The science is clear that in the long run spent fuel can and will be recycled in fast reactors which extract the remaining 90+% of the energy content while reducing the need for storage to about 300 years. Keep in mind that no one has ever been harmed or killed by spent nuclear fuel in the entire history of nuclear energy, when know how to handle and store it. Far from being a problem, the waste is actually nuclear's biggest strength. Not only is it tiny in volume but it is the key to long term sustainable use of nuclear energy.
@@Spacedog79 Hitler believed that if you keep repeating a lie... the people will be convinced it to be true.... the story of nuclear technology is the same.... NO ONE DIED OR SUFFERED FROM NUCLEAR... WHATEVER.... Whether it is the victims in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushina or during the early years when workers handling radioactive stuff (oops that it is not part of nuclear energy) suffered then died as their death certificates did not say "Cause of Death... Nuclear Energy" (just like Pollution today... no one died or suffered from it .. right..??) .... You are welcome to keep your head in the sand for the next 100,000+ years hoping the lethal effects of radioactive nuclear waste will go away... but those who have their heads above ground... know much much better.... I spent 30 years in the Nuclear Industry and "cast my shadow" on 20,000MW of different types of Nuclear and Fossil Plants... and observed just "broken promises"... specially neutralizing lethal nuclear waste... and now... here we go again... If nuclear waste is such an asset... why don't you buy it all up (owners will be happy to get rid of it) and become the first "glowing" Trillionaire of the world ... There are thousands of tons of this stuff lying around Decomissioned Nuclear Plants and Nuclear Research Labs all over the USA and the World... with NO TAKERS FOR THIS INVALUABLE ASSET... nothing more nothing less.... Not sure how close you or other nuclear proponents were/are.... Ok let us take YOUR WORD... Nuclear Plants are 100% safe... donot spread any form of Pollution or endanger anyones lives... so what... in the end they all produce steam, like the boiling of water in a kettle, to produce Electricity... so what... yes it was a big deal in the 20th Century... but the 21st Century belongs to to Solar Energy ... also a form of Nuclear Energy... • It is Free (can you match that), • • It is Abundant (can you even come close) • It is Sustainable (match that) • It is Non-Polluting (No nuclear waste of ANY KIND... match that).. • Using UHES based S2S Energy Storage one can get Uninterrupted Solar Electricity (got you there..).. • It can be converted DIRECTLY TO ELECTRICITY (no need for Reactors, Boilers, Turbine, Generators, Condensors and Cooling Water and hundreds of pumps, heaters, fans, automatic valves, sensors.. and on and on and on... )... match that...!!! • The Conversion from Free Energy to Electricity also makes it Competitive ... try that... Thankx... but NO THANKX... I refuse to bury my head in the sand.....
It would have been really interesting if you had included nuclear power, since it is often discussed as a short term solution, that has a lesser carbon footprint than other non-renewables
nuclear is literally the opposite of a short term solution considering construction of plants can be measured in decades. Oh, and the little fact that it is the most expensive energy source we know
@@Tobias-ld2pv Yeah, but the construction of plants taking decades is a feature of the political/legal climate, rather than technology itself. And 4th generation reactors are not suppose to take decades, but basically the time frame for constructing cargo container ships, once the first one is delivered.
Thanks that's Excellent. In the UK we have a bout 20% wind which we back up with gas so the system cost of the wind part is the cost wind generators + cost of gas required to back it up. I would have included nuclear and also a look at France who mostly de-carbonised their electricity grid back in the 80s and showed that when nuclear is done on a large scale the cost reduce enormously (eg same design repeated 20 times is much cheaper and quicker per build than when your just building a one off)
Great info Rosie! Considering the overall goal of replacing fossil fuel power generation with green energy generation, have you done anything with Generation 4 nuclear such as LFTR's and SMR's?
I like this method, but it is limited to comparing energy sources for homes, offices and factories. Can you branch out and use this to compare EVs and ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars? I would love to see the whole-of-life cost comparison done between a Tesla Model 3 and a Toyota Corolla. The more you factor in, the better.
At 6:51 you say 1 BTU is 3412 kWh’s but I think you have that backwards. 1 kWh is 3412 BTU’s. 1 BTU is the amount of energy to raise 1 pound of water 1 degree F. As to the overall video it’s good. As someone who works in the solar field, most new panels won’t last 30 years, and probably not 25. The higher voltage systems (1000-1500vdc) are really hard on panels. But panels are not the largest cost of the system, which is site prep, racking etc. So it will raise the overall cost some. As to over production during some daytime hours, that’s actually just poor design. As more solar comes on line this issue will increase and so a location for all this “excess” power is needed. Could be DCA or some other use such as heating for turbine for night time use. The issue is long term storage, for when you have big multi day storms for example. Or locations with very short days and lots of clouds, there just isn’t enough daytime production to fill a battery. Lithium based batteries are just not up to the scale we need, there is too much embodied energy and materials. I’m curious your take on where, what storage looks like in the future.
LCOE is an imperfect metric for many reasons. The largest is probably due to the time adjusted cost of electricity and storage requirements as you stated. CCGT efficiencies drop a great deal if not used at a high capacity factor. The inefficiencies generated by cycling on and off instead of operating at optimum level sometimes are so large they can actually offset the CO2 reductions associated with renewables. Lastly, why not a single word about Nuclear? High capacity factor and long life with virtually no CO2.
The whole story is BS. It's all about environment wins and those are not in the formulas. Also she assumes wind and solar are more efficient in the future but that's what they said about batteries too and we are nowhere there. Coal on the other hand can be much more CO2 neutral than ANYBODY at the climate alarmist side are taking into account. Also that race is about comparing apples and oranges for very simplified small measurements that are not about reality. All the climate alarmist play games and cherry pick and apply anti science. Woke the same thing.
@@Madrrrrrrrrrrr Coal CO2 neutral? You're kidding me right? Coal is simply the most abundant fossil fuel on Earth (per proven reserves), but you can't say it can be carbon neutral. And even if you do not believe at all in AGW, it has very bad impact on people's health. You seem stuck into your anti-renewables views as some climate alarmists are anti-anything that's fossil fuels.
@@ac0rpbg The problem with nuclear is that any new recent plant announced has had much longer construction periods than planned. Hence its LCOE goes up as the Present Value of electricity generated decreases. CAPEX amount is not the only thing, CAPEX TIMING matters a lot too, and impacts the cost of capital as well. For the high capacity factor, I agree (it's around 90% if I'm not mistaken) and on CO2 I agree too. And another drawback: the public has a very bad image of it in most part of the world, though it may not (and likely not) deserve to have such a bad image.
@@nc27fr I said: much more CO2 neutral. Ever heard of filters? Storing CO2 underground? It's already happening. And i'm not stuck in anything. The trash from solar and wind is HUGE. That's why i said it's about environment wins which means i don't deny climate change. Although there isn't much hard proof.
Thank you for exploring the pluses and minuses of hydrogen for space heating. My takeaway from the video was that the problems seem to be centered on the pipeline transport of hydrogen gas. It seems to me that generating hydrogen at each point of use would eliminate this class of problems. There are multiple commercial sources of water electrolysis units that are currently available which could meet the need of point of use hydrogen generation for nearly all sizes of installations. These systems could be adapted to take advantage of the installed base of space heating systems that currently burn fossil fuels and contribute significantly to our CO2 crisis.
Two things to remember about burning hydrogen: 1) it’s only totally clean when used in a fuel cell. When burned it gives off GHG. 2) burning pure hydrogen in you home appliances will be far too hot. You have to mix it with methane in order to burn in safely. I like how you’re thinking outside of the box, but I don’t believe burning hydrogen is going to be a good idea outside of operations like making steel.
The problem with nuclear is that at this point LCOE predictions that are lower than what we see with the AP1000 in the US or the EPR in Europe, are speculative. And at LCOE costs like Lazard is estimating them for nuclear (i.e. the empirical costs when looking at the mentioned EPRs and AP1000s) is simply too high to make nuclear competitive.
Pretty sure Nuclear doesn't improve with VALCOE as it can't dynamically adjust to demand. In terms of LCOE, Construction is terrible, finance is also terrible, capacity factor is great, fuel is negligible and maintenance is anywhere between negligible and pretty damn bad. There is a huge amount of variance though, and should really be done individually for each regulatory scheme, as the construction and finance costs can vary enormously.
@@jimmychin8313 Potentially. Several planned reactors are in the construction version of development hell where they are billions over budget and years behind schedule. There are also reactors that are built on time, in six to eight years and on budget that will be profitable and useful. Also the most common way of making reactors more viable is by extending the design lifetime of a reactor when it reaches the end of its existing design lifetime. This can practically halve the LCOE but isn't suitable if the reactor is already having issues.
Yes! And you have anticipated how I want to approach my planned future video on the cost of storage. ARENA has a nice report with modelling from ITP showing the cost of each form of generation with various durations of storage. Very interesting way to compare. arena.gov.au/projects/dispatchable-renewable-electricity-options/
The capacity factor for nuclear is over 90%! I wish nuclear held greater sway in these discussions - it seems like the most pragmatic solution to the energy crisis.
The capacity factor is only that high, as long as there exist truly dispatchable power plants (i.e. gas), that can react to demand changes. If you have a lot of nuclear power plants, then the capacity factor will be lower. For example, in France, the nuclear capacity factor is only 70%.
Yeah, you need to add in a carbon tax to get nuclear to compete with natural gas and coal. With 4th generation technology, you probably can compete even factoring in the insurance subsidy for nuclear.
You have totally ignored the" true -cost accounting" of any carbon fuel. In nuclear you must account for the price of making fuel and the cost of storing spent fuel. Coal emissions must be scrubbed. And coal is harmful to human lungs. Coal pollution runoff damage to waterways - and total carbon emissions to atmosphere will shorten a viable future for humans on Earth. Disappointed that you did not include that in your basic calculations.
Something that is omitted almost 100% of the time is coal gas emissions. The naturally occurring methane that accompanies coal and gets released into the atmosphere. We have to carefully vent and monitor coal mines. Otherwise workers get asphyxiated and mines explode. That is underground gas that gets freed by the process of mining. More gas is released when the coal is crushed prior to use in a coal plant. We are simply ignoring this source of greenhouse gas emissions.
It was sort of kind of included in the carbon price mention, and was discussed at the end of the video. Unfortunately human beings are terrible at understanding things that cannot be easily converted to numbers that have to be dealt with eg fuel and build costs. Some of us assume that if something does not have a direct, clear cost now, then we can ignore it. Blatantly wrong but a common failing. (I like the video, and I am grateful to Rosie for creating it.)
The Lazard report Rosie references specifically states it accounts for all nuclear fuel mining, fuel milling, plant decommissioning, and spent fuel storage.
@@factnotfiction5915 The cost for spent fuel storage for the next 100,000 years? How about the cost for abandoned uranium mine cleanups. We know of roughly 18,000 sites so far.
@@bobwallace9753 Nuclear nations have a spent nuclear fuel liability that is: * contained * stored * maintained * and isolated from the biosphere. * in most places (ex: USA) the funds to deal with this are collected as a tax on electricity AS IT IS GENERATED (so the financing exists). Nuclear nations can find time to deal with it over the next several decades (it harms no one where it is, and of course, we have known technical options to deal with it). Germany is spewing fossil fuel emissions (CO2, SOx, NOx, particulates) into the biosphere. These emissions are: * not contained * not stored * not maintained * IN the biosphere. Germany must deal with this problem NOW, it harms people NOW, the IPCC suggests actions NOW to have an impact before 2050, 2100 - waiting decades is not an option.
I do think that you could have included hydro electric and nuclar in your tables. It might not be a major parts of the supply in Australia, but it is important globally.
Beautifully done, Rosie. Halfway through I paused to write a comment that you should include storage costs - and then you dod! Near the end I was going to say you haven’t included externalities - then you did! It’s one hell of a lot more complicated than most of the deniers - or the AGW accepters - realise and you’ve managed to show that. In the end, though, it’s population. We have outstripped the planet’s capacity to absorb the waste as well as provide the resources. It’s people, people: people!
I just picked the top two fossil, top two variable renewables. This took me about 80 hours of work to produce, so I couldn't add in everything that's interesting. It also missed hydro and geothermal. If you're interested in nuclear, then watch out for a video on small modular reactors and nuclear hydrogen some time in February probably.
@@EngineeringwithRosie While first adding my thanks for the great video, I second the view that it would have been great to include nuclear in this. While i agree that gas peaker plants will be around for a long time, we know that fossil fuels must be phased out asap from bulk generation. So whether or not they are more expensive than renewables is somewhat of an academic point. The more important thing for the future is how the cost of nuclear compares with the cost of renewables plus storage to provide power at all times of day and year as needed. The cost for nuclear is in the region of double that for renewables so you would think nuclear isn't worth bothering with, but i was shocked to discover the lcoe for batteries is nearly double that for nuclear. So it is a complicated question. Added to the complexity as you hinted at here, is that the value of energy massively depends on how mismatched demand and supply are which depends on the generation mix. As you said if you have lots of solar then the energy produced becomes almost worthless some of the time. People say that batteries pay for themselves in a short time. But that is only because there are very few of them online so they can earn massive prices. It's like there is only 1 hotel in town they can charge what they like. With 4 hotels they have to compete on price.
nice vid but why not having subsidies in account? both for renewables and non renewables... would be great to have them in consideration. what if they wouldnt exist?
Rosie, I often see presentations of calculations like this, seldom do I see the inclusion of the acquisition and transportation cost of petroleum-based fossil fuels. It would seem any fair comparison of energy costs would capture these considerable costs that are currently externalized by energy companies but born by consumers.
Correct, it was not a video about geothermal or nuclear or batteries :-) All those are good ideas for future videos though, and I do have one in progress on nuclear.
The value of energy is why the wind power generated on the passes to the central valley of California is so valuable - the wind resource very closely matches the demand, especially into the evening on hot summer days.
What ever we use it has to be affordable, my electricity bill has quadrupled, because they decommissioned fossil fuel generators before their end of life for a mad dash for renewables. In the 1960's they promised us cheap abundant electricity using nuclear, that never happened and now they are promising cheap green energy which is not so cheap as my bills have quadrupled.
Your BTU conversion is backwards at 6:45 - there are 3412 BTUs in one kilowatt-hour.
A more useful comparison might be to compare the cost that it takes to meet a realistic power demand curve for a certain geographical area using a certain power source or combination of sources. Ideally, the demand curve spans enough time to include rare events such as heat waves or winter storms where peak demand is much higher than the average daily peak.
Concentrated Solar Power towers have thermal storage built in, sometimes for up to 15 hours.
Could you do an episode on why CSP towers are around as expensive today as they were ten years ago? Thanks for your work :)
Simply because there is really no new technology in the process to drive the costs down with scale. And the fact that it is very limited in locations where it can operate.
With CSP you run into hard material limits, physical limits. There simply is no material that's able to reliably handle the temperatures generated with CSP over a long time. Also cooling, it's extremely difficult and questionable if it's worth it in general.
@@oldrageface8706you're right, this is exactly what is happening now in the largest CSP plant in the world here in Morocco, they've run into multitudes of structural problems, the latest of which is leaking, the plant has stopped for maintenance for at least 6 months. And even when the plant was working at capacity it was very costly, more than double of its sister photovoltaic plant in the same location. CSP is a flop for now.
Some reasons I don't like renewables.
1. Short service life.
2. Unreliability (low capacity factor)
3. Vulnerability to natural disasters
4. Need for expensive power connections, which usually isn't talked about
5. need for expensive energy storage
6. poor recyclability and disposal options at end of life
7. social and environmental costs of raw materials
8. Land use and NIMBY issues
9. Grid instability due to lack of predictability
10. Difficulty of maintenance for offshore wind and wave power
11. stubbornness of renewable zealots and their dislike of nuclear
Energy use avoidance usually trumps any other form of investment in terms of returns. Window and wall shading, or insulation are simple examples. Modifying zoning to allow residents to access services without cars is another at a larger, though still very human scale.
Poor zoning is one of the biggest climate issues that few talk about. Forcing huge numbers of people to drive an hour or more every day and doubling the amount of infrastructure we need to serve the same people is not good climate policy. Super low densities require lots of cars and lots of roads and lots of parking which leads to even lower density. It's not a great cycle.
I wonder how diminishing returns factor into this- I am an architect in Germany and it seems like we are at least close to getting tiny improvements for massive efforts. New buildings are insulated so well, the biggest energy loss comes from ventilation- so we need automatic ventilation systems because you technically can't open the windows anymore. I could be wrong on the scale here, maybe we are still far from diminishing returns, but it seems like the building sector is already pretty "optimized" while other sectors are still in the "small changes would do much" zone. Building has gotten so expensive, that money has to be earned somehow, and earning money also costs energy and has a hard do calculate CO2 footprint associated with it.
@@cadekachelmeier7251 The zoning a lot of cities in the US practice is not only an ecological nightmare, I think it deteriorates quality of live as well. I live in a European town built for pedestrians 1000 years ago (at least the center). Public transport is good, you can get everywhere by bicycle as fast or even faster than by car. There is a lot of mixed zoning, allowing I commute by train or bicycle, depending on weather, season and my mood. My wife walks to her work of place in 5min. When we prepare dinner and miss some ingredients I walk 3min to the grocery to get it. There are restaurants in the area, and sometimes we order food - full meals from restaurants - which is delivered by bicycle. My children walked to primary school themselves starting at an age of 6 years, it is just 5min, no need to escort or even drive them. Later they used public transport. Now they study in other cities/towns, they get there by train, no need to buy a car.
We do have a family car, but it is more a nice-to-have than a real need, we use it in particular for leisure time activities (going hiking or skiing, vacation ...).
Only true if the energy is imported, ie not self produced from ones own energy conversion resources.
@@olik136 Totally agree, number of passive built million dollar mega homes here in Australia is pretty insane and many of them are backed by things like Bitcoin or other things that might as well just be diesel truck racing when you consider how efficiently their business model works in terms of emissions to how it could be done.
It would be really good if you could go a follow-up on the relative price of energy storage with different systems for example battery storage, pumped hydro or something simple as heating sand or bricks??
We have a current example in Austria. The existing pump power station in Kaprun is getting reworked - was originally from 1955 - into a 833 MW electric power, 610 MW charge power, 742 GWh yearly capacity @ 405 million Euros. The existing power plant and storage adds around 300 million Euros. For a total of 700 million without the need for buying the land! Because it was state owned. And without discussion with the BUND or the Grüne Liga because: 1955!
A battery with the same capacity and a daily recharge@600MW would need at least 600MWh x 365 = 219GWh - not enough. It would have to be at least 3,4 GWh or around 900 million Euros to reach similar yearly capacity. With much lass landuse!
Fact: Battery storage is about the same startup cost as a pump hydro power plant in the same dimension.
BUT: A hydro power plant lasts at least 50 years. A battery of course not.
In 50 years a hydro powerr plant will be about 50% - including manpower for repairs, new turbines etc. of the cost of battery storage
BUT Again: Battery storage can react in 20 Milliseconds. A Pump Storage needs a few minutes to turn around the flow of water.
Verdict: Battery storage is better used with small decentralized solutions everywhere.
Every village and community should have thier own megapack or something similar.
Pump hydro is of course only usabele if you have the mountains. And can sacrifice them for energy storage.
That storage can come from policies that encourages purchase of EVs and using part of its battery capacity for a distributed grid. The average commute in the USA is something like 30 miles per day.
@@gr8bkset-524 If you can and are allowed to connect your cars to the grid and have the software that the grid can use your battery to store short time electric energy.
Neither is the case and will not be for a long time in Europe. Maybe in the US or Australia they will start to do just that. But in Europe it takes a very long time before something like that is permitted.
@@elephantintheroom5678 Depending on the area in every house locally, in every community e.g. one megapack for our village would be perfect. Or a few strategically placed megapacks or something similar in and aorund bigger cities. They got enough space. Batteries can e.g. be stored underground and most european cities have many and big places under ground.
@@wolfgangpreier9160 Few if any Americans will want their EV to become part of the grid. Actually, few Americans want an EV.
Thank you for the video (s). I’m one of the tiny fraction of your viewers who is not a fan of formulas. My formal education was too brief. So thanks for including me.
One of the greatest TH-cam videos of all time. Interesting, authoritative, educational. Thank you!!
I hope key decision makers are following your work. Your analyses are very good.
Brilliant simple explanation! Great too that you went beyond LCOE to explain why that's only the start. I like to remember that LCOE is an investment metric, to inform investors in energy projects how much money they can make. So it only has a loose relevance to the total final price of retail electricity that we all pay.
I do also think costs are still most important even if you care more about climate change or other impacts. If we properly internalize all the costs like CO2 this will help us find the cheapest, and therefore easiest, ways to address these important issues. And because that makes it good business, investors will then put their finance into the projects that are needed to deliver whats needed, and just as importantly won't invest into the ones we don't want.
I realize that fully internalizing costs is a big 'if' but many governments are now moving policy for things like CO2 and social benefits in the right direction.
This was very interesting and helped put the economics in perspective as well as the differences. I would be interested to see a video about how nuclear energy compares to renewables and fossil fuels.
Do you mean all the world having nuclear industries to stop CO2?
lol I came her for nuke figures .. no luck
@@magicker8052 I have posted a lot of numbers against nuclear and for Renewables.
Have a read of my comments 😀
OMG, you don't need her to tell you that nuclear power is way way the most costly way to produce electricity and also who would want a nuke power station next door, just will not happen.
@George Simmons with Electric vehicles, EV, tripling electrical supply demand, the home plus 2 EVs, the grid has to triple in capacity.
Nuclear is a concentrated supply reflecting the existing privately owned power plants.
If BWRX300, a small 300Mw nuclear power plant, and at a $1billion each and replacing 3x existing fossil fueled power plants capacity the financial burden will be locked into power costs for 60 to 100years.
If every building has rooftop solar PV then every EV can be topped up daily.
Every building is connected to the grid.
Every EV will be trading power for money with the grid.
I am talking about a dispersed power supply with the grid concentrating power from the ends of the grid.
No need to expand the grid capacity.
No need for nuclear.
No need for huge monopoly investments and monopoly political donations.
Renewables technology can continue to push efficiency and lower prices.
We will pay to connect to the grid.
Do the numbers.
Given that they enable a 100% renewable system to be 100% available, shouldn’t the cost of batteries (not just e.g. LiFePO, but e.g. liquid air, etc.) should play a greater part in these calculations.
You do need to factor in energy storage technology costs (battery, flywheel, ect) that solar and wind do require if you are going to count them as totally green. Alternatively, lacking some sort of storage method, there is the fossil fuel approach to backup power (coal and natural gas). Add in these factors and you will get a much more realistic and accurate cost of renewables. Most analysis of renewables seem to always leave these factors out for some reason, as if they do not matter, but the reality is they do represent a very major part of the equation and any discussion that leaves them out is useless.
This has been my comment on renewables for a long time. In the UK we have an almost completely untapped renewable that does not have a huge storage problem, tidal turbines. The coastal tide flow phasing around the islands gives a very good and predictable output over time. Little has been invested as the politicians do not see it as politically "sexy".
That is not calculated in because it is just the cost of energy. And if you want to include that you also need to include transportation cost, because transporting energy from a handful centralized coal plants needs far more infrastructure and has a lot more losses than using local small renewable plants. Then you also can include health costs with fossil plants and the costs of the damage the failure of those plants produce, as fossil fuel plants don't have a naturally redundancy.
renewables are way more expensive than fossile fuels
You took the words right out of my mouth.
Why no talk of hydroelectric generation?
Just like you can have solar panels on your house without a battery to store it - IE, use whatever is generated and sell excess to the grid, you can also have the exact same thing in principle, the point of this wasn't to discuss 'the energy problem' in terms of how we go about the whole issue, but specifically the cost of building, generating and maintaining these energy sources. You could use coal or gas to charge batteries too. Even if it's not a smart thing to do, it could be done. Read the description. Rosie specifically questions "What happens when the sun goes down and we still want to use electricity?" - not as a "this is in the video" but as a food for thought comment.
I Own and build small hydro and noticed you didn't include it in your race ...WHY. Bizarrely hydro is the most expensive technology and the cheapest so it would have been good to include especially as its the largest source of renewable electricity in the world.
Currently we are building 4 schemes subsidy free and its quite a challenge to raise the large amount of cash required for a UK (Scottish) build,
Great video... Thank you for taking the time to do it so well.
Rosie, I really enjoy your videos. I know there are a lot of people calling for more depth, but from what I've seen you tend to get to the depth by creating follow on videos on topics. I think it's a good approach because it keeps your video length reasonable and I share your videos because I think they don't overwhelm people. That's important for those strange people who aren't energy nerds.
BTW, speaking of strange people, what kind of person is it who doesn't love a good equation?
Thanks for all you do.
The tools we are going to balance the renewables grid with are as you mentioned storage, transmission, demand/load shifting, overbuild, and maybe a little dispatchable generation, like gas, which could be bio gas if it's used very little. My problem is, I have a dumb meter that can't measure when I produce or consume electricity. I should be charging my car when it's cheap. Some thermal storage is really cheap, like having a smart thermostat lower the temperature in your home in hot weather 2 extra degrees when the sun is up, then turn it up 4 degrees during the evening peak. Overbuild will compete with storage some, particularly with wind. If there are large swaths of time, somebody might find something with low capital costs, that can do something useful with cheap electricity. Also, have you ever watched Tony Seba?
V2G is also part of the solution
@@foley.elec.services I don't know whether people will want to do that a lot, but California was in danger of rolling blackouts for like 3 hours in the last year. If a million BEVs put 7kw on the wire for those 3 hours, that's 7GW extra, which is a huge amount of power when you are a little short, but building anything for 3 hours of use is stupid expensive.
Another plug for Tony Seba, ReThinkX. He's really become one of my new gurus.
"Renewable Energy" -- a kid's-lemonade-stand business model, "batteries not included".
* * *
I don't care about global warming.
I'm not going to impoverish myself by 25% in order to "fight global warming"?
What are the consequences of global warming?
1) A 1-2 degree increase in average temperature: I don't care. I can deal with that by turning down the temperature on the AC thermostat (and I prefer milder winters).
2) A 1.2 inches per decade rise in sea level: again, I don't care becuase:
a) Most people live well enough above that for that to be of any concern to anyone alive today.
b) In 100 years time, this may be a concern for people living on beachfront property, but they are the most wealthy people among us and I'm not impoverishing myself by 25% to preserve their vacation homes. Coastal cities that haven't already built their waterfronts to handle a 1.2 foot rise in sea level have 100 years to deal with the problem.
c) Poor and low lying subsistence agricultural lands have a tough row to hoe, but sea levels have been rising for more than 100 years, and their circumstances would be better improved by moving out of subsistence agriculture and into higher value added (and mobile) occupations.
3) Oceans becoming less basic (currently 8.1 pH; 7.0 is neutral, i.e. tap water): again, I don't care. a) I don't care if clam shells become more fragile at this level of pH. b) I find it preposterous to hear that clams, with billions of years of evolution behind them in a hostile environment (sea water), can't handle a 0.1 decrease in basic ("alkaline", not "acidic") pH -- which is a movement toward neutral, i.e. "fresh" water. [The term "ocean ACIDITY" is used by climate hustlers to incite fear for political and personal gain.]
Have I missed anything? Melting glaciers? Sorry, I'm not impoverishing myself by 25% over receding glaciers.
Sorry, but I don't care. The costs and power grabs behind this issue are astounding. So are the lottery-ticket benefits, unless you are in on the scam: the politicians, enforcers, and renewable energy opportunists.
If you feel so strongly about global warming, you should lobby for THORIUM MOLTEN SALT REACTORS -- not only for electricity, but for manufacturing synthetic gasoline -- all carbon neutral.
If not already familiar with it, here is a playlist for it:
th-cam.com/play/PL6JjafE5gsb9nSmudoj5MUKxX8LTKO0-J.html
Here is a list of Australia's green energy fiascos:
th-cam.com/video/HWRyVemsTvs/w-d-xo.html
Big Trouble in the Tropical Troposphere (Aug 27, 2021)
John Robson/CDN - Climate Discussion Nexus
th-cam.com/video/n6VM41-v2gg/w-d-xo.html
Min 16:30
What we found (is) the amount of heat that is being retained by THE MODELS is much greater than what we actually see in the real world. So this is important in the sense that it's a test metric. In other words all the models show this should be happening when you increase greenhouse gases -- when you increase that heating amount, and it's something we don't find, which means the real atmosphere evidently has ways to expel that heat that the models don't allow. It turns out that the models that agree most with the actual observations -- you know, they're still too warm but they're closer to it -- are the ones that are LEAST SENSITIVE TO CARBON DIOXIDE -- the ones that have the lowest warming rate at the surface. Scientifically it's just uh amazing or almost incomprehensible because in in the scientific method we make a claim and then we test that claim against independent data. - John Cristy, professor of atmospheric science.
Vs.
Min 4:00 to 11:00
1. Climate Change -- the scientific debate (Sep 21, 2008)
Source: Potholer54
th-cam.com/video/52KLGqDSAjo/w-d-xo.html
I'm curious about LCOE of molten salt reactors as well as solar with energy storage.
Your videos are still amazing! Have not commented for a while, but nothing has changed! Its still top notch :D
Is it possible to include energy storage costs of renewables to LCOE to improve the accuracy of equivalence?
Yes, but it's a lot more complicated. I will do a video like that next year.
@@EngineeringwithRosie apologies, I didn't mean to suggest it was simple I just wondered if I was possible to do
@@wyldrushorchard1061 Love how reasonable this community is!
@@EngineeringwithRosie I'm really looking forward to it.
@@EngineeringwithRosie i believe that, even including storage and transmission upgrade costs, solar still has a lower lcoe than new fossil build-out. i'm keen for a video on this, yo! show the australian public how it is really not impossible
Considering that the program ignores the fact that solar and wind have a heavy material demand that our mines today cannot meet....and therefore material prices will skyrocket and be another factor.
another great video ,well done. A lot of prep went into that.
One of the greatest TH-cam videos
This was a great video, it laid out the various factors very clearly!
A big missing piece though, is the value of grid stability and the cost of maintaining it in the face of the wide swings in the availability of renewable energy, and the potential for low periods coinciding with each other (no wind and no solar at the same time).
Rather than looking at the expense per KWh of gas generation on its own, some amount (I suspect a fair bit) of the cost of gas peaker plants should be tallied on the renewables side of the ledger. Without the extreme variability of renewables, I doubt the Aussie government would have needed to build a gas peaker plant with a projected 2% capacity factor.
Another cost that’s not accounted for is that for transmission. While solar can be distributed fairly easily, in practice it usually isn’t, so transmission capacity may need to be added to accommodate it. This is a much bigger issue for wind power, because wind farms must typically be located far from population centers. (Everyone loves cheap wind power, as long as the windmill is in someone else’s back yard :-)
I also question the assumed lifetime of wind generators. I haven’t made a study of the area like you have, but my impression is that wind turbines have been experiencing much shorter lifetimes than initially projected. What’s the most recent data looking like on thar?
Finally, there’s the financial and environmental cost of decommissioning. Again I don’t know the specifics, but wind turbine components (especially the blades) are troublesome to dispose of in an environmentally responsible manner, and solar panels have toxicity issues when consigned to landfills as well.
I don’t want to seem too negative though; this was an excellent and very clear presentation of a lot of complicated concepts; well done!
The short life of wind turbines is simply opportunity cost. If you had a 0.5MW built 10 years ago, then there is the cost of land rent, tower, site access, network access, engineering and operations. So if you are replacing an old one with a new say 4.5MW or 15MW, you have the wind data, you have grid connection, road access, & rental of land and maintenance. So you increase wind production by maybe 10 times, for just the cost of the turbines. And reduce maintenance with the latest gear.
@@HughButler35 That's a very good point; a lot of the site-prep/access/network and operations infrastructure will be substantially amortized, so upgrading the generating capacity will have a different cost basis than the initial turbine. But the short life does still affect the cost justification for the first turbine. Its LCOE will be a good bit higher than initially calculated. It'd be interesting to see a full analysis that calculates the overall LCOE, assuming shorter life spans and lower going-forward site costs, across 2 or 3 generations of turbines.
Decommissioning and disposal costs do need to be included though; my impression is they're substantial, and I haven't yet seen any analysis that includes them. (These costs may vary a lot by location, depending on local regulations for waste disposal, so it could be difficult to come up with universally-applicable figures. Still, it would be good to see at least *some* analysis of the issue, even if it were just a single data point for a single location.)
@@DEtchells I don't see in any LCOE the cost of end of life, value of recycled products. EVs case in point. What's a 70kW battery value to home storage? Would a wind farm simply be upgraded for decades or hundreds of years?
I agree. Comparing the cost of producing electricity is not complete if the source that you are evaluating cannot practically perform the task without additional power sources to solve the intermittency issue. The costs of these additional sources, whether they be peaking gas fired plants or something else (grid storage plus additional quantities of renewables to cover the demand peaks or some other source) should be included for a fair comparison. The truth is that coal or gas fired power plants can satisfy a realistic power demand on their own, while solar or wind can not.
@@HughButler35 (Sorry for long-delayed reply) Yeah, decommissioning/recycling costs aren’t usually included in LCOE, probably because it’s hard to get a handle on them. My general concern is that there are significant costs of wind and solar that aren’t being considered in many starry-eyed assessments of their value. Ditto various negative externalities.
I was actually a huge fan of wind power a few years ago, but as I learned more about life cycles, disposal issues and grid stability, my view shifted. Currently, I favor solar as a renewable, although grid stability is a major overlooked problem with current storage tech, and as noted above, the costs of peaker plants aren’t being properly included in the LCOE calculations. Solar does have the advantage of a much longer life when recycling is considered. Output efficiency declines through poorly-understood aging processes, but decommissioned commercial/industrial panels will doubtless find their way into secondary markets as less-efficient but much cheaper products.
Best explanation of LCOE yet. Thank you.
This is just the kind of analysis that Logan Power and Light of Logan, Utah, along with every other electric utility in the world, needs to make in shopping for new capacity. I see a time when the role of the electric utility will be less of a service of connecting many consumers to a few big produces and more of a brokerage service and a smart grid that will connect multiple producer/consumers with other producer/consumers.
First time watching your channel - superb video, and by far the happiest presenter of this type of content! Speaking as someone who has worked in renewables for quite some time, it is very encouraging to see this type of analysis given an engaging and accessible makeover. I'll be back for sure.
Great video Rosie! Loved the analogy and glad to see the video is doing so well given all the time this must have taken :D
Thanks! I have been surprised how many people are interested in this topic! But that's great because it makes me feel like I can tackle some other challenging topics and hopefully get a good response.
That LCOE trend chart at 10:40 tells the whole story.
And of course generating efficiency matters. Production Capacity is part of the formulas.
Great video and content! As a generation resource engineer for a utility, this is extremely helpful. I like that you touched on VALCOE, but I would like to see this exact analysis, but include storage (12 hour?) with the wind and solar. Use something like ESS or EOS as storage products because I see those as leaders in non-Li-Ion technology, where Li-Ion isn't typically economical for over 4 hour durations.
Your video title is wrong. The video is all about True Cost of *Electricity*. Unfortunately the two often get confused. Most countries already produce a lot of their electricity from renewable sources. However it looks a lot worse when we also consider heating and transportation.
Nice video, thank you! There’s also a geo-political dimension to the equation, especially here in Europe. Our reliance on oil and gas has created a dependancy on Russia, which is being exploited for political purposes. And Russia is financing much of its military power using the income it generates from selling fossil fuels. In other regions (the Middle East, Nigeria, Venzuela), other factors come into play, but it safe to say that oil and gas do have a negative impact on political stability and, indirectly, on our ability to combat climate- and environmental crises.
Thats a big, big issue that tends to get overlooked.
@@durwoodmaccool890 Yes we need to become independent from fossil fuels asap. That alone is a reason to invest massively in solar and wind, the energy grid and storage solutions.
@@h.e.hazelhorst9838 Europe will be so beautiful covered with wind and solar "farms"
This turned out to be a prescient comment!
@@EngineeringwithRosieYes, sadly so. People have been (and still are ) naive, to a point that it is threatening our future. We have allowed big oil to take over, economically and politically. Right now, Exxon Mobile is taking the EU commission to court to fight its plans to stop fossil fuel investments. The fight is not yet over.
Just had to comment on how awesome your long elaborate analogies are. Biggup yourself !
Very interesting video, thank you so much. Regretfully the orientation seems somewhat Australian oriented, and as such has left out hydroelectricity and nuclear. The latter has huge advantages, namely very low variable cost, just like solar, wind and hydro, it basically can operate 24/7 all 365 days of the year, thus being an excellent base source of energy, rather than a subsidiary peak source for the high evening demand, which commands the highest prices per MWh. Disadvantages are that it is not scalable, that is to say that of necessity they must be big, starting at 500-1,000 MW (technology has not come up with 50-100 MW reactors), very high initial costs, a nuclear generator may set you back to the tune of 5-8 mln USD per MW, vs maybe 1-1.5 for natural gas (higher for combined cycles), extended building time, 6-8 years for nuclear vs less than 2 for gas, and the unquantifiable cost of storing radioactive waste byproduct for the next 100,000 years. Hydro has many things in common with nuclear, namely high building costs, namely 3-5 mln USD per MW, close to zero variable costs, and reasonable availability, maybe 25-30% for small rivers, but it can be as high as 60-70% for the big rivers. Plus a small handicap, usually these dams are not necessarily close to consumption centres, so that entails the additional cost of transmission lines and some energy loss in the process. Greetings from Down Under (I'm from Argentina!).
when the problem is over heating it seems like a bad idea to introuduce thermonuklear heat
Nuclear energy has a truckload of problems. For starters, no one wants to store the toxic waste in their backyard. And that's if the reactors work 100% without a hitch. On top of that (as seen in Canada), if the government wasn't investing and intervening on behalf of the nuclear industry, it would be impossible for it to get a loan or insurance (for years in Canada a nuclear reactor would have a limited responsibility of 75 millions $CA in case of an accident). Lastly, even with molten salts and thorium, all these nuclear reactors require uranium isotopes (yes Thorium decomposes to U-232 and requires uranium to start the process). If you ask me, the only proper place for nuclear energy is in space.
@@obiwanceleri indeed nuclear technology does have problems and drawbacks, and I mentioned the most serious one. Besides the real ones there are imaginary ones as well. Like thinking that somehow an uncontained reaction would take place, which is altogether impossible. Explosive devices require fissile material enriched to 95%, commercial generators operate with a 5% concentration. Others associate the technology with death, which again os unsubstantiated. In 70 years there have been 3 major accidents: Three Mile Island (nobody died), Fukushima (a couple died, and indirectly, not directly from radiation) and Chernobyl where the toll was higher, but resulting from the crude Soviet technology used. The reactor was not even contained in a dome. Today no plant on earth is designed like that. In all three cases radiation escaped to the atmosphere in different amounts, but let me tell you that even the worst pales in comparison to the radiation released by coal powered plants. Coal, like everything else does contain minute doses of radioactive isotopes, which when burned go to the atmosphere. Plus the huge amounts of CO2, P and S impurities that we get to breathe as a byproduct. These are carcinogenic. Plus global warming. Indeed, no technology is perfect or without drawbacks. Financing is costlier simply because building time is 6-8 years v less than 2 for a plant that runs on gas, hence it is considered a higher risk.
Adding nuclear would not be towing the company line. Plant life of over 60 years and nearly free (extremely cheap, even able to run on its own waste) fuel and an up time of 50 to 51 weeks a year.
@Hels Miäs totally true. The flooded area will greatly depend on local topography. In flat plains to can be considerable to reach a minimum water head to make the dam economically viable. No electricity source is problem free
Appreciate the analogy - will share with friends and colleagues interested in learning more about energy.
One very important cost factor that should have been included is the end-of-life. This is particularly true for the latest technology in solar panels and the wind turbines have their own special difficulties. Also, nuclear should’ve been included in order to show the full picture of electrical energy generation.
It's telling that no insurance company will cover decommissioning costs for nuclear. So the overruns (up to an order of magnitude higher) go on tax payers who are not even born yet.
@@macmcleod1188 No argument here. “Order of magnitude...”? Throw it in there. Let’s see the full picture. You never see a full reconciliation of costs and benefits. Gasohol is a good example. When you do a complete analysis you find that the cost per mile amounts to paying for the unleaded gas plus the alcohol. The whole thing is just a subsidy for corporate agriculture paid for by the general population.
My energy bills have dropped 80% since my move to solar and geothermal. Its absolutely amazing and I cant believe the negative info. I was getting killed yearly with $5k oil bills and my AC/electric bill was over $500 a month. Last month my electric bill was $58. My break even point will be five year or less depending on the price of oil. No turning back here.
Environmental cost of land rehabilitation after coal mining should also be included in total costs.
Rosie, enjoyed your analysis in this video. And while I'm a proponent of renewable energy, I haven't seen an honest in-depth look at the the dis-advantages of wind or solar. Considering the perplexing problems of eWaste and current status of recycling for solar power alone is worthy of your attention. Toxic chemicals and elements built into them as well as used in their manufacturing, needs an honest look.
I have done a few videos on wind turbine blade recycling, and I'll do more next year since a lot has happened since I made those. And I toured a solar panel recycling facility recently so will have a video on that topic out in the new year 😀
Renewable projects rarely (if ever) publish the additional required to keep a gas power station on standby to fill in their unreliable output. The price of electricity has certainly not come down in the UK. I support clean energy but the elephant in the room is lack of grid storage and I don't see that being solved in the near future.
Rosie, as an engineer (and economist) i love your videos. Keep up the great work!
A fair analysis as far as it goes, but the environmental impacts, and therefore the costs, of continuing to use natural gas are not negligible. In their sixth assessment report, the IPCC demonstrates that perhaps the only viable emissions pathway consistent with limiting global heating to the critical +1.5 Celsius threshold requires immediate and rapid reductions in anthropogenic methane emissions. The problem with burning natural gas lies not just with its combustion emissions but also substantial fugitive emissions from extraction and transport.
and building solar "farms" in America is resulting in large losses of forest land- I suppose that environmental impact should be ignored?
Ignore the IPCC and Climate Alarmism... The Neo-Globalist Fake-Greens are owned by multinational industrialists that are no better than the fossil fuel companies. They want to replace a mostly Iron + Carbs based economy with a million complicated to make neo-materials that are equally difficult to recycle more often than not..
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CO2 is demonised like Jews were (like Covidiots and White Male English-speakers are too by The Neo-Left that is owned by uber-right factions).. It's a SCAPEGOAT SMOKESCREEN for their Neo World Order and Industrial Revolution 2 that will do to the 3rd world what it did to the 2nd world in the last 50 years of Liberal Global Investment, trick-all-downed from The West, to our cultural enemies, TIRPLING THEIR POPULATIONS...
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Africa will see the NEO-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 2... It too will be utterly environmentally raped, this time for 2nd World Mass Consumption, not just 1st world.... It's already happening..
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The one tech. that suits all and offers by far the HIGHEST POTENTIAL BANG PER BUCK, with lowest impact and high safety for the most number of nations is BREEDER REACTORS... This tech. has been looked into a few times since the 1950s, always deemed a great idea, then buried by other interests that corrupt the system.. Trillions wasted on Fusion R & D globally and expensive renewable fake-green solutions that either rot in the sea or oppress and ruin the feel of the countryside, whilst killing 1000s of birds a year..
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Russia has finally started working on this tech properly and China plans to (Thorium Solid Fuel Breeder reactors and Molten Salt Reactor research), but the West could have rolled it out globally by the 1970s if it had got its shit together and stopped listening to Fake Greens and the concentrated Enriched Uranium power and nuclear weapons industries, not just the fossil fuel lobby...
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Russia's plant already sustains fission for longer and longer runs while using 100x LESS ENRICHED URANIUM... Some breeder designs only need Enriched uranium to get the thing lit.. Breeder reactors run on mostly non-fissile, cheap as dirt, radioactive waste products. Their own waste is FAR, FAR less radioactive than current best Western solutions. There are many designs that run on (some of) our nuclear waste stockpiles.
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Your sprawling solutions are suitable for some places but breeder reactors are suitable for nearly all... SMALL MODULAR REACTORS and a few medium sized plants.. Nuclear has the best safety record bar wind and solar (though on some metrics they are worse due to a few accidents, including those at chemical plants needed for the vital neo-materials.... and all the bird deaths).. It's waste is a problem - but not with Breeder Reactors.. The half life of their waste is way shorter... Doesn't need to be buried for eternity.
@@JoeZorzin easy - get rid of animal agriculture and use the massive amounts of freed land for agrophotovoltaics (combined solar and farming activities underneath) or solar + insect sanctuaries.
I appreciate the effort in the video notwithstanding the off-topic editorializing at the end. I remain amazed at how much time is devoted to Lazard's flawed levelized cost statistic that is ostensibly used to justify wind and solar brought into an energy grid these days. I am not against "renewable" power generation ( which I put in quotes because it is narrowly defined as wind and solar these days). I am for it. But, any honest grid operator will state the wind and solar power is disruptive. Wind operates against a production tax credit that subsidizes its operation. The economics for putting power into the market are different than they are for a conventional generator and the spill over is that it affects the economics of independent power producers (IPPs). IPPs are designed to produce non-intermittent power but I acknowledge that is (by necessity of accommodating wind and solar) is changing with synchronous condensers permitting better grid stability. Grid scale battery storage, added redundancy, and the requirement of natural gas to come in when wind + solar isn't available are discounted with LCOE.
Good video! Funny/depressing how many comments are about complications you mention in the last half of the video -_-
Anyways keep up the good work.
Worth noting that governments can influence (mostly reduce) the financing cost part for particular sources if they want to. That's really their main lever for shaping energy policy.
Than you for the edit at the end, reminding us of the hidden costs of burning things to make energy.
Great video Rosie, do the build and fuel input prices include the subsidies provided by Governments (or an averaged factor) for each generation type. There are some subsidies going in to building generation as well as significant subsidies going in to the fossil fuels industry. I also think an extended model for true cost of operation should be developed to include the carbon costs as well as the costs of health impacts, as these are real factors in a true cost of operation model.
Yes please
I'm always opposed to "subsidies" of any kind (The government putting its fat ugly thumb on the scales of economic justice)
Here is what a subsidy is: Payments to the government minus payments from the government.
For instance when I send the government $15,000 in quarterly tax payments and I get $1,000 back at the end of the year I am not being subsidized, am I.
How much cash does Exxon send to the government and how much cash does the government send to Exxon?
Similarly how much cash does the government send to solar panel manufacturers and how much cash do solar panel manufactures send to the government?
Exxon paid $20.176 billion in direct taxes before profits.
After tax profits are taxed individually by Exxon's owners though their individual tax rates. Since there are some 4,097,000,000 owner shares that pay individual taxes on Exxon profits annually if we assume a dividend rate of $3.60 per share the annual taxable dividends would be just shy of $15 billion and the tax rate would be 20% so that's another 2.9 billion per year in taxes for a total of around 23 billion in taxes before their product is taxed again at the pump.
Does anyone have good data on what US solar panel manufactures receive in taxpayer cash vs what they pay in annual taxes. The last one I heard of was Solyndra that received 500 million in taxpayer subsidies before Democrat party kickback payments and executive million dollar golden parachutes before declaring bankruptcy and closing their doors leaving creditors and employees high and dry.
Very good but are not ready yet Rosie, two big ones: costs for the environment and the costs of people getting sick. It is complex.
Yes, and the expected casualty rate from accidents per unit of total energy over the lifetime of the equipment is another cost. For renewables, especially hydro, it is very high; for nuclear is is nearly zero. Fossil fuels are somewhere in between.
Could we add costs of long distance transport of energy to this? I imagine that while the wind doesn't blow all the time in each place, it can be blowing enough somewhere else where the energy can be transported more efficiently with high voltage DC lines. That may be cheaper than storage.
High voltage DC lines? - how do you drop the voltage to a usable level at the end point? The reason 3 phase, 3 wire, AC high voltage power distribution, is the norm across the globe, is because it is the most efficient by far. (Thomas Eddison lost this argument more than120 years ago).
this is my favorite youtube channel
Thank you Rosie for such a clear & concise explanation of the cost of various alternatives. I loved the racing car analogy & think it is so simple even Scott Morrison could understand it & might even like it given his recent Bathurst stunt. It would have been interesting to see Nuclear included as well as it seems to be the latest delaying tactic employed by the fossil fuel lobby.
See Rosie's reply to me above.
this video is Lazard's LCoE analysis for people who don't want to read.
I had checked the numbers previously, but I still loved the "LCoE by car analogy" explanation. :-)
I like this race analogy, but I would approach it from a different angle. Currently we three types of electricity: intermittent (wind, solar), baseload (coal, nuclear) and fully flexible (gas, battery with baseload or intermittent). Comparison would make sense within categories, not between.
My second thought that I fully agree with Rosie that cost and CO2 emissions are not the only factors to consider. In renewables, there are two elements, which we tend to forget time to time. First is the land use, which can be enormous in case of renewables, second is the grid, which we can (theoretically) can avoid in case of a household with renewable plus battery setup. In Hungary I saw already solar farms to be built on first class land, where I think the value of land was not taken into the consideration, when the investment decision was made.
One of the ways I think of solar panels is "farming" but without having to worry about irrigation, plowing, pesticides, or harvesting, just simply harvesting the sun's energy.
Obviously you're right that solar shouldn't go on good farming land, but it's great for drier places
@@theelectricwalrus Actually some farming land is a great place for solar; it provides well needed shade for some types of crops. Look up Agrivoltaics to learn more.
It is not a silver bullet though!
All generation is intermittent. The difference is that we know when the wind will blow and the sun will shine, while we don't know when a nuke plant will drop off line until it and it's 1.2 GW leaves the grid.
@@RechargeableLithium We know when nuclear plants leave the grid - it is called scheduled maintenance.
What we don't know is what next season's weather is going to be like - natural gas isn't at an all-time high in Europe 'just because' - low wind and solar output throughout 2021 (at a time when wind and solar installation are at historic highs) were made up with natural gas and coal - raising those prices, and lowering winter stocks to the lowest level in 30 years.
Hopefully it will be a mild winter.
Conflating a single power-plant's potential for tripping off the grid with the complete and utter failure of a entire sector of the power grid requires quite the moxie.
@@factnotfiction5915 Nice try. I live in Texas. Last winter we lost a full 1/4 of our nuclear generation, plus about 60% of our gas generation due to a deep freeze - none of those were 'scheduled maintenance'. We lost about 700 people because of the grid failure. Our wind and solar kept running.
Excellent video!! Using excess solar/wind electricity to split water & store energy as a buffer is the smoothing curve answer.
Hiya 🤚
Tony Seba's analyse of levelized cost pokes à lot of holes in industry future assumptions. I can't help feeling that the fossil fuel industry subsities are not taken into account in the calulations (never mind à carbon tax)
Yea, the subsidies are hundreds of billions of dollars. and they are slowly becoming more visible.
The International Monetary Fund estimated that the costs to the U.S. government from climate change, local air pollution impacts, and infrastructure damage not captured by energy taxes totaled $686 billion in 2015.
That's on top of over 20 billion dollars in direct subsidies (and doesn't include favorable tax treatment amounting to billions more).
@@macmcleod1188 Can you provide a breakdown of the $20 B in direct subsidies or a source for that. I find that regardless of the industry subsidies is a meaningless term as it is a catch all. Therefore I would like to look into it to see exactly what it means.
@@zmavrick after 2 weeks? nope. my search history is gone.
but if you start with these quotes, you may have more luck finding the data/ studies/ articles.
"IMF: fossil fuel industry the recipient of subsidies of $5.9tn per year
Analysis by the IMF has found that fossil fuels are still receiving subsidies of $5.9tn, equating to $11m per minute."
"The Environmental and Energy Study Institute reported that direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry totaled $20 billion per year, with 80% going toward oil and gas. In addition, from 2019 to 2023, tax subsidies are expected to reduce federal revenue by around $11.5 billion.Jul 14, 2021"
@@macmcleod1188 Thank You
Seems two costs are missing (I could have missed them), the cost of decommissioning should be included, and the cost of energy storage so the wind and solar can function on an equivalent basis to nuclear, gas, oil, coal, etc.
This is amazing! So well presented, and a great analogy. I see mostly renewables + storage as the eventual destination, with fossil fuels on standby for extreme hot or cold. Workplace smart charging of consumer EVs would make solar more valuable, e.g. charge your EV at a fixed $0.05/kWh if it's linked to solar or wind generation. With EVs that have 500km range, and 50km/day the average driving, most consumers would be happy to wait a day or two before filling up if it costs them less than the regular rate - people queuing for 30 minutes at the cheapest gas station in town already proves this.
i'm workin on a offshore wind turbine phd protocol, this is just what i needed, thank you.
Could you compare the whole costs of Nuclear power to renewable energy sources?
thanks for the great video rosie, great explanation as always!
This morning here in west central Alberta Canada, the temperature is -38 C. There is little to no wind and it is overcast with ice fog. It has been similar weather for the last few days and will be for the next week(a little warmer). There is around 50mm of fresh snow on everything, around 250mm of settled snow. And the worst winter weather is yet to come with January and February being traditionally the coldest snowiest months with the least sunshine(7.5 hrs a day right now). So far, renewables are absolutely useless here. That makes fossil fuelled energy indispensable no matter all the graphs and cost analyses and theoretic thinking you can display.
Maybe thermal energy is a better way to put it due to its inertia. So that can include nuclear too
But West Central Alberta Canada is only 500 miles from the North Pacific Ocean, which if filled with offshore windfarms like we have in the UK, could power all your needs many times over. This is just one of many possible ways of making renewables work. Just look at the complexity and innovation we have developed over the last 100 years to mine fossil fuels, if the same effort and energy is applied to renewables it would be possible nearly everywhere including Alberta!
@@stevetaylor2818 It took ten years to try get a piece of infrastructure OK'd from Alberta to the BC coast, then it was still cancelled, ok'd,cancelled, protested, ok'd,cancelled again, bought by the federal gov and ok'd again, still being protested and held up by the BC provincial gov., natives and protestors, still not finished 15 years later. And you think we'll just throw up some equally unwanted windmills and run a massive power line through BC into Alberta, nice try. We will still need 50 more years of fossil fuels.
@@gabrielback5615 I only said was physically possible, I did no talk about the political mess. And the corruption of the Oil and gas to block everything else. Canada and the US are littered with Oil and gas infrastructure (I know I helped build much of it over the last 30 years)
Here in the UK we just finished constructing a 1.2 GW offshore windfarm (biggest in the world) and have even bigger under construction.
And you wont be burning fossil fuels for 50 years, one day in the not so distant future any dirty country burning fossil fuels will be sanctioned by the rest of the world, imports blocked and carbon fines applied, so get your political mess sorted and build alternatives to fossil fuels or your country will go bankrupt!!!
@@stevetaylor2818 Wind isn't all that green when you factor in concrete and recycling problems and is an ugly blight on the landscape. As for corruption, do you believe the big businesses behind so-called green energy will be any more honest? Come on. Environmental groups are the most dishonest orgs I've ever seen...they lie continuously but you're expecting something different from green energy companies?
This is excellent! Everyone should watch this.
And as per usual, no mention of storage costs for renewables and how to balance grid supply - the elephant in the room.
No mention either of nuclear?
A decent attempt but the Lazard report had so many errors and assumption errors.
Spot on. They just gloss over the bit where everyone freezes to death on a cold, still night.
Very pessimistic.
There is many solutions for energy storage and some are already in place and many are being developed.
There is plenty of videos of that here on YT.
Unless you are only here to complain.
@@chrislambaa7586The only practical energy storage solution is pumped hydro but that requires special geography.
@@erikkovacs3097 not at all.
Thermal storage is the best.
In Denmark we just open the world's first thermal storage in MW seize for our windmill power.
This means that we completely removed the reliability issue with windmills.
It opened in Esbjerg the 25th of April, if you want to fund info on it.
This will run for a while and then we will open them up all around Denmark. This is a part of the solution for Denmark to reach our goal to reach 100% renewable energy.
These thermal storage of energy with salt or sand is currently the best solution. Both sand and salt os very easy and very cheap and very good for the environment.
Very clear and well described comparison, Is there any data to compare cost with nuclear also? It feels like nuclear would be the best comparison for Wind/Solar 2021?
Thanks for introducing me to the VALCOE concept!
Seeing this and the duck curve pushes me towards realizing that besides seasonal energy storage, daily and weekly arbitrage of solar energy with plain old lithium ion batteries will systemically improve solar VALCOE!
How to calculate/ compare the cost of storage between different techs is a really important topic and more tricky than LCOE and VALCOE, because there are dozens of different ways you can use energy storage. I will tackle that topic some time next year!
@@EngineeringwithRosie Wow, that would be wonderful! I've been wondering about exactly these questions ever since I heard about LCOE, and even this video brought me something new since I did not know about VALCOE!
My pondering went something like this: If/when LCOE + storage (installation+upkeep, TCO, or a similar measure, or LCOES = Levelized cost of energy storage if there is such a concept?) costs together also dip below LCOE of non-renewables, that would be a point when renewables really become inevitable. I wonder when that might happen, if ever. Phrased another way: what would the yearly total cost of ownership of renewables + storage be if we would want to serve the exact same kind of demand that we already have today (for a single country or globally), without ifs and buts. And this calculation could be very interesting over different configurations, e.g. just PV + just li-ion, or PV+wind and peaker gas plants, etc. And also how these costs have already changed over the years and what trajectory they are on.
Christopher, I hate to tell you, but long-term arbitrage will reduce solar VALCOE.
If you have a $100 worth of Li-ion battery that you cycle every day (i.e. nighttime discharge) you get a lot more worth out of that asset than if you cycle 1x per week (i.e. discharge on Sunday).
Long-term storage beyond a few hours makes battery storage value drop while the costs stay the same. To put it differently, you could have a smaller system if you're not storing up a week's worth of energy (or a day's worth stored for a week) to discharge later.
The sticky problem then becomes what is the energy worth after a cloudy week? How often does a cloudy week occur? What are the chances of 2 cloudy weeks back-to-back? etc.
Renewables are cheaper?
What is the history electricity prices in California, Australia, Germany, England?
I was a bit surprised that hydroelectricity didn't show up in the Lazard slides. It's renewable, cheap, clean and includes its own storage, it's just not universally available.
All true, but very limited in it's availability. I sincerely hope thet in a decade or so In Stream Tidal power will be more prominent.
No matter how cheap solar panels and wind turbines get, they make the actual electricity more expensive, because you have to keep underutilized fossil fuel plants for backup. Plus you also need more land and transmission. There is no practical or economical solution to the intermittency problem. Another pernicious effect of renewables is that they congest the grid and make it harder to build nuclear plants, which unlike renewables can actually replace coal plants as they've done in France.
You must have your head buried in the sand ! Your parochial little observations are ignoring the Sum Total of Global Temperature and shift in Planet Wide damage caused. I weep for the world you are wishing on your grandchildren and the whole human population! Not to mention our Bio Ecology and living creatures ! I just bet you are celebrating how your lifestyle is junking the only Planet we will inhabit in the next million years !
Those rounded earings at the end of the video are so beautiful. your channel , your "not verbal comunication" , your direct and clear content transmision, are beautiful too, but the best is your smile , which is is the most incredible energy source in the technical side of internet, to me, thanks
This LCOE comparison is too simple. Many engineers realize solar is the most expensive generating source, followed by onshore wind. The simple reason is that both require wasteful back-up to provide stable power 24 hours per day. In your calculations you omit this cost of fossil diversity to supplement these renewables. Experience in Europe suggests that both solar and wind must be backed-up for periods up to 3-4 days. (Note: recent weather event caused wind to be low for 7 days) This has nothing to do with peak suppression.
Grid availability is achieved using supply diversity but you 'must' include this in the LCOE calculation. Your video paints an unrealistic picture of true costs and explains the thinking behind the present high cost of electricity in Australia and Germany.
Including storage is an important calculation (she already said there is a video in the works doing that), but it isn't a 'must' for LCOE... It is just a different calculation with slightly different applicability. Chill a bit
BTW: Speaking of chill... Variability in fuel markets, especially demand and disruption induced, are a further complication leading to another different and arguably more applicable comparison. Availability for fossil fuel sources isn't as great as some folks appear to assume. Yeah, this stuff does get a wee bit complicated ;)
Completely brilliant. You said almost everything I think is relevant, and in a way easy for anyone to understand!
Could you simply add the price of LFP storage into the capex number?
Nuclear is actually the cheapest energy source when you factor in the reliability, 60+ year lifetime and lack of need for expensive backup.
@@4drops No they are not, they fail to take in to account the reliability of the output and thus fail to account for the cost of transmission, the backup needed and that the backup needs to run in a highly variable mode, which increases their costs and reduces their fuel efficiency. It is not an appropriate metric to judge energy systems, though intermittent advocates constantly use it because it makes them look better by hiding so much detail.
@@4drops Probably not. Does the LCOE factor in all subsidies? Just because the cost is spread amongst many people doesn't mean the cost doesn't exist. And more importantly, what the LCOE does not factor in is life and safety, both during and after generation.
Amongst the 3 major nuclear disasters globally (Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima), the death toll is 32. 31 of which were a result of Chernobyl, which was entirely avoidable. In the U.S. alone, solar and wind have more deaths on their hands in a few years than Nuclear has in about 70 years. In that time it has created an amount of waste that would fit in a standard American football field at a depth of 10 yards. As she said in the video, these are some of the costs the LCOE does not factor in. And they are vastly important.
How about cost and risk of storing/managing Nuclear Waste for 100,000+ years.... and who "pays up" for damage done say... 50,000 years down the road...
@@AjayAjay-gz3oz Nuclear waste is perhaps the most widely misunderstood issue, and this is a shame because it is one of nuclear's biggest strengths. The science is clear that in the long run spent fuel can and will be recycled in fast reactors which extract the remaining 90+% of the energy content while reducing the need for storage to about 300 years. Keep in mind that no one has ever been harmed or killed by spent nuclear fuel in the entire history of nuclear energy, when know how to handle and store it.
Far from being a problem, the waste is actually nuclear's biggest strength. Not only is it tiny in volume but it is the key to long term sustainable use of nuclear energy.
@@Spacedog79 Hitler believed that if you keep repeating a lie... the people will be convinced it to be true.... the story of nuclear technology is the same.... NO ONE DIED OR SUFFERED FROM NUCLEAR... WHATEVER....
Whether it is the victims in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushina or during the early years when workers handling radioactive stuff (oops that it is not part of nuclear energy) suffered then died as their death certificates did not say "Cause of Death... Nuclear Energy" (just like Pollution today... no one died or suffered from it .. right..??) ....
You are welcome to keep your head in the sand for the next 100,000+ years hoping the lethal effects of radioactive nuclear waste will go away... but those who have their heads above ground... know much much better....
I spent 30 years in the Nuclear Industry and "cast my shadow" on 20,000MW of different types of Nuclear and Fossil Plants... and observed just "broken promises"... specially neutralizing lethal nuclear waste... and now... here we go again...
If nuclear waste is such an asset... why don't you buy it all up (owners will be happy to get rid of it) and become the first "glowing" Trillionaire of the world ...
There are thousands of tons of this stuff lying around Decomissioned Nuclear Plants and Nuclear Research Labs all over the USA and the World... with NO TAKERS FOR THIS INVALUABLE ASSET... nothing more nothing less....
Not sure how close you or other nuclear proponents were/are....
Ok let us take YOUR WORD... Nuclear Plants are 100% safe... donot spread any form of Pollution or endanger anyones lives... so what... in the end they all produce steam, like the boiling of water in a kettle, to produce Electricity... so what... yes it was a big deal in the 20th Century... but the 21st Century belongs to to Solar Energy ... also a form of Nuclear Energy...
• It is Free (can you match that), •
• It is Abundant (can you even come close)
• It is Sustainable (match that)
• It is Non-Polluting (No nuclear waste of ANY KIND... match that)..
• Using UHES based S2S Energy Storage one can get Uninterrupted Solar Electricity (got you there..)..
• It can be converted DIRECTLY TO ELECTRICITY (no need for Reactors, Boilers, Turbine, Generators, Condensors and Cooling Water and hundreds of pumps, heaters, fans, automatic valves, sensors.. and on and on and on... )... match that...!!!
• The Conversion from Free Energy to Electricity also makes it Competitive ... try that...
Thankx... but NO THANKX... I refuse to bury my head in the sand.....
A very complex topic very clearly explained. Thank you.
It would have been really interesting if you had included nuclear power, since it is often discussed as a short term solution, that has a lesser carbon footprint than other non-renewables
nuclear is literally the opposite of a short term solution considering construction of plants can be measured in decades.
Oh, and the little fact that it is the most expensive energy source we know
NO BRIGHTLY SHINING DEADLY NUCLEAR POWER RUINS! NO MORE TCHERNOBYL! NO MORE THREE MISLE ISLAND! NO MORE FUKUJIMA! NEVER!!!!!!
@@wolfgangpreier9160 Agreed. No more.
And let's end nuclear weapons too (before some idiot uses them again)!
@@sanjuansteve 👍👍👍
@@Tobias-ld2pv Yeah, but the construction of plants taking decades is a feature of the political/legal climate, rather than technology itself. And 4th generation reactors are not suppose to take decades, but basically the time frame for constructing cargo container ships, once the first one is delivered.
Thank you for greatly simplifying the situation Rosemary.
The answer is modern nuclear power plants.
Thanks that's Excellent. In the UK we have a bout 20% wind which we back up with gas so the system cost of the wind part is the cost wind generators + cost of gas required to back it up. I would have included nuclear and also a look at France who mostly de-carbonised their electricity grid back in the 80s and showed that when nuclear is done on a large scale the cost reduce enormously (eg same design repeated 20 times is much cheaper and quicker per build than when your just building a one off)
Great info Rosie! Considering the overall goal of replacing fossil fuel power generation with green energy generation, have you done anything with Generation 4 nuclear such as LFTR's and SMR's?
I did one on SMR NuScale shortly after this video th-cam.com/video/2a4CeJ6XjUE/w-d-xo.html
I like this method, but it is limited to comparing energy sources for homes, offices and factories. Can you branch out and use this to compare EVs and ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars? I would love to see the whole-of-life cost comparison done between a Tesla Model 3 and a Toyota Corolla. The more you factor in, the better.
At 6:51 you say 1 BTU is 3412 kWh’s but I think you have that backwards.
1 kWh is 3412 BTU’s.
1 BTU is the amount of energy to raise 1 pound of water 1 degree F.
As to the overall video it’s good. As someone who works in the solar field, most new panels won’t last 30 years, and probably not 25. The higher voltage systems (1000-1500vdc) are really hard on panels.
But panels are not the largest cost of the system, which is site prep, racking etc. So it will raise the overall cost some.
As to over production during some daytime hours, that’s actually just poor design. As more solar comes on line this issue will increase and so a location for all this “excess” power is needed. Could be DCA or some other use such as heating for turbine for night time use.
The issue is long term storage, for when you have big multi day storms for example. Or locations with very short days and lots of clouds, there just isn’t enough daytime production to fill a battery.
Lithium based batteries are just not up to the scale we need, there is too much embodied energy and materials. I’m curious your take on where, what storage looks like in the future.
Thanks Rosie - really informative and useful video!
LCOE is an imperfect metric for many reasons. The largest is probably due to the time adjusted cost of electricity and storage requirements as you stated.
CCGT efficiencies drop a great deal if not used at a high capacity factor. The inefficiencies generated by cycling on and off instead of operating at optimum level sometimes are so large they can actually offset the CO2 reductions associated with renewables.
Lastly, why not a single word about Nuclear? High capacity factor and long life with virtually no CO2.
The whole story is BS. It's all about environment wins and those are not in the formulas. Also she assumes wind and solar are more efficient in the future but that's what they said about batteries too and we are nowhere there. Coal on the other hand can be much more CO2 neutral than ANYBODY at the climate alarmist side are taking into account. Also that race is about comparing apples and oranges for very simplified small measurements that are not about reality. All the climate alarmist play games and cherry pick and apply anti science. Woke the same thing.
Yea, Nuclear win big time on all the metrics. High CAPEX but it is offset quite fast. And it is able to produce 24/7
@@Madrrrrrrrrrrr Coal CO2 neutral? You're kidding me right? Coal is simply the most abundant fossil fuel on Earth (per proven reserves), but you can't say it can be carbon neutral. And even if you do not believe at all in AGW, it has very bad impact on people's health. You seem stuck into your anti-renewables views as some climate alarmists are anti-anything that's fossil fuels.
@@ac0rpbg The problem with nuclear is that any new recent plant announced has had much longer construction periods than planned. Hence its LCOE goes up as the Present Value of electricity generated decreases. CAPEX amount is not the only thing, CAPEX TIMING matters a lot too, and impacts the cost of capital as well. For the high capacity factor, I agree (it's around 90% if I'm not mistaken) and on CO2 I agree too. And another drawback: the public has a very bad image of it in most part of the world, though it may not (and likely not) deserve to have such a bad image.
@@nc27fr I said: much more CO2 neutral. Ever heard of filters? Storing CO2 underground? It's already happening. And i'm not stuck in anything. The trash from solar and wind is HUGE. That's why i said it's about environment wins which means i don't deny climate change. Although there isn't much hard proof.
Thank you for exploring the pluses and minuses of hydrogen for space heating. My takeaway from the video was that the problems seem to be centered on the pipeline transport of hydrogen gas. It seems to me that generating hydrogen at each point of use would eliminate this class of problems. There are multiple commercial sources of water electrolysis units that are currently available which could meet the need of point of use hydrogen generation for nearly all sizes of installations. These systems could be adapted to take advantage of the installed base of space heating systems that currently burn fossil fuels and contribute significantly to our CO2 crisis.
Two things to remember about burning hydrogen: 1) it’s only totally clean when used in a fuel cell. When burned it gives off GHG. 2) burning pure hydrogen in you home appliances will be far too hot. You have to mix it with methane in order to burn in safely.
I like how you’re thinking outside of the box, but I don’t believe burning hydrogen is going to be a good idea outside of operations like making steel.
Would have liked to see a 5th car called nuclear just to see how it compares in LCOE/VALCOE terms.
The problem with nuclear is that at this point LCOE predictions that are lower than what we see with the AP1000 in the US or the EPR in Europe, are speculative. And at LCOE costs like Lazard is estimating them for nuclear (i.e. the empirical costs when looking at the mentioned EPRs and AP1000s) is simply too high to make nuclear competitive.
Pretty sure Nuclear doesn't improve with VALCOE as it can't dynamically adjust to demand. In terms of LCOE, Construction is terrible, finance is also terrible, capacity factor is great, fuel is negligible and maintenance is anywhere between negligible and pretty damn bad. There is a huge amount of variance though, and should really be done individually for each regulatory scheme, as the construction and finance costs can vary enormously.
@@SocialDownclimber
Oh dear, I guess the 'car-nuclear' is a 'dnf' in this race.
@@jimmychin8313 Potentially. Several planned reactors are in the construction version of development hell where they are billions over budget and years behind schedule. There are also reactors that are built on time, in six to eight years and on budget that will be profitable and useful.
Also the most common way of making reactors more viable is by extending the design lifetime of a reactor when it reaches the end of its existing design lifetime. This can practically halve the LCOE but isn't suitable if the reactor is already having issues.
Great vid Rosie! Well explained!
Instead of dropping solar energy value in VALCOE, can we add "load balancing capability" as cost when calculating renewable energy?
Yes! And you have anticipated how I want to approach my planned future video on the cost of storage. ARENA has a nice report with modelling from ITP showing the cost of each form of generation with various durations of storage. Very interesting way to compare. arena.gov.au/projects/dispatchable-renewable-electricity-options/
@@EngineeringwithRosie Thanks for replying.Nice report indeed. Love your video
This is amazing. Thank you for this explanation. Could you please do a followup with valcoe and add nuclear power generation?
The capacity factor for nuclear is over 90%! I wish nuclear held greater sway in these discussions - it seems like the most pragmatic solution to the energy crisis.
It's too expensive, even with the high capacity factor (which LCOE accounts for, by the way).
The capacity factor is only that high, as long as there exist truly dispatchable power plants (i.e. gas), that can react to demand changes. If you have a lot of nuclear power plants, then the capacity factor will be lower. For example, in France, the nuclear capacity factor is only 70%.
You can see at 9:38 the LCOE for nuclear.
Yeah, you need to add in a carbon tax to get nuclear to compete with natural gas and coal. With 4th generation technology, you probably can compete even factoring in the insurance subsidy for nuclear.
Part of the reason capacity factor nuclear is so high is the cost. Basically if that plant isn't going at 100% capacity it's losing money.
Excellent video, thank you!
You have totally ignored the" true -cost accounting" of any carbon fuel. In nuclear you must account for the price of making fuel and the cost of storing spent fuel. Coal emissions must be scrubbed. And coal is harmful to human lungs. Coal pollution runoff damage to waterways - and total carbon emissions to atmosphere will shorten a viable future for humans on Earth. Disappointed that you did not include that in your basic calculations.
Something that is omitted almost 100% of the time is coal gas emissions. The naturally occurring methane that accompanies coal and gets released into the atmosphere.
We have to carefully vent and monitor coal mines. Otherwise workers get asphyxiated and mines explode. That is underground gas that gets freed by the process of mining.
More gas is released when the coal is crushed prior to use in a coal plant.
We are simply ignoring this source of greenhouse gas emissions.
It was sort of kind of included in the carbon price mention, and was discussed at the end of the video. Unfortunately human beings are terrible at understanding things that cannot be easily converted to numbers that have to be dealt with eg fuel and build costs. Some of us assume that if something does not have a direct, clear cost now, then we can ignore it. Blatantly wrong but a common failing. (I like the video, and I am grateful to Rosie for creating it.)
The Lazard report Rosie references specifically states it accounts for all nuclear fuel mining, fuel milling, plant decommissioning, and spent fuel storage.
@@factnotfiction5915
The cost for spent fuel storage for the next 100,000 years?
How about the cost for abandoned uranium mine cleanups. We know of roughly 18,000 sites so far.
@@bobwallace9753 Nuclear nations have a spent nuclear fuel liability that is:
* contained
* stored
* maintained
* and isolated from the biosphere.
* in most places (ex: USA) the funds to deal with this are collected as a tax on electricity AS IT IS GENERATED (so the financing exists).
Nuclear nations can find time to deal with it over the next several decades (it harms no one where it is, and of course, we have known technical options to deal with it).
Germany is spewing fossil fuel emissions (CO2, SOx, NOx, particulates) into the biosphere. These emissions are:
* not contained
* not stored
* not maintained
* IN the biosphere.
Germany must deal with this problem NOW, it harms people NOW, the IPCC suggests actions NOW to have an impact before 2050, 2100 - waiting decades is not an option.
That was really helpful. Thanks a lot!
I do think that you could have included hydro electric and nuclar in your tables. It might not be a major parts of the supply in Australia, but it is important globally.
Beautifully done, Rosie.
Halfway through I paused to write a comment that you should include storage costs - and then you dod! Near the end I was going to say you haven’t included externalities - then you did!
It’s one hell of a lot more complicated than most of the deniers - or the AGW accepters - realise and you’ve managed to show that.
In the end, though, it’s population. We have outstripped the planet’s capacity to absorb the waste as well as provide the resources.
It’s people, people: people!
(in deserts spolar panels give shade and shelter to crop and animals)
Am i missing something? Why didn't you include nuclear power in this comparison?
She is comparing Australia's power options :)
I just picked the top two fossil, top two variable renewables. This took me about 80 hours of work to produce, so I couldn't add in everything that's interesting. It also missed hydro and geothermal. If you're interested in nuclear, then watch out for a video on small modular reactors and nuclear hydrogen some time in February probably.
@@EngineeringwithRosie While first adding my thanks for the great video, I second the view that it would have been great to include nuclear in this. While i agree that gas peaker plants will be around for a long time, we know that fossil fuels must be phased out asap from bulk generation. So whether or not they are more expensive than renewables is somewhat of an academic point. The more important thing for the future is how the cost of nuclear compares with the cost of renewables plus storage to provide power at all times of day and year as needed. The cost for nuclear is in the region of double that for renewables so you would think nuclear isn't worth bothering with, but i was shocked to discover the lcoe for batteries is nearly double that for nuclear. So it is a complicated question. Added to the complexity as you hinted at here, is that the value of energy massively depends on how mismatched demand and supply are which depends on the generation mix. As you said if you have lots of solar then the energy produced becomes almost worthless some of the time. People say that batteries pay for themselves in a short time. But that is only because there are very few of them online so they can earn massive prices. It's like there is only 1 hotel in town they can charge what they like. With 4 hotels they have to compete on price.
Thank goodness you didn’t include nuclear or most of the comments would be about that, like on absolutely every energy discussion on the internet.
@@benoithudson7235 Most energy videos and comments _should_ be about how awesome nuclear is.
nice vid but why not having subsidies in account? both for renewables and non renewables... would be great to have them in consideration. what if they wouldnt exist?
Why not include nuclear in this race🤓?
Nuclear is the best reliable energy source
Rosie, I often see presentations of calculations like this, seldom do I see the inclusion of the acquisition and transportation cost of petroleum-based fossil fuels. It would seem any fair comparison of energy costs would capture these considerable costs that are currently externalized by energy companies but born by consumers.
Okay, but I heard nothing about geothermal or nuclear. Nor anything about disposal of toxic battery storage.
Correct, it was not a video about geothermal or nuclear or batteries :-)
All those are good ideas for future videos though, and I do have one in progress on nuclear.
"disposal of toxic battery storage." is actually called recycling
thats why it's so important to monetize unvalued factors like environmental or socioeconomic impacts (maybe via CO2 taxes)
The unvalued positive impacts being modern society
The value of energy is why the wind power generated on the passes to the central valley of California is so valuable - the wind resource very closely matches the demand, especially into the evening on hot summer days.
Its good you went on to explain that LCOE isnt sufficient to compare generation costs.
does LCOE factor in transmission and storage costs + subsidies?
What ever we use it has to be affordable, my electricity bill has quadrupled, because they decommissioned fossil fuel generators before their end of life for a mad dash for renewables. In the 1960's they promised us cheap abundant electricity using nuclear, that never happened and now they are promising cheap green energy which is not so cheap as my bills have quadrupled.