| ▲ | 59percentmore 3 hours ago |
| My completely uninformed perspective: There's a danger here, in that we're rolling out all at once, which means infra will reach EOL all at once. Replacement costs of suburban infra is killing a lot of American municipalities that can't grow in order to generate the taxes to cover those replacement costs of water infra and such. More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing. |
|
| ▲ | AnotherGoodName 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| Fortunately the grid storage rollout is happening at a blistering pace too. Reported payback of investment for 2 years for many of the early rollouts (due to arbitrage between peak/off peak prices) and while that won't last it's still amazing economics. |
|
| ▲ | maxerickson 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wouldn't worry about it too much. Electric generation is a business and existing sites will be prime locations for new panels (likely straightforward to permit, connection to the grid, etc.). Municipalities often have bonkers cost structures and imposed limits on tax increases (limits in state laws and such). Here they are redoing lead service lines, rebuilding substandard water mains and repaving streets. State and Federal grants are paying for a lot of it, along with increases to water rates (to maybe 5-10% above the national average, enough to make people unhappy, but not out of control). |
|
| ▲ | dralley 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well, that will certainly be an issue for nuclear power capacity in the future. |
| |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction. An operating plant has the wear items replaced on a regular basis as part of normal maintenance, so it's more like Ship of Theseus than something that has a specific lifetime. | | |
| ▲ | Kon5ole an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | >The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction. That's a common claim but it's not really correct. Firstly, the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years, I assume the situation is similar in the EU. New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures. Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined. Similarly the cost of managing Fukushima is way higher than the cost of constructing all the nuclear plants in Japan. These costs are of course never added to the cost of nuclear power, since nobody operating nuclear plants has any chance of paying such sums. But they are in fact a larger factor than the construction costs were. These experiences did have some effect, thankfully, in that made new power plants more expensive, because we know that we must take any conceivable measure to prevent more Chernobyls and Fukushimas from happening. And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost, despite them being paid off a long time ago. Meaning there is significant cost even after the construction is paid. So it seems that the claim that "construction is the main cost" comes from the operator's point of view. Basically "the construction is the largest part WE have to pay, because taxpayers cover the rest". | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > That's a common claim but it's not really correct. It's a common claim because it's correct. > the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years That includes paying principal and interest on the construction loans, right? > New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures. The modern cost increases have nothing to do with actual deficiencies in older US plants. Chernobyl had no containment building and a positive void coefficient. Even the US nuclear power plants build in the 1960s have a containment building and a negative void coefficient. > Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined. It's a good thing none of the US nuclear plants have ever been Soviet RBMKs then. > And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost The reason was that their electricity prices were very low at the time from a combination of having a large amount of hydro and the then-price of natural gas being low. Most places have no ability to control either of those things. Meanwhile how is the decision to close those reactors looking given how prices are now? |
| |
| ▲ | crote 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That works for things like auxiliary pumps, but replacing the reactor vessel or control room is going to be a completely different game. And all of that is made even worse because of the whole "nuclear" part, with plenty of critical parts becoming irradiated and essentially impossible to touch unless you let it rest for a couple of decades. On top of that it locks you in to an old reactor design, which might be very undesirable for safety reasons. At a certain point it just becomes cheaper to build a brand-new one right next to it and decommission the old one, even with a nuclear reactor. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse an hour ago | parent [-] | | > That works for things like auxiliary pumps, but replacing the reactor vessel or control room is going to be a completely different game. There are nuclear plants built in the 60s and 70s that are not only still operating but in the process of extending their operating licenses in order to keep operating for decades more. The period of time it takes before this makes "keep operating it" unviable is evidently pushing 80 years without actually hitting the limit. Control rooms and reactor vessels are themselves made of modular components and a lot of maintenance to those things happens during refueling. > On top of that it locks you in to an old reactor design, which might be very undesirable for safety reasons. That can't be the argument against building new ones. It's the argument that what you want is to build the newer, safer designs and then operate those for a long time. |
| |
| ▲ | president_zippy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hopefully, small modular reactors (SMRs) bring down construction costs and build times significantly. The economics would be better than 2010s fossil fuel prices if companies like NuScale and TerraPower deliver on their ambitious, but attainable promises. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | 7952 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Much easier to do upgrades piecemeal though with solar and wind. |
|
| ▲ | crote 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Suburban America is dying because it is operating like a Ponzi scheme: the property taxes aren't high enough to pay for the long-term maintenance and replacement of infra, and for the past handful of decades it has compensated by filling the budget holes with one-off windfalls due to taxes on new development. This house of cards obviously falls down when expansion ever slows down. The only solution is to raise the property taxes per yard of road, but that means low-density housing becomes unaffordable, which would force towns to increase density by building things like row houses and apartment buildings. Solar is in a completely different position, as the solar itself is profitable. There will be no shortage of cash to replace it, only perhaps a shortage of labor. But solar doesn't really have a fixed lifetime and will happily operate a few years longer, and due to its highly distributed nature it doesn't require a risky all-at-once replacement like the Boston Big Dig either. The global solar rollout is going slow enough that it won't be finished before the first units will reach the end of their economical lifespan. I reckon it'll just shift into ongoing maintenance as time goes on. |
|
| ▲ | jeffbee 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Explain the mechanism by which you believe photovoltaic panels start failing. Your concern would be valid for a nuclear thermal power station, a Goldberg machine with millions of moving parts. It is not really applicable to semiconductors. |
|
| ▲ | dyauspitr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You just replace it with more solar panels like what is so complicated about this? Also, this stuff is growing every year. It’s all staggered. |
| |
