> Basically the best thing personally for my family Great. It probably is. However, consider that another high-value benefit for your family is to have a functioning society (y'know, providing food, education, entertainment, building materials, sewage, garbage collection, etc, etc, etc). Thus we all need to support a vibrant, moderate-cost energy market.

consider flywheel generators

Yup, France has cheap electricity from nuclear, Germany has expensive electricity from wind/solar/coal. Such a contrast!

Hype!!!

Unless he gets the wrong conclusion by ignoring a few more facts.

It’s okay to have to think about nuanced things! Add to the Zeitgeist

> California would still be getting power from San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station if defects hadn’t occurred in replacement steam generators. Yes, Nelson pointed this out in the video, and suggested that the steam generators should have been replaced. > Diablo Canyon life has been extended. Yes, a very safe plant producing over 10% of CA's electricity. > PS - Nuclear in California given earthquake risk was never a great idea. Japan chose to accept the risk and live with it Fukushima Daiichi was pretty close to one of the biggest earthquakes in history, and had no problems riding out the earthquake, unlike the tsunami sent its way. In the same vein, Diablo Canyon is designed to ride out an earthquake and given that "The elevation of the Fukushima site is approximately 20 feet (6.1 m) above sea level, while Diablo Canyon sits on a bluff 85 feet (26 m) above sea level." it doesn't really have a tsunamic problem. > PS2 - Natural gas is supply constrained in California due to pipeline capacity Again, pointed out by Nelson that its easier to locate NPPs close to the demand than import energy across the Sierras.

look up pebble bed reactors, stupid simple, stupid safe

There will never be civilian use of navy reactors as they exist now, they use weapons grade fuel to allow the reactors to be small enough for a ship/sub.

Mirroring the weapons grade uranium problem - a selling point of many reactors are their inability to be configured as a weapon.

*_There Will Be Mustaches._*

Hahahaha

Sure they are just the richest Europeans. Fair enough though

Smart metering is totally doable these days. Good idea!

you are sort of close -- but have the time-of-use and time-of-production backwards. In general, the Night is surplus, and the Daytime is heavy use. So Solar PV (without storage) already closely aligns to the higher use time.

@@philtimmons722 You have it backwards. High use is evening. Solar PV is high 2 hours before and after noon. Steeply sloped before and after that. Rooftop solar has negative market value.

@@philtimmons722 in California solar produces a surplus around mid day. Peak usage is in evening. Of course cloudy windless days will cause shortages. A smart meter would be using power when the price is low and selling when the price is high. The TerraPower's Nathan reactor kind of does the same thing. Storing power in molten salt when electrical wholesale prices are low and selling power when prices are high.

@@stanleytolle416 Some days. (California daytime surplus I mean) Spring and Fall in particular due to low(er) Air Conditioning loads. But we have to design for the Peaks and "worse" cases, which are Winter and Summer. And we have to do things so they can make money to keep things going. Meanwhile across the US, daytime surplus is not the case. A better plan would be export surplus (when surplus) and be able to import in turn when needed. As far as storage -- thermal storage, if used for thermal loads tends to work well. For Thermal Loads. But not so much for Electrical Generation loads. Because as practiced it has to go to additional Steam, Turbines, Generators, Transformers, and Transmission -- all dedicated full-time for the part-time use of the Thermal Storage-Generation. That makes for enormous Capital Cost and O&M for a part-time source. Have you seen elevated (water) storage? The pumps function as generators on the return cycle and have a high rate of regeneration from the surplus electricity put in.

Your "experience" was the Central Plant Model. Central Plants generate, send out, hits retail meters, and money flows back in. All Last Century. World is moving on from that.

Yes, you can see your experience play out in Europe where electricity is super-expensive.

@william you should share this so others can learn as well!

Mark is the best. He’s got some good master classes on this channel

Yes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant "The elevation of the Fukushima site is approximately 20 feet (6.1 m) above sea level, while Diablo Canyon sits on a bluff 85 feet (26 m) above sea level."

Yeah otherwise NIMBYs would complain about that too.

> Won’t the growth of grid scale batteries balance the grid flow? Sure. However, not enough. The scale is much larger and over longer periods of time than what current batteries can support. Also, batteries have a low return-on-assets; you can build out batteries to deal with the scale/time, but they mostly sit idle, because you aren't charging/discharging to deal with the average scenario, but the extreme scenario. Think about a stadium, if we built it for the average attendance, we would build 1 seat (because the stadium is literally empty most of the time). However, we don't build it for the average attendance, or even the average game-day attendance; we build stadiums for PEAK game-day attendance!

Spending trillions on grid level lithium ion batteries is A solution. It’s not a great solution, considering my laptop uses the same technology and 6 years later is useless unless plugged into the grid! 😂

Dependent is not the right word. You import power when it is less expensive than producing it locally. The California Public Utilities Commission also wants an economical and reliable power supply for the state.

@@philipdamask2279 > You import power when it is less expensive than producing it locally You are putting the cart before the horse. You don't purchase and import power because it is cheap, you do so because you need to - hopefully obtaining the lowest cost electricity. We can see this in Quebec and Germany. Quebec's neighbors found themselves in an dire situation a few winters ago - reservoirs were down and demand was high. Quebec, quite rightly, shut off the neighbors and supplied their own citizens first. So, the neighbors, not having power - cheap or dear - had brownouts/blackouts. Germany has much more expensive electricity than its neighbors. One reason is that intermittent wind/solar comes on all at once. So, with lots of wind power the price drops and Germany exports. When the wind dies down, the price rises and Germany imports. Buy high sell low - not a great formula. So, you have a great theory there (to import when prices are low) it just doesn't work in practice - because not only is the demand inelastic, the supply is also. Electricity isn't this magic stuff that just comes out of wall sockets.

Maybe they can share their routine later

Yeah it’s definitely pro nuclear, but there is no media without a slant.

Yeah and that’s with a lot of your costs being subsidized by non solar owners!

Source: My parents paid a ~$1,200 electric bill in August 2023, though the rates were a little lower than 400/MWhr, and they used slightly more than 3MWhr

The way we like it

well, they do not exist and those that did exist did not work well. So. back to the real world.

Like ERCOT? Texas Feb 2021, blizzard plus sub-zero temps for about 2 weeks. Prices rose from the typical $50/MWh to $9,000/MWh. But, y'know dynamic pricing didn't bring much power onto the grid! Both demand and supply are inelastic, which means dynamic prices are an insane idea. (inelastic means that demand isn't really driven by price - its driven more by things like the World Cup/Superbowl/weather; ditto the supply - sure I'd love to take advantage of the 9,000/MWh price, but since it takes 2-3 years to build a small powerplant, it isn't even worth beginning to plan out for a 2 week cold snap, let alone trying to build one; ditto laying in a new transmission line from a neighboring geography).

Haha right? Agreed and rip

There's a new geothermal energy approach that uses a new drilling technique that makes geothermal practical anywhere, not just in volcanic areas because it makes drilling bore holes 10 to 15 miles into the Earth possible to tap the natural heat at that depth. Look up: new geothermal electricity project Utah. It means geothermal power plants that deliver renewable energy 24/7 can be built in areas that used to be coal or natural gas plants and connect to the grid.

This one gets it.

@@johncoviello8570cost per kilowatt hour? Come back when you have hundreds of years of grid scale generator hours

@@oo-bb4qs We will know soon enough. The Google geothermal power plant is already up and running in Nevada. There are plans for at least three more in the US. It is a relatively cheap source of energy since it doesn’t rely on any fuel, it draws heat energy from deep in the Earth. The biggest cost is drilling the boreholes. It could definitely be used as base power since geothermal doesn’t depend on the weather or any other surface conditions. The plant could run 24/7. These new geothermal power plants could be built at the location of abandoned power plants to save even more money, since those plants already have the transmission lines to reach people in populated areas.

@@johncoviello8570 the anti nuclear propaganda and regulation has been so intense people will really dig a 10 mile deep borehole just to avoid having to store harmless dry casks.. Hilariously that borehole tech would completely solve geologic storage of nuclear waste and there’s no “we’ll see” about any of it.

That well is less than 1.5 miles deep.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole This citation shows how little research johncoviello8570 has done.

Nah it’s not nepotism it’s a meeting of the mustache

California has massive geothermal potential. Like around the Salton Sea area a two giga watt plant is being developed. Another interesting development is the extraction of lithium and other materials from the hot brine being brought up. The amount of Li being rather staggering, enough for millions of electric cars. This geo power having the ability to be dispatchable to making up for the intermittency of of other renewables sources of electricity.

Let us know when there's proof-of-concept.

@@aliendroneservices6621 Proof of concept? Google just completed a new geothermal plant in the Nevada desert last fall. It’s way beyond any initial stage. More to come. Next one is being built in Nevada.

@@johncoviello8570 It needs to be tested for years before you get all excited. There were a lot of geothermal plants that had to be abandoned in the past. They worked for a number of years and petered out.

It is what comes up with the steam or brine that causes economic problems for geothermal plants. And yes geothermal plants normally face the problem of depleting the heat source.

> All electricity users will have to make most electricity at home and store at home. Or in their work building. Thus trading in the flexibility, economies of scale, and division of labor advantages of a grid, for rigid, high-asset low-value, jacks-of-all-trades-master-of-none shoddy single point generation.

@@factnotfiction5915 some people waste their space.

Why is my laptop battery useless after 6 years and how is this different from your grid level battery that costs trillions of dollars?

@microburn Back off a little. The EV battery management includes liquid temperature management and is showing very little battery degradation. Even battery recycling operations are finding fewer EV batteries available. Compared to their business projections. When Australia 20 million vehicles are EVs, then the real savings will be part of the economy.

Politics need to stay out of it when possible, Coal is no longer competitive with natural Gas. Kentucky GOP are trying to force coal on the grid. Keep politics out of the grid.

Fossil fueled back up makes a lot of sense for a very short time.

have a packet-switched grid rather than a circuit-switched one

@erkinalp Actually, I can easily visualise the EVs big battery being the packet of electricity energy. Topping up all day and supplying as peak demands sweep through the national electrical grid. For example, a cloud cover moves across many rooftop solar PV systems and the out put drops. Or at night, the normal quiet time, EV battery is supplying. If you do the maths of total numbers of EVs, big batteries, and daily electricity demand, it is all within the workable possibilities.

@@stephenbrickwood1602 Yes, just take the wheels off of the EVs and use them as batteries.

@Billy97ify Hahaha 😆 Actually, everyone talks about how many hours a day a generator works, its utility factor, and the nuclear promoters say it has the highest utility factor. If you only build base load capacity. Nuclear is expensive to turn off or turn down to lower levels of supply. In the USA, 300 million vehicles are a $10TRILLION asset with 300 million big batteries parked 23hrs every day. The modern EV battery with liquid temperature controlled battery management system shows extremely long lifetime durability. To claim high utility as the criteria means 300 million vehicles, big batteries must be used 24hrs daily. Nuclear is a waste of resources.

@@stephenbrickwood1602 What are you trying to say? Use EV batteries for the grid? Then they cant be used for driving. You can't drive if you just discharged your battery into the grid. For driving you need to keep the battery charged.

They are arguing that electricity is a service, not a tradeable good.

> the tone is becoming more and more aggressive towards electricity markets and it is a bit like negating math or physics. However, this is mostly a factor of how the 'market' is set up. In the US and most of the West, the market hasn't priced intermittent electricity differently the dispatchable electricity - so sure, it "doesn't work", but that could also be stated as "it won't work because it hasn't in the past and we don't want to change". The current 'market' is designed to be expansive and equate energy generation with success, but were we to design the market to meet demand load reliably, we would have different incentives and a market more favorable to nuclear finance.

⁠@@lukacsnemeth1652 Electricity is a tradeable good as any other, with the particularity that storage is very difficult. That is why you need to have suitable market that models this characteristic. Ignoring this and treating it like a service only will lead you to an inefficient allocation of welfare as you have limited information about the demand or supply.

@@factnotfiction5915Most of the markets in western countries have several layers to cope with the intermittency of renewables. You have the main day-ahead energy market, and as you get closer to the time horizon you have intra-day markets, regulation markets, ancillary markets and ultimately restrictions set by the PSO/TSO. These are supposed to bring in the revenue and signal the need for additional capacity on top of the inflexible renewable and btw, nuclear. The thing is, with low marginal price sources like nuclear, wind, solar or hydro, it is ultimately scarcity pricing is what dictates the demand for additional capacity and only happens when you push the system. What Mark is proposing here is bundling the generators, distributors, TSO and PSO in one and getting rid of any market driven pricing information.

Dankspain you got a lot of Lazard LCOE all over your analysis and it shows! Ignoring the time value of electricity makes your analysis bad, it doesn’t make the value 0