Is the power company just biding time?

However some sort of breeder-reactor technology to make use of 'spent' nuclear fuel might be on the near horizon.

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We've known how to do this for like 50+ years. It's banned because the tech to reuse nuclear fuel is the same tech you need to enrich to weapons grade. But there's no technical hurdle to reuse the fuel, just political will to do so.

I'd love to have fusion, but, thing is, fission is kind of "good enough". Fusion would be better (~10X more power released) but, let's not throw the good out in search of the perfect.

Back in 1990 I came real close to working at the FFTF (Fast flux test facility ) at Hanford that was researching breeder reactor technology. This was after I got out of the Navy. The process to getting hired was a lengthy and involved one requiring knowledge testing, physicals, psychological interviews, several personal interviews and a FBI thorough background check. I had got done with most of it with the exception of the FBI clearance when the facility lost funding. As far as I know that was the end of official US research and testing into breeder reactors.

Interesting walk down memory lane.

In Alberta, Canada 80% of my bill is a connection charge. 20% is usage charges, maybe 30% if I bring in over 1000 kWh. I added another 4000 watts to my south wall to see if I could make it throughout the winter on solar electricity. Nope. Now, 2/3 of my energy does come from my vertical panels, but we can't live on 10 kWh / day average or 20 kWh max generation during this winter solstice period with 10 kw of solar panels. My $170 bill for 300 kWh this month might be better spent on generation. Most of my neighbors have setup off grid, but if I cut off from the grid they take my transformer and charge me $30,000 to get it back. If batteries come to half their current value I would consider disconnecting, but then I would lose some resale value.

Overtaxed said:

What's the benefit of a neighborhood microgrid vs doing it yourself (a nanogrid?)? I see a lot of these discussions and understanding a bit about solar/batteries, the economies of scale don't seem that compelling. Can you 1/2 the cost of panel/batteries if you're buying MW's at a time? Maybe? IDK, but, if not, I'm not sure how a microgrid would be better than off grid.

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Essentially as you add load and generation you increase diversity. With 10 homes, it is unlikely that everybody is cooking at the same time or starting their air conditioner at the same time, and as a cloud advances through a neighborhood generation becomes slightly diversified in time. Individual homes can size their own battery for half the overall need, and the centralized storage for the balance given the operating needs. The central system can also coordinate with the utility (single service) for both import and export on a somewhat larger scale.

When you go it alone, there is zero benefit to your excess capacity if you are away on vacation for two weeks, you still need a grid connection (more on that below), and everybody might need their own backup generator as well.

Quattrohead said:

I have said it before and I will say it again, Solar is making less and less economic sense unless you go 100% off grid.

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The economics for full off grid (when grid is locally available) suck unless you live like an off-gridder which means sacrifices on cloudy days. For me (20 degrees north) it would take 2x the solar capacity and 7 days of storage to get close to be able to live off-grid (and off-propane), and assuming average utilization I would still need the equivalent of two full days consumption from a generator per year. The LCOE for that system is around $0.50/kWh. If I was willing to run the generator for an equivalent of 20 days per year the LCOE would drop in half.

In contrast, with a system sized for 120% of annual demand and batteries sized for two days of storage I can get my worst-case annual utility cost down to $500/year. (That is assuming real-time pricing for grid energy.) That puts me at a LCOE of around $0.15/kWh IIRC. That system would need 40 days consumption on generator to be off-grid and still come out with an LCOE of $0.25/kWh.

Overtaxed said:

I was thinking today (riding my tractor around, always good for the imagination), given my lovely interactions so far with Duke where their solar plan basically transfers all the benefit of the panels from me to them.

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Very rough energy cost/kWh for a US grid operator:

Solar farms (when sunny) - 1.5-3.0 cents
Wind farms (when windy) - 2-4 cents
"Old" coal/nuke - 3-5 cents (newbuild much higher)
Baseload NG - 4-8 cents (LNG higher)
Peaking NG - 5-20 cents

Regions with decent wind/sun soon build up until they must curtail production at times. Any additional kWhs dumped onto the grid at those times is worthless.

The other big cost for a grid operator is the wires, substations, etc. That cost is basically fixed. It doesn't matter if a house pulls 100A every day or once every few years, the cost to make that capacity available is the same.

A fair system would:
- Credit a homeowner 2-4 cents for each solar kWh dumped near midday, less during curtailment periods
- Charge peak TOU rates for kWhs consumed during peak times
- Charge a capacity fee (roughly half a typical non-solar bill, same dollar amount for a customer with solar)

Early net metering schemes were not fair, of course. They wildly favored well-off homeowners with on-grid solar at everyone else's expense. But not many had rooftop solar, so it was a rounding error.

Even if home battery costs fall 50% is won't make financial sense to go truly off-grid in most areas. A few socialist states with severely screwed up grids might be exceptions. Opt-out will become a real problem for them if they don't get their act together.

amendt said:

In Alberta, Canada 80% of my bill is a connection charge. 20% is usage charges, maybe 30% if I bring in over 1000 kWh. I added another 4000 watts to my south wall to see if I could make it throughout the winter on solar electricity. Nope. Now, 2/3 of my energy does come from my vertical panels, but we can't live on 10 kWh / day average or 20 kWh max generation during this winter solstice period with 10 kw of solar panels. My $170 bill for 300 kWh this month might be better spent on generation. Most of my neighbors have setup off grid, but if I cut off from the grid they take my transformer and charge me $30,000 to get it back. If batteries come to half their current value I would consider disconnecting, but then I would lose some resale value.
View attachment 183405

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It costs money to have the grid. Much less expensive per household when they are closer together, and the burden is shared. That $30K probably doesn't fully cover the expense either. Tough decision, based on the picture, you could do a pretty darn big ground mount, and you will need the battery to tide you through the crappy days, and a generator for when all else fails. Looks very doable. Resale kind of depends on whose buying.

Overtaxed said:

there's effectively no cost to the cable company if you use 1MB/mo or 10TB/mo

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In my area their are tiers in terms of how many Gb one uses. I have never gone over my 12Gb allocation but my sister did one month and got charged another $20. I imagine that fee is probably all profit based on what you are describing?

Ampster said:

In my area their are tiers in terms of how many Gb one uses. I have never gone over my 12Gb allocation but my sister did one month and got charged another $20. I imagine that fee is probably all profit based on what you are describing?

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19.95 of profit.

At some point, the cable company does have to upgrade equipment to support more throughput, but, honestly, that's going to happen anyway.

The incremental cost to a cable company to move another GB of data for an existing customer is so close to 0 that, any level of rounding is going to give you a zero.

Quattrohead said:

Road users don't have to pay for the roads

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We pay for road maintenance with gas taxes or in my case an extra fee for my EV on my registration which is supposedly going toward road maintenance.

ksmithaz1 said:

We as a citizenry need to make sure that the idiots we elect to office levy the taxes sanely, spend the revenues appropriately, and create rules that benefit society as a whole, and not line the pockets of their friends and themselves.

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How has that worked out for you?

Overtaxed said:

We've known how to do this for like 50+ years. It's banned because the tech to reuse nuclear fuel is the same tech you need to enrich to weapons grade. But there's no technical hurdle to reuse the fuel, just political will to do so.

I'd love to have fusion, but, thing is, fission is kind of "good enough". Fusion would be better (~10X more power released) but, let's not throw the good out in search of the perfect.

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As much as I’d love to see fusion, I don’t see it in any commercial capacity in many generations. It’s one thing to finally get a hit and make power for a fraction of a second but it’s its beyond comprehension to do it continuously. Not to mention that there’s so much infrastructure just to initiate an event that it leaves little area of recoup the energy generated. There’s no resistance to international fusion funding programs because the competitive energy sources aren’t worried (lobbyists). They are worried about thorium reactors/LFTR, a known technology that was buried and resurrected
by a slip up ( they forgot to destroy documents) and the freedom of information act. Who would loose with LFTR? Uranium mining and processing, petroleum and natural gas, oh and politicians loosing lobbying money.
If that technology had been allowed to prosper from the 70’s, today energy would not be a second thought, nor climate change.
It’s always about the money, not society.

As much as I’d love to see fusion, I don’t see it in any commercial capacity in many generations.

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Part of the problem for fusion, IMHO, is it's solving a problem that we kind of don't need to solve. The problem fission would solve is a lack of fissile material to run a standard (fission) nuclear reactor. There's only so much uranium out there and, as a very heavy element, it's not exactly common. However, we have known sources for plenty of it, and if we are willing to reprocess, it takes very small amounts to produce tremendous amounts of power.

Fusion would be better in that it releases more energy and uses incredibly common (and easy to create) elements as fuel. This would be a "must have" if we were low on fissile material, but, today, we really don't have that problem. Shoot, we probably have 100 years of electric sitting in casks called "nuclear waste" right now; just reprocess it and back into the reactor and we would have much less (perhaps almost none) demand for more uranium.

With 10 homes, it is unlikely that everybody is cooking at the same time or starting their air conditioner at the same time, and as a cloud advances through a neighborhood generation becomes slightly diversified in time.

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This makes sense, however, the counterpoint that I'd make; it's not peak loads that are the primary solar/battery problem. It's overall consumption that drives the size of the battery, if my neighbor and I both consume 100KWh, he from 8PM to 12AM and me from 12AM to 8AM, going it alone or together, we still need to get 200KW of battery. Where with traditional generation, the situation is opposite, the power company only needs to size for 100KW; their constraint is transmission/transformers, not storage.

That said, your post makes a lot of sense and there's almost certainly some scale gain if you share a battery (and panels) across multiple people. I'm just not sure it's worth the hassle to do it locally, the big economy of scale would be sharing between areas that have a lot of sun right now and those that do not, which typically would require more than a microgrid.

My $170 bill for 300 kWh this month might be better spent on generation.

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Over 50c/KWh! Phew. I understand why (per your explanation) but man, that does start to make a big battery bank and a diesel generator start to look reasonable! Running a generator for a day per month could fill in the gap; even gas, you'd probably consume <30 gallons of fuel for a full day of runtime at 100% capacity (charging your batteries back up).

If off-grid, then there are no issues with all the grid madness. Leave the grid insanity for the grid providers, big business (grid consumers), and anyone else not looking to join into the disruptive power of off-grid solutions (the masses who can't/won't figure out how to cut all or some of the cords).

If on-grid, leave the connection in place, as it's an already-paid-for power source. Put in a parallel system (off-grid, running in parallel to on-grid). Could be just an inverter/charger+battery-bank+generator (no panels needed); work out the details for your specific home. Any power used in the parallel system is money saved from being used in the on-grid system.

Finally, you have an off-grid system, no matter where you are in the world, out in the country (eating berries ... really?) or in a dense neighborhood of a big city. Grid goes down, no problem, as you have a parallel off-grid system.

Thorium is an excellent nuclear fission fuel, much safer and it is one of the more common elements and easily and widely available to us.

The US Dept of Energy chose to enable/encourage uranium fission for power generation _because_ it produced dangerous isotopes useful for building nuclear weapons.

There are very good thorium reactor designs that fail safely (can’t melt down) and the resulting waste is less amount, less long lived, and has much less dangerous isotopes like plutonium.

amendt said:

My $170 bill for 300 kWh this month might be better spent on generation.

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Farm diesel would cost you $0.41/kWh electrical with free waste heat as a bonus.

@amendt I see you have gas service. You could replace the grid completely with gasoline generator fueled on nat gas.

AntronX said:

@amendt I see you have gas service. You could replace the grid completely with gasoline generator fueled on nat gas.

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In Canada our leader JT is trying desperately to get us off carbon. $70 / tonne is our current carbon price. $150 by 2028. For 10 GJ of gas I pay $50 just as one tax

amendt said:

$70 / tonne is our current carbon price. $150 by 2028. For 10 GJ of gas I pay $50 just as one tax

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That's 1.8 cents/kWh(t) at $70/T and 3.86c/kWh(t) at $150. Still not too terrible considering diesel will have its own carbon tax at $170/T by 2030 or 4.47c/kWh(t). If you capture waste heat from gas generator then electricity is "free". How much to you pay total for 10GJ ?

Danke said:

How has that worked out for you?

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Sadly not as well as I would like. People being people, they always bring their own interests with them. Part of the problem is the education system not teaching children to be good citizens.

amendt said:

In Canada our leader JT is trying desperately to get us off carbon. $70 / tonne is our current carbon price. $150 by 2028. For 10 GJ of gas I pay $50 just as one tax

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Trying to get YOU to do this. He couldn't care less. These fools fly around in private jets, live in, and buy huge old properties with horrid insulation and oil boilers, drive around in huge gas guzzling full size SUV's with large entourages, and then they look you in the eye and tell you you need to cut your carbon footprint or you are evil. And people for some reason genuflect and slurp it up. I'm 'greener' than every single one of these id10t's based on their standards, which they don't even attempt to try and follow because they are the anointed, and us little sheeple should listen and obey. You voted him in, he's your problem.