Your number is "right" but irrelevant for comparison


And I'd be amused to hear how "wrong" I am. You do realize I work in the energy space, right? I get paid for being right on these issues

Which piece would you like links for, James?

As for Manwe's silly "more efficient" argument, that's mostly just logic in that it'll look more efficient if you ignore most of the energetic costs.

As for the social cost of carbon, that'd flood the forum to provide. The EPA has a rundown of their calculation with is decent. California is working on a GHG adder also right now. The EPA one is far too low because it include a social discount for future generations, which is the wrong way to think about it and doesn't include mitigation inflation to reflect that avoiding harm gets very rapidly more expensive the longer you wait.
Without including the full costs, claims about cost effectiveness are plain wrong. A Maserati will look cheaper than a ford if you ignore a big fraction of the costs of buying a Maserati.
https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climatechange/social-cost-carbon_.html


As for some of the costs on solar, I'd point to the Lazard reports for unsubisdized levelized costs. They're fairly respected

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-100/

I'd also point to some of the PPA prices we are now seeing for solar AND STORAGE projects. You were mentioning $43 ish for natural gas, but Tucson has a project that came in at $45, and that's a lot of batteries there, so the solar alone is a big chunk under that. That PPA price includes credits though. PPAs are mostly confidential so reports are spotty
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-can-tucson-electric-get-solar-storage-for-45kwh/443715/


Oh, and the carbon per ton for natural gas? That's just a heat rate calculation. EIA has some of the numbers here.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11

Also, keep in mind that costs of solar are dropping around 11% a year, so any source that more than a year old is out of date. Storage is falling even faster (dropped 40% in the last three years

Finally, for the "it can't be done" crowd, I'll point out that Germany, Denmark and the U.K. already have solar penetrations up in the 30% range. And as our Irish friend pointed out their meeting all of their energy needs at time even with a crappy solar resource. The US really has no excuse because we are so much further south. (Latitude is a big driver, rather than clouds as well)

Also, I'd caution that the generation costs aren't the whole story. For distributed generation, you should include the transmission costs they don't incur, which are an important and growing component.

Finally, stock prices have little to do with company performance and nothing to do with the underlying merits of renewables. If you're going to gamble in the stock market you should understand that you're bascically gambling on the hype among a crowd of conservative rich New Yorkers and what fad they'll latch onto next. It isn't groundsd much in reality.

For distributed generation you have nee infrastructure problems which germany discovered (where clouds cause spikes in production in local areas); this can be a challenge compared to massive centralised power systems.

But once you develop the infrastructure, i'm sure you save a lot.

Virtually all distribution systems were designed for delivering electrical power from large single source generators..coal fired steam driven and hydro electric, and then gas and nuclear were easily introduced without needing any significant changes in distribution systems.
Using solar & wind with existing distribution systems is a bit like the way we first started transmitting data over telephone systems, so the progress is really quite impressive.
But it's clear that there are still problems to be solved, matching generation capacity to demand needs, but they are solvable problems.
At the "end of the day" it's costs that most influence decisions, and that's where solar, wind and hydro have ever increasing over time cost advantages over coal fired and nuclear power generation

And over gas & diesel, although gas is generally the "cheapest" out of coal, nuclear, diesel and gas...particularly if you ignore CO2 emissions

So if you ignore gas emissions, then gas fired power generation is the only member of that group that remains "cost competitive" with hydro, solar and wind, but that's perhaps a false advantage

Plus it assumes gas will remain cheap indefinitely, which might well not be the case

Anything that requires batteries for electricity storage has a big environmental impact of its own. Solar power itself might be free and unlimited, but the materials involved are not. Nuclear is the optimal solution, and we should be building reactors in the middle of all big cities, from San Francisco to Istanbul to New Delhi. Slash the regulations on building them so that the red tape doesn't put companies off. Nuclear for all!

Geothermal is the only thing better.

I have a hard time telling if this is snark. It must be

Because of course, uranium mining and transport and radioactive waste disposal have no environmental impacts.

Battery construction uses some mined resources also, but ultimately that's still less than all that concrete and steel and uranium.

That looks like a bit of trolling HR with your comments on nuclear energy. "Nuclear energy" is a "generic" term, as there a several different "types" of nuclear energy production. The common form is fission reactors "burning" enriched uranium. The "nuclear industry" has been telling us that a fusion process "burning" hydrogen is "just around the corner", as soon as they resolve the technical challenges... But they've been saying that for nearly 30 years and the technical challenges are substantial.
It's interesting that you mentioned India, as India leads the way in using enriched Thorium as a fuel in fission reactors. Call me cynical but I think the reason that India explored the use of, and uses enriched Thorium as a fuel is because India has relatively poor quality domestic uranium reserves, but plenty of domestic Thorium reserves. Until Australia decided to export uranium to India, because India hadn't signed on to some relevant treaties, none of the major uranium exporters would supply India with uranium. So India explored the use of enriched Thorium as a fuel because they have plenty of thorium, and it meant they could substitute it for uranium and " keep their limited amount of domestic uranium for military applications"..that's just my cynical opinion.
The advantage of using enriched Thorium as a fuel in fission reactors is that you get a different group of "decay chain" elements produced..for example, no plutonium. So in some ways, using enriched Thorium as a fuel in fission reactors offers advantages to counter some of the disadvantages it has compared to using enriched uranium.
I can't get too moralistic about using uranium, I've helped explore and map uranium deposits in Australia. One of the tools I've used emits high energy nuetrons underground, which if there is uranium in the ground, induces fission reactions. No danger of an explosion because the concentration of uranium is so low and it's not enriched and concentrated as a "pure" form..

Still, despite the huge amounts of energy that fission reactors "burning" enriched uranium can deliver it's a very high cost way to go. The design, compliance and construction costs are extremely high in dollars and environmental costs..all that steel and concrete has significant production costs, then there's the "running costs", but the huge costs are at the " end of use" stage..the costs of waste storage and treatment, and the "deconstruction" costs. Demolishing a large coal fired electrical generation plant and then site and materials rehabilitation is expensive, but is "cheap and technically easy" when compared to the same process for decommissioning, deconstruction of, and waste material treatment and storage, and site rehabilitation associated with a fission reactor that used enriched uranium as it's fuel.
As an "economic" exercise Nations wouldn't build nuclear fission reactors simply for producing electricity, but they're more or less essential if you want to develop nuclear weapons. Simply for providing the "critical mass" (ho ho) of technical expertise, as well as some of the required "ingredients" for nuclear weapons.
I think the USA and other Western nations made a tactical error in the way they've confronted Iran over it's nuclear program, by going for the "you cannot have it" tactic which has clearly failed.
Given that Iran has always used the propaganda line " we're only going nuclear for peaceful purposes " those nations that opposed Iran's nuclear ambitions could have instead used a "well that's OK if you intend to only use enriched Thorium as a " fuel" and offered to supply the thorium.. Effectively "calling Iran out" on this "only for peaceful purposes" line.
Australia is in an interesting position, we have a significant proportion of the world's known uranium reserves, and an even higher proportion ( I think) of the world's known thorium reserves.
I live in one of the two States (WA & Sth Australia) that would best be suited ( geologically ) for having a nuclear waste storage (underground) facility.. But it's clear there is massive political opposition to that, and, in my opinion, much more importantly, the traditional owners of the lands identified for such sites, are adamantly and determinedly opposed.

In my opinion, and I'd like Ogion's comment, because he actually does know the economics quite well, I think that the "business case" for solar and wind generation of electrical power is inexorably and inevitably getting stronger and stronger, and only hydro~electrical can effectively compete with them ( and possibly "tidal/Sea wave") The "business cases" for coal, diesel, gas and nuclear are becoming weaker and weaker by comparison. Particularly when environment and nuclear 's decommissioning costs are added.
Hydrogen fusion might get there, but that's a long long way off, imho. And it's "failure costs" are rather daunting.

Thorium's advantages over Uranium include not being a risk/target for weapons proliferation, ie can't make bombs from Thorium, thus have less to worry about in regards a terrorist attack.

Unfortunately this was always seen as a disadvantage by states whih want nuclear weapons, and are willing to invest heavily in developing nuclear reactors (for producing fissible materials). India developing Thorium is an interesting choice, but i'm not clearon what Thorium concentrations are required to be economically feasible for refining into fuel grade materials... To be considered as 'reserves'. My understanding is that Thorium was far more common in the earth's crust.

But common and dilute to the point of uneconomical to extract isn't useful. I would love to hear more about Thorium, but i'm not convinced.

Meanwhile Batteries are great, if only because they are necessary for the transportation industry; which continues to represent a large % of carbon emissions (along with agriculture and industry, i think domestic use is the smallest of these three). Getting to the point where we have batteries capable of the energy demsities to run transatlantic flights will be a major step forward. But somehow i don't think we're there yet...

I suspect flight is going to involve biofuels, the way the US Air Force is working on.

Reducing dependece on foreign oil => biofuels?

That may be the fastest route at least.

Actually, the fastest route is electrification of transportation. Reducing dependence on foreign oil can't be done except by reducing dependence on oil or by imposing price and export controls. Oil is a global market so if you're buying oil from anyone you're dependent on foreign oil because that's what sets the price you pay.

"The "nuclear industry" has been telling us that a fusion process "burning" hydrogen is "just around the corner", as soon as they resolve the technical challenges... But they've been saying that for nearly 30 years and the technical challenges are substantial."

The "nuclear industry" and nuclear physicists are not the same thing, and the "nuclear industry" would be funding the shit out of hot fusion if they had any interest in making it happen. The technical challenges of creating a literal sun - actually, to be exact, creating an atmosphere that exceeds temperatures 6 times hotter than the core of the sun - are, as you say, substantial, but so are the technical challenges of basically everything we (the United States, the USSR, and friends) accomplished during World War II. With proper funding from governments interested in having that sort of technological boom again, a fusion reactor could be built and the same incremental progress that took us from milliwatts in the 1970s to over 16 megawatts of fission output in a reactor could happen again. Maybe initially it would be unreliable, and maybe the materials would only be able to withstand the heat of the reaction for seconds or minutes at a time, but that progress would mark a step into a future without energy concerns.

Imho.. Controlling a hydrogen fusion reaction for any meaningful time is substantially/"exponentially" harder than controlling fission reactors

Plus there's the "opportunity/lost opportunity" costs.. If you spend billions on x you can't spend it on y or z, and there's probably many other fields where r&d dollars will get "better" returns for investors, and the lumpenproletariat than spending on fission r&d

Of course it's harder. If it's accomplished, though, it is a dream of an energy source: more efficient, less wasteful, completely renewable, and no major environmental hazards. Being harder has never been an excuse for any innovator, so if you think it is one, stay out of the way.

The opportunity cost argument really confuses me, not just when discussing nuclear fusion but when discussing basically anything involving government funding. The idea that inefficient and/or corrupt governments give a shit about opportunity cost is laughable. The United States has had two Marine aircraft crash in the last few weeks, which makes me wonder how safe their operable aircraft even are, and 70% of their entire fleet is currently grounded due to failed budget negotiations, cuts, and the influx of parts prices. Despite this, the United States military consistently and predictably puts billions of dollars behind newer, fancier, more expensive projects - unnecessary in the grander scheme because, if they chose instead to budget money toward these existing issues, the military's capabilities would be dramatically expanded. Suppliers and contractors long ago stopped mass producing the parts necessary to make these fixes because their contracts ran out, so when a plane that was supposed to fly for 10 years is now extended to fly for 25 years, they still only get parts for 10 years. What do you do about this? If you're rational, you put together some more contracts for suppliers, you get your parts, and fix your fleet, and you try to get your budgets back in order. If you're the United States government, you come up with a fancy new bird (that sometimes flies and sometimes doesn't, parts be damned) because Lockheed Martin needs some paper.

Opportunity cost is a great word for a high school macro quiz, but if you're talking about the actual operations of the actual world, that idea gets lost in the shuffle of bureaucratic shit and special interests, two euphemisms for legal corruption. If they could be corrupt in favor of fixing our energy problems as opposed to invading [random]stan, that would be great.

Opportunity cost is actually a great word to describe government spending, and what you so call "corruption" and "special interests" is, by definition, influencing the opportunity cost of anything the government decides to finance. If we didn't have opportunity costs, we wouldn't give a shit about what to fund with the federal budget. The bottom line is that the government decides who and what to spend money on each year and that involves a series of negotiations (obviously influenced by special interests), tradeoffs, and the resulting opportunity costs. If the DoD decides to spend trillions on a war in Afghanistan, the opportunity costs are nearly immeasurable, but they're still there. Flippantly deriding opportunity cost as a "great word for a high school macro quiz" completely overlooks the fact that this is exactly what you describe.

Perhaps a better way to phrase it would be to say that our government is terrible at following the principle of opportunity cost, which in no way invalidates a word of what I said. If the DoD decides to spend trillions on a war in Afghanistan, the opportunity costs are indeed immeasurable - so why enter into such an immeasurably expensive conflict without immeasurably beneficial returns? Your example is just like my example - an easy look into the operations of a government that would prefer to push forward into ambitious new projects and ambitiously stupid prices before focusing on the structures that already exist. I'm not suggesting that ambition is all bad, but when the most efficient and opportunistic thing to do would be to repair an already devastated and crumbling military infrastructure, spending billions and sometimes trillions of dollars on new projects amounts to decades of spending with limited return if you take into account technological improvements by the time the projects are completed and the unfortunate reality that some of these projects end up flopping like fish out of water. Likewise, when they choose to fund a war with trillions of dollars instead of funding research of and production of completely and totally renewable energy, the implication is that the war in Afghanistan has greater returns than pushing forward with nuclear fusion, or anything you might choose to believe might hold remarkable value to our society and could have been achieved with those funds, resources, and people. That is a conversation that many in the federal government never had prior to entering into Afghanistan, Iraq, or whatever other proxy wars we're fighting right now, which is, in my opinion, a total ignorance of the principle of opportunity cost.

The opportunity cost of not using paragraphs is that fewer people read your diatribes.

Nuclear is the answer even Liberal Vox agreed

I'll concede that, Leon, but I figured there were only so many who bothered reading what I say anyway after the last 5+ years, you know?

nyuk, nyuk