I disagree with your quoted numbers. They aren’t current or inflation adjust to the same year, they also exclude several costs associated with nuclear such as insurance and setting money aside for decommissioning.
Ex: Your quoted fuel costs would be 0.9c/kWh in (2020 publish date) = 1.3c/kWh in 2024. O&M is often quoted as 4x fuel costs so 5.2kWh. “Fuel costs account for about 28% of a nuclear plant's operating expenses.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
A battery system which costs 200$/kWh and does 5,000 cycles = 5c/kWh. (Not every kWh from a solar farm needs to be stored, but this is just a ballpark comparison.)
> At which point the transmission becomes the limitation; the grid operator probably wants a fairly stable flow of electricity through the wires to maximise utilisation
You’re missing the forest for the trees here. Utilization follows demand, a state with peak demand of 6GW is going to have transmission lines setup for 6GW. But comparing the options you have nuclear with 4x 1.5GW reactors averaging ~40% utilization or batteries backed by solar. Run the numbers and Solar wins by a landslide.
> They aren’t current or inflation adjust to the same year
Page 41 states
All costs are reported here in 2018 USD terms.
> several costs associated with nuclear such as insurance
Insurance is required for any industrial facility. The IEA report does not mention insurance. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec... puts insurance costs at around 1M USD/year (and separate conditional payments if an accident does happen), which divided by 9M MWh/reactor does not work out to much.
> setting money aside for decommissioning
For nuclear between 0.01 and 0.39 USD/MWh, and solar between 0.03 and 0.58 USD/MWh (depending on discounting).
> O&M is often quoted as 4x fuel costs
The data in the IEA report differs; it is somewhere between the fuel costs and twice the fuel costs.
> Not every kWh from a solar farm needs to be stored
Rooftop solar will cannibalise the utility solar's daytime market. The demand for utility solar's energy will for the most part occur when the sun does not shine.
> a state with peak demand of 6GW is going to have transmission lines setup for 6GW.
But this ignores the physicality of the grid; power stations are dispatched based on location as well as availability because transmission is expensive to build and limited in capacity.
> you have nuclear with 4x 1.5GW reactors averaging ~40% utilization
So your demand model is 2GW for 22 hours and 6GW for 2 hours, right? Are there many places which exhibit such wild swings? Dynamic pricing/load shifting, pumped hydro and OCGTs would be the traditional solutions.
> O&M is often quoted as 4x fuel costs
The data in the IEA report differs; it is somewhere between the fuel costs and twice the fuel costs.
Operations & Maintenance must include fuel costs… They are doing the thing where they break actual costs into several buckets to make actual operational costs seem lower. Refurbishment isn’t maintenance yadda yadda.
Same deal is going on with insurance. That 1.1 M / year covers some nuclear accidents, but the self insurance risk is quite significant even if you exclude the risk subsidy assumed by governments. IE: In the event of a large scale disaster insurance doesn’t make the reactor owner whole meaning their out the value of 1 or more nuclear reactors.
So yea 1.1M / year only works out to 0.01c/kWh but that’s an underestimate.
> Rooftop solar will cannibalise the utility solar's daytime market. The demand for utility solar's energy will for the most part occur when the sun does not shine.
Even assuming vastly more rooftop solar… PV panels produce power on a long tail curve not just at peak hours. Rooftop solar however only supplies the grid with power after the houses needs are met which is a significantly narrower area.
Do you have references for how much a solar plant costs to build and maintain? A breakdown of costs would be good.
> Operations & Maintenance must include fuel costs…
I presume this was done to make section 5.4 "Fuel cost sensitivity" easy.
> Rooftop solar however only supplies the grid with power after the houses needs are met which is a significantly narrower area.
What about if people are over-specifying their solar PV system to make use of net-energy-metering (or high feed in tariffs) to reduce their annual bill (for instance in California)?
> What about if people are over-specifying their solar PV system to make use of net-energy-metering (or high feed in tariffs) to reduce their annual bill (for instance in California)?
Don’t just think about what happens when these systems are at 100% output. At 5% output that home is sucking power from the grid while the solar far is providing the grid with power. Which means even if every home and business adds panels a solar farm will still supply some electricity directly.
Ex: Your quoted fuel costs would be 0.9c/kWh in (2020 publish date) = 1.3c/kWh in 2024. O&M is often quoted as 4x fuel costs so 5.2kWh. “Fuel costs account for about 28% of a nuclear plant's operating expenses.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
A battery system which costs 200$/kWh and does 5,000 cycles = 5c/kWh. (Not every kWh from a solar farm needs to be stored, but this is just a ballpark comparison.)
> At which point the transmission becomes the limitation; the grid operator probably wants a fairly stable flow of electricity through the wires to maximise utilisation
You’re missing the forest for the trees here. Utilization follows demand, a state with peak demand of 6GW is going to have transmission lines setup for 6GW. But comparing the options you have nuclear with 4x 1.5GW reactors averaging ~40% utilization or batteries backed by solar. Run the numbers and Solar wins by a landslide.