Nuclear gets a greentech fanbase - we'll get higher electricity prices
The "excess renewable power crowd" faces reality, and pivots toward nukes. This many not be the fanbase we were looking for.
In my journey to figure out where the energy transition’s going, I decided that skipping to the ending and waiting out the back and forth in between would be a more productive use of time. To that end, I sought out and found a handful of folks who have actually built, run, and evaluatet various types of tech to follow. One of them is B.F. Randall
, who gets credit for a very tough task - changing my mind about the potential of nuclear energy. As you’d expect, most of these folks are engineers, who have had a very hard slog these past few years attempting to insert some sort of reason into the arguments for and against the many forms of cleantech/greentech that are supposedly going to eliminate the market for oil and gas in the not too distant future. Try to remind the world that the virtual world can’t exist without the real one, that the ChatBot factories, the AI movement, all of it, can and probably will be severely crippled at some point when someone simply cuts off the power and the fiber optics that make it happen. Good luck with that!One of Mr. Randall’s posts, expressing frustration that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission was staffed with, well, staffers, instead of actual nuclear experts, pointed out that one big reason why nukes haven’t been a focus of the clean energy movement is that they don’t have a defined group of people lobbying for support.
You may be happy, or possibly dismayed, to know that the hydrogen crowd has discovered nukes, and is busy figuring out how to raise the price of electricity from the existing plants, which is very low, to support getting the cost of hydrogen down to something less breathtaking than the current levels that are causing some people to pause in their devoted support. The US DOE has apparently now realized that the calls for massive expansions of EV sales and coversion of ‘dirty’ industries such as steel and cement to low carbon power will use far more than the amount of so called excess renewable power that is likely to be available in the next few years. Hydrogen producers have to contend with, among other things, battery storage makers and bitcoin miners for these supposedly free electrons.
So, attention is now turning to the “excess” power generated by existing nuclear plants. Many of these use pumped storage, which is a fancy way of saying they move water from one place to another when the grid doesn’t need the power. The idea is, to divert that power to producing hydrogen via electrolysis. I'm assuming that somehow the water they were pumping will come into play here, but not going to jump down that rabbit hole for now.
Just reading it sounds reasonable, right? But wait, electrolyzers are expensive, can’t use dirty water, and hydrogen will need storage and distribution at a minimum even if somehow the production site is located right next to a steel mill. How to pay for this? The DOE is standing at the ready with loans and tax credits (the 45B program to be exact), but the generator operators and their lenders may not be convinced that these will survive multiple elections. How about following the Texas example for bitcoin miners? Rather than connecting all the renewables to the grid to feed the metropolitan areas that need the juice, how about diverting the “free” nuclear power that would otherwise keep grid prices lower, and use it for hydrogen? And when the grid is short, and power prices are higher at certain times, turn off the electrolyzers and feed the market? Of course, that makes electricity more expensive than it is now, but it speads the cost over a much larger base. And maybe, just maybe, the ratepayers (aka us) won’t notice that our electric bills keep creeping up? And get angry at the folks who are manipulating the power markets behind the scenes?
Us Texas ratepayers have just been treated to higher bills effective September 1 to pay for grid changes that our primary grid provider in this region is making. These charges are noticeable - $50 a month for average homes. Wonder what will happen next year when they go up again?
The DOE expects to announce the winners of the Phase I Hydrogen Hub stimmies before year end. These awards are supposedly to kick start the projects to the tune of $1 billion each. Then, if all goes well, the project sponsors will be coming back for another $8-9 billion apiece to actually build the projects. To say that this sounds very much like a typical economic development push to front end load spending into targeted communities ahead of a major election would probably be mean spirited. But it’s hard not to go backwards a few years to the Clean Coal era, with the Future Gen competition for sites that would demonstrate how coal fired power plants could be made sustainable. One of the plans included a greenhouse to use the CO2. A couple were built, one ran for awhile, at least one is a field with a For Sale sign.
The difference this time is that back then inflation wasn’t a problem. This time it is, and getting worse. If you’re a nuclear power advocate, be very careful what you wish for.