Ontario set to begin construction of Canada's 1st mini nuclear power plant
There's been a lot of talk about SMR's over the years, it's nice to see one finally being built.
Even if it comes in over budget, getting the first one done will be a great learning experience and could lead to figuring out how to do future ones cheaper.
Assuming it's on time, completion in 2029, connected to grid in 2030.
enough electricity to supply about 300,000 homes The estimated construction cost of the initial reactor is $7.7 billion
Interesting. That comes out to just over $25,000 per home, assuming it's delivering power to 300,000 homes.
I wonder what it would cost to fit those 300,000 homes (or the roofs of large buildings) with solar, wind, and other green tech... interlinking communities to their wider municipality, and the rest of the province for redundancy.
Top end solar systems for the "average" home in Ontario would be around the same $25,000 price tag - one time - and would pay for itself in under 10 years, saving home owners from having to worry about rising energy costs.
Would it be most cost-effective? More sustainable? More eco-friendly?
You're forgetting that the SMR provides a baseload, while solar would only provide during the daytime hours. You'd need to tack on a battery system capable of running the house overnight which would increase costs further by at a minimum another 10-15k with installation for a small single family dwelling, or build a more centralized MW level scale battery system elsewhere. Wind doesn't really work too well for residential as the turbines aren't as cost effective at smaller sizes. (edit: You'd also need to over provision each house in order to ensure there's enough excess capacity to charge the batteries for the evening, increasing the cost further, and ensure it is over provisioned enough for winter)
The article mentions that IF it comes in on budget, it'd cost around the same as a centralized wind/solar project which would be cheaper than a home system, but home systems obviously provide better national security in terms of not a single point of failure.
Also the goal of these SMR projects is to just churn these things out of a factory which will make them cheaper in the long run. These things are brand new, and saying lets just forgo this new tech because solar, which has had decades to get to it's current cost, are cheaper is a mistake. SMRs could very well be cheaper than solar in the long run if we put the effort into it.
Edit: And I'm not trying to say putting home solar/battery is a bad idea, it's also a critical thing to do. It's not one or the other, it's both!
Edit: Also unless it's on a standing seam metal roof or other similar snap on install roof, assume at least one likely removal/reinstall for the solar panels per lifetime of the roof which would add another few thousand dollars.
The problem with using nuclear as baseload is that people have the wrong idea of what is required from a baseload power source.
A baseload power source's most important quality isn't constant output, it's rapidly adaptable output.
When it comes to cost, nothing beats solar. It's cheap, it's individually owned and especially with a battery the self-sufficiency basically means not paying for power anymore. So, people will adopt solar at greater numbers as the cost of solar panels is still dropping.
Solar and wind at peak times in several countries already exceed the demand. Nuclear, which is more expensive to run, now has a problem, because nobody wants to buy that energy. They'd rather get the cheaper abundant renewable power.
So, the nuclear reactor has to turn off or at least scale to a minimal power output during peak renewable hours. This historically is something nuclear reactors are just not good at. But even worse, it's a terrible economic prospect: nuclear is barely profitable as-is, having to turn it off for half the day kills the economic viability completely. Ergo, government subsidies are required to keep it operational.
Flexibility is king in the power network of the future. That means batteries or natural gas plants at the moment. Nuclear can be useful for nations without those and with a lagging renewable adoption, but it will be more expensive in the long run. It will also become more important to do heavy industrial tasks during peak renewable hours, so that the demand better matches the output.
A baseload power source’s most important quality isn’t constant output, it’s rapidly adaptable output.
A baseload supply shouldn't need to throttle up and down, it's the Base Load. The load that exists 24hrs a day.
Well that's exactly the popular misconception. The constant part of the baseload is the demand, not the supply. The total supply should always match that of course, but given the variable makeup of the supply, where renewable power sources are simply cheapest and at peak moments will supply the full demand, any other source will have to be variable as well to economically compete. Otherwise it's just making energy needlessly expensive.
Look at the demand and supply graphs for the 6 day period: https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
The lowest demand is about 12K MW, that is the base load, the load never goes below that. Nuclear and hydro cover that 12K MW constantly, and even hydro is throttles up and down to cover the some of the load that varies throughout the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
Power plants that do not change their power output quickly, such as some large coal or nuclear plants, are generally called baseload power plants.
I know that nuclear and hydro can constantly cover it, the point is that when it's very sunny out countries with good solar adoption will already 100% cover it (if not more). The nuclear power at those times has to compete with cheaper solar power, which it loses on price. And because the grid can't handle more supply than demand, it requires shutting something off. The cheapest power is solar so you'd prefer to keep that on for economic reasons, but since nuclear is bad at scaling up and down you have to pick the more expensive option. This increases energy prices beyond what is really necessary.
This also becomes even less tenable as battery adoption increases.
Just buy batteries for the nuclear power plant as well. If you have to turn it off, you're making a mistake with our current tech.
Assuming you still need the nuclear power to fill those batteries that is. Given the rate of solar adoption, that might well become unnecessary.
Assuming all power was handled by a single entity and not various businesses, there's no point in building new solar (or any new capacity) when you can just build batteries for the existing nuclear plant that you have to shut down in the evening.
You should only build new power generation once you are able to drain the nuclear plants battery each day (or have the logistical planning to know when that will be the case anyway)
edit: made up numbers example: If a 300mw plant can power 300,000 homes but has to shut down in the overnight, that same plant with batteries can maybe power 400,000 homes.
Except people will just purchase their own solar, because it's cheaper than getting nuclear power from a battery. They won't wait for demand to catch up, they'll make sure their own demand is fulfilled so they won't have to purchase power anymore.
It's a simple economic rule, if there's a cheaper option people wi shift towards it. You can't force people to purchase your power. You can't stop it unless you ban buying solar, which won't be received well.
Nuclear fills a rapidly shrinking niche in the power mix of tomorrow, and it's economics that's squeezing it out. There's no point in fighting that unless you want to pay more for power than is necessary (which nobody does).
Why would you use the batteries for nuclear when solar is so much cheaper?
If there's any excess capacity (solar/wind/geothermal/nuclear/coal/natural gas), batteries extend it's usefulness and help manage any peaks better and can help you avoid building another generation facility for peak times. It also takes much less land than solar and with SMRs can in theory be brought much closer to population centers reducing transmission losses.
Edit: 300mw of solar would be between 1,500 and 3,000 acres of land. 300mw SMR could be as low as 10-20 acres.
In theory you can setup electricity intensive operations that can use extra energy and power down when supply is tight. Things like water desalination or hydrogen production. You have the problem of capital not being used but desal plants are often cycled off already.
Rooftop solar takes basically no extra space and it's hard to get even closer to population centers than that.
300mw of solar would be between 1,500 and 3,000 acres of land. 300mw SMR could be as low as 10-20 acres.
In that context, it may still be better to plan for solar panels on all roofs in new developments.
Just taking one example of Whitby, Ontario, which only has a population of around 140,000. Using a quick and dirty measurement of the developed area from the waterfont to Taunton Rd., there's over 12,000 acres of area used up by mostly homes and other buildings (schools, retail, etc.).
You may not even need to have EVERY roof covered to meet the demands of a municipality like that. This makes it even more compelling because you have room to expand the capacity, if needed. And it still comes with the benefit of having multiple redundancies, being self-sustainable, offering residents free or extremely low-cost electricity (or even be paid to put energy back into the grid!), etc.
Anyway, this fantasy is unlikely to happen in Ontario. LOL
It might happens eventually for new builds at least... It just did in the UK!
I'm not pro-nuclear, but the baseload argument is compelling. We clearly need both more renewables, but sprinkling a few SMRs throughout the system seems to be a pretty good idea - especially if we don't want to integrate with the US grids.
The article mentions that IF it comes in on budget
That's one of the big ifs. It's new technology (kind of), so I'll be surprised if there aren't some overruns.
All you need to counter the baseload though is a shit ton of batteries.
It's doable, but it greatly increases the cost vs just solar. Going that route would still be very competitive price wise when centralized.
Edit: And even the baseload of an SMR might want batteries if there isn't enough usage overnight, so they can use it during the day rather than building another SMR. So we want batteries regardless.
It's still kinda comparable:
According to that analysis, providing a similar level of base power as the SMRs by building wind and solar power with battery energy storage would cost in the range of 13.5 to 18.4 cents per kWh
At the lower end of the estimate, at least.
At the lower end of the estimate, at least.
That will probably change for batteries as well as we come up with cheaper options. Lithium Ion ones can be expensive, but don't take up much space, but when you want grid scale, space isn't as big an issue. I have a lot of hope for the new Sodium Ion batteries. They're much cheaper, they just take up more space. Very new tech though.
All you need to counter the baseload though is a shit ton of batteries.
This is not presently a practical option. That's why it's almost never attempted. The best "batteries" we have right now are things like reservoirs with a pump and a dam.
Except it is happening now. It wasn't happening before.
It happens now in rarefied cases, but in general, it is not a practical option. It doesn't merely have to be physically possible, it has to be economically competitive.
But it is competitive now, we've reached that point. It's not "rarefied" cases anymore.
Tesla just installed 37GWh of capacity in the past year and recently bumped their capacity to 80GWh, and they're just one company.
We're going to start seeing GWh scale batteries now from the likes of Tesla, CATL, BYD and others.
Edit: This is a 15.3 GWh contract - https://www.intersectpower.com/tesla-provides-intersect-power-with-15-3-gwh-of-megapacks-for-solar-storage-projects/