Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check
Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check
Too expensive, slow, and risky for investors, and they're taking focus off renewables, say IEEFA experts
With a few SMR projects built and operational at this point, and more plants under development, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) concludes in a report that SMRs are "still too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning away from fossil fuels."
Return on investment is still heavily in favor of solar or wind generation with battery or hydro storage for low generation periods.
Yes, and SMR tech is not mature enough to be considered useful, BUT if it can overcome that hurdle, it has the potential for applications that need exceptionally high availability, like data centers targeting five 9s availability.
Energy costs aren't always the only consideration
Excellent point, but we should also consider how much data center utilization is due to wasteful, zero-value-added activities such as crypto mining, which should be banned.
We can't scale battery storage or hydro storage to the capacity we need to go carbon free
When you look at a large grid such as the EUs, you will find that wind + solar has no days without any electricity production and that worse case is at more then half of average electricity production of these sources.
As soon as you go weekly it becomes even more stable:
We also already have a lot of hydro storage in form of reservoirs. Those are built already and can vary their output. It is more of a matter of changing how we use those.
Why not? We're working on things like iron air batteries that only need basic material inputs. We have all kinds of demand response potential that isn't realized. And we can do more transmission so a local event can be covered by capacity in other regions. Besides, any issues we have with the last 5% of generation are meaningless for the next 50%.
Big overruns in budget and time for first 4 plants currently under construction, but the analysis double dips regarding "risk" as they are again talking about financial risk to investors, not risk of meltdown or other disaster.
Investment risk is a category of risk. How's that "double-dipping?"
The investment risk is directly related to cost overruns and delays, which are already stated.
On the other hand, a major point of these projects is how they significantly reduce the risk to humans and the environment compared to other nuclear plants, so I don't think I'm alone in expecting the "risk" in the headline was referring to some rebuttal of their claims, but that is not the case.