I used to worship efficiency. For years as a control systems engineer, I sweated over fractions of a percent, shaving seconds off processes and optimising production lines.
Now I look around and realise: efficiency is dead. Killed by cheap solar and ever-cheaper batteries.
It pains me to admit that efficiency has lost. It has been beaten, hands down, by cheap generation and cheap storage.
The example that hammered this home for me this week? An Aussie who bought a 30 kWh home battery so he can both power his home and recharge his car every night. A battery charging a battery. That sound you hear is every efficiency nerd screaming into a pillow.
Rational But Wasteful
Would it be more efficient and better for the planet to simply plug the car in while it’s parked at work? Of course. But workplaces rarely have chargers. And he likely can’t control how many chargers are in his work car park. What he can control is slapping an oversized battery in his garage. Rational? Yes. Efficient? Absolutely not.
(Tune in next week, and I’ll explain why, without specialist configuration, he’ll still pull from the grid every night, even with his monster battery.)
I’m Guilty Too
Confession time: I own a solar pool cover designed to prevent heat loss. It stays rolled up most nights. Instead of rolling it out before bedtime, I just hammer the heat pump all day off my 20 kW array to make up for the overnight cooling. It’s lazy. It’s wasteful. It works.
Lifestyle and laziness beat efficient living. That’s the story now, and I’m guilty as charged.
In my defence, I do have a thermally efficient home. The comfort of a sensibly sized, well-insulated home with proper thermal mass and tight seals is a beautiful thing. You have to live it to appreciate it.
But it is a tough sell to convince homeowners to spend tens of thousands fixing their home’s gaps, glazing and insulation when they can just bolt 20 kW of solar to the roof, throw a big-ass battery in the mix, and run a ducted reverse-cycle off free energy until the place feels like a Westfield in summer. Efficiency is out. Brute force is in.
My home in Adelaide features a raft of energy efficiency innovations, but for many Australians brute force solutions are winning out.
The Easiest Path Always Wins
You can’t fight human nature. Efficiency feels virtuous, but most people will always choose the easy path. And right now, the easy path is simply to oversize your solar, battery and appliances and get on with life.
The truth is, efficiency was fragile all along. It only works when people have no alternative. The moment the lazy option got cheap enough, efficiency collapsed.
Do I like it? No. But results are what matter. If plastering our suburbs with solar and stacking batteries in garages cuts emissions and reduces particulate pollution, then it’s hard to argue against it.
Buying a monster home battery just to charge your EV might look inefficient – maybe even silly – but it’s still miles better than the laziest option of all: buying another petrol car.
Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column by SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to get it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.
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Yes, I’m guilty as charged too… living off-grid most of my life meant being super efficient but now with the low cost of solar and batteries, I take the attitude of “use it or loose it” and now use inefficent panel heaters just to burn off the surplus power so the system can cycle another day.
Yeah, i remember a dim distance past when i used to turn off lights when i left a room, didn’t turn on my air conditioners unless i had guests or it was over 35. Nervously awaited each quarterly power bill. We made part payments each month so we were on top of it and didn’t have to scramble to pay the bill when it arrived.
These days i run most of the lights all day because, well why not! same with the air cons, come summer they run every night and days if i am at home.
It costs me nothing and being older these days, i see better in brighter light. Solar and the battery have transformed my life.
And those Power bill’s? Well all the election bribe money from the last couple of years sitting in the account as a credit will probably pay the next 2 years worth of network charges. After that maybe technology will have improved enough going off grid will be viable, unless there are more election bribes of course!.
Yep, I have been having this ‘debate’ for a while now.
Why spend thousands on double glazing or insulating your underfloor or building to Passivhaus standard when the same comfort can be gained for around $20k of solar and storage.
I have spent decades slowly upgrading our house to a very low energy use home and now find I am spilling energy from 10am most days.
Sure, we need to ensure we are doing better than building glorified tents but let’s not get bogged down reaching for ten stars.
Interesting, and yes, you’re correct … (but only up to a point.)
It’s still true though that efficiency does matter, because a watt saved is one you don’t have to generate and store to use. When the weather is very inclement, even a massive solar system won’t generate much power.
Many people can NOT have solar and battery, such as renters and unit dwellers, or people struggling to pay the bills and mortgage each week.
Efficient airconditioning makes a big difference.
Using aircon wisely makes a big difference.
Efficient appliances make a big difference.
And even efficient lighting makes a big difference.
And an efficient electric car makes a big difference. (Some have HUGE batteries and consume a hell of a lot of energy compared to others.)
So all of these efficiency gains combined are what I would argue make living off solar and battery possible.
And finally I’m still horrified when I hear how much energy some households use!
“But workplaces rarely have chargers.”
In Canada it’s the opposite. Almost all workplaces have a row of plugs for car engine heaters.
But they only deliver 1400 watts continuous, per circuit. And some are thermostat controlled to shut off, if the air temperature warms up to -10 C.
One of the reasons I ended up with a Tesla vehicle was their superb efficiency. Other EV makers are doing what you’re describing, adding much larger batteries to compensate for poor efficiency.
With G2V, I’m one of many I’m sure whose home solar is sitting alone all day while I’m at work, exporting back to the grid. It’d be nice to be able to credit your own production against any work-based charging.
Nick, preserving your personal PV generation for fossil fuel displacement is exactly what an ample home battery does when you use it to charge the BEV overnight. That some photons are spilt in battery losses costs little beyond the opportunity cost of export, + modest battery wear. The CO₂ displacement of the BEV commute has to exceed that of exporting into an increasingly renewables-powered grid, so all good.
You’re then not paying retail to pull your wholesale-sold kWh back out of the grid – instead, paying off 2/3 of a large battery.
The sun wantonly spills as much energy into space in a second as all nations combined produce in 650 millennia. I’ve consumed up to 52 kWh of photons in a day, solo off-grid, but can never manage to utilise one sandgrain on a million mile beach of the CO₂-free bounty. But I try. It preserves enthalpy, i.e. fights entropy, perhaps counter-intuitively in some unobservant minds. Use it or lose it into the heat death of the universe, folks.
Economies of scale. Having millions of households paying $10K+ each for a battery is grossly inefficient for charging vehicles.
Nick,
Having millions of households paying $30K+ each for up to 5 polluting ICE cars is grossly inefficient – even worse with a high ongoing petrol cost burden vs free BEV travel.
A thousand households *are* buying home batteries every day, just in Australia. While that is highly efficient leveraging of tax dollars, reducing grid load and providing some needed grid firming, it is also attractive for personal cost, reliability, and convenience reasons. Far more efficient than burning petrol up hill and down dale.
You’re failing to understand that not only is the ~90% battery round trip efficiency 300% more efficient than a foul polluting ICE, when powered by ample rooftop solar, it is cost free! WNTL?
By 2035 there will be no ICE cars sold, and BEV operation will be better understood. Whether home battery energy is used to make toast or whack free km into the BEV during overcast, for a pizza run instead, it’ll be dead set normal. Those who adapt, thrive.
Having cars fuelled electrically is of course always more efficient than having them run on fossil fuels. It’s just ridiculously inefficient to spend $10,000+ per household to access excess solar in the grid, when strategically-placed chargers throughout the community (at workplaces) could access that same energy without the batteries.
super cost too eh ?
Pretty good.
As a coder decades ago, we would scrutinise code to be efficient because computing hardware was expensive. Today it’s a different story, hardware is cheap so efficient code is not a concern.
The same goes for solar, it’s cheap and abundant and quality is redundant.
As a coder _right now_ I can tell you efficient code is a concern.
At the low end. People are running code on smartphones, devices, billions of embedded controllers in the world. Efficiency matters.
At the high end. AI is sucking down gigawatts of power. They’re talking about building nuclear reactors just for AI. Or, as the Chinese found after the US sanctioned all their compute power, you could design more efficient models. Efficiency matters.
There’s a new book, Abundance, that all the politicians and government officials in Australia are reading right now. The idea is to give everybody heaps and heaps of the good life. And apparently, the way to do that is through (smarter and fewer) government regulations.
Anyway that’s the current trend, abundance.
The other note about abundance. Back at university engineering, my teacher drew a pie graph, with a 98% slice and a 2% slice. They represented non-solar and solar power. This was decades ago before PV solar took off.
Then he pointed out that our assumption was backwards. The 98% was solar power, and the 2% was “other”.
His point: 98% solar included lighting and heating the planet during the daytime. If we didn’t have a sun, it would be perpetual night and we’d need to find a lot of power generation to cover that.
My point: abundance. There’s so much solar to go around.
This was foreseeable, but perhaps not obvious to efficiency lovers. I used to be one until . . . . .
In 2018 I purchased a very efficient 65 inch Sony TV for our new house. I had done a lot of research and not only did the TV appear technically ahead of the field (albeit in Sony’s lower tech stream) but its operating and standby figures were great. It had standby of 10W for about 10 minutes, after which it dropped to something under 2W. And it was on sale.
This was well under half of my then current TV running costs. So did I contribute this windfall to reducing demand on the grid? Well yes, for about 12 months. Then I purchased a second TV (on sale), because I needed (wanted) a Google compatible TV. So I was still morally ahead wasn’t I? I consumed less (just) what I would have been had I kept the original TV. But now I had a second TV for the family.
Win win: not really, but it is human nature. I’m my defence, I still have both TVs. But am checking out new televisions . . . .
Great article. Ive come to same conclusions a little while ago. Especially re restive element hotwater systems
If live or Sydney or higher in NSW and have ability to have a reasonable sized PV. An old fashioned storage HWS , even with its 3x efficiency deficiency to heatpumps are far more effective. As dont need efficiency if got energy to throwaway. So the cost and complexity of a heat pump HWS is moot. As as reasonable size REHWS store hot water for days a house battery isn’t even needed.
Yes Finn, the trend has been sneaking into Solarquotes comments, too. But 30 kWh will barely be an average sized new battery before decade’s end – the 1000/day going in now already average 20 kWh. Prices will fall.
Here, off-grid, I use my 46 kWh battery to charge the BEV at 7.2 kW by day, regardless of clouds. “Solar excess only” charging smarts are yesterday’s counterproductive faffing, given adequate battery. Whack max power into the BEV, despite clouds, then let the house battery recoup photons while zooming down the highway at 100 km/h. It approaches the convenience of battery swapping without the hassle of battery swapping. It will be a norm, if it isn’t already.
Modest losses are fine, so long as it’s only photons lost. It’s fossil burning we must reduce, not energy consumption. Beware +2°C by 2035, +3°C before 2060. It’s baked in now. Max battery & PV for coming grid outages. Resilience is vital.
Consume your photons – it cools the roof!
Correct. However there is a hidden CO2 & financial cost to the cyclical replacement of plant. Second Batteries (home to charge car), bigger heat pumps etc all add up over decades.
On that basis the idea of generating more excess PV to then self consume for eg resistive heating of water instead of a heat pump has enormous appeal.
There is also the disruption cost of fixing all the heat leaks in a home; a bigger heatpump using free energy works.
Go massive on PV….. yes.
Go bigger on heatpumps; maybe.
I always say to people ‘if gasoline was free, we would burn it in the streets to heat our homes & drive around in semi’s’
Des,
It was not so much to avoid the extra embedded energy of a heatpump, that I chose the resistive element in the HWS, as to avoid the subsequent maintenance cost of spinning ironmongery.
And yes, with ample solar, there is zero emissions cost, zero grid load, and zero ongoing energy cost for that resistive element. Efficiency counts for nought there, as the extra solar panel is doubtless cheaper than the heatpump. Heatpumps are for homes with awkward roofs, I figure.
The infrastructure replacement cost you mention can become very expensive.
Kelvin Thompson, when a Victorian MP, reminded us that 2% population growth is enough to double infrastructure expenditure. Bridges, schools, roads, hospitals, etc. last on average about 50 years, so 2% must be rebuilt each year. So 2% population growth is an equally massive burden. (Even before the environment is considered.)
I agree with a little extra solar I get free hot water with my resistive hot water and a catch diverter set on solar only !! People don’t take into account having to buy subsequent units and electrician costs to install them as heat pumps only last half or more as long !!
I don’t know I thought I tried to do things in the “right” order. Bought an older house and invested in floor/ceiling/wall insulation. Invested in double glazing in the bedroom and main living area. The house came with a woodfire as it’s in a rural area and our winter temps on average are -7 overnight. The fire heats the house the most effectively. But I “tried” to do the right thing and installed what was meant to be very efficient electric reverse cycle air conditioning. My power bill tripled overnight. I tried being “efficient” and running the heating at a low barely noticeable 18 degrees when it was -3 at sundown. Didn’t really make a dent in the bills. My frozen tears got the best of me and I gave into the hype and got solar and a battery. The 10kw solar + 20kw battery was meant to more than cover our two person household. Maybe in warmer climates. If the temp drops below zero the battery quickly tanks with the “efficient” electric reverse cycle running. Back to chopping wood.
Did you get a central/ducted system, or use splits in each room? Your electricity bill will go up either way, if the heating beforehand was burning wood. But I live in one the coldest parts of the country, and have been toasty warm all winter for several years now, using reverse cycle split units. Way cheaper than any other form of heating I’ve used, and in fact when i balance any extra grid use in winter against the excess we produce in the other 3 seasons, i haven’t paid a cent for heating in 3 years. A household with 5 people.
I won’t touch wood, wood smoke is toxic and terrible for the neighbours too. I do understand for some it’s the only affordable option.
Thanks Finn, but I think, looking to the future, efficiency will become even less important. Not just human nature, but the nature of cost recovery.
As more people adopt solar arrays/batteries the costs for non users are going to rise. So the daily charge (fixed cost) will need to rise as grid consumption (variable income) falls. Proven model would be Water in ACT. Instead of paying for litres of water, we now pay a large fixed amount and a much smaller consumption amount:
Water supply charge (fixed) = $60
Sewerage supply charge (fixed) = $150
Actual consumption charge (variable) = $110
The first 2 items are on every bill irrespective of usage, so are equivalent of electricity daily charge. Last item is water equivalent of kW used
So in planning we really need to prepare for significant increases in daily charges with (if suppliers are honest) significant decreases in kW charges.
I expect we will see these changes over next decade, so be prepared.
Yes, I share your views about that “very efficient electric reverse cycle air conditioning” for heating in a cold climate. After a winter of trying to keep warm with it, I have decided I will be sticking with my “inefficient” gas central heating from now on.
The air con wasn’t very effective at heating and it didn’t end up being any cheaper.
Hi Alan,
Did you look at any other measures to fix up your house?
Gas heating is very efficient at sucking up all your money, as it uses raw power to overcome a badly built house.
RCAC is invariably cheaper but you need to address the fundamental inefficiencies no matter what you use for heating.
We’ve done a whole series of articles on windows, doors and insulation.
“Gas heating is very efficient at sucking up all your money”
Well, sorry, but that’s not my experience. I normally spend on average around $1000 a year on gas. This winter I spent $250 as I only used it for cooking. My average annual electricity bill for the last few years has been $600. This year it looks like it will be more like $1400.
So I will have spent the same amount for a much inferior form of heating. The air con splits heated 2 areas. Moving between them or going to the downstairs bedrooms was like going into the cold room at the local bottle shop (without the beer). The gas central heating warms every single room in the house (even the bathrooms) – you completely forget how cold it is outside.
I got the impression that the air con couldn’t cope with my badly built house, whereas the gas could.
Hi Alan,
Mosey on over to My Efficient Electric Home and they’ll explain it to you in fairly polite terms.
All electric houses are cheaper to run, healthier to live in and better for the surrounding environment. Plus they’re better for the national accounts.
If you had to pay for the externalities, like using the sky to dump your waste, gas would be doubly expensive. In any case if we improve housing stock with basic draftproofing and insulation, everyone is better off except the gas company profit margin.
10kw solar + 20kw battery = $A k (10 =20) = $30k installed ?
I began with SOLAR PV in 1942 when my father’s Absorbers were Selenium Rectifiers modified to allow the sun to reach the selenium on the steel disc.
I have experimented all my life virtually with SOLAR PV, my first 2 watt panel I bought in 1966,
My experiments have all panels in parallel connected to the bus by diodes.
My loads are mostly MR16 8 Watt LED fittings but I was talked out of my experiments in the mid 60’s and my system stopped at 50 watts input only.
That saves me about 2 kWh a day and it has worked ever since 1966 until they built a 2-storey DUPLEX on my north and cut off my sun to the largest 20 watt panel.
I am 90 and frustrated because the DC system is the best efficiency being about 95%
Alan
I think it probably depends. If you have the means to make an investment in solar and a big enough battery that efficiency doesn’t matter then go at it. Personally I think a more balance approach is better, not least because much of the embedded energy of something is spent during its manufacture not its use. But if you are building or renovating or replacing appliances as then efficiency should matter. It also matters for those who won’t be able to cover up their inefficiency with pv/batteries. It will still matter A LOT in an industrial or manufacturing or transport context.
I agree. Efficiency has lost its appeal. I am retired now but I am an Electrical Engineer and taught Renewable Energy for many years. In the early days, efficiency calculations were a critical part of system design, especially for off-grid systems. I live in an off-grid log home with 12 kW of PV and batteries of course. I bought an EV late last year and that has been a challenge charging it off-grid, but generally can do this unless I have several days of poor solar.
I really appreciate the Solar Quotes blog. Consumers can get factual information about the Renewable Energy and how we can manage the energy transition.
Thanks for your help Gary,
Feel free to muck in on the comments section. We always appreciate informed comments.
Cheers
Greetings Garry,
It is quite an accomplishment to manage an EV, off-grid with 12 kW of PV. Even with a bit more PV here, protracted overcast is still an EV charging killer. In winter, resorting to the wood stove to free up energy helps. (The stove heats the HWS too, granting up to another 10 kWh.)
Once fully electrified, EV included, efficiency is a compromise at best, I think. A big battery can time shift EV charging, but production beats all, if roof space permits. (There’s room for ground mount here, though, and the kangaroos diligently keep the grass down.)
I’m guessing the log home is insulated? That translates to km of BEV travel too.
Retirement makes it easier to use the BEV less during a few overcast days. That effects a virtual V2H without moving any energy, just priorities – and maybe a box of UHT milk to tide things over.
I’m reconsidering my decision to stick with Tesla Powerwalls for the sake of ecosystem consistency, and I believe it was a mistake. My home has a 3-phase electrical system with 20kW of solar and 3 Sungrow inverters, which allows me to install a Powerwall 2 and Gateway on phases one and two. However, despite this setup, my electricity bills remain high, and the system doesn’t effectively balance loads across all three phases.
A dedicated 3-phase inverter paired with a 30kW battery system would likely be a much more effective solution for my needs.
Unless someone knows a hack I don’t, but it’s disappointing 3 phase owners can’t have a Tesla solution. Although, the new SigenStor looks good.
Hi Dave,
You might try a 15kW 3ph Sungrow unit, with your existing single phase(?) Sungrows downstream of it.
They’re capable of running during an outage.
Don’t feel bad Finn. Efficiency is a broad brush term. It all depends on what resource we need to optimise, maybe time or money or energy. Even these subheadings are fuzzy, eg time as in getting the job done as soon as possible or else minimising the minutes spent during a day (with no actual deadline). An interest-free (green) loan throws a lot of business principles out the window. And you are right that when the marginal unit cost of a (solar) kwh is literally nothing, trained engineers have nightmares. Some equations were never meant to have a zero in them. My own training (a long time ago) in chemical engineering ranked energy sources by entropy: we were taught to never use electricity or gas to warm a tank if we could channel waste heat from the process next door. The modern advice to households to “electrify everything” still makes me twitch.
Finn the truth is: from a purely engineering perspective, is you have become lazy and lost your way.
However from a flawed and fragile human perspective, welcome to the club. You are now truly one of us.
And that is precisely the dilemma we all face: Who needs to be listened to and embraced the most in this techno centric world: The world’s best and brightest academics, scientists, researchers, and engineers; or the ordinary Joe, like you and me who by our own admissions have given up a bit on striving for perfection in all things?
For me, I always go for the world’s best and brightest viewpoint every time, and dismiss the noise and scuttlebutt, which is generally self indulgent and ill informed.
Lawrence Coomber
Much as I want to say I told you so,…I’ve been banging on about this for years,( and even got blacklisted from an an “energy efficient home” website when I suggested they were not being objective and we’re pedalling vested interests).
Free sunshine captured can not really be wasted (no matter how we use it), but if the more efficient machines are more expensive or less reliable or less convenient and more costly to maintain, then it is much smarter to apply the KISS principle and to bang on more pv (and now batteries to benefit from free energy resources.
Of course this will not necessarily apply to all people ( those in very cold or cloudy climates, or large families with small or no roof etc,.. so we must always keep an open mind,.. and new technologies will turn the status quote on its head as well.
I mean in many areas a mud brick house has most of the attributes that passive house proponents ascribe to,…and it’s just dirt thoughtfully placed.
The truth is that batteries are not good for the environment, we simply swap our emissions over to China and whatever mining company supplied the metals etc.
It takes a huge amount of energy and produces a huge amount of emissions to mine and create the batteries. Sure, your house might seem energy efficient or low emission, but the emissions created to make the battery are huge. I work in mining and see this first hand.
Hi Dave,
The unpremeditated holes that litter Gippsland really blow my mind.
At least batteries are 95% recyclable, unlike coal.
So True – I was seriously considering swapping out our clothes dryer (which we rarely use) for a new (expensive) heat pump version but now that we have a 40kWh home battery that thought has well and truly gone out the window. Given we now have more battery storage than we actually need I’m now resigned to not caring whatever anyone turns on – will be interesting to see how peak summer goes and if we actually manage to drain the battery with AC running day and night
I don’t however use the battery to charge our EV’s (they just use excess PV or free grid during the day or an occasional longer overnight charge on a super cheap tariff)
As usual with humans, “colour and movement”. Climate, what’s that!? So all these wonderfully heated and air conditioned homes won’t eventually be spilling their “climate controlled space” into the wider world climate?
That’s all well and good if you’re allowed put more solar on ausnet here in Victoria won’t allow more than 10kw on single phase while connected to the grid !!
That’s usually the inverter limit, not the panel limit, so you may be able to get around it if you have a battery.
I still try to maximise my efficiency, but the addition of batteries has seen me take a bit less rigorous approach. I think if I had of chosen a larger battery I probably would have been less rigorous again. I’ll see where I am at in 12 months time.
Very provocative article Finn. Given the battery rebate is part of the Government’s strategy to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the article and comments from others suggest these rebates on their own are not the ideal strategy if they just lead to savvy users increasing the size of their battery purchase, deaden the desire for efficiency and don’t encourage surplus needs to be exported to the grid.
As a climate scientist this concerns me. Seems like we need to get a better deal on exports.
I love the Solarquotes website – so much useful information.
Thank you
Thank you Beth,
We try to help everyone make better decisions and rail against the shonks who flogging needless stuff to punters who don’t understand.
I’d love to get your input on recent policy though.
Are they still pursing carbon capture to meet targets in the last round of announcements?
Cheers
There is an article by Alan Kohler on the ABC website today, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-22/climate-target-2035-2050-carbon-emissions-global-warming/105799080.
His analysis suggests that carbon capture is indeed required to achieve the latest targets. Given most carbon capture is done by forests he calculates that an area equivalent to half of Vic & 2x Tas will have to be planted in fertile regions ie existing farmland!
Seems like this idea below, might be a better alternative, and using modern scientific achievements as well: rather than hand planting of a very large number of tree and shrubs:
To Power 526,000 Homes:
Each Linglong-1 reactor has the capability to generate 125,000 kilowatts of electricity, culminating in an annual output of 1 billion kilowatt-hours. This is sufficient to power approximately 526,000 homes or support around 1 million people. By substituting coal-based power with nuclear energy from Linglong-1, China can achieve a substantial reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, estimated at about 880,000 tons annually. This reduction is equivalent to the environmental impact of planting 7.5 million trees.
https://www.sustainability-times.com/energy/mini-nuclear-breakthrough-china-activates-worlds-first-compact-reactor-to-deliver-clean-energy-to-over-half-a-million-homesplant-set-to-power-over-half-a-million-homes-in-c/
Lawrence Coomber
Alan Kohler’s article explains that carbon capture is required to meet the targets even AFTER electricity generation & transport is largely carbon free.
Adding nuclear energy to mop up the last carbon from electricity generation isn’t going to contribute much.
125 MW would power about 166,000 Australoan homes, on average (18 KWh per day). Not 526,000
The reactor is expected to be complete sometime in 2026. The linked article suggests it’s complete.
Randy Wester: – “The reactor is expected to be complete sometime in 2026. The linked article suggests it’s complete.”
Nope. Per IAEA’s PRIS database, for LINGLONG-1:
Construction start date: _ _ _ 13 Jul, 2021
First Criticality Date: _ _ _ _ _N/A
First Grid Connection: _ _ _ _N/A
Commercial Operation Date: N/A
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=1111
So far, that’s 4 years, 2 months, 11 days, since the first concrete pour of the base of the reactor began. That doesn’t include the time required for planning, approvals, financing, design, procurements and site preparation activities that must happen first before construction. Typically add five years for the pre-project implementation phase, so a 2026 completion year for this project means a likely 10+ year project duration from scratch.
Meanwhile, the world is heading for +2.0 °C GMST anomaly before 2040.
Nuclear is DEMONSTRABLY FAR TOO SLOW to deploy.
Good point Geoff,
Do the nuclear fanbois have a definition for “small” that you’re aware of?
Seems 300MW needs a lot of concrete and construction but isn’t big enough to reach the economies of scale you get with a 1000MW plant. However they can lift the lid on with a single crane so that’s deemed “small”
While the fever dream of factory built, truck deployable SMRs is just vapourware. Even the optimists say they’ll be expensive, and production line volume needs to be high if they’ll ever get competitive.
Guess they just need some more billions in public subsidy, and another decade, to go with the last 6 that haven’t delivered cheap nuclear.
Anthony Bennett: – “Do the nuclear fanbois have a definition for “small” that you’re aware of?”
IAEA’s definition for small reactors is they “have a power capacity of up to 300 MW(e) per unit” with a subset category for microreactors “designed to generate electrical power typically up to 10 MW(e).”
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrs
US DoE microreactor definition: 1-20 MWₜₕ.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-nuclear-microreactor
The IAEA’s definition for ‘modular’ is:
I’m not aware of any factories anywhere in the world that are being built or operational to serial factory build & assemble so-called nuclear SMR units.
Small reactors physically exist; but I’d suggest serial factory-built SMRs don’t yet physically exist
I just want to say that’s a lovely front garden
There is likely no way the world will get anywhere near needed emission reduction targets, at its current rate of action. Which is something Kohler writes about often. I think what often gets forgotten is that fossil fuels entered our societies via a revolution, the Industrial Revolution. It takes massive disruption. We need similar scale disruption to shift to renewable energy, societies need to literally be on a war footing. The risk is far greater than the ones we stopped the world for, for two world wars, for more than a decade.
The only disruption even approaching that level of urgency is the one the Chinese have created, by dramatically scaling up renewables and driving their costs down. We can hope it might be enough, but I doubt it. Revolutions can’t be managed via KPIs, they mean a fundamental uprooting of the status quo.
“We can hope it might be enough, but I doubt it.”
It’ll be enough. The hurdle was figuring out how to make new generation that would produce a lot more electricity than it took, to manufacture.
And I think we’re there now, especially with cheaper batteries, especially in warmer countries. It’ll be harder than stopping CFC manufacture, but nothing like WWII.
Rooftop solar can,on average, produce enough electricity to run a house in Canada. Just at the wrong time of year, so we’re going nuclear as well. But we’re not going to need a bomber an hour.
It’s not a technical problem. The impossible bit will be meeting the deadlines, to restrict warming to manageable levels. We’re not within a million miles of hitting those deadlines, globally. And to clarify, I desperately want us to hit those targets, it’s just a comment on the realistic state of play.
The elephant in the room of the transition that is only very rarely mentioned too is that the fossil fuel industry is a petrochemical industry. The fuels are only one component. Petro-chemicals are an absolutely vital part of modern life. So we will need to keep using fossil fuels for a lot of those, but just not burn them, as fuels. Or find alternatives to them, which is a gargantuan task. It took several hundred years to develop those we use now.
Basically we need a new Industrial Revolution, not a managed transition.
Nick yours is an accurate summary.
How did your thoughtful comment though, get through the “don’t publish it unless it fits the Solar Quotes narrative” filter though?
My similar to your comments, are always purged.
Lawrence Coomber
Hi Lawrence, your history indicates we’ve approved over 600 comments from you, including six in the last few days. Comments aren’t rejected for not suiting our “narrative” but when they are off-topic or contain lies or abuse.
Max thanks.
My comments are rarely off topic. Their breadth though is defined by my history, experience, performance, knowledge, and qualifications: the same attributes that every commentator brings to framing of their comments.
I am an Electrical Power & Hydraulic Systems Engineer since 1970 having served 20 years in the RAN as a weapons and missile systems engineer (65-85). Founded a technology innovation company in 1985, developing new technology for AU Regional Councils; Digital Water & Sewage optimisation and management.systems.
Added RE Technology in 1995 and started as a consultant in China to many new Chinese Companies starting in this space.
I have a Masters Degree in RE Technology from EIT, and a senior CEC/SAA Systems Designer and Installer; and the only current licence holder with all endorsements: Solar, Storage, Wind, Hydro, Hybrid.
I have designed and installed RE systems throughout Asia, India, Oceania since 2008.
I have a global focus.
Lawrence Coomber
Thanks for your expertise Lawrence,
I for one am sometimes challenged to learn things when presented with some good arguments, and I’m sure others here are too.
The comments section here for instance, it was a real burster.
Keep the comments coming.
Cheers
Randy Webster you are correct.
Around the 100-150 is the sweet spot for SMRs of this type.
I am very familiar with nuclear power since my Navy days as a power engineer 65-85. My first impression left me and my shipmates a bit speechless actually when on a RIMPAC multi Navies joint exercise off Pearl Harbour in 1970. The USS Enterprise was involved as one of about 200 ships and submarines. I was on a Destroyer Escort HMAS Stuart and we were known as a fast ship, but when the Enterprise went past us like we were parked, that made us all instant converts to the potential of nuclear power generation.
The Enterprise had 8 x 30 MW Westinghouse reactors. Also impressive was that every other ship was liquid fuel powered and had a funnel belching black smoke and soot out continuously. The Enterprise also had a small funnel belching out nothing but water vapour.
I am in my office in China at the moment and am very connected with Chinese engineers in the Solar Wind Hydro and Nuclear.
Hi Lawrence
Correct me if I’m wrong but SMRs are vapourware aren’t they?
NuScale gave up and everyone else has concept images and nothing in the way of a commercial demonstration plant.
In any case they’re incredibly expensive to the best of my knowledge.