How does the United States generate electricity currently?

Over the course of 2020, the U.S. generated 4,009 TWh of electricity, with the majority coming from fossil fuels. Natural gas (40.3%) was the biggest source of electricity for the country, accounting for more than nuclear (19.7%) and coal (17.3%) combined.

Including nuclear energy, non-fossil fuels made up 41.9% of U.S. electricity generation in 2020. The biggest sources of renewable electricity in the U.S. were wind (8.4%) and hydro (7.3%).

But on a state-by-state breakdown, we can see just how different the electricity mix is across the country (rounded to the nearest percentage). //

But for the U.S. to reach its ambitious carbon-free goal by 2035, the biggest impact will need to come from the biggest electricity producers.

That title currently goes to Texas, which generated 12% of total U.S. electricity in 2020. Despite being the most populous state, California generated less than half Texas’ output, and less than both Florida and Pennsylvania.

In 2020, the U.S. produced 4,009 terawatt-hours of power (also written as 4,009 billion kWh, since one billion kWh is one TWh).

■ About 60 percent of that total came from fossil fuels like natural gas (40.3 percent), coal (19.3 percent), and petroleum (0.4 percent), all of which have CO2 emissions as an undesirable side effect.

■ Nuclear energy accounted for just under 20 percent. It is debated whether nuclear power falls under the category of “sustainable,” but at least it doesn’t emit any greenhouse gases.

■ So-called renewables make up the remaining 20 percent, the main ones being wind (8.4 percent), hydro (7.3 percent) and solar (2.3 percent). Smaller renewable energy sources are biomass (1.4 percent) and geothermal (0.4 percent).

Let me start by dispelling the notion that I think smaller, modular, manufactured nuclear power systems – often called SMRs or micro reactors – are the be all and end all solution to anything, including climate change or energy security.

Though not THE solution, they have the potential to be a crucial, uniquely capable part of a fully-integrated, 0% emission climate-solving grid.

The best of the breed build on lessons from aircraft manufacturing, submarine construction, electric vehicles, wind & solar and even computers. They are leavened with six decades worth of experience in building, operating and maintaining extra large nuclear systems. They address some of the public relations challenges that have plagued very large reactors. //

As former submarine engineer officer who also had the rare opportunity to plan and budget for fleet level nuclear power training, maintenance and construction programs, I have a personal understanding of how economies of series production and standardization work to help keep costs under control and schedules predictable.

It is enlightening to see how much costs fall when you can train a group of operators in a common speciality and send them out to several dozen plants that have identical equipment, spare parts lockers and layouts. It’s also easy to see how maintenance procedures can be written once and used by all and how alterations can be planned, reviewed and implemented. These are just a few of the examples I can list. Rules protecting confidential information prevent me from sharing quantified details. Space prevents me from listing other examples.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone who has made anything that people learn to do things with experience or that doing the same thing repeatedly produces better results the more often the task is done. Those learning curve-related improvements don’t require mass production of thousands or millions of units, they start improving cost and performance with the second unit. //

The modern renewable industry – wind and solar energy collection systems – demonstrate the utility of replication. Starting from the high cost systems of the early 2000s, the industry took advantage of tax credit and mandates originally designed to help them build markets and achieve scale economies. Their impressive cost reduction performance is more attributable to the economy of learning by doing than it is to technological innovations and new inventions.

Nearly 47 years after construction began on the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Northeast Alabama, the Tennessee Valley Authority is giving up its construction permit for America's biggest unfinished nuclear plant and abandoning any plans to complete the twin-reactor facility.

TVA notified the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week that it would not renew its regulatory permit at Bellefonte after a federal court agreed to cancel the proposed sale of the nuclear plant to an investment group that had hoped to complete the two boiling water reactors and operate the nuclear facility.

Former Chattanooga developer Franklin L. Haney, whose Nuclear Development LLC agreed to buy the Bellefonte plant five years ago, was unable to transfer the construction permit from TVA and a federal judge ruled last month that TVA could cancel the sale of Bellefonte to Haney's group.

Giving up the construction permit at Bellefonte signals the end of any new nuclear plant construction at TVA with only seven of the 17 nuclear reactors the utility once planned to build ever completed.

Solar Panels Will Create 50 Times More Waste & Cost 4 Times More Than Predicted, New Harvard Business Review Study Finds //

Three years ago I published a long article at Forbes arguing that solar panels weren’t clean but in fact produced 300 times more toxic waste than high-level nuclear waste. But in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone, solar panel waste risks exposing poor trash-pickers in sub-Saharan Africa. The reason was because it was so much cheaper to make new solar panels from raw materials than to recycle them, and would remain that way, given labor and energy costs. //

A major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world’s leading energy analysts thought. “The economics of solar,” write Atalay Atasu and Luk N. Van Wassenhove of INSEAD, one of Europe’s leading business schools, and Serasu Duran of the University of Calgary, will “darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash." //

The solar industry, and even supposedly neutral energy agencies, grossly underestimated how much waste solar panels would produce. The HBR authors, all of whom are business school professors, looked at the economics from the point of view of the customer, and past trends, and calculated that customers would replace panels far sooner than every 30 years, as the industry assumes.

“If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model,” they write, solar panels “can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than [International Renewable Energy Agency] IRENA anticipates.” //

The HBR authors found that the price of panels, the amount solar panel owners are paid by the local electric company, and sunlight-to-electricity efficiency determined how quickly people replaced their panels.

“Alarming as they are,” they write, “these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger.”

Beyond the shocking nature of the finding itself is what it says about the integrity and credibility of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency. It is an intergovernmental organization like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, funded by taxpayers from the developed nations of Europe, North America, and Asia, and expected to provide objective information. Instead, it employed unrealistic assumptions to produce results more supportive of solar panels.

IRENA acted like an industry association rather than as a public interest one. IRENA, noted the HBR reporters, “describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat.” IRENA almost certainly knew better. For decades, consumers in Germany, California, Japan and other major member nations of IRENA, have been replacing solar panels just 10 or 15 years old. But IRENA hadn’t even modeled solar panel replacements in those time frames. //

It’s now clear that China made solar appear cheap with coal, subsidies, and forced labor. And in the U.S., we pay one-quarter of solar’s costs through taxes and often much more in subsidies at the state and local level.

And none of this even addresses the biggest threat facing solar power today, which are revelations that perhaps both key raw materials and the panels themselves are being made by forced labor in Xinjiang province in China.

The subsidies that China gave solar panel makers had a purpose beyond bankrupting solar companies in the U.S. and Europe. The subsidies also enticed solar panel makers to participate in the repression of the Uyghur Muslim population, including using tactics that the US and German governments have called “genocide.”

Nations are coming to grips with their overdependence on renewables //

Over the last decade, energy experts repeatedly assured policymakers around the world that increasing the use of renewables, while shutting down nuclear plants, would make energy supplies more secure, while lowering prices. To make their case, experts pointed to radical declines in the price of solar panels, wind turbines, natural gas, and lithium batteries. //

But the heavy reliance on renewables in Europe and the United States has made electricity supply more vulnerable to a single commodity’s volatility. Today’s electricity grids mean that high gas prices cause energy price spikes and a return to the dirtiest forms of electricity production, including diesel and coal.

The return to coal was most dramatic in Germany. Electricity from wind was 20% lower in Germany in the first half of 2021 than the first half of 2020, resulting in a 24% higher use of fossil fuels and 28% greater emissions from electricity. Coal was the number one source of energy for electricity in Germany in the first half of 2021, comprising 27% of total electricity.

Illinois passed one of the most aggressive clean energy bills in the country on Monday, in a rousing success for environmental advocates that, unusually, also bails out some of the state’s biggest sources of clean power: nuclear energy. //

Importantly—and unusually for a bill cheered by green groups—the bill also contains a huge bailout for the state’s nuclear industry. It earmarks nearly $700 million in subsidies to prevent the closure of the Byron and Dresden Generating Stations, two of six nuclear plants in the state. Doing so will extend their lifelines by another 5 years. Exelon, the plants’ owners and one of the biggest utilities in the country, had set a deadline of Sept. 13—the day the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act was passed—as the day they’d need to start closing Byron without some help from the state. Doing so would have taken one of the biggest nuclear plants in the country offline. A report from nuclear advocates estimates that Illinois’s six nuclear plants currently provide 90% of the state’s clean power. Some analyses have shown that the plants’ closure would spur coal and gas plants to run more frequently to keep the grid operational, in addition to affecting the thousands of workers at the plants. //

The Illinois bill, on the other hand, clearly ties the nuclear bailouts to new provisions for clean jobs and environmental justice. Green groups like Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club have both supported the closure of nuclear plants in the past, and the Sierra Club has spoken out against subsidies for nuclear in Illinois. But both groups have cheered the passage of this new bill.

The success in Illinois doesn’t mean nuclear is suddenly on the table for green groups, however. “Illinois needs to transition away from dirty fossil fuels as quickly as possible to fight the climate crisis,” JC Kibbey, a clean energy advocate for NRDC in Illinois, said in an email. “Longer-term, we will transition away from nuclear because wind and solar provide a cheaper, safer and more reliable source of energy.

In the first half of 2021, coal shot up as the biggest contributor to Germany's electric grid, while wind power dropped to its lowest level since 2018. Officials say the weather is partly to blame.
Despite efforts to boost renewable energy sources, coal unseated wind power as the biggest energy contributor to the German network in the first six months of 2021, according to official statistics released on Monday.

The data comes as Germany looks to speed up its exit from coal-powered plants after years of mounting pressure from climate experts and activists over the country's dependence on coal and its detrimental impact in fueling the climate crisis.

Scientists are excited about an experimental nuclear reactor using thorium as fuel, which is about to begin tests in China. Although this radioactive element has been trialled in reactors before, experts say that China is the first to have a shot at commercializing the technology.

The reactor is unusual in that it has molten salts circulating inside it instead of water. It has the potential to produce nuclear energy that is relatively safe and cheap, while also generating a much smaller amount of very long-lived radioactive waste than conventional reactors.

Construction of the experimental thorium reactor in Wuwei, on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert, was due to be completed by the end of August — with trial runs scheduled for this month, according to the government of Gansu province. //

When China switches on its experimental reactor, it will be the first molten-salt reactor operating since 1969, when US researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee shut theirs down. And it will be the first molten-salt reactor to be fuelled by thorium. Researchers who have collaborated with SINAP say the Chinese design copies that of Oak Ridge, but improves on it by calling on decades of innovation in manufacturing, materials and instrumentation.

Nuclear energy has been quietly powering America with clean, carbon-free electricity for the last 60 years.

It may not be the first thing you think of when you heat or cool your home, but maybe that’s the point.

It’s been so reliable that we sometimes take it for granted.

Did you know about a fifth of the country’s electricity comes from nuclear power each year? //

1. Nuclear power plants produced 790 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2019
   The United States is the world’s largest producer of nuclear power. It generated 790 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2020, surpassing coal in annual electricity generation for the first time ever. Commercial nuclear power plants have supplied around 20% of the nation’s electricity each year since 1990.

2. Nuclear power provides 52% of America's clean energy
   Nuclear energy provided 52% of America’s carbon-free electricity in 2020, making it the largest domestic source of clean energy.

Nuclear power plants do not emit greenhouse gases while generating electricity.

They produce power by boiling water to create steam that spins a turbine. The water is heated by a process called fission, which makes heat by splitting apart uranium atoms inside a nuclear reactor core.

3. Nuclear energy is the most reliable energy source in America
   Nuclear power plants operated at full capacity more than 92% of the time in 2020—making it the most reliable energy source in America. That’s about 1.5 to 2 times more reliable as natural gas (57%) and coal (40%) plants, and roughly 2.5 to 3.5 times more reliable than wind (35%) and solar (25%) plants.

Nuclear power plants are designed to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week because they require less maintenance and can operate for longer stretches before refueling (typically every 1.5 or 2 years).

4. Nuclear helps power 28 U.S. states
   There are currently 94 commercial reactors helping to power homes and businesses in 28 U.S. states. Illinois has 11 reactors—the most of any state—and joins South Carolina and New Hampshire in receiving more than 50% of its power from nuclear.

5. Nuclear fuel is extremely dense
   Because of this, the amount of used nuclear fuel is not as big as you think.

All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.

In July, House and Senate appropriators zeroed out funding requested by the Biden administration for the Versatile Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratories, a decision that could have disastrous impacts on America's role as a leader in the next generation of advanced nuclear technologies. The VTR would allow advanced nuclear reactor developers here in the U.S. to test fuels, materials and components for fast neutron reactors for the next 60 years or more.

These new reactor technologies offer a range of important safety, efficiency and economic advantages over large conventional nuclear reactors. They represent a critical pathway to cutting emissions to address climate change, especially in hard to decarbonize sectors of the economy such as steel production and refining. They are critical to assuring that the United States remains a global leader in advanced nuclear technology and nuclear security.

Predictably, opposition to the VTR has been led by entrenched opponents of nuclear energy, who have long attempted to regulate conventional nuclear power into obsolescence and fear that innovation of the sort that many U.S. nuclear startups are presently betting on might give the technology a second life. //

In service of that effort, the author makes all manner of easily falsifiable claims. No, the Natrium Reactor is not capable of having a runaway chain reaction like the one that caused the Chernobyl accident. The basic physics of the reactor core would shut down the fission reaction long before such a chain of events could occur. No, the Natrium Reactor does not require more uranium than a conventional reactor per unit of energy it produces. It uses its fuel much more efficiently.

These and other claims are drawn entirely upon a self-published report based, by the author's own acknowledgment, on his own "qualitative judgments," reviewed only by his employer, and contradicted by an enormous peer-reviewed and refereed literature, much of it based on technical evidence from decades of full-scale tests.

The author's position reflects not a considered position informed by the latest scientific and technological progress but rather a posture toward both environmental challenges and nuclear energy that has hardly evolved since the 1970s, before most people had ever heard of climate change, much less come to terms with the scale of technological change that would be necessary to address it.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/advanced-isnt-always-better

The impacted facility went online in December 2020 and features lithium-ion batteries from LG Energy Solution. Fire crews found scorched battery racks and melted wires.

The Independent System Operator for the New England power grid (ISO-NE) has produced a summary brief describing the challenges associated with Arctic Outbreak 2017-2018, a period of substantially below normal temperatures that lasted from Dec.25, 2017 until Jan. 8, 2018.

After describing the intensity of the cold wave with a number of graphs, charts, images and words, the brief made the following sobering statements about the fuel mix used to supply power demand.

Overall, there was significantly higher than normal use of oil
– Coal use also increased over normal use
Gas and Oil fuel price inversion led to oil being in economic merit and base loaded
As gas became uneconomic, the entire season’s oil supply rapidly depleted

China’s natural experiment in deploying low-carbon energy generation shows that wind and solar are the clear winners. //

2010–2020 Showed Strong Wins For Wind & Solar In China, Nuclear Lagging

In 2014, I made the strong assertion that China’s track record on wind and nuclear generation deployments showed clearly that wind energy was more scalable. In 2019, I returned to the subject, and assessed wind, solar and nuclear total TWh of generation, asserting that wind and solar were outperforming nuclear substantially in total annual generation, and projected that the two renewable forms of generation would be producing 4 times the total TWh of nuclear by 2030 each year between them. Mea culpa: in the 2019 assessment, I overstated the experienced capacity factor for wind generation in China, which still lags US experiences, but has improved substantially in the past few years. //

My thesis on scalability of deployment has remained unchanged: the massive numerical economies of scale for manufacturing and distributing wind and solar components, combined with the massive parallelization of construction that is possible with those technologies, will always make them faster and easier to scale in capacity and generation than the megaprojects of GW-scale nuclear plants. This was obvious in 2014, it was obviously true in 2019, and it remains clearly demonstrable today. Further, my point was that China was the perfect natural experiment for this assessment, as it was treating both deployments as national strategies (an absolute condition of success for nuclear) and had the ability and will to override local regulations and any NIMBYism. No other country could be used to easily assess which technologies could be deployed more quickly. //

My 2014 thesis continues to be supported by the natural experiment being played out in China. In my recent published assessment of small modular nuclear reactors (tl’dr: bad idea, not going to work), it became clear to me that China has fallen into one of the many failure conditions of rapid deployment of nuclear, which is to say an expanding set of technologies instead of a standardized single technology, something that is one of the many reasons why SMRs won’t be deployed in any great numbers.

Wind and solar are going to be the primary providers of low-carbon energy for the coming century, and as we electrify everything, the electrons will be coming mostly from the wind and sun, in an efficient, effective and low-cost energy model that doesn’t pollute or cause global warming. Good news indeed that these technologies are so clearly delivering on their promise to help us deal with the climate crisis.

Two of Poland’s richest men have signed a deal to build the country’s first nuclear power plant, which they aim to complete by 2027. They see the plans as a necessary step in Poland’s move away from its reliance on coal and towards lower-emission forms of energy. //

The investors plan on setting up between four and six nuclear reactors with a capacity of 300 MW each. The plant would operate “on the basis of the most modern and safest American technologies,” they say. However, SMR-type reactors have not yet been commercialised.

Nuclear energy is far safer than its reputation implies. It's also clean and reliable -- yet power plants are being phased out around the world. //

A quick thought experiment. What would the climate change debate look like if all humanity had was fossil fuels and renewables -- and then today an engineering visionary revealed a new invention: nuclear energy. That's the hypothetical posed to me by Dietmar Detering, a German entrepreneur living in New York.

"I'm sure we'd develop the hell out of it," he said, before sighing. "We're looking at a different world right now." //

Detering thinks nuclear energy could be the key to solving the climate crisis. A former member of Germany's Green Party, Detering now spends his spare time as co-chair of the Nuclear New York advocacy group. He's part of a wave of environmentalists campaigning for more nuclear energy.

Though the word evokes images of landscapes pulverized by atomic calamity -- Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima -- proponents like Detering and his colleague Eric Dawson point out that nuclear power produces huge amounts of electricity while emitting next to no carbon.

This separates it from fossil fuels, which are consistent but dirty, and renewables, which are clean but weather dependent. Contrary to their apocalyptic reputation, nuclear power plants are relatively safe. Coal power is estimated to kill around 350 times as many people per terawatt-hour of energy produced, mostly from air pollution, compared to nuclear power. //

But many scientists and experts believe nuclear power is necessary to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. "Anyone seriously interested in preventing dangerous levels of global warming should be advocating nuclear power," wrote James Hansen, a former NASA scientist credited with raising awareness of global warming in the late '80s, in a 2019 column. //

In the public imagination, nuclear power presages disaster. But the numbers tell a different story. Estimates of deaths from nuclear incidents range from less than 10,000 to around 1 million. As you can infer, it's a highly contested number -- but in either case dwarfed by the death toll from fossil fuel pollution. Around 8.7 million premature deaths were caused by fossil fuel pollution in 2018 alone, according to a February Harvard study.

Tesla aims to eventually become a massive distributed electric utility, and we’ve now learned of a new product, Autobidder, which appears to be the next step in that direction.

Solar energy can be stored by converting it into hydrogen using hematite. //

Researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have made a scientific breakthrough on the storage of solar energy, as reported by Energy & Environmental Science. A project led by Professor Avner Rothschild of the Technion's Faculty of Materials Science doctoral student Yifat Piekner from the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP has shown that hematite can serve as a promising material in converting solar energy into hydrogen.

The process entails the use of photoelectrochemical solar cells, which are similar to photovoltaic cells, but instead of producing electricity, they produce hydrogen using the electric power (current × voltage) generated in them. The power then uses sunlight energy to dissociate water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

Hydrogen is easy to store and when used as fuel, does not involve greenhouse gas or carbon emissions.

U235 is 5 orders of magnitude more energy than wood, and breeder Thorium had 3 orders more than that!