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It is cheaper than wind plus storage. Wind plus storage might even be impossible to meet baseload requirements with current technology. Even if battery costs fa
by Brakenshire 10y ago
It is cheaper than wind plus storage. Wind plus storage might even be impossible to meet baseload requirements with current technology. Even if battery costs fall by 80%, they wouldn't feasibly be able to store grid-scale electricity for weeks.
But admittedly the situation may change within the lifetime of a new nuclear station, or even in the 20 years before it's actually built.
- Retric 10y agoYes. Base load power is a misnomer based on coal/nuclear plants having poor responses to changing demand. Without fuel use over production is completely viable. Some net storage for 99.9% reliability for a combo of wind / solar / hydro in the US adds ~10-20% which is still vastly lower than nuclear which is expensive even after massive subsides. Yes, the grid will look rather different, but backbone power transmission is going to stay a tiny percentage of GDP. (The gap between max wind output and median output is huge, but the gap between median output and minimum output over a day for a large area is much smaller.) PS: You see a lot of overly simplistic analysis that fails to account for the hydro power as energy storage and shifting demand east west to shift solar production vs. demand. A massive dam stores a lot of power which can be released on demand at any point in the year. Add some pumped hydro storage for fitting the day to day demand curve which can be thousands of miles from both production and use and storage is already both cheap and a solved problem.