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The issue is that peak power consumption occurs after sundown in most countries. Nuclear power also costs the same to generate power 24/7 as it does to generate

The issue is that peak power consumption occurs after sundown in most countries. Nuclear power also costs the same to generate power 24/7 as it does to generate power intermittently. So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. This is why people invested in renewables are often very adverse to nuclear power.

godelski 6y ago
I don't think it really works that way. Think about battery power, it isn't going to scale linearly. If land costs are a big issue (and limitation) this is true. If wind and sun aren't uniform, this is true. If the premise was true then we would have always only used coal because it is so cheap. You don't have to eliminate the duck curve, but smooth it out. There's also many other reasons to have a well diversified portfolio. It would be ridiculous to say "only wind" or "only solar." I'm not sure why this argument is made with nuclear when we don't do it in with any other source nor have we done it historically. It is just a non sequitur and a weird argument to make.
- manfredo 6y ago
  Land costs are indeed an immense issue. The exact figure of how much land needs to be covered in solar panels varies depending on inclination with the sun and weather.Its not too bad for countries like Australia that have reliable sunlight and plenty of land. But much of the energy consumption occurs closer to the poles, and with more frequent obscuration of the sun from weather. And these countries are typically much more population dense. Dedicating several percentages of the landmass of a dense country is indeed a substantial cost. And this isn't even getting into the require immense amounts of energy storage. We have 5 minutes worth of hydroelectric storage relative to our average 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. But hydroelectric is geographically dependent and hard to scale. We only have 10 seconds worth of battery storage, about 1 Gigawatt hour. It's incorrect to say that countries never go all in on one energy source. Norway generates almost all of it's electricity from hydroelectricity. Iceland generates the overwhelming majority from geothermal. And France generates the lion's share of it's electricity from nuclear power. The last of these three is geographically independent. Sure, Norway and Iceland probably don't have to build a single nuclear plant. Nor would some states like Vermont and Washington that have extensive hydroelectric generation. But other geographies can only make do with fossil fuels. Intermittent sources can mitigate this, but we'll always need a solution to fill in the duck curve until we either make a breakthrough in energy storage or some other carbon free form of energy. But we already have another form of carbon free energy, and one that is already working for other countries.
  - jnxx 6y ago
    Can confirm that Germany is totally covered by solar panels by now. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-green-technology-record-power-generation-35-cent-renewables-solar-wind-turbines-a7820156.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-gree... https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-renewables-record-overshadowed-slump-onshore-wind-power-expansion https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-renewables-recor... https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/29/solar-other-renewables-heading-for-new-record-in-germany/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/29/solar-other-renewable... https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2020/net-energy-production-first-half-of-2020.html https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
    - sir_bearington 6y ago
      Germany also produces under 10% of its electricity (and an even smaller fraction of its total energy consumption) from solar power.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Land costs are not a big issue, especially when looking at the world as a whole. In much of the US, for example, the cost of putting solar equipment on some land is nearly two orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the land itself. If a country is land constrained, then in an era of cheap solar they'll lose heavy industry to other countries with more land. If land cost ever did become significant globally for renewables then renewables will have already slaughtered the competition, by being cheaper by a huge factor.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Relying on another country for your energy needs isn't a great idea. We've long sought to be energy dependent. Doing so has led to less wars and less influence from outside governments. Are you really going to base your entire economy and civilian well being (because let's be real, we live in an electric world) on the promise that another country will always sell that energy to you at a fair price? Always? Never decide to change?
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      It's not relying on the other country, it's having your industry become uncompetitive and die. It's not something you'd have a choice about.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. If you build enough nuclear power to fill the gap in the duck curve without storage, and remove fossil fuels, you're basically running entirely nuclear and hydro, and mostly nuclear. You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use, because you need e.g. 100GW for the peak load in the evening but only 50GW for twelve hours overnight. That doesn't seem likely to be cheaper than using storage for only the differential load in the evening. But once you have storage there isn't any good reason not to use cheap solar for the daytime load differential, and to provide the energy to charge the storage for later in the day.
- manfredo 6y ago
  The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. The redundancy isn't an issue with nuclear, it's an issue of the notion that we need nuclear and renewables. Just cut out the renewables, and only use nuclear. Using nuclear to fill in the duck curve makes renewables redundant, thus the aversion to nuclear of many proponents of renewables. If storage does become cheap and available, then renewables could be cheaper depending on the price of land and capacity factor of the energy sources. But that's a question of if. We have nowhere near the amount of storage required and no solid plan for reaching the required scale. So it's a matter of burning fossil fuels until we're able to build out orders of magnitude more energy storage.
  - socialdemocrat 6y ago
    Renewables are already widely deployed and payed for. It is nuts to build nuclear to replace fully functional wind turbines and solar cells. Nuclear fans just have no economic sense. It is all about nuclear no matter the cost.
    - manfredo 6y ago
      Maybe some promising new storage technology will prevail, but solutions that are 5-10 years of development away from being viable have a habit of taking a lot more than 5-10 years to become viable. Until then nuclear presents the only proven way of decarbonizing an energy sector to a great extent that works in any environment. It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and using solar when you can. You can get a greater immediate carbon reduction by spending the cost if a nuclear plant on supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear. But that'll only go so far. Once you outstrip demand during peak generation hours, you're effectively getting less energy for the same capacity. It doesn't provide a path to decarbonization without storing large amounts if energy - much larger than what we'll be able to store for decades at least.
_Microft 6y ago
Flatten all the curves! \o/ Our daily routines are so synchronized that we see these massives peaks everywhere. Not only in energy consumption but also in road use (congestion), commuting services (packed subway cars) or in super markets (low fraction of total available checkouts needed during most times of the day because their number was dimensioned for peak times). I'm sure you can find other examples if you think about it. Flattening the demand over time by allowing to spread out daily routines (by not requiring or forbidding certain opening hours or office hours for example) so our infrastructure would not need to be dimensioned for these outsized peaks would be addressing the actual underlying issue. Building nuclear plants and more streets might be an easier task as the other would require personal and societal change ... and people are creatures of habit (which is something we should never underestimate).
- jnxx 6y ago
  In fact, in the 1950 and 1960s it was attempted to make more use of nuclear by using electrical night storage heaters with cheaper tariffs over the night. If you remember the pro-nuclear argument at that time, hold on, it was "electricity from nuclear energy will be so cheap, it will be useless to install a meter in privates homes".
  - opo 6y ago
    >..."electricity from nuclear energy will be so cheap, it will be useless to install a meter in privates homes". That was simply a statement from the head of the AEC at a meeting with science writers along with a lot of other bold statements about the future: >...It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. >...A later survey found dozens of statements from the period that suggested it was widely believed that nuclear energy would be more expensive than coal, at least in the foreseeable future.[6] James Ramey, who would later become the AEC Commissioner, noted: "Nobody took Strauss' statement very seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter

godelski 6y ago

I don't think it really works that way. Think about battery power, it isn't going to scale linearly. If land costs are a big issue (and limitation) this is true. If wind and sun aren't uniform, this is true. If the premise was true then we would have always only used coal because it is so cheap. You don't have to eliminate the duck curve, but smooth it out. There's also many other reasons to have a well diversified portfolio. It would be ridiculous to say "only wind" or "only solar." I'm not sure why this argument is made with nuclear when we don't do it in with any other source nor have we done it historically. It is just a non sequitur and a weird argument to make.

manfredo 6y ago
Land costs are indeed an immense issue. The exact figure of how much land needs to be covered in solar panels varies depending on inclination with the sun and weather.Its not too bad for countries like Australia that have reliable sunlight and plenty of land. But much of the energy consumption occurs closer to the poles, and with more frequent obscuration of the sun from weather. And these countries are typically much more population dense. Dedicating several percentages of the landmass of a dense country is indeed a substantial cost. And this isn't even getting into the require immense amounts of energy storage. We have 5 minutes worth of hydroelectric storage relative to our average 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. But hydroelectric is geographically dependent and hard to scale. We only have 10 seconds worth of battery storage, about 1 Gigawatt hour. It's incorrect to say that countries never go all in on one energy source. Norway generates almost all of it's electricity from hydroelectricity. Iceland generates the overwhelming majority from geothermal. And France generates the lion's share of it's electricity from nuclear power. The last of these three is geographically independent. Sure, Norway and Iceland probably don't have to build a single nuclear plant. Nor would some states like Vermont and Washington that have extensive hydroelectric generation. But other geographies can only make do with fossil fuels. Intermittent sources can mitigate this, but we'll always need a solution to fill in the duck curve until we either make a breakthrough in energy storage or some other carbon free form of energy. But we already have another form of carbon free energy, and one that is already working for other countries.
- jnxx 6y ago
  Can confirm that Germany is totally covered by solar panels by now. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-green-technology-record-power-generation-35-cent-renewables-solar-wind-turbines-a7820156.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-gree... https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-renewables-record-overshadowed-slump-onshore-wind-power-expansion https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-renewables-recor... https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/29/solar-other-renewables-heading-for-new-record-in-germany/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/29/solar-other-renewable... https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2020/net-energy-production-first-half-of-2020.html https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
  - sir_bearington 6y ago
    Germany also produces under 10% of its electricity (and an even smaller fraction of its total energy consumption) from solar power.
pfdietz 6y ago
Land costs are not a big issue, especially when looking at the world as a whole. In much of the US, for example, the cost of putting solar equipment on some land is nearly two orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the land itself. If a country is land constrained, then in an era of cheap solar they'll lose heavy industry to other countries with more land. If land cost ever did become significant globally for renewables then renewables will have already slaughtered the competition, by being cheaper by a huge factor.
- godelski 6y ago
  Relying on another country for your energy needs isn't a great idea. We've long sought to be energy dependent. Doing so has led to less wars and less influence from outside governments. Are you really going to base your entire economy and civilian well being (because let's be real, we live in an electric world) on the promise that another country will always sell that energy to you at a fair price? Always? Never decide to change?
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    It's not relying on the other country, it's having your industry become uncompetitive and die. It's not something you'd have a choice about.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. If you build enough nuclear power to fill the gap in the duck curve without storage, and remove fossil fuels, you're basically running entirely nuclear and hydro, and mostly nuclear. You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use, because you need e.g. 100GW for the peak load in the evening but only 50GW for twelve hours overnight. That doesn't seem likely to be cheaper than using storage for only the differential load in the evening. But once you have storage there isn't any good reason not to use cheap solar for the daytime load differential, and to provide the energy to charge the storage for later in the day.

manfredo 6y ago
The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. The redundancy isn't an issue with nuclear, it's an issue of the notion that we need nuclear and renewables. Just cut out the renewables, and only use nuclear. Using nuclear to fill in the duck curve makes renewables redundant, thus the aversion to nuclear of many proponents of renewables. If storage does become cheap and available, then renewables could be cheaper depending on the price of land and capacity factor of the energy sources. But that's a question of if. We have nowhere near the amount of storage required and no solid plan for reaching the required scale. So it's a matter of burning fossil fuels until we're able to build out orders of magnitude more energy storage.
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  Renewables are already widely deployed and payed for. It is nuts to build nuclear to replace fully functional wind turbines and solar cells. Nuclear fans just have no economic sense. It is all about nuclear no matter the cost.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    Maybe some promising new storage technology will prevail, but solutions that are 5-10 years of development away from being viable have a habit of taking a lot more than 5-10 years to become viable. Until then nuclear presents the only proven way of decarbonizing an energy sector to a great extent that works in any environment. It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and using solar when you can. You can get a greater immediate carbon reduction by spending the cost if a nuclear plant on supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear. But that'll only go so far. Once you outstrip demand during peak generation hours, you're effectively getting less energy for the same capacity. It doesn't provide a path to decarbonization without storing large amounts if energy - much larger than what we'll be able to store for decades at least.

_Microft 6y ago

Flatten all the curves! \o/ Our daily routines are so synchronized that we see these massives peaks everywhere. Not only in energy consumption but also in road use (congestion), commuting services (packed subway cars) or in super markets (low fraction of total available checkouts needed during most times of the day because their number was dimensioned for peak times). I'm sure you can find other examples if you think about it. Flattening the demand over time by allowing to spread out daily routines (by not requiring or forbidding certain opening hours or office hours for example) so our infrastructure would not need to be dimensioned for these outsized peaks would be addressing the actual underlying issue. Building nuclear plants and more streets might be an easier task as the other would require personal and societal change ... and people are creatures of habit (which is something we should never underestimate).

jnxx 6y ago
In fact, in the 1950 and 1960s it was attempted to make more use of nuclear by using electrical night storage heaters with cheaper tariffs over the night. If you remember the pro-nuclear argument at that time, hold on, it was "electricity from nuclear energy will be so cheap, it will be useless to install a meter in privates homes".
- opo 6y ago
  >..."electricity from nuclear energy will be so cheap, it will be useless to install a meter in privates homes". That was simply a statement from the head of the AEC at a meeting with science writers along with a lot of other bold statements about the future: >...It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. >...A later survey found dozens of statements from the period that suggested it was widely believed that nuclear energy would be more expensive than coal, at least in the foreseeable future.[6] James Ramey, who would later become the AEC Commissioner, noted: "Nobody took Strauss' statement very seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter