3 ms·
If you have a high-capacity, constantly running power source, you can subtract that power from the demand curve, up to the minimum power demand. That means the
by svara 5y ago
If you have a high-capacity, constantly running power source, you can subtract that power from the demand curve, up to the minimum power demand.
That means the winter renewable production troughs on dark, windless days become more shallow. Since the requirement on installed wind and solar capacity is driven by how many Watt-hours you need to overproduce so that they can be stored for sunless, windless days, that ends up drastically reducing how many solar panels and wind turbines you need.
You can test this in the model.energy simulator that you linked by simply subtracting a value from "constant electricity demand". I just did that using realistic values for Germany - reducing the constant electricity demand by 20GW from 66 to 46 GW (roughly the peak capacity of nuclear plants in their heyday) leads to a reduction of peak renewable capacity from 537 to 358 GW, basically exactly a factor of 1.5.
You'll still need a flexible source of course to get rid of the oscillations over the minimum demand.
- pfdietz 5y agoIf you look at the solutions at model.energy as you vary cost assumptions, the solutions go from 0% nuclear to 100% nuclear in a step-like manner. It's almost never the case that the two get mixed. There would be some mix in a variable demand scenario if (for example) some of the demand varied along with insolation. But in the baseload case, it's like Highlander.
- svara 5y agoNot sure if you're referring to a different simulator since model.energy doesn't seem to allow modeling nuclear? But, qualitatively, it sounds like the step-like behavior you describe simply reflects whether LCOE(nuclear) > LCOE(renewable+storage)? That wouldn't tell the whole story though, since you might still want to keep the number of nuclear plants low, or you might simply be thinking about whether to keep operating existing plants, rather than building new ones.
- pfdietz 5y agoYou can turn on nuclear (look under the advanced assumption setting; it's called "Dispatchable technology 2" for some reason.) And yes, this modeling site is about designing an energy system from scratch, not operating existing plants.
- hokkos 5y agothis toy model use constant load, ignore grid cost, inertia needs, multi year weather pattern on renewable production other most sophisticated model can disagree with your observations