3 ms·

Great post, but somebody has to care about base load, round-the-clock power, grid frequency and so on, right? The cost argument is quite compelling, but there

• p_l 5y ago
  Looking only at the price is how we have renewable-caused instabilities and need to build up extra plants while having trouble financing stable sources - because by purely cost when the wind blows right or sun shines you suddenly have a lot of cheap energy you want to dump into grid. We definitely need to start including dispatchability into price calculations.
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  You're not wrong. But how many GWH of baseload for how much do you think is reasonable for this? Specifying it allows us to run some numbers. I can bet you it's not going to look good for nuclear. Baseload just means having enough GW available for x hours/days/weeks/months. GWH in other words. The reason the Chinese are investing in nuclear is actually really interesting. This is just speculation but I believe that the reason is not that it they believe it is cheaper but simply because they want to replace a lot of dirty coal (well over 1000 GW) and are willing to pay the price for that. So far, the plan was to build more coal plants, and then get rid of it as early as they can in a few decades once they have enough renewables. Not a bad plan but coal has become an embarrassing problem for them (smog, lots of finger pointing internationally, etc). They've been floating 2065 as a deadline for going fully carbon neutral. So, those new coal plants they have been building would only be in operation for less than 50 years. To go fully carbon neutral, they'll need more than just that 1000GW; a couple of thousands minimum; possibly more. It's not just current energy consumption but also transport, heavy industry, etc. that are currently powered by fossil fuels. To power all of that with clean electricity or hydrogen created using clean electricity, they would need a lot of power. Many TW of capacity. The issue is that renewable capacity is only deploying world wide at a rate of 100-200GW. That is globally and it's happening as fast as we can do and we're getting better at it. And while that is a lot, it's not nearly enough. Over a few decades it of course adds up to plenty of capacity; especially as production processes improve over time and scale up. But for the Chinese to be able to start shutting down coal plants in the near future they need an alternative. Even if that is more expensive. So, they just announced well over a TW of nuclear power capacity in the form of 150 nuclear plants. Problem solved but it won't be cheap. To me it looks like their plan is to ramp up nuclear at great cost so they can commit to shutting down coal sooner than the second half of this century; which is increasingly becoming a hard to defend position. A few decades in, they'll have quite a bit of nuclear capacity, much more renewable capacity, and a vanishingly small minority of fossil fuel based production; which they will pull the plug on at some point. Once that is done, they'll shift attention at reducing cost. A lot of those nuclear plants might not even reach their planned end of life. They'll have served their purpose long before that. Once there is enough renewable capacity producing energy cheaper, they'll start doing to those plants what is happening to many expensive coal plants all over the world right now: shut them down. They'll cut their losses.