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It's somewhat disingenuous to use "primary energy" stats in this discussion. IIUC it includes stuff like gasoline used for transportation and natural gas used f
by fuoqi 5y ago
It's somewhat disingenuous to use "primary energy" stats in this discussion. IIUC it includes stuff like gasoline used for transportation and natural gas used for heating and cooking. In France they produce 70-80% of their electricity from nuclear plants. Installing more renewables will not solve migration to EV and heat pumps, it's a whole another discussion barely relevant here.
- coldtea 5y ago>IIUC it includes stuff like gasoline used for transportation and natural gas used for heating and cooking. As it should, as those are the things we should be replacing with environmental friendly sources and consumers (e.g. EVs). So if nuclear can't cover energy uses of 'stuff' currently using gasoline and nature gas, it's no real good...
- fuoqi 5y agoWhat? Of course, the existing nuclear capacity is not enough to cover full migration to EV. The same applies to the existing capacity of renewables. You can not have 150% of nuclear (or any other kind of) generation relative to your current electricity consumption in anticipation of future migration to EV. The point is that it was demonstrated in practice that high (~80%) nuclear ratio of electricity generation works well and results in stable and affordable long-term electricity prices, so you can scale it following mass migration to EV (it's a multi-decade process, so quite enough time to build new reactors). Meanwhile, we can see that grid starts to struggle when renewables get to 30-40% of generation capacity and you have to rely on fossil fuels to back them up during unfavorable conditions. Yes, in theory it could be solved, but those solutions have not been demonstrated in practice on large scale and long time frame.