10 ms·

Weekly and seasonal changes are not a concern for nuclear power - reactors can scale up or down thermal generation on that larger time frame. Daily power fluctu

Weekly and seasonal changes are not a concern for nuclear power - reactors can scale up or down thermal generation on that larger time frame. Daily power fluctuations are much smaller than you seem to think, 20% to 30%. Excesses of energy are easily solved: use it to desalinate water, create hydrogen fuel, or some other energy intensive things. And as stated previously, nuclear power plants can reduce their output if needed by more aggressively cooling the reactor. Nuclear plants want to operate at 100% load as much as they can, but they don't need to. Renewables have the opposite problem: they don't produce energy when we need it. No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down. Peak pricing is not going to help us here. This is why renewable advocates assume that there's going to be some magic storage solution that offers effectively free and unlimited storage. > Like pumped hydro or off peak pricing which already exists and is therefore included in your "flat" graph. The USA has 20 GWh of pumped hydro storage. That's 2.4 minutes of electricity supply at an average hourly consumption of 500 GW.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Okay, so your answer is that you're going to aim for the high end, and your going to waste the extra energy as heat when required on the short term and turn entire plants off during seasonal lulls. This is called "overprovisioning" and it's exactly what renewables intend to do. In both cases it's more expensive than having magical demand matching production. Or your going to use it to desalinate when power is abundant. This is "demand response" and again, it's exactly what renewables grids are going to do. I see you also want to create Hydrogen, another great idea that renewables also plan to do, except nuclear generated is called Pink Hydrogen and renewable powered is called Green Hydrogen for some reason. Same basic idea though. So, I don't understand why you're so angry about renewables when you already know all the solutions a fossil free grid needs. > No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down. Did you happen to notice where the bottom of the lumps in your graph were? Nighttime. So we'll need some wind power and/or storage and/or HVDC lines. But if you have to pretend you've never heard of wind power in order to justify nuclear power, maybe that's a sign that it's not as good an idea as you think. And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy. I'm fairly chill about storage because cheap solar that lets you turn off gas during the day and cheap wind that lets you turn gas off another half of the time is the quickest and cheapest way to stop burning fossil fuels. We only need to come up with crazy solutions once we try to get rid of the last few bits of fossil fuels. And you already listed them for a fully nuclear grid so we don't need to go over that again. Some people try to act all appalled about that, as if burning 80% less fossil fuels easily at an overall cost saving in a short period of time is some big conspiracy by fossil fuel companies to undermine nuclear. It doesn't really pencil out though. Not even if you pretend wind power doesn't exist.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  Wind still needs to be over-provisioned by a factor of 3 or 4 [1] due to seasonal variation. By comparison, nuclear only needs to be over-provisioned by a factor 1.2 or 1.3. > And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy. No, the reason why we don't have storage on the grid is because we have no feasible way of storing energy at grid scale. Hawaii, California, and parts of Germany all produce excesses of electricity during peak solar and wind generation. We were promised that people would take this energy off the grid, store it, and release it later when energy is in greater demand. But these promises have not panned out, because storage remains infeasible. So instead, we keep burning fossil fuels. And we'll continue to keep burning fossil fuels until we either adopt nuclear power or some massive breakthrough in storage is found. It'll still take significant amounts of storage even to drive fossil fuel use down to 20%. Estimates say 12 hours of storage [2]. That's an incredible amount of storage, hundreds of times greater than what we have now. 1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112 2. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Your first link doesn't say what you think it says. Did you link to the wrong thing? Or just make a wild assumption based on capacity factor, which is what that page talks about? The second link also doesnt say what you claim. It says 12 hours of storage or HVDC connections would be required. 12 hours storage being half an EV per American household, which isnt particulalry massive and is explicitly an upper bound, ignoring hydro and nuclear and biomass and demand response etc. Their solar only model suggests 1.5x overprovision. How much cheaper does solar need to be for a purely solar grid to beat nuclear using your number? 1.2/1.5 suggest 20% cheaper is all they need in this extreme solar only model. But in reality solar (and wind) are 20% of the cost of new nuclear (80% cheaper) and predicted to fall further. So even your entirely unsubstantiated claim about needing 3-4x wind overprovision means it would be cheaper than nuclear.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Okay, so your answer is that you're going to aim for the high end, and your going to waste the extra energy as heat when required on the short term and turn entire plants off during seasonal lulls. This is called "overprovisioning" and it's exactly what renewables intend to do. In both cases it's more expensive than having magical demand matching production. Or your going to use it to desalinate when power is abundant. This is "demand response" and again, it's exactly what renewables grids are going to do. I see you also want to create Hydrogen, another great idea that renewables also plan to do, except nuclear generated is called Pink Hydrogen and renewable powered is called Green Hydrogen for some reason. Same basic idea though. So, I don't understand why you're so angry about renewables when you already know all the solutions a fossil free grid needs. > No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down. Did you happen to notice where the bottom of the lumps in your graph were? Nighttime. So we'll need some wind power and/or storage and/or HVDC lines. But if you have to pretend you've never heard of wind power in order to justify nuclear power, maybe that's a sign that it's not as good an idea as you think. And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy. I'm fairly chill about storage because cheap solar that lets you turn off gas during the day and cheap wind that lets you turn gas off another half of the time is the quickest and cheapest way to stop burning fossil fuels. We only need to come up with crazy solutions once we try to get rid of the last few bits of fossil fuels. And you already listed them for a fully nuclear grid so we don't need to go over that again. Some people try to act all appalled about that, as if burning 80% less fossil fuels easily at an overall cost saving in a short period of time is some big conspiracy by fossil fuel companies to undermine nuclear. It doesn't really pencil out though. Not even if you pretend wind power doesn't exist.

Manuel_D 5y ago
Wind still needs to be over-provisioned by a factor of 3 or 4 [1] due to seasonal variation. By comparison, nuclear only needs to be over-provisioned by a factor 1.2 or 1.3. > And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy. No, the reason why we don't have storage on the grid is because we have no feasible way of storing energy at grid scale. Hawaii, California, and parts of Germany all produce excesses of electricity during peak solar and wind generation. We were promised that people would take this energy off the grid, store it, and release it later when energy is in greater demand. But these promises have not panned out, because storage remains infeasible. So instead, we keep burning fossil fuels. And we'll continue to keep burning fossil fuels until we either adopt nuclear power or some massive breakthrough in storage is found. It'll still take significant amounts of storage even to drive fossil fuel use down to 20%. Estimates say 12 hours of storage [2]. That's an incredible amount of storage, hundreds of times greater than what we have now. 1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112 2. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Your first link doesn't say what you think it says. Did you link to the wrong thing? Or just make a wild assumption based on capacity factor, which is what that page talks about? The second link also doesnt say what you claim. It says 12 hours of storage or HVDC connections would be required. 12 hours storage being half an EV per American household, which isnt particulalry massive and is explicitly an upper bound, ignoring hydro and nuclear and biomass and demand response etc. Their solar only model suggests 1.5x overprovision. How much cheaper does solar need to be for a purely solar grid to beat nuclear using your number? 1.2/1.5 suggest 20% cheaper is all they need in this extreme solar only model. But in reality solar (and wind) are 20% of the cost of new nuclear (80% cheaper) and predicted to fall further. So even your entirely unsubstantiated claim about needing 3-4x wind overprovision means it would be cheaper than nuclear.