3 ms·

In the context of "turn the most gas and coal plants off per dollar ASAP", I think 80% is pretty reasonable. Especially when you include things like plants that

In the context of "turn the most gas and coal plants off per dollar ASAP", I think 80% is pretty reasonable. Especially when you include things like plants that were paid for but never opened and various safety shutdowns. Similarly 25-30% for solar and 60% for wind with them being anticorrelated enough that you can call an equal mix ~40% over all. The other benefit is solar+wind incentivises storage development in a way that nuclear does not. Cost-wise, for many applications it's optimal to overbuild by a factor of 2 or 3 just to get energy in the sides of the energy curve. This results in energy that has been paid for, and can be turned on or off in milliseconds but has no value at 11am. Many storage technologies become viable at $10-20/MWh that need further development to be viable at higher price.

Retric 4y ago
That’s a reasonable point, but I think it’s still overestimating the value of adding new nuclear power plants when you already have significant nuclear capacity. It’s clear the average capacity factor falls when you add more nuclear power. In other words rather than looking at the average capacity factor as being X%, you need to consider how much the average capacity factor falls with each additional reactor and then calculate what the effective capacity factor of that reactor must have been to hit the new average. To illiterate if 10GW averages to 80% and 11GW averages to 79% then the 11th GW must have effectively been 69%, because (80 * 10 + 69) / 11 = 79.