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It's comparing apple and orange. Solar/wind aren't available on demand. How much would cost a wind power plant that has the same guaranteed power as a nuclear p

It's comparing apple and orange. Solar/wind aren't available on demand. How much would cost a wind power plant that has the same guaranteed power as a nuclear plant, including batteries for storage? what would be the environmental footprint of such a thing?

kristopolous 4y ago
The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things. The word "guaranteed" is about lowest variance - most predictable. What is prone to unscheduled maintenance, breakdowns, forced outages, etc. The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%. https://rmi.org/fuel-hand-make-coal-nuclear-power-plants-valuable/ https://rmi.org/fuel-hand-make-coal-nuclear-power-plants-val... In practice, forced nuclear outage is 1-2%. An additional 7% downtime is scheduled outages for refueling. Coal is about 15%. Here's a live report: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/reactor-status/ps.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/... You can see about 7 are offline. Disruptions are normal, daily, common occurrences and in practice, solar is pretty reliable in places like the Southern California desert where the grid-scale installations are built (example: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.7923792,-118.4060493,17707m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@34.7923792,-118.4060493,17707m/...). They are subject to occasional monsoons, but that's why there's more in other places such as down near the mexican border (https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7188416,-115.6454361,19457m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7188416,-115.6454361,19457m/...). That's not farmland being replaced with solar panels btw. Instead it's called agrivoltaics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics) This is still early, scroll down to the map here: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects-list https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects... ... that's the kind of redundancy we're talking about.
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  > The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things. Except it doesn't. Which is why Germany didn't decrease its gas plant capacity. They're needed when there's no wind. > The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%. The issue with wind/solar isn't forced outage. It's that the wind doesn't blow all the time, so comparing how much cost 1MWh of wind when the wind blows with 1MWh of coal is dishonest. You're comparing apple and oranges.
- jdkoeck 4y ago
  Right, forced outage of solar is 1%. Meanwhile, Germany is back to building coal plants because solar/wind doesn’t get you through the winter. Also, they postponed closing their nuclear plants. Jee, I wonder why?
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    You must read a lot of right wing media. That's a very nonlinear cherry picking of news items out of context and a packaging of them to puppet a talking point. You can wonder why all you want but hobbling together headlines some of which are 3 years apart and pretending they're related is the thing you actually should be wondering about.
    - jdkoeck 4y ago
      The facts I cited above directly contradict the myth of solar having a small forced outage. The fact of the matter is that solar is an intermittent source of energy. Sure, you can get away with saying that solar has a small forced outage, if you conveniently forget that solar generates a minuscule amount of power when the sun is out. You’ll have a hard time heating yourself with that, as the Germans discovered. By the way, my source of information is mainstream French media.

kristopolous 4y ago

The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things. The word "guaranteed" is about lowest variance - most predictable. What is prone to unscheduled maintenance, breakdowns, forced outages, etc. The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%. https://rmi.org/fuel-hand-make-coal-nuclear-power-plants-valuable/ https://rmi.org/fuel-hand-make-coal-nuclear-power-plants-val... In practice, forced nuclear outage is 1-2%. An additional 7% downtime is scheduled outages for refueling. Coal is about 15%. Here's a live report: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/reactor-status/ps.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/... You can see about 7 are offline. Disruptions are normal, daily, common occurrences and in practice, solar is pretty reliable in places like the Southern California desert where the grid-scale installations are built (example: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.7923792,-118.4060493,17707m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@34.7923792,-118.4060493,17707m/...). They are subject to occasional monsoons, but that's why there's more in other places such as down near the mexican border (https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7188416,-115.6454361,19457m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7188416,-115.6454361,19457m/...). That's not farmland being replaced with solar panels btw. Instead it's called agrivoltaics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics) This is still early, scroll down to the map here: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects-list https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects... ... that's the kind of redundancy we're talking about.

yodsanklai 4y ago
> The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such things. Except it doesn't. Which is why Germany didn't decrease its gas plant capacity. They're needed when there's no wind. > The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about 1%. The issue with wind/solar isn't forced outage. It's that the wind doesn't blow all the time, so comparing how much cost 1MWh of wind when the wind blows with 1MWh of coal is dishonest. You're comparing apple and oranges.
jdkoeck 4y ago
Right, forced outage of solar is 1%. Meanwhile, Germany is back to building coal plants because solar/wind doesn’t get you through the winter. Also, they postponed closing their nuclear plants. Jee, I wonder why?
- kristopolous 4y ago
  You must read a lot of right wing media. That's a very nonlinear cherry picking of news items out of context and a packaging of them to puppet a talking point. You can wonder why all you want but hobbling together headlines some of which are 3 years apart and pretending they're related is the thing you actually should be wondering about.
  - jdkoeck 4y ago
    The facts I cited above directly contradict the myth of solar having a small forced outage. The fact of the matter is that solar is an intermittent source of energy. Sure, you can get away with saying that solar has a small forced outage, if you conveniently forget that solar generates a minuscule amount of power when the sun is out. You’ll have a hard time heating yourself with that, as the Germans discovered. By the way, my source of information is mainstream French media.