3 ms·

You export the electricity. Either directly, or by bottling it. Excess power always has a use.

cauch 4y ago
Well, you cannot really export it if no one around needs it because they also are not in a peak. If they rely on importing electricity when in non-peak time, what do they do in peak time? By construction, the non-peak time is the worse time to export. Unless you export to a different part of the world, but then, the same argument works with renewable (said simply: if you can export at midnight to a country where it is 4pm, then you can use solar and import at midnight from a country where it is 4pm). What do you mean by "bottling it"? Do you mean storage? Because that's exactly what I'm saying.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >What do you mean by "bottling it"? Aluminum production, for one example. Bauxite is so cheap and abundant that the cost of aluminum is almost entirely in the electricity required for smelting. And because aluminum is such a critical material for industry, it is effectively equivalent to energy exportation. This is why tiny Iceland is a top 10 global exporter of it: abundant free geothermal energy with nowhere else to go.
  - cauch 4y ago
    Yes. It's basically demand response based on turning on and off factories.
  - nradov 4y ago
    No one is going to invest in an aluminum plant unless they have some assurance of cheap electric power for many years. The capital expense and fixed operating costs for those plants are tremendous. It's not economical to start and stop production on a daily basis as power prices fluctuate. How would you even schedule the production workers? And you still have to pay things like property taxes and insurance whether the plant is producing or not.
  - m4rtink 4y ago
    Also the local district heating company installed an electric 30 MW water heating boiler recently, which they can run on excess electric power and throttle down the regular combined cycle plant powered by natural gas.
m4rtink 4y ago
Also IIRC you can design the reactors to support a degree of output scaling, if not shutdown. IIRC French reactors are designed to do that - they have some issues right now with premature fatigue but I'm not sure it is related.
- cauch 4y ago
  Yes, I believe it's the case. The French nuclear plants can do some load following. But they are not doing it, because it's more inefficient for a nuclear power plants, and as the nuclear is anyway not 100% of the mix, the load following is done by the other parts of the mix that don't have such problem. On my mind, the main problem of scaling down production for nuclear plant is that a nuclear plant is very expensive, and if it produces only at submaximal capacity, it means that the construction cost is spread on less electricity production.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Operating a nuke at less than 100% is untenable: if run at 50%, each kWh costs twice as much as at 100%, but even running at 100%, it costs radically more than all other choices.

Well, you cannot really export it if no one around needs it because they also are not in a peak. If they rely on importing electricity when in non-peak time, what do they do in peak time? By construction, the non-peak time is the worse time to export. Unless you export to a different part of the world, but then, the same argument works with renewable (said simply: if you can export at midnight to a country where it is 4pm, then you can use solar and import at midnight from a country where it is 4pm). What do you mean by "bottling it"? Do you mean storage? Because that's exactly what I'm saying.

ramesh31 4y ago
>What do you mean by "bottling it"? Aluminum production, for one example. Bauxite is so cheap and abundant that the cost of aluminum is almost entirely in the electricity required for smelting. And because aluminum is such a critical material for industry, it is effectively equivalent to energy exportation. This is why tiny Iceland is a top 10 global exporter of it: abundant free geothermal energy with nowhere else to go.
- cauch 4y ago
  Yes. It's basically demand response based on turning on and off factories.
- nradov 4y ago
  No one is going to invest in an aluminum plant unless they have some assurance of cheap electric power for many years. The capital expense and fixed operating costs for those plants are tremendous. It's not economical to start and stop production on a daily basis as power prices fluctuate. How would you even schedule the production workers? And you still have to pay things like property taxes and insurance whether the plant is producing or not.
- m4rtink 4y ago
  Also the local district heating company installed an electric 30 MW water heating boiler recently, which they can run on excess electric power and throttle down the regular combined cycle plant powered by natural gas.

m4rtink 4y ago

Also IIRC you can design the reactors to support a degree of output scaling, if not shutdown. IIRC French reactors are designed to do that - they have some issues right now with premature fatigue but I'm not sure it is related.

cauch 4y ago
Yes, I believe it's the case. The French nuclear plants can do some load following. But they are not doing it, because it's more inefficient for a nuclear power plants, and as the nuclear is anyway not 100% of the mix, the load following is done by the other parts of the mix that don't have such problem. On my mind, the main problem of scaling down production for nuclear plant is that a nuclear plant is very expensive, and if it produces only at submaximal capacity, it means that the construction cost is spread on less electricity production.
moloch-hai 4y ago
Operating a nuke at less than 100% is untenable: if run at 50%, each kWh costs twice as much as at 100%, but even running at 100%, it costs radically more than all other choices.