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It’s much more expensive than solar or wind + storage, so why exactly?
by TradingPlaces 3y ago
It’s much more expensive than solar or wind + storage, so why exactly?
- crims0n 3y agoMore reliable, less of an eyesore.
- hermitcrab 3y agoI think windmills are rather beautiful. Subjective, obviously.
- ren_engineer 3y agoHave you ever been around a sizable wind farm at night when you have to look at bright red flashing lights for miles in every direction?
- hermitcrab 3y agoCan't say I have. Is it any worse than looking out at a big city at night?
- crims0n 3y agoProbably not as serene as the star-filled countryside they replaced.
- hermitcrab 3y agoWell, no, but better than a coal fired power station?
- Zigurd 3y agoExactly. Electricity is fungible and so is capital. Spend the capital on the technology that arrives soonest with the least capital. Cost comparisons for nuclear are also dubious. The French are discovering their decommissioning costs are a multiple of what they predicted. Who, using what cash-generating capability, is going to pay for that? And where to reprocess or stash the waste? What we are seeing with uranium fission plants being touted as new tech is an attempt to forget the PWR uranium fission problems. TBF it is not for the sodium-cooled uranium reactor people to solve all the problems. But those problems still need solving.
- FredPret 3y agoNo it isn’t. Electricity has to be delivered the instant it is consumed. You can pile up capital.
- Zigurd 3y agoStorage in the form of batteries, pumped storage, hydrogen, or ammonia works. It is needed more for renewables than for nuclear, but nuclear is hard to throttle to a fine granularity like fossil fuel plants. Anyway, I should have said power generating capacity is mostly fungible. You can mostly replace any capacity with a different kind, within some limits, the same way money isn't perfectly fungible if you need currency conversion, have FDI limits, repatriation limits, etc.
- FredPret 3y agoSo a reasonable engineer would then conclude the practical route to a green grid is nuclear baseload + natural gas peaking + solar and windmills. Storage is nowhere near practical today. A house can barely run off batteries. How about mines, factories, aluminum smelters. In future it would be great if this changed.
- danmaz74 3y agoMore expensive than "solar or wind +" which amount of storage? The amount of storage which would put wind/solar on par with nuclear in terms of reliable baseload is huge.
- acidburnNSA 3y agoThat statement is being challenged. https://www.ctvc.co/firming-costs-renewables/ https://www.ctvc.co/firming-costs-renewables/