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>It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant. When you say this you need to also talk about how much it costs to build en

>It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant. When you say this you need to also talk about how much it costs to build enough energy storage for solar to become some given percentage of grid power. There is probably some % where it stops being cheaper than coal

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Thank you for nicely illustrating my point.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  It's interesting how you could hand a solution out on a platter and all that will happen is that people will run around yelling 'it isn't perfect'. As if any powersource has a 100% uptime guarantee.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    U.S. nuclear power plants typically refuel every 18 to 24 months. The average planned outage time is about a month. We never hear much about how nuclear power plants only have a ~95% planned uptime.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    The problem isn't the uptime, it's that the downtime strongly correlates across all instances of wind power and across all instances of solar power in a country: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      So what? It's not as if those baseline powerplants that we have today will all suddenly disappear. They will just have a lower utilization factor. And that's perfectly fine. Solar, hydro and wind when you have them, nuclear when you don't, gas when you don't have nuclear and coal when you don't have gas. It is really quite simple. And the best bit is that you can have your solar and wind installations up and running before the ink is even dry on the kind of permit and investment required for a nuclear plant and it is much cheaper to boot, as well as decentralized so far more resilient and friendlier to the grid (assuming the grid is well designed in the first place, which isn't always true). And 'in a country' is the wrong level to be thinking at. You should look at much larger areas than that, and across both longitude and latitude.
lolinder 3y ago
They have a paragraph addressing that point, if you read on: > It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that?

bryanlarsen 3y ago

Thank you for nicely illustrating my point.

jacquesm 3y ago
It's interesting how you could hand a solution out on a platter and all that will happen is that people will run around yelling 'it isn't perfect'. As if any powersource has a 100% uptime guarantee.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  U.S. nuclear power plants typically refuel every 18 to 24 months. The average planned outage time is about a month. We never hear much about how nuclear power plants only have a ~95% planned uptime.
- concordDance 3y ago
  The problem isn't the uptime, it's that the downtime strongly correlates across all instances of wind power and across all instances of solar power in a country: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    So what? It's not as if those baseline powerplants that we have today will all suddenly disappear. They will just have a lower utilization factor. And that's perfectly fine. Solar, hydro and wind when you have them, nuclear when you don't, gas when you don't have nuclear and coal when you don't have gas. It is really quite simple. And the best bit is that you can have your solar and wind installations up and running before the ink is even dry on the kind of permit and investment required for a nuclear plant and it is much cheaper to boot, as well as decentralized so far more resilient and friendlier to the grid (assuming the grid is well designed in the first place, which isn't always true). And 'in a country' is the wrong level to be thinking at. You should look at much larger areas than that, and across both longitude and latitude.

lolinder 3y ago

They have a paragraph addressing that point, if you read on: > It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that?