8 ms·

> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes d

> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.

closewith 2y ago
> You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather. Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.
- pjc50 2y ago
  > Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.
  - closewith 2y ago
    Well, that's a false dichotomy, because no-one's (at least no-one reasonable and in good faith) is suggesting shifting the grid entirely to nuclear. Instead, a diverse set of generation sources is ideal, including solar, wind, nuclear and hydro.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      Dunno, all the nuclear advocates seem to contrast it with wind/solar, which are also much cheaper and quicker capital investments.
      - closewith 2y ago
        Well, the point of this thread is that's only true until a sufficient level of availability is required, and then nuclear (and fossil thermal plants) all of a sudden become a viable option again.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        Nope, virtually all nuclear advocates call for combined renewable/nuclear grids. Nuclear and reliable renewables for base load, intermittent renewables for intermittent load where and when it matches. Wind/solar are not cheaper. Per kWh they are more expensive. Thanks to China, they are a lower and smaller-grained capital investment.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    Not the same scenario. First, France came through this just fine. Second, the could have kept those plants operating and taken a more piecemeal approach to fixing the cracks. They shouldn't have, and didn't, because you really want that triple or quadruple redundancy in your cooling systems, but they could have if push had come to shove, the plants were still operational. But since there was plenty of capacity available, they could afford to take those plants offline and do the checks and repairs all at once. Intermittent renewables afford you no such optionality. If the sun don't shine, the sun don't shine. If the wind don't blow, the wind don't blow.
  - venj 2y ago
    This event happened in 2022. this is the only year since 1995 where nuclear production fell below 300TWh (278TWh in 2022 vs 360 in 2021 and 320 in 2023). These cracks are not the only factor for the poor performance on nuclear in 2022 : several reactors had to do their 10-year maintenance (grand carénage), which had been delayed because of the pandemic. It's hard to extrapolate reliability issues from an event that happened once in 30 years.
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    Why did they have to be checked all at once? That sounds like a design or regulation problem.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  Practically, a lot of nuclear power plants can be down at the same time for maintenance etc., so you need to overbuild quite a bit there as well then
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Hopefully you have multiple reactor designs so that if an issue with one is found, you don't stop all reactors just reactors of the same design.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    No. Nuclear power plants are super reliable and available. German und US plants had/have capacity factors of well over 90%, and the downtimes are scheduled. The "overbuild" is minimal.
    - RandomLensman 2y ago
      France in 2022 didn't have a lot of capacity down at the same time? Availability was at 40% of maximum capacity for about a month at it's lowest. How these things will be managed in the real world matters, too, not just how it could play out hypothetically.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        Yep. That was a one-time occurrence, due to (a) inspections being deferred during COVID and (b) France's long time catastrophic underinvestment in their nuclear fleet. Until March 2023, there was a law in France that made it illegal to increase nuclear capacity in absolute terms and mandated reduction to under 50% in relative terms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=isgu-VrD0oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=isgu-VrD0oM But again, a one-time event, and it doesn't change the high capacity factors world-wide (over 80%) and the extremely high capacity factors in reasonably well run fleets ( > 90% in the US, and also inGermany when they still had nuclear ).
        RandomLensman 2y ago
GaggiX 2y ago
The cost effectiveness plummets after one point.
phil21 2y ago
> We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. Exactly. And everyone is putting their heads in the sand over this calculation. Seasonal energy storage is simply not a problem we have even begun to solve yet. We know the numbers, we're just not talking about them.
bloopernova 2y ago
Plus if it's not sunny/windy in one part of the country, it may well be very sunny or windy in other parts of the country. We have a whole freaking energy grid! This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.
- RhysU 2y ago
  Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.
  - piva00 2y ago
    > Nuclear can be built most places. Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.
    - doublepg23 2y ago
      That’s most places humans live isn’t it?
      - piva00 2y ago
        If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen). This limits a lot nuclear facilities placement.
        TobTobXX 2y ago
        Nuclear power plants only really have an effect on the water temperature if they do not have a cooling tower. This makes the plant considerably cheaper, but, as you mentioned, damages the ecosystem. Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily. > you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen). There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.
christina97 2y ago
It’s literally just that having a solar+wind grid that can survive 3 days of bad weather costs 6x as much as a grid that can survive normal day to day.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  The number I heard was 8x. Solar is about 50 cents / kW, a "24 hour" solar grid is about $4/kW. But that's still about half the price of a natural gas grid and 1/5th the cost of nuclear.
  - pona-a 2y ago
    What about negative externalities? If we were to force all actors to pay for their emissions and toxic by-products, factoring the entire lifecycle into the cost, what would it look like then? If, even with that in mind, solar looses to nuclear, that would be a fairly interesting result.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      The total lifecycle cost of nuclear is massive - rehab'ing a nuclear plant would be well into the 10s of billions.
himinlomax 2y ago
> I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” Something close to that happens almost every year in Europe. Last year there was nearly 3 weeks in winter where there was very little wind across the continent (<20% capacity production on all wind farms), and obviously little to no solar (high latitudes).
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Spain isn't part of Europe? It's sunny in the winter.
  - qwytw 2y ago
    You "just" need to get all of that energy north somehow...
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    Was Spain immune?
  - himinlomax 2y ago
    90% of European solar farms are not in Spain. Also, Spain only has a ~2 GW connection to France to sell their solar power to the rest of Europe.
- Teever 2y ago
  Another way to look at that is we only need to increase wind capacity by 5x to cover that event.
w4 2y ago
Nuclear isn’t a replacement for solar and wind. It’s additive. Build all of it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gregw2 2y ago
You make very legitimate point which I appreciate; I agree than in aggregate weather forecasting should be fairly reliable as regards sun and wind. Question though... do we understand the tail risk from volcanos on solar outputs, either natural-occurring eruptions or maliciously-triggered ones?
Suppafly 2y ago
>“what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” Anything alive after that wouldn't be human and wouldn't be worried about electricity.
lm28469 2y ago
The problem is that you need to plan for the absolute worst case, once in a century, scenario and size your batteries accordingly. Same reason why almost no one goes 100% solar at home deep in the south/north because you'd need 20x your needed capacity in batteries to account for that once in a decade bleak winter week
- wahern 2y ago
  I don't mean to be cynical, but manifestly this isn't necessary. It's why widespread power outages remain a thing even in rich, highly industrialized countries. American Gulf Coast utilities don't spend astronomical sums on distribution infrastructure to ensure 100% uptime through hurricanes; entire regions end up going hours if not days without power on a regular basis. Likewise, Texas doesn't maintain enough generation and robust infrastructure to make it through every cold snap unscathed. People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages." I'm all for nuclear, but let's be honest about how real-world infrastructure truly works. And, yes, I believe this means safety claims of Gen 4+ nuclear are off, just as they were for prior gen plants. Through motivated accounting people arrive at the numbers that are demanded, but knowingly or not the actual risk of an incident will be greater, as it manifestly always has been. At the same time our real risk tolerance is much greater than we claim, and this will eventually be born out in the power markets, whether through greater nuclear, less reliable power, or some other state of affairs.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    > Likewise, Texas doesn't maintain enough generation and robust infrastructure to make it through every cold snap unscathed. Correction: Texas, the state, doesn't require producers to maintain adequate reserve generation or robust infrastructure, and since they are not (except for a couple of small exceptions) connected to other regional grids, they can't be made to do so by the federal government. This is by design. It's a bad design, but one that greatly pleases corporations. > People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages." This was not my experience when I lived in Texas. There was a brief moment in time for me (~2017 – 2019) where it was actually substantially cheaper, but only if you had the time and knowledge to scour all of the available plans and run some kind of modeling on them, since some had a lot of weird rules. Around COVID, that changed, and the cost savings evaporated. I check periodically, and it still hasn't recovered. Cheapest I could find for where I lived was 10.1¢/kWh, but that's just the base price. In contrast, my base price in North Carolina, on an REMC, is an annual average of 7.48¢/kWh. All that to say, Texans were/are paying more than many others for sub-standard service. I bought a generator while there, and had to use it many, many times. I have used it precisely once here in NC, and that wasn't even a real need – sunny, pleasant afternoon, and someone hit a transformer with their car. Lost power for about 2 hours. Could've easily just done without and been fine.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
Somehow you never hear these people say "What if the nuclear fuel supply chain becomes compromised for an arbitrarily extended period."
- Filligree 2y ago
  Because it’s reasonably cheap to buy two decades of fuel in advance, and it won’t take up much space. If such a thing were a concern, then people would do precisely that. If it were still a problem towards the end of that period, then you can in fact extract uranium from seawater.
  - cykros 2y ago
    This is true even before you start talking about reprocessing spent fuel with breeder reactors.
  - akvadrako 2y ago
    It's also plentiful in many countries, it's just not mined because it's too cheap. But since fuel is under 1% of the cost of Nuclear, if it was a problem we could easy mine more difficult places.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      Or start recycling the "waste". Which still contains >95% of the energy of the original fuel. Problem is: raw Uranium is too plentiful (=cheap) for recycling to be worth it. "Problem"
lossolo 2y ago
Nuclear plants often operate at 90%+ capacity factors, while solar can range from 10-25% depending on location. So you might need 4-9 times more solar capacity to match total energy output. So depending on the region, you might need 4-9 gigawatts of solar capacity with a higher amount of battery storage to match 1 GW nuclear output. This is because you need to account for winter vs summer, for bad weather etc. Maybe it will take a lot more space and cost more to build than restarting a nuclear plant for 1.6 billion.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data We absolutely do not have long-term climate models with that sort of accuracy.
- scoofy 2y ago
  We also only have probability distributions, and with all probability distributions, the existence of very bad luck hangs out in the tails.
incrudible 2y ago
> what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months Forget about two months, the cost to battery store just for two or three days is enormous. At the same time, it does not happen often enough to justify the cost over just using natural gas as a backup, so that is how it is done.
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
We'd be screwed if a Mount Tambora black swan event happened again.
Affric 2y ago
Many documented cases of non zero marginal cost energy systems failing. And in response we have learnt to eliminate, minimise, and manage risk better in those systems. But apparently, in zero marginal cost energy it’s impossible. The only energy systems where you can have reliability have rent seeking minerals companies selling you fuel.

closewith 2y ago

> You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather. Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.

pjc50 2y ago
> Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.
- closewith 2y ago
  Well, that's a false dichotomy, because no-one's (at least no-one reasonable and in good faith) is suggesting shifting the grid entirely to nuclear. Instead, a diverse set of generation sources is ideal, including solar, wind, nuclear and hydro.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Dunno, all the nuclear advocates seem to contrast it with wind/solar, which are also much cheaper and quicker capital investments.
    - closewith 2y ago
      Well, the point of this thread is that's only true until a sufficient level of availability is required, and then nuclear (and fossil thermal plants) all of a sudden become a viable option again.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      Nope, virtually all nuclear advocates call for combined renewable/nuclear grids. Nuclear and reliable renewables for base load, intermittent renewables for intermittent load where and when it matches. Wind/solar are not cheaper. Per kWh they are more expensive. Thanks to China, they are a lower and smaller-grained capital investment.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  Not the same scenario. First, France came through this just fine. Second, the could have kept those plants operating and taken a more piecemeal approach to fixing the cracks. They shouldn't have, and didn't, because you really want that triple or quadruple redundancy in your cooling systems, but they could have if push had come to shove, the plants were still operational. But since there was plenty of capacity available, they could afford to take those plants offline and do the checks and repairs all at once. Intermittent renewables afford you no such optionality. If the sun don't shine, the sun don't shine. If the wind don't blow, the wind don't blow.
- venj 2y ago
  This event happened in 2022. this is the only year since 1995 where nuclear production fell below 300TWh (278TWh in 2022 vs 360 in 2021 and 320 in 2023). These cracks are not the only factor for the poor performance on nuclear in 2022 : several reactors had to do their 10-year maintenance (grand carénage), which had been delayed because of the pandemic. It's hard to extrapolate reliability issues from an event that happened once in 30 years.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  Why did they have to be checked all at once? That sounds like a design or regulation problem.
RandomLensman 2y ago
Practically, a lot of nuclear power plants can be down at the same time for maintenance etc., so you need to overbuild quite a bit there as well then
- dylan604 2y ago
  Hopefully you have multiple reactor designs so that if an issue with one is found, you don't stop all reactors just reactors of the same design.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  No. Nuclear power plants are super reliable and available. German und US plants had/have capacity factors of well over 90%, and the downtimes are scheduled. The "overbuild" is minimal.
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    France in 2022 didn't have a lot of capacity down at the same time? Availability was at 40% of maximum capacity for about a month at it's lowest. How these things will be managed in the real world matters, too, not just how it could play out hypothetically.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      Yep. That was a one-time occurrence, due to (a) inspections being deferred during COVID and (b) France's long time catastrophic underinvestment in their nuclear fleet. Until March 2023, there was a law in France that made it illegal to increase nuclear capacity in absolute terms and mandated reduction to under 50% in relative terms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=isgu-VrD0oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=isgu-VrD0oM But again, a one-time event, and it doesn't change the high capacity factors world-wide (over 80%) and the extremely high capacity factors in reasonably well run fleets ( > 90% in the US, and also inGermany when they still had nuclear ).
      - RandomLensman 2y ago

GaggiX 2y ago

The cost effectiveness plummets after one point.

phil21 2y ago

> We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. Exactly. And everyone is putting their heads in the sand over this calculation. Seasonal energy storage is simply not a problem we have even begun to solve yet. We know the numbers, we're just not talking about them.

bloopernova 2y ago

Plus if it's not sunny/windy in one part of the country, it may well be very sunny or windy in other parts of the country. We have a whole freaking energy grid! This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.

RhysU 2y ago
Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.
- piva00 2y ago
  > Nuclear can be built most places. Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.
  - doublepg23 2y ago
    That’s most places humans live isn’t it?
    - piva00 2y ago
      If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen). This limits a lot nuclear facilities placement.
      - TobTobXX 2y ago
        Nuclear power plants only really have an effect on the water temperature if they do not have a cooling tower. This makes the plant considerably cheaper, but, as you mentioned, damages the ecosystem. Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily. > you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen). There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.

christina97 2y ago

It’s literally just that having a solar+wind grid that can survive 3 days of bad weather costs 6x as much as a grid that can survive normal day to day.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
The number I heard was 8x. Solar is about 50 cents / kW, a "24 hour" solar grid is about $4/kW. But that's still about half the price of a natural gas grid and 1/5th the cost of nuclear.
- pona-a 2y ago
  What about negative externalities? If we were to force all actors to pay for their emissions and toxic by-products, factoring the entire lifecycle into the cost, what would it look like then? If, even with that in mind, solar looses to nuclear, that would be a fairly interesting result.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    The total lifecycle cost of nuclear is massive - rehab'ing a nuclear plant would be well into the 10s of billions.

himinlomax 2y ago

> I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” Something close to that happens almost every year in Europe. Last year there was nearly 3 weeks in winter where there was very little wind across the continent (<20% capacity production on all wind farms), and obviously little to no solar (high latitudes).

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Spain isn't part of Europe? It's sunny in the winter.
- qwytw 2y ago
  You "just" need to get all of that energy north somehow...
- mpweiher 2y ago
  Was Spain immune?
- himinlomax 2y ago
  90% of European solar farms are not in Spain. Also, Spain only has a ~2 GW connection to France to sell their solar power to the rest of Europe.
Teever 2y ago
Another way to look at that is we only need to increase wind capacity by 5x to cover that event.

w4 2y ago

Nuclear isn’t a replacement for solar and wind. It’s additive. Build all of it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

gregw2 2y ago

You make very legitimate point which I appreciate; I agree than in aggregate weather forecasting should be fairly reliable as regards sun and wind. Question though... do we understand the tail risk from volcanos on solar outputs, either natural-occurring eruptions or maliciously-triggered ones?

Suppafly 2y ago

>“what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” Anything alive after that wouldn't be human and wouldn't be worried about electricity.

lm28469 2y ago

The problem is that you need to plan for the absolute worst case, once in a century, scenario and size your batteries accordingly. Same reason why almost no one goes 100% solar at home deep in the south/north because you'd need 20x your needed capacity in batteries to account for that once in a decade bleak winter week

wahern 2y ago
I don't mean to be cynical, but manifestly this isn't necessary. It's why widespread power outages remain a thing even in rich, highly industrialized countries. American Gulf Coast utilities don't spend astronomical sums on distribution infrastructure to ensure 100% uptime through hurricanes; entire regions end up going hours if not days without power on a regular basis. Likewise, Texas doesn't maintain enough generation and robust infrastructure to make it through every cold snap unscathed. People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages." I'm all for nuclear, but let's be honest about how real-world infrastructure truly works. And, yes, I believe this means safety claims of Gen 4+ nuclear are off, just as they were for prior gen plants. Through motivated accounting people arrive at the numbers that are demanded, but knowingly or not the actual risk of an incident will be greater, as it manifestly always has been. At the same time our real risk tolerance is much greater than we claim, and this will eventually be born out in the power markets, whether through greater nuclear, less reliable power, or some other state of affairs.
- sgarland 2y ago
  > Likewise, Texas doesn't maintain enough generation and robust infrastructure to make it through every cold snap unscathed. Correction: Texas, the state, doesn't require producers to maintain adequate reserve generation or robust infrastructure, and since they are not (except for a couple of small exceptions) connected to other regional grids, they can't be made to do so by the federal government. This is by design. It's a bad design, but one that greatly pleases corporations. > People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages." This was not my experience when I lived in Texas. There was a brief moment in time for me (~2017 – 2019) where it was actually substantially cheaper, but only if you had the time and knowledge to scour all of the available plans and run some kind of modeling on them, since some had a lot of weird rules. Around COVID, that changed, and the cost savings evaporated. I check periodically, and it still hasn't recovered. Cheapest I could find for where I lived was 10.1¢/kWh, but that's just the base price. In contrast, my base price in North Carolina, on an REMC, is an annual average of 7.48¢/kWh. All that to say, Texans were/are paying more than many others for sub-standard service. I bought a generator while there, and had to use it many, many times. I have used it precisely once here in NC, and that wasn't even a real need – sunny, pleasant afternoon, and someone hit a transformer with their car. Lost power for about 2 hours. Could've easily just done without and been fine.

BobaFloutist 2y ago

Somehow you never hear these people say "What if the nuclear fuel supply chain becomes compromised for an arbitrarily extended period."

Filligree 2y ago
Because it’s reasonably cheap to buy two decades of fuel in advance, and it won’t take up much space. If such a thing were a concern, then people would do precisely that. If it were still a problem towards the end of that period, then you can in fact extract uranium from seawater.
- cykros 2y ago
  This is true even before you start talking about reprocessing spent fuel with breeder reactors.
- akvadrako 2y ago
  It's also plentiful in many countries, it's just not mined because it's too cheap. But since fuel is under 1% of the cost of Nuclear, if it was a problem we could easy mine more difficult places.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    Or start recycling the "waste". Which still contains >95% of the energy of the original fuel. Problem is: raw Uranium is too plentiful (=cheap) for recycling to be worth it. "Problem"

lossolo 2y ago

Nuclear plants often operate at 90%+ capacity factors, while solar can range from 10-25% depending on location. So you might need 4-9 times more solar capacity to match total energy output. So depending on the region, you might need 4-9 gigawatts of solar capacity with a higher amount of battery storage to match 1 GW nuclear output. This is because you need to account for winter vs summer, for bad weather etc. Maybe it will take a lot more space and cost more to build than restarting a nuclear plant for 1.6 billion.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data We absolutely do not have long-term climate models with that sort of accuracy.

scoofy 2y ago
We also only have probability distributions, and with all probability distributions, the existence of very bad luck hangs out in the tails.

incrudible 2y ago

> what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months Forget about two months, the cost to battery store just for two or three days is enormous. At the same time, it does not happen often enough to justify the cost over just using natural gas as a backup, so that is how it is done.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

We'd be screwed if a Mount Tambora black swan event happened again.

Affric 2y ago

Many documented cases of non zero marginal cost energy systems failing. And in response we have learnt to eliminate, minimise, and manage risk better in those systems. But apparently, in zero marginal cost energy it’s impossible. The only energy systems where you can have reliability have rent seeking minerals companies selling you fuel.