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I don’t think the percentage of nuclear was ever planned to be high enough to serve as a replacement for storage, and China is badly behind those plans.
by matthewdgreen 1y ago
I don’t think the percentage of nuclear was ever planned to be high enough to serve as a replacement for storage, and China is badly behind those plans.
- ethbr1 1y agoNuclear isn't storage: nuclear is base generation and frequency intertia. I.e. the thing that makes the grid as a whole reliable even with fluctuating renewables For that, only a fraction of the total is needed.
- matthewdgreen 1y agoI mean, unless we're turning electricity into Uranium, nuclear obviously isn't storage. But when it comes to reliability, storage absolutely is the alternative to generation like nuclear. China already has 57GW of pumped hydro storage (about equal to their whole nuclear fleet), and they added 42GW of new 2.5hr battery storage just in 2024 alone. Given the declining price of both types of storage, it's likely that these will dominate nuclear when it comes to short- and medium-term grid reliability.