7 ms·

> They take too long to build and cost too much. The global average to build one is ~7 years. People have been saying they take too long to build as an excuse

> They take too long to build and cost too much. The global average to build one is ~7 years. People have been saying they take too long to build as an excuse for not building them for what, two decades or more? It seems to be taking longer to not build them than to build them. > By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch. Neither of those have the same purpose. Solar + battery lets you generate power with solar at noon and then use it after sunset. It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. More than a third of US energy consumption is for heating which is a terrible match for solar because the demand is nearly the exact inverse of solar's generation profile both in terms of time of day and seasonally. HVDC is pretty overrated in general. It does nothing for the seasonal problem and it's expensive for something that only provides a significant benefit a small minority of the time, i.e. the two days out of the year when the entire local grid has a shortage but a far away one has a surplus. It's also hard to secure because it inherently spans long distances so you can't have anything like a containment building around it and you end up with an infrastructure where multiple GW of grid capacity is susceptible to accidental or purposeful disruption by any idiot with a shovel or a mylar balloon.

jdlshore 7mo ago
> It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. That’s not necessary. Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
  > Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear. Only you don't. In latitudes that get winter, solar output is only about a quarter as much in the winter as in the summer. You often hear things like "twice as much in the warmer half of the year" to try and stuff October and March into the "colder half" and disguise how screwed you are in December and January. Worse, if you electrify heating then it's not just that solar supplies less in the winter, you also have more demand in the winter. By this point you're not just overbuilding by a bit, you'd need five times as much or more in January as in July. "Five times as much" is already over what it costs to use nuclear. Then it gets worse, because you now have a price of zero during the summer and even the spring and fall because of the massive oversupply and lower demand, so you now have to recover the entire cost of the overbuild during the three months when you're generating the least amount of power. Then it gets worse yet, because heating demand is higher at night and we haven't yet added the cost of storage.
  - jdlshore 7mo ago
    Okay, let’s say that we use solar + battery to cover everything but Nov, Dec, Jan, when the days are too short. Solar is cheaper than nuclear the rest of the time, so (due to the way energy markets work) we pay solar producers the cost of nuclear generation, creating strong incentive to build out more solar + battery. So we end up using nuclear 1/4 of the time. But unfortunately, nuclear’s cost is in the capital expense, not the operating expense. We pay about the same amount for it regardless of whether we’re using it or not. So if we’re only using 1/4 the energy, the cost per watt of nuclear energy is effectively 4x larger. This incentivizes further build-out of solar, catching those sweet winter profits (now 4x larger!), further squeezing nuclear’s usage, driving up its prices, and incentivizing even more solar. Eventually nuclear gets squeezed out and solar’s profit margins go from “astronomical” (naturally, it’s power from the sun, nyuck nyuck) to “low margin.” But they’re still making money. Whoever built the nuclear plant is left with a very expensive stranded asset. At least, that’s my understanding. I’m not a power company accountant. What I observe, though, is that power companies who do employ accountants aren’t building nuclear. They’re building shit-tons of solar. And I’m pretty sure it’s not because they’re hippies who hate nuclear.
    - AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
      > Solar is cheaper than nuclear the rest of the time, so (due to the way energy markets work) we pay solar producers the cost of nuclear generation, creating strong incentive to build out more solar + battery. The way energy markets work is that prices change based on supply and demand. So you build a lot of solar and then the price goes down at times when solar generation is high. (There isn't really enough solar in the grid for this to have happened yet in most places.) Because nuclear has high capital costs but low unit costs, it continues generating all the time even if prices are lower some of the time. It needs to hit a particular average price but will take essentially any instantaneous price. It can't operate with an average price of $0.02/kWh but it can sell for that at noon in July as long as it's getting enough to offset it at midnight in December. So, you add a bunch of solar to the grid and as a result the price of electricity during daylight hours in the summer falls below the average breakeven cost for solar. Nuclear is still getting more than that at night, when the price won't fall below the daytime price plus the cost of storage, and in the winter, when solar output is lower and heating demand is higher. Because it's still recovering a lot of its costs on summer nights and even a little bit on summer days, the winter price nuclear needs never gets to be 4x as high, but it goes up some. Now the solar companies are looking at that price and trying to decide whether it's worth getting. If they add more solar it's going to generate e.g. 4kW in summer, 2kW in spring, 2kW in fall and 1kW in winter. So for every 9kWh they generate, only 1kWh comes in winter, and that's during the day. Suppose solar needs to average $0.04/kWh to be sustainable but we're already at $0.02/kWh in the spring, summer and fall. Then solar needs the price during the day in winter to be at least $0.20/kWh before wanting to add more. On top of that, if they do add more, then the price during other seasons drops. If those hit $0.01/kWh during the day then solar needs the price during the day in winter to be $0.28/kWh. And, of course, then the price in the other seasons would drop again, until solar would need to have $0.36/kWh in the winter because by then they would only be getting paid in the winter. Whereas nuclear still makes some in the summer at night. On top of this the demand is higher in the winter at night, but it's not higher in the summer at night. So to use solar with storage, you would also have to amortize the cost of the additional storage during only the winter months. And the winter nights have more hours than the days, don't forget. So for solar to supply all power in the winter it needs the daytime price to be $0.36/kWh and the nighttime price to be more than twice that. Then solar is intermittent. People still need heat when it's cloudy. Overbuilding solar sufficiently to handle the heating load on a cold cloudy day in winter? Nope. Hopeless. You'd have to use long-term storage in addition to short-term storage and that's a whole new category of expensive when we were already looking at prices nobody was going to like. So what happens instead? Well, probably the daytime price in the non-winter months gets to something like $0.02/kWh and the daytime price in the winter gets to something like $0.20/kWh and you fall below the breakeven point for building more solar. Then nuclear takes the same $0.02 and $0.20 during the day and something more than that at night and continues to cover its costs. Really the problem here is not that solar is going to push out nuclear in the winter, it's that natural gas could unless you have a price on CO2. Or more likely, without a carbon price people might not switch to electric heat instead of continuing to heat with natural gas and fuel oil. So we kind of need a carbon price to do heating. Or to solve it from the other side (which would be even better), we need to get nuclear to be more cost efficient so it can out-compete natural gas since solar won't.
- renaudg 7mo ago
  1. Overprovision as much as you want, solar still won't work at night. 2. Do you realize the consequences of casually overprovisioning solar capacity when it uses orders of magnitude more land than nuclear per kWh produced ? Source : https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
  - sehansen 7mo ago
    Land use per kWh is almost completely unimportant. Here in Denmark solar farms take up 0.09% of the land area and produce 7% of our electricity or ~2.5% of our energy use. That means 4% of our land area would be enough to cover all our energy needs.
  - don_esteban 7mo ago
    Overprovision to cover the night is only 2-3x, not a big deal. Storage (batteries, hydro, heated sand/whatever new thing you can come-up with) for night use is also much easier. The real problem is seasonal variation: The total amount of stored energy is much larger (~100x) and you cycle it (and, hence, pay for storage) once a year, not 365x. Wind + long range power transfer should help. At the cost of today's overpriced nuclear powerplants you can fund a lot of storage research and installation. Perhaps you can use overprovisioned solar to eletrolyse water and use captured C02 (ideally from air) to generate methane or more complex hydrocarbons, for use in applications where electric power just won't work (e.g. long-range flight), or for long term power storage. Yes, there are significant conversion losses, but overall it is still in the low multiplies, not 200x.
- belorn 7mo ago
  Lets put down some Swedish numbers. During the coldest winter month, solar energy produce (as per statistics from the solar industry in Sweden) somewhere around 3-7% of the amount produced during the warmest month. Households also consume around 2-4 times the amount of energy during the coldest month compared to the warmest month. Sweden is a country where only a small minority have air conditioning installed at home. Those are the worst month vs the best month. Overall the winter is not that bad, but it is still pretty bad for solar. Talking with people who has had solar installed here, the general story is very similar. During periods where it do produce the market price is already exceptional low, so it isn't returning a major saving. When the market price is high, the output is low, forcing them to be connected to the grid and pay whatever the electrical company demand during the highest market peaks, as well as taxes and grid fees which themselves has increased to match the cost of high variability. All this looks very different in countries with much warmer climates and where the major energy consumption from households are air conditioning.
  - gpm 7mo ago
    Yeah but: 1. Sweden is just about the worst case, there's very few countries/people that far north. 2. There's this genius invention called "wires". HVDC has transmission losses on the order of 3.5% per 1,000km. You don't have to colocate the solar.
    - buzer 7mo ago
      You don't need to colocate the solar, but you need to make sure you can get that power when you actually need it. During crisis nations are going to restrict exporting electricity and prioritizing their own residents. Electricity that is generated in Germany is not going to warm up Nordic countries if Germany doesn't let it. Wires are also susceptible to sabotage, especially undersea ones (which are the current major connection points to Europe).
      - hardlianotion 7mo ago
        The issue is more the other way at the moment. Norwegian prices can get high as they are exposed to German demand over the interconnector.
- buzer 7mo ago
  I selected random date in July 2025. During that time Finland produced about 10GWh of solar. I selected random one from February 2025. During that Finland produced about 0.5GWh. February also actually doesn't have shortest daylight hours, mid-December situation is even worse. Christmas Eve 2024 produced about 0.05GWh. You sure overprovision factor of 200x is still cheaper? This is when looking at the peak generation. From what I understand solar has about 30-40% capacity factor in summer. Just to panels (I'm not sure about total cost of grid-scale solar) seem to be about $300k per rated 1MW or $750k per 1MW during peak. $150M per 1MW during December. OL3 cost about 11B € for 1.44GW (assuming 90% capacity factor) or 7M € per MW. Unless there has been some huge overnight exchange rate change 7M € seems much cheaper than $150M. Latter of course would actually be much higher when you factor in rest of the equipment, labor etc. Some numbers I found say that it's probably 5x higher.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
Spooky23 7mo ago
The issue with them in addition to time is a huge capital expense that needs to be amortized. Nobody wants to hold 30-80 year debt on giant capital projects that could be rendered obsolete. For commercialization, solar makes more sense as there is a much better return on capital. If I were king, I’d do socialized power and have the government capitalize and own the nuclear plants, and bid out the operations to private entities. Government has better debt economics and doesn’t care about return in monetary means. Even then, relatively small tweaks to tax law and some grid investment would create a solar boom at lower cost. Every Walmart parking lot and some road infrastructure should be covered with solar. Interstates could be utility and generating corridors - they aren’t because federal law makes any multimodal use very difficult.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
  > Nobody wants to hold 30-80 year debt on giant capital projects that could be rendered obsolete. There isn't really an "obsolete" after it comes online because things get built when expected revenue exceeds construction costs + operating costs, but once built (or close enough to completion) they continue to operate as long as revenue exceeds only operating costs because by then the construction cost is in the past. When the construction cost is large, the amount the price of electricity would have to decline to fall below operating costs is equally large. And investing in something where you expected a positive ROI and you ended up with a slightly negative ROI clearly isn't what you'd have preferred, but it isn't nearly as bad as the -100% ROI you'd get from shutting down the plant instead of selling it for slightly less than what you put in. There's a reason the US is not only continuing to operate 20th century nuclear plants but even looking to reactivate some of the ones that have already been decommissioned. Moreover, solar has the same problem. You invest in a solar farm because you're expecting to profitably sell power at current prices, but if e.g. the AI thing turns out to be a bubble then there will be oversupply and current prices won't stick. Solar also has the added "everybody is doing it" risk. If you and everybody else add solar then the price at times when solar output is highest is going to be lowest and vice versa, i.e. if too many people invest in the same type of generation then your output gets inversely correlated with the market price, which is bad for ROI.
  - 7mo ago
adrianN 7mo ago
Wind generally works well when solar output is low. That greatly reduces the amount of seasonal storage you need (although you still need some).
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
DrScientist 7mo ago
I think HVDC is a more important component in smoothing out demand/supply than you give it credit for, especially if you add wind into the mix. In terms of security - one of the reasons nuclear power stations are so expensive is they have to survive a targeted plane crash etc - they are expensive high profile targets. In the end the renewables model is a much more distributed model of generation, storage and consumption ( rather than a few massive power stations ) - so with a proper grid you could argue you would have fewer single points of failure, and increased resilence.
- mpweiher 7mo ago
  Nuclear power plants are not expensive per unit of power delivered. "distributed" sounds good as long as you don't think about it too much, because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation: all these "distributed" plants produce very much in lockstep due to external factors (day/night, weather, seasons) that are extremely correlated, much more than any set of nuclear power plants ever could be. Intermittent renewables do not increase resilience, they massively reduce resilience. In Germany, redispatch has increased more than tenfold in order to keep the grid stable in light of the destabilizing influence of intermittents that have been introduced. Spain just suffered their blackout last year with over a hundred deaths due to this destabilization (though the PR is trying everything to deflect the blame).
  - DrScientist 7mo ago
    > because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation It does it if your interconnects make the grid scale large enough, and it does if you consider distributed generation and storage as part of the overall system. Sure if you take a grid designed for centralised on-demand generation, and apply that to renewable generation then you'll have problems. However I'm not suggesting that. I'm also not suggesting something that has no emergency on-demand generation capacity. > they massively reduce resilience. I'm not talking about renewables alone - but in tandem with a grid infrastructure that has reach across timezones, multiple layers of distributed generation and storage. Note nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline. https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuse... But just to be clear - I think there needs to be a mix - and part of that mix is grid capability improvements.

jdlshore 7mo ago

> It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. That’s not necessary. Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear.

AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
> Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear. Only you don't. In latitudes that get winter, solar output is only about a quarter as much in the winter as in the summer. You often hear things like "twice as much in the warmer half of the year" to try and stuff October and March into the "colder half" and disguise how screwed you are in December and January. Worse, if you electrify heating then it's not just that solar supplies less in the winter, you also have more demand in the winter. By this point you're not just overbuilding by a bit, you'd need five times as much or more in January as in July. "Five times as much" is already over what it costs to use nuclear. Then it gets worse, because you now have a price of zero during the summer and even the spring and fall because of the massive oversupply and lower demand, so you now have to recover the entire cost of the overbuild during the three months when you're generating the least amount of power. Then it gets worse yet, because heating demand is higher at night and we haven't yet added the cost of storage.
- jdlshore 7mo ago
  Okay, let’s say that we use solar + battery to cover everything but Nov, Dec, Jan, when the days are too short. Solar is cheaper than nuclear the rest of the time, so (due to the way energy markets work) we pay solar producers the cost of nuclear generation, creating strong incentive to build out more solar + battery. So we end up using nuclear 1/4 of the time. But unfortunately, nuclear’s cost is in the capital expense, not the operating expense. We pay about the same amount for it regardless of whether we’re using it or not. So if we’re only using 1/4 the energy, the cost per watt of nuclear energy is effectively 4x larger. This incentivizes further build-out of solar, catching those sweet winter profits (now 4x larger!), further squeezing nuclear’s usage, driving up its prices, and incentivizing even more solar. Eventually nuclear gets squeezed out and solar’s profit margins go from “astronomical” (naturally, it’s power from the sun, nyuck nyuck) to “low margin.” But they’re still making money. Whoever built the nuclear plant is left with a very expensive stranded asset. At least, that’s my understanding. I’m not a power company accountant. What I observe, though, is that power companies who do employ accountants aren’t building nuclear. They’re building shit-tons of solar. And I’m pretty sure it’s not because they’re hippies who hate nuclear.
  - AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
    > Solar is cheaper than nuclear the rest of the time, so (due to the way energy markets work) we pay solar producers the cost of nuclear generation, creating strong incentive to build out more solar + battery. The way energy markets work is that prices change based on supply and demand. So you build a lot of solar and then the price goes down at times when solar generation is high. (There isn't really enough solar in the grid for this to have happened yet in most places.) Because nuclear has high capital costs but low unit costs, it continues generating all the time even if prices are lower some of the time. It needs to hit a particular average price but will take essentially any instantaneous price. It can't operate with an average price of $0.02/kWh but it can sell for that at noon in July as long as it's getting enough to offset it at midnight in December. So, you add a bunch of solar to the grid and as a result the price of electricity during daylight hours in the summer falls below the average breakeven cost for solar. Nuclear is still getting more than that at night, when the price won't fall below the daytime price plus the cost of storage, and in the winter, when solar output is lower and heating demand is higher. Because it's still recovering a lot of its costs on summer nights and even a little bit on summer days, the winter price nuclear needs never gets to be 4x as high, but it goes up some. Now the solar companies are looking at that price and trying to decide whether it's worth getting. If they add more solar it's going to generate e.g. 4kW in summer, 2kW in spring, 2kW in fall and 1kW in winter. So for every 9kWh they generate, only 1kWh comes in winter, and that's during the day. Suppose solar needs to average $0.04/kWh to be sustainable but we're already at $0.02/kWh in the spring, summer and fall. Then solar needs the price during the day in winter to be at least $0.20/kWh before wanting to add more. On top of that, if they do add more, then the price during other seasons drops. If those hit $0.01/kWh during the day then solar needs the price during the day in winter to be $0.28/kWh. And, of course, then the price in the other seasons would drop again, until solar would need to have $0.36/kWh in the winter because by then they would only be getting paid in the winter. Whereas nuclear still makes some in the summer at night. On top of this the demand is higher in the winter at night, but it's not higher in the summer at night. So to use solar with storage, you would also have to amortize the cost of the additional storage during only the winter months. And the winter nights have more hours than the days, don't forget. So for solar to supply all power in the winter it needs the daytime price to be $0.36/kWh and the nighttime price to be more than twice that. Then solar is intermittent. People still need heat when it's cloudy. Overbuilding solar sufficiently to handle the heating load on a cold cloudy day in winter? Nope. Hopeless. You'd have to use long-term storage in addition to short-term storage and that's a whole new category of expensive when we were already looking at prices nobody was going to like. So what happens instead? Well, probably the daytime price in the non-winter months gets to something like $0.02/kWh and the daytime price in the winter gets to something like $0.20/kWh and you fall below the breakeven point for building more solar. Then nuclear takes the same $0.02 and $0.20 during the day and something more than that at night and continues to cover its costs. Really the problem here is not that solar is going to push out nuclear in the winter, it's that natural gas could unless you have a price on CO2. Or more likely, without a carbon price people might not switch to electric heat instead of continuing to heat with natural gas and fuel oil. So we kind of need a carbon price to do heating. Or to solve it from the other side (which would be even better), we need to get nuclear to be more cost efficient so it can out-compete natural gas since solar won't.
renaudg 7mo ago
1. Overprovision as much as you want, solar still won't work at night. 2. Do you realize the consequences of casually overprovisioning solar capacity when it uses orders of magnitude more land than nuclear per kWh produced ? Source : https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
- sehansen 7mo ago
  Land use per kWh is almost completely unimportant. Here in Denmark solar farms take up 0.09% of the land area and produce 7% of our electricity or ~2.5% of our energy use. That means 4% of our land area would be enough to cover all our energy needs.
- don_esteban 7mo ago
  Overprovision to cover the night is only 2-3x, not a big deal. Storage (batteries, hydro, heated sand/whatever new thing you can come-up with) for night use is also much easier. The real problem is seasonal variation: The total amount of stored energy is much larger (~100x) and you cycle it (and, hence, pay for storage) once a year, not 365x. Wind + long range power transfer should help. At the cost of today's overpriced nuclear powerplants you can fund a lot of storage research and installation. Perhaps you can use overprovisioned solar to eletrolyse water and use captured C02 (ideally from air) to generate methane or more complex hydrocarbons, for use in applications where electric power just won't work (e.g. long-range flight), or for long term power storage. Yes, there are significant conversion losses, but overall it is still in the low multiplies, not 200x.
belorn 7mo ago
Lets put down some Swedish numbers. During the coldest winter month, solar energy produce (as per statistics from the solar industry in Sweden) somewhere around 3-7% of the amount produced during the warmest month. Households also consume around 2-4 times the amount of energy during the coldest month compared to the warmest month. Sweden is a country where only a small minority have air conditioning installed at home. Those are the worst month vs the best month. Overall the winter is not that bad, but it is still pretty bad for solar. Talking with people who has had solar installed here, the general story is very similar. During periods where it do produce the market price is already exceptional low, so it isn't returning a major saving. When the market price is high, the output is low, forcing them to be connected to the grid and pay whatever the electrical company demand during the highest market peaks, as well as taxes and grid fees which themselves has increased to match the cost of high variability. All this looks very different in countries with much warmer climates and where the major energy consumption from households are air conditioning.
- gpm 7mo ago
  Yeah but: 1. Sweden is just about the worst case, there's very few countries/people that far north. 2. There's this genius invention called "wires". HVDC has transmission losses on the order of 3.5% per 1,000km. You don't have to colocate the solar.
  - buzer 7mo ago
    You don't need to colocate the solar, but you need to make sure you can get that power when you actually need it. During crisis nations are going to restrict exporting electricity and prioritizing their own residents. Electricity that is generated in Germany is not going to warm up Nordic countries if Germany doesn't let it. Wires are also susceptible to sabotage, especially undersea ones (which are the current major connection points to Europe).
    - hardlianotion 7mo ago
      The issue is more the other way at the moment. Norwegian prices can get high as they are exposed to German demand over the interconnector.
buzer 7mo ago
I selected random date in July 2025. During that time Finland produced about 10GWh of solar. I selected random one from February 2025. During that Finland produced about 0.5GWh. February also actually doesn't have shortest daylight hours, mid-December situation is even worse. Christmas Eve 2024 produced about 0.05GWh. You sure overprovision factor of 200x is still cheaper? This is when looking at the peak generation. From what I understand solar has about 30-40% capacity factor in summer. Just to panels (I'm not sure about total cost of grid-scale solar) seem to be about $300k per rated 1MW or $750k per 1MW during peak. $150M per 1MW during December. OL3 cost about 11B € for 1.44GW (assuming 90% capacity factor) or 7M € per MW. Unless there has been some huge overnight exchange rate change 7M € seems much cheaper than $150M. Latter of course would actually be much higher when you factor in rest of the equipment, labor etc. Some numbers I found say that it's probably 5x higher.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

Spooky23 7mo ago

The issue with them in addition to time is a huge capital expense that needs to be amortized. Nobody wants to hold 30-80 year debt on giant capital projects that could be rendered obsolete. For commercialization, solar makes more sense as there is a much better return on capital. If I were king, I’d do socialized power and have the government capitalize and own the nuclear plants, and bid out the operations to private entities. Government has better debt economics and doesn’t care about return in monetary means. Even then, relatively small tweaks to tax law and some grid investment would create a solar boom at lower cost. Every Walmart parking lot and some road infrastructure should be covered with solar. Interstates could be utility and generating corridors - they aren’t because federal law makes any multimodal use very difficult.

AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
> Nobody wants to hold 30-80 year debt on giant capital projects that could be rendered obsolete. There isn't really an "obsolete" after it comes online because things get built when expected revenue exceeds construction costs + operating costs, but once built (or close enough to completion) they continue to operate as long as revenue exceeds only operating costs because by then the construction cost is in the past. When the construction cost is large, the amount the price of electricity would have to decline to fall below operating costs is equally large. And investing in something where you expected a positive ROI and you ended up with a slightly negative ROI clearly isn't what you'd have preferred, but it isn't nearly as bad as the -100% ROI you'd get from shutting down the plant instead of selling it for slightly less than what you put in. There's a reason the US is not only continuing to operate 20th century nuclear plants but even looking to reactivate some of the ones that have already been decommissioned. Moreover, solar has the same problem. You invest in a solar farm because you're expecting to profitably sell power at current prices, but if e.g. the AI thing turns out to be a bubble then there will be oversupply and current prices won't stick. Solar also has the added "everybody is doing it" risk. If you and everybody else add solar then the price at times when solar output is highest is going to be lowest and vice versa, i.e. if too many people invest in the same type of generation then your output gets inversely correlated with the market price, which is bad for ROI.
- 7mo ago

adrianN 7mo ago

Wind generally works well when solar output is low. That greatly reduces the amount of seasonal storage you need (although you still need some).

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

DrScientist 7mo ago

I think HVDC is a more important component in smoothing out demand/supply than you give it credit for, especially if you add wind into the mix. In terms of security - one of the reasons nuclear power stations are so expensive is they have to survive a targeted plane crash etc - they are expensive high profile targets. In the end the renewables model is a much more distributed model of generation, storage and consumption ( rather than a few massive power stations ) - so with a proper grid you could argue you would have fewer single points of failure, and increased resilence.

mpweiher 7mo ago
Nuclear power plants are not expensive per unit of power delivered. "distributed" sounds good as long as you don't think about it too much, because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation: all these "distributed" plants produce very much in lockstep due to external factors (day/night, weather, seasons) that are extremely correlated, much more than any set of nuclear power plants ever could be. Intermittent renewables do not increase resilience, they massively reduce resilience. In Germany, redispatch has increased more than tenfold in order to keep the grid stable in light of the destabilizing influence of intermittents that have been introduced. Spain just suffered their blackout last year with over a hundred deaths due to this destabilization (though the PR is trying everything to deflect the blame).
- DrScientist 7mo ago
  > because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation It does it if your interconnects make the grid scale large enough, and it does if you consider distributed generation and storage as part of the overall system. Sure if you take a grid designed for centralised on-demand generation, and apply that to renewable generation then you'll have problems. However I'm not suggesting that. I'm also not suggesting something that has no emergency on-demand generation capacity. > they massively reduce resilience. I'm not talking about renewables alone - but in tandem with a grid infrastructure that has reach across timezones, multiple layers of distributed generation and storage. Note nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline. https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuse... But just to be clear - I think there needs to be a mix - and part of that mix is grid capability improvements.