In a recent study, researchers from the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) questioned the planned development of new nuclear capacities in the energy strategies of the United States and certain European countries.
That’s a false dilemma. Nuclear and renewables provide different things, so they shouldn’t be compared directly in an “either or” comparison, and certainly not on cost. Nuclear power provides a stable baseline, so you don’t have to rely on coal/gas/diesel powered generators. Renewables cheaply but opportunistically provide power from natural sources that may not always be available but that can augment the baseline. The share of renewable energy in the mix is something engineers should figure out, not “the market”.
Also, monetary cost shouldn’t be the only concern. Some renewables have a societal cost too, for example in the amount of land that they occupy per kWh generated, or visual polution. I wouldn’t want to live within the shadow flicker of a windmill for example.
Base load. Here’s an argument that we don’t need it: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/28/we-dont-need-base-load-power/
There’s an interesting point buried at the end of that article: electricity quality. With batteries in the loop, supply can scale with demand almost instantly, versus the time it takes for various types of power plant to adjust output.
I wonder if this has any impact on another piece of the puzzle, high voltage direct current (HVDC) which we need to transport electricity over large distances with minimal loss.
There’s an equally buried link to a death by powerpoint that made me pray for a blackout before i could get anywhere close to understanding how that bar graph was constructed.
I can’t vouch for the following being a necessarily better source, but this one seem a lot more upfront about some of their assumptions and sensitivities. In this adding storage to wind is seems to be +tens of dollars per MWh; a fair amount more than the +1-3 dollars per MWh shown in the cleantech article.
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
So i’d like to know where these cheap battery cost assumption comes from - is it proven tech, available at scale , at that price?
just seems a bit too good to be true.
Reading that… It basically seems to say that we can live with intermittent blackouts when wind and solar fail.
They don’t provide different things, they both provide electricity. Nuclear is only really suited to base load, whereas renewables can be spun up and down to match varying demand - however renewables are also more than capable of covering base load, because it’s all just electricity.
The only thing nuclear provides that renewables don’t is grid stability. Nuclear turbines have large rotating masses, when loads are switched on and off they keep spinning the same speed, helping to maintain voltage and frequency. Meanwhile renewables are almost all run via inverters, which use feedback loops to chase an ideal voltage and frequency, but that gives them an inherent latency when dealing with changes on the network. However, there are other ways of providing grid stability.
It’s not a windmill. It doesn’t mill anything. The technical term is Wind Turbine Generator (WTG), but usually they’re called wind turbines or just turbines. A group of turbines make up a wind farm.
Land occupied is not much of a concern when most renewables (and nuclear, for that matter) tend to be installed away from population centres. It feels like you’re grasping for reasons now.
Suffice it to say, I work in the electrical industry, and this isn’t the first report that’s come out saying renewables are cheaper, better value and quicker to build and get us to net zero when compared to nuclear. That isn’t to say nuclear isn’t important and shouldn’t be built, just that nuclear shouldn’t be a priority in pursuit of phasing out fossil fuels. At the end of the day, demand will only go up, so building a lot of renewables before building nuclear won’t exactly be going to waste. We’ll need all of it.
Renewables cannot be spun up. You have to massively over build to do that. And even then, you’re still depending on availability of sun and wind.
If you need more power than is available, it’s done with natural gas peaker plants at 10x the normal cost of electricity.
On the flip side, a stable base load of nuclear, can be spun up and down over the day to meet expected load.
That’s exactly the suggestion, over-build renewables right now to get to net zero, then fill out the generation portfolio with nuclear. The demand will only go up, so that excess renewables will eventually be used to capacity anyway. The study is laying out what the priority should be right now, when climate change has already got its foot well in the door.
Renewables can effectively be spun up or down as long as they have batteries. That way, they can usually be generating as much energy as possible regardless of demand.
In that case it’s the batteries being loaded and unloaded, not the renewables.
Storage can be connected to the grid anywhere and charged whenever power is cheap - from whatever sources are generating at that time. It is effectively an independent investment - assuming your on-grid / grid scale.
As far as i know the only major renewable electricity generation that is intrinsically linked to storage is reservoir based hydro with reverse pumping capability though even that increases costs and is a quite situation dependent if you want a lot of peaking power…
Nuclear fanboys could equally argue to add batteries so as to convert baseload into shape, or peaking.
is our battery tech even up to this?
Yes. There’s numerous live examples which have been in place for years (Horndale South Australia for example)
Yes. It costs less and requires less mining to use the most expensive and wasteful storage option. The only reason there aren’t more is a lack of sufficient investment in VRE required to make them useful.
Two’s a crowd: Nuclear and renewables don’t mix
Only the latter can deliver truly low carbon energy, says new study
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005112141.htm
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-00696-3
Adding 1GW that runs 80% of the time with months long outages to a grid that has 10GW of power available 95% of the time and 3GW 5% of the time doesn’t fix the issue and requires charging $4000/MWh rather than merely $200/MWh to pay back your boondoggle.
All the people chanting “baseload” understand this but pretend not to.