Comment by marcosdumay
13 hours ago
> It will take longer
Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
Nuclear is baseload which is why it always runs. Gas peakers is what you turn on and off.
All around Europe nuclear plants are forced off the markets because the electricity prices are for weeks lower than their wear and tear and fuel costs.
Why should someone with rooftop solar and a battery buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity from the grid when they can make their own?
”Baseload” is a title earned by having the lowest marginal costs. There is nothing fundamental about it.
Today renewables have the cheapest marginal cost at 0. They are the new ”baseload”.
This is not true. I assume you are talking about the french nuclear reactors and their abysmal capacity factors?
The reason for the french case is that they were required to reduce output to allow more space for other new energy generation types. Fortunately the French have realised the error of their ways.
1 reply →
> economically
When we're talking about societal public investment - even investment in the private sector - capital cost is a much more constrained consideration than anything related to abstract market "competitiveness". The latter does not influence the former in real terms (only in argumentative policy terms, which are unfortunately more impactful than they should be).
> Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Longer than nuclear to do what? I was replying to the above commenter who said the following:
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables
TTL for individual nuclear is obviously always much longer than for renewables but time to any arbitrary large generation goal is almost certainly shorter for nuclear (barring taboo).
> time to any arbitrary large generation goal
China is proving this to be objective false. Their total energy production (not nameplate power) for wind/solar/hydro is growing substantially faster than their nuclear output.