Comment by Krssst
8 hours ago
This means not running infra for half the day (and when the weather goes bad), halving the return on investment of anything relying only on solar. That's definitely a choice but not sure if people are ready for this. Of course storage solves this but storage sounds it is a bigger problem than "put solar everywhere you can".
What's important is the cost of the total electricity production apparatus, seasonal storage and transport included. (and environmental cost and availability, meaning fossil fuels should be avoided)
And, a similar argument could be made that "just a tiny bit of uranium can provide so much power, why are we not using it?" completely disregarding the infrastructure cost of nuclear. So this argument does not make much sense IMO.
(to be clear, I'm not saying we should not do anything, just that it's not as easy as it sounds)
We are getting to storage solutions already. But I think many of us think nuclear for base load and massively overbuilt solar and wind so that we can handle the full electrification of our system would be a net economic win as well as an environmental one.
Also, consider that we have a connected grid outside of Texas and that the weather is not usually bad everywhere.
The problem is that there isn’t any ”base load” when you’ve introduced renewables.
Take a look at the South Australian grid for a peek into the future. How would you introduce a nuclear baseload to this grid? Turn it off for days on end when renewables deliver?
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...