Comment by red75prime
17 hours ago
Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.
17 hours ago
Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.
Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...
The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.
> Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
Those arguments typically assume Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage, which is a completely clown argument.
I've yet to see any serious engineer make the argument that Li-ion batteries will be used for seasonal storage. I've more often seen it used as a straw man argument against renewables.
I've seen "just slap a battery onto a steel mill to make it work with solar." So what? People on every side are saying dumb things. The required restructuring of the grid makes wind + storage + peaker plants + solar not so dominant as you picture it. Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.
One can account for those with more detailed optimization/simulation, and if you do so you find nuclear still doesn't compete.
I've seen calculations for Denmark that has a great offshore wind power potential[1]. They indeed don't need nuclear. The lowest cost mix is offshore wind power (66%), combined cycle gas turbines (26%), and solar PV (8%). The costlier carbon-neutral option is offshore wind power (84%), solar PV (13%), and biomethane CCGT (3%).
Solar photovoltaic is so low thanks to its intermittency. The more solar you have as a percentage of the total production the more costly it gets. At the limit of 100% solar its SLCOE is about 4 times higher than nuclear (Fig. 3).
So, the availability and the quality (offshore wind is less variable, causes less backlash and so on) of wind power resources play a big role.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...