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Re:Rolls-Royce Touts Nuclear Reactors as Key to Clean Jet Fuel by wffurr on Friday December 06, 2019 @09:32PM (#21728066)
Even so, seems like pricing would work out better with the reactors attached to the grid. Lock in a rate for providing baseline power, and then bid for renewable energy to power the facility when spot prices are low enough at times of peak production, and ramp up synthetic fuel production at the same time.

You can keep using process heat from the reactor since it's already operating anyway, but get much cheaper electricity (sometimes even negative prices!) from peak renewable generation and turn that into synthetic fuels for storage.

Re:Rolls-Royce Touts Nuclear Reactors as Key to Clean Jet Fuel by greggyb on Friday December 06, 2019 @11:12PM (#21728421)
The challenge with many environmentally-powered renewables is specifically that they can't be used for spot production.

Nuclear tends to share this. Most nuclear reactor technology is not optimized for rapid swings in production. A reactor is a very expensive thing to not run most of the time.

The two technologies aren't terribly compatible. The first tend to be intermittent (not great for on demand needs) and the second are best suited for base load.

What you need is something that is relatively cheap to maintain, and can be ramped up quickly. This is where you typically see natural gas peakers in a fossil-fuel based system.

Wikipedia summarizes these well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load

For peaking demand you need something that can store energy and can adjust to load rapidly. Batteries do this (I include mechanical solutions as batteries, e.g. a flywheel or pumped hydroelectric). Natural gas plants tend to fill this role now. These are not the only options, just common examples.

Re:Rolls-Royce Touts Nuclear Reactors as Key to Clean Jet Fuel by craftinator on Saturday December 07, 2019 @12:43AM (#21728722)
Could the excess energy be fed into the local grid during non productive times, help balance out the cost of keeping it running?
Re:Rolls-Royce Touts Nuclear Reactors as Key to Clean Jet Fuel by greggyb on Saturday December 07, 2019 @12:41PM (#21731480)
In short, yes, but there are limits. A really (really) rough analogy would be filling a tank of water. If you fill it faster than it can drain, eventually it will overflow. If it is sealed, it may burst. The grid equivalents of an overflowing or bursting tank are not great scenarios.

And with intermittent energy sources, there are additional problems. We only get energy sometimes. We want energy always. It basically inverts the idea of base load and peak load sources. If your source is intermittent, then you do want to be able to over-produce at certain times, with an ability to capture the energy. Think batteries, but know that they need not be chemical batteries. Energy storage can then cover the valleys of production or the peaks of demand.

Add coordination to the challenges as well. Much (most?) solar is distributed. It's much easier to ramp generation up or down in a few centralized plants. If every home has a solar panel array, then you need to be able (either at the local or the grid level) be able to store excess energy or turn off production.

None of this is insurmountable, but there are many challenges that are non-trivial by nature and some that are difficult d/t the way energy grids are typically set up.

Re:Rolls-Royce Touts Nuclear Reactors as Key to Clean Jet Fuel by eloff on Friday December 06, 2019 @09:39PM (#21728096)
In an efficient market that's probably the way to go. But it depends partly if your production process can scale up and down easily, which is rarely true in general. It could be designed like that though.
Re:Rolls-Royce Touts Nuclear Reactors as Key to Clean Jet Fuel by hokkos on Saturday December 07, 2019 @03:24AM (#21729148)
And now your coslty electrolyser only run a few sunny or windy hours a day?