> These are business decisions unique to Ontario and reflect the current realities of the market.

This doesn't seem to support your general argument.

Do you have any evidence that renewables are generally cheaper than nuclear when accounting for storage?

No, I’m not an analyst who crunches those numbers. But it’s worth highlighting that Ontario didn’t find it worth building more reactors, even with all of the necessary infrastructure in place and plenty of public support for the nuclear industry. And in the 10 years since then, renewables have only gotten cheaper.

How about asking what conditions would be needed in a different country to make new reactors much more feasible than in Ontario?

> Solar and wind became cheaper than competing new-build power plants years ago. What the latest report shows is that they have actually gotten so cheap that they are now competing with existing coal and nuclear power plants. In other words, new wind and solar farms can be cheaper than continuing to get power from existing coal and nuclear power plants. [1] [2]

> The storage report also shows a rapid drop in the costs of batteries, which leads to wind + storage or solar + storage getting increasingly competitive (and putting natural gas peaker plants out of business). [1] [2]

8 minute energy's blended solar and storage costs are roughly $40/MWh, just above existing nuclear generation per MWh costs (that doesn't fully internalize waste disposal costs and other ancillary costs of that power). “The vast majority of our development pipeline are solar-plus-storage projects, with more than 24GWh of energy storage under development,” 8minute Solar Energy’s Sean Kiernan said. [3] Portugal just signed a deal for a 700MW project at 1.3 cents/kwh, a historic low (mentioned to demonstrate the cost decline continues, and can be expected to continue into the future). [4]

If you're looking for storage that discharges for days, that is not necessary with robust transmission infrastructure (which needs to be built anyway due to aging infra in the US) and overbuilding of cheap (and rapidly cheaper) renewables [5].

[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/renewables-continue-to-get-...

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/11/22/solar-costs-wind-costs-...

[3] https://www.energy-storage.news/news/developer-8minute-says-...

[4] https://www.pv-tech.org/news/52925

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580707 (Hacker News: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills)

I've said this before but there is no evidence that battery storage can scale to anything like the required storage. Tesla's battery in Australia stores roughly what the UK receives from French nuclear over production in a few minutes.

"no evidence that battery storage can scale"

Obviously laws of physics do not bar it from scaling, the question is around cost.

Are we short some raw material or why do you mean it couldn't work?

"As of 2016, global lithium-ion battery production capacity was 28 gigawatt-hours, with 16.4 GWh in China."

UK current electricity demand is 30GW. So the demand for one hour is similar to the entire lithium battery production for a whole year.

How many hours worth of storage would we need to balance the energy grid using only battery storage? Off grid homes usually aim for around 3-7 days worth. Obviously that's excessive for a whole country where weather conditions vary across the country but I'd think several house would be required to account for peak in demand at times of low production.

Realistically distributed storage and load side control I think are more likely to be a bigger part of making it work.

That's a fairly old statistic to pick, not sure if it was intentional or not, but the reality is lithium battery production has grown significantly since 2016 and shows no signs of stopping. The largest manufacturer in China, CATL is estimated to grow its capacity beyond 307GWh by 2028 [2].

"In 2019, LG Chem had the most lithium battery production capacity at over 50 GWh. LG Chem [is] increasing EV battery production capacity to as much as 110GWh by the end of 2020."

The design of a modern grid with battery storage would change as well - no reason to have singular giant storage plants. A mixture of solar, wind, and hydroelectric with distributed storage doesn't need to self-sustain 30GWh of storage, it needs to be able to smooth distribution and handle peaks. It'd be far more honest to look at seasonal average loads versus peaks, plus a buffer.

[1] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103401/predicted-lithiu...

The UK has very little hydroelectric power and the undeveloped hydro resources are in remote areas of outstanding natural beauty (which is a shame because it's by far the best option for base load renewables).

The UKs current installed pumped hydro resources amount to some 28GWh. Clearly we need a multiple of that if that is currently required to balance a grid consisting of largely dispatchable power. Given that, I don't think my estimate of needing several hours worth storage is too far out.

That was the first statistic I found. Even if we say current production is 200GWh of lithium battery storage, that isn't going to go very far if the rest of the world also need to create similar storage infrastructure.

It would work just like running your house on a car battery, for about five minutes. My dad has 24 industrial lead acid 2V 450Ah cells which amount to 1m³ and 4.5kWh of usable storage since if you drain more than 20% you will kill the batteries too early. The 1140Wp PV array charges about 6kWh on a sunny summer day. We use about 5kWh daily in our apartment - that's no AC or electrical heating, just the basic appliances and a gas heater. He probably uses two to three times that amount, again no AC or electrical heating. Also lead acid batteries are rated for like 10y, PV retains 80% of its capacity for 25y, so you need to change 2.5 batteries during its lifetime. Batteries alone amount close to 50% of the TCO.

So good luck running the grid on batteries for more than 15 minutes. We'd probably need to cover Alaska with lithium batteries.

At least 40% base load is what is needed and one only gets that from nuclear and geothermal if we discard fossil fuels. Maybe solar thermal with molten salt storage too, dunno.

Lead Acid is pretty old tech. My car (Tesla Model 3) has a roughly 75kWh lithium-ion battery. Even with AC and/or a heat pump, that battery could run a rather large home for more than a day on it’s own. Their powerwall home battery is a roughly 17kWh battery that is stackable to build any size system you want.

Point of use energy generation and storage is a much bigger deal than I think people realize. I believe internally Tesla thinks this is many times it’s car business.