Nuclear arsenals.
It's the only reason I can think of for paying inflation linked £92.50 per MwH for 35 years for Hinkley point c when the UK can build wind or solar for £35-40 now and probably less in future years.
The economics are insane.
And in the mid 2000s, nuclear seemed to be a much better idea. Solar and wind were more expensive, not far less expensive, than estimated nuclear costs. It seemed like nuclear was going to be an absolutely essential part of a carbon neutral or negative society.
Fifteen years later, we have had an energy technology revolution, and we are still in the middle of it. Personally, I don't see a future for nuclear, and for that matter I see only niche applications for thermally generated electricity. Other technology will undercut the steam turbine driven electricity that has been the basis of grids for a century. We might have some chemical storage in hydrogen, methanol, methane, or longer carbon chains that comes from atmospherically extracted CO2 for use in extreme scenarios, but it also seems likely that long-duration battery storage (e.g. vanadium flow batteries) will get cheap enough to replace even that.
Really? Intermittency seems like a very good reason.
It's not like nuclear is dispatchable either, whereas wind turbines can be.
Really? Is that battery storage? Hydroelectricity?
I haven't seen a storage plan, let alone a cheap one, that hasn't assumed some future technology like hydrogen, synthetic gas, or molten salt will essentially be a cheat code to provide nearly-free storage.
For a long time the carbon lobby pretended that lithium ion batteries were the only thing that could be used to manage renewable intermittency. This was precisely because they wanted to charactize it being technology that was impossibly far fetched. In reality it's the most expensive of many options and the best last resort but as a result most people think it's just "the solution".
The price of even those has plummeted though and even they are being rolled out (e.g. in Hawaii, next to solar farms). That's still a lot cheaper than hinkley point C.
However, if you're Germany and you've got a calm and overcast day the most cost effective approach is to tell heavy non time sensitive industrial users like aluminum smelters to ramp down production today and ramp it up extra high tomorrow when it's very sunny and windy. The cost of doing this is comparatively very low for many users like smelters and we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this space.
So, investing in capacity on the presumption that dealing with the intermittency costs of solar and wind will be an enormous 160% of production costs is flat out insane without subsidies.
Hence why it's fairly clear that the UK wanted hinkley point c for other reasons - i.e. to keep nuclear capacity and know how local so that the nuclear arsenal can be maintained.
> There's a few papers on managing the mix of this but theyre not widely read or reported on.
Again, great of you to cite these papers.
> For a long time the carbon lobby pretended that lithium ion batteries were the only thing that could be used to manage renewable intermittency. This was precisely because they wanted to charactize it being technology that was impossibly far fetched. In reality it's the most expensive of many options and the best last resort but as a result most people think it's just "the solution".
Okay then: if not lithium ion batteries, what is the storage solution? Pumped hydro is geographically limited. That leaves approaches still in testing, like thermal storage or hydrogen storage.
> However, if you're Germany and you've got a calm and overcast day the most cost effective approach is to tell heavy non time sensitive industrial users like aluminum smelters to ramp down production today and ramp it up extra high tomorrow when it's very sunny and windy. The cost of doing this is comparatively very low for many users like smelters and we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this space.
So we have to tell people not to use energy. Because we have no effective way of addressing intermittency.
You're assuming that industries can just "ramp up extra high" when there's excess energy. Not all industries work like that. If a factory uses 100 MW at peak capacity it can't just produce 3x as much product if you feed it 300 MW. The reality is that few industries can be flexible like this.
What about things like street lights? Or sewage and water distribution? Hospitals, data centers, and essential services? There's plenty of things that cannot shift load like this.
Also, the 1,000 year figure for fissile fuel does not consider reprocessing which reclaims over 80% of fuel used.
A lot has changed since then - the costs he specifies, for instance, might as well be from the previous century.
Energy use has also decreased.
So its real. but, its not perfect. All systems have losses. The losses in PHES are not necessarily a huge problem.
This is why retrofitted dams generally increase the maximum power production rate even if the average remains the same time shifted power is extremely valuable.
Anyway, reducing power output regularly is straightforward in the moment but requires reactors to sit idle for ~90% of what it costs to run at full power. That extra capacity is therefore what’s expensive. France got around that by exporting a lot of nuclear power rather than see rates spike due to that excess capacity.
Essentially you can pay between X$/kwh for nuclear on a grid with storage or peaking power plants or 2.5X$/kWh for near 100% nuclear without storage or peaking power plans. The second one is what’s completely uneconomic and gives rise to the term base load power as it’s poorly suited to cover peak demand.
Also, Ontario’s production is weighted towards nuclear, but it’s second by second usage is significantly less so. They export a lot of nuclear power and import non nuclear power. That arrangement only works because nuclear is less common in other areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
Also, hydro complements Nuclear extremely well as it can shift production across time, thus maximizing each nuclear power plant’s capacity factor. However, wind fills the same niche more cheaply even with significant excess capacity. This shows up as a grid where the wholesale price frequently sits around zero, which makes nuclear even less economically viable.
I personally expect nuclear to stick around for various reasons like bulk radioactive isotope production, but ramping up to become a significantly larger chunk of global electricity production would take dramatically lower unsubsidized prices.