While dams certainly store energy I wonder how many actually have flexibility to change their output by 80% of rated capacity or more on the same timescales that wind and solar output can vary.

I imagine there are a lot of environmental restrictions to keep the river flowing, avoid dewatering habitat for fish and otherwise impacting the ecosystem, and also supplying water to downstream users like farms and cities. Can’t stop the river completely!

As I understand it, some hydro plants have a second, smaller reservoir downhill from the dam. It absorbs water from surge production, and even allows the water to be pumped back uphill.

you can switch turbines on and off , leading water to a turbine or a bypass in minutes

You can, but I wonder do the operating conditions of the river actually allow it for a great number of plants? Or are they hemmed in by needing to always have a certain flow in the river plus/minus 10%.

Usually they require a certain flow, the flow will be the same whether it goes through a turbine or bypass ofc.

With a sufficiently high base load provided by renewables the short demand spikes can be served with plants with quicker reaction times like gas plants. With sufficiently high install base of wind and solar power the base can be high enough and the excess stored or things like aluminium plants retooled to use excess energy.

So poor countries must massively over-invest in renewables and when renewables are high they have absurdly to much energy they can't do anything with leading to negative prices.

And then the need to build storage to capture some of that energy and also peaker plants to cover that.

Given those countries are barley able to but up coal plants right now, and are massively lacking in the power infrastructure to wildly distribute wind/solar power that seems like an incredibly hard plan.

If you can just get 1 working nuclear reactor design (even if its an old PWR) to the point where you can build and run it. Over then next 10-30 years you can just build them as fast as you can next to every large city and provide reliable power.

> aluminium plants retooled to use excess energy.

The problem with that is that if you are an aluminium plant you want to run at high utility. You don't want to continuously! Not turn it on and off 3 times a day. Those kinds of installations are hard enough to run with reliable power.

Why focus on poor countries? Exactly for the reasons you mention I see only developed countries do this.

For the aluminium processing type plants issue, it appears steel plants and other heavy industry here in the Netherlands are investing in their own power/heat storage capabilities. Exactly so that they can operate on their own terms instead of the net having to develop a generic power storing solution.

Because no amount of changing the power mix in Europe will prevent climate change.

Indonesia is gigantic has a huge population and will have a massive amount energy needs. If not nuclear this will be coal. And those plants have 50 year lifetime at least.

The reality is that climate change will be decided in India, Indonesia and China more then anywhere else. If they can actually adopt nuclear and be a pro nuclear society they have the potential to have game changing impact.

Indonesia in particular has gigantic amount of people living at the cost. So an approach where you do centralized building and then ship the plants to the population makes a lot of sense. And Indonesia by itself is big enough that its actually worth building such a model. They will need 100s of GWs of reactors if they want to reach Western standards of power consumption.

> investing in their own power/heat storage capabilities

Yes and that costs a lot of money. Europe is also in a Europe wide power net with lots of nuclear, coal and renewables. Doing that in such a system is much more doable then in Indonesia.

Indonesia will, like everywhere else, end up relying on overwhelmingly cheaper renewables. Nukes will turn out to be a very expensive detour. We can only hope, for the sake of these put-upon people, that they abandon the nukes before they spend too much on them.

Storage and distribution of synthethic liquid fuels such as ammonia will probably be best adapted to Indonesian needs.

Well you should have told them because they are planning to build many more coal plants.

And even the basic infrastructure of the grid that is absolutely required for renewables to be even remotely practical doesn't exist.

Wasting gigantic amounts of energy to produce chemical fuel highly inefficiently with low utility plants, and then transporting them around to then burn them up again highly inefficiently is a terrible plan to power a country of 100s of millions of people.

They will regret building coal plants as the cost of renewables plummets past coal. Then, they will need to convert their coal plants to burn hydrogen or ammonia, or retire them in favor of better methods, after this expensive detour. But the builders of coal plants will have done fine.

"Waste" is a curious concept applied to something with zero marginal cost. If not used to synthesize fuel, the insolation would have been wasted. Instead, it synthesizes useful fuel, that also fuels the ship taking it where it is needed.

Indonesia will be able to build their own solar farms and synthesizers, and end up exporting their excess in the temperate countries' winter, provided they can escape the grip of the oligarchists.

Did you comment in the wrong thread? This has nothing to do with wind power, ThorCon uses a molten salt fission reactor.

My quote was directly from the article.