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A comment on Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift. Parent comment

Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by cauch on Thursday December 22, 2022 @09:54AM (#34093859)
Well, you cannot really export it if no one around needs it because they also are not in a peak. If they rely on importing electricity when in non-peak time, what do they do in peak time? By construction, the non-peak time is the worse time to export. Unless you export to a different part of the world, but then, the same argument works with renewable (said simply: if you can export at midnight to a country where it is 4pm, then you can use solar and import at midnight from a country where it is 4pm).

What do you mean by "bottling it"? Do you mean storage? Because that's exactly what I'm saying.

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Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by ramesh31 on Thursday December 22, 2022 @11:37AM (#34095229)
>What do you mean by "bottling it"?

Aluminum production, for one example.

Bauxite is so cheap and abundant that the cost of aluminum is almost entirely in the electricity required for smelting, which makes it effectively equivalent to energy exportation.

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Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by cauch on Thursday December 22, 2022 @12:08PM (#34095647)
Yes. It's basically demand response based on turning on and off factories.
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Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by nradov on Thursday December 22, 2022 @12:57PM (#34096259)
No one is going to invest in an aluminum plant unless they have some assurance of cheap electric power for many years. The capital expense and fixed operating costs for those plants are tremendous. It's not economical to start and stop production on a daily basis as power prices fluctuate. How would you even schedule the production workers? And you still have to pay things like property taxes and insurance whether the plant is producing or not.
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Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by m4rtink on Thursday December 22, 2022 @02:58PM (#34097820)
Also the local district heating company installed an electric 30 MW water heating boiler recently, which they can run on excess electric power and throttle down the regular combined cycle plant powered by natural gas.
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