the article is speaking about average power, not peak power. how do you and the article present such different figures?
My friend, let me introduce you to the wonderful world of "not reading the article".
It's getting close to the point that wind+storage can compete with nuclear, and even gas, on price. With the way cost has been developing on renewables and energy storage sulitons it's more or less inevitable. You're also starting to see off-shore wind, even floating off-shore, come rapidly down in cost, and those have more stable generation and require less energy storage.
The problem of storage is also exaggerated by people who haven't looked at the big picture. We need to replace oil/gas in lots of areas where you need to store and transform energy anyway. Like cars. Think about it.. if you buy an EV you'll generally have enough storage there to power your house for 1-3 days. In a world where all cars are BEVs we'll be well within an order of magnititude of having the manufacturing capacity to have energy storage for all homes. You can even feed electricity from BEVs back into the grid, and I already have my BEV set to only charge in the hours where electricity is cheapest right now. We're also starting to see people use smart controllers to exploit the storage capacity in hot water tanks.
Green metal production will also be a huge source of flexible load. Somewhat related to that, there's even molten metal batteries that can provide extremely cheap grid storage.
> WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.
If you need to shout I'm just led to expect you don't have much meat behind your opinion. Anyway, the problem is just this: what we really need isn't baseload.
You can't solve the worlds energy crisis without lots and lots of renewables. Going all nuclear would be too expensive, too slow, and would probably generate enough heat to slow recovery after climate change. Thermal power plants in general have a whole range of issue that makes it a bad idea to go all-in on it.
Nuclear can certainly supplement with a bit of baseload capacity. But what we need is load following and peaker plants. We need a replacement to gas power plants. Because those are what works well when combining with renewables. And without lots of renewables we have zero hope of combatting climate change.
> And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.
At least copper and steel is easily recycled, with low carbon impact. Nuclear power plants use a lot of concrete and the sustainability of that is far more uncertain.
SSAB and LKAB has experimented with green steel since ~2017. [0]
[0] https://www.ssab.com/sv-se/ssab-koncern/hallbarhet/fossilfri...
Who knows maybe once renewable market penetration is nearly maxed out and if storage tech somehow hasn't caught up enough despite the great strides being made, the economics won't be so terrible for the GREENEST BASELOAD.
Who
Solar and wind power sources requires an absurd amount of metal (sometimes rare metals) to build the generators (solar panels, wind turbines, etc). This metal is extracted today with an enourmous consumption of fossil fuels, and it will be difficult to have a greener alternative for this extraction (anything running on batteries will require even MORE metal).
The prices per Mwh of renewable energy sources are heavily linked to the prices of fossil fuels, which are quite "low" compared to what will probably happen in the next decades. Moreover, most metals are getting harder and harder to extract (it's likely that we met the peak of copper extraction already), which means that we'll have to dig deeper and deeper to get metal.
I'm not saying we should not invest in renewables, but it will be probably be 10x to 50x more expensive to maintain a renewable parc of solar panels or wind turbines without relying on fossil fuels at all, which will cause the prices per mwh to explode.
Countries that try to go 100% renewable without a healthy dose of nuclear energy will probably end up either burning fossil fuels or buying raw materials from countries that does, at a very heavy price.
please look at this, I'm tired of having to remind people that nuclear is the best on ALL fronts except cost
it's very difficult to predict future technological developments, especially as to pricing, but getting nuclear power down to the price of pv would require dramatic reductions in the cost of heat engines; the nuclear island is only a part of the cost of a nuclear power plant, and the rest of the plant is by itself enough to make the plant economically uncompetitive
solar panels, as i understand it, contain minuscule quantities of metal; they're mostly silicon and glass, with much smaller amounts of boron, phosphorus, aluminum, copper, silver, and eva. but they are commonly mounted in aluminium frames, on the order of a gram of aluminum per peak watt or ten grams per average watt
refining aluminum or iron from ore does cost a significant amount of energy, but there's no real obstacle to doing it with renewable energy and no fossil fuels; aluminum smelting pots won't even notice, and in the case of steelmaking, the technical problems of reduction with hydrogen are interesting but don't pose a risk to the success of the enterprise. the energy payback time on current solar panels is a few months, which is to say they generate all the energy needed to reproduce themselves (metals and all) in that time
aluminum, silicon, and iron are among the most abundant elements in the earth's crust (#3, #2, and #4, respectively), so there's no real risk of having to dig for them. even copper averages 100 ppm. with silver there's a bit of a pinch, as about 10% of world silver production is going to solar panels; copper works as a substitute but significantly impairs efficiency
windmills use the same kind of electrical generator you'd use in a coal or nuclear plant, just at a lower duty cycle, so at worst they have a small disadvantage relative to fossil fuels in terms of metal use. the counterbalancing advantage is that they don't need steam plumbing or a parsons turbine; windmill blades are fiberglass, not metal
(sometimes generators do use rare elements, but that's just a matter of what's cheaper at the moment)
that's why renewable energy from pv and wind is already much cheaper than fossil energy and continuing to get cheaper
if your conclusion were correct, then despite your posited subsidy from cheap fossil fuels, pv and wind energy would already be more expensive than fossil-fuel energy, as it was until about 02014, because their energy payback time would have to be decades. you're two orders of magnitude outdated
It's trivial to fund renewables with a chinese, coal-powered industry, so it will look cheap, but it's putting coal under the rug.
It is interesting to see the responses to Nuclear of 'too much up front/takes too long' while simultaneously patiently waiting out solar/wind 'it's getting there.'
Interesting they also included biomass here as it is certainly not a carbon friendly process nor renewable.
Too much 'we've picked our winners and won't hear a negative word' in this space now, and it's getting worse.
That's not including the ongoing gearbox maintenance requirements.
In high school, my Chem II class had an assignment where pairs of kids had to present on why nuclear was good or bad. Of 16 or so kids, only my friend and I presented on why nuclear energy was good. Even the chemistry teacher was against nuclear energy.
Edit: This was in rural USA.
Coal and nuclear plants have poor abilities to ramp power production up and down in response to fluctuating demand, so they were called 'baseload'. Various versions of natural gas power plants could respond more rapidly, so they were typically placed in the other other two categories.
This is all irrelevant if you have distributed wind/solar production coupled to efficient storage systems that manage the distribution using technology that doesn't have those limitations. Practically that means short term storage of power in batteries (daily), long-term storage in synthetic fuels (seasonal).
Since you're obviously some time traveler, would you mind sharing winning lottery numbers with us?
Renewables generates 5 times less than coal annually and still peak for a short period of time, so this is not a big progress. Wind turbines can have big energy peaks when it's very windy, but there is no cheap way to store that energy for a long period of time, WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.
And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.