Anyway, don't know where I was going with this but those are my two cents.
the heavy investment that goes into those plants incentives operators to drive (and staff) them 24/7, but there are hidden social costs (negative externalities) of having so many people out of diurnal rhythm. maybe massive solar power buildout, with sharply cheaper daytime electricity, would relieve people from working “graveyard shifts” – and maybe that’d be a good thing
That said, the companies aren't going to just stop, they'll just charge higher prices. To stop producing in the third shift, they'll need to:
- add more daytime production lines, which means buying more floor space, possibly in a different location with new logistics to work out
- new capex for the new lines
- higher overhead because your newly expanded production lines are idle 30% of the time
- higher overhead from daily startup and shutdown times
Even places like hospitals don't exactly get to choose to just turn off all the life support and lights at night.
I thought the opposite was proven. E.g. When Germany produced a lot of variable output electricity they varied aluminum smelting rates accordingly. That was highly effective and not generally expected.
There's tons of low hanging fruit like that but if you listen to carbon or nuclear lobby propaganda theyre insistent that the only thing that can solve the problem is more lithium than exists in the entire world.
We always need electricity available, but the demand is not constant and there are quite a few discretionary loads which can be run preferentially in the day time. We can expand our electrical capacity with clean solar energy in the day time, reducing the total need for existing polluting sources. Even if industrial factories run off of natural gas at night, a large installed base of solar will allow discretionary loads (home appliances, EV charging, etc) to run off of zero emissions solar when available. And even the industrial plants can utilize solar during the daytime, cutting their CO2 emissions related to energy use in half.
In the age of renewables, things have changed. If you have enough renewables to cover large parts of the electricity demand on average, then you will frequently produce 100% more of the maximum grid demand. In this situation, "base load" power plants don't make any sense at all. The new term is "residual load". This refers to the load at a point of time which cannot be delivered by renewables at that time. This can also vary between 0 and 100%. Which obviously requires different power plants, like gas, water.
If you had a predominantly renewable grid, this would generally be 80-100%, because low generation could coincide with peak load. Which is extremely bad, because then you have to duplicate that proportion of generation capacity via some alternative even though it's only rarely needed. Or worse, it's needed a lot but it's fossil fuels.
Meanwhile you want some degree of energy storage, because if you have times when renewable generation is more than 100% of the load, you want to be able to use that power later and not just throw it away.
But then you're back to base load sources making sense. They reduce the amount of storage or peaker plants you need at night and the amount of renewable generation you need during the day.
They just don't make sense as more of the grid than there is "base load" for the same reason as always. Otherwise you'd have times where there is surplus "base load" generation and have to put that into energy storage, when it'd have been cheaper for that part of generation capacity to be renewables.
Even China regularly spends 7+ years to build nuclear from the point where construction actually starts and even longer when you include planning.
What if they don’t? There’s no assurances there will be magic battery tech
There is a reason China India Russia and others are still building nuclear plants
China is building nuclear because they are building everything, but they are effectively building 3x as much solar and 7x as much wind because nuclear just costs more than any other option.
From 2020-2022 China increased generation power by:
51,600 GWh/year Nuclear
156,600 GWh/year Solar
357,500 GWh/year Wind
Adding more capacity is an all hands on deck situation for the China they are throwing everything at it. Nuclear is simply achieving the smallest gains because the ROI is low.
On the surface, that sounds logic. In reality so, that is exactly what happens: as short notice reaction by big consumers (reducing or increasing consumption as needed), planning in accordance with electricity exchanges... And that behaviour is actually pretty profitable, it contributes to grid stability, enables more flexibility on the consumption side and is technically possible in a surprising number of high consumption industries (paper, chemicals, graphite, steel...).
So then what. You could overbuild solar, build distribution, build battery banks. I'm not wild about that. Mining for batteries is nasty business and we need all of the Lion we can get for electric mobility. Distribution? It's alright, but you run into problems -- like, what do you do when the sun goes down on the west coast? What do you do when a line goes down? Your system is larger, more centralized, more vulnerable.
Nuclear under the current regulatory regime is clearly a nonstarter. But the capex of nuclear is almost entirely artificial. Something much closer to "too cheap to meter" could be a reality. All it takes is a cultural willingness.
By the way, nuclear having an extraordinary capex makes it even tougher to compete with solar in the mix. Because your capacity factor goes way down if you are only generating at night. This is why we build oil and gas plants -- they're cheap. What we need is for nuclear to favorably compete with oil and gas. It does not need to compete with solar.
Even though I don't like natural gas for energy generation, let's say an area is currently being served by a natural gas plant. But now everyone wants electric cars and more power is needed. You can deploy a whole boatload of solar and use rate structuring to incentivize consumption in the day time (you charge your car at work). Now the gas plant spins up at night but it is only running half the time, and all day long people are using emission-free solar energy. And they aren't burning gasoline for their cars anymore. Plus if there is a power outage they can use their car as a home battery backup.
So yeah, I don't think it really makes any sense to say "we have 78 seconds of battery backup so solar is pointless". You can make a HUGE dent in people's energy-related carbon emissions if you install solar tomorrow. Or you can pay much more and install nuclear in 15 years. Maybe we should start building out nuclear now but it would absolutely not be to the exclusion of solar! Even if we built 1000 new nuclear power plants in the US we would still need lots of solar and wind energy.