I wouldn’t call it just useful. As far as I understand it’s the best realistic shot we’ve got.
To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much.
It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports can't cover the use, better to simply increase storage and production a bit more.
Edit: I should note that one proposal I’ve seen to mitigate some of this is to improve long distance transmission, since it’s never cloudy everywhere, and taken to an extreme, you could, for example, put lots of solar in the Sahara to power the UK, or even send power from the hemisphere in summer to the hemisphere in winter. But then, besides the huge capital costs for building out transmission infra, you run into energy independence issues/trust issues between governments. But maybe within large political blocs like the EU, Italy/Southern Spain could sell solar power to the more northern European countries, with less risk.
And of course a ton of short term storage.
And then you build a bunch of cheap, inefficient gas peaker plants for the two weeks a year where neither are enough.
At the moment it looks like that will be a lot cheaper than nuclear. But if nuclear gets cheaper, that’s also a great option!
In most other places, you can overbuild the PV panels. Which isn't too bad, since you do not have to overbuild inverters or grid connections.
In New England we pay upwards of 14 cents per kwh or higher. My understanding is that this would buy a substantial overbuilt, it's likely that energy prices upwards of 30 cents per kwh would be politically viable provided there were guardrails to keep heat/hot water cheap.
Pumped hydro storage was better, if you have the water resources and elevation change nearby. Lots of places don’t.
Specs: 300MWe, nominally $1B first-of-a-kind build cost and $675M next-of-a-kind build cost. Runtime between fuel changes is 18-24 months.
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On the battery side I was looking at the Tesla Megapack 2 XL, since our neighbouring province has a bit of capacity installed.
Specs: 979kW output per pack, 3.9MWh capacity. For 300MW output capacity we need 306 units => $425M. The total capacity from fully-charged to fully-discharged is 1193MWh. Total time from full-charge to full-discharge: 3.9h.
In the middle of winter we have 8h of daylight and 16h of night/twilight. To provide 300MW overnight on a calm day we need 4.02x the storage capacity (16h runtime/3.9h discharge). That gives us 1231 units for a total cost of $1.7B.
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Yes, the nuclear plant will be more expensive to run (trained staff, security, disposal, etc). On the other hand, the $1.7B cost doesn't include any of the devices that would actually be charging the battery packs either.
We do often get cloudy days and calm days here as well. Saturday, for example, we actually had pretty good wind performance but negligible solar performance: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812.... A week ago we had both dark and calm: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664.... These plots are summed across the entire grid in our province, so the commonly stated "well it's never calm everywhere" isn't really valid.
https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/8... talks about the Shin Kori 3 and 4 reactors (brought online in 2016 and 2019) costing $6.4B USD for the pair (after a 32% cost overrun), if I'm reading correctly. Those ones are 1416MW and 1418MW, or $2258/kW which is right in line with GE's estimate of a next-of-a-kind SMR build (spec sheet says $2250/kW)
So compared to EPR, we could spend another 10M per MW for production…. I saw a relatively conservative price of 2000$/kw AC at https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2023/utility-scale_pv
That’s 2M per MW. We can spend 10, an over capacity of 5x ! And that is not accounting for the price of money, it takes very long time to build a nuclear power plant, and you will have your PV plant in the year, probably a couple for mega pack due to demand.
To me, nuclear is not the future.
The magazines will be full at times, but when they are not, it should be possible to just pump the water back up again and thereby store excess wind and solar power.
I live in Sweden, and yeah, flooding large amounts of new land will be impossible by now.
The indigenous (Sami) people will say no and file lawsuits. And rightly so, they just didn't had that option 100 years ago.
But there is an abundance of existing magazines that can be used this way. They are full around November but after that they start to drain.
Because it’s nowhere near effective enough.
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I suggest watching a few videos by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder to educate themselves on this topic
I posted videos in reply to this comment:
> Why not solar, wind and storage?
So that people who ask such questions can do their own research and study things about nuclear power. Nobody said anything about economy.
Seems like a win win, people get cheaper energy all without force. Generally the market chooses the best product, which is why we replaced horses crapping all over our cities with cars. It wasn't legislation or some global consortium of governments that phased out the horse, it was a better product. What am I missing here?
Foolishly reductionistic model: at the instant that solar becomes defacto cheaper, if everyone immediately changed, you'd need at least [total world power consumption / solar panel production rate] years to change over.
2022 world electricity consumption was about 25000 TWH. That envelope-backs to about 2800 GW if the sun is always directly overhead everywhere and there are no transmission losses.
In 2022, we installed about 228GW of solar panels. Assuming constant production (HAH!) that says it should take more than a decade to replace the existing demand. Which will of course stand still for us.
Apply whatever multiplication factors you like about what percentage of the year a given real solar cell will generate power; about how quickly folks are convinced to change; about the construction of projects which were planned before this price threshold was passed; about the impact of using grid power to do transportation work which was previously done by pumping dead dinosaurs...
The confounding factors abound. But that's an ignorant sideline answer to why. :)
A simple but useful back-of-the-envelope estimate would be 25%. Half of the day, there's no sun, so you have 50%; the other half, it increases gradually until the middle of the day, then decreases gradually until the sun sets. Simplifying this to a linear increase and decrease, if you plot it into a graph you'd have a pair of isosceles right triangles, which cover half of the area, so you have another 50% over that first 50%, and the end result is 25%.
(IIRC, the real result for the single-axis trackers you'd find on grid-scale power plants is something like 30%, showing how good that simple back-of-the-envelope estimate is.)
It’s dominant already in newly added capacity. It just takes a while, mostly due to permission processes taking long.
And limited grid capacity, which is also held back by environmental review and nimbys - at least in the western world.
Still needed to some extent even in your optimistic scenario. Because growth is increasing so is demand. New sources of energy are not displacing old ones. Just covering new demand.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-countr...
So it's do-able, but we haven't quite reached the tipping point yet in China.
The thing is: I am confident that Solar will push out Coal, even in China.
China is building a lot of new factory capacity for PV modules. Factory capacity is proportional to the acceleration of PV power production: It's a second derivative. The more battery capacity gets added, the faster PV capacity will start growing. The more PV capacity grows, the more clean power will be produced, competing with coal.
Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industrial society.
What works is: Changing the source of the energy we consume. Solar is the cheapest source of energy now. Wind is good in some areas. Nuclear can be useful too.
The amazing thing is that solar is so cheap now, there is basically no way stopping it. We may still want to burn gas and oil in the off-hours, but it will be expensive and consumption will be much lower than today.