20% is more than enough to modulate side by side with renewables.
The French Grid does that all the time intraday.
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
The reason the French can get away with it is because they have to. If you have this much nuclear on your grid, you can't get around it, the reactors need to follow demand. The good news is that because they have so many reactors, they can have them take turns poisoning their fuel and still have enough time to slowly come back up again. So each night a different reactor ramps down and gets poisoned.
Also, French reactors can take the financial hit of decreasing output much better than American reactors. Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like that. They need to run at 100% all year, or lose billions.
They do it intra-day. You can currently follow that through their monitoring [^1]
> Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like tha
Nuclear reactors tends to be hugely profitable considering their lifetime (80y in USA) but requires an enormous CAPEX.
Like most infrastructure, any attempt to try to fund them entirely privately with investor seeking a 9% quick ROI is doomed to fail.
Hinkley Point is a very good example of that. It is estimated that the price per MWH would be more than halved if the project would have a funding by public bond instead of the current private investor deathtrap.
[^1]: https://energygraph.info/d/gr_6-QW4z/unit-availability?orgId...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/18/french-gove...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-14/france-an...
EDF as hugely profitable and brought back billions to its main stock holder (the French state) for multiple decades.
The recent debt crisis has mainly two causes:
- The state has used EDF to shield consumers against the 2022-2023 energy price increases. EDF has taken the losses directly for the state.
- The results of terrible energy policies the last decades (attempt to reduce nuclear at 50% and mainly the infamous ARENH).
What happened is pretty typical of when you have a state is directly managing a private actor: Incompetent politicians swiping their foots on the company to satisfy their own demagogy.
A lot of times connectivity impacts site selection of projects. A wind farm needs to have good wind, reasonable neighbors, and access to loads. There's articles about not being able to build more wind in northern england because there's not enough transmission infra to get the power where it needs to be.
However, battery is improving the capacity factor of renewables; especially solar by allowing two things:
- when there's too much of it, you can charge batteries with energy that would otherwise be curtailed/wasted. - when there's not enough solar, you can discharge batteries.
Both effects help dampen peaks and dips in renewable energy supply and demand. I.e. it helps flatten the curve similar to what you point out is the case with nuclear. The first effect is often over looked: we are actively curtailing renewable energy that we don't know what to do with. People talk about shortages but not about surpluses. And that's actually a lot of energy. It also leads to the fallacy in believing that having lots of EVs increases energy demand when actually it also allows for better utilization of surpluses. Which dampens the impact this has.
Grids are bottle-necked on a lack of cable capacity. We have overproduction of energy in one region and shortages in another. Northern and southern Germany are a good example where on a windy day in the north, the wind energy can't get to the industries in the south that need it. So, they fire up coal plants. The same is the case in the UK where getting wind energy from Scotland south is a problem.
Cables and batteries help improve utilization of renewables. The main thing that drives these things is cost. Nuclear is costly and very slow to deploy. Realistically, any nuclear we don't have right now, won't be there for at least a decade or two. And that's if we would be really diligent about getting to that right now, which of course we aren't.
In the time until then, we'll be deploying solar by the TW/year. Same with batteries. And wind is also growing rapidly. And of course laying some more cables is a lot less controversial than building new nuclear plants. There has been quite a bit of talk of upgrading existing cables with better ones to effectively double capacity. This is even less controversial since the permitting is a lot easier and faster. In short, we'll deploy orders of magnitude more of all this than nuclear, and a lot earlier too. So much that nuclear might turn out to be a rounding error.