The reason is peak demand. If your demand is say 5GW and hydro can provide max 3GW, unless you overbuild ren, it's 'easier' to have some more firm power while ren will act as water savers for hydro (especially considering droughts).

For now they have sufficient power, but considering nuclear timelines, you better start now

Enhanced geothermal could play a role here, but for now it's debatable.

They have lots potential for wind (~20%) and hydro. Peak demand is increasing, but lasts for very specific amounts of time during a day, it doesn’t justify the increases in base load. These peaks could be certainly fulfilled by smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification before new building new power plants. Yet, many of these will be needed despite nuclear, but since nuclear is the elephant in the room, they are going with it first, while stalling everything else. They are even trying to convince Germany to do the same.

"smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification" - electrification increases the demand, maybe you meant efficiency?

Demand response is basically - please don't use power because we don't have enough or because it's expensive. That's not an appealing option.

Smart grid management is good but it'll take years to reach good condition - you need to expand/upgrade transmission and distribution systems with proper equipment.

Germany has it's own path that's more or less stable for a long time- coal+gas firming, tons of ren and major transmission expenses, to the point govt will start subsidizing them

No-one ever characterises cheap rate electricity at night that is common with nuclear as "please don't use power during the day because we don't have enough".

It's a strange double standard. As is the building of expensive pumped hydro storage for use with nuclear.

(I) Electrification displaces energy demand. Efficiency controls growth of demand. Various limits have been reached with efficiency. (II) Demand response is not about “do not use power because we don’t have enough.”, it is about “here is some money so you shift demand to a later point in time when saturation is lower.” (III) It doesn’t take years to find better ways to manage the grid as is. Do you think there won’t be a need to upgrade large portions of the grid to handle new nuclear plants?

THE UK gets 30% of its electricity from wind and another 5% from solar; Denmark gets 70% from renewables, mostly wind. Iowa gets 65% of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind; California, whose economy is larger than that of most countries, gets 38%, mainly from solar.

But some lobbyists are trying to kill momentum, especially those who see nuclear as a silver bullet. It is not.

Electrification doesn't displace demand. It adds more demand.

what you described with demand response is equivalent of rationing- use power when weather is good because otherwise you'll not afford it

Don't confuse transmission needed for 1GW of nuclear vs 10GW of solar with 10% cf and more redispatching requirements

> Electrification doesn't displace demand. It adds more demand.

Take cars, for instance. When someone buys an EV rather than ICE, do you think the EV consumes the same amount of energy than the ICE car?

> what you described with demand response is equivalent of rationing- use power when weather is good because otherwise you'll not afford it

Sure, what do you think that needs to be done when there is a limited resource such as electricity? Yes, produce more, but until then, what should the grid do?

> Don't confuse transmission needed for 1GW of nuclear vs 10GW of solar with 10% cf and more redispatching requirements

It is two different models, one is centralized (nuclear) and the other is distributed (solar). The planning is essentially different.

Ice didn't use electricity. It used energy from fossil fuels. Are you comfusing things? Electrification does add electric demand. It reduces total energy consumption due to efficiency but electric demand still grows

Yes, you need vastly more transmission for a distributed ren grid. Both for deployment and for avoiding curtailment

It is very hard to argue when you think electricity != energy, and you cannot even see that EV displaces the use of fossil fuels (I.e., a type of primary energy), even when you yourself wrote that it consumes less energy lol

Solar panels in rooftops can decrease the saturation of the grid, so more transmission is not necessarily needed.

Politically Sweden the current government is wanting to expand nuclear power through the largest subsidy program in Swedish history.

The company supposed to build them held a tender for first SMR, then pivoted to large scale reactors and shortlisted three options. Then that tender disappeared and now they have shortlisted 2 SMR options.

What is happening is a no one wanting to admit the absolutely ludicrous costs and hope the question will fizzle out.

Which as we all know are paper products which rely on ”scale” to achieve anything. No one seems to talk about who will buy the couple hundred SMR prototypes to achieve said scale.

I'm not sure about largest subsidy program. Large reactors make more sense but since Korea was banned by US, realistically it's better to pick Hitachi to get something on the grid

Nothing even comes close. We’re talking tens of billions of euros.

”Get something on the grid” when the mangled number put out in PR communication is 2035.

So realistically early to mid 2040s. Why not just build renewables and storage and have ”something on the grid” counted in months and years instead of decades?

Sweden did spent similar amounts for ren subsidies over years, that's why I'm not sure it's the biggest. If the goal is 1.5gw nuclear, that would be about 20bn for bwrx if fully funded by govt, looking at Canada. 20bn is a lot, but on the other hand Sweden for sure did spent similar amounts for ren over years.

renewables cover different aspect of demand. What you do if you don't have enough firming power? Hope neighbors will have spare power? That's why you start planning nuclear now, or you'll start planning gas later, just like Germany

Please stop guessing and making stuff up?

Anti subsidy reports in 2019 [1] landed on a what was seen as a worryingly large €10B for the entire Swedish market based subsidy system over the period from 2003 to 2045. 2018 the actual costs landed on €300m.

In 2021 the price of the system went to zero and was subsequently phased out for new producers. You know; market based subsidies.

In other words, much less than €10B will ever be spent on it.

Please stop making stuff up because you can’t bring yourself to accept how horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power is.

Are suggesting that we should build peaking nuclear power plants to solve firming? Because that is Sweden’s problem. Managing a January cold spell coupled with low wind is what is used to calculate the resiliency.

What capsize factor should we calculate? 20%? That is way higher than a January cold spell but let’s go for it.

Running Vogtle at a 20% capacity factor leads to 80 cents per kWh electricity.

What you are suggesting is completely batshit insane when actually putting a number on it.

Who cares if the final bit of firming is fossil based with possibility to be decarbonized through synfuels, biofuels or hydrogen when we still have large portions of the economy to deal with?

Don’t let imaginary perfect be the enemy of good enough.

[1]: https://timbro.se/miljo/ny-rapport-subventioner-till-fornyba...

I'm suggesting phasing out fossils including gas firming.

Hydrogen firming is extremely expensive per Lazard, it's strange you are bringing it up while complaining about nuclear. Needless to say their numbers are for US. For europe it'll be more similar to Germany https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/shipping-green-hydrogen... https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/eu-report-says-making-g...

Nuclear can achieve this and you can reform capacity market to guarantee 60%cf if you need, because you know, you still need firming power and maybe you want to avoid too high transmission expansion and grid forming inverters.

If ren strategy alone can't achieve this due to gas firming, then you deploy less ren. Sweden can expand ren as long as hydro can firm it. Past that, you don't have other realistic option than nuclear if you want to phase out fossils entirely

It seems like you are looking at this from a binary stance.

Willing to waste 10x as much resources and money because 99% is not 100% even though we still need to decarbonize shipping, aviation, agriculture and industry. Laser focused on one sector ignoring all else.

That sounds like a juvenile position coming from an ideologist rather than someone vying for the quickest possible decarbonization of our entire society.

I’m not sure why you latched on to hydrogen? Maybe because that is the one you could hope to ”debunk”?

We of course also have biofuels, the ethanol blend in for US gasoline is enough to run the entire grid without help for 16 days.

Just repurpose that, while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize, as we switch our transportation fleet to BEVs.

This does not have to be solved today, it is a problem for the 2030s so let’s not jump ahead of ourselves when Poland still runs 70% on fossil fuels.

What you are saying is that we should force the market to build nuclear power despite the insane cost through subsidies. Vogtle running at 60% is still a completely insane 30 cents per kWh excluding transmission costs.

Please do explain what is scary with grid forming inverters? In the latest Chinese auctions the lots with grid forming inverters added ~$20/kWh to the storage price.

And then you circle back to the completely binary world. You do know that Sweden has a huge oil power plant running a few hours per year in a capacity reserve? It just never gets called in due to not being needed.

With your logic nothing is worth doing until that power plant is entirely phased out even though it runs for a fraction of a percent per year?