On the nuclear side I was looking at a GE BWRX-300 (SMR) because my province is currently looking at building a few of them.
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.
That’s interesting.
The quotes for the nuclear power plant are really low though.
France, which has a lot of knowledge and trained workforce for nuclear, is slowly building a reactor of 1.2gwe for like 20B euros.
If you use those numbers… it looks very different.
And that’s at least not idealistic price since it’s they are completing the construction.
Yeah, I'm really curious to see how the SMR thing shakes out over time. It does make sense to me that the costs between large bespoke reactors and smaller modular reactors would not necessarily be a linear scaling by MWe. Another factor that affects the price significantly is whether or not the reactor is being built at an existing site that is already licensed or whether it's a scratch-build at a new site.
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)
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.
I’m assuming you’re looking at the Flamanville Unit 3? Reading through the history of that build is pretty bad for sure. I’m maybe jaded enough now to expect construction projects to go over budget by maybe 20-30% but lol 580% over budget is not normal at all.
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.
--
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.
--
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.