Nuclear power does not complement renewables at all. Why should someone buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity when renewables or stored renewables are available?
Which means we have to factor in the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh.
That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
The duck curve talking point is years out of date due to storage buildout in California.
Yeah but not all places are California (constant sunshine) and even there the battery storage solutions so far are what, not even 20% of demand or something ?
Energy policy is very much locale dependent. The solutions that work for California do not work for most other places. In Germany we have periods where there are two weeks with no sunlight. Sucks, I know.
Of which about all storage has been built in the last 2 years.
Grids tend to operate on the timescale of decades. Do you realize what a complete disruption of the grid storage is now?
Storage does now work as long as you can cycle it every couple of days.
Then we of course also have the backup of open cycle gas turbines. Low CAPEX and high OPEX. A good solution for backups.
Force them to run on decarbonized fuels like ammonia, hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels (with decarbonized inputs) when even the backup needs to be decarbonized.
You know, the exact same thing we use today to manage the yearly peak.
"just wait for the magic solution of the now+10 years" is what Germany has been doing for 70 years while France invested in nuclear.
They're paying their electricity about 2x more than France while producing almost 10x the co2. Of course now that everyone fucked up for the best part of a century nuclear seems like a bad option... Nuclear didn't have to be expensive
The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power. Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
Daily reminder that we have still not solved the problem of energy storage for renewables at scale (i.e. the duck curve).
Nuclear is a greenish way to complement solar and/or wind.