It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
Generally the heat was only “on” at night when electricity was cheap
That is exactly why rates are going negative during the day now. Baseload generation benefits from artificial increases in the base, off-peak load. With solar and wind generation increasing, we now have a need to reduce that base, overnight load, and increase peak, daytime load.
Let me rephrase: “ the heat was only “on” … when electricity was cheap” which at the time was overnight. That was 1970’s tech so basically a mechanical timer, but the timer could be set to whenever, plus surely current technology could be used for a smarter solution
Edit: I currently opt into a program to shift load, in return for a bonus on my bill. My smart thermostat is able to pre-cool the house before the peak time, and only shaves off two degrees at peak, so it maintains adequate comfort while helping shift load (assuming enough consumers join)
At risk of starting a whole new fight, this is why hybridizing renewables with nuclear doesn’t work. They don’t cover for each other’s faults very well.
Nuclear isn’t particularly good for leveling the daily demand curve, no.
But, it can be very useful for leveling the seasonal variation. Slowly ramping up nuclear production to make up for the short winter days of December, January, February. Slowly rolling it back for the long summer days of June, July, August.
Nuclear is also an excellent option for meeting overnight demand.
But you’re right: it is terrible for making up for inclement weather, and other short-term variation. We will continue to require short- and medium-term storage. We will continue to need peaker plants, although we will hopefully be able to fire them with hydrogen instead of carbon-based fuels.
But, it can be very useful for leveling the seasonal variation.
Which isn’t actually necessary. Winter has less sunlight, but also more wind.
We can be smart about this. We have weather data for given regions stretching back decades, if not more than a century. We can calculate the mix of power we’d get from both wind and solar. There will be periods where both are in a lull. Looking again at historical data, we can find the maximum lull there ever was and put enough storage capacity to cover that with generous padding.
And then you just don’t need nuclear at all. Might as well keep what we have, but no reason to build new ones.
The trouble with that kind of variation is that the economics of nuclear don’t make much sense. Nuclear is a large up front investment with (relatively) low marginal cost. If it’s running at a low level for half the year, then it can’t make back that huge initial investment in its expected lifetime.
ok just so we’re clear here, you wouldnt ramp up or down nuclear power output, unless you’re doing maintenance. It’s at or near 100% power output, always. Most plants sit at a capacity factor of about 80-90%
You would however, ramp down wind turbines, or dump solar, or even store that solar since you’re in a peaking cycle.
ok so, solar, naturally produces the most power during the daytime, when the sun is up, which in places where it’s warm is when you get the most significant energy bump due to AC and what not. There is also a bit of a trailing period in the evening where people get back from work and cook dinner/relax and whatever. But that’s not super far off from noon peaking in the grand scheme.
Nuclear plants are baseload, so they produce 100% power output for 100% of the time they exist (at least in an ideal world) usually they have a capacity factor of about 80-90% though i’ve seen plants go past 100% before. This load is super useful for leveling out the power demand overnight, as well as shortening the day time peak loading a little bit. As well as providing a very consistent and regular source of power than can be used for things like hydro storage, and battery charging for example. So paired with a large thermal battery a nuclear plant might even be able to adapt to the midday loading cycle pretty functionally, as it can recoup most of it’s lost energy over the night, through the baseload averaging out.
Nuclear plants are actually really well suited to be used with a thermal battery solution (given that they output thermal power, obviously) It’s more common for modern plant designs to integrate thermal battery technology to some degree, but those are all gen IV designs, so they don’t exist yet.
As for wind, i’m not sure what the effects on it during the day/night cycle is, but i imagine during the day they generally produce more power, though they will also produce some power over night. So those are a relatively low yield but high regularity power source, similar to nuclear, however you have much greater control over them as you can change the blade pitch during rotation in order to increase/decrease output as needed. Though ideally you would always be outputting, as often as possible.
Even in the event that you have a total grid blackout, nuclear plants are a potential source of blackstart power sources, though presumably it’s not nearly as big of a deal in a solar plant for example. It’s unclear how much those rely on being secondary producers, or how well they can function as primary producers to me. Presumably it will be dealt with at some point if it hasn’t been already.
Ignoring the paragraphs of mansplaining about how nuclear works . . .
As for wind, i’m not sure what the effects on it during the day/night cycle is, but i imagine during the day they generally produce more power, though they will also produce some power over night.
Wind speed at 100m tends to drop in the late afternoon and pick up during the night. See page 49 here:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy15osti/61740.pdf
Even in the event that you have a total grid blackout, nuclear plants are a potential source of blackstart power sources
What? No. Much of the Ercot failure in Texas to deal with the 2021 winter weather was nuclear plants being knocked offline.
