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.
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.
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.
Baseload storage is a pipe dream. The storage and generation capacity necessary to make that work would be about two orders of magnitude more expensive to maintain and operate than the equivalent nuclear capacity, and the environmental impact would be far greater still.
That’s not to say that storage is useless; it certainly isn’t. But its utility is in leveling spikes and dips, not replacing baseload generation during a “lull”.
That’s simply not true. This has been well studied, and a 100% renewable + storage option is quite feasible. It’s even easier if you focus on going 95% first (that last 5% gets much, much harder).
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.
We are currently charging very low overnight rates because we need to increase night time load on nuclear. With solar and wind being cheaper, grid operators are going to want to drive consumers to daytime consumption wherever possible. Night time rates are going to naturally increase, and I would expect artificial incentives on top of that to drive as much consumption as possible to the day, especially to clear, windy days.
The alternatives to nuclear are pumped storage, (which isn’t sufficiently scalable); traditional baseload generation (which is significantly more expensive); and various forms of peaker plants (which are much more expensive).
Basically, overnight and winter rates are going to rise to wherever nuclear needs them to be to remain profitable, because every other option has either limited feasibility, or higher costs.
You left out a large number of storage options. There’s plenty out there. Not every one is going to work for everything, but there’s almost always something that’s going to work.
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.
Solar and wind are cheaper and potentially more plentiful, more distributed than nuclear. Renewables are going to be the primary source of power; nuclear and every other type of generation will augment the renewables.
What you’re saying is what nuclear has been, not what it will be.
potentially, that’s always an option, but unlike something like oil where it’s a generic concept, energy is kind of an ethereal concept. I see it much more likely that if nuclear plants get sufficient development time and funds, that they will pair nicely with renewables as you can buy the electricity wholesale at price, but the versatility of the pricing will offset the increased cost as you can subsidize it using cheaper renewables.
Allowing you to minimize energy storage and some amount of renewable production as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised if grids ended up using solar primarily for day time production consumption and short time storage (evening consumption time) and then used nuclear as the primary producer for power consumption over night, along with wind somewhere in the mix. But this would require nuclear power to be built in the first place.
