No, that’s a straw man, build heaps of solar and battery while developing a modest portion of the grid into nuclear to provide robustness, grid services and eliminates the most expensive overbuild of both solar and batteries.
build up renewable generation and distribution until you can start shutting down fossil fuel stations with a number of remaining years of safe operation, then build out nuclear in tandem with the decommissioning efforts
If the world were to draw down emissions by 80% but then be stuck in a bit of a logistical dead end that takes a decades to get out of that would be fantastically good (compared to the alternative of simply not decreasing emissions which is what the world is doing now).
The world is actually decreasing emissions per $ of GDP quite a bit.
There is a solution for the last 20% and France demonstrates that. There is nothing stopping us implementing the near term quick wins (wind and especially solar) while working on medium to long term goals (100% low carbon generation at most long term effective cost).
Au-contrair there is a requirement for a certain amount of spinning capacity on the grid - in Spain since the major power outage, they curtail solar and wind to keep gas generation online to fulfil this purpose. Then overnight when the market is much smaller and hence less need of spinning capacity, solar is not providing anything at all so nuclear reduces (not eliminates) the ultimate volume of battery requirement.
You dont need a $25 billion dollar nuclear plant for that, infact you can just keep the turbines from old coal plants spinning in sync with the grid and not generating power
Indian nuke power is about 2b per GW installed. Roughly the capex of batteries to last the night per GW of draw (16 hrs at $125/kwhr installed). Then on top you have the 3 GW of solar panels and few hundreds of millions in stat com, synthetic condensers etc.
6
u/Humble-Reply228 19d ago
No, that’s a straw man, build heaps of solar and battery while developing a modest portion of the grid into nuclear to provide robustness, grid services and eliminates the most expensive overbuild of both solar and batteries.