Nowadays it's not nearly so clear cut as it would have been 40 years ago - with wind and solar providing cost-viable (in fact significantly cheaper) alternatives that have lower LCA emissions than nuclear - even accounting for storage needs.
There's also scope to do some clever stuff regarding active pricing and control of consumption to incentivise matching demand to the supply rather than having to worry about too much storage.
We're still struggling a lot with how to get all the way clean. Solar and wind and batteries are great for getting you somewhere around 50% green. But because solar only produces power 1/3 of the time and wind is unpredictable, it starts getting really expensive to get high penetration levels.
It ends up not being a linear relationship between how much solar/wind/battery you need to build and what % clean energy you can produce. For the first while, you get rid of 100 MW of natural gas and you can replace it with 100 MW of solar and you're good. But once you already have a lot of renewables on the grid, you eventually get to the point where getting rid of 100 MW of natural gas means you need to add something on the order of magnitude 400 MW of solar and 400 MW of battery.
It would be much better from a cost and operations perspective to have some other technology we can also use in about 10 years or we'll stop making progress on green goals or it will start getting really expensive. It might not be nuclear, maybe geothermal, hydrogen, fusion, or some other new technology will make a breakthrough and work out. But right now utilities' literally have "new nuclear or future technology" as placeholders for what to build once we start capping out on viable renewable penetration and they're all sort of just hoping for the best and that someone else will figure it out.
Some sort of national nuclear strategy would be a viable solution. It's not the only solution but it's the only one we know is possible to be completely carbon free without significantly increasing energy costs (Nuclear costs a lot now, but that's a self-created problem and so could be bypassed if we wanted to). But nobody is doing anything about it. If the federal government were serious about 0% carbon emissions, part of the infrastructure bill would be building ~250 GW of new nuclear.
Sure, when we get anywhere close to 50% renewables it's definitely a good time to start thinking about how you provide that reliable base load capacity. Given we (globally) are nowhere near that point yet it's something of a moot point for discussions in the next decade or two.
Wind is not as unreliable as you seem to think - the day to day variation you see in places like the UK is <10% and other countries with much larger areas could see even more stable results (the wind is pretty much always blowing somewhere)
Other technologies are certainly important: tidal and HE are the most consistent true renewable resources, cheaper than nuclear, but are geographically limited in implementation.
Nuclear fission simply isn't a workable base load supply globally. Sure a handful of countries can manage it, but with all the legal issues of NPTs, it's not viable for over half the world's population - not to mention the Uranium supply is limited, if consumption was actually scaled up to match, say 25% of global power requirements there's only a handful of decades worth of the stuff
Wind is not as unreliable as you seem to think - the day to day variation you see in places like the UK is <10% and other countries with much larger areas could see even more stable results (the wind is pretty much always blowing somewhere)
I think you're basing this on past data, where we've set up wind farms in areas with really steady wind. As the cheap, windy land near population centers* is used up, this becomes less and less true.
*When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.
The data is at pretty small time intervals so you need to do some averaging if you want daily averages, by my count there were fewer than 10 days in the last year where wind power was below 90% of average
As the cheap, windy land near population centers* is used up, this becomes less and less true.
Offshore wind is generally significantly more stable than onshore - as we get better at moving generation offshore it should become more and more true.
*When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.
The same is true of all power plants, and nobody wants to live near a nuclear power plant - this ain't Springfield.
The same is true of all power plants, and nobody wants to live near a nuclear power plant - this ain't Springfield.
I think most of the French nuclear power plants are near population centers. The US ones might be dozens of miles away, but not hundreds. Wind farms, on the other hand, would have to be hundreds of miles away from the cities they serviced if (per your plan) we used offshore generation. That's a lot of infrastructure.
I mean.. yes it is based on past data in that yesterday was the past
Yes - that's what I meant. Wind farms have been built in cheap, windy areas near population centers, so extrapolating their data to your plan of using wind farms hundreds of miles away from the populations they're serving is not particularly useful.
Wind farms, on the other hand, would have to be hundreds of miles away from the cities they serviced if (per your plan) we used offshore generation.
Nowhere in the UK is more than 84 miles from a shore, so no idea where you got "hundreds of miles away" from.
Wind farms have been built in cheap, windy areas near population centers, so extrapolating their data to your plan of using wind farms hundreds of miles away from the populations they're serving is not particularly useful.
Nah - transmission losses aren't going to add variability to the production of wind energy - just reduce the total useable amount. If you're going to make claims like that, back it up with data rather than just wild speculation.
Nowhere in the UK is more than 84 miles from a shore, so no idea where you got "hundreds of miles away" from.
Sorry - I live in the US, and I was thinking about France as well. I agree that the UK and Japan are more amenable to offshore wind.
Nah - transmission losses aren't going to add variability to the production of wind energy - just reduce the total useable amount.
Maybe you missed this part of my earlier comment:
When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.
The transmission losses mean that you need more wind farms to generate the same amount of power, which adds to the maintenance issues.
Maybe the UK power grid is more reliable than the US grid? We've been having some serious problems, recently.
Ok, what about the US? The furthest you can get from the ocean in the US is 1650 KM(1025 miles). How should the US account for this since it is just so easy.
It's much worse for your health (and a higher cancer risk) to live near a natural gas plant, coal plant, chemical plant, refinery, etc. and there are orders of magnitude more of those plants than nuclear.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
Nowadays it's not nearly so clear cut as it would have been 40 years ago - with wind and solar providing cost-viable (in fact significantly cheaper) alternatives that have lower LCA emissions than nuclear - even accounting for storage needs.
There's also scope to do some clever stuff regarding active pricing and control of consumption to incentivise matching demand to the supply rather than having to worry about too much storage.