| ▲ | ViewTrick1002 2 days ago | |||||||
Which is a quirk of hindering renewable deployment. All over Europe nuclear reactors are throttled down or even shut down for days/weeks because renewables lead to too low prices for the reactors to even cover wear and tear and fuel costs. Given that renewables are the cheapest energy source in human history this will happen in every grid that is based on a free market principle. In the monopolized markets the distributed aspects of renewables will mean that rooftop solar and storage enables home owners to largely disconnect from the grid if the monopoly starts to force new built nuclear power costs on the ratepayers. In other words: Nuclear power is fucked unless it can either get the marginal cost to zero like a solar panel, i.e. impossible or get CAPEX low enough to act like a fossil gas peaker which again seems near impossible given the past 70 years of nuclear powers history and commercialization. | ||||||||
| ▲ | throw0101a a day ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
> Given that renewables are the cheapest energy source in human history Not according to the energy contracts in Ontario as shown in the OEB report linked above. | ||||||||
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| ▲ | natmaka 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
Indeed! Experts (International Energy Agency, McKinsey, etc.) are clear: renewables will produce the majority of electricity by 2050. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/tripling-renewable-power-ca... https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/energy-and-materials/our... This is inevitable (no other possibility is realistic), and this applies to France, where RTE (EDF's subsidiary that manages the electricity grid) has emphasized that 100% nuclear power is out of the question, and that more than 60% nuclear power would be utopian. This trend is already clearly visible and welcomed by investors. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa... The cost of producing renewable electricity is increasingly lower than that of nuclear power. https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... During their operation, they do not consume fuel, produce waste, or expose people to a major accident, and are therefore and will be preferred. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-09/european-... The surplus electricity sometimes produced by renewables will be leveraged by increasing storage capacity (electric vehicles, hydro pumped storage, etc.) as well as green hydrogen. It will gradually replace nuclear electricity, which is supposed to compensate for their variability, especially since the latter cannot adjust its production quickly and frequently enough ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796580 ). All of this will reduce the nuclear load factor and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with strong feedback (the higher the load factor, the more likely it will be). This will increasingly favor the deployment of a system based primarily on renewables, meaning that nuclear electricity will become less and less useful and more and more expensive, making its fate (and therefore the profitability of the heavy investments required for its infrastructure) easy to predict. A renewable-nuclear mix will doom the latter. | ||||||||