| ▲ | ViewTrick1002 an hour ago | |
That’s not what we are seeing in reality. In Spain the nuclear plants massively load follow. Same as I just mentioned they do in Sweden. Pretending they can just do “baseload” in 2026 doesn’t work. They can bid negative, but that’s just extending the life of the plant a few extra years. And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available. And this is today a purely physical problem. You only need to look to Australia to see grids where rooftop solar today crowds out all other sources, even utility scale renewables. How do you force them to buy ruinously expensive grid based nuclear? A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels. Gas turbines are cheap in CAPEX and expensive in OPEX. They can cope with it, although even they have trouble with the sliver of hours left after solar, wind and storage make up the bulk. Since that’s a far slimmer portion than their bread and butter peaking style of operation | ||
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse an hour ago | parent [-] | |
> And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available. You're kind of answering your own question when you can't call them "cheap stored renewables". Ask yourself why the price is lower in France than in Spain. "Stored renewables" are fairly expensive even on the days when renewable output is high. When renewable output is low they're not even available because you had no surplus generation to charge the batteries during the day and now the sun is down and they're empty. > A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels. A nuclear plant is hit lighter than this than a gas turbine because it still generates during the day. And when your concern is cost, are you aware of what it costs to produce "carbon neutral fuels"? That's original electricity generation cost + fuel production infrastructure cost + conversion losses + fuel storage cost + conversion losses again + capital cost for the rarely used fuel-burning generators. That's the thing that's ruinously expensive. | ||