It's a mess of a deal, but what was the alternative? On a nice windy day we're getting away with no coal, relying on a mix of ~8GW wind, ~25GW gas and ~7.5GW of existing nukes, but on a cold still day we're pretty much flat out on 10G of coal, 25G of gas and 7.5GW of nukes, so until someone can find an alternative for ~17GW (coal+nuke) or a way to store ~30GWh worth to get us over the evening peak without coal+nuke then we need to keep nukes going. Of course it's going to be a cost overrun, but I am glad that Flamanville etc are being used as the debug points first.
Lots of options, but here's one: $20B buys massive amounts of HVDC to interconnect and trade with distant parts of the continent and enable trade in both directions for intermittent renewables. HVDC has shorter lead times and lower cost overruns too. Multiple lines are important too, because those massive inverters don't work 100% of the time.
Fortunately we've already got ~5GW+; but cold still winter days are tending to affect large areas at the same time for extended periods of time; those are the days when everyone is at peak usage and has ~no solar. The last time the UK power grid had to raise a warning (a few years back) was a cold still February when the whole continent was low on wind generation, and you could see that a couple of weeks back where we were running coal generation and exporting to France (well the EU grid) at the same time.
We have a significant amount of HVDC already. Not sure how that helps as there is still many many days when there is 0 wind across the whole of the EU.
Not to mention as the article states the closest big nation, France, is on the verge of an energy crisis itself....
Solar battery backed is under $100/MWh (wind even cheaper), and those costs will decline rapidly as battery manufacturing scales up.
Nuclear will never get cheaper, not to mention the rapidly increasing decommissioning costs everyone is keeping off the books. Batteries are mostly non toxic and easily recycled.
A backup battery for the 10-day wind lull from Dec 5th to Dec 15th in the Pacific Northwest would cost $90B and be a football field 100 stories high. Then it'd have to be replaced every 20 years. The footprint of something like that from a land, mining, and carbon standpoint is not trivial.
That doesn't sound quite right. Nuclear is very energy dense and has very low footprints in terms of land, fuel, mining, pollution, waste, and everything else except capital cost. I hope we can figure out how to build them cheaper.
Acres per Megawatt Produced for different energy sources [1]:
Coal 12.21
Natural Gas 12.41
Nuclear 12.71
Solar 43.50
Wind 70.64
Hydro 315.22
Maybe today, but with demand (and thus potential profit) for grid-scale storage increasing we see a lot of promisimg research in that area. Li-Ion is engineered for completely different tradeoffs, so there's massive room for improvement.
The 4 GWe wind farms have an average capacity factor of 35% so over ten days that's 336 GWh or 4.8 million Teslas, and that's just for the fraction of electric generation that's wind in the PNW. Scale that up to full electricity and then full energy and you're looking at a pretty serious challenge. Batteries are generally not what people consider for grid-scale power. The 100% renewable Stanford superstar, Jacobsen (who's suing his scientific critics), doesn't even use batteries in his scenarios (he uses pumped hydro and hydrogen instead).
The problem with battery backed is getting longer storage; The UK government has just reduced the subsidy for storage technologies that can't keep it going for a few hours; See https://www.emrdeliverybody.com/Lists/Latest%20News/Attachme... for the full assesment of how they came up with that.
Other states who rely less on their military nuclear threat arsenal showed how to manage this small problem. Just act rationally without corrupt politicians and lobbyists who turn around the facts.
Renewable energy easily can provide all that.
Guatemala runs mostly on biomass energy from their sugar industry, Germany runs on wind. There's enough cheap biomass and solar and wind.
https://www.electricitymap.org/
