Well I think comparing intermittent energy with baseload energy 1:1 is kind of unfair since they fill different functions in the grid.
It's cheaper and less risky to produce a bike than a train. Both are a means of transportation but you can't replace trains with bikes or bikes with trains.
I suppose you could complain to the grid operators that they're being unfair in buying the cheapest electricity rather than the more expensive stuff, but I'm not sure it will sway them much :)
Is electricity in the US socialized? I thought they were all private companies, but you seem to be talking as though this is a political choice, rather than an economic one. I freely admit I don't know much about how the US operates its grids.
As a baseload source, it is likely that nuclear has been out-competed by "natural" gas, and other fossils (and hydro, where available), but when we start shutting those down, we're likely to want our nuclear back. Saying nuclear is uneconomical compared to wind/solar is dishonest without mentioning baseload (comparing price only when one source is abundant).
In practice, what seems to happen if you shut down nuclear in favour of renewables, is that renewables will replace maybe 30-50% of the nuclear power, and the rest will be covered by gas.
The total price tends to end up around $0.15/kwh, plus taxes, or around the same as new nuclear, with all associated regulations. (but more than already established nuclear, or the cost nuclear should have if built economically).
For those who really care about global warming, nuclear is still much better than such a mix.
If you're really not worried about global warming, gas + renewables make a lot more sense. Especially if you don't want coal or nuclear "in your back yard".
It's a mix. They are pretty much all private companies, but very heavily regulated. There are different degrees of regulation and a few different "deregulated" market structures, but there is a lot of government oversight even in the least regulated market (in Texas).
> The baseload[1] (also base load) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week. This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of low cost, availability and high reliability in any particular market.
Could you say more about that? It seems like an intrinsic property of the demand curve and the attributes of different kinds of power generation (ie. some can be turned up and down quickly, some can't).
They actually fill the exact same function on the grid.
You need load following to keep up with shifting demand, that’s absolutely required and the only thing actually required. Intermittent and base load on the other hand is simply cheaper than load following which lowers production costs vs a 100% load following grid.
Intermittent sources can actually provide a much higher percentage of annual power than base load sources at a lower cost per kWh.
No, intermittent energy can't load follow since it's intermittent. You can see this mostly in europe where those that keept nuclear online has cheaper grids that those that didn't. Especially true for this is in germany
Load following is the 1st category historically, currently filled by hydro, gas turbines, and batteries.
Base load was the 2nd category which was less flexible but historically cheaper coal and nuclear. The only advantage it has over load following is price.
We now how a new 3rd category intermittent generation which is also cheaper than load following but just like base load it can’t follow the demand curve.
Therefore replacing all base load generation with cheaper intermittent generation is absolutely fine as lone as load following can pick up the slack there is zero downsides.
PS: Nuclear doesn’t actually lower peoples electricity costs. The difference is people in France are paying a percentage of their electric bill in taxes rather than as a separate bill. That’s great for poor people, but less so for the economy.
The thing is that there is not yet a non-fossil-fuel non-intermittent non-geographically-constrained scalable generation source capable of load following. Base load could be replaced with natural gas, and yeah that's just a cost trade-off. But renewables are intermittent, hydro is geographically limited, and batteries have not yet been scalable enough.
I mostly agree, but if you look at the annual power demand base load can provide about X% of total energy needed. Intermittent sources can provide significantly more than that at the same cost so replacing all base load with intermittent sources reduces the need for load following in terms of kWh per year.
That’s critical because nuclear really doesn’t fit very will in a renewable heavy grid. Given the choice of nuclear + hydro + batteries or solar + wind + hydro + batteries the solar + wind grid is vastly cheaper.
Having said that, some nuclear is likely to be cost competitive without subsides in 2060+ somewhere.
I'm very much not anti-nuclear but I do wonder if we've possibly missed its window. To me, a plausible two-step solution to decarbonization would be (or could have been): 1a. Replace all the fossil fuel base load generation with nuclear/hydro, 1b. Replace all the variable load natural gas plants with storage, 2. Now that storage is mature and scalable, replace all the nuclear with solar/wind.
The reason this makes more sense in my head is that renewables are actually more dependent on natural gas than nuclear would be, in the current world of limited storage. I agree with you that once storage is built out, the role of nuclear is a lot less clear. But I think you'd have to say that it's still an open question whether we can really make storage scale as much as it needs to if it's going to support a fully renewable grid. It has only recently started to seem like the answer to that may be promising.
I do not think you can conclude anything from household prices. Those are artificially kept low in France and artificially kept high in Germany. Market prices are similar (higher at the moment in France because half of the nuclear plants are down).
I had a longer post here, but I didn’t mean solar was load following, just that load following was separate from both intermittent and base load. While bales load and intermittent sources where in direct competition with each other.
