Given sunshine in Cuba it might not be necessary to finish. The for-profit grid feeding giant solar power station in Rajasthan, India is buying power at a rate under 3 cents per kWh, and the private capital that put up the money to build it still has an ROI that pencils out. A hundred million dollars of ground mount photovoltaics in Cuba might do a lot more good than spending money to finish a possibly obsolete design nuclear reactor.
No, I'm assuming it can be built because the unit economics work better.
Back in 2013 I remember people used to constantly trash solar and wind because it was 1-2% of the grid anywhere, max, while nuclear power was often 10-30% (or 70% in France). We're at that same point with storage.
Since then we've had a decline in nuclear power due to the high cost and enormous growth in renewables due to it being 5x cheaper.
Unit economics prevailed with solar and wind and theyll prevail with storage. solar + wind + 8 hours storage is not just the cheapest way to get to a 98% carbon free grid it's also the fastest.
Gas is still the cheapest "battery" by far though, which is why so many countries use it as baseload and peaking. Pumped storage, batteries and syngas combined only make renewables a cheaper baseload/peaker than nuclear power.
This whole article illustrates a huge benefit of solar over nuclear: if you deploy 90% of the required solar panels, you get 90% of the energy, while if you build 90% of a nuclear plant, you get nothing. The power of incremental deployment.
But, a solar plant with a nameplate capacity of 1GW is roughly 15-17x cheaper than a 1GW nuclear plant and starts chipping away at gas and coal usage almost straight away, not in 15-20 years.
> Since then we've had a decline in nuclear power and enormous growth in renewables.
The only reason we've had decline in nuclear is politics. That's why now Germany is busy burning coal and importing electricity.
> Unit economics prevailed before and theyll prevail again.
Wishful thinking is no substitute for reality. Where are the calculations? That include both the need to ridiculously overbuild renewables and the need for the so-far-nonexistent grid scale storage?
> Nuclear propaganda has always had a bit of a reality problem.
Propaganda cuts both ways. For example, you completely ignore the reality that the sun doesn't shine at night ad that the wind doesn't alway blow. So Germany shut down its nuclear plants an now is burning coal to compensate.
Just a random idea: given the nature of Cuban society would neighbourhood or house level batteries be viable? Enough to store your electricity needs for (say) two or three days. So you can smooth out the day/night wind/calm cycles to some extent?
Tangential: given the state of the structures in the OA is it really possible this facility can be completed without effectively rebuilding it?
> given the nature of Cuban society would neighbourhood or house level batteries be viable?
Possibly maybe?
You need 10kW per household per day with generous electricity consumption [1] Retail prices for 10kW batteries seem to be in the range of $5k to infinity.
At scale this will be cheaper, but then the question then becomes the same: availability at this scale
That is a "model" tat is very handwavy about a lot of things.
36% battery power capable of sustaining Hawaii for 11 hours. 4% is "flexible gas" from "carbon-neutral synthetic fuels" that will be produced using "excess renewable energy", etc.
No numbers except "flexible solution is 68% cheaper than just overbuilding renewables". "All technology options have been priced at their expected costs at year 2030."
These are not calculations. These are marketing materials for Wärtsilä
Edit:
There are some interesting things though. For example, if you click on solar, they show that you need 3.4x installed solar capacity compared to peak load. And (emphaisis mine): "Because the sun is only shining for part of the day, solar panels can on average over the whole day produce energy at maximum of around 25% of their installed capacity"
I know xkcd thinks we should celebrate the 10,000 people learning something new each day, but I wish people would hold back from having strong opinions on renewables if facts like the sun not shining at night are blowing their minds.
I linked you to a comprehensive study that explicitly discussed overbuild and storage to meet both diurnal and seasonal variation, for 147 regions around the globe.
There are many interesting take aways from that, but the one you quoted, and added your own emphasis to, is that solar has a 25% capacity factor.
> Because the sun is only shining for part of the day, solar panels can on average over the whole day produce energy at maximum of around 25% of their installed capacity"
Why did you find this interesting if you are aware that the sun doesn't shine constantly all day and night?
Oh they absolutely do. "did you know you need to overbuild?" is well up there with "did you know the sun doesnt shine at night?"
A solar farm with a nameplate capacity of 1 GW is about 5% of the cost of a 1GW nuclear plant. The need for overbuilding pushes the price up to roughly 20% of the cost.
Adding all the necessary storage to provide peaking can push it all the way up to ~80% of the cost of a nuclear power station.
Storage is kind of a moot point anyway these days. Most grids don't even have enough nameplate capacity to supply 100% of demand for even 1 day a year. With a few exceptions every GWh produced at any time by any solar panel or turbine - is just a GWh of gas that can be burned some other day.
> "did you know you need to overbuild?" is well up there with "did you know the sun doesnt shine at night?"
Of course it isn't. Almost none of the renewal proponents take those costs into account.
> A solar farm with a nameplate capacity of 1 GW is about 5% of the cost of a 1GW nuclear plant. The need for overbuilding pushes the price up to roughly 20% of the cost.
Are you sure you added all the requirements to the picture?
E.g. Two weeks ago there was a quiet night in Germany. Solar was at 0%. Wind was at 5%. You'd need to overbuild wind 400% just to compensate for some of the power needed then.
> Adding all the necessary storage to provide peaking can push it all the way up to ~80% of the cost of a nuclear power station.
Ah yes. The magical non-existent storage.
> Storage is kind of a moot point anyway these days. Most grids don't even have enough nameplate capacity to supply 100% of demand for even 1 day a year.
Funny how storage is moot, so Germany is burning coal during the night to compensate for solar, and for wind on quite nights, because they shut down their nuclear power plants.
In particular, one can calculate minimum base load and amortized base load.
Critical infrastructure informs minimum base load. For example parts of defense grid, AC when disabling it would kill people, medical systems, certain lighting, running and monitoring the power plants, certain kind of industrial cooling, mining safety equipment like air and gas pumps, certain sluices in regions with flooding.
More or less anything that if turned off would or could immediately cause a catastrophe.
Amortized base load adds some other things that just cannot be off for long or you incur huge restart or lack of function costs.
Examples would be microchip manufacturing, water treatment, key mass transportation, oil pumping and drilling.
A lot of amortized base loads are on week scale rather than day, so they tend to be reasonably solar friendly, but less wind friendly.
