But massive battery farms are becoming cheap as well. And people vastly overestimate how much energy storage is needed to balance renewables.. especially if the country in question starts to decarbonise transportation and industry. The solution to these imply a huge amount of flexible load.
Wouldn’t rule out nuclear regardless. But feels like nuclear needs a big kick in the but in the next decade to keep up, otherwise it will be left in the dust.
Nuclear power plants take a long time to plan and build. China started a nuclear building boom about 12 years ago, ages before it was clear solar and wind will become so cheap. Now, your point is that given the knowledge that solar and wind are where they are, why is China not stopping building nuclear? China is building every year more than the rest of the world combined? Why?
We don't know for sure, because there are lots of things in China that we don't know.
But one possibility is that China sees a possible learning curve for nuclear that will make building nuclear power plants much less expensive in the future. They already got to levels unheard in the rest of the world. They have built 2 nuclear power plants for Pakistan (Karachi K2 and K3, [1]) in record time, for $6.5 BN that they have financed themselves (i.e. Pakistan got the loan from China, and paid with the loan for the construction of the power plants). For 2.2 GW of electricity, this comes at $3 BN per GW. This is stunning if you compare with Vogtle or Hinkley point C, or any Western nuclear power plant. It's not too bad even compared to solar. According to NREL [2], the cost of solar is about $1BN per GW, however solar has a capacity factor of about 30% while nuclear has one of about 90%. Still, in China it is very likely that solar is much cheaper than in the US, so solar still wins.
Solar wins as of now. But technology can and does evolve. China has hooked to the grid two helium high temperature reactors [3], which are basically SMRs. There are so many good things to say about this design, but I'll leave them out for now.
Is there room for nuclear technology to achieve a reduction in cost of 10x, or 100x? It's just technology after all, many technologies have achieved that, including solar. It looks to me that China thinks there is, and they are investing some solid money into this.
Here's a couple of graphs:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&facet=...
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&facet=...
I don't think I can get them on the same chart so you'll need to manually compensate for the different axis scales.
But basically these show that wind and solar are achieving the goals that nuclear aims at in China, but faster and cheaper, and are accelerating.