The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
The benefit of nuclear here is that its output doesn't correlate with the others. If you have 1/3 nuclear and 2/3 solar but solar output is at 50% of normal then total output is at 2/3 of normal instead of 1/2. It leaves you that much less to have to make up with peaker plants and demand-based pricing. It also leaves you with that much less need for battery storage at night.
The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.
We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants. Thats where nuclear is headed.
And nuclear doesn’t really help with cold spells, huge aircon loads or other strained situations.
Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
> The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.
The answer is obviously that it delivers when they don't.
Every power plant has to hit a certain average price per kWh, and the ones with a variable operating cost (fossil fuels) also need a minimum price in order to generate right now, since the cost of fuel is a significant part of their costs.
What this means is that nuclear does pretty well in a market with high volatility, because its fuel cost is negligible so it can sell for $0.04/kWh when other supply is available and $1/kWh when it isn't, and end up at a viable average. Meanwhile solar never gets the $1/kWh because the reason the price is that high then is that the sun is down and the batteries are low.
> We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants.
This is just putting a battery storage unit at the site of an existing power plant because it already has a stout grid connection.
> Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
Pushing the bottom up during the times when other generation methods have low output does help with the hard part.
Regardless of whether nuke fuel cost is negligible, nukes were already quite expensive even under the previous model where nukes were highly utilized (expensive due to the very expensive non-fuel parts of building/running nukes). (And I'm not even sure if those existing high costs assumed the government handled the costs of insuring (or otherwise paying) if the nuke plant has a disaster, or if it included decommissioning/safe nuke disposal costs?)
But if we're talking about moving from a model where nukes run ~100% of the time (excluding maintenance) to one where they just cover the 1/x portion of the time that zero-fuel-cost renewables (+ storage) can't, then wouldn't nuke's cost per kwh end up 'x' times higher than before as a result because we still have the same amortized costs split over fewer generating hours per year, and nuke fuel cost is negligible?
> But if we're talking about moving from a model where nukes run ~100% of the time (excluding maintenance) to one where they just cover the 1/x portion of the time that zero-fuel-cost renewables (+ storage) can't
Nobody is talking about doing that. Nuclear plants are baseload. They always run 100% of the time because even if the current price of electricity is low, their incremental cost savings from reducing output is basically zero, so any positive price means they remain at full output.
This means you don't want 100% nuclear generation, because you don't have constant load. If you have 10GW of demand at night and 20GW during the day then you don't want 20GW of nuclear and nothing to do with half of it at night. But having 5 to 10GW is good, because you never need less than that anyway.
The thing people don't seem to have caught onto yet is that the combination of solar being cheap and solar not generating anything at night means that the price at night is going to be higher not just than it is during the day, but than it has been historically, because now whatever you're using to supply power at night -- regardless of what it is -- has to recover most of its capex exclusively at night. That's not great for nuclear but it's even worse for most other things. On top of that, the most competitive real alternative to nuclear there is natural gas, which doesn't work if you want to stop emitting CO2.
The massive battery buildout in places like California and Australia are seriously eating into these night time windows already, and we’ve really just gotten started. California will exit 26 with roughly ~20% fossil, and still dropping fast every year as batteries move deeper into the night. The opportunity for nuke to sell at higher prices during the night is being eaten fast. Batteries filled with cheap excess daytime solar are cheaper than nukes already, and can be deployed instantly. The niche won’t exist soon, which is why noones building nukes.
(Yes there is a small amount of legacy nuke in California too.)
Batteries are still too expensive to cover the whole night. So it will take few years before they will threaten nuclear base load. But they are already cheaper to serve electricity from solar or wind during 4 hours evening peak consumption than running natural gas peaker plants. Plus they reduce the scale of grid upgrades in many cases.
We’re already seeing prices approaching zero or even going negative due to renewable buildouts, and with storage we’re also already seeing solar cover significant demand even after sunset.
So it seems like even if you run nuclear 100% of the time, you’re not going to earn much of anything or may even need to pay the negative rates if you don’t stop feeding into the grid, for a number of hours per day, so I don’t see how you get around having fewer hours per day to cover nuclear’s existing (noticeable) amortized costs?
And the trend line of renewable and storage costs getting cheaper doesn’t seem to be stopping.
> We’re already seeing prices approaching zero or even going negative due to renewable buildouts
There is a huge difference between prices hitting zero from time to time and the year-long average daytime price being zero. The latter is the thing that would bankrupt solar because that's when all of its generation occurs.
> with storage we’re also already seeing solar cover significant demand even after sunset.
Which is completely expected, because a moderate amount of storage can be used to smooth out time of day misalignment of demand with supply, and it makes sense to charge that with solar during the day whenever it's available. But the thing that's displacing is peaker plants rather than baseload.
> I don’t see how you get around having fewer hours per day to cover
It's not about being exactly 24 hours every day. It's about averaging 20+ hours every day instead of 12, and getting not just all 24 hours but also the higher price for all 24 hours on the days when the output of other generation methods is lower.
Expect that the price per kWh at any given time is inversely correlated with renewable output. What does that do to the profitability of renewables and what does it to do the profitability of something whose output is uncorrelated with renewable output?
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
> 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.
I have solar and batteries. The battery cost me about 200€/kWh and is expected to last a few thousand cycles. That works out to a couple of cents per kWh. That’s not terribly expensive and grid scale storage has economies of scale that my balcony setup can’t match.
For hydrogen is gas turbines you’re right that the electricity thus produced is rather expensive, but keep in mind that it will only be used a few hundred hours a year. Total system cost can hence still be cheaper than the alternatives.
> The battery cost me about 200€/kWh and is expected to last a few thousand cycles. That works out to a couple of cents per kWh. That’s not terribly expensive and grid scale storage has economies of scale that my balcony setup can’t match.
The up-front cost of just the battery itself isn't the total cost. You have to add installation, land, time value of money (interest) since you're paying up front for something and then only getting those charge cycles over several years, etc.
Ends up being 10-20c/kWh, and that's on top of what you pay for the electricity to put into it.
Also gets worse the more capacity you want to have, because then you're doing less than a full charge cycle more of the time, which means it takes you longer to do those few thousand cycles, which means you pay more in interest.
There are several ways to spread battery costs out, the installation,
maintenance, and rolling cell upgrades; large farms, community batteries, and virtual farms (via smart grids).
I don't have any numbers but would be surprised if the cost of the hardware is not the large majority of the cost of a BESS. The electricity you put into the batteries is rather cheap, since you can charge them while there is a surplus on the grid and prices are close to zero. BESS are already starting to displace peaker plants. That would seem unlikely if they were more expensive than burning natgas.
> The thing people don't seem to have caught onto yet is that the combination of solar being cheap and solar not generating anything at night means that the price at night is going to be higher not just than it is during the day, but than it has been historically, because now whatever you're using to supply power at night -- regardless of what it is -- has to recover most of its capex exclusively at night. That's not great for nuclear but it's even worse for most other things. On top of that, the most competitive real alternative to nuclear there is natural gas, which doesn't work if you want to stop emitting CO2.
This is where you're wrong. That is the big problem for nuclear in particular. You just can't recover your capex during the night. The night is the low demand time anyway, and you are still competing with wind etc.. Nobody wants to build new nuclear reactors, because it's not economically viable. In fact operators even want to turn off reactors because even their running cost are too high (happened in Sweden, a while ago. IIRC the government wanted to turn it back on for political reasons).
In this kind of debates people often forget how far north Sweden just happens to be. Solar farms has their average production output down to single digit percent during the worst months. At the same time, those months also see an increase to around double consumption of electricity demand compared to the warmest months. Solar production has a negative correlation to electricity demand in Sweden.
Wind has a slight positive correlation to demand, but the storage requirement for wind can be calculated as weeks/months compared to hours for solar.
Sweden also has a free market for electricity without any price roofs. That mean prices can be zero for long periods during the summer when solar is overproducing, but it can also reach over €1 per kw/h during periods of supply shortage. Have the record price for 5 days and have the remaining 360 days free of charge, and you would still end up paying more than if you paid the average cost for a full year (to be fair, in the cheapest of the 4 energy regions).
To add some more aspect for the Swedish energy grid, currently the south of Sweden that is connected to the Danish and German grid are suffering from significant supply shortage. The main power plant to address this is an old Oil power plant that was supposed to exist only as reserve energy, but have since a few years now been running every day throughout the year.
There is construction of more new thermal power plants. The two main strategy to solve the shortage, split along the two political lines, is either nuclear or to combine wind power with power plants burning bio fuel and then carbon capture the emissions (both being technologies with absolutely zero controversies). The later is what is being constructed right now, while nuclear might see construction in the future.
System studies find that renewable energy systems are cheaper than involving new nuclear in both Denmark and Finland.
The thermal plant you are complain about mothballed one of its two burners last autumn when the contract for firm emergency reserve capacity ended.
The final burner stayed open only with a new emergency reserve contract. Last time I checked it has ran like 50-100 hours per year. Never being called in as emergency reserve, although stepping up to hot standby a few times.
They also reactivated a mothballed CCGT plant in the same region for emergency reserve duties. But that was based on the war in Ukraine and ensuring local preparedness rather than needing the electricity.
You need to realign what you think is reality and what reality actually is. Look at the studies again and you will see that building new renewables is cheaper in terms of increasing the total amount of exported electricity and for expanding total amount of electricity produced over the year, not to fill in during periods of high demand and low supply. Producing electricity regardless of demand is a different question that producing electricity when there is demand for it. There is also a very significant price difference between electricity bought at the cheapest possible point vs the most expensive. Producing the cheapest energy, but only during periods when the price of energy is cheapest, does not make for the cheapest energy overall.
And if you want to believe a different reality, please convince the political parties in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and so on to replace existing thermal power plants with renewable energy, and to stop construction of new ones! The green party in Sweden went into the election that we had just a few weeks ago on a energy platform that said: Thermal power plants are essential to enable renewable energy and keep prices low. Not even they believe that you can replace thermal power plants with only renewable energy and storage. Their local branch in south of Sweden is part of the coalition that approved and support the current construction of the new thermal power plant, together with the carbon capture plan.
Not that people read sources, but here is the reality check (all naturally in Swedish):
> At the case level, we find that in countries such as Denmark with available wind and solar energy resources, nuclear power does not seem to be part of the least-cost solution, neither in today's energy systems nor in future systems of climate neutral societies. This conclusion is valid for the present cost of nuclear power in Europe as well as for IEA/WEO future expectations.
> system costs are comprised by overcapacity of the technology itself, electrolysers and hydrogen storage, back-up power, influence on spinning reserve and transmission systems cost.
Green hydrogen storage solution has shown to be much more expensive than what earlier studies predicted, and are still not economical competitive to be used in industries that need the hydrogen itself rather than burning it for electricity.
> Thus, the simulation of, e.g., nuclear power involves back-up-power and peak-load power in order to cover all hourly electricity demands in a least-cost manner
This is an assumption that they don't explore.
> It should be emphasized that all the alternatives have exactly the same use of biomass and they all contribute with carbon for CCU, CCS and biochar to achieve a fully climate neutral society in all sectors including agriculture, industrial processes and LULUCF.
Again, they explicitly claim that all their solutions must burn fuel for electricity.
> The “LC mix biomass restricted” alternative is still comprised by a least-cost combination of offshore wind power (84%), solar PV (13%) and CCGT (3%)
> CCGT and therefore also the least-cost mix either use natural gas or biomethane
CCGT, as is thermal power plants, which is what is exactly what Sweden is constructing and what I linked above. A combination of wind, solar, and burning fuel for power. The difference between LC mix biomass restricted and least cost mix is how much fuel that grid is expected to burn.
Their model of just 3% CCGT do fly a bit against what Denmark is doing. They have over 100% wind capacity, and yet need to import almost 50% of the energy demand. Reducing that imports to 3% seems a bit like wishful thinking.
If the intent was disprove the need for thermal power plants by linking to that study, then the study itself disproves that in no unclear terms. The result of the study is that combining wind, solar and gas is the cheapest strategy to generate electricity.
yeah the math doesnt work. On top of the running costs you mentioned, You are trying to pay back the ridiculous capex over a reasonable timeframe (say 30 years). Nukes already have trouble doing that at 100% high power price sales. Saying "oh they can keep selling power but at a fraction of price" is technically true but fatal to the economics of nukes.
Because they aren’t when you look at wholesale costs?
Either way. France is wholly unable to build new nuclear given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and the ruinously expensive proposed subsides for the EPR2 fleet.
While Germany still pays for expensive early renewables. Back before the industry exploded in scale.
The relevant question is where to spend the next 100b to get the most decarbonization the fastest, today.
I also wonder how much of electricity costs in recent years have more to do with things like:
- Did France previously largely pay off the cost of building their old nuclear plants, while Germany has been spending heavily in recent years to majorly change their generation mix and build new generation? I've also heard that even France is now facing some significant challenges with the needed replacement of nukes nearing their retirement age being costly.
- How much of French and German generation buildouts were covered by the gov instead of ratepayers, if any?
However, I haven't researched the above questions.
The subsidies estimated for the EPR2 fleet (0% interest loan during construction, then reduced rate during exploitation) are 1/4 what Germany paid (365 billion) in subsidy for its renewable the last 20 years and nobody complained. All the money will be used in France/Europe meanwhile, the surplus of stable energy will benefit all its neighbors, meanwhile all the PV panels for solar production come from China. Renewables (even from France) which are responsible of much of the instability and problems of the european grid.
The 100b should be given to France to build its EPR2 fleet and save the italian electrical grid and provide backup to spanish solar production.
That’s a backwards looking metric. You’re complaining that late 2000s renewable were expensive.
The problem with nuclear is that it doesn’t solve stability. When cold spells hit Europe the French exports turn into imports. So all the French neighbors needs enough backup capacity, generally fossil based today, to both make up for the French exports vanishing, they experiencing the same cold spell, and exporting to France.
Stick two French grids next to each other and they would quickly collapse due to how brittle they are.
> That’s a backwards looking metric. You’re complaining that late 2000s renewable were expensive.
All renewable are still subsidized now, at all time, without subsidy no renewable would be installed in europe currently, they would be crushed by nuclear production (who can sell at loss event when renewable are available). Most of the modulation of nuclear reactor is cause because nuclear is pushed out of the marked by subsidized renewable would be sold at loss otherwise.
You can look at the graphs there is no correlation between winter and imports
and France mostly export at all time. You are just making things up. Nuclear production does not depend on the weather and the french production is exactly sized for the french consumption. Historically France used hydro as the other pilotable part of its mix (before the pan european electric grid and exchanges at spot price). Don't look at special events since 2020, look at the graphs for the last forty years.
You're still sidestepping the fact that you're comparing already installed capacity and not costs of new buildouts for solar vs. nuclear. Despite the history of nuclear blowing past timelines and budgets, it was easily the best option for zero-emissions power available throughout the 70s/80s. So it's indeed unfortunate that Chernobyl/Three Mile Island and the collapse of the USSR stymied the industry while it was still competitive which would have offset fossil fuels we're using today.
But the economics of nuclear vs. renewables have drastically changed with current solar/solar+battery costs (without subsidies) which make it very difficult to justify new construction of nuclear in 2026. Plus, apart from the per megawatt price comparison, the most recent examples of new nuclear projects in the west have been plagued by budget overruns and deadlines repeatedly pushed years into the future.
Huge amounts of new solar/solar+batteries come online every year: it's a boring, proven investment at this point and actively benefiting from the learning curve given the rapid cadence and relatively short timelines for new construction. So your suggestion to give France a huge amount of money for nuclear over renewables, in the hopes that new plants could come online in 5-10 years (likely getting later pushed to 15+ years with individual projects scaled down/cancelled) seems driven more by a sentimental attachment to nuclear than objective weighing of pros/cons.
I get it, I'm a 90s kid and thought nuclear was the absolute coolest thing ever, staring at pictures of glowing pools while growing up and amazed by the idea of entire cities powered by a few semi-trucks worth of rocks. And I do regret that we missed the opportunity to take full advantage of its potential during its heyday. But technology is always changing and with every passing year it becomes increasingly hard to justify new nuclear construction against solar + batteries, both because of raw cost per MW and well known weaknesses not shared by solar.
I'm speaking of total cost of ownsership, current renewables, new and old, needs subsidy (or market distortion) to operatenow without it they would be non viable economically. There is nothing romantic about my defense of nuclear. All PR around renewables is mostly propaganda, yes it works, yes marginal cost of production is nearly 0 but not 0, so you still need revenues, but the most important thing is not raw volume of production it is stability of production to be able to secure production contracts and no storage technology (not event pumped hydro storage) can provide the volume of storage needed to stabilize the grid of a sufficiently big grid like europe, not today and not for a long time.
I'm not even speaking about the transport network overhaul needed to integrate so much distributed and uneven production, it's humongous cost still non budgeted by most countries (see the drama about power lines between spain and france), a lot more than the price of 20 new nuclear reactors (want to move 20Gw of intermittent PV power from spain to poland ? good luck).
60% of the newly installed PV are from China and Europe, both zone with an hugely distorted energy market, for different reasons. Europe is victim of Germany political choice to abandon nuclear power and over reaction to climate change (compared to the rest of the world), all their neighbors are angry at them. And China is edging geopolitical risk of being cut of from oil by over-investing in independent energy generation. Japan historically did the same (why did the japan economy not collapse after Fukushima and nearly stopping all their nuclear reactors ? France would have collapsed in the same situation. It did not collapse because knowing they are an island and so cannot rely on neighbors, they had double the needed production as thermal electric power generation, that's why, same situation for Great Britain but they mainly rely on power links to France and Benelux). If PV was such a cheap/easily deployable/marvel technology you would see more development from under-developped countries like in Africa or South-America, or from isolated developed countries like Japan; it's not the case, much come from already highly developed economic zone (EU and China, but not the USA, for contrarian ideological reason, see Trump/Republican/BigOil) which would have no need for it if raw economic calculus was applied (Gernamy would still have nuclear power, Italy too, and the grid would have been developed before deploying new power generation everywhere).
If you are right why is Italy (which does not have the installed industrial migth around nuclear of France) is intending to create new nuclear power generation if PV/wind are ideal ? Are they stupid ?
> What this means is that nuclear does pretty well in a market with high volatility, because its fuel cost is negligible so it can sell for $0.04/kWh when other supply is available and $1/kWh when it isn't, and end up at a viable average. Meanwhile solar never gets the $1/kWh because the reason the price is that high then is that the sun is down and the batteries are low
Variability and fuel costs have nothing to do with why nuclear is a bad idea. The problem why nuclear is expensive is that all the cost comes from capex, which is huge in comparison to all the other sources (which is also the reason why trying to quickly bring down emissions with nuclear is so fraud). But because they are not variable, nuclear has to accept the price which is set by other sources.
This is actually illustrated by Denmark. They are a net importer of electricity in terms of kWh, but a net exporter in Dollar amounts. In other words their energy mix allows them to export when prices are high and import when prices are low.
Battery at a coal plant also allows it to operate at less variable output which is more efficient. Modern plants can throttle more than the old ones, but even with them a battery to smooth the load curve make sense economically to use less coal.
$1/kWh is ludicrously expensive. It's only hit that level for a handful of hours here in Denmark across the last decade. Most years the most expensive hour doesn't even clear $.70/kWh and it doesn't stay at that level for long. In the past year the spot price only cleared $.50/kWh in 24 individual hours and the longest stretch was 4 hours. Most days the price doesn't even hit $.30/kWh during the evening peak. So there isn't really that much opportunity to make up for the low prices the rest of the time.
> Except turning off when prices are too low for too long
Even that is unlikely. Most nuclear power plants operate with a "strike price": they negotiate a fixed price, and the government makes up the difference between that fixed price and the actual market price.
For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK has negotiated a strike price of about €160/MWh. When the market trades at €100/MWh, the taxpayers will pay them an additional €60/MWh for every unit they produce. To make it even worse: the contract is for every unit they could produce. If the reactor is technically able to generate power but the grid operator, for whatever reason, decides to source it elsewhere, the taxpayers are still on the hook for €160/MWh for every MWh the reactor could've generated but didn't.
The result of this is that reactors aren't turned off when the prices go low and will always be the last to get throttled down. Low grid demand? The expensive reactor will keep running at full blast, it'll be the dirt-cheap solar which gets turned off.
This is why building new nuclear is such a horrible idea from an economic perspective: you are essentially locking in those high power prices for the next ~60 years, no matter what happens. Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
> Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
Guess you just explained how one investor was convinced: the government.
Why? Because governments don't think in quarterly reports and short term profits, but also have to make strategic investments in stability. Ignoring the existence of baseload power needs is classical fallacy of "solar-pilled" westerners with the luxury of having 24/7 power from sources they are willing to ignore. I'm saying this with solar panels on top the house I'm living, and charging an electric car from them.
Solar and wind are not a panacea, and batteries won't solve all power needs, it is the same mindset as outsourcing polluting and humanely taxing industries to China or the third world and acting if we solved environmental or ethics problems, because we can now conveniently nott see them.
If we stop our industry, and civil infrastructure for the night, sure, no need for baseload, just some batteries... wish nobody wants to make a tea, make food, smelt aluminum at night...
>governments don't think in quarterly reports and short term profits, but also have to make strategic investments in stability
Looking at the United States government since the end of the Cold War I don't see a lot of "strategic investments in stability" but rather a lot of technically legal bribery to enable short term profits.
It is still intermittent, not available in such an amount everywhere, also when we take out insane amounts of energy from wind, weather patterns might be effected. Just because we ignored the global effects of mass-deployment of fossil fuel usage,m and are seeing the effects of "negligible amounts" of CO2 released, why should we ignore the effects of other antropocenic effects?
I MADE IT UP, just like you "citing" your earlier HN post :)
Once again, you ignore that if you would make such insane amount of demand, supply couldn't keep up, and the price would definitely be effected.
Energy needs to be transported, stored. You need to solve winter heating, and energy needs of heavy industry, lot of which cannot be intermittently turned on/off and needing insane amounts of energy. Oh, I'm wrong, you can luckily ignore that, as that has been already closed down to the current energy strategy based on your single-minded approach, so we don't need to solve such demand, when it magically disappears. As long as the coffee machines and the macbooks can be powered we are all well.
Also it is not insane amount? For half a year's GDP Hungary gets a nuclear power plant that can power the 30% of the country's energy needs for ~60 years (plus some fuel cost)...
A lesson being learnt in the Middle East and Eastern Europe right now is that any form of highly centralised energy generation (or energy processing) is hugely risky during a war. It's an Achilles' heel that makes modern economies hugely vulnerable when attacked, even by a mid-power like Iran, let alone a super power.
Solar and wind have been branded as unreliable by propogandists working for billionaire fossil fuel magnates, oil sheiks, and oligarchs.
The converse is true: distributed power generation and storage is incredibly robust and can easily meet the needs of our civilization even under active attack.
If you want long term thinking, if you want robustness over short term profits, then solar + wind + batteries are you answer.
No super power can blockade the sun and wind.
No super power can blow up every rooftop panel without also nuking entire cities.
That’s for new nuclear. Existing nuclear reactors operate on the whim of the markets.
For that we have energy futures, or just bidding negative, if you don’t want to turn off. But anyone buying the electricity will ask themselves why they should pay a premium for nuclear electricity at the height of summer when the continent is flooded with solar
Here’s an article in Swedish how a reactor was turned off for about a week due to consistently low prices. While another reactor at the same plant was already having maintenance done.
This is similar to how wind and solar actually work, except CfD payments are taken from consumers directly rather than indirectly through taxes. Price at £5 in summer - wind still gets £90. Wholesale price in UK has little relation to actual cost.
> Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
yes, if magic unlimited free power arrives nuclear will turn out useless
if it will not, then it provides some stability to energy grid and ensures that low polluting, resilient source of power exists
somehow I think that risk of magic unlimited free power appearing is low - and if it appears, then costs of contracted power will be now negligible
personally I prefer to pay a bit more for reduced risk of blackouts
The problem with nuclear is that their daily throttling capacity is low leading to those minimal price contracts. So it makes sense to pair nuclear with batteries as coal plants in US started to do. With that having nuclear as a base load during winter or prolonged bad weather would still make sense.
Storage is still expensive. But if there is enough storage to cover the demand for couple hours then it can also be used to store excessive energy from nuclear making throttling down the reactor output much smoother. In few years when the storage will be cheap enough to last the whole night it will kill nuclear, but while the capacity is low why not to use it to make running nuclear more efficient.
The problem is not smoothing demand for a couple of hours, the problem is that you have excess production most of the year but need reserve capacity for two weeks without sun or wind during peak demand in winter.
In 10 years when the batteries will cover 24 hours of demand to cover few weeks without sun and wind nuclear will be too expensive as reactors requires maintenance even when they do not work. Coal will be vastly cheaper beating even natural gas as one can store coal in bulk.
But right now we do not have excessive capacity and smoothing the curve for nuclear allows to burn less coal and natural gas. Essentially right now batteries are killing peaker natural gas plants, not nuclear or coal.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.