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Thank you for injecting some great numbers! One minor quibble though, as offshore construction procedures improve, and get cheaper, it looks as though more sites are becoming "easy." And in the US, off-shore wind construction hasn't even really begun. Nuclear is also similarly "non-dispatchable" when compared to wind; nuclear has to be run at maximum capacity in order to get to those numbers, just as wind's energy has to be used to get to its numbers, and neither of these follows the demand. So both nuclear and wind require other dispatchable resources. Though it's gas plants at the moment, it seems very likely that battery storage will take over quite soon from gas plants. In many markets, peaker plants are already more expensive than battery storage. As batteries get cheaper, and more technologies (like flow batteries) mature, gas's days are numbered (except perhaps for combined-cycle gas turbines). I also can't share your optimism about nuclear construction costs going down. The numbers you are citing already are best-case scenarios, of well-managed projects without huge cost overruns like what happens in the US. The promise of the AP1000 reactors which were just abandoned in South Carolina was that it was a modular, consistent design, implemented around the world. The cost savings for that have not materialized. Meanwhile, the tech curves for wind, solar, and storage technologies have had more than a decade of proof of declining costs. Even in "modular and reusable" designs, every nuclear plant seems to be a one-off, due to the massive scale. |
> One minor quibble though, as offshore construction procedures improve, and get cheaper, it looks as though more sites are becoming "easy." And in the US, off-shore wind construction hasn't even really begun.
Offshore construction procedures aren't going to improve by a ton. There is half a century of intense offshore experience in the oil sector, and two decades of experience building a lot of off shore wind. Even with that, prices has stabilised at a very high level. Yes, there is low-hanging fruit in the US, that is correct, but the total potential (miles of coast) is very limited.
> Nuclear is also similarly "non-dispatchable" when compared to wind
Strictly speaking, yes, but it's non-dispatchable in the opposite direction, if you will. It's much, much more efficient to have nuclear covering the base load in the grid, and then having some gas to deal with peak loads, whereas for wind or solar, you need alternative sources to cover nearly the whole installed capacity (a cold, cloudy day with little wind). But yes, if you were to get to 100% nuclear, you'd need a good (if smaller) storage solution, as with wind and solar.
> The numbers you are citing already are best-case scenarios, of well-managed projects
Both Olkiluoto and Hinkley Point C have famously and massively overrun their initial estimates. Optimistic numbers would be those for, say, South Korea or China.
> without huge cost overruns like what happens in the US.
That's going to be true (or solved) for any large, complex project, whether wind, solar or nuclear.