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You're welcome :) > 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. |
Not quite, offshore wind construction is improving, perhaps because they are focusing on improving that rather than just repurposing oil tech.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/09/14/new-record-fo...
>That's going to be true (or solved) for any large, complex project, whether wind, solar or nuclear.
Wind and solar are far far far less complex than nuclear, and do not have similar cost overruns.