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>So you have to build new baseload capacity... No, you don't. The coal plant in another Alliant Energy area has been around since roughly 1900? or so. It's been updated several times. Never was there a need to rebuild from scratch any coal plant. (This is Madison Wi btw.) Now we stopped using coal there in 2011, (all gas now). But the point is, all the renovations are much cheaper than building a nuclear plant. Utilities around here, (the midwest), are run by old, stodgy, conservative guys who are generally not prone to rash action. There are very few executives around here who are going to build entirely new plants because the machinery in the old one has reached its end of service life. They are going to replace the machinery, at a fraction of the cost. I don't think executives in other parts of the nation are all that different in this regard. Now all that said, even if they did completely tear down and rebuild their plants, which they wouldn't, but even if they did, it would still be cheaper than building a nuclear plant. So the coal plants are fine. And as I mentioned elsewhere, whatever you use to fill gaps will be a transitional technology. Wind turbines will become more efficient. (Work at lower windspeeds.) Pumped hydro storage will be built in new and innovative ways. What will fill the gaps in 2069 will bear little resemblance to what is filling the gaps in 2019. Because the new methods will likely be not only more clean, but much cheaper to boot. And incidentally, >You can't say that electricity from renewables is cheap without accounting for the cost of that standby capacity renewables require... the 2 cents per kWh people see on their bill does factor in every source in the dispatch stack. |
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Running existing coal and nuclear generation appears to be cheap (2nd chart), but new generation appears to be much more expensive (1st chart). The cost of Solar + Storage is low and dropping, and already beats the cost of new nuclear plants (4th chart).
BTW, I grew up on the east side of Madison, Cheers.