| > Hydro is a little different though. It requires a lot of land and the right geography in order to work. While I think there are more places where you can add hydro, I think it they are generally running out. It also doesn't help that a lot of well meaning, but IMO wrong ;), environmentalist really oppose hydro for the effects it has on the river critters. That sort of red tape makes gums up new deployments about as bad as new nuclear deployments are gummed up. Yah, I'm not really saying to add hydro-- there's few opportunities to do this. But lots of hydro installations are already suited to "peaker" use, where you draw from reservoir just when you need to, and many more can be adapted this way. (Really doing this effectively may require large capital costs to increase the amount of peak generation available from them, drawing down the reservoir more quickly). > Perhaps. You'd have to somehow incentivize some industrial businesses to participate in the grid smartly. For example, an electric smelter which only operates during overproduction periods. IDK, maybe the power companies get involved in the steal milling business. This already exists. You can get a big discount on your power if you are a big industrial customer and willing to be turned off with little notice. We need to extend this out to delaying house heat slightly, etc, electric car charging points, as you say. > the required cost of deploying that sort of equipment would be pretty high Ain't nothing compared to the capital cost of overprovisioning further or doing storage. That's what I'm saying: use nuclear as part of a series of things to limit the amount of wind overprovisioning needed. We're going to have extra power during the day most of the time. But the intermittency at night of wind alone is a big problem. It seems like burning some gas-- hopefully mostly biogas-- is part of the solution, along with leveraging hydroelectric to the maximum extent. As we add things like electric heating and electric cars charging, etc-- nuclear has a big opportunity to address this increase in base load (and can be effectively combined with smart grid on these uses). In the end, we cannot build out just wind fast enough, anyways, even if we ignore the overprovisioning required for availability. Might as well build out nuclear in parallel. |