[rhodozelia]

Who pays for the shadow generation system that we keep perfectly maintained and ready to generate 100% of system demand on the 5 days stretch of cloudy windless days? This cost has to be added to the cost of building a 100% solar/wind system.

Nobody is arguing the solar and wind power isn’t cheap, but the cost of power on those cloudy windless weeks is going to be real high to make having all that standby generation around. It’s the cost to achieve the same reliability and 99% carbon free that is expensive.

Money is imaginary and global warming isn’t so let’s just print some bonds or move some numbers around in some database and build it all! - an electrical power engineer

[pfdietz]

The cost will be there, but overall it looks like it will be cheaper than nuclear.

[rhodozelia]

In British Columbia they are building a 1000 MW hydro plant that is going to cost 10-12 billion. Similar story at muskrat falls in Labrador.

Large projects are just expensive now. Nuclear would be competitive with either of these hydro projects.

[pfdietz]

That hydro project doesn't sound competitive.

[rhodozelia]

I guess not, but when two or three projects come in at the 10 billion cad mark it’s a pretty good sign that’s our cost to build. Not necessarily unique to hydro - we might have high cost to build anything