[nicoburns]

But what we need is not baseline power, it’s load following power. And both nuclear and renewables struggle with this.

Nuclear can solve this by overbuilding and reducing power output at non-peak times. Renewables by overbuilding by and augmenting with storage. Both are proven technologies, both are expensive. I don’t really see that nuclear has an advantage here.

[dmitriid]

What storage? There's no storage that can hold enough power to offset times when renewables are not working.

Overbuilding renewables doesn't help with baseline either.

[nicoburns]

> Overbuilding renewables doesn't help with baseline either.

Yes it does. It means that at times when production is reduced (e.g. cloudy days or not-very-windy or only-windy-in-some-places days) then you can still generate enough power to cover baseline load.

> What storage? There's no storage that can hold enough power to offset times when renewables are not working.

What kind of timescales do you have in mind here. From what I've seen, 6 hours worth of storage would cover 95% of use cases here. Especially if we could be more aggressive about scheduling load around times with abundant generation. We'd still need a backup for the occasional times where you get a few days in row of low production, but this doesn't happen very often at all (every few years) so we could look to solutions like biofuels here, or simply adding extra storage for critical use cases and shutting everything else down.

[dmitriid]

> What kind of timescales do you have in mind here. From what I've seen, 6 hours worth of storage would cover 95% of use cases here.

Ah yes, the good old "640 k should be enough for everyone".

From November 2020 to January 2021 Stockholm region had less than one hour of sunlight. Yes. This is on top of the fact that in mid-December there's a total of 4 hours of daylight per day.

So, let's pretend Stockholm is 100% powered by renewables. So, to live through that Stockholm would need? Triple the amount of wind farms just in case? Or triple the amount of solar panels to "still generate baseload"? Or to hope that neighbors have excess power they can spare, and import that?

And don't forget: solar and wind are extremely ineffecient compared to almost anything else. It takes 630 square kilometers in an open sea to produce less power than the smallest operational nuclear plant in France (Hornsea Project One vs. Saint-Laurent Nuclear Power Station).

> We'd still need a backup for the occasional times where you get a few days in row of low production, but this doesn't happen very often at all

This happens literally all the time. There are both daily and seasonal fluctuations. And on top of that there is anything from storms and bad weather to maintenance and human errors.