[idiotsecant]

Nuke is 'reliable' in a much more important way - the plant outages are scheduled and the generation is scheduled. You can (and do) bet the health of the grid on nuke having the output you plan when you plan for it to be there. This is referred to in generation industry jargon as 'dispatchable' power. This makes a modern zero-sum storageless grid work. Solar is non-dispatchable. You can estimate what power output will be available, you can over-provision generation and store it in expensive batteries, but you simply can not rely on it being there and expect the grid to stay online.

It turns out that regular plant maintenance outages aren't particularly important compared to not being able to properly plan generation.

[Arnt]

Of course you can decide that. That's what the French did before the price peak in 2016. The thing is that only some of the decisions involved plannable dates.

They decided that when problems were discovered such that redundant security mechanisms weren't, then the problems should be fixed, with time limits. They decided what kind of problems should require fixes within set time limits, and they decided what those time limits should be.

And they decided that some reactors should be taken down for planned maintenance in specific periods.

When problems were discovered at inoppportune moments, the decisions combined to leave them with too few operational reactors.

[pydry]

Nuclear plants are "dispatchable" in the same way wind farms are "dispatchable" - you can just not feed as much of the power you are creating into the grid.

Gas and hydro are actually dispatchable. You can dial down the power you are using and actually use it later.

[dragontamer]

You can dispatch nuclear power plants.

Its just that their high costs make that an uneconomical decision. Nuclear fuel is damn near free, so why would you ever want to turn it off unnecessarily? Only if the price of electricity reaches into negative-territory is it economically viable to turn off a nuclear power plant.

Same thing with wind / solar. As long as the price of electricity is positive, there's no point in turning them off.

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Now think about coal / natural gas. The price of fuel in these cases dominate. Which means its economically viable to turn off when the price of electricity drops (even if its still above $0).

[pydry]

Nuclear fuel is not free but it is cheap, especially compared to the eye watering capital costs of nuclear power.

It is helpful to turn off power production to stabilize the grid. It's not always about production costs. This is why nuclear plants and wind turbines sometimes just "waste" excess energy.

[liketochill]

False. You can’t make more power out of a wind farm than there is wind.

[Arnt]

Of course. But also not much less. If you have a 50-unit wind farm you'll have a lot of problems that reduce your output to 98% of what the wind allows until you can fix them. Not so many that reduce output to 0% of what the wind allows.

[pydry]

Did I say you could?

[liketochill]

Dispatchable means you can turn it on and turn it up when you want to.

[pydry]

That was my point.

[liketochill]

Colour me confused, a nuclear power plant the operators can choose how much power they make every day and generally choose as much as possible, a wind farm they can set a limit for the maximum power generated but the actual power generated could be anywhere from zero to the set maximum depending on the wind speed.

nuclear is more often considered baseload generation as opposed to dispatchable but wind is not baseload or dispatchable since it is not possible to control the wind speed.