[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.

[pydry]

>a nuclear power plant the operators can choose how much power they make every day

No. They cant.

It takes 24-48 hours for them to ramp production up or down and this is both expensive and difficult. This is far too slow to be useful. Natgas takes ~7 seconds-minutes to go from 0-100% and it's cheap and easy. Same for batteries. Hydro is slower but still in the order of minutes/seconds. This IS useful.

When nuclear plants have claimed ramp up/down speeds quicker than that they are always still producing the same amount of energy at the same cost they are just wasting some of it.

The nuclear industry tries to blur these distinctions.

>but wind is not baseload or dispatchable since it is not possible to control the wind speed.

Wind can often pull the same "trick" nuclear does where if the grid only wants 100MW but it's producing 150MW it can just let 50MW go to waste.

This isnt really "dispatchable" either but sometimes wind energy advocates pull the same trick.