| >Is it cheaper than demand shaping/wind/solar/grid-scale batteries though? That's the real question. Hmm, I think one should also add other factors. Space Requirements for Wind and solar. To generate the same amount of energy as a nuclear power plant a lot of space is needed for Wind and Solar. Resources to Produce Batteries, Solar Panels and Wind mills. Battery production requires a fuck ton of water. With impeding Water shortages this is suboptimal. How many Solar Panels and Wind mills can we produce daily?
Not just construction and installation on site, but also mineral mining for the Solar panels.
And then how many factories can produce these, and can that be scaled up?
How many construction workers are there and how many on site installation can be completed. We need 1200 wind turbines to replace an 30year old nuclear power plant. Windturbine = 3mW, Nuclear power plant = 1.2GW Just to cover our current demand of electrical energy we need a ton of wind turbines and solar panels. Than add to that every other industry that needs to switch to electricity, Transportation, Chemical Industry, Steel Industry, heating etc. This would quintuple our electrical energy consumption. |
Hornsea two provides as much as a nuclear plant, with vastly lower cost and built about 15x faster. It's 165 x 8 MW turbines.
It was planned, executed, built and brought online before Hinkley point C even laid the first brick at ~45% of the cost and a load factor of about 65% (to nuclears 80) due to the greater reliability of wind with large turbines.
>mineral mining for the Solar panels
You mean going to the beach?