Solar is cheaper than nuclear power, faster to build, easier to deploy, easier to scale up and extend. Downside is obviously that one needs storage. But nuclear power is also not really suited for load following.
> But nuclear power is also not really suited for load following.
This is mostly a myth. The actual reason nuclear powerplants run at max power all the time is that nuclear fuel is very cheap compared to operating costs, therefore it is more economical to follow load variations on the other plants.
What is true is there is little expertise in load following with nuclear powerplants because it is uncommon. Areva has been developing and exporting ALFC (Advanced Load Following Control) technology for automated load-following operations.
There are safety-related limits to this flexibility: one cannot at will reduce/augment the "power" (thermal) delivered by a reactor. After each small set of tweaks a somewhat durable stable state (or a complete shutdown) must be respected. In the proposed SFEN document it corresponds to the mentions "palier d’au moins deux heures" (at least 2 hours between tweaks) and "deux fois par jour" (max two tweaking sequences per day).
The real (observed and useful) ability to follow load at a useful extent is offered by the float (tens of reactors simultaneously active => more flexibility towards tweaking limitations).
At this game nothing beats a gas turbine (hydraulic dams are serious contenders).
This is a known trade off between safety and convenience. Arguably we have enough expertise/data to move the set-point toward convenience with better automation.
I am not saying load following isn’t possible, I was trying to say nuclear isn’t ideal for load following. It’s definitely not comparable to a gas turbine.
Then, why aren't you applying the same logic to solar and wind? They are less than ideal for load following. Of course, there are technological solutions (energy storage), but I just pointed out that there are technological solutions for nuclear load following as well, and they are already there, far simpler, cheaper, don't require a huge new supply chain, ...
I think the issue with load following is that as most of the costs of nuclear are fixed costs, it increases the cost per unit of energy in proportion to the amount you "turn down" the output. As nuclear is already struggling to be cost competitive with solar+wind + storage, that makes it hard to justify.
Cost per unit of energy is talked about a lot, but it's not that relevant, though. What people buy is usually guarantees to be able to provide. There are different types of contract (peak power vs base load, futures vs. forwards, spot vs. month- or year-ahead contracts), but overall, what people buy is a guarantee that they will get power when they need it. Whether they actually use it or not is not as relevant from the contract's pov.
The ability to load-follow is unrelated to energy price, but to grid stability. Regardless of what contract exists between a provider and a consumer, there is a third party, the grid operator, who can ask the generating parties to adapt their production to actual consumption.
> solar+wind + storage
Simply doesn't exist at scale currently. We don't really have good estimates of what a storage-balanced grid costs at scale, and we don't have the industrial bandwidth to build storage at scale with the current technologies.
To give you a back-of-the-envelope calculation, current estimates are that european countries relying on wind/solar would need 8 days worth of batteries to avoid most of negative-generation events. For a country like Germany which consumes 1.5TWh a day on average, that would be more than many thousand units of the large battery Tesla built in Australia.
"the planned development around the North Sea means 100 GW (100 large power stations) would need to be turned on or off to balance out changes in wind power production when the weather changes. With a more cooperatively designed system, this could be reduced to just 20 GW across the continent.". Add solar, biomass... and storage, including a smartgrid enabling (for example) V2G:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid , then green hydrogen (boosting production units' output and reducing the amount of electric electricity needed).
We don't have production facilities for that much clean hydrogen either (about 350.000 tons would be needed for 8 days' worth of Germany's needs. World production of green hydrogen was about 1 million tons between 2015 and 2018[1]).
As I said earlier, the theory may exist, but solving scaling problems isn't trivial, and is going to take some time.
And how much ground you need to cover to have equivalent of an average nuclear power plant? And yes, one needs storage, and viable storage technology is not even on the horizon.
It is so sad and so bad for our planet that for instance Germany decided to spend billions of billions on renewable energy plants while spending the same amount on nuclear power plant would made Germany zero emission economy.
That statement definitely needs some numbers to check out, it's a claim that needs backing up. The full nuclear power "pipeline" isn't CO2-neutral either and depends on resources we'll eventually run out of, probably within the next hundred years, maybe sooner [1].
I also don't think that "but what about space requirements" is an argument with enough weight to dismiss the long list of advantages given by the GP. We have so much unused space on roofs. We could get rid of a few parking lots if you're concerned for ground.
We don't even need to get rid of parking lots, we can build roofs with panels over them, which will help shade cars and even minimally lower co2 emissions from running car ac units of people who get back to cars.
Viable storage is already here. It's called green hydrogen or hydrogen-from-seawater, and pilot plants are coming online or being built right now.
The storage is limited only by tank size, and we already know how to store and use large quantities of hydrogen. The hydrogen produced from the process can be pumped elsewhere by pipeline and used as fuel for gas turbines to balance the grid, or combined with carbon dioxide or nitrogen from the atmosphere to produce zero net carbon methane and ammonia for use as denser fuel sources, or feedstock for industrial processes. You can even make zero net carbon synthetic jet fuel this way.
Hydrogen is an extremely inefficient energy storage medium. We don't have massive amounts of energy to just waste away in an inefficient system. If we did, green hydrogen would have been chewing away at current hydrogen production for industrial usage (95% gray hydrogen).
You're of course free to believe that countries will build 3 times the capacity of their energy production to compensate for that inefficiency.
To give an idea of the order of magnitude of inefficiency :
* Currently a grid => hydrogen => grid round trip is 40-45% efficient.
* A grid => battery => grid round trip is 90-95% efficient.
You can recover 2x more energy by NOT using hydrogen. There is no competition. Unless the lost energy from green hydrogen production can be recovered somehow (co-generation)...
Green hydrogen is produced thanks to electricity produced by renewables (wind, solar...) when it is useless (not immediately consumed). It's a "use it or lose it" situation: using it, even at a loss, seems sound.
Many applications (transportation, industry...) can use it as such, without any way from hydrogen to electricity, and more and more probably will.
I have no doubt that batteries will also form part of the grid energy storage solution. But they don't scale as well as hydrogen and have higher maintenance costs and replacement rates.
Given how cheap renewables are becoming, yes, countries will absolutely build overcapacity.
But we won't need 3 times the amount - hydrogen will only be used to balance the grid. Most grid energy will come direct from renewables. Most of Europe would only need about 20 days' worth of hydrogen as insurance against a lack of wind or sun.
Green hydrogen has only become viable to replace hydrogen-from-fossils within the last few years as the cost of renewable energy has plummeted. That drop in renewable energy costs is what has changed recently and what has taken so many people by surprise.
> spending the same amount on nuclear power plant would made Germany zero emission economy.
Power generation is only a small part of Germany's emissions. Germany would still be a large CO2 source with full nuclear power generation, just like France is because of transportation, food, heating, industry, etc.
Permissions (regulatory) is also easier. Not sure how it is in India but I know that investors here opted for solar/wind/water a few times because it would take too long and is too unsure if it would succeed. Mind you, that was closer to Fukushima and Germany was shouting loud against nuclear.
This is mostly a myth. The actual reason nuclear powerplants run at max power all the time is that nuclear fuel is very cheap compared to operating costs, therefore it is more economical to follow load variations on the other plants.
Here is an example of high-amplitude and relatively high-speed variation (10GW over a few hours) : https://twitter.com/TristanKamin/status/1102625880520699911
What is true is there is little expertise in load following with nuclear powerplants because it is uncommon. Areva has been developing and exporting ALFC (Advanced Load Following Control) technology for automated load-following operations.
https://new.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power...
All in all, load following with nuclear is a technologically much easier problem to solve than high-scale energy storage.