What's the round-trip efficiency of such a system? There are multiple lossy conversions, you'd be doing well to hit 50% if the gas is simply burned to spin a turbine.
Solar and wind are already far cheaper than gas or nuclear plants, and they’re still getting cheaper while gas and nuclear are getting more expensive (although to be fair, gas has only recently gotten more expensive). In so far that the economics in favor of renewables+storage don’t work out yet factoring in conversion losses, it is all but inevitable that they will.
Nuclear is a lot cheaper than solar, it simply depends on the nuclear plant model. Russians are the world leaders regarding nuclear plants time to market and costs (4 years).
> Also, I wouldn’t put too much faith into Russian numbers for their nuclear projects.
It's not propaganda because we are talking about a free market here. Countries around the world buy nuclear reactors from Russia. They are by far the biggest exporter.
Russia is not needed though, China is very cost effective and their popular model is in fact American based. Their other popular model is a french derivative. Their secret sauce is to build refined second generation models with added safety instead of building 4th generation economic ineptia because of absurdly high safety bloat. The answer to how to make nuclear reactors costs effective is simple: 1) Do not fire all competent and trained nuclear engineers 2) Make nuclear reactors maximally secure, not absurdly secure.
It's of course not particularly great. You can make hydrogen at like 80% efficiency and use it at like 60% efficiency in a combined cycle plant. So 50% is probably in the right ballpark. Batteries are much more efficient, but efficiency is only weakly correlated with cost. I don't know the actual numbers, but from what I've heard hydrogen (or even methane) are the most economically promising storage options when you need weeks or months worth of backup.
Then there is wind power and other sources such as geothermal energy and Bio-gas Plants, which is are independant of day time.
And let's not forget the lower energy demand at night, the possibilities for supply based energy consumption, (green) gas imports from somewhere else.
Depends on the factory. Most production processes are multi-stage. Most multi-stage processes have differing energy needs across individual unit operations. You could easily schedule low energy, slow processes (testing, drying, settling, cooling, etc.) to evenings to better match power availability. This has the secondary benefit that people prefer to sleep at night. Normally you'd have to redesign the whole factory to facilitate such a process change, however.
10000% Nuclear. France just announced a massive Nuclear project, meanwhile in the USA, the NRC bankrupts every project with non-stop delays instead of timely constructive work with designers, builders, and investors.
The nuclear announcement makes nice headlines for nationalistic dreams. What they actually do tells the real story.
> France will also increase its solar power capacity tenfold by 2050 to more than 100 gigawatts (GW) and target building 50 offshore wind farms with a combined capacity of at least 40 GW.
So they are adding ~10 GW nuclear (6 * 1.6 GW) and at least 140 GW of renewables. Use any capacity factor you want but the numbers speak for themselves.
The real reason for this is likely continue have an industrial base for their naval submarine reactors by subsidizing a complementary civilian industry.
> The real reason for this is likely continue have an industrial base for their naval submarine reactors by subsidizing a complementary civilian industry.
Interesting, I've never read about that angle. Nuclear is a great complement to Wind/Solar as it provides a steady base load.
The thing is, they don't complement each other at all. They both compete for the same share of the market: the cheapest most inflexible power generation. Renewables win there and force nuclear plants to be more flexible.
Due to the extremely high fixed costs and lower marginal costs of nuclear plants they then have to make the money back in fewer hours, driving cost even higher.
The other issue is the costly steam turbine side. The reason gas won over coal is the efficiency and tiny footprint of gas turbines. Tack on a tiny steam side for the last percent of efficiency and you have a CCGT plant. Coal and nuclear share the same steam side, both have been dead ends since the 80s.
That is not true. They do not compete for the some market segment.
The problem is most renewables fall off before peak load subsides. That's why cheap energy storage would be a huge boon for transient renewables as they could keep providing energy after the sun is down and the wind has subsided.
When did France announce a massive nuclear project? The last news I heard was that they plan to build a couple of new nuclear power plants, but far from the numbers they'd need to maintain the current capacity as ageing plants go offline in the coming years.
That really depends what "up to" means and how big the "fleet of smaller reactors" is going to be. Announcing up to 14 today is very little when you have over fifty reactors to replace in the next two or three decades when you consider that building a reactor takes around fifteen years. Nuclear energy hopes are pinned on those small reactors, but afaik, none of them are ready for prime time today.
While France is aiming to significantly reduce the number of nuclear power plants they operate, building any nuclear power plants is seen as a good sign by the industry.
