[Schroedingersat]

You can't use a report from 2015 citing data from 2010 as indicative of a technology that has dropped in cost 10-fold and nearly doubled capacity factor since then.

Additionally the overwhelming majority of that material is foundation and tower. Both of which can be reused by replacing the nacelle.

[mathiasgredal]

The Vestas V112-3MW from 2009 has a 42% capacity factor. I don’t know any modern wind turbines that has a capacity factor of 80%.

https://www.thewindpower.net/turbine_en_413_vestas_v112-3000...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humber_Gateway_Wind_Farm

[Schroedingersat]

And this makes the point. A 2009 model turbine is a huge improvement on a retrospective on past history of plants that had been running for some time in 2010

https://www.vestas.com/content/dam/vestas-com/global/en/sust...

A V112 has 40% lower materials per TWh (or ~30% for the lower wind configuration) than your report without considering modular foundations which would drop it by another factor of 3 or being able to reuse the foundation and tower at least once which would drop it by another 2.

On the other end you're not considering Uranium mining or enrichment facilities or waste storage or that the metals are all recyclable immediately rather than half of them being LLW or SLIW.

[mathiasgredal]

Average capacity factor is basically an irrelevant metric. What is more important is the lowest seasonal capacity factor, since seasonal power storage doesn’t make sense. For the UK this is 25% for offshore wind: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/bd2bb73a-ef25-4c4b...

This means that we need to overbuild wind by >200%, to have the necessary power year round.

Solar doesn’t work, since it is basically useless in the northern hemisphere during winter, and it needs a lot of battery storage during the night.

There is also a week in February where there is no wind, which will require green methane production and gas peakers(edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute)

Nuclear can work year round with load following using a design like the Natrium reactor. This design also uses a lot less concrete than traditional NPP’s.

[Schroedingersat]

Nice train you've got the goalposts on there.

The wind and solar capacity factors are anti-correlated.

There are areas in france where the december average is >2.6kWh/d. At 54kg/kWp a modern panel on a lightweight racking system gets this works out to 1800t/TWh and it's almost all glass you can build the same net wattage now for half the price and then use the money you save to replace in 30 years (or 50 if you take real world degradation rather than predicted). Having to recycle some glass once to decarbonize now ranther than in 20 years is a reasonable tradeoff for halving the costs. The gas plants are dirt cheap and that much solar would easily power enough electrolysis to fill your february gap during the 11 months of the year when it produces far more. The electrolysers will be needed in either case for ammonia, shipping, and SAF.

If we're invoking technology that doesn't exist and costs several times more, just use something that does exist and costs several times more like a CSP plant and an HVDC cable.

Additionally for the vast majority of the world which is in transmission range of somewhere arid, CSP is strictly cheaper than the easy part of a Natrium reactor.