[wtfmcgrill]

You are my hero, been telling this at clouds for years after I took a power engineering course. Solar and wind are cheaper until you consider storage and grid reliability. Grid storage battery can be used for peaker/frequency regulation regardless of what you used to charge them full stop.

[rstuart4133]

> Solar and wind are cheaper until you consider storage and grid reliability.

Counter example. South Australia hit 80% of it's electricity production from renewables in the last two quarters:

    https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-enjoys-80-1-pct-wind-and-solar-share-in-blackout-free-summer/

Power prices are now cheaper then before renewables were took over:

    https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_pack.pdf

Grid reliability remains about the same as everywhere else:

    https://reneweconomy.com.au/five-years-after-blackout-south-australia-now-only-state-with-no-supply-shortfalls/

[pydry]

They're five times cheaper when you dont take storage into account. Theyre cheaper after you consider storage too.

Indeed, if you use solar and wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that for electricity (a process that is ~40% efficient) it's still cheaper.

https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

This means that even on the darkest most windless winter days when the grid has to eat into long term seasonal storage, solar and wind energy is currently still cheaper than an MWh of nuclear power is on the sunniest, windiest days.

[chii]

I too, am pro-grid scale solar (and wind). However, solar and wind require both land, or at least suitable locations. It aint compact. The decision to do solar might be constrained by population centers - you can't build it too far away, but can't be too close; there may not be such an available space.

Nuclear is compact, and can really be built anywhere (may be consider earthquakes and don't build near tsunami zones). Therefore, a country that does not have suitable solar or win terrain would necessarily have to consider nuclear. A place like South Korea.

But of course, countries like australia (and to some extend the USA, and many other countries that's not in europe) would have the land, and it's just political and financial reasons that these power sources aren't more invested in.

[Schroedingersat]

> Nuclear is compact, and can really be built anywhere (may be consider earthquakes and don't build near tsunami zones). Therefore, a country that does not have suitable solar or win terrain would necessarily have to consider nuclear.

It really isn't if mining is expanded. Low yield mines (the only kind left for new resource) produce tens of watts per m^2

It has also shown no evidence of being viable without a river, coastline or lake. It needs specific geological and geographic features and it can't be too close to population centers or important watersheds.

Contrast with wind where the land right up to the base of the tower can be used and solar where the land under the panels can be more productive than it would without partial shade (effectively a negative land use).

Not that the quantity of land matters because for solar it's over 20W/m^2 and usually over 50W/m^2 -- more land is reserved for the average US car to park in than required to power someone's life.

[pydry]

It doesn't monopolize that land though. There is already a vast amount of farmland, for instance, which is hosting wind and solar and operating about as efficiently as before.

In theory nuclear power being compact would serve it well for small countries without a lot of space (e.g. Singapore), but because of the risks they want nothing to do with it.

South Korea builds nuclear power for the same reason as Iran and Sweden: it's part of their national strategy to be able to quickly develop nukes. It's not about economics.

[zdragnar]

So you're advocating for a base load of natural gas power plants, with wind and solar supplementing them, which was my original point- that they only work as a supplement, rather than a replacement, for nuclear and fossil fuels.

Maybe nuclear isn't a great alternative to natural gas. I'm down with that. I'm not going to ignore the fact that wind and solar are at best complimentary, and that we can talk about pricing them without also talking about pricing in the base load that they're supplementing.

[pydry]

I'm advocating for solar+wind+batteries+pumped storage+windgas long term which provides supply matching demand cheaper than nuclear power.

Windgas (synthesized natural gas) is carbon neutral, for what it's worth. It's inefficient to make but stores for long periods very cheaply so it's good for when the pumped storage and batteries run dry - e.g. rare long spells of relatively dark/still weather.

Short term while grids are 60% natural gas powered with no need for baseload it makes even less sense to build nuclear instead of solar or wind. 5x more expensive and 5x-20x as long to build? Why?

[peterfirefly]

> Theyre cheaper after you consider storage too.

What's the price of the Ukraine war?