Big picture is that theyre not just cheaper but 5x cheaper.
In fact it's so much cheaper that it's even more economic to use solar/wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that to generate electricity.
Never mind all of the cheaper short term storage options (pumped storage, batteries).
And this doesnt even account for the storage nuclear power would need (it's even less economic to use it for load following) or the need for taxpayer indemnification against catastrophe cleanup costs.
It's not done at scale because we don't actually have that much spare renewable energy capacity. Whenever renewables power over 90% of current usage on one particular day anywhere it tends to hit the news.
Pretty much every MWh generated by green energy these days is just a MWh of natural gas extracted from the earth that is not burned. This actually means that while we use as much natural gas as we do that the economics of nuclear power are even worse by comparison.
The above study is a hypothetical solution to solar and wind routinely overproducing what batteries and pumped storage can keep up with. Even then it probably wouldn't make economic sense until natural gas extraction gets hit with import or carbon taxes. Just because it's cheaper than nuclear power that doesn't make it cheap.
No one will do this at scale until we stop burning fossil gas.
But as a technology it exists. The early outputs will be for things that can't be replaced with cheap renewable generated electricity, like e-fuels for spacecraft, which Tesla is doing in Texas.
Ah. Those fights I mostly put in the same category as "fights with NIMBYs over building new 8-track factories", "fights with NIMBYs over digging the Mississippi-Yukon shipping canal", etc.
(Vs. the NIMBYs are pretty much fine with 100%-carbon steel.)
...when they're available. Energy storage is another story, especially in places where there are no convenient hydropower facilities which can be "run in reverse" to store the output from said renewables as potential energy in the reservoirs. Maybe hydrogen storage can play a role here, maybe synthetic hydrocarbons can but for now there is no real solution for those still dark winter nights when the sun and wind are absent, necessitating the establishment of a backup power source which can cover the entire demand. Some of this can be achieved by importing power but where does that imported power come from? When it is dark here it is dark in neighbouring countries as well. There might be some wind power but that won't be enough to cover the needs. There may be hydropower available in neighbouring countries but how far can this power be exported before the losses outweigh the gains? Someone somewhere will need to build a backup power plant to cover the needs. That will most likely be a nuclear power plant since that is the only "carbon-free" source which can supply the needs. And then... there is a nuclear power plant which can supply power all day long since fuel costs are only a small part of the operational costs of nuclear power plants. Why only use it as backup power then?
A possible future scenario might be a base load infrastructure fed by reliable nuclear power plants and hydropower where possible ensuring power is always available. Renewables feeding into hydrogen storage or hydropower storage facilities to create hydrogen for those processes which can make use of it - e.g. steel production, synthetic fuel production etc. - and to keep the hydropower reservoirs filled. Domestic solar may play a role as well since it is feasible to use battery storage at a single-home scale, especially when used EV batteries start to become available at scale - for now it is just too expensive.
France transition from coal and oil to almost 100% nuclear in 20 years.
I'll wait here for any other country to do remotely as well with 'renewables'.
Lets see how Germany did after 20 years of their Green revolution ... mmhh yeah they would have done a lot better with nuclear.
Nuclear was the fastest scaling of any energy source ever discovered in the US. Faster then even oil. But then regulation changed and basically forced all plants to be totally re-engineered and new designs had to be made. At the same time coal became massively cheap and at that time the idea that a green source should have some kind of advantage was simply not viable.
Had nuclear given the same intensives as renewables, it would have been adopted in huge numbers. For example, a simple law that states all utilizes need some X% of nuclear would have totally changed the US. Renewables got that incentive, nuclear never did.
Many would argue that Germany saved human civilization by investing early in renewables.
Various other countries/places/people/organisations contributed too, but still, it's weird that something can be considered as so dramatically successful on such a scale and also such a complete failure by different groups.
I started this talking about nuclear policy only, but I wrote more on all the issues I have with German environmental policy. I'm gone lay out a case on why German is a negative player in the global movement against climate change.
Their removal of perfectly well functioning nuclear plants that could have run for another 50 years is nothing less then criminal, Ill talk more of that later. Their strong anti-nuclear position influenced the countries around them to also get ride of their perfectly well functioning nuclear plants.
Belgium for example turned of a perfectly well functioning plant in the middle of the energy crisis. Switzerland stopped investing in its own energy production because Germany would just produce so much cheap energy that can easily be imported, yeah great policy.
Even France had been persuaded that nuclear is bad and in 2015 they basically also followed Germany and tried to do a nuclear phase out far earlier then technically possible. All in blind trust that they can just replace 20+ nuclear plants with a few solar panels. They also forced the potential profit of the utility (from nuclear) to be reinvented into solar (not to mention forcing them to support fossil as well).
All nations around Germany have to breath the coal ash that Germany distributes over all off Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland and Eastern France. And have done so for decades and it has measurable effect on air quality and health in all those places. Somehow Switzerland (where I'm from) doesn't get coal ash from France, funny how that works.
France on the other hand has had clean energy for 40 years. Even home heating in France is usually done with electric. Its baffling to me that people see Germany as this great success, when their coal plants are still going strong and will be for another 10 years at least. Housing in Germany is still often oil and gas as well.
Anti-nuclear people love to just ignore the last 50 years of coal use in Germany and have for over 30 years insisted that nuclear is to expensive and slow, despite the evidence from France that you can change a economy to nuclear in 20 years and having paid very little for it. Don't believe people who claims France has high taxes because of nuclear, that is nonsense.
Its countries with the cleanest energy use the most nuclear, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Finland. Some countries with a lot of wind do decently well but also build a lot of gas capacity so it isn't as cheap as people claim.
611 gCO₂eq/kWh right now, France 28. And that is with all the idiotic anti-nuclear policy France has adopted in the last 20 years. Germany currently has almost 25 GW of coal on the network, and only 2.7 GW nuclear. At peak, Germany had enough nuclear capacity to replace all the coal use they have today, but they made the choice to shut down all nuclear before all coal, and this was widely supported by Greens and environmentalists.
How anybody can call this a success, because they invested in some solar panel production is beyond me. Germany played itself up as the environmental savoir nation in the international press, everybody around the world tried to 'be like Germany'. And yet, France had literally already achieved more then Germany decades earlier but of course that was never mentioned anywhere.
I'm genuinely baffled why people are so positive about Germany. They have been selling themselves as this green nation for decades. But reality this is not supported by any evidence what so ever.
They didn't do very much to get away from oil and gas heating. Their strongest industry is the car industry, and they are backwards in terms of the new green urbanism. Their high speed rail network is still patchy, sub-optimally designed and incredibly delay prone. 'Die Bahn' the German railway operator is generally regressive in its European policies, opposing many major European rail reforms. The Autobahn high speed is polluting. Their car makers are currently trying to prevent the adoption of laws EU laws that push EVs.
They had international obligation and agreements to increase cargo rail transport North-South in Europe. A real all electric rail cargo highway, from North Sea ports all the way to Italy. Switzerland build the longest rail tunnel in the world and everything else. Even f*ing Italy build its part of this project. Germany, mmmhh, maybe they will do it next decade. Well I guess at least the Autobahn will be used for more diesel trucks instead, thanks Germany.
I can't think of a single area of environmental policy where Germany is actually leading. Germany is everything that is bad with the environmental policy. Its a success of marketing over results. 3rd world nations around the world should not look to Germany, they should look to France (in the 70/80, not so much lately) for electricity, to Netherlands for urban policy, Switzerland for public transport.
Remember that Greens parties all around the world got their start by protesting against nuclear. Even though it's a completely idiotic position to hold today it's a legacy of a time where it was thought to be more dangerous than coal.
Unfortunately they can't let that legacy go in the face of new evidence so they still campaign as hard as ever against nuclear which has was less vested interests protecting it than coal and thus it falls first.
Though they generally need much more power storage/distribution grid construction per GW, to actually deliver a reliable supply to users.
Then you get to countries where the NIMBYs fight tooth & nail over even tiny grid construction projects...