[frafra]

Cost != price/value. You can produce energy cheaply at noon, but it has little value compared to electricity produced at 18:00. The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly. You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas. There are a lot of factors to keep into account, and the cost of electricity production is often a minor one, when considering the total price.

[ben_w]

> You can produce energy cheaply at noon, but it has little value compared to electricity produced at 18:00

Batteries literally solve this problem more cheaply than nuclear.

And given the speed with which people have actually been building both reactors and batteries, this specific issue is also being solved with batteries faster than with nuclear, too.

> The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly.

What's needed for the grid is also less than needed just for fully electrifying cars.

> You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas.

There's a single grid connecting bits of Canada with bits of Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection

Pertinently to this case, all of Ukraine is south of me (I'm in Berlin), and both Ukraine and Berlin are on the same grid as Spain and Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

[frafra]

[citation needed]

Lazard 2024, CAISO scenario: nuclear is cheaper compared to go with renewables + batteries (max 4 hours). It also does not take into account integration costs, such improving network connectivity.

It is quite ironic, because European Nordic countries do not want to build more network because of the crazy electricity spot prices that Germany has because of renewables. I live in Norway and no-one wants to further connect their electricity network to Germany, and the Swedish government blocked the construction of new connections. When Germany needs electricity, people in Oslo start to pay electricity even hundreds of times more, and when Germany has too much power from renewables, the energy price goes below zero, which means that German taxpayers are paying people from other countries to buy their discounted low value electricity, damaging the other producers. It is a terrible system, and it will only get worse without a good base load or accumulators that are not realistic for the foreseeable future. If Germany had a stable electricity production with renewables+nuclear, it would be beneficial to strength the network, which would indeed be beneficial to renewables.

If there is a place which clearly show how the fight against nuclear caused damaged is Germany: ~700 b€ between investments and subsidies to renewables, has very high emissions in the energy sector, while being dependent on Russian gas (costed ~1500 b€ in the last years) and France export of nuclear energy, high and unstable energy prices, that contributed to an industrial crisis that made France more attractive (where electricity is cheap and stable), while still failing at reaching climate targets.

The alternative would have been to keep the existing reactors open, build new ones, for a grand total of ~36 b€.

Source: doi.org/10.1080/14786451.2024.2355642

The belief that renewables+batteries alone are the only solution (even in hard to abate sectors) is not supported by real world data, nor by simulations. IPCC scenarios clearly shows that there is the need of a nuclear+renewable mix to meet the climate targets. The report from JRC recommends the same.

Historically, German citizens have chosen to be reliant on fossil fuels and highly subsidized electricity to not use nuclear energy. I just hope that at Germany will stop blocking nuclear at the EU level if other countries have different opinions on that and rather prefer not to follow the demise of the German energy policy.

[EasyMark]

Why not mention the USA when discussing the Western region electric grid?

[ben_w]

I don't understand your question.

Are there people who don't know the USA fills the 2000 km gap between famously snowy Canada and famously sunny Mexico?