They could always build more nuclear plants to fill additional demand. Again, non intermittent sources don't need supplemental sources of energy, as long as there's sufficient supply. By comparison, a country cannot possibly run their grid entirely with solar on account of intermittency.
I'd suggest reading people's comments in greater detail, before accusing people of lying.
So now you suggest that we should build peaking nuclear plants in an attempt at covering your previous blunder with pure insanity.
Lazard expects peakers to run at 10-15% capacity factor because you know, how often do we have cold spells in France or whatever other reason causes them to run? A couple of weeks a year at most. Lets say 15%.
Lets calculate what Hinkley Point C costs when running as a peaker. It has a CFD at $170/MWh for 30 years. Lets assume it runs at a 85% capacity factor and that $20/MWh are O&M costs.
153/0.15 + 20 = $1040/MWh
You want to solve the problem by forcing electricity costs on the consumers at double of the peak of the energy crisis.
All because you view the world in nuclear fanclub fantasy land glasses.
If you've already provisioned enough nuclear plants to meet peak energy demand, producing less energy has no marginal cost. Alternatively, you can just keep operating at full capacity, and give energy away for free and use it for energy-intensive tasks like desalination or arc furnaces. The idea that we'd build nuclear plants that only operate a few weeks per year is a strawman of your own construction.
You're right that nuclear is more expensive than continuing to burn fossil fuels. And the reality is nobody has a plan to build fossil fuel free grid based on wind and solar. Absent a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage, solar and wind will always have to be deployed in tandem with fossil fuels. If we're looking at actually eliminating carbon emissions, nuclear is the only viable option besides geographically limited sources like hydropower.
> They could always build more nuclear plants to fill additional demand.
And then
> If you've already provisioned enough nuclear plants to meet peak energy demand, producing less energy has no marginal cost.
If the magic tooth fairy comes with free nuclear plants... Nuclear cult member fantasy land.
So at what capacity factor will the entire fleet run at when built out to manage both outages and cold spells requiring 30 GW of fossil fuels to handle?
France currently run their fleet of 63 GW at a ~70% capacity factor. Add another 30 GW (lets call it 100% reliable when a cold spell hits) and the capacity factors vastly lower due to extremely low utilization factors of the last 30 GW.
You can spread out the lower of capacity factors across the entire fleet or just let the peakers bear them.
But in the end the results are the same because you still need to finance the your fleet now delivering a measly 45% capacity factor.
Lets translate a 45% capacity factor to Hinkley Point C numbers:
Now you are forcing the consumers to pay $355/MWh or 35.5 cents per kWh for all electricity delivered the whole year.
All you have done is take the ~$1000/MWh cost from 15% of the time and spread it out over the whole year.
Do you see the pure insanity of what you keep proposing now?
For the third time, I never said nuclear was cheaper than contuing to burn natural gas. It has the distinction of being the only non-intermittent source of carbon-free electricity besides geographically contrained sources like hydroelectricity and geothermal power. It is the only viable path to decarbonization for most countries.
What's the alternative to nuclear power for reaching a carbon-free grid? No doubt, your plan will assume a breakthrough in energy storage that delivers orders-of-magnitude more scale than existing solutions.
You said:
> Non-intermittent sources of energy don't need to be supplemented by alternative sources of energy.
Like I said the. The French grid would crash during cold spells if not supplemented with 30 GW of fossil fueled power production.