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by Tuna-Fish 39 days ago
> Just for a moment, try to imagine how much wind, solar and battery storage can be bought with the money required to build just one regular nuclear power plant (gigawatt output).

Assuming the most expensive nuclear power plant in the world, assuming the solar is free and you are only paying for the batteries, assuming costs in line with the cheapest grid-scale battery storage in the world, about 6.5h worth of that nuclear plant's output.

That's on the right scale to power California with renewables alone! That's within sight. Anywhere less sunny, powering things with solar and batteries alone would still be very expensive.

1 comments

Hinkley Point C in the UK is costing £48bn at current prices, providing 3GW.

Building 3GW * 2 hours of battery storage at current prices is £1.75bn, so for the same money we get about 48 hours of storage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

https://www.lzyess.com/news/1571.html