this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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That's not how renewables work. They don't produce electricity on demand (at least not solar and wind), their energy output is dependent on the weather. If there's no wind and no sun, they won't cover any demand spikes. Which is why baseload power like nuclear is pretty much useless in combination with renewables.
What is actually needed is flexible power that can be quickly adapted to the varying output from solar and wind. This is currently mostly done with natural gas, which we're trying to get away from. In the future, biomass, water and storage will cover that part, while demand response strategies will help reduce demand peaks during times of low energy production.
If there is no wind or sun, we're facing a global apocalypse. There's always wind or sun. You just need to capture it. Nuclear is not on demand either, most plants aren't designed to be. Nuclear is designed to be baseload energy, which, for decades, has fallen out of favour in lieu of more flexible doctrines. Octopus Energy is doing quite a bit of work with AI and energy demand, using incentives to control public energy consumption, which reduces the backup you would need for renewables. Also, that study I referenced, presumes about a 25% decrease in cost of nuclear. Again, best case scenario for nuclear.
No, we're facing nighttime. That happens literally every day.
So who goes around switching off the sun and turning off the wind?
You could actually use nuclear for stabilizing the grid. The reason no one does so is that you need to run nuclear power plants at reduced power, rendering them even less economical.
Oh good, biomass. Because there aren't enough starving people in the world already.
Growing plants just to use them for energy production is absolutely stupid and incredibly harmful, agreed. But there are types of biomass that are basically waste from food production or forestry. It's not a ton of energy, but it may play a part somewhere.
Two problems with that:
Man, the existence of batteries is going to blow your mind
Edit: Just realized I think you missed the main point. You want a (functionally) 100% reliable baseline to meet your energy needs. That's why you don't use renewables, at the moment anyway. You want as much renewable as possible on top of that.
Batteries, at the colossal capacity required for this purpose, are nowhere even close to existing.
First of all, nuclear is anything but reliable. Germany had to supply huge amounts of electricity to France last year because half of their nuclear plants had to be shut down. They would have had major blackouts without support from their European neighbors.
But my main point is that baseload power does not mix with renewable sources at all. Using batteries and other solutions to store renewable energy during times of little wind or sunlight is actually the goal. But that also eliminates the need for baseload.
Baseload was never really a feature anyway, it was a necessity. Nuclear and certain types of coal power plants were unable to follow demand, they had to be run at close to full load all the time, either for technical or for economic reasons. To compensate for that, other more expensive plants had to be used to cover times of higher demand.