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A fossil-fuel plant seeing nuclear coming... (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50691754

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[–] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (3 children)

Renewables often have storage issues since they aren't on demand. And for the ones that are like hydro, we're to the point that any new dams are the same timeline and cost because everything easy was dammed long ago, and dams of that scale are not without risks.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    Batteries need to be included if you want to compare renewables to nuclear, yeah. Still by now they beat nuclear on price, including the batteries.
    Hydro can be disregarded since it's usually already built, as you mentioned.

    For solar and wind, especially solar, things have changed quite a bit. Of course mainly batteries just got a lot cheaper and better, but the power production got so ridiculously cheap that you can use over-provisioning. Meaning you build way more power than you'd need if you could store it, and them simply don't store it all. For example you build enough solar to supply average power for a rainy day in winter, and then only build batteries for the night, completely disregarding seasonal and weather-based storage.

    Overprovisioning compared to naive numbers (still thrown around by lobyists) can save you like 80% of battery capacity.

    And as a bonus you can run power-based industry (aluminum, hydrogen, titanium, ...) for free when you are otherwise not using the over-capacity, if you don't mind running the machinery on-demand.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Overall, I agree. I run my own yard offgrid with solar and battery, but I still end up firing up the generator a fair bit in winter because the demand periods don't match the production peak.

    But it seems like that's just a scaling problem, and it seems like a few billion spent on batteries is a less technical solution than a fission plant, depending on the design and scale. But it hasn't really happened yet, even in China where the parts are produced. They're further along, but they're still firing up coal and nuclear at a scale unmatched by the western countries right now, alongside record solar production. So something in that theory isn't lining up.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    The price stuff is only relevant for new production, there's not yet a financial reason to replace all existing plants with renewables.

    As for China, I'm not fully sure why they aren't. Either it's internal lobbying, making decisions against the public interest, or it could be China wanting to keep their market control.
    There is still limited supply, for example building solar cell fabs is a very involved process. China might well be able to use their entire production internally for a long time before fabs scale past their demand. And in the mean time, the rest of the world would first see price increases or shortages, and then build their own fabs taking chinas market control.

    There is also the very short-term thing where they are replacing oil with coal due to the Iran war (best war in the history of war, maybe ever).

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