New research shows renewables are more profitable than nuclear power::In a recent study, researchers from the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) questioned the planned development of new nuclear capacities in the energy strategies of the United States and certain European countries.
While an interesting article(/ sales pitch), the base load system as a paradigm has been around forever because it works very well and is safe. Perhaps we won’t need it in the near future. However, fundamentally, you don’t control the sun and you don’t control the wind. It could be cloudy for an extended period of time and there could be an extended period of time with a low amount of wind. What are you going to do? Article talks about geothermal, hydropower, etc and while those are great the reality is that not every place in the world can reliably harvest large amounts of geothermal or hydropower power. Wind and solar is more or less the only constant renewable.
Nuclear may be more expensive relative to renewables but it has a potential to be much more reliable. You can create a nuclear power plant and you know it will pump out xxxMW consistently. You can rely on that. I believe you could even get a majority of power from wind & solar. But getting rid of that base load is very risky unless our tech significantly changes. Granted, it probably will in the near future, so I’m not discounting that base-load paradigm perhaps could become a thing of the past.
For example with cheap and effective energy storage, you can just build large amounts of wind and solar and store all the excess. At that point, you would have a reliable source of power to handle any peak demand. Just as of today, it is needed practically speaking.
Renewables are reliable though over a long enough time frame. Offshore wind is very predictable and you can count on the sun shining in plenty of places. Solar still generates when cloudy though at a reduced output.
The problem with base load is what to do when it’s very windy and sunny. You can’t just turn off a nuclear plant for practical and financial reasons so nuclear isn’t compatible with renewables + storage.
Ideally governments the world over will start to mandate storage construction on a massive scale, with the methods being dictated by the resources available. Pumped hydro is great where the terrain has big changes in elevation, molten salt storage is great for desert climates, etc.
We’re moving rapidly to EVs too. I wish we’d get ahead of the game just once and build in a small amount of grid storage per EV, with compensation to the owner for making the capacity available.
There are an immense number of ways to dissipate excess power by shifting the cost/benefit curve.
One recent work looked at repurposing aging electronics when the energy cost curve allows it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06870