• Sodis@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Well, you can potentially design them in a way, that you can control the energy output more easily. However, then they will be even less economical than they are now. If you run at lower output, you waste more fuel.

    • Svante@mastodon.xyz
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      1 year ago

      @Sodis @MattMastodon Nuclear power plants can quite easily do load following. It happens regularly e. g. in France. However, since it has the lowest running costs, other sources are usually cut first as far as possible.

      • Svante@mastodon.xyz
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        1 year ago

        @MattMastodon @Sodis Only about 40% of demand can be directly met from volatiles (wind and solar), i. e. no intermediate storage. The rest has to come from »backup« or »storage« or however you call it.

        Current storage tech is still almost 100% pumped hydro. Batteries have not made a real dent there yet. But pumped hydro is not enough by far, even potentially, and batteries have a long way to go to be even as scalable as pumped hydro.

        So, backup. The only clean, scalable backup is nuclear.

        • @Ardubal @Sodis

          We have to be careful. Different counties have very differnt energy make ups. I live in the UK where nuclear is

          I don’t understand where you got 40% from. This seems arbutrary.

          In the UK Nuclear is 15% and renewables about 40% (over the last year) we mainly burn gas for the rest.

          • Svante@mastodon.xyz
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            1 year ago

            @MattMastodon @Sodis Careful about labels. »Renewables« often includes biomass (which is just fast-track fossil tbh) and hydro (which is not so volatile). I’m talking about wind and solar specifically (volatiles).

            40% is roughly the mean capacity factor of a good mix of volatiles. This is what you can directly feed to the user from the windmill/panel, without storage. You can expand a bit by massive overbuilding, but you can’t overbuild your way out of no wind at night.

            • @Ardubal @Sodis

              Mostly we don’t use energy at night. In the UK there is a peak in the morning. In the UK we mainly use gas to fill this. We will have to find a storage solution as nuclear can’t be upscale that quickly. Gas was meant to be used just to fill the gaps but it’s quickly become a staple.

              We need to find a way of smoothing the graph. Energy storage is the best option in the short term.

              Or we can vary use.

              #nuclear #renewables