The question is simple. If you have installed solar power of 40% your country peak use, how much nuclear power you need - assuming simplified you have only these two power sources.
In a market or effincient economy, where peak occurs mid hot summer day, 100% solar dominated renewables makes sense. In Spring and fall, EVs can absorb daily oversupply and profit from trading back at night. Winter is when solar can fail to meet heating and electricity needs, and so either backup energy sources or having much more than 100% peak demand in order to make green H2 that can be exported to where it gets cold is needed.
0 new nuclear is best amount of nuclear for any economy.
If you trade too much EV energy during night, then you can’t drive during the day. And again, EVs capacity is not reliable at all. As per green H2, please show me a production and a storage capable of providing energy to a city. Or at least a real project that’s building it. Storing H2 is a big problem, like a huge one. If nothing else, Hindenburg tells a story. The fact that energy loss is at more than 50% when producing green H2 is a minor problem compared to storage.
You need H2 only after solar + EVs provides more than 24 hours of needed energy in an area. Although H2 does save on transmission costs for medium to long distance. One of the remarkable aspects of BYD Dolphin, now under $9000 for 32kwh battery is that the battery value alone is $260/kwh capacity, and if you never drove it, but sold electricity 2.6c/kwh higher at night than you pay at day, then you pay for the car in its entirety. Just batteries can be sold under $100/kwh in China, and you could make 200% ROI from 3c/kwh price differential. EVs and batteries can be paid by private sector instead of utility investment markup model.
H2 technologies are advancing, including storage and pipes. Electrical transmission is more than 10x more expensive than transmitting gas/H2, and saves money on that end relative to efficiency loss. Surplus solar with input cost at 2c/kwh or less achieves under $2/kg H2 target which is equivalent driving distance to $1/gallon gasoline, and 10c/kwh electric only value delivered energy, and 6c/kwh combined heat and electricity value.
EVs provides more than 24 hours of needed energy in an area
Only if it was fully charged, you don’t drive with it and you live in a house. And thus are not a reliable energy source at all, even less for general energy problems.
H2 technologies are advancing, including storage and pipes.
All technology is advancing, but do you have a solution today? And even with advancements, you’ll hardly solve H2 flammability. Even keeping it contained is problematic.
FishFace@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Not really enough information. I will assume that by “installed solar power” you mean peak generation when the sun is shining, and that instead of peak use, you mean 40% of average use, i.e. let’s suppose that at an average moment the country consumes 100GW and, if the sun is shining, generates 40GW from solar.
Assume further the sun is up for half the year and the sky is clear for half the year, meaning the total amount of your yearly electricity you can generate with solar is 10% assuming typical weather. Then you would be able to reliably power the country with a combination of nuclear totalling 90% of average use (90GW) and enough storage that you can ride out cloudy periods.
Mihies@programming.dev 9 hours ago
Yes, something like that. Now, while you can theoretically install that many solar panels, the kicker is that you don’t have nowhere enough storage. And even if you had that 10%, you could increase solar all you want, but the nuclear would be still running at 90MW because of the storage, or better, the lack of it. And because you would have a surplus of cheap solar power energy during the day - assuming more solar panels than 10%, it would erode more expensive nuclear one to become even more expensive. Basically if we solve storage, we can get rid of nuclear, but not before.
FishFace@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I mean the UK has 6% of its energy over the year come from solar, and 30% from wind, and installations are only accelerating, so this amount of installed solar is far from unrealistic.
Installing storage approximately doubles the LCOE of solar energy, so this is also feasible from a cost point of view as we get rid of dispatchable gas turbines.
I am not saying we should get rid of nuclear. I am saying we should keep some nuclear, also once we have got less gas and more storage. Does this resolve some things in this discussion for you?
Mihies@programming.dev 5 hours ago
Yep. No issues there. The core problem is storage here. And until we have a solid plan how to deliver with proven technology present today, we have to build new and run existing nuclear power plants. The other option is gambling.