In Spain we are starting to get negative prices every weekend for electricity thanks to renewables. France is not even close to those prices with their bet for nuclear.
Don’t get me wrong, I love nuclear power. And I’m not a big fan ok what thousands of windmills made to our landscapes. But efficiency wise renewable is unbeatable nowadays.
They don’t need to be exclusive. Power generation should be diverse. Otherwise prices will go through the roof on times without wind (happens in Germany). This can lead to higher energy prices in combination with high energy exports.
Nuclear power does not solve the issue here. Nuclear reactors take hours or even days to ramp up or down. They are not quick enough to react to such occasions.
True, it wouldn’t be enough, This is why Germany still has a lot of coal-fired power station and natural gas power stations, despite huge investments into renewables, and is also investing a lot into wood-fired power stations (imo a really terrible idea). The nuclear plants could still ease the situation by giving a stable basic load that has some planable variability (wind models are getting also better every year and aren’t that bad as it is). For now renewables cannot really provide a very stable basic load (at least not here, might be different for other areas).
There are great concepts to improve all of this with stuff like pumped-storage hydroelectricity, but those cannot be build everywhere and take up a lot of space. It is going forward and I think nuclear power will come to an end eventually. For now, I think they still have their place (and imo Germany acted irrationally by shutting them all down).
I mean, we’ve been lucky that France completly fucked their energy sector up (hints towards that nuclear plants probably also won’t be the ultimate solution), otherwise we’d have lost a loooot of money and would have had energy prices even worse.
Here an imo interesting read: https://gemenergyanalytics.substack.com/p/capture-price-of-importsexports-in
Meanwhile in Georgia (USA) they completed a new nuclear power plant and they have to raise rates because it went 100% over its $14 billion budget.
Negative energy prices are a bad thing! That means that someone is dumping energy into the grid (you should be paying the grid if you have solar panels!!) In the UK all renewable energy had to be called ‘experimental’ so that the pricing was fixed and the government picks up the tab - that’s not good. Check this map - right now the wind isn’t blowing and solar hasn’t got out of bed - so most of the countries using renewables are looking shit - later today solar will kick in, but tonight it will be bad again. That isn’t a solution.
The Spanish government is now petitioning its public for ideas on how to waste power.
Mine bitcoins. Or ditch capitalism. Wait, last one is opposite of wasting. Feed capitalism.
