World's biggest wind turbine shows the disproportionate power of scale

Depends on the site and readers. As we've seen recently, wrong answers take on a life of their own and become gospel or canon to eliminate religious overtones.

In addition to electricity, nuclear power plants also produce a lot of heat, which can be used for district heating purposes (called co-generation), as is done frequently in northern and eastern Europe. Heating is the dominant component of the final energy consumption, accounting for close to half of all energy use. This is apparent when driving around in an electric car - keeping the cabin warm easily accounts for ~30% of the consumption. Wind turbines obviously produce no surplus heat to extract

A 50% capacity factor does not mean there's no wind 50% of the time. It only means that, averaged over a whole year, the power produced is 50% of the maximum the generator is rated to produce. This includes periods of time when there's wind, but wind that's not strong enough to reach the maximum output of the generator.

And the wind not being strong enough to reach the maximum output of the generator is probably the most common situation, since it makes sense to design the generator to reach its maximum output at the strongest normal wind on the region; when the wind is stronger than that maximum, the generator has to shut down (feather the blades and brake the rotor), otherwise it will get damaged.

It may not be windy in some places, but chances are it will be windy in others.

Fossil fuel backups such as gas are not a bad interim solution, considering gas is less polluting than coal.

There are some problems with economics, as backup solutions cost money even when they are not being used.

I exaggerated of course [1]. But you probably don't realize how huge half of New York city, or 444 sq. km is.

And the area is likely to larger because you will need additional infrastructure to handle all this and maintain the generators.

[1] There are 43 countries smaller than that: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=countries+smaller+than...

Vertical still only makes sense in limited space.

It's a "perfect is the enemy of good enough" thing. Better designs along one axis with a multi axis problem won't be best overall.

And the cost savings are likely less about building materials which likely scale at more than quadratic pace with height, but about labour and maintenance. Each trip out to an offshore base is costly, fewer trips made both for building and for maintenance saves a lot of money.

https://www.theverge.com/22296979/us-offshore-ships-wind-boo...

[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/dispelling-the-nuclear-baseload-...

The base load is nothing especial, only the fraction of the maximum load of the grid, that is always drawn and can be served by power plants which cannot be regulated well. Which most of the time of the day is a big disadvantage of those power plants. If there is a demand peak, they can't serve it. If their overall output is too high, you cannot turn it down quickly enough. As coal and nuclear power traditionally had a large part of the supply and both are quite slow, for decades the net was designed to raise the "base load". Like in Belgium, where all highways were illuminated at night to consume excess nuclear energy...

The good news about wind and solar is, they can be switched off quickly at any time. Their disadvantage is, and that probably is, when you talk about base load, that the maxim power output depends on the weather. With a coal plant, you can put more coals into the fire, with solar, you need to wait for sunrise. That is indeed a challenge and requires storage and grid planning to compensate. Larger scale grids which mix wind and solar are much less affected by the. But nothing of this has to do with the base load.

And with nuclear: yes, wind should beat nuclear easily in the aspects of cost and CO2. But the most important metric is: the cost of building new nuclear plants is prohibitive. Just compare the costs of the most recent English nuclear plant with new wind installations. They are about 1/3rd of the cost and not have any of the problems of nuclear energy attached (operation risk, nuclear waste).

They're sort of in a sweet spot right now financially but once their plants start aging out - which is soon - the costs will jump a lot if they try to extend their life or build brand new plants.

The best time to go zero carbon with nuclear was 50 years ago. The second best time is never.

But the most important thing is the opportunity cost - a typical nuclear power plant takes 7 years to complete.

For this reason in terms of GWh delivered in China, wind overtook nuclear in 2012 or so and the gap has been widening ever since.

The new Flamanville project is plagued by budget and time overruns.

Nearly 6 times over-budget and yet to provide a watt nearly 10 years after its initially projected completion date. Most recent cost estimates are for over 19B euro - $22B. This buys you a single 1.6GW reactor.[1]

The same amount of money would buy 20GW of onshore wind. Even adjusting for capacity factors - about 70% for French nuclear, about 40% for well positioned modern turbines - the cost per MWh is about 7 times higher for nuclear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...