On the other hand, your comment presumes that there is such a thing as too much power. Once hydrolyzers mature, we could use all of the current renewable power in Europe just for producing hydrogen for steel production to replace coal there.
But, very broadly and simplistically speaking.
We are not even remotely close to living in a "We have too much power" world. ( Markets will change drastically then.)
All the nuclear supply has already been sold and is being constantly used 100% of the time. It never makes sense to turn off the nuclear power plant.
There is more demand then that, not meeting the demand is catastrophic.
If a popular sports is on TV and halftime everybody boils water, or the wind is unexpectedly low, or some part of the grid is having trouble.
We must still meet the demand.
Turning on a gas plant is the cheapest solution we have at the moment.
This couldn't be further from the truth, at least for France: hover over the lower graphs to animate the source upper graph here: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
Every single day nuclear oscillates between 60% and 80%, in strong anti-correlation with wind, solar and border exchanges.
With hydro and pumped storage, this margin is well enough for attending to peak demand. And it is economically viable; This is the thing about nuclear: it costs practically the same wether you're at 20% or 95% of the plant's capacity. You consume your fuel faster, but it is only a small fraction of the cost (15% IIRC). And you still get 0 CO2 emission.
And with current gas prices this is the cheapest solution we have at the moment. (not the cheapest in terms of political will, but educating masses can solve that)
The point I was trying to make in my second paragraph is that when hydrolyzers get sufficiently cheap that you can buy enough to cover your peak over-production and let them idle when you are missing power, then you have effectively moved the elasticity from the production side to the demand side -- and then slow baseload does not require you to derate down your renewables.
This is far from the situation today where hydrolyzers are so expensive that you need to run them at pretty high utilization to make the economics work out.
BTW there is a very efficient way to run hydrolyzers at 95%: run them on nuclear power. Problem solved?
Assuming the plant operations are running smoothly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Belgium#Hydro...
Which will be less and less the case for the European nuclear champions whose plants are approaching their 40-50 years lifespan of commercial support and safe operations (or so I am told) and it's going to cost a lot to replace them, more than going full renewables apparently.
In Belgium, at some points we had to shut down offshore wind turbines because there was not enough demand on the grid and turning off and on our nuclear plants would take too much time.
Gas plants don't have that problem (or so they say). So we are building some to compensate until we have enough renewables to shut them off for good.
Also, SMR are gaining tractions so who knows.
Disclaimer: I hear both sides, one claiming we don't need nuclear to reach our emissions carbon target and the other claiming we need classic nuclear plants to manage climate change and I don't know who's right.
Not a "world", but this happens locally in Europe due to wind/solar momentarily producing more than demand. There have been instances with negative prices.
Anecdotally, one mitigation seems to be adjusting the local base voltage to 220V so that peaks due to solar stay below 240V (or something like that).
Nuclear can, at least theoretically, be throttled hour-by-hour over the day to compensate wind, although hydro is probably more cost-effective if available.
I don’t think the question is “is natural gas better than nuclear?”. It’s more “nuclear isn’t quickly dispatchable, which is what we need”. It’s not that gas is better than nuclear, it’s that they solve two different problems. Solar and wind need something to fill gaps when production fluctuates. Today that can be hydro or fossil fuels. In the near future, that will also be storage. For the foreseeable future, nuclear can’t fill that role.
Demand response is an interesting concept, and a subset of researchers have been pushing it for years. I’m skeptical that the economics would work out (large fixed costs mean that there’s pressure to run 24/7 and eat the high electricity prices), but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. That said, it doesn’t fix the fundamental problem that sometimes the wind dies at night, and something needs to turn on in the next 5 minutes or streetlights start going out. Right now, nuclear isn’t capable of filling that niche.
> something needs to turn on in the next 5 minutes or streetlights start going out. Right now, nuclear isn’t capable of filling that niche.
Depends on the reactor. A single ~1GW reactor should be able to adjust its output up by 150MW or so in 5 minutes. If you have multiple that number multiplies obviously.
For example a typical reactor in France with a max output of 1300MW can be adjusted all the way down to 400MW within 30 minutes (and up to max 1300MW output from minimumn 400MW in the same time). If they could not do that there is no way France could generate 70%+ of their electricity with nuclear.
(obviously the reactor has to be designed with the goal of being adjustable for it to be able to do this. France started to do this in the 80s)
edit: Though because the vast majority of the costs of running a nuclear power plant is in building/maintaining it and running it at max vs min output costs the same amount of money most owners want to run their reactor at max output always.
Ah yes. We already have enough storage capacity to provide for hundreds of megawatts of daily power fluctuation. See Figure E.2 https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp...
We certainly need gas in the short term. Sure. But you can’t let nuclear take over the role of gas (and other potential on demand power sources, pumped hydro and maybe batteries in the future). That just doesn’t work.
Also, I‘m all for producing an overabundance of power and using that in a meaningful way. But that’s not the issue we are talking about here. Baseline framing of the current problem we are facing makes no sense and that is my point.
Nuclear and renewables don’t work well together.
If so, you've failed to convincingly articulate how. It's a meaningless assertion to me.
The power available from nuclear is useful full stop.
There are multiple utility scale competing battery technologies becoming quite mature and Thats a good thing. Especially if one or more of them are viable.
It’s almost certainly easier and faster to scale battery tech than it has been nuclear.
No we can't. Not in the amounts required. We're not talking about 100kW Tesla batteries.
> There are multiple utility scale competing battery technologies becoming quite mature
You mean, there are multiple competing battery technologies that are barely at the theoretical level with multiple significant challenges and no implementations beyond theoretical or impractical for the use case in question.
Flow batteries: low energy density, requires large tanks to be anywhere useful. Low charge and discharge rates, so are not practical for load following applications
Iron-air: only theoretical so far with first small plant potentially in operation by 2023, and its efficiency is yet to be seen (so far it's mostly marketing materials and hype).
> t’s almost certainly easier and faster to scale battery tech than it has been nuclear.
Ah yes, it's certainly easier to scale non-existent and non-scalable tech.