Nuclear is still likely cost effective at night, or in the rainy season. The only other carbon neutral technologies rely on special geographical features (geothermal, hydro).
One way to think about energy moving forward is reducing the problem to heating houses with heat pumps during stormy weather, or at night.
Solar, wind and batteries basically imply we'll have surplus energy in all other scenarios.
BTW there have been several publications that performed modelling on large integrated grids that found there would be very little overprovisioning needed if we have a Europe wide grid (it always blows somewhere). Fortunately, the European grid is moving in this direction anyway.
nuh-uh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...
Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute.[7] Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.
A nuclear plant is capital expensive, and it requires to be used as much as possible to be cost competitive.
You have to take whatever you can get for the power, even if it doesn't cover operating cost, to pay down the capital you spent building. When it becomes clear that you cannot bring in enough to pay for operations and debt service, you have no choice but to declare bankruptcy.
Of course, all this is foreseeable. So, you don't get the capital to build at all, because who wants to loan money that will predictably be defaulted on?
I tried for a long time to find such publications (for or against renewables). Could you like a few of these? Thanks.
So, provisioning 2x, 3x, 5x solar + storage will still be cheaper than nukes. Storage in the form of transportable liquids, even where round-trip efficiency is low, is very attractive because you don't need long-term storage if you can import what you need, in a pinch, from the tropics. And, whenever the tankage you do have is full, you may sell the extra production for industrial use. The world can absorb an effectively unlimited amount of hydrogen and ammonia overproduction.