The big question that the crisis seems to highlight is if price competition is relevant. What people want is energy on demand when people want it, and the supplier want to demand as much money as the market can take. What energy cost to produce doesn't influence either of those two unless there is an overcapacity with multiple producers competing for the chance of selling.

When customers pay 10-100 times the production cost, and are happy to do so over the alternative of not having heating or open factories, then the issue that energy politics is trying to solve is not about finding the optimal technology that in theory is cheapest or best. Any technology that can solve either short term or long term is desired technology as long they actually get implemented.

is that why they still get outrageous subsidies to be any kind of desirable to build?

See Figure 1.2 Global weighted average LCOEs from newly commissioned, utility-scale renewable power generation technologies, 2010-2021

https://irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/202...

Hydro costs are going up, solar and wind going down. Hydro is still less than fossil fuels, which is great, but that's not the target to beat anymore, and renewables are lower and trending even lower.

And that's before the more extreme geographical constraints for siting, with good locations already used, the project sizes and the longer lead times and investment paybacks compared with renewables.

But Hydro also has flexibility, which is really useful for balancing renewables and nuclear. It's important to switch existing Hydro into this mode to make the most of it. But again, for new build, since the raw power is more expensive than renewables, the flexibility would need to be cheaper than the equivalent flexibility provided by more renewables plus batteries to win back that lost ground. And it isn't.

Same story for pumped storage. Here's a worked example for the Snowy 2 project:

https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...

The key thing is, energy production is cheap these days. So storing energy has to compete against just building even more production and a small amount of storage. This applies to batteries as much as it does to hydro. But batteries scale down better.

This can drop to almost zero, if you build a dam near a location with preexisting cement plants, or, in an area where you snap build your own cement plant.

Even steel transportation ; is it local? Is their train? Is there a waterway, which ships can transport steel to you on?

Hydro is so clean, it isn't even funny.

Very bad projection because:

- Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto 3 and EPR Flamanville are all prototype. Their CAPEX cost are not representative of industrialized Nuclear. As example, the production cost as expressed by the French ARENH is around 42-1€/MWh [1]

- Electricity price skyrocket when weather conditions make production of renewable impossible. This is where this kind of plant make a profit. [2] Your projection just fit a worst case scenario.

- At the current electricity price due to the Russian conflict, Some EPRs including the French ones are predicted to be cost effective in only few years.

[1]: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-16/german-po...

No idea about Hinkley Point but TVOs 2 earlier reactors have costs in the 15 to 20€/MWh range with average market prices around 30 to 40€/MWh they are making healthy profits with the reactors (and have for decades now). Once OL3 is running their target combined operational costs of all the reactors are around 30€/MWh. It will be tight but they should be able to make it profitable especially as they don't have to sell all the production at day ahead spot prices but higher fixed rate contracts far into the future. Obviously nuclear also produces at the moments when wind does not and the price spikes.

(https://www.tvo.fi/material/collections/20210713150018/7Rllf... scroll down to page 7)

edit: And TVO does not actually sell anything on the open markets but instead at production costs to its owners based on the % of investment into each reactor. Those can then either sell it or use it themselves.

That is sophism and what-aboutism and irrelevant.

> There is no valid technical reason you can point to that would prevent a 100% renewable grid from operating.

There is and it is named Energy Storage.

Solution: Build renewables on a scale never seen before, then do it again two more times, as well as once every ten years to replace the ones that failed.

Do you see the slight problem? We do not have the resources for that. We cannot afford that. Is nuclear perfect? No. We have spent fuel (that hopefully we can figure out how to reuse, but for now, it's just waste buried deep), it's big, it's unwieldy. But it's reliable. Resources are both plentiful and we don't need that much. A whole lot of concrete (still much less that we would need to put wind turbines), fissile material that can be found pretty much anywhere, and a good bunch of pipes and various metals (infinitely less than what we'd need for solar or wind).

I said green hydrogen was shit for storing energy, and so is pink hydrogen. But if that can make you happy, I'm more than willing to use whatever surplus we get from renewables to make hydrogen. I'd just rather we waste 70% of a small production, rather than 70% of all.

What's wrong with EVs charged from nuclear? Everything. The only green car is a car that isn't manufactured. For most people (especially in europe), an EV will pretty much take 10 years before it offsets its CO2 emissions. Should we stop selling ICEs? Yes. Should we replace millions of existing cars with EVs? Absofuckinglutely not.

Nuclear means you're less dependent on those interconnects. Which, you know, is a useful thing to be as a sovereign country. See: Europe and its dependency on gas.

> Are you really just arguing for fossil fuels?

Considering how happy fossil fuel companies are about renewables because it allows them to sell gas when it inevitably doesn't work for a day and you need something else to make up for it, you would do well to rethink your mindless support. Every 100% renewables plan is the equivalent of a spherical cow in a vacuum. We cannot mine that much. We cannot find that much space in ideal locations, nor maintain it. There is not a single mine in the world able to get the resources we need. Ignoring reality is all fun and games, and if we had infinite time in front of us, I'd be all okay with going full intermittent power. But we both know it's not the case. Pretending anything else is ignorance and optimism at best, and malice at worst. You need to learn compromise, and as it stands, we cannot afford not to.

The Baltic sea is also definitely workable for off-shore wind. Not to the level of the north sea but not that far off.

https://globalwindatlas.info/

You can also provide a base load with just solar. You just need to spread your panels all over the country to make up for the fact that sun is not always shining everywhere, but the idea stays the same: can we produce 100TWh over a year with our installation, no matter what ?

Energy isn't produced for the fun of it. Base load is related to total demand, at all times. Some of that demand is so you can run your USB powered coffee cup, some of it is to run foundries. You pick what you fit in that, but whatever you pick must be covered by that base load.

Needless to say, with sources as intermittent as wind and solar, making any kind of plans except "we're going to produce X over this month" is pretty much impossible, and you need to compensate by building tons of storage to smooth things out, otherwise you get brownouts.