They have lots potential for wind (~20%) and hydro. Peak demand is increasing, but lasts for very specific amounts of time during a day, it doesn’t justify the increases in base load. These peaks could be certainly fulfilled by smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification before new building new power plants. Yet, many of these will be needed despite nuclear, but since nuclear is the elephant in the room, they are going with it first, while stalling everything else. They are even trying to convince Germany to do the same.
"smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification" - electrification increases the demand, maybe you meant efficiency?
Demand response is basically - please don't use power because we don't have enough or because it's expensive. That's not an appealing option.
Smart grid management is good but it'll take years to reach good condition - you need to expand/upgrade transmission and distribution systems with proper equipment.
Germany has it's own path that's more or less stable for a long time- coal+gas firming, tons of ren and major transmission expenses, to the point govt will start subsidizing them
(I) Electrification displaces energy demand. Efficiency controls growth of demand. Various limits have been reached with efficiency.
(II) Demand response is not about “do not use power because we don’t have enough.”, it is about “here is some money so you shift demand to a later point in time when saturation is lower.”
(III) It doesn’t take years to find better ways to manage the grid as is. Do you think there won’t be a need to upgrade large portions of the grid to handle new nuclear plants?
THE UK gets 30% of its electricity from wind and another 5% from solar; Denmark gets 70% from renewables, mostly wind. Iowa gets 65% of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind; California, whose economy is larger than that of most countries, gets 38%, mainly from solar.
But some lobbyists are trying to kill momentum, especially those who see nuclear as a silver bullet. It is not.
> Electrification doesn't displace demand. It adds more demand.
Take cars, for instance. When someone buys an EV rather than ICE, do you think the EV uses the same amount of energy than the ICE car?
> what you described with demand response is equivalent of rationing- use power when weather is good because otherwise you'll not afford it
Sure, what do you think that needs to be done when there is a limited resource such as electricity? Yes, more production, but until then, what should the grid do if the demand is growing?
> Don't confuse transmission needed for 1GW of nuclear vs 10GW of solar with 10% cf and more redispatching requirements
It is two different models, one is centralized (nuclear) and the other is distributed (solar). The planning is essentially different.
Ice didn't use electricity. It used energy from fossil fuels. Are you comfusing things? Electrification does add electric demand. It reduces total energy consumption due to efficiency but electric demand still grows
Yes, you need vastly more transmission for a distributed ren grid. Both for deployment and for avoiding curtailment
It is very hard to argue when you think electricity != energy, and you cannot even see that EV displaces the use of fossil fuels (I.e., a type of primary energy), even when you yourself wrote that it consumes less energy lol
Solar panels in rooftops can decrease the saturation of the grid, so more transmission is not necessarily needed.
No-one ever characterises cheap rate electricity at night that is common with nuclear as "please don't use power during the day because we don't have enough".
It's a strange double standard. As is the building of expensive pumped hydro storage for use with nuclear.
