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Nuclear power too expensive and slow to be part of Australia’s plans to reach net zero, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
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We will overprovision.
We will use long range transmission to compensate for local weather.
We will use storage.
We will all pay more for power in the short term.
It's a myth that conventional generation is cheap. This was only (relatively) the case in the recent past as that infrastructure was already paid for, primarily by tax dollars; from the power stations, to the rail lines to transport the coal, to the transmission lines and substations.
Now the key part of that infrastructure, the coal plants, are reaching end of life.
Power prices are already trending up, not because evil renewable energy is destabalising the grid, but because the cheap old machines can no longer be maintained. Not tomorrow, but within the next few years, they will need to be replaced with something.
It will not be new coal.
Origin, AGL, EnergyAustralia, Ergon, Alinta etc have all said as much.
It's just too expensive to build, and the prices required to pay back those loans make it a non-starter.
Currently we need coal sometimes, and due to the long start up and shut down times of a coal plant, that means we need coal all the time - contractually.
THAT is what is causing the current grid instability. Wind and Solar are mature technologies, but currently, we curtail (turn off) wind and solar output, when it is adding too much to the grid.
If we had large storage infrastructure, we would no longer need to do that, as we could take the over abundance of power and store some tiny fraction of it, for times when the sun is down and the wind isn't blowing.
And industry is making that pivot, they're just waiting to see how the political dice will fall, how they can maxamise their profits and minimise their costs.
They are businesses after all.
As for scalable storage technology, here's an example we have right now: Liquid Air. It is infinitely scalable, since it doesn't rely on perfect sites like pumped hydro (which requires an ongoing water supply, proximity to transmission and at least 2 storage reservoirs with a significant height differential).
The largest trial I'm aware of happened in the UK 10 years ago, and only had 15% efficency, but considering we were going to throw the power away anyway, and now that 15% is dispatchable, that's suddenly a good deal even if it never acheives the hypothesized 60% efficiency.
There's more of these being built right now: https://highviewpower.com/projects/#uk-projects
And this is just one storage technology example, chosen to address your concern of scalability.
Scale is solved, money to build it is not.
But as I said, the fact that this transition will occur is not in question and eventually the major players will have to pay for it themselves, or the government can pour tax payer dollars on it to ensure it occurs smoothly.
The fact we are seeing nonsense like "Why not nuclear?" from one particular political party, is just a step in this dance.
There's a limit to that - the grid has to charge less than the cost of going off grid. Honestly, current prices might be over that line already.
Time is in the essence. We do not have time to build all these fancy,expensive and mostly experimental stuff. Planet will be already cooked by the time they a ready. There are lots of good potential technologies around. From hight altitude wind, to ocean current turbines, to orbital solar. Problem is none of them is ready for production.
There is are two well tested green technologies capable to provide stable power. Hydro and nuclear. We do not have place to build more hydro in Australia. Nuclear is only option.
Keep burning coal due to radiophobia is just stupid. And we will not get anything else in time.
I'm not against Nuclear, go for it.
It's not cost competitive, so I don't think the government should be subsidizing it, but I say we reduce the laws banning it to merely enforcing strong environmental protections (as we should on all things).
Let's say we did that today.
Let's assume you already have a site picked out and ready to go, and that no protestors are going to stop the build.
It'll still be 10 years before it turns on and produces it's first watt: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/nuclear-power-stations-are-not-appropriate-for-australia-and-probably-never-will-be/
I'd be curious if you can find a source with a shorter build time quote, so link us.
In the meantime under this proposal, the existing coal plants are still going to shut down.
With the nuclear not ready to plug the gap.
So either the government pays for the construction of more coal (because no investment company or bank will touch it), or more renewables + storage is going to go in.
In fact, within a year we'd have some new solar and wind producing power, more in year 2, more in year 3 etc.
By the time the Nuclear plant passes it's shakedown tests, we probably don't need it anymore.
I've got strong opinions about which tech we should be going for based on ecological reasons, but the fact we are going to wind and solar + storage is based on pragmatic economic reasons.
Also, ANU has identified over 3000 promising sites for pumped hydro in Australia.
Some of them could probably be straight hydro I assume.
I'm not against those either, let's go!