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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)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
28 points (96.7% liked)
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No, just until such time as storage (pumped hydro/battery/potential gravity/flywheel/liquified air/magical pixie dust - most likely a combination of seperate technologies in seperate locations) is sufficiently integrated to take the grid overnight.
Then dispatchable power goes down to gas etc, which itself gets phased out except for emergency backup when the storage grows sufficient.
Nuclear is just being proposed by certain groups as a way to delay/discourage spending on renewables and storage - maintaining the status quo of coal for a bit longer.
Ignoring the timeline, or even the net zero goal, renewable (solar and wind) + storage is already cheaper to install, and cheaper to run for a given output than anything else we've got.
The only reasons we're still running coal is:
The primary reason we are changing over isn't because the companies running these coal plants are suddenly huffing the hippie bong, but because their current infrastructure is reaching end of life (the point at which it is no longer financially viable to maintain and must be replaced) and no sane bank is going to lend them the capital to build a new coal plant, because there's just no way it'll ever get paid back.
Yes cheap storage will solve lot's of problems. Problem is we do not have technology for that yet which is scalable. Snow Hydro 2 is pretty much all we can do for gravity storage in Australia. Only other option is batteries. There is no production capacity to cover demand in that scale, and will take long time to build it up. And for some reason no one takes account ecological impact of building all these batteries/solar/wind turbines. They all very material heavy on per kW basis.
It is a myth that solar and wind are cheaper at scale than conventional generation. It is only the case if covenantal generation is pay for all unpleasantness of renewable instability. As soon too much renewables is in the grid you have to pay to keep it stable.
There are 3 main method: Overprovisoning - to compensate for annual cycles. Australia is happy here as we consume more power at summer than at winter. Long range transmission - to compensate for local weather Storage - to take care od daily cycle.
It is all costs lots of money and not required now as it was taken care off. This is why solar/wind is cheap.
Yes we do. And projects like Snowy Hydro 2 are significantly cheaper and quicker to build than a nuclear power plant.
Tasmania is near as makes no difference 100% renewable now. South Australia is rapidly heading in the same direction. It's going to take time, but eventually the entire country will get there - because renewable power is just cheaper.
Hydro is not modern technology - humans have been using it for thousands of years. Coal is far more recent, and we never should have switched to it.
Australia could easily run entirely off hydro and we'd be paying less for power than current prices. That won't happen though, because there are even cheaper options than Hydro (solar, for example, is significantly cheaper if you don't need baseload power, and a lot of use cases don't need that).
I agree, it's not possible to run the country off batteries. Nobody (who knows what they're talking about) is suggesting that.
Hydro is great. Problem is we will never have second Snow Hydro, there is no place to build second one. And we also nearly out of places to build hydro generation plants. TAS have some resources but transmission to/from is pita.