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Comment by mgnacl | Hacker News Reader

This is great news. Years ago it was considered an indisputable fact that solar (and wind) couldn't compete with the economics of coal and nuclear.

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And it is still true, wind will be never be able to compete with nuclear for the simple fact that wind blows when it blows and you need energy when you need it. Unless we develop a technology that is able to cope with the huge spikes that windmills put on the energy grid and store energy in a very efficient way (including gaining the energy back when we need it) wind will not be more than few percentage of the overall energy production with the cost of having gas turbines in the system to just to balance windmills. Solar is obviously far better, there are few things to sort out but the progress we made is definitely promising.

Note that nuclear is also not exactly grid-friendly, since you cannot quickly change the power output of a nuclear power plant. They are useful for base load and nothing else.

This is not the definition of grid-friendly. I am just calling out that windmills could never serve as base power plant, and serving as peak power source has a serious side effect of requiring gas turbines to provide smooth energy production that does not stress the grid. You do not change the output of your base power plant on a daily basis, this is why it is called base. For the peak coverage you have something that is easy to change the performance of.

The Ludington Pumped Storage plant (the largest in the world at the time of construction) was built to store nuclear and use it for peaking.

So the same storage tech that is needed to increase the share of renewables we can rely on also makes things better for nuclear.

>And it is still true, wind will be never be able to compete with nuclear for the simple fact that wind blows when it blows and you need energy when you need it. Unless we develop a technology that is able to cope with the huge spikes

A) The spikes aren't actually that huge (fossil fuel companies exaggerate, who knew?).

B) It's a problem that's relatively easily dealt with by overproducing and variable pricing. After years of championing free markets, fossil fuel companies 'forgot' that they are efficient mechanisms for mediating fluctuating demand and supply.

Can you provide some info about how pumped storage doesn't cover this need? Because pumped storage was developed to deal with the huge spikes that user demand put on an energy grid that's mainly generated with nuclear.

Ok. Maybe I shouldn't lump wind together with solar.

Wind is getting cheaper and more reliable, too. I think I read that it's because we're building bigger wind turbines.

Wind actually provides power at night. Currently at night wind has to compete against cheap base load power which tends to be subsidized. If coal and nuclear plants are phased out the economics of wind is very attractive.

Absent any credible options you would certainly expect to be able to sell whatever power people could get their hands on.

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