I don’t really understand how wind and sun could totally replace nuclear. How do we get electricity during the night? How do we get electricity when it’s cloudy but the wind is light at the same time?
There are a lot of options, almost all of them less expensive than nuclear. That's my point, traditionally nuclear was good for baseline and renewable doesn't have a comparable equivalent apart from hydro. But other renewables like wind are getting to be so efficient and inexpensive, that I don't see how building an excess of it can't compete with nuclear.
Only in warm climates.
Battery technology still has a bit to go before it can perform this task though. Even if we don't account for freak weather events (which are becoming more common).
> When demand is high, inexpensive natural gas can be turned on quickly.
Is this a good option though?
I think the only good argument against nuclear is cost, so I agree with that. But if we consider the cost of emissions, storage (these aren't counted in solar and wind and don't make for fair comparisons to base loads like coal, gas, or nuclear), or other factors that fall under "tragedy of the commons" (i.e. putting sources on even playing fields) the prices become more comparable (depending how you weigh factors). But it really does come down to how much you value the cost of climate and human lives (since nuclear is about 50x safer than natural gas).
Cost is a good argument, but we have to define our priors because "cost" means different things to different people. I for one would rather pay more for electricity and save human lives and reduce emissions. Just at $50/ton tax (low) would make it competitive[0], assuming that we couldn't regain economies of scale.
[0] https://www.axios.com/nuclear-energy-could-be-competitive-bu...
We're talking power station level storage, as in it doesn't have to be light, cheap and consumer durable.
Risks of fire or toxicity from consumers doing dumb things doesn't have to be worried about for instance. A pet gnawing at it and getting sick? Not happening.
So not unobtainium but expensivium can be used. Also operating environments can be dictated, such as temperature, humidity, water cooling or say if the battery technology required a contraption the size of a house, etc.
And lastly it doesn't have to be produced at scale. The lead time for some power station equipment is already months to years. Clunky awkward manufacturing is production ready.
There's many more possibilities given those possibilities. Right now it's Li-ion and nicad at installation sites but look for that changing soon
The problem is complicated.
> A pet gnawing at it and getting sick? Not happening.
Power outages are often caused by animals. 11% are from squirrels[0]. SQUIRRELS!
> Also operating environments can be dictated, such as temperature, humidity, water cooling or say if the battery technology required a contraption the size of a house, etc.
This just adds to the nuance from above. Because now you need to power your containment. This needs priority over powering homes actually. So now you need more excess and more backups because this is going to be expensive if it fails and take a long time to get back up.
A lot can be reduced if people start building battery systems in their homes. But most people don't have $5k-$15k to drop on a powerwall. But that is shifting the burden to consumers and I'm not sure that's a fair comparison because this consumer cost isn't included in our pricing comparisons. Though this would be a much more robust system (assuming we ignore increase in risk of fire) and greatly reduce damage done by events like what we saw in Texas, even if there is a lot of human error involved.
Climate and power is an extremely difficult topic. Anyone saying otherwise is uninformed.
[0] https://gesrepair.com/what-are-the-most-common-causes-of-pow...
For instance Lithium–air batteries have about the energy density of oil but comes with loads of problems that make them currently impractical for consumer devices. There's fewer hurdles however in making it power station ready.
Same thing with liquid electrodes research. There could be large reservoirs that are on multiday flow cycles for capacity smoothing.
It's like comparing a drainage pipe to a hydropower river dam, it's fundamentally a different problem space
It's rather ironic that the carbon industry spent the last 30 years telling us through Koch institutes etc. that the market knew best (when fossil fuels were most viable financially) and now that the green energy competition is undercutting them to death, suddenly markets don't solve anything.
There are multiple 2500km transmission lines in use today. They are relatively cheap to build and solve almost all the intermitency issues.
China has a few over 3000km long already, eg: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid... and there is a 4500km long line planned for Australia to Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_...
Lots of places do not have the geography required for pumped storage, or it is already fully exploited (building a new dam is also an environmental disaster)
Molten salt also still seems to be in it's infancy.
The most practical solution I could see today to live without baseline power would be to build a massive inter-continental HVDC grid. Large grids have a tendency to be fragile and have catastrophic failures though.
Remembering that the damage to Texan energy production was due to failure to winterise their equipment after the last two cold snaps. It has happened before, they were told it was going to happen again, but the legislature decided that it was best to let the market decide the outcome.
An SMR operator refusing to winterise their plant would end up in a similar situation: part of the equipment freezes or ices over (because antifreeze costs money), leading to an inability to scale up production until ambient temperatures rise far enough to defrost the frozen plant.