- Pumped hydro: Use electricity now to pump water uphill. When power is needed, water is allowed to flow back downhill, powering a turbine to generate electricity.
- Thermal storage: Heat up water or molten salt. This heat can be used directly later (e.g., use hot water for showers) or to power steam turbines to generate electricity
- Flywheels: spin up a heavy wheel, which can "smooth" out power delivery when inputs briefly shut off
- Compressed air: can be stored / used to power turbines to generate electricity later
- Fuel generation: can use electricity during high-production times to generate fuels like hydrogen (electrolysis ) or methane (reverse methanogenesis).
None of these are silver-bullets. But if used intelligently for specific problems, they're excellent tools to help cover the volatile output of wind/solar.
There's also still the real possibility that we develop suitable supercapacitors with graphene or other extremely cheap materials. I don't know what the process is for recycling graphene but considering it's pure carbon I doubt it will be much trouble. I know supercapacitors are not batteries but the advancements in one can definitely help cross-pollinate advancements in the other.
Suppose a grid with just nuclear and solar. Nuclear may be overall very stable, but solar is still not, and so you still need storage. The only difference is how much of it you need.
But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really economical. Solar is much, much cheaper and therefore any economically minded person would build solar if they had a choice, and would just not enter the business space at all if they couldn't.
The business model of nuclear is just broken in modern times. The idea was that nuclear is cheap but unwieldy, and can be supplemented with small amounts of more flexible but more expensive sources for when it can't adjust fast enough. But that just hasn't panned out.
Against what honest option? If fossil fuel plants had to charge to cover the deaths from pollution they'd be blistering expensive.
It could just as easily be said that nuclear power is the only source we can truly afford.
> The business model of nuclear is just broken in modern times.
Right, because it's not really a business. Power is infrastructure.
Solar, wind, natural gas, geothermal, thermal solar, hydro.
> Right, because it's not really a business. Power is infrastructure.
An infrastructure that underlies way too many things. Say we subsidize nuclear with taxes. But everyone uses electricity. So what does it matter whether the nuclear plant gets $50 from me from my power bill, or $50 I have paid in taxes?
In the end, it has to be paid for, and that means that if you go with an expensive power source people and industries will have a reason to move somewhere cheaper.
The other options aren't cheaper, you just aren't being sued for the damages they caused (yet).
Creation and decommissioning of solar and wind are quite polluting, natgas is a byproduct of the dirtier fossil fuels, and geothermal and hydro are only practical in a limited number of areas.
> So what does it matter whether the nuclear plant gets $50 from me from my power bill ...?
Because treating dirty power production as just a business, like a muffin shop, isn't appropriate for society. We're making poor decisions for the group because we make them individually, buying dangerous gasoline today rather than saving to build clean power.
That's not the cheapest, because the price for the emissions gets paid (whether or not we choose to account for it).
The cheapest is the source of new power capacity that provides the lowest total levelized cost - including its externalities - at a given level of reliability (firmness). Right now, that's a race between renewables+storage and combined cycle natural gas.
So say somehow I've got $10 billion burning a hole in my pocket. Would I build nuclear with that? No, it'd be stupid, because chances are high I would never see a profit.
So I would build solar. It's not reliable and troublesome for the grid? Well, not my problem to solve, I'm merely a power provider, balancing the grid isn't my responsibility.
Ok, say there's a really well intentioned politician, will they use lots of tax money to build nuclear? But why would they? In modern countries such things are achieved by consensus, which means one person can hardly take credit for it, and they may never see it actually start operating during their term.
A political party then? Power tends to switch back and forth, and the next power in party is fairly likely to sabotage their predecessors legacy. Since the plants take a long time to build the chances are slim for a party in favor to see the benefits.
Hydro is an excellent pseudobattery but it's not available everywhere.