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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

We actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night if we want to have a modern industrialized economy with factories and refineries operating around the clock. It's generally not practical to shut down those facilities just because electricity prices are temporarily high. So, in practice all of those industries will migrate to areas with cheap, reliable power (even if it's not "green"). This has obvious national security concerns in that it makes us dependent on unreliable imports for critical materials.

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> We actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night if we want to have a modern industrialized economy with factories and refineries operating around the clock.

We always need electricity available, but the demand is not constant and there are quite a few discretionary loads which can be run preferentially in the day time. We can expand our electrical capacity with clean solar energy in the day time, reducing the total need for existing polluting sources. Even if industrial factories run off of natural gas at night, a large installed base of solar will allow discretionary loads (home appliances, EV charging, etc) to run off of zero emissions solar when available. And even the industrial plants can utilize solar during the daytime, cutting their CO2 emissions related to energy use in half.

Still burning O&G - the goal is to not which means you need that base load which means nuclear where hydro/pumped storage is not an option.

Only in the short term. It’s taking 10-15+ years to get nuclear online. Looking at the ramping up of battery production by you can build solar today, add batteries in 10 years and be much better off financially and environmentally.

Even China regularly spends 7+ years to build nuclear from the point where construction actually starts and even longer when you include planning.

Hand waving the cost there both financially and environmentally as well a “well we assume things will work out” - there will need to be battery storage in the 100s of gigawatt hours and it needs to be cheap reliable and durable

What if they don’t? There’s no assurances there will be magic battery tech

There is a reason China India Russia and others are still building nuclear plants

We don’t need magic battery tech. Current PV + Batteries can already 24/7 power cheaper than nuclear. It’s only vs fossil fuels where batteries have trouble.

China is building nuclear because they are building everything, but they are effectively building 3x as much solar and 7x as much wind because nuclear just costs more than any other option.

From 2020-2022 China increased generation power by:

   51,600 GWh/year Nuclear
  156,600 GWh/year Solar 
  357,500 GWh/year Wind

Currently they get as much power from solar as nuclear and twice as much from wind. In total they are 34% renewable vs 5% from nuclear. It’s the US that’s heavily invested in Nuclear not China.

umm that doesn't explain why they are building nuclear - could it be because they realize they need the ability to produce power at night and when the wind isn't blowing?

They are literally adding 18+X as much fossil fuel as nuclear over that time frame. That’s what’s proving nighttime power.

Adding more capacity is an all hands on deck situation for the China they are throwing everything at it. Nuclear is simply achieving the smallest gains because the ROI is low.

Base load is a term from the fossil/nuclear time. It is a pure statistical amount which designated how much "slow" sources (coal, nuclear) could be used because there is never less demand than the base load. And everything was done to push the base load up. But it never meant that it was sufficient to deliver the "base load". The power generation still hat to match any demand at any time. So everything else was done with "fast" and often more expensive plants like gas, water.

In the age of renewables, things have changed. If you have enough renewables to cover large parts of the electricity demand on average, then you will frequently produce 100% more of the maximum grid demand. In this situation, "base load" power plants don't make any sense at all. The new term is "residual load". This refers to the load at a point of time which cannot be delivered by renewables at that time. This can also vary between 0 and 100%. Which obviously requires different power plants, like gas, water.

> This refers to the load at a point of time which cannot be delivered by renewables at that time. This can also vary between 0 and 100%.

If you had a predominantly renewable grid, this would generally be 80-100%, because low generation could coincide with peak load. Which is extremely bad, because then you have to duplicate that proportion of generation capacity via some alternative even though it's only rarely needed. Or worse, it's needed a lot but it's fossil fuels.

Meanwhile you want some degree of energy storage, because if you have times when renewable generation is more than 100% of the load, you want to be able to use that power later and not just throw it away.

But then you're back to base load sources making sense. They reduce the amount of storage or peaker plants you need at night and the amount of renewable generation you need during the day.

They just don't make sense as more of the grid than there is "base load" for the same reason as always. Otherwise you'd have times where there is surplus "base load" generation and have to put that into energy storage, when it'd have been cheaper for that part of generation capacity to be renewables.

Call it what you want you still need an always available always there source of power to ensure demand is met. In the PNW hydro fills this role, elsewhere you will need something else and only nuclear really can fulfil that need

You haven't gotten the point: nuclear is very bad for varying loads and that is why it is bad to fill the gaps in renewable production.

>> It's generally not practical to shut down those facilities just because electricity prices are temporarily high.

On the surface, that sounds logic. In reality so, that is exactly what happens: as short notice reaction by big consumers (reducing or increasing consumption as needed), planning in accordance with electricity exchanges... And that behaviour is actually pretty profitable, it contributes to grid stability, enables more flexibility on the consumption side and is technically possible in a surprising number of high consumption industries (paper, chemicals, graphite, steel...).

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