ViewTrick1002

That is ancillary services. And where all battery implementations started before saturating those marketss.

We've now past that and batteries are actively killing the business case for fossil gas peakers while renewables are doing the same for legacy thermal producers.

Why is it irrelevant? There has been recent research on just this question. It is still in its infancy with simplified models but their findings suggest that as grids decarbonize, storage will increasingly take over the price setting role traditionally played by conventional generators.

The new merit order: The viability of energy-only electricity markets with only intermittent renewable energy sources and grid-scale storage

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014098832...

It does. At some point the next marginal investor looks at the market and can’t make their money back.

But it is a problem for legacy thermal electricity producers being undercut by renewables and storage.

Which is why we have ancillary services and grid regulations.

We aim for those to be real-time markets as well. But for some services that doesn’t fit so we instead buy the services on longer contracts.

The goal is of course to have the ancillary services to be as small and few as possible since it is a supplement creating market based pricing for the things the marginal net energy market itself doesn’t provide adequately today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_services

System studies find that renewable energy systems are cheaper than involving new nuclear from Australia to Denmark and Finland.

Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway.

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...

What are these grid operators and researchers missing that you know?

Add a bit of firming and you can. Or just accept a tiny bit of fossil fuels. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

We still need to decarbonize agriculture, chemicals, aviation, shipping, heavy industry, construction and so on. Most of which use either chemical energy carriers, or fossil feedstock.

Siphoning off a tiny bit off that for grid firming duty is trivial. Or do sustainable biofuels from food waste and so on.

Which is also what the system studies lands on. Finding that adding new nuclear makes it far more expensive.

Not really given how ruinously expensive it is? Isn’t the most decarbonization per dollar the fastest what matters?

Which is crying over spilled milk. We live in 2026.

Today renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history, and is reshaping the global energy system.

Given that Germany's coal burning levels are the lowest in over 70 years please do explain how Germany replaced nuclear with coal.

I just can't comprehend why some people get so upset by Germany.

In my experience LLMs tend to work far better when they have a tree of structured information to search through and change.

Compared to poking at a mungy ball of accidental state where every change introduces complexity for the future which every downstream agent needs to correctly find.

This comment doesn’t seem aligned with reality?

System studies find that renewable energy systems are cheaper than involving new nuclear in both Denmark and Finland.

The thermal plant you are complain about mothballed one of its two burners last autumn when the contract for firm emergency reserve capacity ended.

The final burner stayed open only with a new emergency reserve contract. Last time I checked it has ran like 50-100 hours per year. Never being called in as emergency reserve, although stepping up to hot standby a few times.

They also reactivated a mothballed CCGT plant in the same region for emergency reserve duties. But that was based on the war in Ukraine and ensuring local preparedness rather than needing the electricity.

That’s a backwards looking metric. You’re complaining that late 2000s renewable were expensive.

The problem with nuclear is that it doesn’t solve stability. When cold spells hit Europe the French exports turn into imports. So all the French neighbors needs enough backup capacity, generally fossil based today, to both make up for the French exports vanishing, they experiencing the same cold spell, and exporting to France.

Stick two French grids next to each other and they would quickly collapse due to how brittle they are.

And nuclear power is the worst solution imaginable to do firming for renewables.

You need something with low CAPEX to do that. Which is the complete opposite of nuclear power.

Because they aren’t when you look at wholesale costs?

Either way. France is wholly unable to build new nuclear given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and the ruinously expensive proposed subsides for the EPR2 fleet.

While Germany still pays for expensive early renewables. Back before the industry exploded in scale.

The relevant question is where to spend the next 100b to get the most decarbonization the fastest, today.

That’s not what we are seeing in reality. In Spain the nuclear plants massively load follow. Same as I just mentioned they do in Sweden.

Pretending they can just do “baseload” in 2026 doesn’t work. They can bid negative, but that’s just extending the life of the plant a few extra years.

And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available.

And this is today a purely physical problem. You only need to look to Australia to see grids where rooftop solar today crowds out all other sources, even utility scale renewables. How do you force them to buy ruinously expensive grid based nuclear?

A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels.

Gas turbines are cheap in CAPEX and expensive in OPEX. They can cope with it, although even they have trouble with the sliver of hours left after solar, wind and storage make up the bulk. Since that’s a far slimmer portion than their bread and butter peaking style of operation

The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.

We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants. Thats where nuclear is headed.

And nuclear doesn’t really help with cold spells, huge aircon loads or other strained situations.

Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.

That’s for new nuclear. Existing nuclear reactors operate on the whim of the markets.

For that we have energy futures, or just bidding negative, if you don’t want to turn off. But anyone buying the electricity will ask themselves why they should pay a premium for nuclear electricity at the height of summer when the continent is flooded with solar

Here’s an article in Swedish how a reactor was turned off for about a week due to consistently low prices. While another reactor at the same plant was already having maintenance done.

https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/forsmark-2-ur-drift-pa-agarna...

The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.

It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.

Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.

But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.

Last spring, there was some kind of payment outage at my local grocery store, so only cash was accepted.

The cash register rejected about a third of the bills I had been keeping in my wallet, simply because they had become so battered from sitting there.

That's the state of cashless in Sweden today.

Please re-check your numbers, since they’re all wrong.

For example, the world deployed 1600 GWh batteries in 2025.

I would check out these recent articles. They’ve taken the step to model the entire grid hour by hour.

This is of course not how reality will play out, since the grid is market driven, but it’s quite interesting to see the results.

Denmark 2026:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Finland 2025:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Australia 2025–26:

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...

I have a hard time taking you seriously when you claim that Germany replaced nuclear with fossil gas. It has been roughly flat for the past 20 years while coal generation collapsed, renewables exploded and nuclear disappeared.

And this still assumes that rebuilding a nuclear industry somehow is an end in itself. It isn't.

The objective is to decarbonize society. Not construt nuclear reactors. We don't have any special obligation to build new nuclear, anymore more than there was an obligation to keep building oil-fired power plants once they stopped making economic sense.

Those system cost analyses easily solve, at far lower costs than involving new nuclear.

Which is like in the polar high north of the arctic circle?

What’s the relevance?

Which is why the best possible days for the first EPR2 reactor in France is 2038 with massive state support.

Or just build renewables and storage? Distributed and extremely cheap.

The answer twenty years ago is not the same as the one today.

Nuclear weapons or nuclear power?

Weapons yes, power seems quite stupid given the costs and lead times.

That’s exactly why I prefer whole-system modelling over simple LCOE comparisons. Backup, seasonal balancing, transmission, lifetime and integration costs all need to be accounted for.

What I find interesting is that the system studies I’ve been looking at, from Australia to Denmark and Finland, still don’t find new nuclear improving the least-cost outcome.

And they’re not assuming another Vogtle, Flamanville or Hinkley. They generally give nuclear much more optimistic NOAK or adjusted future costs.

So I’m curious: what system-cost study are you relying on that reaches the opposite conclusion?

I’ll take that as confirmation that you can’t identify a single false claim.

Which is unsurprising, since all six are based on publicly available information.

Which bullet is false? Be specific.