To a first approximation, China does not build nuclear power. Nuclear's share of power production in China is 4% and dropping. It seems to me that the main reason China keeps building a relatively tiny amount of nuclear is strategic. Reasons like ensuring they never forget how and ensuring they always have buildable designs so that if something changed they could ramp up the program. And probably even more likely: nuclear expertise is important to the country's military.
But coal is still 49%. The whole point of nuclear in a carbon-free, mostly-renewable grid is to avoid needing enormous amounts of storage and overproduction. That's a need that doesn't come up when you're still half fossil.
If you want to decarbonize as fast as possible, it makes sense to focus on rolling out wind/solar/battery as fast as possible for now, but keep developing nuclear technology to cover the last bit where it starts getting especially expensive to replace fossil with renewables without losing reliable power. That's exactly what China appears to be doing. They're not just building a few reactors, they're also the world leaders in developing various GenIV designs, like molten salt reactors.
The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy) The remaining 2-10% is nat gas, if you have a piped source, or coal if you don't.
But 98% renewable doesn't mean you can hit 100% by adding 2% more of something else, it means your something else has to supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time.
If China is aiming for that cost-optimal 90-98% renewables, that means they need to build a lot of coal.
It would also be better if you ate only vegetables and drove an ultralight (ebike) good luck. I personally like being able to turn on my lights 100% of the time
It's not about lights, it's about electricity always being available.
And well, always having power available (for domestic, but also for expensive production facilities that looses money while idle) using renewables is a lot more expensive than generating most of your power with renewables
Solar battery is not by any stretch of any possible definition the cheapest generation to deploy. Not even close. We do a disservice to the entire conversation saying easily falsifiable things like that. At 90% penetration solar + battery has a LFSCOE somewhere around $800/mwh depending on the study. Natural gas is something like 30-60. Solar panels are cheap. Building the required transmission and storage to service those panels is far more expensive than the panels themselves.
Increased renewable generation is an important goal, but we need to let the facts guide the path, not the other way around.
A) I am an electrical engineer who makes a living designing control systems for renewable generation. I know more about most of this than just about anyone in this conversation.
B) the post I am replying to is specifically calling for a 98% solar grid.
You replied to: "The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy)"
There's a big difference between "letting the facts guide the path" and tilting at strawmen built out of straw nobody else even brought into the discussion.
If you'd like to make the point that "cost of panels" can be misleading when supporting components and interconnects begin to take up the lion's share of costs then that sounds like a noble thing to remind folk of, but ideally not as a segway into shilling more fracking which includes untold environmental costs as externalities.
That's a fundamental problem with nuclear plants. Their classic "baseload" niche is gone. Like the intermittent sources, wind and solar, they need storage to hold what they overproduce during peak periods.
This is also true of geothermal, which, like nuclear, is almost all fixed capital cost.
It's only a problem because of capitalism. Every plant needs to independently make money, so nobody wants to be the ones spinning down because that's their profit margin dwindling.
But society would be better off with excess generation. So we either need a system where some are incentivized to spin down, perhaps by being paid a consistent amount regardless or something like that, or we need publicly owned power generation that doesn't care about profit.
This argument assumes we must build nuclear power.
The problem is that electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin. Now that we are moving beyond a purely centralized design.
Think about a homeowner or factory with their own renewables and storage.
They fundamentally operate on marginal price by choosing when they use their own system and when they buy from the grid.
If you add state owned reliable power to this mix they will cherry-pick. Their own cheap electricity when it delivers and the states subsidized reliable electricity when it doesn’t.
We can try add all manner of markets, fixed connection costs and what not to this but all it does is introduce strange arbitrage possibilities in the market.
Which is why we have settled on net energy markets and then the lowest possible amount of ancillary markets to shore up any gaps which would cause problems for the larger society.
We have needed to build nuclear power since the day it was invented. The amount of fossil fueled power generation is indisputable proof of that.
The only way we don't need nuclear power is if we have some other way of producing the energy we need without dooming the planet, and obviously we do not as we're still burning billions of tons of coal every year. Not to mention gas.
We could have made power generation fully fossil free many decades ago if we actually took climate change seriously. It would have been fine. Sure fossil fuels may have been cheaper, but if you include the damage they're already causing and will cause in the future you could multiply the cost of nuclear by orders of magnitude and it would still come out on top. Plus higher investment would lead to faster improvement in the technology, mass production of components and lower cost etc.
I agree that renewable with storage is cheaper of you price in destruction of habitable zones of the planet. Most people don't, and the dollar cost of the storage is a problem over fossil.
The coal argument about China doesn't hold water when you look at what they're actually building. Around 80% of their new power sources are renewable, and 10 to 15% is coal. They're aggressively focusing primarily on building renewable -- so to say that their coal is 49% is either misleading or entirely missing the point.
This assumes that the renewables built are actually contributing to the economy, which we don‘t actually know for sure. In fact there was an article stating that they discard a lot of the energy produced because the grid cannot deliver. [1]
> China, the world's top producer of solar power, rejected 360 terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean power from January to June, up 49% from the same period a year earlier, according to a report this month by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
which is great, but as i understand it will still lead to an overall decline in share of nuclear power. The scale of their power production is unfathomable
No, almost every one is above 1GW - divide the net capacity by the number under construction to see the power [1]. They appear to be almost all CAP1400 (1.4GW), Hualong One (1.0GW), or CAP1000 (1.0GW). I see a single Linglong 1 (100MW) under construction. Proposed are all above 1GW.
You need to look at where those nuclear plants are being built, in the east, and where the new energy is out west that makes it appear that nuclear is falling behind. Having power generation that doesn’t need to be transported via UHV lines is useful, it also acts as a nice baseline that keeps the grid stable.
China is building more new nuclear power than the rest of the world combined. They’ll soon produce as much renewable electricity as the United States produces electricity
