âYou are missing the point, currently with relatively low percentages of wind power, new fossil plant doesnât have to be installed, it just has to be running on standby matching expected wind output - up to 100% name plate.â
When you say âit just has to be running on standbyâ does the âitâ refer to the new fossil plant which doesnât have to be installed? Because Iâm not clear on how it could be running on standby if it was not installed.
If you are saying that existing fossil plants can make up for any shortfall between wind production and demand, without the need to build new plants expressly for backing up the wind, then yes, in many places which have low wind penetration, that is true. But just because many places were already equipped to handle demand before any wind was added, and thus can deliver 100% of wind nameplate while penetration is low, that doesnât mean that wind units must be backed to 100% nameplate. With higher penetration, nameplate capacity could greatly exceed demand, and there is no need to back up beyond what demand is likely to be. Backup generation would only be needed to smooth out the low end of the generation profile.
âHowever in the current low to no electricity market growth situation, subsidized wind makes older fossil plant too expensive to run, forcing retirements, and the installation of new inefficient peaker plants to carry wind backups and replace the old fossil plant when the wind isnât blowing GHG and air pollution saving- none.â
By some ways of accounting, the carbon savings from Texas wind power has been less than none. That can also happen where wind starts displacing existing nuclear power. Norway, on the other hand, was able to directly displace fossil with wind, because fossil was only used to reduce hydro drawdown in drier years, and wind can perform that function just as well. But in general, wind isnât going to be of much help wherever it is paired up with fossil fuel plants.
âActually coal capacity factor is less than 50% so effectively it could be replaced with 800 GWatts of nukes,â
More like 950 after you compensate for global average nuclear capacity factor. Except thereâs another problem. Part of the reason that coal has a lower capacity factor is that some of that coal generation is doing load following. See, for example, this month of German production:
The brown coal (lignite) generators are baseload, but the hard coal generators and gas are what the Germans are using to buffer the very challenging zone between baseload and the combined variability of fluctuating demand and erratic forms of generation. The capacity factors of their hard coal plants are worse than for their lignite plants, but thatâs because they are providing a much more valuable generation profile. You canât just replace that with inferior baseload. There are kinds of nuclear under development which should be much better at load following, but those too will have lower capacity factors, so theyâll still replace coal at closer to 1:1 capacity.
Ultimately, however, even 1.6 terawatts of low carbon energy is way short of what we are actually going to need to replace all fossil fuels. Even 10 terawatts would have been skimpy just to displace current fossil fuel consumption, and demand is only expected to grow from here.
âWith factory mass production, with such large orders, both AECL and Westinghouse forecast $1B/GW pricing compared to the $2B/GW achieved in France, and Canada under the todayâs old one or two a year scenario.â
Horse and cart problem. You have to spend money to save money. Some widgets can piggyback onto an existing production infrastructure, but nuclear power is not one of them. Itâs going to take many billions of dollars just to build the manufacturing system, and there are basically three sources for that kind of dough. One is through ongoing salesâwhere you have demand for an expensive product, and the income from that product finances better and cheaper ways of making it. Two is government support. And three is through private equityâeither the manufacturer eats the up-front costs themselves, or they bring investors on board in exchange for future payback. For existing nuclear power, all three of those are non-starters. There isnât a clamoring demand for them (and what little demand there is is split between multiple providers), and very few governments, companies, or investors want to take a chance on them because payback is slow, and because there are a number of new-tech development projects underway, any one of which could wind up making current-tech reactors obsolete long before they have a chance to reach payback. With all the competing investments which have good prospects for payback, hardly anyone wants to sink a bundle into building a factory for a technology which is widely seen as doomed and just waiting to die.