Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment.
Yes, all the things mentioned should be looked into and done when it makes financial sense but "wasting wind" is much less a thing to worry about than "burning gas", and I'd rather waste wind than waste money.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
... most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design)
to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once
or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated
power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of rated power per minute.
But operating a nuclear plant in this fashion pushes up the price per MWh considerably given their very high cap-ex and op-ex. And while fuel cost is negligible for nuclear, creating more nuclear waste per useful MWh generated is a further drag on costs.
So as a solution, it "works" if the nuclear plant does not have to compete in terms of price with other sources of electricity. But nuclear fails to compete on cost even if operated continuously - it's uncompetitive with cheap, quick to deploy, low op-ex, modern tech like CC gas turbines or renewables in most western electricity markets and can only survive with government subsidy[2].
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0703/ML070380209.pdf [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/04/19/biden-adm...
It's called pumped storage.
We dont need as much storage as people think. Solar and wind anti correlate and a vast amount of demand can be time shifted.
It's because of this that there's a lot of talk about wild ideas like pressurizing abandoned mines and so on - there are a lot of mines around. But then we're back to the "proven technology" sticking point.
Nowhere is currently "well" provisioned for pumped hydro given a solar and wind grid coz while they existed for over a hundred years they have never had to store that much energy. Newer, larger ones are being built around the world. Australia will be well provisioned soon.
Go back in time 10 years when solar and wind first became economic and people made similar comments about how little of it there was (1% of total power!), ignoring the unit economics completely. We are at that exact same inflexion point with pumped hydro.
What's the longest period without wind and sun you're willing to provision for before you give up and tell the population they'll have to do without electricity for a bit? A day, a week, a month? Numerically, how much storage would that actually need? How many stations, how big? You'd need over a hundred Fengnings to power the UK for a week. Where would they go? I'm all for renewables + storage but you can't handwave these questions as FUD, it's a serious problem.
I suspect that if we committed to categorically eliminating fossil fuels, including peaker plants, the first time the lights went out because the weather was bad you'd have people clamoring to build nuclear power plants. Statistically, it'll happen at some point no matter how much storage you provision.
6.5 Fengnings or equivalent should be enough for a 94% renewable grid in the UK.
It is well within the same order of magnitude.
>the first time the lights went out because the weather was bad you'd have people clamoring to build nuclear power plants
because why build a solar or wind farm this year when you can instead wait 20 years for hinkley c to be finished at FIVE times the LCOE cost?
it's absurd. the people dont clamor for nuclear power. only the military industrial complex does.
That doesn't follow at all from your article, which is about the US. You can't just extrapolate from a different country at a lower latitude with different weather patterns and vastly more space to put things like onshore wind/solar farms without running into NIMBYIsm, not to mention more hours of sunlight just from spanning 4 timezones. 6 hours of storage is not even close to enough for reliable renewable power in the UK. It wouldn't even cover a single windless winter night.
And even if we take it at face value, the scenario you linked involves masses of overbuild, over the course of nearly 30 years ("by 2050"), and still leaves 6% of energy coming from carbon combustion. If we start building nuclear plants now, even if we accept your premise that they take 20 years to build (they needn't, especially with scale), then we can get to zero carbon almost a decade earlier - and with minimal land use.
It's not like it's impossible - France went all in on a nuclear grid.
This is FUD.
You absolutely can if you are discussing orders of magnitude which we were.
Our fundamental disagreement wasnt about whether it was 8x fengnings or 6.5x but rather whether it was of the order of 65 or 6.5.
>It's not like it's impossible - France went all in on a nuclear grid.
Not impossible, just at great expense and it wasnt worth it. In 5 years less of France's electricity will be nuclear than it is now while still spending vast sums on new plants. They're officially hoping renewables will make up the difference.