zlacker

  "French electricity prices turned negative as a drop in demand and surging renewables output prompted some nuclear reactors to power down."

This is an issue with nuclear in a net zero scenario. Nuclear starts out at 90%+ capacity factor, like in California today. But as fossil fuels become a low percentage of the grid, you inevitably get a low capacity factor which increases LCOE. Even if you don't want any renewables and you only build nuclear, the problem is demand isn't static so you have to overbuild nuclear by a lot and run at a low capacity factor, or you build storage, either of these increases LCOE.

The sensible thing will be to use renewables on top of nuclear rather than overbuild nuclear, like what France is doing. But that will also eat into capacity factor when it's more windy and sunny like what France experiences.

Just something to keep in mind when you hear people talk about nuclear costs. Multiply it by at least 1/0.7 if they haven't taken this into account.

>>hacker+(OP)
High level planning is important for efficiency. It'd be great to have some resources which either store power in bulk cheaply (even if not efficiently) and/or inexpensive to idle operations that can achieve public benefit for spare power.

>>hacker+(OP)
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is the rate of the total energy output of the energy system to build and operate it over its lifetime to the average total cost of the system over that lifetime.