| Where can I learn more about having a higher baseload making renewables more expensive? |
Mar. 12th, 2024|11:22 am |
"Renewables are cheapest when they can be used directly. If you can use lots of them to cover the direct consumption, more energy is produced at a lower price. Instead, when you using it for storage, it's more expensive, because storage costs will be added. If renewables can be used to cover the entire load when available, the ratio of a plant of direct usage/indirect usage is bigger, thus the energy will be cheaper. But if nuclear covers the base load, the same energy can not be used from renewables production, thus lowering that ratio and making renewables more expensive. Of course you could say that the nuclear energy goes into storages, when renewables are available, but this would make nuclear even more expensive and unprofitable than it already is. This is under the assumption that nuclear reactors won't be turnes off/ or their production won't be reduced.
Although it would be possible to lower the production of nuclear reactors if needed, but this would lower theie efficiency and their life expectancy. It would also raise the need for maintance. That would result in lower energy production over life time and reducde life expectancy even further. Also cost/per life would raise, because of more maintenance and the need ro repair and replacement of parts like valves, pipes etc, because those parts would be stressed way more by the change of temperature (basic thermodynamics). All in all it results in less energy production/time unit, lower life expectancy and higher investment costs. All of it increasing the price/kwh number or LCC/LCOE/LCEA... whatever you want to call it. (and also LCA impacts)
At the end, you can say both. Either the price of renewables goes up or the price of nuclear goes up. It's tom8o tomato. It depends how you write it down on your paper sheet. Both have a bad synergy. But of course people will put the "storage burden" on the renewables, to make nuclear look less unprofitable.
---The only thing I can think of is them being unprofitable if the KWH price drops below production price.
Basically this. But if you have both, nuclear and renewables, you'll have this situation way more frequently. But because of contracts (which you need if you want base load production for +50 years) all that burden will be put on renewables and nuclear can ignore this.
You can also say, let's build less renewables, then the price will be more stable, but renewables are cheaper. If you reduce the cheap option, the ratio will go up.
----maybe even having to pay for more power grid costs due to the higher load on the power grid like the netherlands is facing with its "full" power grid causing powercompanies (eneco) to want to start charging people for delivering power back to the powergrid.
Different story, same answer. It will happen more frequently, if you have both, NR and RE. Except if you decide to reduce RE capacity. But like I said, reducing the cheaper energy form will raise the ratio at the end. Also this would be a very strange move. Before asking the small producers for money, they could turn off their bigger plants. But of course this would be less profitable for them than demanding money from the customers and leaving their plants on the grid, producing money. There are storage technologies (better suited for that specific situation than hydrogen/co2-reduction, at least for the part which is to fluctuating for electrolysis) which would be way better alternatives (eg. compressed air storage) when the available batteries are fully loaded. If not, you can just load the batteries, right?
-----like we will need anyway without nuclear since renewables aren't 100% online right?
Yes, we will need them with or without nuclear. Nuclear would just change the amount we would need. Like I said in the beginning, nuclear would raise the ratio of renewable energy which would have to go into storage, making renewables more expensive in average. That's the biggest downside of nuclear. It doesn't really solves the storage problem, it just makes it a little smaller. But brings lots of other downsides if combined with renewables." |
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