Zane SelvansJigar Shah (current head of the US DOE's Loan Programs Office) recently wrote a long enthusiastic thread about the role he sees for #nuclear power in the US energy system. I've been surprised and kind of confused by this, given the cost overruns and delays associated with recent attempts to build new nuclear in the US, and the relative immaturity of smaller factory-built reactors that some hope can get onto technology learning curves and so reduce costs over time.
Some of his nuclear enthusiasm seems to come from pessimism about the prospects for clearing the interconnection queue traffic jam (~1 TW of renewables is currently waiting) and the difficulty of permitting and building out new transmission at the scale required by scenarios for rapid decarbonization through electrification. Which... yeah. Fair enough. Interconnection & transmission are currently very hard.
What surprises me is that he thinks nuclear would be *easier* -- it's got plenty of its own regulatory and permitting baggage!
He briefly talks about the problem in a more generic way in this podcast: On a zero-carbon grid *something* ultimately has to manage the non-dispatchability of renewables, and almost by definition, that thing is going to be utilized at a low capacity factor, and will raise costs relative to bulk renewables e.g. solar PV at $20/MWh.
Chris Nelder 🤘@ZaneSelvans I don't suppose he has addressed how storage and DR would compare to nukes for that specific purpose?
Greg Schivley@chrisnelder @ZaneSelvans Storage and DR (flexible load) are very useful but not going to cut it when wind is low for a week or two. I’d bet more on geothermal right now but something firm has to be available unless you charge batteries and let them sit idle all the time.
@gschivley @chrisnelder The EGS stuff is very exciting! I guess there's not really a capital cost per MWh for geothermal the way there is for batteries so probably geothermal has to end up being cheaper beyond some threshold of maximum "discharge"
@gschivley Also welcome back!
@gschivley @chrisnelder Are there any large potential pools of low opportunity-cost dispatchable demand? Stuff you really can turn off for weeks on end without being too disruptive?
@ZaneSelvans @chrisnelder Not that I know of! Maybe (heavily subsidized) hydrogen electrolysis, which could also be used for storage and converted back to electricity. Or maybe some new technology/process with low Capex that can afford to overbuild capacity. Not my area of expertise though.
@gschivley @ZaneSelvans Hydrogen electrolysis is clearly the plan in Europe.
@gschivley @ZaneSelvans Which is why some models find that in a high-RE scenario, keeping some old gas peakers around is the most cost-efficient solution. But again - all highly speculative assumptions at this point. As Paul Denholm said in Ep. 188: