You don't need to run coal power plant close to 100% to be profitable. You want to run nuclear power plant close to 100% because fuel is cheap and you want pay back CAPEX as early as possible.
The article you send is perfect example why it's not economic to build new coal or nuclear power plants in US. The reasons are: very cheap natural gas and no CO2 tax. In US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity.
In Europe the situation is very different.
"Europe is in the opposite spot. The continent's main gas point, the TTF benchmark, nearly doubled to over €60/MWh by mid-March."
Renewable + battery is already the cheapest and fastest way to build new power in many domains + geographies, and the number of and range keeps expanding as the price keeps dropping.
It's always a peculiar response that outright ignores certain power combos, and it always seems to come in nuclear discussions.
You mean solar + batteries. Batteries can be used to flatten the day/night cycle of a solar power plant on many days. But it's depending on location and it's not cheap.
For cost of $100 / MWh, you can do it in sunny regions like Spain, Mexico, middle East.
It doesn't make economic sense to combine batteries with wind, because periods of low wind output can be multiple weeks long. The betterie costs would be
ridiculous.
How do you cover the last 10-20% of the missing solar+wind+batteries output, at what cost?
Usually its a combo of solar+wind+batteries+fosil , costs depend gas cost and CO2 costs.
Five years ago, skeptics were saying a few hours of grid on battery was "impossible" and coal would be displaced only by gas. Now we're talking days of grid supply from batteries even from non-grid optimal lithium tech. Batteries are following the manufacturing optimization S-curve and its not even on the fastest part of the curve yet. Lithium is dominant only because its early in the pipe but multiple types of other battery techs (flow, iron+ etc) will probably become viable unlocking weeks -> months -> seasons of output. And probably this will happen before the first nuclear plant from this Iran adventure energy squeeze is even ready to light up - as its taking the west 20+ years to plan and commission a nuclear plant.
Currently, the Iran energy squeeze is not much felt in the west, just slight increase in prices. It would take real pain, something like 1973 oil crisis, for west to reconsider nuclear power generation.
> How do you cover the last 10-20% of the missing solar+wind+batteries output, at what cost?
First of all, we're very far from this being a problem. If you "only" move 90% of the electrical grid to solar and use fossil fuels to make up the remaining 10% it's a ridiculously huge win anyways. The person you are talking to is just talking about "new power", not "replacing all existing power"... so unless the grid is growing by 5 to 10x your objection here is utterly irrelevant.
Secondly, that whitepaper shows you can do this with incredibly unfavourable assumptions. Namely that they're
1. Ignoring transmission, in reality we can and will move power around from sunny to shady areas. The paper is assuming a single off grid facility. Because different areas are cloudy at different times this greatly reduces the peak amount of batteries needed.
2. Ignoring other sources of energy, like wind, hydro, etc. Because their failures are uncorrelated with solars failures, they greatly reduce the amount of storage needed to hit reliability targets. It's a lot more likely that you'll have a cloudy week than a cloudy and windless week.
This is also why pairing wind with batteries makes a ton of sense. You aren't just pairing wind with batteries, you're pairing wind with a mix of other electricity and batteries. The more uncorrelated sources of electricity you have the less batteries you need to paper over outages.
so what should europe do? gas being expensive doesnt make nuclear economics better for the role of variable backstop of an increasingly renewable grid. Its still a fatal economic equation for nuclear.
Btw battery is rapidly changing the math on
> US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity
california went from 45% gas in 2022 to 25% gas in 2025 almost entirely because of batteries (and more solar), and they're just getting started. I know its not generally true across the US, but very soon batteries are going to be pushing a huge amount of gas off the grid.
1. Think very hard how to reduce reliance on imports (US, Russia, Middle East fossil fuels), (China solar, batteries, consumer goods).
2. Think very hard about the decarbinization strategy. The strategy was: we will replace fossil fuels with renewables, we will be successfull, everybody else will see how see how successfull we are and everybody will follow our example. This strategy is not working, world-wide CO2 emmisions are increasing every year, industry from Europe is moving outside Europe because high energy prices, GDP is stagnating. Europe should think how to push other major CO2 emmiters China, India, US, to strongly decrease CO2. Europe alone will fail to fix climate change.
The article you send is perfect example why it's not economic to build new coal or nuclear power plants in US. The reasons are: very cheap natural gas and no CO2 tax. In US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity.
In Europe the situation is very different.
"Europe is in the opposite spot. The continent's main gas point, the TTF benchmark, nearly doubled to over €60/MWh by mid-March."
https://www.briefs.co/news/u-s-natural-gas-just-hit-a-record...