Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need forms of storage for that. The conundrum can be turned on its head - "What do you do when you have nuclear and the businesses and factories are closed ?" You either simply waste nuclear capacity that you've paid and waited years for to be built - or you need forms of storage to make use of it. Both Nuclear and Renewables really want storage, they will compete for it. If you can only make use of 60% of a nucl…
It may be still better to run nuclear plants then. We'll need data from modern nuclear designs, (especially the small ones) but renewables are not exactly free to run. Storage degrades, solar degrades, lithium needs to be mined, turbines mean lots of mechanical parts, etc. We may learn that running just the renewables common today is even more uneconomic.
Additionally, battery degradation appears to be primarily related to high speed charging. In decade old battery packs that were not charged at extreme rates like 2C or above, you rarely see significant degredation. Grid scale operators will almost certainly manage their battery farms to limit the C rate to optimize battery life and long term profits.
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