Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

> You can overprovision generation, you can build dispatchable storage solution or dispatchable alternative generation source.

Every model I have seen does that. And for Europe at least that total cost of doing all that is below nuclear.

> That relies on only taking the base load and offloading the actual hard part to other generators. Exactly what nuclear proponents like to say will be impossible for renewables.

It's certainly not impossible, since that's what we do currently. The reason we would like to stop doing it in the future is co2 emissions, not a feasibility barrier.

Now my point was that we don't have experience of massive storage. And in the absence of storage, nuclear costs go up, while renewables output goes down. One is painful but manageable, we don't have a plan to handle the other.

Personally, I wish we spent a bit less subsidies on renewable production, and a bit more on grid-sized storage, so we can have an answer on costs. Without this, discussions on storage-enabled grids are conjectures at best.

The TSOs coordinate in ENTSOE, they are not responsible for actual energy production. But they are responsible for many aspects of system stability, and ENTSOE also coordinates security of supply studies.

How to make sure that everything that is needed in order to have sufficient production capacity in all scenarios is also built is not in the responsibility of TSOs. Of course when we consider how to develop flexibility and system service markets we are exactly talking about making sure that everything that is needed _is_ built. Not through centralized planning but by making sure we have a market where we pay for people to provide what is needed.

The big questions, like energy only vs capacity markets, are directly about making sure the necessary investments are made, no matter what technology options are backing them up. You don't need central planning, but you need ESM studies to guide your market designs and long term political decisions (i.e. do we need a hydrogen grid).

And the fact that right now we don't have a market (or other incentives/regulations) for virtual inertia is a real problem worrying TSOs (much more so than the hypothetical issue of under-supply in 10-20 years that you raise for which the basic organisational mechanisms are in place).

> 2) the difference between paying 5% more and having to cut consumers from the grid is massive. for any TSO trying to save money is a goal, but curtailing consumption is an absolute failure criterion, second only to damaging the grid itself.

Of course, but what is your point? That renewables require massive storage to ensure supply at all time? Yes. That's obvious.

But, as every study and common sense shows, it turns out massive storage is also helpful for a nuclear grid, especially once we get into electrifying the heat sector (an important point you have not acknowledged at all).

Finally security of supply studies also assume that conventional generators sometimes fail for unpredictable reasons. In Texas it wasn't the renewables, it was the gas system freezing over that almost fucked up the grid.

I still don't get what your initial complaint was about. The point I made was pretty explicitly: "Renewables require massive storage to solve the fact that they are not dispatchable. But actually so does nuclear for completely different, economic reasons." What was it that you object to in that statement? What are you "debunking"?

Finally: As to the idea that energy systems are optimized for reliability first, and that renewables threaten this somehow:

Germany had an average of 12 outage minutes in 2020 on 49% renewables.

US: 280 outage minutes on 23%.

Germany outage minutes have been trending down as well last I checked, with the general explanation I have heard being that the focus on renewables has forced people to coordinate better, and check their grids more thoroughly than they did before.

I am not sure I see the point of continuing this. Other than I initially thought you clearly are knowledgeable, yet you refuse to cleanly argue your point. You attacked me directly for bringing up that storage has a role to play in nuclear as well as renewables, and now you claim that renewables are not the point.

I never claimed that they played the same role either. Again, why is that an issue?

That said, the point of storage for nuclear is exactly also that you don't build out the peak load, so if large scale storage failure leading to undersupply is your worry (as you indicate elsewhere), then that is a concern for this scenario as well.

But again, why? Storage backed energy grids are already a reality: we were running Europe on stored Gas for much of the winter. We are not talking about hypothetical batteries but about storing methane/H2 and operating gas power plants in these scenarios. Nothing in this tech stack is unproven by now, it is primarily a question of economics.

You insinuate (without clarifying) that markets arent working, yet we have fantastically reliable grids in Europe. Finally, the degree to which economics trumps reliability can be seen very directly in the energy-only vs capacity market debate. Energy only puts the critical safety decisions in the hand of market actors. Negative and very high positive prices in the market are supposed to incentivise building a base load that will only run for a few weeks a year and feeding it with flexibly produced gas/storage. Capacity markets put the decision how much of this to build I. The hands of the planners and engineers instead. Much to the horror of most engineers and planners I know energy-only markets won the political debate a few years ago. It seems politicians really hate giving engineers money to spend on reliability directly.

This debate probably would work if we were at a bar or conference, but it's not really clear it makes sense here...

> Every model I have seen does that

Not really. Both overprovisioning and dispatchable storage are hugely expensive, therefore dispatchable alternative generation is employed, which is gas. So in an attempt to move away from carbon-emitting generation these models make carbon-emitting generation integral part of the system.

What models based on renewables actually do is try to find a problem for a solution: throw away grid stability requirements out of the window altogether, introduce huge variabilities and hope that spending power inequality will mask brownouts, i.e. it is hoped that pricing changes and consumer reaction to those changes will be fast enough for load to disconnect voluntarily before parts of grid are forcibly disconnected.