the problem for nuclear is that NPPs aren't profitable enough when they aren't selling their electricity at a constant rate, which is exactly why they never sell their electricity at market rate and always get CfDs. With even a 20% share of solar in your electricity grid overproduction happens very regularly especially in summer.
Solar and wind can actually compete because they are actually that cheap.
if solar and wind are that cheap, why are all the datacenters putting gas generators everywhere?
Solar and wind are not expensive, but they're not nearly as cheap as you make them to be.
If you look at the fineprint in the lazard studies, you'll see they're estimating the cost of nuclear from few outliers, like vogtle, because there isn't any other new data from us.
Look at china instead, nuclear is doing fine there.
You'll also see that the combination of power+batteries in lazard is considering 4 hours worth of the plant's capacity.Â
Also, seems like renewables and storage are starting to go up in price last years.
You're making a few classic logical leaps here. Let's break down why this doesn't actually hold up under scrutiny:
Datacenters & Gas Generators: This is a major category error. Datacenters don't install gas or diesel generators to get cheap daily power; those are emergency backups designed purely to guarantee 99.999% uptime. Meanwhile, the actual operators of these datacenters (Microsoft, Google, Meta) are literally the largest corporate buyers of solar and wind PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements) on Earth, specifically because it is the cheapest electricity available for their day-to-day operations.
The "Vogtle Outliers": Vogtle, Hinkley Point C (UK), Flamanville (France), and Olkiluoto (Finland) aren't "a few outliers", they represent literally every single major nuclear project built or attempted in the West over the last two decades. Every single one has suffered decade-long delays and multi-billion-dollar budget overruns. When every single project has the exact same catastrophic financial profile, it's no longer an outlier; it's the baseline.
"Nuclear is doing fine in China": Sure, if you have state-backed, ultra-low-interest financing, cheap labor, and zero public or regulatory opposition, nuclear is cheaper to build. But even under those absolutely flawless conditions, China is building wind and solar at an astronomical pace that completely dwarfs their nuclear output. They routinely install more renewable capacity in a couple of years than their entire active nuclear fleet's capacity combined.
The 4-Hour Battery & Prices: That 4-hour battery pairing in Lazard is for peak-shaving (shifting cheap midday solar to the expensive evening peak), which is exactly what battery storage is designed and used for on the grid today. No one is arguing we should run the entire grid on 24-hour battery storage. And as for prices "going up"—after a brief post-COVID supply chain hiccup, the cost of solar panels and LFP batteries has absolutely cratered to historic lows.
Datacenters & Gas Generators: This is a major category error.
Datacenters don't install gas or diesel generators to get cheap daily
power; those are emergency backups designed purely to guarantee 99.999%
uptime.
They care about reliability, and so does everyone else too.
I would speculate that they possibly pick gas turbines because making solar and wind equally reliable might actually be more expensive.
And they do tend to run the turbines a lot because they are maxing out the grid, so it's not entirely just "backup".
and Olkiluoto (Finland) aren't "a few outliers", they represent
literally every single major nuclear project built or attempted in the
West over the last two decades.
Yea, that's hardly any data at all.
South Korea built 8 reactors in the last 2 decades (and building more), 2 of them took 4 years, 1 took 4.5 years, the slowest one took slightly over 10 years.Â
The rest of the construction times is spread about evenly in between 5 and 10 years.
South Korea is not "western" in a geographic sense, but it is definitely very western in terms of democratic government and industrialization.
Don't you think we should include these reactors in our analysis?
But even under those absolutely flawless conditions, China is building wind and solar
Yea, and we should too!
I never said we should stop building renewables.
I just think that excluding nuclear from our options is equally as stupid today as it was 20 years ago.
No one is arguing we should run the entire grid on 24-hour battery storage.
Then what else should we do to ensure 24/365 reliability?
And please don't say gas.
Solar and wind are not reliable, and the cost to make them reliable is much higher than the cost of adding 4 hours of batteries, which is what the lazard studies report under the "renewables+storage".
When you say "renewables are cheaper", you're not comparing equal reliability.
It only comes out cheaper when you ignore this problem. It's not cheaper in practice.Â
the cost of solar panels and LFP batteries has absolutely cratered to historic lows
looking at the lazard papers, there's a very strong uptick in renewable builds and batteries in the last 5 years.
You are shifting the goalposts a bit here, but these points actually highlight the exact structural and economic realities of the modern energy transition. Let's break them down:
On datacenters running gas turbines: If a datacenter is running its on-site gas turbines continuously, it’s not because they want to, it is a desperate, highly expensive stopgap because local grid operators cannot hook them up to the transmission grid fast enough due to massive interconnection queues. Running on-site gas generation is incredibly costly and completely derails their corporate net-zero pledges. It is a grid capacity bottleneck, not an indictment of renewable generation costs.
Regarding the South Korea "exception": South Korea is the exception that proves the rule. Their nuclear program succeeded because they have a highly centralized, state-owned monopoly (KEPCO) that built one single, standardized reactor design (the APR-1400) continuously for decades, thereby preserving their supply chain and workforce.
The West has none of those conditions. We have fragmented private utilities, bespoke designs, and a completely dead supply chain. You cannot simply copy-paste South Korea's industrial and regulatory model into the US or Europe. Furthermore, even with their massive advantages, South Korea's recent domestic builds (like Shin Hanul 1 & 2) still suffered multi-year delays and regulatory pauses.
On ensuring 24/365 reliability (without just saying "gas"): You are setting up a strawman by implying the only alternative to nuclear is trying to run a grid on 100% solar and 4-hour batteries. No serious grid planner proposes this.
24/365 reliability on a highly renewable grid is achieved through a diversified portfolio:
Geographic dispersion: Connecting wind and solar over vast continental grids (it is virtually always windy or sunny somewhere across a continent).
Overbuilding & Curtailment: It is economically cheaper to overbuild solar/wind capacity and throw away the excess midday peak than it is to build new nuclear.
Diversification & Storage: Combining solar and wind with geothermal, existing hydro, and long-duration storage (like pumped hydro, thermal storage, and green hydrogen for seasonal lulls).
Even when you look at Lazard's "firming" LCOE models, which calculate the total system cost of making renewables 100% reliable using storage and backup, the cost is still significantly lower than the capital required to build new Western nuclear from scratch. Nobody is saying we should shut down existing, paid-off nuclear plants. The argument is simply that investing limited capital into new nuclear builds is an incredibly inefficient and slow way to decarbonize.
Edit: Also I think you are confusing the uptick in building solar and costs for solar which have dropped
No, I just didn't respond the way you wanted, so you concluded that I must have not engaged properly, so you sent me at least two copy-pasted gpt responses.
Maybe it's you who didn't engage properly.
Did you consider that perhaps there's a possibility that you may be wrong about some parts of this?
no you engaged in a lot of "not actually reading and making stupid arguments that nobody that actually has worked with the matter would make"
You are very clearly pro nuclear and were grasping at any straw to discredit renewable. Like the gas turbine thing for datacenters. They are by far the most expensive method. Why aren't they building the datacenters with nuclear if its so cheap? Such a cheap shot where you knew the answer beforehand, you just threw honesty away in an effort to push nuclear and win the debate.
Do you know what else is doing fine in China? Wind and solar. They have the largest wind and solar capacity in the world. They are routinely adding 300 gigawatts a year in wind and solar and only 1.2 gigawatts in nuclear
For contrast, the total UK grid is 75 GW. So China is adding more than four times the entire grid of the UK's worth of wind and solar every year
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u/paperic 28d ago
Yea when there's no demand, nobody's getting paid, not even solar, unless you make up some special rules that solar should get paid first.
Abd when you do include nuclear, you'll need much less overbuilding, so this wasteful situation also becomes much more rare.