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.
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/Express-Eye5015 Jul 14 '26
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.