𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

Except people will just purchase their own solar, because it’s cheaper than getting nuclear power from a battery. They won’t wait for demand to catch up, they’ll make sure their own demand is fulfilled so they won’t have to purchase power anymore.

It’s a simple economic rule, if there’s a cheaper option people wi shift towards it. You can’t force people to purchase your power. You can’t stop it unless you ban buying solar, which won’t be received well.

Nuclear fills a rapidly shrinking niche in the power mix of tomorrow, and it’s economics that’s squeezing it out. There’s no point in fighting that unless you want to pay more for power than is necessary (which nobody does).

Assuming you still need the nuclear power to fill those batteries that is. Given the rate of solar adoption, that might well become unnecessary.

Rooftop solar takes basically no extra space and it’s hard to get even closer to population centers than that.

The problem with using nuclear as baseload is that people have the wrong idea of what is required from a baseload power source.

A baseload power source’s most important quality isn’t constant output, it’s rapidly adaptable output.

When it comes to cost, nothing beats solar. It’s cheap, it’s individually owned and especially with a battery the self-sufficiency basically means not paying for power anymore. So, people will adopt solar at greater numbers as the cost of solar panels is still dropping.

Solar and wind at peak times in several countries already exceed the demand. Nuclear, which is more expensive to run, now has a problem, because nobody wants to buy that energy. They’d rather get the cheaper abundant renewable power.

So, the nuclear reactor has to turn off or at least scale to a minimal power output during peak renewable hours. This historically is something nuclear reactors are just not good at. But even worse, it’s a terrible economic prospect: nuclear is barely profitable as-is, having to turn it off for half the day kills the economic viability completely. Ergo, government subsidies are required to keep it operational.

Flexibility is king in the power network of the future. That means batteries or natural gas plants at the moment. Nuclear can be useful for nations without those and with a lagging renewable adoption, but it will be more expensive in the long run. It will also become more important to do heavy industrial tasks during peak renewable hours, so that the demand better matches the output.

Not tennis balls, no. Quite frankly I can’t remember what it was. Just the colour stuck 😅

Whether a specific colour was green or yellow. We eventually looked up the RGB value to settle it, and as it turns out it is the exact shade that’s halfway to yellow and halfway to green.

We were both equally correct in the end.