Comment by StopDisinfo910

Comment by StopDisinfo910 11 hours ago

If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.

For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.

V__ 11 hours ago

I am totally in agreement, that nuclear plants shouldn't be shut down before fossil ones.

A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.

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StopDisinfo910 11 hours ago

The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.
Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.

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- V__ 11 hours ago
  
  This year again multiple nuclear plants in France had to reduce their output due to heatwaves and water levels, and ongoing cooling concerns. This is becoming a yearly occurrence. Though, I am not saying you can't have a nuclear grid, or you shouldn't use it at all, it's just that renewables seem to be a much better solution for most cases.
  
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mulmen 11 hours ago

By definition the grid is decentralized. That’s what makes it a grid. Resiliency of the grid is a function of excess capacity but not the number of nodes.

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- V__ 10 hours ago
  
  I am no expert but remembering the grid outage in Spain this year, which was caused by a substation or node failure and not by a capacity problem. Wouldn't it be fair to describe resiliency as a combination of both capacity and nodes?
  
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  mpweiher 10 hours ago
  
  The Spainout was caused by having too little rotating mass in the grid that stabilizes the frequency.
  There was a trigger in some of the PV systems, but that wasn't the underlying cause.
  
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  StopDisinfo910 9 hours ago
  
  Yes, interconnectedness is critical if you want reliability.
  Spain has far too little transnational capacities. That was a significant contributing factor in the grid outage.
  
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  mulmen 10 hours ago
  
  If you want to change the topic of this conversation to distribution resiliency instead of production resiliency then sure.
  
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  V__ 10 hours ago
  
  I had both of these as a single concept in my head, thus the confusion.
  
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