Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
A 2019 analysis from the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University by Amory B. Lovins mentioned that grid integration costs matter too when comparing electrical resources but they do not add much. They would need to be about two to twelve times the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) in order for nuclear to rival renewables. However, just the opposite is true. Solar and wind grid integration costs are at worst comparable to their LCOE. In the U.K., these grid integration costs are low. In U.S. utilities find they’re many times below renewables’ LCOE even at eighty five percent wind share. This means that adding them into the comparison can’t flip the outcome as the 2016 report claimed. BNEF finds that even a flat load is most cheaply provided by variable renewables, plus backup that is also carbon-free if it is demand-side, renewable, or storage. That is why the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts renewables to supply at least ninety five percent of the world’s new capacity. This amounts to about three hundred gigawatts per year through 2026.
It is likely that grid integration or small grid expansion cost would probably increase nuclear’s cost disadvantage because big thermal plants usually incur much higher integration costs than wind or solar farms. This is consistent with the findings of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The reason for this is that those renewable’s outages are slower, shorter and more predictable. In fact, those outages are easier to predict than demand itself. Renewables usually avoid big thermal plants’ high intermittency or forced outage costs for reserve margin, spinning reserve and cycling. Those costs must also be counted and compared.
Adding complementary nuclear power does not aid but actually harms variable renewables. Its cycling limitations and high capital cost requires maximum runtime. However near-zero-operating-cost renewables idle reactors by dispatching whenever available. Reactors cannot have both a high and low capacity factor. In addition, cycling reactors spoil their economics via lifetimes, maintenance and efficiency penalties. They spread high fixed costs over less output. The same thing holds true for proposed small modular reactors (SMR). These bring greater economic and use-case challenges, novel safety and proliferation issues that are now making the Department of Energy (DoE) undercut the mission of the Department of Defense, and lesser carbon savings achieved later.
Thus, nuclear newbuild are already grossly uncompetitive when renewables generate a minor share, and gets more so as they grow. It’s also slower. It cut global carbon emissions from 2010 to 2020 five times less than renewables did. President Macron of France recently said, “We need to massively develop renewable energies because it is the only way to meet our immediate electricity needs, since it takes 15 years to build a nuclear reactor.”
Most existing commercial nuclear reactors cost more to operate that replacing them with carbon-free efficiency and renewables. The 2016 report urges increasing that misallocation with billions of dollars more in subsidies to keep uneconomical reactors running and save carbon. But allowing them to exit the market instead would open up demand for cheaper carbon-free competitors to contest which would save more carbon starting in a year or two later as efficiency and renewables overtake and reverse transient gas substitution