Ontario may have gone a little hard a little early with solar. They get about half as much sun as sunny places in California or Australia. Prices have gone down a lot since they started though and as prices have gone down, solar works better in more places and I’ve heard about solar in Ontario for several years. Doesn’t mean now is not good when most of the projects probably cost a quarter of what they did when built.
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That’s some bad writing! I edited it a couple of times without really checking it over. Oh well.
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Absolutely. But I think wind is also better for Ontario with the evening peak.
Nuclear and solar don’t work particularly well together, especially in a cold climate.
Nuclear wants to run flat. You can ramp it up and down a bit, but your marginal cost is close to zero so you don’t really save anything by doing so.
With a huge fleet of nuclear at almost no marginal cost, the challenge is what you do around the daily peaks and troughs.
The insanity of course is treating the current economics of nuclear day to day as if it tells you anything about the cost to build new, or how they got there (massive subsidies for projects that were late and with massive cost overruns)
Or how they end up.
Absolutely.
I keep coming back to the Monju reactor in Japan.
It went so badly wrong, in so many different ways. The end result will be spending 10s of billions of dollars over 60 years for a power station that has produced a single hour of usable power in that time and won’t be completed decommissioned until 2047.
Nuclear, like any massive project, carries a completely different project risk (cost, time, value).
A state in Australia well on track to have the grid almost entirely renewables. With support from interconnections, batteries and gas.
This part is a solved problem, and we should be doing this everywhere as fast as possible.
Electrify transport and heat at the same time.
That’s over 50% of the emissions right there. And this is cost comparable to the alternatives now, and a no brainer if you allocate any cost for the carbon.
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The particulars of SA are good for this, tons of sun, plenty of suitable sites for wind, and only one city of any note. The bipartisan approach has been very helpful. The center-right Marshall government was a good government. Excellent covid response too.