> A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor.
Except that 1GW of nuclear capacity means up to 900MW of production in practice, while 1GW of solar means 100MW.
Nuclear stops for maintenance, refuelling and repairs. A well maintained plant can operate for 60 years or more.
Solar stops at night, slows down on cloudy days, and so on. Panels degrade and have to be replaced after 20 years or so.
Non-hydro renewables only beat nuclear when you conveniently forget storage, which is insanely expensive, and when you look at nominal capacity, not actual production.
Just go look at https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR : currently, wind is barely producing anything across Europe. Germany has 67GW of wind capacity, yet they're producing a laughable 7.4 GW. It's been that way for *WEEKS*. You can't possibly store weeks of production.
> Solar stops at night, slows down on cloudy days, and so on.
All of which is already accounted for, so you're double-counting
> Panels degrade and have to be replaced after 20 years or so.
Most of the ones I've seen have 25 year guarantees; historically they've lasted longer, but I don't know how much the manufacturing etc. has changed so I'm not sure how strongly to predict extra years of life beyond such guarantees.
> Non-hydro renewables only beat nuclear when you conveniently forget storage, which is insanely expensive, and when you look at nominal capacity, not actual production.
1) Hydro is a storage system as well as a source
2) Even with li-ion backing it's cost-comparable to nuclear, and li-ion is one of the more expensive PWh-scale options
3) The current pricing is for digging up rocks and applying enough chemistry to make them batteries; recycling is expected to be much cheaper once scaled up.
(I'll grant that recycling is an "if and when", if you like; but the other points stand without needing any support)
Except that 1GW of nuclear capacity means up to 900MW of production in practice, while 1GW of solar means 100MW.
Nuclear stops for maintenance, refuelling and repairs. A well maintained plant can operate for 60 years or more.
Solar stops at night, slows down on cloudy days, and so on. Panels degrade and have to be replaced after 20 years or so.
Non-hydro renewables only beat nuclear when you conveniently forget storage, which is insanely expensive, and when you look at nominal capacity, not actual production.
Just go look at https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR : currently, wind is barely producing anything across Europe. Germany has 67GW of wind capacity, yet they're producing a laughable 7.4 GW. It's been that way for *WEEKS*. You can't possibly store weeks of production.