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Right now solar and storage are eating into the most economically-profitable generation. That means we’re seeing deployments of storage that shift supply a few hours into the high-demand evening period. This will work well in places that get a lot of sunlight or that have lots of sunny days or highly-connected grids (Europe is in the process of building HVDC links to North Africa for this reason.) What’s going to happen is that this low-hanging profitable fruit will be plucked first, and then as storage costs decrease (happening quickly as we speak) we’ll see a second layer of multi-day and seasonal storage get deployed. The problem for nuclear is that (1) this construction will eat a lot of the most profitable generation opportunities, and (2) nuclear takes so long to build (and has such a long payback period) that any new plant will arrive just as storage gets cheap enough to make it unprofitable.


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