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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Nuclear cannot be used as a “backup”. France is using nuclear for baseload generation, just like every other grid with nuclear generators.

    And that is the underlying problem. Like all grid providers, they are incentivizing overnight consumption to improve the efficiency of their baseload generators.

    Those perverse incentives are the primary cause of the problems you are describing.

    Remove those perverse incentives.

    Those industries currently taking advantage of the incentives switch to cheap daytime power instead of cheap night time power. They increase daytime demand, reducing the overcapacity problem.

    Now the overnight baseload has dropped. We can now reduce nuclear baseload generation overnight, which also reduces it during the day. Now the daytime overcapacity problem is also reduced.






  • Storage is a red herring. Storage is attempting to make solar operate the same way as existing generation models: “supply shaping”. Attempting to match supply to demand.

    Supply shaping doesn’t even work for our existing baseload generators. We use demand shaping to move our biggest loads to a time of day when we can most easily meet them with legacy generators. Which happens to be overnight. Which is the worst time of day to generate power with solar.

    When we get rid of the current counterproductive demand-shaping models, we drop the overwhelming majority of our storage needs as well.


  • Nuclear pushes major industrial users (steel mills, aluminum smelters, etc) to overnight. Nuclear can’t be ramped up or down fast enough to match the normal demand curve, so they use “off peak” incentives to raise the trough and lower the peak. This allows nuclear to meet a much larger percentage of total demand. Without such incentives, nuclear has even more problems than solar. It would only be able to produce about 20% of our power, with 80% coming from “peaker” plants. With those incentives, nuclear can meet about 80% of out need, with peaker plants filling in.

    By driving consumption overnight, those same incentives prevent solar from being able to meet the overnight demand.

    Removing those “off peak” incentives, and providing new “on peak” incentives pushes those customers to daytime consumption that can be easily met by solar.

    Stop thinking of nuclear as a “backup”. Its not a backup. It is baseload generation. “Backup” is not provided by baseload generators. “Backup” is provided by generation that doesn’t suffer from the limitations of baseload generators. “Backup” is from generators that can ramp up and down to match a fluctuating demand curve. “Backup” is provided by “peaker” plants.


  • Look at the date on the article you linked. It was published on July 7th.

    When solar panels are seeing 15 hours of high-angle summer daylight and clear skies, generation should be considerably overcapacity.

    Come back to me when you can write that same overcapacity article in November, when your panels are struggling with 9-hours of low-angle overcast.

    When you have sufficient solar capacity to meet winter demand, you’ll have 200% - 400% of demand in summer. That is simply the nature of solar production outside of the tropics.


  • The heart of your argument is a Myth.

    Baseload generation like nuclear requires leveling loads by driving large industrial customers to off-peak hours. This artificially inflates overnight demand that can’t be met by solar directly.

    Removing the off-peak incentives and shifting them to hours of peak solar production allows solar to meet that demand. Without those off-peak incentives, solar can operate without nearly as much nuclear “backup” required.

    The remainder of your argument is sunk-cost fallacy. Nuclear is much more expensive than solar. Assuming all coal-fired plants are offline, excess nuclear plants should be decommissioned.




  • I get this pretty bad from time to time. Usually, I’m spelling a word over and over again. Sometimes, the chorus of a song.

    When I consciously recognize I’m doing it, I can usually force myself to switch from one word to another, and after three or four times, I lose interest in it.

    Worst is waking up in the middle of the night doing it. I try to avoid it by keeping video playing overnight.