Scout**
2022-09-06 15:25:02
- #1
By 2040, it is planned that nuclear power plants should have a total nominal capacity of 150 gigawatts. So 1/7 of what renewable energies in China already produce today.
So, now nuclear power plants have an efficiency of over 90%, i.e. more than 8000 full load hours per year. They are very plannable and predictable and controllable up to nominal capacity.
Wind power in China maybe has 3000 or in the best locations 4000 full load hours, difficult to plan and predict and how much of the nominal capacity is currently available is more or less random.
With OPV it looks even worse, in China you might have about 1500 full load hours.
So 5 kWp photovoltaic capacity then produces 7500 kWh per year.
But 1 kW nuclear power capacity produces 8000 kWh per year.
In other words: newly installed nominal capacity without stating the achievable full load hours is rubbish, big time!
Or: you only need to build about 1 kW conventional capacity for 4 kW from a wind/photovoltaic mix for the same annual output. Whereas the photovoltaic/wind mix is so erratic that it either requires a shadow power plant park of conventional power plants or gigantic electricity storage.
That means for 1 kW secured capacity you need nearly 1 kW conventional power plant running on standby plus 4 kW renewable energy generators. Alternatively 4 kW renewable energy generators plus storage (for photovoltaics at least a 2-month winter demand, for wind about 1 week demand).
It really looks different with coal, there China actually is the "world champion". But even there I assume that for China this is a bridging technology that will eventually be phased out and replaced by clean energy.
Coal is at least a substitute for missing storage. Somehow you have to have something for power generation at night when the wind is weak or you risk a blackout. In Germany the latter is increasingly preferred, in China I strongly suspect the former.
Why are no storage technologies in sight? Germany currently consumes about 83 gigawatts of electricity per day. The currently 600,000 registered pure electric cars alone have a total storage capacity of 41 gigawatts, so not quite half.
Why not 83 GW per hour right away? Per second would also be correct! GW is a power. Power is not consumed, it is provided. Like a gasoline engine that delivers 100 kW. The 20 liters of gasoline or 200 km range that one may achieve with it in an hour is the work done. So work = power times time.
Now electric cars have batteries to store work. So you probably mean 41 GWh storage capacity. That is what 83 GW of power plants can deliver in about 30 minutes. But if of the 83 GW only 41 GW were available because it is night and the wind is not blowing much, then of course you could take the car batteries and feed their power into the grid. Provided they are all fully charged, no one has to drive soon and they may therefore be discharged to a SOC of 0, you could compensate the underperformance of the power plants exactly for 1 hour, 41 GW*1h = 41 GWh. After that it’s over. Blackout for days.
For comparison: in the year 2020 about 500 billion kilowatt hours of electricity were generated in Germany. That is 500,000 GWh and you come here with 41 GWh... factor 12,000. Even if the existing 600,000 BEVs once became 60 million, the factor is still 120. And then nothing would be left for the actual purpose of a BEV (providing driving performance).