* Increased incentives for solar (which serves as a consistent energy source during daylight hours)
* Guaranteed rates for base load nuclear generation
* A carbon tax on fossil fuel generation, used to subsidize nuclear
Across the US, we already pay for reserve capacity, known as "peaker plants". They are paid simply to sit idle all year for those few days when we reach maximum system demand. It would be similar to paying low/zero-carbon base load plants (nuclear) to produce flat out, acknowledging their fixed costs.
I cringe at the thought of a substantial number of natural gas turbine plants being built, and the price of natural gas skyrocketing.
Building more solar/wind power means building more gas turbines, because that's the only way to ensure you can meet demand from a solar plant when it's dark out or a wind plant when it's not windy.
If we want more nuclear capacity we need to be serious about it. I think LFTR probably deserves a few billions in research, if it pans out it could make nuclear competitive on price and reduce a whole crap-ton of issues normally associated with nuclear.
I always thought that it would be a better alternative to peak-demand power plants to have a variable-demand industry connected to the base-load power plant.
Rather than firing up the peak-demand plants when load rises, just keep the plant humming along at the same rate and throttle back the cement producer, or biomass gasifier, or fertilizer plant, or aluminum smelter, or paper mill, or desalinator, until the grid load comes back down. Any industry that can singlehandedly soak up all the excess power on additional production would do.
Yes, we'd just need some kind of signal that was proportional to demand. If the demand was high, the signal would also be high, so that consumers would know it was time to cut back on consumption. And likewise, for producers, a high signal would indicate that it was time to bring on extra capacity. Of course, we'd want the signal to be something meaningful that people wouldn't ignore. It would be best if the whole signaling infrastructure was decentralized, so that producers and consumers could act according to their own needs without coordinating through a central authority. It seems like there may be a startup opportunity in there somewhere.
You just described how Nest is using their data and how utilities are trying to use Time Of Data metering to signal pricing to consumers (using smart meters).
Also, most if not all industrial electricity users have load shedding agreements with utilities; in the event of demand spikes, those industrial users are required to curb their power use within X number of minutes.
They already do that. There just isn't any industry that can singlehandedly soak up all the excess power (subject to constraints of proximity to power plants, distance from cities, etc). There's a chance electric cars will change this.
Paper mills are pretty good at providing large amounts of instantaneous interruptible load. I'm sure there are others, but you're probably right, soaking up ALL the excess baseload in a baseload only grid i would be a challenge.
Energy storage, using electric car batteries as grid smoothing utilities is an interesting approach. Grid sized flow batteries[1] are another interesting option.
* Increased incentives for solar (which serves as a consistent energy source during daylight hours)
* Guaranteed rates for base load nuclear generation
* A carbon tax on fossil fuel generation, used to subsidize nuclear
Across the US, we already pay for reserve capacity, known as "peaker plants". They are paid simply to sit idle all year for those few days when we reach maximum system demand. It would be similar to paying low/zero-carbon base load plants (nuclear) to produce flat out, acknowledging their fixed costs.
I cringe at the thought of a substantial number of natural gas turbine plants being built, and the price of natural gas skyrocketing.