yes of course all can ramp up and down, Nuclear is even by far the worse at it, and it is the point of it, the inertia of spinning rust at high rate make those type or gas turbines very useful as they can absorb spikes before others can react, it is the point, be it nuclear or any other type of thermal energy source boiling the water, does not make any difference to that. just that for now coal is a far worse option than nuclear. and i never talked off the grid stuff, i talked about the huge stuff how do you provide electricity at night with wind and solar? either huge batteries that no one wants to build and are rather inefficient or coal/gas in your idea, or does no one use power at night in your scenario? there are a few emerging battery tech that may work but batteries have a rather finite and short life span. i just feel that everyone is destroying before thinking about the replacement....
Government PR moves should not really be taken as scientific facts... governments now that nuclear as a bad PR so build coal instead, just making the problem worse... i am saying before killing nuclear and relying on gas/coal we need to build the future that will not kill us even faster nuclear is just a very horse to beat on so everyone joins for a quick buck and easy PR and makes the future even more problematic.
to explain why i talk inertia, to spin up and down a wind turbine can take from 15 to 60 minutes while your spike is instantaneous, you need something to absorb that spike else you get brown and black outs, this is why we need either very high energy batteries doted around the place(and anyone saying high energy in a small area also talk explosion waiting to happen) or something to spin rust so that you have stored energy somewhere. you also say that the grid will cover for the deficiencies in the ability for power to be produced anywhere, only issue is that it was never built for that, you would need to transport much higher quantities of power from places where energy is produced but population is low to where it is consumed.
TL;DR: ffs peoples stop destroying before thinking of what to build, build and then destroy what was here before, we are doing things backward. and yes i will defend anything that i see a bit of good in
In the last few years green power has come a LONG way and it seems many people still think wind and solar is stuck in the 70's and 80's.
I was trying to cover both angles because they are treated different and your comments were blending the two.
Salt batteries and water batteries are not batteries in the traditional sense (though a salt battery,
sodium-nickle, can be). A water battery (called
pumped hydro) is a reservoir on a hill, they drain the lake reservoir for hydro power during high draw into a second reservoir, then pump it back up during low draw, Australia is already using this technology. Salt batteries are used in solar farms, they can use sodium-nickle cells or molten-salt storage, for
molten salt storage they use mirrors instead of solar cells to heat pipes with salt, at really high temp salt liquifies, this can now be used to create steam and turn steam engines, just like nuclear. It retains heat for a long time so you can also store it in heated liquid form and keep generating power long after you've lost sunlight, more than enough to get through the night. Molten salt storage is operational in a few solar arrays. Sodium-nickle batteries are extremely common in industrial applications in common cell form and is often used in combination with solar and wind.
We are not killing nuclear, most of them are old with
most close to 40 years old and not just in the US, the industry wants exemptions to keep their current ones operating beyond the expected lifespan (usually 50 years). The only way to do that is get the public behind it and pressure politicians to offer extensions rather than replace them with newer greener plants. A great example is the one in Scotland, it's already had two extensions on it's permit to operate beyond it's rated lifespan and it's lobbying for a third despite plenty of evidence the plant is falling apart (massive cracks in the cooling pond). These plants will lobby to stay open right up until the point they fail, either in a boom or bankruptcy. We need the current power generators but only until we can replace/retire them and that is the problem, the owners don't want to retire them and so long as we don't build replacements they will keep getting those extensions.
Politicians push coal (and nuclear) for political reasons and political reasons only, it has absolutely nothing to do with coal itself. They all know coal sucks, they know the jobs suck, they even know most of their power is no longer generated by it and that there's really not much left of the industry as a whole compared to what it once was. Coal has nothing to do with coal, it's just a dog whistle.
Spikes at the regional level do not usually happen second by second or even minute by minute and they also know when to expect them and can prepare for it, it's quite predictable, however it's not easy to control as generators have a limited range of adjustment as they have to spin at the right speed, too little power draw can actually cause it to stop generating power. This was actually why we were/are testing loosening the 60hz requirements in parts of the country as it would allow them a larger range of adjustment (this has raised hell with older electronics that require it for accuracy, clocks in particular). Wind and solar farms actually have better control over their power, you don't have one massive generator to spin up or down within a small range, this is often the cause of small short brownouts as they spin down large generators and the rest of the grid takes up the slack, with wind you have many small ones that you can tune in small increments. It's the same as maintenance, if you have 3 hydro/steam/generators and one goes down you just lost 1/3rd of your power, if a windfarm loses or shuts down a generator they lose 1/1000th. Solar is even more controlled as they can vary it not just by bank but by intensity.
