Growth in german wind capacity is slowing. Soo… then the plan is to keep on with lignite and gas? Am I missing something?
Installed Wind Capacty - Germany
Growth in german wind capacity is slowing. Soo… then the plan is to keep on with lignite and gas? Am I missing something?
Installed Wind Capacty - Germany
Also worth noting are the centralization and security risk aspects of nuclear
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by these. Can you expand on that? (I mostly mean the centralization, but also looking for clarity on what you mean by security)
For centralisation - large areas of the grid are dependent on a few locations, so if there is an issue with one or two areas, the entire network can fail. Say for example if there is an earthquake which disables two nuclear power plants, that could cause massive issues with the grid.
If you have many small power sources distributed across a larger area, it significantly mitigates the issue - the loss of even dozens or hundreds of wind turbines would be able to be handled much more responsively.
Nuclear is uniquely disadvantaged at having very bad responsiveness to demand. Renewables are extremely good at that, coincidentally.
For security, I’m sure you can imagine many scenarios, but nuclear waste is a potential target for creating dirty bombs for example.
It takes a lot of money, planning, and technical know-how to build a nuclear power plant, especially a safe one. It isn’t like a new nuclear company can just pop into existence, and start offering reactors for sale.
Traditional nuclear reactors are, therefore, a technology that requires a lot of centralization to implement. Only nation-states and huge corporations can assemble the resources to construct them.
Compare that to wind or hydro-electric power. You can build a generator with some wire and magnets yourself, so you could call them more decentralized.
This might be changing with modular reactors, I don’t know.