Wind + solar is just adding another failure mode for when there is no wind. There are many places without adequate wind speed. Nuclear does not care about either, and has the highest energy density on top of that.
Wind + solar is just adding another failure mode for when there is no wind. There are many places without adequate wind speed. Nuclear does not care about either, and has the highest energy density on top of that.
Wind + solar + batteries.
Nuclear has its own failure modes. In Switzerland, one of the nuclear plants will be offline for winter (!) due to "unplanned repairs". This will cost the owners of the plant millions.
Renewables also have those, it's just that you have weather failures on top of the technical failures.
Nuclear also have weather failures: low water levels, and high river temperature. In both cases the power plant needs to reduce output or be turned off.
Those aren't weather failures but environmental regulations, there's nothing preventing the plant to work of you really want to, it's just not needed, especially in summer.
If you remove environmental regulations, then (pumped) hydro, wind, and photovoltaics would also be much cheaper, and much faster to build. For windmills, it's birds and whatnot, for photovoltaics (specially large-scale in the mounts) it's wildlife and other environmental impact.
Yes, but those are still different from weather failures. When there's no sun and no wind, you can do whatever you want with regulations, you can't bring it back. Weather failure is something unique to renewables on top of everything else.
All modern electric grids are interconnected at continental level because it is by far the best approach on nearly all accounts (optimization, robustness, resilience...). Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...
At continental level "no sun and no wind" is extremely rare and doesn't last.
The nature of nuclear power doesn't make it 100% available (no equipment is), therefore a classic way of presenting the challenge, such as "nuclear power is perfectly controllable and it's necessary" (two lies), is a distortion.
The major intellectual fraud consists of considering the characteristics of a type of energy source (renewable, nuclear, etc.) when all that matters is the adequacy of the electricity system, i.e., to begin with, its ability to meet demand.
In terms of the imperfection of sources and equipment, which prohibits us from always expecting them to be ready to produce, the solution is known, applies to all types of sources and equipment, and is already in place: a production fleet containing a number of units that sufficiently reduces the effect of their individual variability (whatever the cause).
The French nuclear fleet is thus made up of a sufficiently large number of reactors (57 in 2025) to make it unlikely that they will all be shut down simultaneously, and for their combined flexibility to increase its "controllability."
This smooths out the impact of imponderables because it is possible to approximate the probability of failure of each reactor (its reliability) and because they are not identical, so the discovery of a defect does not necessarily imply the shutdown of the entire fleet.
A renewable mix at continental level will be way better on nearly all accounts (cheaper, less dangerous, no dependency on any fuel, no durably very dangerous 'hot waste', no weapon proliferation...).
If there's an issue with a wind turbine you don't have to shut down every turbine in a field. A nuclear plant is a single point of failure
But those are uncorrelated while weather systems are not.
10 countries do 100%, 20 do over 90, and this data is 2 years old
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...
I'm an empiricist.
FUD about "what about where renewables aren't available " is just rhetorical handwaving. The answer, which already exists at nation-level scale is storage and infrastructure.
The increase in renewable generation is great, but some of these are kind of cheating by importing energy to cover shortfalls. You need some kind of baseload generation that’s not dependent on weather, and borrowing this from a neighbour while pretending you don’t need it is like those ‘tiny house’ guys.
Now you're just empirically lying, by equating the behaviour of solar and wind with that of hydro.
That table also doesn't say what you apparently think it does: it lists Luxembourg as 89% renewable, which is true, but does not include that Luxembourg only covers about 28% of the electricity it uses, and imports the rest.
Thus Luxembourg's production being 89% renewable is worthless information as to the viability and reliability of wind and solar for baseload: Luxembourg relies on its neighbours for reliable electricity supply.
right, there's a vibrant international real time energy market with thousands of km of energy travel on the GW scale which also invalidates the "what if it's cloudy right where I am" argument.
> when there is no wind.
Or when there’s too much and you’re melting your grid.
No, you just turn off some windmills.
That's genuinely not how it works. You can see it every spring as Germany wholesale prices go negative to try and offload as much electricity as fast as possible to keep their grid from falling over.
Wind turbines can, and are, turned off (by turning, feathering the blades, and braking). There are two main cases: high wind / storm, and too much electricity in the grid. Photovoltaics can also be turned off.
The main reason for negative electricity prices are inflexible generators, eg. nuclear and coal, because they can't easily (cheaply) ramp down or shut off. Sometimes it is cheaper to let prices go negative than to use emergency mechanisms (that do exist).
Negative prices are not all bad: they are an incentive for storage / flexible demand to step in. Specially, a negative price does not mean the grid is melting.
'Too much electricity in the grid' is a wrong way of expressing it, just like you can't have 'too much fluid in a pipe'. What happens is that the line voltage creeps up because loads are lagging further behind compared to generation.
And like you wrote, that's controlled. Agreed with the rest of your comment, especially the bit that pricing is mostly controlled by the worst parties, not by the best. What we are simply finding out is that a grid designed mostly for baseline loads needs fast response generation (for instance: half of the UK putting their kettle on during half time requires so much extra power that pumped storage becomes a good alternative). And conversely, that if you change the mix considerably that you're going to have to have more control over the cumulative effect of many smaller generators.
But there are already standards for dealing with that even absent remote control of resources: as soon as the local grid voltage that the inverters in modern wind and solar plants see exceeds a very specific maximum for a proscribed period of time they fully autonomously back off their capacity until they are well below those maximums again, and then slowly ramp up to avoid causing grid instability due to oscillation.
What grid balancing is all about is to make this all financially optimal, it has relatively little to do with the safety of the grid, it is simply a way to extract maximum capacity without affecting that safety. A coarser mechanism would simply incur some more waste, but given the amounts of money involved it pays off to tune this.
That’s very interesting, but as a counter point, it seems that the major spain blackout was partially caused by such a voltage increase that was not mitigated properly.
So yes there are mitigations but it still is a major cause of concern I think
Yes, but that voltage increase alone wasn't enough to have caused the outage. The bigger issue was the subsequent oscillations which were amplified by the fact that that part of the grid is relatively isolated. The larger lessons there are still being learned with the report on that outage due in October I believe, but this isn't the first and it certainly won't be the last power outage. The 2003 one in the USA and Canada was much larger and didn't have any renewables other than as instantly available recovery loads for a good chunk of the grid, whereas nuclear power (everybody's baseline stand-by) took much, much longer to recover.
I think for myself the main takeaway is that we have come to rely on always available grid power to a degree that we probably should not have. Unfortunately inverters and battery systems that are capable of running in off-grid mode are very hard to come by compared to the on-line variety. Automatic disconnect and synchronization hardware are present in pretty much all inverters but they are connected in ways that the house would not be isolated from the grid and the software does not support such a solution because of the certification requirements.
Interestingly, a large (house capacity, which is a considerable amount of power) UPS does have those capabilities, and charging UPS batteries through a different mechanism than the built in charger is easily doable.
As for that Spanish/Portuguese outage: I fully expect that there will be some regulatory demands made on grid operators, especially with respect to containment of such outages, and possibly a requirement for better interconnection to increase the amount of perceived inertia in the grid. That is the best protection against such issues. Another thing that needs to be studied better is the kind of 'thundering herd' scenario that seems to have been the cause here (that's very much preliminary, but that seems to be the most logical explanation), especially in grid regions with low internal inertia. Such inertia is basically tightly coupled to how much grid synchronized rotating mass there is in a particular section of the grid. The more mass like that the more inertia there is the harder it is to make the grid go into oscillations. This mass is present both on the production side (generators) and on the consumer side (industry, because the prevalence of electric motors). So areas where the are no traditional (non-renewable) sources and very little industry are more susceptible to such kind of problems, especially when they become more isolated.
I'm following this closely because I look at companies in this space with some regularity and it is in fact what I went to school for at some point, it has always been a field that has interested me.
As the grid moves away from physical inertia sources and loads, do you think it would be realistic to distribute a grid-wide signal separate from the actual line voltage which could assist non-rotating power sources to stay in sync or at least help reduce the chances of oscillation?
The easiest is probably radio or satellite broadcasts but the topology of the grid, which does change, would also have to be considered. Probably not an easy problem to solve simply?
The grid itself is the best source for that. What I think we will see instead is custom superconductance based sink/source units that help with local grid stabilization. Those are already being deployed and they work quite well absent mechanical solutions, but they are still expensive and their capacity is still limited. A really dumb (but probably quite effective) way of doing this could also be by simply hooking up massive but slow flywheels.
Both have the same effect. Good distribution of generation and consumption in a geographical sense is something we never really gave much consideration in the past, it wasn't rare at all to have one side of a geographic region to be 'mostly producers' and another to be 'mostly consumers' and where the two sat next to each other it was usually to accommodate some really large consumer (for instance, a paper mill or a steel or aluminum plant). That also allowed for co-generation which is far more efficient. I think we will see more of this as well, and incentives to allow EVs to be used as sinks during times of excess power availability.
Other options are HVDC interconnects between geographically distant regions or to use these to create micro grids, each of which would be less stable than a much larger one but it would serve to isolate problems if and when they occur.
Interesting detail: wind power, while theoretically rotating grid synchronized mass is increasingly uncoupled and powering the grid using inverters. This is for efficiency reasons, the rotors have a much wider range that way, and you then only use furling of the blades to protect the installation from overspeeding and maximum efficiency the rest of the time even if that means rotating at a different speed than what would sync with the grid. This is optional, if the machine is synchronized it will still produce power, but not quite as much because blades are more efficient at higher RPM running flatter than at lower RPM running coarse, though coarse they do have more torque. So by sticking an inverter in the middle you can basically electronically do MPPT for the windmill rather than doing that mechanically.
Over the life of an installation the cost of that inverter is more than paid back in extra power but it has the downside of not having the mechanical mass of the wind turbine rotor and blades as extra inertia. Win some, lose something else...
> The main reason for negative electricity prices are inflexible generators eg. nuclear
Ah yes, wind and solar generation crushes the grid (https://x.com/ElectricityMaps/status/1786377006562541825) but that's the fault of all those dastardly nuclear plants germany is littered with, all zero of them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...)
> Negative prices are not all bad: they are an incentive for storage / flexible demand to step in.
Maybe that'll happen, but currently such events only keep increasing in frequency (https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/08/26/germany-records-453-h...), and as neighbours also install more solar and wind the ability for germany to maintain their grid stability through exports is going to worsen not improve.
Your own link shows coal, gas and biomass production as flat throughout a day while solar ramps up and "crushes the grid"? They all pay a price for doing so when cheaper cleaner energy is avaialable and they presumably find it a better choice than ramping down their boilers.
Why do market based financial incentives to shift demand and balance supply and demand freak you out so much?
Do you have the same visceral reaction to cheap prices used to shift demand towards overnight periods for nuclear? The frequency of that increased as people built nuclear too. Some even spent millions on storage systems to take advantage of it.
That's genuinely exactly how it works. There are companies that provide that offloading-as-a-service who make good money on this concept and the grid isn't anywhere near falling over. Your 'grid melting' comment upthread is nonsense. Nothing is melting.
Melting would imply that currents exceed rated capacity of the lines that is entirely impossible due to how the grid is set up. What does happen is that loads that are otherwise not economical to run get turned on and that sources that are remote controllable (which is all wind installations > 2 MW and all solar farms > 10 KW except for residential) are switched off. This is a fascinating subject and worth some study, the thing you want to read up on is called grid balancing.
Typically the day-ahead and the 15 minute ahead markets take care of this with pricing alone and there have been no meaningful excursions due to overproduction of renewables, that's just FUD and it does not contribute to the discussion.
What you could argue if you had read up on this is that there are market operators that do both sides of the market, which sets you up for an Enron like situation because they can make money by front-running. After all, they have a little bit of time between the moment where they know what they're going to do and the moment when they actually do it. Market makers that are also traders is always a dangerous combination and this has already led to some trouble, especially early on in the energy balancing market process. Now it is much better.