[minimuffins]

> increasing reliability and resilience

I'm far from well versed in this area but I was under the impression that renewables really suffer in this department. The lifespan of a wind turbine is about 20 years. We don't know exactly what the lifespan of a nuclear plant is but it's certainly longer than that. And of course the availability on solar and other "harvesting" type mechanisms can be inconsistent, up and down as a function of weather, etc. What am I missing?

[japanuspus]

Wind turbines have a design lifetime of 20 years, but most will last much longer (source: I work at a large offshore wind company).

There are two reasons why everything is still built for 20 years: Firstly, there is not pressure on the projects to increase lifetime, because the deprecated value today of further production in year 21 is basically zero. Secondly, the turbines we installed 20 years ago were so small that there is really no reason to keep them going.

[epistasis]

Germany saw a huge increase in reliability over the past decade as it increased its renewable percentages. Old-timers said that anything above 5% renewable would cause grid collapse, then kept on shifting up the percentage as renewables increased on the grid and no disasters happened.

It does require running the grid differently. But part of that is becoming more responsive to constantly changing conditions, and a grid that it used to that will have far fewer problems then one where a GW reactor trips off because of some sensor problem (as happened in Texas). As we get closer to 80% renewable grids, then we will be used to running backup natural gas plants to keep everything running. And the ultimate in resilience and reliability will happen as we add more storage. With batteries everywhere, we will have buffering all over the grid that will make it far far easier to make sure everybody has power, and to limit outages to the smallest areas possible.

The first year of power shut offs for PG&E's public safety in the face of high wind and fire conditions covered massive areas. This last year they covered far less, as they could focus the power shut offs far better with an extra year of work. This sort of finer grained granularity and control is what happens as more renewables and storage will be added to the grid, as we update this impressive machine that we started building a century ago. Adding modern communication and control will come along with more storage, demand response, and home-to-grid power from solar.

[ReptileMan]

Decommissioning nuclear is pain in the ass though. A turbine can be recycled - everything but the concrete.

And I think that you have some serious metal fatigue in some critical nuclear reactor core components.