[Full_Clark]

I agree that the current nuclear proposal seems intended principally to extend the life of the coal and gas plants. It's likely born from a cynical attitude of 'who cares about how much the nuclear plants will cost when/if they do get built, just kick the carbon-neutrality can down the road another decade and let the next generation of politicians deal with it.'

I do wonder if there'll ever be a desire to build nuclear plants for baseload firming, though. What amount of excess capacity has to be built in to an all-renewables + storage grid to give the the same reliability as the current grid? Could nuclear power ever be cheap enough to compete on ROI with the marginal providers, the last ~5 gigawatts of wind or solar needed?

[natmaka]

David Osmond work is interesting. He wrote last week: "Each week I run a simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid using rescaled generation data to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with 24GW/120GWh of storage (5 hrs at av demand) Results: Last week: 98.6% RE Last 187 weeks: 98.7% RE (1/5)"