[pedrocr]

> I don't know what a "nuclear roll-out simulation" is, exactly.

Any simulation where building nuclear power plants makes economic sense would do.

> I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem.

You're again asking for simulations about Minnesota specifically which doesn't make sense. Unless you're thinking of seceding from the union and closing the borders to energy trade, as long as the US as a whole can do it Minnesota in particular can be a net energy importer in winter if that's what's needed. Here's the RethinkX simulation of that:

https://www.tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Rethinki...

"Our analysis makes severely constraining assumptions, and by extrapolating our results from California, Texas, and New England to the entire country we find that the continental United States as a whole could achieve 100% clean electricity from solar PV, onshore wind power, and lithium-ion batteries by 2030 for a capital investment of less than $2 trillion, with an average system electricity cost nationwide of under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour if 50% or more of the system’s super power is utilized."

This is almost 5 years old at this point. Others have linked other such analysis. At this point asking people to show them simulations for renewables while trying to argue for nuclear is disingenuous. Renewables are the ones being built out at scale all over the world while nuclear struggles to deliver new projects and doesn't seem to have a viable path to being cheap.

[coldpie]

> You're again asking for simulations about Minnesota specifically which doesn't make sense.

No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.

> Here's the RethinkX simulation of that

Thanks for the link. I focused on the New England scenario, as it's the most similar to Minnesota of the 3 scenarios. It doesn't seem to account for heating. This is the problem I keep coming to in these analyses. See page 25:

> Our model takes as inputs each region’s historical hourly electricity demand ... For the New England region, our analysis applies to the ISO New England (ISO-NE) service area which provides 100% of grid-scale electricity generation for the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

Our heating is not supplied by electricity. I definitely believe that our current electricity demand may be met by renewables in a feasible timescale, but that leaves out the massive hole of heating our buildings.

The only reference I could find to New England's heating is this little note at the bottom of page 46:

> If New England chose to invest in an additional 20% in its 100% SWB system, for example, then the super power output could be used to replace most fossil fuel use in the residential and road transportation sectors combined (assuming electrification of vehicles and heating).

But I don't see any actual numerical analysis backing this up. Given their analysis earlier only spoke about electricity usage, I'm not super convinced by this one sentence.

Additionally, the New England scenario suggests they need 1,232 GWh of storage to supply only 89 hours of electricity for the area. Even if we agree that's a sufficient amount of time, the currently largest energy storage facility on the planet is only 3 GWh[1]. We would need 410 such facilities for New England alone. Can we really scale battery tech up that much, especially given resource constraints like Lithium and copper? Maybe! Hopefully! But it's a big question. Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.

[1] https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/worlds-largest-battery-storag...

[pedrocr]

> No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.

If that's your assumption then this is a non issue. Minnesota is currently less than 2% of total winter electricity demand in the US. Lets be pessimistic and assume that because it needs more heating in winter than average those 2% become 5% with electrification of heating nationwide. Even if 100% of that electricity needed to be imported from other states that's still a very small amount of the total. You could import all that solar and wind energy from other states if you can't produce any at all locally. The scenario is obviously much better than that, you'd only need to cover the shortfall which is what already naturally happens in joint grids all over the world.

> Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.

I'm still waiting for a link that shows that nuclear can be built at anything approaching reasonable cost. In all these discussions that's always presented as a given and then all the discussion is on the shortfalls of renewables. Meanwhile the actual reality on the ground is that the renewable roll-out is rising exponentially and nuclear projects are practically non existant.