Who Says Nuclear cannot Smooth Out an Erratic Wind?

Wind Energy / Economics

Date posted: 08/25/15

Dr. Conca reports that as renewables, especially wind, enter more of the energy market, the power grid has had to make some adjustments, particularly for the intermittency of the wind and sun. Intermittency is all the rage with folks who do not want renewable energy, on economic grounds as well. They point out that it takes so much natural gas, hydroelectric and even coal plants to back-up, or load-follow, wind and solar that it skews the benefits of the renewables, albeit the costs, and hides the actual carbon footprint. But a few write-off nuclear as being able to load-follow renewables because it is just a waste of money not to be running a nuclear power plant when it could run, since it runs just about all the time anyway. But not any more, it seems. A new study by the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), together with NuScale Power and Energy Northwest, has shown that small modular reactors, a new design for nuclear power, can easily and economically back-up wind just fine for as long as the turbine last that is. With none of the issues that older nuclear power plants conjure up in most minds, like plant construction costs - although these plants are built to last 50 or more years, and like where to store the waste, although the Yucca facility is available now. Partisan politics are screwing this up. UAMPS is a consortium of forty-four utilities in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, California, NV, Oregon and Wyoming. The consortium established a Carbon Free Power Project to encourage the deployment of clean baseload electrical power in response to the anticipated closure of coal plants over the next two decades. UAMPS concluded that SMRs will be an important option and are working with NuScale Power to deploy the first full-scale NuScale SMR plant in Idaho. So the load-following of their wind farms is an ideal application that needs to be studied for its feasibility. At least when the wind turbines begin to fail, nuclear will back them up.