Dr. Conca reports that the German Grohnde nuclear power plant in Lower Saxony has just become the single most productive power plant in history. It just passed its 350 billion kWh production milestone, the most of any nuclear plant, and the most of any plant of its size in the world. Sure, the Three Gorges Hydroelectric Dam in China is the absolute largest power plant in history by installed capacity (22,500 MW), 16 times the size of Grohnde, and has produced well over 700 billion kWhs. But Three Gorges has thirty-two 700 MW turbines driven by over 30,000,000 acre-feet of water from a reservoir that is 400 square miles in size. Not a fair comparison.
Grohnde is just a single plant with a single reactor that puts out a steady 10 billion kWhs every year, and sits on just a square mile of land. The Grohnde 1,400 MW reactor has generally been used for baseload power, just churning out energy 90% of the time. However, Grohnde is now helping to provide grid stability by load-following in the face of increasing renewables. According to plant operator E.ON Kernkraft, while the plant was used exclusively for baseload in the past, it is now using up to 600 hours each month to regulate load, ramping 40 MW up or down per minute, something no one thought traditional nuclear plants could ever do. Unfortunately, Grohnde is scheduled to close in 2021, decades ahead of its useful life, like all of the German nuclear plants, and the positive and negative affects of that policy are still being debated while coal is burned and nuclear continues providing power for the expensive renewable experiment.
Original URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/21/the-little-reactor-that-could-germanys-grohnde-nuclear-plant/#1f8964fa21a4
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