77% of the cost of a kWh in California are fixed costs. So if production cost 19 cents, then your cost would be 19 cents + 77% of your current price + a few more cents for the profit on the production costs. IOW, it would increase your electricity bills.
Last year, North Sea wind parks produced at full capacity for more hours than french nuclear plants.
The advantage of nuclear is of course that to some degree you can schedule the shut-downs.
Solar will make energy production essentially free [1] at the time scales we are looking at. The price of renewable energy systems will be entirely in moving them through time and/or space to when the demand is. We need massive Hydrogen build out anyways to decarbonize industrial processes, so betting on Hydrogen storage for this purpose seems reasonable.
The thing for nuclear economics is this: People will build these solar cells anyways. So during summer/day time you can not sell your nuclear power. So nuclear power plants don't need to be cost competitive with Solar. They need to be cost competitive with hydrogen storage if you only operate them for a fraction of hours per year. Nobody has shown a viable economic path for this. The only benefit is that the technology is more proven than mass hydrogen storage and conversion. However, proponents always point to unproven future hypothetical technologies to bring down prices to make nuclear cost effective.
And nuclear waste disposal remains a problem as well.
> Solar will make energy production essentially free
It may end up being cheaper to just use PV to resistively heat large masses of rock and use that heat to drive turbines, instead of fissioning uranium to make the heat. Not that this would be the best way to do things, but it would be an illustration of nuclear's cost problem.
> Nuclear only has a 90% uptime, whereas the goal for power delivery is 99.99%.
Nuclear in the US has a more than 90% uptime, and the downtime is scheduled maintenance, which is done at times chosen specifically because the load on the grid is known to be lower then, rather than being chosen by nature at random.
Not arguing the earlier points or saying this is relevant - but - here in Kansas, kinda known for it's wind, it usually dies down around sunset. We do get wind at night sometimes but we get a lot more during the day.
Yes, it is well known that the sun shines during the day and the wind blows at night, so together they provide all the baseload we will ever need. Ignore the new coal plants, nothing to see there.
