What about the gas guzzlers?

Sounds reasonable, or even generous depending on your local neighbourhood. If your neighbour is using the power you create, that's reasonably efficient. But if it has to go back out through the nearest transformer most of it will be lost...

> Given sufficient notice, there's no reason why nuclear can't be ramped up and down even over a short time period.

No, current nuclear plants can't ramp up and down even once per day.

> switch the domestic gas network to hydrogen

You can add maybe 20% extra hydrogen to most existing gas networks. Hydrogen molecules are small and will leak from pipes that are designed for natural gas.

However, there's a company planning to generate hydrogen and capture CO2 from the air and create methane and even heavier hydrocarbons from that. We'll see if they can do it cheaply enough.

Absolutely not. The grid has one requirement: power generated = power consumed at all times. If you are generating and consuming power and not making any effort to correlate the two, then you are asking someone else to do it for you and they obviously want to be paid for that. Which happens now via the difference in pricing between your production and consumption.

The different between (predicted) production and (predicted) consumption has to be rectified by the energy imbalance markets, because while we can predict production to some extent, predicting consumption is obviously also not 100% perfect. In NL households without solar panels cost energy companies €4-8/MWh in imbalance costs, but with solar panels €32-65/MWh. These costs used to be distributed over all customers, but there are now moves to charge solar panel owners directly, unless they take steps like disconnecting their solar panels when the electricity price goes negative, or installing a battery.

There's no doubt we could be much smarter about it, with community batteries and allowing you to match your production with your neighbours consumption, but those technologies are only just starting to be rolled out. People who think they can just install solar panels and call it a day massively underestimate the complexities of the electricity grid.

Further, if we want to compare a hydrocarbon plant built without subsidies, to a nuclear one paid for by the state, are we taking into account the fact that the market as it stands generally have no way to price in the cost of the CO2 emissions. I.e., the HC plant is getting that for free - effectively a subsidy too, against the ongoing and future costs incurred to the rest of society by climate change from CO2. Many arguments I've been in do not account for that cost.

If CO2 is going to cause catastrophic damage to large parts of the planet, then the fair present cost of CO2 emissions is basically infinite. If a near-0 carbon electricity system requires nuclear to achieve it, then any subsidy TO ANY LEVEL is _worth it_!

For France, in terms of the annual operational basis I thought EDF were running on a commercial basis. They have an agreement with the french state to provide a certain amount of electricity at minimum, capped to a certain price, and they have to meet their operational costs and extract profits within those parameters. That was my understanding when I went and read EDF reports on this on their costs, as part of a similar debate I was having with someone else.

Who cares if it took subsidies to build the plants. Unless you believe there exists some monetary value past which the damage of CO2 emissions is OK, then this is irrelevant - given the technology available today that is proven to be able to provide reliable, abundant base-load capacity.

On the US market question, you're saying basically everyone else is an outlier. Maybe that's true on "unsubsidised" energy markets, but.. who cares about that? If:

- nearly all energy markets across the world work on a "state subsidises builds in order to get sane planning" (not least because true competition in energy networks and physical delivery is basically impossible; along with market difficulties in building plants in a pure market-competition way)
- every energy market simply is dysfunctional anyway simply on the basis of having no (or near no) ability to correctly price in the societal/global cost of CO2 emissions (which then can only be corrected by state planning, likely by use of subsidies if it wishes to devolve implementation to commercial companies)

Then the "pure" market with no subsidies is indeed both dysfunctional and inefficient, on that view. And the US is indeed the outlier.

There was an almighty fuss over the Peace lot and a defunct oilrig, and while I've no doubt the oil company was looking to save money, there was also an extremely good eco argument for what they wanted to do. The Greens' attitude came over as "we don't care why it might be a good idea, you can't do that!"

I've always been extremely wary of them since.

It's like the anti-hunting brigade. Most active conservationists hate them, not because they agree with hunting (they don't), but the hunting brigade are prepared to PAY for conservation, precisely because they want stuff to hunt! They make unlikely bedfellows, but pragmatism pushes hunters and conservationists together.

Cheers,
Wol