A Challenge to a Flexing Role for Nuclear Energy Amid Grid Growth of Renewables
Longtime renewable-energy maven Amory Lovins offers a reply to nuclear maven Matt Wald
Earlier today, I cross-posted a
article on the shifting role of nuclear power as renewable-energy sources expand, written by my onetime New York Times colleague Matt Wald (who later worked for the Nuclear Energy Institute lobby).![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdb3fcc22-19a7-484c-8f00-756e65a35697_1670x560.jpeg)
This is an arena of great interest to the Department of Energy’s nuclear division, as you can explore here: “3 Ways Nuclear is More Flexible Than You Might Think.” The same goes for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory: “Nuclear–Renewable Synergies for Clean Energy Solutions.”
But in my repost, I asked for reactions and got one from Amory Lovins, a longtime consultant on energy efficiency and renewable energy and co-founder of RMI, when it was the Rocky Mountain Institute. (I referred to Lovins’ “negawatts revolution” in a piece on the underappreciated value of conservation awhile back.)
Here’s Lovins’ reply:
Andy, I think Matt’s views on how grids work and how to keep them reliable as they become renewably powered would have made sense ~15 years ago. He uses the antique honorific “baseload” in only two of its five senses, namely #1 and #4 (or a variant referring to constant output):
However, his discussion of grid-balancing resources is limited to pumped hydro, batteries, and hydrogen. There are ~8 other carbon-free choices that are ample to make the batteries unnecessary and at lower system cost, as sketched in this conceptual supply curve: