I have yet to see a cheap scalable alternative to carbon to deal with that volatility. Hydro perhaps in a handful of smaller, mountainous countries (and if you are not too regarding of the environmental damages). Right now the UK is using LNG to compensate wind.
So inevitably, the first batteries will always prioritize daily arbitrage, and only once that market is capped out will some battery projects target weekly/monthly/yearly arbitrage.
In countries with cold winters, the obvious solution is heat-energy storage systems, which don't output electricity but instead store and output heat directly; they're basically just a big pile of sand/stones/bricks wrapped in a ton of insulation. Thanks to the cube-square law, they scale up unbelievably well and can easily store months worth of heat.
Due to that scale they don't make much sense without district heating, but energy storage is a numbers-game and lots of cold places already have district heating that could be quite easily retrofitted.
Getting to France's level of nuclear decarbonization with batteries is cheap and easy with current prices. Using existing thermal plants for a few weeks a year and renewables for the rest is quite similar overall to France's mix.
What's challenging is the final 10%, 5%, and 1%. But it will take 15-20 years of deployment of our current cheap renewables+storage technology before we need to solve those final percents. In that time, technology will have advanced tremendously and we don't know what the cheapest solution will be, just that it will be cheaper than current tech. Plus it would take much longer than 15 years to even build nuclear in any significant quantity! France said a few years ago that they would be building handful of new reactors but I still have not seen progress!
We also have periods in the winter (so solar of little to no use), where we can have a week or two of no wind.
As the gas generators are not run constantly, they're more expensive than if they were. There are various (at least 3) UK "gridwatch" sites available, offering real time and historical generation mix. Maybe have a look.
From memory, so probably flawed, we still tend to depend upon nuclear and gas for around 40 - 50 % of our generation (nuke being low - say between 5 and 10).
Coal has gone from 32% to 0.
Gas has gone from 40% to 30%
How do you square these numbers with wind being responsible for the amount of gas burned?
It illustrates both the volatility of wind (which regularly goes to zero for at least a week), and how it is currently pretty much 100% offset with gas.
The major factor was reducing the use of gas which lowers gas prices. As a result the main beneficiaries weren't electricity users but gas users paying lower prices and saving 133 Billion.
There are also other ways to store energy. For polar regions sand batteries are capable of storing heat for months. High grade heat to the point they can siphon off that heat for power generation.
As such they are essentially massive switching-mode PSUs, and there is no possibility of having a synchronised connection, as the AC has to be synthesised, following the local spinning iron.
France is increasing its nuclear output. And planning to build new plants. (Expanding nuclear generation was prohibited by law up until March of 2023).
The added renewables help to make the nuclear plants more efficient and profitable, by taking up a good amount of the variable demand.
Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
For a number of fairly well-understood reasons:
1. It's a FOAK design.
2. France stopped building reactors, so expertise was sparse
3. The EPR is too complex, partly because it was designed for German safety standards, which in turn were specifically designed to make nuclear reactors economically unviable (they did not succeed with this). Those regulations are also prescriptive instead of requirements-based, so they don't allow simpler+safer passive cooling like the AP-1000s. It's silliness layered on top of silliness.
4. It was built as a single unit, instead of a series of overlapping builds of the same reactor design. This was because until March 2023, expanding French nuclear capacity was forbidden by law. So they couldn't legally build in a way that is efficient and effective.
The EPR2 project addresses this in a number of ways:
1. The EPR2 is dramatically simplified relative to the EPR.
2. The law was rescinded in March 2023, so they will be building six of them initially, in batches of 2, with overlap between all the units. 8 more are planned for later.
3. They are making much more realistic assumptions at the start
I am not sure how you can claim that the EPR2 program is "a shambles" when they haven't begun building in earnest yet and are explicitly addressing most if not all the issues with FV3. Seems a tad premature.
Of course nuclear is one of the things that is financing the French state and industry, with EDF returning massive profits to its owner (the state) and the ARENH program subsidizing industry.
And the ones recently started, like the Darlington SMR also have near equal costs before they have even started building.
I love the blind belief. Just another aboslutely bonkers handout of tax money and it will be solved!
Which is why the EPR2 project is getting more delayed and more costly by every update released.
Existing nuclear power might be cost neutral. The problem is building new.
Yes, because we stopped building. Once we start building again, those problems go away by themselves.
And no, the handout of tax money you complain about is to intermittent renewables, not to nuclear. Exactly the reverse of your claims. Just look at the EDF financial reports. Nuclear produces profits that are returned to their owner, despite having to finance ARENH.
Oh, of course EDF does receive state subsidies. For their intermittent renewables projects. Ba-da-dumm-tss.
Same in Germany: renewables are subsidized in production with around €20 billion per year just for the EEG, never mind the feed-in priority they get that lets them shunt the massive problems of their intermittency onto the other suppliers. That's probably worth more. Oh, and the preferential loan conditions and reduced regulatory burden etc.
Nuclear power in Germany never got a single cent for production. And had to account for all the sorts of costs others get to externalize, such as waste.
So once again: exactly the opposite of your claims.
The problem is not building new. The problem is building the first new.
For evidence of this, just look to China: they also built FOAK AP-1000 (Vogtle) and EPR (FV3, HPC).
And lo-and-behold: their FOAK versions of these also took around 10 years to build, whereas China typically builds in 5, so twice as long. In absolute terms they were a little faster, because they actually have industrial experience with nuclear (currently building 20+ reactors, lots more planned), the thing that needs to be rebuilt in Europe and the US.
Nowadays, they are building their NOAK AP-1000s in 5 years, for $3.5 bn. They didn't go for more EPR, as the AP-1000 is a better design. The EPR also hasn't won any of the recent tenders for nuclear reactors, for example in Poland (AP-1000) and the Czech Republic (South Korean APR-1400)
So to repeat: the problems with FOAK builds are well-known, as are the ones with building up nuclear expertise in a country. These go away by themselves once you build a number plants, preferable of the same design. The problems with the EPR design go away once you stop building EPRs.
Now these are actual facts.
Whereas all you've come up with is empty slogans and emotional fantasies.
~/git/iaea-pris % sqlite3 pris_data.db
sqlite> select year, sum(electricity_supplied_gwh) from reactor_statistics, reactor_operating_history where reactor_statistics.reactor_id=reactor_operating_history.reactor_id and country_code='FR' and year > '1999' group by year;
year sum(electricity_supplied_gwh)
---- -----------------------------
2000 395392.3
2001 401256.49
2002 415110.33
2003 421028.62
2004 428040.69
2005 431179.56
2006 429819.63
2007 420129.49
2008 419800.32
2009 391752.97
2010 410086.42
2011 423509.48
2012 407437.88
2013 405898.51
2014 418001.4
2015 419035.02
2016 386452.88
2017 381846.02
2018 395908.34
2019 382402.75
2020 338735.78
2021 363394.15
2022 282093.23
2023 323773.23
2024 364390.78
Anyway: those numbers are not "reactors likely reaching EOL". Those are reactors reaching the end of their original operating license.
These two things are not the same. At all.
Initial operating licenses were intentionally relatively short, because at the time there was no experience with the longevity of reactors. So you conservatively license towards the short end.
Now that we have that experience, reactor operating licenses are getting extended. A lot. The first reactors in the US have had their licenses extended to 80 years, and the current consensus appears to be that 100 won't be a problem.
So France won't be running low on nuclear power anytime soon. Unless you're Mycle Schneider and/or confuse "current operating license expiry" with "EOL".
So even to build the one Flamanville 3 reactor, they had to shut down two older reactors in Fessenheim in order to not have an illegal increase in capacity.
Now that the law has been rescinded, they are planning 6 simplified EPR2 reactors, taking lessons from the fairly catastrophic EPR project FV3.
(Of course, even that catastrophic reactor will be more profitable than any intermittent renewable projects in, for example, Germany, but hey, the standards for what counts as "success" and what as "failure" are different for nuclear and for renewables).
France also currently does not need to urgently expand their nuclear fleet, so the schedule for the EPR2s matches those needs and the need to fully account for the problems with FV3. Instead, they are increasing the production of their existing fleet, both by operational upgrades and also by increasing use of intermittent renewables to cover variations in demand, allowing the nuclear fleet to run closer to fully rated capacity instead of having to load-follow.
So it apparently doesn't matter what your existing grid is, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, of whatever mix, the thing you should be building now is mostly solar, wind and (not quite caught on globally but just about to make a very big splash) batteries.