OPINION | DAVID HESS
Flexible power: No stretch for nuclear
A prevailing narrative that nuclear plants can’t operate flexibly and are unsuitable for low-carbon hydrogen production is leading to nuclear being excluded from a big part of the
envisioned future energy mix. It’s a narrative that needs to change David Hess is a policy expert specialising in nuclear energy, he is currently Senior Vice President of Strategy and Sustainability at DeepGEO
HE SEASONED ENERGY ANALYST READS a table of nuclear plant capacity factors in much the same way as sports pundit reads through a list of team stats. Any score under 85% and the verdict is that the plant must be underperforming – taking too long on outages or tripping
for presumably no good reason at all. Capacity factors have long served as the benchmark of nuclear excellence, and the universal aim of plant operators is to maximise the number of kilowatt-hours sold in order to earn as much revenue as possible. Or is it?
It is no secret that most nuclear plants are technically
capable of varying their output to support the needs of the grid. French plants have done so routinely for decades, flexing in tune with the daily cadence of electricity demand.
Until recently so did several German plants. Increasingly across Europe and even in North America we see plants adopting flexible operation to help balance the volatility created by the rising share of intermittent renewable generation. Nuclear plants can provide a range of flexibility services
to help ensure grid stability. They can provide frequency regulation automatically or through minor adjustments on the turbine, and thus help the grid operator deal with small daily fluctuations. They can also provide a tertiary response wherever plants are adapted to operate in load-following mode and increase or decrease their output substantially in order to help balance any significant deviation in grid voltage or frequency. This fact alone suggests that industry analysts should
start putting nuclear plant availability as the primary metric of plant performance, rather than capacity factor. So far, even this minor adjustment in thinking has been hard to win acceptance for. It seems that many in the nuclear industry still resist
©Alexy Kovynev
the idea of flexible operations. Yes, they grant, existing nuclear plants can load follow, but why should they? Some operators clearly don’t want to mess with the finely- honed operation and maintenance regimes which have allowed them to achieve high performance levels, and certainly don’t want to involve the regulator in a modified safety case. Plant owners don’t want to have the difficult conversations with market operators or come up with the arrangements that will adequately compensate the income from lost generation. Beyond this is a sense of fairness, the belief that as
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nuclear plants were on the grid first, newcomer generators should take on the additional costs and challenges of flexibility. While perhaps reasonable in some ways, the underlying mindset is that the rest of the energy system should flex around the nuclear plants, rather than the other way around! This must be why in document after document industry continues to refer to nuclear technologies as ‘baseload’ with the firm conviction that this is a selling point.
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