COVER STORY | NUCLEAR AS BASELOAD OR MORE?
Meeting needs key to nuclear’s future
With its low-carbon credentials, nuclear has clear strengths in the emerging energy industry but it has to join forces with complementary sources if it is to win customer business in future
UP UNTIL RECENTLY NUCLEAR HAS had a simple offer for electricity buyers. It provides a huge amount of power from a plant that requires little land at the point of dispatch. It does it consistently, 24 hours a day and for decades. What is more, this century, its status as a low carbon generator has made it more attractive. But now its customer proposition has to change. The offer of so-called ‘baseload’ power may be a
compelling proposition if you have a several large buyers, or a central buyer, that have a need for large, steady power supply. Now the numbers of such customers are shrinking and the way they interact with the electricity industry is changing too. An example of nuclear’s ideal customers might be a
group of industrial users who require power for decades and will not have the option to relocate. But even those users may change the way they use power over the lifetime of a nuclear plant, which in current discourse may reach a century. Of course some customers will continue have a need a need for bulk power and they will no doubt be willing to sign contracts, some lasting several years, with
inflexible generators. But they are unlikely to contracts for more than a few years, because they see the risk and benefit changing and they do not want to lose the ability to change their approach. Recently, industrial customers have looked at their own potential energy resources – whether that is a waste product that can feed a thermal power plant, or the roof and land area that allow for on-site renewables – and used them to reduce the power needed from the market. In that case they now need variable power imports that can respond to the rise and fall of self-generated power or act as an emergency backup. Other typical nuclear customers are national monopoly electricity suppliers. In practice, this group of nuclear customers always had to make sure nuclear was part of a portfolio. Each electricity supplier had end-customers to serve who generally need variable supply to match their usage over days, weeks and months, not unchanging baseload. It was suppliers who took on that job – and the financial risk of being ‘out of balance’ between supply and demand – combining nuclear with complementary sources to provide the variable supply needed by their customers.
Right: Nuclear has to prepare to lose its ‘baseload’ customers and consider how it can satisfy different customer needs in a very different power industry
16 | April 2024 |
www.neimagazine.com
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