COVER STORY | NUCLEAR AS BASELOAD OR MORE?
Will solar eat everyone’s lunch?
A major energy story of the 2020s has been the immense rollout of solar – from utility scale to household panels. In a February blog post Michael Liebreich, senior contributor
at Bloomberg New Energy Finance named solar power as a ‘superhero’ of the drive to Net Zero. He compared 2004, which saw 1 GW of solar PV installed with 2023, when there were several occasions when 1 GW of solar PV was installed in a day. He said that with last year wind and solar added enough capacity to deliver 3,400 TWh, or 3% of global power demand – and the rate of deployment is accelerating. Solar is being deployed at utility scale. In 2023 the largest
solar plants worldwide were in India and China. The 2.7 GW Bhadla Solar Park in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan has an area of 56 square kilometres. But the Golmud Solar Park in China is already bigger – 2.8 GW – and China plans to expand it to 16 GW by 2030. According to data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), solar provided 49.3% of new generating capacity in the United States, 50% more than the year before. In total, solar added 18,356 MW to the grid in 2023, while natural gas added 11,024 MW and wind added 6,356 MW. DNV says that Boosted by IRA, solar and wind power will grow 15- and 8-fold respectively by 2050. Solar will become the largest producer of
electricity by the mid-2030s, supported by favourable economics and enhanced policy support in the region. Wood Mackenzie agrees: in a report on South America it said that with advances in batteries and lower costs, solar will outpace wind growth rates and become the leading technology for expansion over the next ten years in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile where it expects 48 GW of new utility and distributed projects by 2033. By 2050, solar will account for almost half of all electricity generated in North America. But solar’s benefit is that it can be deployed at any scale. Recently BNEF has increased its solar forecasts in the US by 12 GW for the 2023-2030 period, compared with its previous outlook. It believes most of the extra 12 GW will be in home solar. PV is already the second largest part of Brazil’s electricity capacity mix. Hydroelectricity still has 40% of the generation market with almost 110 GW installed, but in 2023, but PV uptake in Brazil grew at a rate of more than 1 GW per month and the cumulative installed PV capacity reached over 37 GW. The deployment rate is 60 W per person per year and is fast enough to double the installed capacity every two years. What is more, 70% of the 1 GW installed in 2023 was rooftop
PV, so most of it never entered the electricity network. There are 93 million rooftops in the country, and so far, fewer than 2.5% of them have a rooftop PV system installed. ■
longstanding if it is to make up for lost generation,
increased stresses on plant systems and - unique to the nuclear industry – the cost and time involved in developing a safety case to ensure the regulator is comfortable with such an operating regime.
Nuclear as part of a system One answer is for nuclear suppliers to operate their nuclear capacity not as a standalone entity but as part of a system. Michael Liebreich makes this point when he says the answer to variability is not any single technology, although batteries have been a focus of investment. Instead, “it is a system solution – a combination of demand response, interconnections, excess generating capacity, pumped
storage, nuclear power, CCS, hydrogen and biogas long duration storage, integrated by means of an extensive grid and managed using the latest digital technologies”. This is already happening elsewhere. In the UK now
storage in the form of distributed batteries, some standalone and some in applications as small as electric vehicles, can participate in contracts to supply the system operator with capacity or flexibility as part of a ‘virtual power plant’ aggregating tens, hundreds or thousands of units. Elsewhere, large-capacity batteries are increasingly being co-located at wind farm or solar farm sites. They allow efficient use of the grid connection, but also they give the operator the tools to offer flexibility or fixed supply, as required, to customers.
Right: According to data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), solar provided 49.3% of new generating capacity in the United States, 50% more than the year before
18 | April 2024 |
www.neimagazine.com
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