The Ontario government’s new policy directive to allow bids from natural gas and nuclear energy may hinder the province’s ability to transition to a cleaner and more sustainable energy future.
I’m not sure it’s quite so simple. A modem nuclear plant can run at 80-90% capacity and have an output of 1200MW. How many acres of solar panels are needed to achieve that power output, and how big would the energy storage systems be? Of course you can build solar distributed, but I think I recall equivalent area of solar panels for one modern nuclear plant is on the order of 10000s of acres. Building that with appropriate batteries and hooking it up could easily take a decade or more.
Anyway we should never aim to put all of our energy generation eggs in one basket. The technologies are complementary and diversity is a key principle of integrity and reliability of the supply.
I’m not sure it’s quite so simple. A modem nuclear plant can run at 80-90% capacity and have an output of 1200MW. How many acres of solar panels are needed to achieve that power output, and how big would the energy storage systems be? Of course you can build solar distributed, but I think I recall equivalent area of solar panels for one modern nuclear plant is on the order of 10000s of acres. Building that with appropriate batteries and hooking it up could easily take a decade or more.
Anyway we should never aim to put all of our energy generation eggs in one basket. The technologies are complementary and diversity is a key principle of integrity and reliability of the supply.