WIND CAN GROW FASTER THAN NUCLEAR

Which Is More Scalable, Nuclear Energy Or Wind Energy?

Mike Barnard, August 22, 2014 (Forbes)

“China is the true experiment for maximum scalability of nuclear vs wind. It has a tremendous gap between demand and generation. It can mostly ignore democracy and social license for nuclear. It is building both wind and nuclear as rapidly as possible. It has been on a crash course for both for about the same period of time. It has bypassed most of the regulatory red tape for nuclear…[And] China turned on just over 16 GW of nameplate capacity of wind generation in 2013…[while over] the four years of 2010 to 2014, China managed to put 4.7 GW of nuclear into operation [at five plants. Their stated plans for nuclear] had them building almost double this in 2013 alone and around 28 GW by 2015…The variance between the nuclear roadmap and nuclear reality in China is following the trajectory of nuclear buildout worldwide: delays, cost overruns, and unmet expectations…Modern wind turbines have a median 40.35% capacity factor…[The nuclear capacity factor is] 90.9%...[T]hat’s about 6.5 GW of real capacity of wind energy in one year vs 4.3 GW of real capacity for nuclear over four years. That’s roughly six times more real wind energy capacity than nuclear per year…In empirical terms, it doesn’t matter what anybody claims is theoretically possible: wind energy is growing rapidly while nuclear is going backwards. That’s reality…” click here for more

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