OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Question for you O/K … I’m going to hand you $50 billion to spend on the Texas grid … GO !
Are we limited to what's currently certified for deployment in the US?
1. Analyze what's available for expanding hydro capacity and what a reasonable expansion of that might look like if viable.
2. Expand the two existing nuclear plants using the most cost-effective design available.
AFCR CANDU's would probably be at the top of my list but wouldn't be for an American doing the same plan. 4x of them have a higher installed capacity than the two units at Vogtle and a pair only cost $4 billion to construct in China. Even if we double that for American deployment that's $16 billion for 3,060MW vs $25 billion for 2,500MW. So, if we added 8 units (4 per plant) we are $32 billion into your 50 and have added 6,120MW of new nuclear, more than doubling nuclear capacity and bringing it to 11,273MW. This assumes the remaining $18 billion would go into hydro, if it were viable. If not, we'd put that into an additional 3,060MW of nuclear, bringing us up 14,333MW of additional firm capacity and put that $2 billion into something else, maybe PHS.
This would directly reduce gas baseload capacity by almost 15,000MW. Given, on average, gas was short 20,000MW during the events of the 15th, it would have greatly reduced the requirements for demand-side management, likely wholly achievable via shedding some industrial customers and leaving residential areas unaffected. That of course assumes gas isn't further hardened and the same supply disruption were to occur again.
Nuclear would produce 117TWh in this scenario, meaning significant emissions reduction as it would represent ~1/3rd of total annual power generation in the state.