DOE
Julie Kozeracki is Senior Advisor, Loans Program Office at the U.S. Department of Energy.
The growing consensus that the electric industry's transformation to low and then to zero-carbon electricity must include a fleet of advanced nuclear plants as a clean baseload foundation was much discussed and celebrated as well at a gathering in New York of tech, financial, and industry leaders.
Here are key remarks by the U.S. Department of Energy's Julie Kozeracki.
Julie Kozeracki: Nuclear has a unique value proposition for net-zero grid. To deeply decarbonize, nuclear is a clean firm resource, and it uses land efficiently, much more than renewables. It requires a lot less transmission buildout than many resources. Folks often under appreciate the sheer scale of transmission and land use required for renewables deployment at scale.
Nuclear also has high temperature applications for processed heat and desalination that are difficult to do with renewables alone. Geothermal and hydro are also clean firm options but are difficult to get to the type of scale we need for one hundred to two hundred gigawatts.
It's important to set the stage for how nuclear is competing and the value it's providing to the grid. Because anytime Jigar [Shah, U.S. DOE Loan Programs Director], my boss, posts about nuclear, all the comments are, "Did you know that solar's going to be two dollars a megawatt hour?"