In this section, the competitiveness of the SMRs is analysed for countries with interconnected electricity grids (i. e. for “on-grid” locations). Niche markets for SMRs in the remote and isolated (“off-grid”) locations are analysed in Section 7.2.5.

The evaluation presented in the previous section was limited to SMRs and alternative technologies intended for generating electricity. Some of the power plants currently operating worldwide, as well as many advanced SMRs, provide for the simultaneous production of electricity and heat in a co-generation mode. Such plants are referred to as Combined Heat and Power Plants (CHPs) [7.1]. As the produced heat is transformed into a commercial product (heat for district heating, desalinated water, etc.) and sold along with the generated electricity, co-generation mode may contribute to the enhancement of the overall plant economy. The heat credit model proposed in reference [7.1] and discussed in Section 6.5 is used to take into account the associated benefits.

To evaluate the deployment potential of co-generating nuclear power plants with SMRs, the LUEC estimates for SMRs from Table 7.7 in Section 7.2.1 were compared to the LUEC values for the CHP from Table 3.7e of [7.1]. The latter publication takes into account the heat credit at a fixed rate of USD 45/MWh.

The evaluation results are summarised in Table 7.14, which generally has the same structure as Table 7.8-Table 7.13 of the previous section. Regarding these results one should note that:

• Countries rather than technologies are listed in the left column of the table, i. e., the specified ranges of LUEC for CHPs encompass all technologies specified in [7.1] for a particular country.

• All SMRs evaluated in this chapter (PWR SMRs) were considered as capable of producing heat in the co-generation scheme (and not only those for which heat credit data are specified in Table 7.6).

The main argument for the last point is that almost all SMR designers do not exclude the non­electrical applications and co-generation modes for their designs as discussed in Section 4.4. For the SMRs from Table 7.6 — PWR-8TB, PWR-35TB, PWR-90SL, and PWR-302TL — the LUEC estimates taking into account heat credit were taken from the Table 7.7, while for all other SMRs from the same table, the LUEC values used in the evaluation had no correction for the heat credit.

The data from Table 7.14 leads to the following conclusions:

• At least some SMRs could be competitive with other CHP technologies in China and in the Russian Federation at 5% discount rate[63]. As co-generation modes are typically not provided for in NPPs with state-of-the-art large reactors, NPPs with SMRs appear to be the only nuclear option for a CHP.

• It is noted that in the case of the Russian Federation, the SMR based CHPs are competitive with gas turbine and Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) CHP that fill-in the upper part of the LUEC ranges specified in Table 7.14. Plants with SMRs cannot compete with the Russian coal-fired CHP for which the LUEC values (without carbon pricing) are at the lower boundary of the LUEC ranges of Table 7.14. In contrast, in the Chinese case, the specified co-generation NPPs with SMRs are competitive with the coal-fired CHPs.

• In the case of the United States, reference [7.1] includes the CHP LUEC data only for the two technologies, biomass and simple gas turbine. Both appear so cheap that no SMRs could compete with any of them at either a 5% or 10% discount rate.

• Similar to what was found in Section 7.2.2, the evaluation performed in this section has found no cases when small barge-mounted co-generation plants with the PWR-8 and PWR — 35 twin-units (based on the Russian ABV and KLT-40S designs) are competitive (in the considered “on-grid” CHP applications).