Wind Turbines

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Perhaps @andy11 can use his mighty intellect to find the evidence that nuclear is NOT the most expensive power source.

It will be interesting to watch him try
Irrelevant really. The important aspect is what sources are needed. If needed cost comes secondary.

Wind dropped to 1.46gw on Sunday. demand 34.8 and remained low for a while. It went up to 8.73 on wednesday and then fell a bit. Peak demand is usually in the week ~40gw . Peak demand is set to go higher over time -.when we all fit heat pumps and drive electric vehicles. Already happening to some extent. Low wind days can happen on any days. Duration at the whims of the weather.

Steel is still produced using coal. Yet more electrical power needed.An interesting area really. We also need it where ever it comes from.

So we generate way too much and sell it. What do you think other countries will be doing?

You have the usual problem. The gov's trends who ever in power is the need for more nuke. They are idiots but unlike the greens are faced with the problem of doing it. They will have looked at the whole thing carefully. ;) Not that this means they will get it exactly right. They may see it as a replacement for just turn on as per gas. Use when needed. Excess might go to hydrogen which can be stored pretty easily.

In the most recent COP gas has become a greener fuel. Sunak has changed petro company taxation, Increased but if the invest £100 in production it costs them £5 as they can offset against tax. Pity it can only be applied to sales to the UK. Why has he done this? Wind is saying yes please me too. Silence - why?
 
That hasn't aged well has it. :)
Actual cost of nuke relates to service life. That has been extended and maybe even more. France has been looking at that. The sting in the tail is decommissioning. Continuously calculated and added to the usage costs. ;) I wonder where they put the money, Maybe they build more and use the income to decommission others. Even buying gold isn't foolproof.

Solar. I wonder how much space it uses per gw. I have seen it used directly to generate hydrogen. Some background greens are saying nuke in terms of area taken and power generated has it's advantages. Are you all considering that? Land has all sorts of usages. I suppose a shipping lane could be created around Felixstow surrounded by windmills but are all coastal areas suitable?

Inland wind levels variations is a feature of the counties topology. Some areas tend to get more than others.
 
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I dare says wobs will complain that if we built enough tidal, we'd be "forced" to sell the excess and make a profit.
Selling cheap (or worse), and then having to buy at a much elevated rate when demand is high (& no wind) is not making a profit, as I already explained. I'm not sure I can make it simpler.

BTW, I was talking abouit wind not tidal. Tidal is a seperate issue, and currently really not going to happen. We had that discussion some years ago here, and things haven't changed. The Severn Barrage isn't ging to happen any time soon, and that's the most likely large scale project. The Swansea idea looks more possible in some ways, but not so big (320MW).

The loss of habitat on the Severn would have been pretty bad, which is why environmentalists opposed it.

I'm not against large scale wind power, in fact I've been watching the Dogger Bank conversion station been built with some interest (not far from us). There's a huge factory making offshore turbines in Hull. Its all good. But they are not suited for baseload supply.

Nuclear energy is teh low carbon solution to replace coal. We are currently using too much gas for this purpose, as we can clearly see on teh grid watch link I put up. Even Drax's biomass isn't ideal.

It is not coincidence that Germany is now burning the dirtiest coal to replace the nuclear they closed down.

Maybe people don't want safe energy sources.
 
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The conclusions are not specific to Virginia, they are generically true for all markets where fossil fuel based generation is being displaced by subsidised intermittent renewables. The study points out that the LCOE (Levelised Cost of Energy, which reflects the cost of generating electricity from different types of power plants, on a per-unit of electricity basis over an assumed lifetime and quantity of electricity generated by the plant) for renewables is higher than for fossil fuel generation once the costs of backing-up their intermittency is included, something many analyses including the ones used by BEIS, fail to include. Cost comparisons should reflect the costs of delivering reliable electricity to end users, ie the cost to meet demand, so ignoring intermittency invalidates these
 
"By the end of 2003, all government policy indicated that Hinkley Point C would never be built, and there was no prospect of any other new nuclear power plants. It seemed certain that nuclear had no future in Britain – which is why, when the government performed a volte-face three years later, so many onlookers were astonished. “Without any obvious change in the world, by 2006, the position in government had been completely reversed,” MacKerron told me. “Nuclear power had become extremely beneficial, important and not uneconomic.”

One thing that had happened in the intervening years was a PR blitz by the nuclear industry, which had deployed scores of lobbyists, including former politicians such as the former energy minister Brian Wilson, to push the idea of a “nuclear renaissance” in the UK. Between 2003 and 2006, says Andrew Stirling, professor of science and technology policy at Sussex University, “Britain saw the beginnings of a massive pro-nuclear lobbying and PR campaign that continues to this day.”
 
Hinkley:
Current strike price 106.12£/MWh

Offshore:
The offshore projects landed CfDs at a strike price of £37.35 per megawatt-hour,

Which is lower?

(Edited for brevity)
 
Actual cost of nuke relates to service life. That has been extended and maybe even more. France has been looking at that. The sting in the tail is decommissioning.
HPC will spend 35 years selling at £95 per MWh.

For it to average at £26 it would then have to spend roughly another hundred years producing power for free.
 
Haha! I thought posting that would stir John up :)

There's a "Cardiff Bay" lagoon proposal, several times the size of Swansea, but it would be a long way off. Their "cost" comes up low because they claim a 120 year life.
Bristol barrage would have heavy environmental impact but a bunch of undersea turbines could be put in. It was mostly China with sizeable plant but I see there are a few more now: https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/tidal-energy-what-it-is-advantages-and-disadvantages

Onshore wind situation does look daft.
There must be godforsaken windswept moors around, where nobody is too sensitive about a bit of wooshing.
I can understand local objections, because the farm would be built using foreign gear, the leccy would be sold on the open market, no benefit to locals, and the farm sold to France or China.

Obvious pro for nuclear looking forward, is energy security. We need something to fill in those gaps, without relyng solely on gas.
With more leccy cars, V2G vehicle to grid battery usage could get to be significant. I have a vision of, in a few years' time, blokes collecting up s/h Prius batteries in the shed, to connect to the grid and earn money. You could lift them at night and let them fall generating extra power at peak times, too :LOL:
 
"
Offshore:
The offshore projects landed CfDs at a strike price of £37.35 per megawatt-hour,"

What would it actually cost US if WE owned and ran it, and didn't have to pay for another company/country's profits?

That's 3.735 p/kWhr. So why is power so £££?
Even HPC is less than 10p.
 

“Cost comparisons should reflect the costs of delivering reliable electricity to end users, ie the cost to meet demand, so ignoring intermittency invalidates these”

All forms of electricity generation require backup, so there has to redundancy included in the system anyway.

Nuclear despite its cheap running costs has huge capital costs to build, massive decommissioning costs and never end in waste storage costs.

I would imagine renewables require very little in the way of back up as they are small discrete forms of generation.


I don’t think All of the cost of intermittency should attributed to renewables as it’s clear we have to have an energy mix with spare capacity with or without renewables.

As time goes on there will be continuous growth in storage, including: battery, pumped and hydrogen so we can reduce our need for fossil fueld
 
"
Offshore:
The offshore projects landed CfDs at a strike price of £37.35 per megawatt-hour,"

What would it actually cost US if WE owned and ran it, and didn't have to pay for another company/country's profits?

That's 3.735 p/kWhr. So why is power so £££?
Even HPC is less than 10p.
The boss man has a big car
 
It's just regurgitating Gordon Hughes theory that it's all a pyramid scheme.

His work missed the increase in Capacity factor over the last 20 yey so misinterpreted questionable extrapolated data about price per MW of capacity to assume that it meant there is no price reduction.
 
"
Offshore:
The offshore projects landed CfDs at a strike price of £37.35 per megawatt-hour,"

What would it actually cost US if WE owned and ran it, and didn't have to pay for another company/country's profits?

That's 3.735 p/kWhr. So why is power so £££?
Even HPC is less than 10p.
Distribution, grid management and balancing, overheads and so on.

BUT everything that isn't sold under CfD or RO is being sold to the grid at the price of Gas, which is somewhere closer to £300 MWh, so 30p per kWh (plus overheads above).

If it were government owned, and loans at government rates we'd pay less than £37.35 (plus overheads) But that's not how we want our electricity to be managed.
 
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