Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

joefizz said:

michaels said:

Just playing devils advocate how many MWH nominal of wind power would you need to produce the same annual output as a 440mwh SMR - about double?  And then how much storage would you need to ensure 24/7/365 power availability from wind (or wind plus solar) based on historic weather records?

Im studying an environmental energy course through Harvard online, and the figures they have given is about 5 times the wind for nuclear plus the storage.
As Ive mentioned before comparing nuclear and wind is comparing apples and oranges because nuclear is on all the time, 24/7 so thats your base load. Wind and storage (battery/hydrogen) after that with gas backup plants.
Its why most of the internet forum calculations on price are meaningless in the real world. See what happens when the lights go out, theres no discussion on cost then.
Sad to say the course has me more and more convinced the uk needs nuclear... at least until you have enough installed renewables to produce hydrogen for the gas fired plants.
Thats why the price of nuclear is so high. It needs to be because its inevitably what the country will rely on for base load and critical systems. The UK is in for an interesting time with currently nuclear capacity reduced, brexit looming and large percentage of wind. It just takes a couple of windless days to cause problems (see the coal and diesel stor usage recently).
Its a planning and infrastructure question and maybe we will get answers later on today with the chancellor... I wouldnt hold my breath though, most of this stuff needed sorting out 5, 10 years ago. The wind rollout and plans are pretty much bang on with phased approach and that long term plan has always been the case. Its the transition thats the problem but that doesnt get the soundbites or the twitterati going.

The Gov's economic advisors told them 2.5yrs ago that RE + storage is the safer and cheaper investment option to nuclear, and suggested they scale back the planned 16GW of new nuclear to 6GW (HPC + 1 more).
I suspect the economics of RE + (RE + storage) v's nuclear have only continued to shift in favour of RE. I'd also point out that in an all nuclear scenario nuclear would probably need a greater amount of long term storage than all RE, as it would need to shift the 6 months of lower demand / excess generation to the 6 month period of higher demand / shortfall generation, whereas RE can be rolled out to have a winter weighting, and thus 'only' have to manage several weeks of long term storage. [Intraday storage will probably be similar.]
Of course, in a mixed bag of RE and nuclear, the nuclear storage element gets hidden under the now antiquated term 'baseload' and piggybacks of RE curtailment and RE storage.

Also now worth considering subsidies too, since PV, on-shore wind, and off-shore wind are now closing in on net subsidy free, whereas of course nuclear (despite the previous 60yrs of subsidy support) is entirely dependent on government grants / support and now at around 5-10x the subsidies for RE, and to be paid for 2.33x longer.

Cool down nuclear plan because renewables are better bet, ministers told

Government advisers have told ministers to back only a single new nuclear power station after Hinkley Point C in the next few years, because renewable energy sources could prove a safer investment.

The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) said the government should cool down plans for a nuclear new build programme that envisage as many as six plants being built.

michaels

joefizz said:

michaels said:

Just playing devils advocate how many MWH nominal of wind power would you need to produce the same annual output as a 440mwh SMR - about double?  And then how much storage would you need to ensure 24/7/365 power availability from wind (or wind plus solar) based on historic weather records?

Im studying an environmental energy course through Harvard online, and the figures they have given is about 5 times the wind for nuclear plus the storage.
As Ive mentioned before comparing nuclear and wind is comparing apples and oranges because nuclear is on all the time, 24/7 so thats your base load. Wind and storage (battery/hydrogen) after that with gas backup plants.
Its why most of the internet forum calculations on price are meaningless in the real world. See what happens when the lights go out, theres no discussion on cost then.
Sad to say the course has me more and more convinced the uk needs nuclear... at least until you have enough installed renewables to produce hydrogen for the gas fired plants.
Thats why the price of nuclear is so high. It needs to be because its inevitably what the country will rely on for base load and critical systems. The UK is in for an interesting time with currently nuclear capacity reduced, brexit looming and large percentage of wind. It just takes a couple of windless days to cause problems (see the coal and diesel stor usage recently).
Its a planning and infrastructure question and maybe we will get answers later on today with the chancellor... I wouldnt hold my breath though, most of this stuff needed sorting out 5, 10 years ago. The wind rollout and plans are pretty much bang on with phased approach and that long term plan has always been the case. Its the transition thats the problem but that doesnt get the soundbites or the twitterati going.

Would be interested in how they come up with the 5x figure as obviously wind is expected to run at a higher capacity factor than 20% so they must be building in a lot of spillage into the modelling, perhaps because of modelling only a small amount of storage based on the relative costs of wind production and storage?

For the UK there was a suggestion that we could use the 2 way link to Norway (and more capacity on the same route) as a massive pumped storage resource but I guess there is a lag on cable laying and with there being so much uncertainty at the moment both political and technology it is hard to justify long term investment.

Is the Harvard course free and is it well respected?

silverwhistle

joefizz said:

Its why most of the internet forum calculations on price are meaningless in the real world. See what happens when the lights go out, theres no discussion on cost then.
Sad to say the course has me more and more convinced the uk needs nuclear... at least until you have enough installed renewables to produce hydrogen for the gas fired plants. Thats why the price of nuclear is so high. It needs to be because its inevitably what the country will rely on for base load and critical systems.

But the lights going out could equally occur in a nuclear scenario, particularly if a large reactor had an unexpected outage, which has happened. So I don't think your emotive language is particularly appropriate. The new situation has more tools to play with  than the old situation of bringing another coal fired or gas turbine station online. Diversity and load management are much more important these days and the tools available are increasing. My own decision to defer putting on the washing machine depending on my solar panels' output or the rate of my time of day tariff would have been inconceivable a few years ago. My new EVs charging is even more sensitive to price stimuli, although that's partly due to the fun challenge of getting the cost as low as possible!:-) 

The other issue is that even if we ignore the cost the lead times of nuclear are so long, and although I agree the transition period needs to be given more thought I don't think nuclear is the answer. Your argument that nuclear "needs to be" high cost is somewhat odd as well. By the time the nuclear has been built it's likely that we will have the renewables/hydrogen option, let alone shorter term and peak lopping storage.

ed110220

silverwhistle said:

joefizz said:

Your argument that nuclear "needs to be" high cost is somewhat odd as well. By the time the nuclear has been built it's likely that we will have the renewables/hydrogen option, let alone shorter term and peak lopping storage.

It's very odd, because in traditional systems baseload generation would typically be inexpensive but inflexible, due to using large, fuel-efficient power stations. Successively more expensive sources, typically smaller and using fuel less efficiently, or using more expensive types of fuel, would then be brought online to cover peak demand when needed. Nuclear baseload "needing" to be expensive would turn this on its head.

Martyn1981

I have a lot of trust in Tony Seba, and so far this year we've seen his predictions start to be proven right with ever lower average costs of leccy, but a growing cost in managing supply and demand, and a move away from 'baseload'.
He's predicting that by 2030 RE + storage will undercut existing conventional generation (let alone new builds) making it cheaper to shut them down.

silverwhistle

ed110220 said:

 Nuclear baseload "needing" to be expensive would turn this on its head.

Quite..
That we need to put effort to transition to a new reality is OK as an analysis but the solution suggested isn't one! 'Baseload' as a concept no longer seems as important, like 'mainframe' in computing. Computer processing power is needed more than ever but the secret is in distribution, aggregation, controlling and communicating. In power terms we know local embedded usage is more important than before, but communicating or transmission hasn't lost its importance.

Martyn1981

I wasn't going to post this article as I know many folk don't like nuclear being discussed, and I agree that we now need to move on, but one paragraph got me thinking/wondering and so I just 'had too', sorry:-

UK’s nuclear sites costing taxpayers ‘astronomical sums’, say MPs

The NDA’s most recent estimate is that it will cost current and future generations of UK taxpayers £132bn to decommission the civil nuclear sites, with the work not being completed for another 120 years.

So? Well, as a very rough rule we can price PV and wind deployment at approx £1bn/GW. It's not entirely true, as off-shore wind costs a bit more, and PV costs a bit less, but after CAPEX, OPEX, life expectancy and capacity factors are taken into account, they all come out at about the same rough cost of generation (in the UK) ~£40/MWh.

So I then divided the £132bn by three and got 44GW's each of off-shore wind, on-shore wind and PV. At capacity factors of 50%, 30%, and 11% respectively, that gives us the equivalent of 40GW's of generation. Why is that so important, glad you asked, because that's how much leccy we currently use in the UK 350TWh pa, or 40GW.

So the cost of decomissioning the nuclear part of our generation is equal to the cost of building out RE to match our average* leccy needs today.

*Average, as we will of course need storage/balancing and additional generation to cover losses.

joefizz

michaels said:

Would be interested in how they come up with the 5x figure as obviously wind is expected to run at a higher capacity factor than 20% so they must be building in a lot of spillage into the modelling, perhaps because of modelling only a small amount of storage based on the relative costs of wind production and storage?

For the UK there was a suggestion that we could use the 2 way link to Norway (and more capacity on the same route) as a massive pumped storage resource but I guess there is a lag on cable laying and with there being so much uncertainty at the moment both political and technology it is hard to justify long term investment.

Is the Harvard course free and is it well respected?

Its not about theory, its about practice.

Im typing this at 8am on Friday 27th and from gridwatch uk wind output is 0.9 GW, nuclear is as usual just below 6 GW. Installed wind is what 25-30GW? If you look at the crown estates website for future wind zones and capacity, the projected installed wind by 2030 wouldnt make up those exta 5GW given this mornings wind patterns.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-6.29,55.53,2592/loc=-6.350,54.876

Since midnight, just with the nuclear difference the battery storage capacity required would be more than the annual projected output for a car manufacturer gigafactory in 2025. So if you took one gigafactory and bought all its output from 2025 to 2030 and installed it in the UK, you still wouldnt be able to read this post ;-)
None of that takes into consideration we've had this wind pattern for 4 days now and even with everything from 2030 installed, reduction in electricity demand, no extra evs and every battery produced on the planet from now to 2030 installed in the UK, the electrons would have ran out sometime yesterday.
Its no coincidence that the nuclear load is roughly the equivalent of strategic infrastructure usage (comms, hospitals, emergency use etc) and they should have bit the bullet and gone one way or the other years ago but hey, politics. Thats what baseload actually means, not what people think it means. Your national baseload is the load that is required to run 24/7 to keep things functioning. Having lights on/available in homes isnt part of the baseload. Just go and spend some time in any nation where electricity supply isnt guaranteed 24/7.

As for the Harvard course, its not free for certification but I think you can do some of it as a taster free (Ive paid). As for is it respected, well the lecturers are but I'll tell you when I finish it ;-) For me, its worth the price alone just to understand how this stuff is being taught over in the US right now as I have enough connections here to find that out over a coffee.

joefizz

silverwhistle said:

My own decision to defer putting on the washing machine depending on my solar panels' output or the rate of my time of day tariff would have been inconceivable a few years ago.

Indeed.
That was a large part of my posting history on the home battery thread. Certain posters couldnt get their head around the concept you have just outlined, that, in future, its the narrative that will be sold. The narrative that energy costs fluctuate (and the corollary that supply fluctuates) almost minute by minute and we have to adapt our behaviour accordingly.

This time last year Jo Swinson was going to be our next prime minister, this morning Im off to the shops checking keys, wallet, phone, mask, sanitiser.

On a side issue about narrative, Grant Williams has done an excellent series of podcasts on the narrative game (along with his endgame series). Not exactly green and ethical material per se but the macro economics feed in to it.

joefizz

ed110220 said:

It's very odd, because in traditional systems baseload generation would typically be inexpensive but inflexible, due to using large, fuel-efficient power stations. Successively more expensive sources, typically smaller and using fuel less efficiently, or using more expensive types of fuel, would then be brought online to cover peak demand when needed. Nuclear baseload "needing" to be expensive would turn this on its head.

Exactly. We have been spoiled by 'cheap' fossil fuels but now we need to look at alternatives and the reason why they havent been implemented on larger scales before is because of the expense.

As Ive mentioned in a post above, theres no wind over the UK at the moment and hasnt been for a couple of days so no amount of wind power or batteries or pumped storage would work today, so we have to plan for days like today for 10 years from now. It doesnt matter what the calculations say for wind load factors because thats an average which means on days/periods like today (which are rare but do occur a number of times per year in the uk)  you have to plan to have something to cover the shortfall. If we are to phase out coal and then gas, that doesnt really leave much alternative (green produced hydrogen being one, nuclear the other).

Thats the problem with using average figures for calculations and extrapolating them, if every day was 'average' there would be no problem.