Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

michaels · 18 January 2019 at 12:50AM

Martyn1981 wrote: »

And another article, but this one is clearly more pro-RE (a bit like me )

Nuclear power can be green – but at a price

Thanks, perhaps the most telling fact is that nowhere except China (centralised control and huge economies of scale) and Russia are building new nuclear at the moment. Eventually economics does seem to win out.

GreatApe · 18 January 2019 at 1:49PM

michaels wrote: »

Thanks, perhaps the most telling fact is that nowhere except China (centralised control and huge economies of scale) and Russia are building new nuclear at the moment. Eventually economics does seem to win out.

Nuclear biggest problem is that it is too big and you get no economies of experience. Any construction project first of a kind is delayed and over budget even things as simple as custom homes often cost twice as much and take 3 times as long to complete.

Plus its real competition is CCGTs which are amazing pieces of engineering and work at so much higher efficiencies that its impossible to compete with with low gas prices

A 1GW nuke operating at 33% thermal needs to dump 2GW of heat into a body of water (or worse into a cooling tower)

A 1GW CCGT operating at 63% only needs to dump 0.6GW of heat into a body of water. Actually it is much less than that as a lot of the waste heat in a CCGT is directly into the air at low infrastructure cost. Lets say 0.2GW into the body of water

So for the same electrical output a 1GW CCGT needs 1/10th the thermal waste heat handling infrastructure

Going by the cooling tower analogy you can imagine building 1 cooling tower is a hell of a lot cheaper than building 10!

Plus nuclear needs too many workers. a 1GW CCGT can be staffed by 40 full time workers, really! While the same in nuclear might need 15x as many staff

And land size, and build time, and..... well the list goes on

Having said all that nuclear does work, the french have solved all their electricity plus their transport plus all their base load heating needs plus some of seasonal heating with nukes + small amount of hydro built decades ago. That is to say the french nukes can power 35 million BEVs just making use of the spare capacity and they can convert millions more homes to electrical water heating for 9 months of the year.

Nuclear is no good for England at this stage but it would be a good idea for China/India assuming they go for 200+ reactors and get economics of experience

GreatApe · 18 January 2019 at 1:55PM

michaels wrote: »

Thanks, perhaps the most telling fact is that nowhere except China (centralised control and huge economies of scale) and Russia are building new nuclear at the moment. Eventually economics does seem to win out.

Very few places are building any form of controllable energy generation apart from CCGTs which are amazing and really cheap

Most the west was saturated with power stations 20 years ago there is no need for more conventional generation even pre wind/solar days no nukes were being built in the west. China still needs to add some capacity but china will stop soon as well as their electricity needs start to peak. For a nuclear heavy china they should have started 15 years sooner so the nukes came online while electricity consumption was growing. My guess is china wont surpass 150GW nuclear or about 10% of their needs had they started 15 years sooner they might have got towards 500GW or 33% nuclear

Solar is great for hot countries and with batteries even better

Offshore wind is good for the uk but its cost is going to be much more than just the offshore wind for instance all the big grid upgrades that will be needed to move more dispersed energy around the country and the capacity payments to CCGTs to secure supply

GreatApe · 18 January 2019 at 2:05PM

One of the problems with the electricity market is that there is one national wholesale price
There should be spot prices in the 14 different DNO regions and electricity transfers between these prices

Or what happens is you have the national grid subsidies bad locations and bad decisions for instance if you have too many wind farms in Scotland then the national grid needs to go build additional interconnections to deliver power 500 miles south.

Contrary to the old green belief that solar and wind will mean possible self generation and consumption and the grid will die as people defect, the opposite is happening grids worldwide are having to need big upgrades and power transferred over much more distance as wind farms and solar grows.

Martyn1981 · 18 January 2019 at 5:08PM

michaels wrote: »

Thanks, perhaps the most telling fact is that nowhere except China (centralised control and huge economies of scale) and Russia are building new nuclear at the moment. Eventually economics does seem to win out.

Yep, a lot has changed in just 5 or so years (2012-17) and it's only getting worse/better since then, depending on what side of the fence you sit, unless of course you just move with the times.

It's also telling that HPC was announced by EDF around 2008, announced by the UK government around 2010, announced a strike price in 2012 .............. and since then no further nuclear deals have been agreed. But the growth in RE generation during that time period has been greater than the amount of generation we get from nuclear - that's to say, we've beaten nuclear generation, with new RE deployments whilst chatting about new nuclear.

It's easy for me to come over as a rabid anti-nuclear poster, but as recently as 2012 I though HPC was expensive, but OK. I thought it was a really bad deal when finally signed off in 2016, and now think it's a stinking two day old, road kill, corpse of a deal in 2018/19.

Things are changing fast, and nuclear is probably the slowest changing technology of all times, so the government's 2012 timing was bad or unfortunate, but a similar decision today would be unthinkable (hopefully) hence why no price agreement seems possible .... I think?

zeupater · 18 January 2019 at 7:03PM

Martyn1981 wrote: »

... But the growth in RE generation during that time period has been greater than the amount of generation we get from nuclear - that's to say, we've beaten nuclear generation, with new RE deployments whilst chatting about new nuclear ...

Hi

Also don't forget that over the same period just the introduction of LED technology as used in TVs & lighting has reduced peak demand by greater than the maximum generation of HPC and the ongoing efficiency improvement related to LEDs is likely to equate to a further two equivalent size plants over the next decade-or-so ....

Listening to local radio when the decision was reported, a representative of the nuclear industry argued the point that nuclear was needed as an alternative to renewables because the wind doesn't blow all of the time ... when the reporter mentioned that backup capacity was currently provided by gas, not nuclear, on a standby basis the representative effectively said that would be impossible in the long term due to emissions & nuclear would need to provide the alternative energy source! .... odd really, I don't think that he realised that his idea of backup suggests that all forms of intermittent generation should be replaced by nuclear because the backup capacity would become the primary generation source ... not really a logically minded individual in my opinion & I'm pretty sure that the reporter had the same thoughts considering the vocal tone of the next few words!

HTH
Z

Martyn1981 · 19 January 2019 at 9:23AM

michaels wrote: »

Did this plant have a strike price for its output?

I ask as that determines whether the decision is based on build and operating costs being uneconomic given the strike price or whether it is actually uncertainty over long term energy prices (due to how cheap renewables are getting as mentioned above) that is the problem?

Update. In the past I've talked about a price of about £70/MWh, despite the government also having to pay £5bn towards the build costs (around 1/3rd.)

I recall mentioning this figure, as I've pointed to the 2017 off-shore wind CfD working out at approx £5bn all in, and before even considering the subsidy part of the £70 CfD. However I couldn't remember where I got that £70 figure from.

Well an article yesterday includes this:

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the new generation of nuclear power stations is proving too expensive. Hitachi walked away from a package including a guaranteed price for its electricity of £75 per megawatt hour for 35 years, well above the wholesale price of around £50, but still below the £92.50 awarded to EDF Energy for power generated at Hinkley Point C.

[At least I'm not going mad.]

But to be clear, as far as I understand it, that's a CfD price being negotiated, not agreed and not signed. It also suggests that that's as far as the government thinks it should stretch economically for new nuclear £26bn (£5bn + £21bn*)

*Wylfa 3,000MW x 90%cf x £25/MWh (£75-£50 wholesale(ish)) x 24hrs x 365 days x 35yrs = £21bn

Note to all - apologies for so much nuclear posting, but this is huge news at the moment, and might hopefully lead to a change in government direction and a massive increase in the rollout of RE generation.

I hope this doesn't appear as ideological nuclear bashing, when it should be seen as economical nuclear bashing, as the technology is getting overtaken by RE this decade.

Martyn1981 · 19 January 2019 at 9:33AM

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

Also don't forget that over the same period just the introduction of LED technology as used in TVs & lighting has reduced peak demand by greater than the maximum generation of HPC and the ongoing efficiency improvement related to LEDs is likely to equate to a further two equivalent size plants over the next decade-or-so ....

HTH
Z

Article out today on this, asking why everyone hasn't done it already? Perhaps folk don't realise just how cheap LED's already are. And personally I have to admit that failures are incredibly rare, with my stock of spares starting to look like they could outlive me.

Lightbulb moment: ‘I pay just £14 a year – and you can too’

It will shave nearly £2bn off the energy bills for Britain’s 25m homes. It requires just a small investment, that will be repaid within three to four months – and give you a payback lasting more than 20 years. It will stop as much as 8m tonnes of CO2 entering the atmosphere and the energy saved at peak time equates to the output of three power stations the size of Hinkley Point C.

And all you have to do is change a light bulb.

The 40 bulbs in Birks’s Swindon home have all been replaced with low-energy LEDs. He has paid as little as 92p for the bulbs – such as the candle-style one pictured below, which fits into chandeliers in his living room.

“I probably have more lights in my home than most,” he says. “LEDs used to be quite expensive but have evolved and are now cheaper than most people think. The payback time is 10 weeks if you use lights for four hours a day. Lighting was making up 18% of my electricity bill, now it’s just 1.8%.

Martyn1981 · 19 January 2019 at 9:42AM

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Note to all - apologies for so much nuclear posting, but this is huge news at the moment, and might hopefully lead to a change in government direction and a massive increase in the rollout of RE generation.

Speak of the devil! I didn't see this coming though, at least not the high number of schemes sitting on the sidelines waiting to be subbed in.

Windfarm industry urges UK to lift onshore subsidies ban

The wind industry said if a bar on onshore windfarm subsidies was lifted it would allow the construction of 794 projects which have won consent through the planning system and are ready to build. Together they would generate around 12 terawatt hours of energy a year; two thirds of what Wylfa would have produced.

The government’s figures show onshore windfarms are the cheapest source of new electricity generation. The Hinkley Point nuclear project in Somerset won a guaranteed price of £92.50 per megawatt hour, compared with £57.50 for offshore windfarms in the early 2020s. Experts think onshore windfarms could hit around £50 per MWh.

At £50/MWh, there's a good chance that schemes would be net subsidy free.

Is there really a strong argument against just slapping out an on-shore wind CfD with a bid cap of £50/MWh and seeing what comes in?

But energy minister Claire Perry, who has hinted in the past year that a U-turn on the subsidy ban could be on the cards, appears to have cooled on the idea.

“Both I and the Scottish conservatives were elected on a manifesto that said there should be no more subsidy. We didn’t think subsidy for onshore windfarms is correct,” she told the Guardian earlier this month, when asked if there were plans for a rethink.

Perry said onshore windfarms had reached the point when they no longer needed to be subsidised, a claim not supported by industry. “I think we are getting to a subsidy-free point … The sense I have is that onshore wind deployment will continue without the substantial subsidy.”

OK then, slap a cap of £45/MWh and see what's out there, unless you don't want to see/reveal what's out there?

without the substantial subsidy.

Naughty naughty Ms Perry, that sort of wording might accidentally (on purpose) give the wrong impression, when subsidies could be low to zero.

GreatApe · 19 January 2019 at 2:07PM

It is not nuclear vs wind/pv it is nuclear vs CCGTs

Even before solar and wind got cheaper no one was building nukes
Nuclear works and works well but it is far too expensive compared to CCGT which is why most the nuclear builds were done pre CCGT days

Nuclear costs 20 x as much as a CCGT which is not a surprise considering the physical buildings and infrastructure to handle everything is about 10 x the size. Nuclear also requires about 10 x as much staff to run and people in the west cost big money to hire and keep. Plus natural gas prices are low thanks to fracking

It is actually worse than this because it is not new nuclear vs new CCGTs it is largely new nuclear vs existing CCGTs

The only places were new nuclear makes sense are nations where the demand for electricity is growing and where natural gas for CCGTs is relatively expensive or the infrastructure for NG is not very well developed. Therefore places like China/India

Existing nukes should be kept for as long as they are safe to do so. Japan should restart its nukes. Germany should stop its phase out and France should keep all its nukes for as long as possible but no new nukes outside of rare cases mentioned above should be built

Instead it will be a 20-30 year decarb via PV/Wind

Electricity is now more or less solved it is just going to take time to deploy the mass wind farms needed
The next chapter is hopefully the move towards EVs the sooner the better

Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

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