Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Piddles wrote: »

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Dieter Helm, Professor of energy policy at the University of Oxford, and author of a major government report on to how reduce energy costs whilst reducing emissions:

36% of new capacity is from non renewables.

Global emissions grew at the fastest rate last year since 2011.

It seems like we need a truly global solution rather quickly.

Africa could use solar from the deserts of Somalia, Pakistan or Western India. India from Australia. But China, South Korea and Japan? There's the whopping great nothingness of the Pacific Ocean in the way until the deserts of North America 10,000 plus kilometres away. That would make for some interesting geo-politics....

Long distance wind and or solar won't displace local wind and or solar

You have not just transmission but also conversion at two ends plus additional losses. But even if all those were solved by cheaper technology the problem of security would make them unviable

Electricity is point to point (at least for now) which means neither side is going to invest due to the other side of reneging on commitments

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Here's a weird question. And I'm not nuclear bashing, I'm trying to support RE.

An argument for nuclear is that much RE generation is variable, and we need predictable reliable baseload generation. Without this, this country, any country can't get to 100% low carbon, or it would be much, much harder.

But, something troubles me. If the nuclear gen is 100% reliable, and operates 24/7, then doesn't it just reduce the nations demand (effectively) by that nuclear gen. For instance, the UK's demand is around 40GW average, varying from about 20GW (early hours Summer), to about 50-55GW evening Winter peak.

Let's say we build out 10GW of nuclear, then don't we then move from being a 40GW average, 20-55GW country with nuclear, and effectively become a 30GW average, 10-45GW non nuclear country?

But the nuclear argument says that a 30GW (10-45GW) country can't go 100% low carbon without nuclear ...... so we have to rollout nuclear ........ see where I'm going with this?

Doesn't inflexible nuclear, simply change the 'size of the country'? How come the UK with nuclear is fine, but a smaller nation without, isn't?

[Edit & note - I appreciate that more variable generation means more storage, but the large and growing cost differential between RE gen and nuclear, means that less nuclear equals more savings for storage deployment. So it becomes a circular issue, I think?]


I wish the government would be more open and start producing papers on nuclear options, and non-nuclear options, and start costing and predicting storage (of all types), otherwise we just get the same ole arguments, over and over explaining how we can't do it without nuclear, but not explaining why not, nor why the 100+ nations that won't be deploying nuclear can (or can't) achieve 100% low carbon.

Firstly nuclear downtime can be scheduled for the lower demand months so if you have a fleet that is 90% CF average then you can be 100% in the winter months 80% in the summer months

Secondly the lower figure of 20GW demand for the UK is very rare we only get close for a few hours during the summer months

Thirdly you can have some small level of curtailment which would be acceptable

Fourthly the UK has some pumped storage and this is being increased effectively by 2.8GW soon by the two 1.4GW links to Norway

So for instance in the UK you could build out 30GW of nuclear
That would be 30GW in the winter (6 months) and 24GW in the summer (6 months) to give an average 90% CF

24GW is still above the current 21GW lows we experience for about 5hours a day
But add the domestic pumped storage and the 2.8GW to Norway and it's none curtailed

As such we can see 236.5 TWh can be produced in the UK with virtually no curtailment
So we can get to 70% nuclear no problems no curtailment
In fact doing the sums again using more realistic figures we get to 79% nuclear without much curtailment at all and only looking at the Norway interconnectors

That figure can be increased to 87% if we build two more links to Norway
Beyond this 87% we get some level of curtailment necessary

But the figures would be a low of roughly
21GW domestic
3GW pumped
5.6GW to Norway
29.6GW low
80% CF in the summer months 100% winter
Gives a fleet of 37GW into a UK grid

This 37GW can meet 87% of UK demand
We would also need 16-20GW of CCGT to fill in the remaining 13%
That would give us a grid of about 65 grams per kWh
That is what I'd aim for if we were starting from scratch
Very efficient very economical

I wouldn't go beyond that so I'd say 87% nuclear 13% natural gas
I would only go further if BEVs become popular
If you assume UK transportation is electrified and it costs 100TWh then you could add 20GW more nuclear capacity again 80% summer 100% winter

That 57GW of nuclear capacity would be enough for 100% nuclear for electricity and transportion
So there is your pathway for 100% nuclear
You would probably still want 5GW of CCGT just in case but they would almost never be used


So to recap
UK of today could be 87% nuclear 13% natural gas with 37GW of nuclear capacity with virtually no nuclear curtailment
UK of future with electrified transportation could be 98-100% nuclear 0-2% NG with no nuclear curtailment and that would be with 57GW nuclear capacity

So nuclear works just fine upto 100% of electricity and transportation with very little curtailment at all

That leaves only heating to be solved which is the most difficult of all the problems by quite a margin. But nuclear also has a potential solutions here. Nuclear heat only Reactors
Something like a 400MW thermal reactor (roughly 1/10th of the heat of a single EPR reactor) feeding a District heating system of 200,000 homes (a city of half a million people)
Those reactors would only be on 6 months of the year so running at 50% CF
But they would be cheap. Hinckley point c is more than 20x the heat output and costs £20 billion
So a first order guess is these will cost £1 billion for a 0.4GW thermal version
But hinkley is a electricity production facility this is heat only which means you don't need about two thirds of the power station bits and bobs so reduce the cost by two thirds and You are at something like less than £330m for 400MW heat only reactor with say 50 year design life and 4% interest with 10% loss in the district heating....you get to just under 1penny per kwH. If we say 50% again is used for upkeep and wages you have 1.5p per kWh if used for 6 months of the year 1p per kWh if used 9 months of the year (some palaces eg Scotland need heat almost all year and many people would like to have higher temp or on for more days of the year but cost limits them here the marginal cost is close to zero so we could have warmer homes for more of the year at little to no additional cost. But let's just go with the 1.5p/kWh of heat as a direct comparison to today. We also need to build and pay for district heating which I don't know how much that would cost but district heating systems do exist in Iceland Norway even some areas of Germany so it can't be unaffordable and dense UK would possibly be cheaper per property.

So it's 1.5p + distribution cost
By comparison today we pay 3-4p for natural gas and burn it at about 80% efficiency so really we are paying 4-5p a unit. We are also paying for expensive boilers while distributed heat is just a pump in your house so no need to pay £1,500 every 15 years to replace your boiler effectively that adds another penny to the current gas system. So we realistically pay some 5-6p a unit for heat under today's system Vs 1.5p + distribution for nuclear heat realtor + distributed heat system. I think it's likely this will come out to less than the current system

This is potentially a huge sector for nuclear and perhaps instead of designing nukes for electricity they should have first been used for district heating. But back then (1950-1960 when the nukes were being designed and thought of) few homes had heating we just accepted cold homes so there was no market for heating.



So there you go mart
A 100% affordable effective nuclear world
Electricity Transport and heating

Oh and the last element of nuclear heat only reactors we could just use the waste heat from reactors rather than build nuclear heat only reactors. Nuclear heat only reactors could be used for nations that don't have nuclear power stations. So 6 months of the year the reactors divert their waste heat to the sea as they currently do. And for 6 months of the year they divert it to district heating systems. The cost of this waste heat would be very low so instead of 1.5p/KWh calculated above it might only be 1/10th of that since it is literally thrown away right now (although the thermal efficiency of the electricity side would be reduced as the cold sink would be 60 centigrade district heating rather than 15 centigrade ocean/river so there is a small hit there


Having said all this which is very pro nuclear
I don't think or expect the UK to junk all its investments and go nuclear
We are already on a path to deep decarb in the electricity sector so there is no point turning back now

Maybe Nuclear for district heating for the uk is possible
But even that is extremely unlikely
The above is just to show how a near total nuclear world would be feasible
The UK will be a mix of 80% wind/PV/green-imports and 20% NG which is ok