Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

pile-o-stone wrote: »

Surely it has to be cheaper to invest in offshore wind and storage than to invest in nuclear? It's certainly a lot safer.

If you include risks, concerns about storage of waste and public opinion, it's got to be a done deal.

Regarding economics I personally believe that RE and storage is cheaper today, but even if it's not, because of the build times for nuclear we get about 10yrs of cost savings to play with.

With off-shore wind at £64/MWh (2023 delivery) and HPC at £100/MWh (2028 delivery), I think we can assume a £40/MWh differential for 2028, perhaps more. That's a lot of storage. PV and on-shore wind are probably at around £50/MWh.

Eos Aurora a US batt manufacturer has reduced its prices and will now accept orders for 2022 at $100/kWh on orders of about 50MWh+. At 5,000 cycles that's a storage cost of $20/MWh of use ($100k / 5,000 cycles). Even allowing a 100% mark up for other storage costs (land, inverters etc etc) that's still only $40/MWh for storage.

Next step (I think about this stuff too much), if 50% of the RE generation needs storage, with the rest consumed immediately, then the cost of storage spread across all RE is just $20/MWh and way way under the £40/MWh differential we started with.

All guesses and lots of assumptions, but I suspect RE + storage is cheaper than new nuclear today, and the economics will only improve over the next 10yrs which it will take to build out that new nuclear.

Hope that makes sense, but don't assume it's right, just postulating.

Massive rollout of storage planned for Claifornia, including a GWh+ facility. These will help to replace gas peakers.

California Looks To Stationary Energy Storage As A Solution To Peaker Plants

The approval of the plan to replace three aging peaker power plants with stationary storage installations by the California Public Utilities Commission is the culmination of an effort by the Commission to encourage PG&E to look to stationary energy storage solutions as alternatives to the aging paradigm of natural gas-fired peaker plants.

The effort to transition utilities away from natural gas plants and to stationary energy storage supports the broader state-wide push to source 100% of its electricity from zero-emission sources by 2045, which includes adding 1.3 gigawatts of energy storage to the state’s grid by 2020.

The CPUC approved a plan to install four new stationary energy storage installations in PG&E territory that would see an additional 568 megawatts of new storage being added. The installations are led by an impressive 300 MW/1,200MWh installation by Vistra Energy Corporation that will be the largest battery storage project in the world.

michaels wrote: »

These numbers make sense but currently we are still only talking short term storage not the sort of storage that covers a foggy November. If we don't have nukes does that mean we need more FF generation overall - IE more carbon overall? Does putting a realistic price on the extra CO2 help the economics of nuclear?

No I don't buy that. The argument that RE instead of nukes means more CO2 emissions has never stood up to strong interrogation. And any extra CO2 cost boosts RE long before generation costs get high enough to meet nuclear generation costs.

In the case of HPC, it alone will account for £44bn in subsidies when the equivalent generation from off-shore wind at the latest CfD auction price would cost ~£5bn. And on-shore wind and PV are close to subsidy free.

Spending on nuclear takes money out of the subsidy pot that could provide storage in the form of overcapacity of cheap RE, short term storage (intra-day) and even chemical storage such as hydrogen or bio-gas which could be used to run gas generation when things are really bad, such as a foggy November. BTW this November has been pretty grey yet we saw near record wind generation a day or so back.

It's worth pondering the sheer scale of nuclear support / subsidy and then assuming that that money is removed from RE generation and storage. Only then do you see the RE generation cost of more nuclear.

Lazard's LCOE report is out, and whilst it's using US numbers we see large scale generating costs of:

PV $36-$46
On-shore wind $29-$56
Gas $41-$74
Nuclear £112-$189

Also consider the time element. We could spend £10bn's on nuclear and get zero low carbon generation for 10+ years. Or we could spend less money on RE, get more generation, and have some of that low carbon generation hitting our grid in 6-12 months, both from the modular format of developing multiple RE schemes, and the modular format of the individual schemes themselves that mean that some WT's and some PV arrays start generating as soon as that string is complete.