Government should just set the conditions for new power and heating infrastructure. No fossil fuels. Zero carbon. A minimum and peak capacity based on current and projected demands. Private companies can bid, but they can't change the conditions.
If a private company can more cheaply and faster build massive amount of battery and use exclusively wind farm to charge them, and have enough capacity to carry through any weather, then cheaper is better. If someone can more cheaply drill into the earth core and use thermal heat (an other promising technology) then great!
If the whole UK energy grid could become fossil free, and the only cost would be a 2x increase in costs, then that would be to me a fair price to pay. It is costly, and by the look from the private companies involved a bit financially risky, but continuing burning fossil fuels is bad enough that all alternatives should be used until the last fossil fueled power plant get demolished.
If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage.
And if you absolutely want to spend on nuclear power, spend it in SMRs and molten salt reactors. ThorCon is probably not that far from a working solution if given enough funding.
Wikipedia says "The potential for further practical and viable hydroelectricity power stations in the UK is estimated to be in the region of 146 to 248 MW for England and Wales,[4] and up to 2,593 MW for Scotland.[5] However, by the nature of the remote and rugged geographic locations of some of these potential sites, in national parks or other areas of outstanding natural beauty, it is likely that environmental concerns would mean that many of them would be deemed unsuitable, or could not be developed to their full theoretical potential." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_United...
Pumped-hydro storage doesn't need existing water, but the national grid averages 30GW and peaks at 40GW ( http://grid.iamkate.com/ ) are there enough places to build "a ton of pumped hydro" for that kind of size which are suitable for the above criteria as well?
And you can store energy as heat or cold, which is easier and cheaper, with a bigger potential
And you can have an impact on the demand side, with energy efficiency and demand-response
We keep thinking of "building renewable power" as "we can produce this amount of watts at peak". What we should demand of these projects instead is "we can provide this amount of renewable power 24/7". There is a big difference. We're ending up in a situation where we can "build renewable power at a fraction of the price" for half of the time. For the other half we rely on fossil fuels but we don't see the issue because we're focused on the amount of clean watts we get at peak.
Humans have always adapted to power being available in different quantities and forms over time. This is why we have corn stores, mills, corned beef, and cold houses. No farmer expects that the sun makes his corn grow in January. In the end, we adapt to our environment, and we have done that though all the ages. Today, we can make it technically much smarter, for example by adding a price signal to electricity, and generating hot water for doing laundry during strong-wind night hours. If this is cheaper and more efficient than battery storage, then why not do it?
There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables, which is why they continue to become a bigger and bigger problem as more and more production shifts in that direction.
Thankfully prices are falling, efficiency improving, and massive battery factories are planned. The growth of EV means that will continue. Peaker plants are already being replaced with batteries.
> Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro
Nope. There is large pumped storage being built in Scotland right now and there are hundreds more glens where it would be feasible.
>There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables
Just as one example that may well magic away these problems, grid attached storage in the form of electric cars and home storage is growing massively right now. It may be we rethink entirely our centralised approach to production and storage.
Fission is expensive, centralised and carries heavy decommissioning costs and extreme tail risks. Fusion may someday give renewables a worthy rival but till then the falling prices mean nuclear has had its day.
Even if every battery production facility on the planet was dedicated entirely to producing storage batteries for the UK it would take almost half a decade to meet the requirements. You can claim that more will be built, but there are resource pipelines involved that are not as elastic and just throwing a pile of money at someone to build a factory. Battery production is growing, but nowhere near fast enough to meet the requirements for grid scale storage.
Right now fission has no competition from renewables+storage because the storage part of that equation remains a fantasy.
They don't get to use natural gas as a backup. They also need to be held liable to maintain the minimum capacity just as effective as more expensive solutions, but if they are willing and able to do that cheaper then they should win the bid and we should let them deliver carbon-free energy.
No thanks. Continuing burning fossil fuels until a better solution exist is not going to work. Climate change is already causing long term damage on a global scale, causing species to go extinct, raises water levels, expands deserts, displaces people, and is a problem that need to be taken serious. No waiting for a future technology yet undiscovered.
If we stop building new fossil fuel plants and only build nuclear and renewable, then maybe in 20-30 years we will reach a zero carbon energy grid. Given some of the most optimistic research, that might give us a small chance in prevent global crisis. A small chance. Continuing to burn gas until we have something better developed will rob us of that small chance. A 2x cost in energy, while somewhat costly, is still small cost compared to the consequences long term if we continue to burn fossil fuels.
2020 will very likely be the first year that renewables overtake fossil fuels in total electricity generated.
Here's a satisfying video of UK coal-fired power plants being demolished: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-52985841
Maybe it won’t be a lot once built, but fuel extraction and processing are energy intensive. Also, 10 years of construction and the vast quantity of steel and concrete are going to burn one hell of a lot of fossil fuel.
It would be interesting to compare the lifetime fossil fuel usage of all power generators, including construction and disposal (and waste storage).
Source: IPCC, 2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
What is the cost of an offshore generation plant that can produce power with the same reliability of a nuclear one? This needs to get into the equation.
I gave it a quick look, but frankly it would take me a lot of time to check if the model and assumptions make sense (it also seems to reply "job failed" whenever it doesn't have a cached answer). But I think real costs can be estimated only from working plants. Do we have, now, renewable energy plants that are capable of delivering a constant amount of energy by storing the excess production? How many have been built around the world? Why aren't we building more if they're so cheap?
As long as we are burning fossil fuels (and in particular natural gas) it doesn't make much sense to build such things, even if we could. The natural gas provides pre-stored energy.
They have plenty of drawbacks, but hydro meets this. The storage occurs pre production though.
Also instructive to keep in mind just how energy dense nuclear fuel is. [2]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/11/eroi-a-to...
We think of “energy invested” as having an environmental cost, and of course that’s true when it comes from polluting fossil sources.
But as grids get cleaner, and transport vehicles and construction equipment are electrified, this is no longer such a concern. Eventually we’re just using clean energy to build more clean energy - a virtuous cycle!
New low-carbon concrete formulas and steel production technology are also needed, of course, since these are a major source of emissions whether for a nuclear plant or wind farm.
Then, why is it not economically viable when fairly competing with solar and wind energy? Because it requires much more subsidies and nuclear developers cannot even bear the financial risks of their projects, as one would expect from a economically viable technology.
The sibling post seems to indicate otherwise though and mentions they're about the same? Any idea where that difference in numbers come from?
A large number of people would die as a result of such a policy. Fuel poverty is already a significant problem, the UK government gives out 'winter fuel payment' benefits to some, but doubling the price of energy would push a lot of elderly, infirm, and poor people to stop heating their homes.
This idea would need to come with nationalised energy costs for it to work.
They've already doubled.
Now, of course this is more complex because some of that price rise is due to "levies" being placed to support both "green" initiatives and support for the vulnerable.
Its a fucking stupid project that was signed to make a political point. Instead of thinking about the needs of the next 100 years, it was signed to fulfill a short term political goal.
The government were over a barrel, the people making the contract knew it, and the government signed anyway.
2x increase in cost doens't necessarily directly translate to doubling the price for everyone. For example it could be coupled with a scheme where consuming way above average makes the part which is above much more expensive, depending on income, to yield the ones consuming less and/or low income not having to pay double. Plus taxing overconsumption could be an incentive to getting rid of some needless energy usage.
So the situation might be different elsewhere, but in Germany, poor consumers pay for Energiewende plus subsidies.
Besides, very soon all new construction in the UK will be required to be heated exclusively by electricity, so for new housing heating costs will be absolutely huge compared to gas.
Isn't it more nuanced than that? Don't know UK rules, but since you mention new housing: aren't these required to adhere to some minimum of insulation, likewise for renovations, thereby drastically reducing the energy required in the first place (I mean if I just compare our renovated house with my parent's, energy requirement is 4 to 5 times less per square m)? Moreover depending on climate, cost to produce a given amount of energy is lower for heta pumps than for gas?
Again, that's just anecdote, feel free to ignore it.
I'm still interested in doing it though because it would massively simplify the heating system. Removing gas from the system would mean I could do all the regular maintenance by myself whereas at present I'm obliged to use a registered, gas-trained plumber on the boiler itself because the law requires it.
Also, I think the idea would be to install an air source heat pump rather than resistive electrical heating.
It would also push adoption of non-fossil energy sources, since poor people have more than enough incentives to chose the economically best solution for them.
China's emissions are approximately double the US's and growing.
Part of the reason for the gap in nuclear construction in recent years, separate from Fukushima, seems to have been growing trade tensions with the U.S. Now that construction and approvals have resumed, it seems like China has decided to ditch almost all foreign designs and only build their "homegrown" AP1000 derivative. Unlike American politicians, Chinese politicians haven't forgotten the art of turning lemons into lemonade. Nuclear, solar, electric cars--they're using the transition to bolster and develop their industrial sectors. As countries should be making many of these investments anyhow to hedge and supplement the often myopic and short-sighted pursuits of the free market, the net costs to abandoning the fossil fuel economy can be significantly reduced. (In retrospect the contracts for American nuclear plants were probably handouts, anyhow, intended to mitigate balance of trade tensions. But with all goodwill having been burned to ash by the current administration, not to mention the collapse of the American nuclear construction industry, it became a pointless gesture.)
The earth has a carrying capacity, locally, regionally and globally, and a high population density does nothing to increase it.
China's population is 1.4 billion compared to 330 million for the US though. Surely you should be comparing this relative to population size (China is four times bigger) and countries with smaller emissions per person should be recognised as doing well?
That's a fascinating proposal.
I don't think that will be particularly favorable to the US, though. There are 195 countries in the world, yet the US accounts for 14% of all of the world's emissions.
Country borders mean nothing to the planet in ecological terms. How about looking at emissions per square kilometer as a target, but focusing treaty efforts on the largest CO2 emitting countries (or coalitions of countries that can be dealt with as a block)?
Capping emissions per capita accomplishes just that. Why are you so opposed to it?
> How about looking at emissions per square kilometer as a target
So, Canada (Population 38 million) should get to pollute three times more, in absolute values than India (Population 1.35 billion), because it has three times the land area?
> Country borders mean nothing to the planet in ecological terms.
Country borders don't mean anything to the planet, but they mean everything to how we must solve this problem.
People need energy to live.
The world has a limited carbon budget.
Distributing it equally, per capita is the least you can do to be fair about it. (In order to actually be fair about it, you must also count historic emissions, which means that the western world has long blown its share of that budget.)
It's not that Canada "should get to" pollute more than India. Canada can pollute more than India and still have the effects absorbed by its environment. Canada has vast forests absorbing CO2 on a scale sufficient to mostly counteract the harmful effects caused by its relatively sparse population. India doesn't have those vast forests, and its population is enormous.
I'm making no claim that it should be this way. It is this way.
Despite emitting more CO2 per capita, Canada is putting a negligible strain on the planet compared to India, the US, or especially China.
Who bothers, the US already wants one. Why should the EU let determine the future of the planet by some political backwater?
This should include embodied energy, or "gray energy", in materials like steel, aluminum and cement.
1. Introduce a substantial carbon tax on extraction and import of any fossil energy source. This should include embodied energy, like aluminum.
2. Pay back part of the tax gains to the poorer population in form of a universal basic income (it could be some other scheme but I think this is the best one).
3. Subsidize any form of non-fossil energy generation, INCLUDING STORAGE, from the carbon tax. This subsidy MUST be non-discriminatory, it must not depend on promised future efficiencies in a technology but what it actually delivers, today. And it must give incentive to make any technology, and also energy distribution, consumption and storage, more efficient. It could be, for example, night time storage heaters (which were heavily promoted in the 1950s / 1960s to make nuclear more economical).
What we should NOT do is to subsidize some technology which has been making fancy promises since five decades, without really delivering them. Among other things, this would be market distortion, and precisely because it would reduce our effectiveness in fighting climate change, it would be very harmful. At worst, it would result in that we do effectively nothing, while pretending we do.
Also, it will be much too late to avoid massive climate change so its a bit mute. And that's assuming we also cut all our other emissions and every other country on earth cuts theirs...
Plus "no matter what the cost" is a pretty weird attitude if you don't mind me saying. If we can save more carbon by spending the same money elsewhere, shouldn't we do that instead?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-tos...
Areva, responsible for the construction of Olkiluoto-3 in Finland on a fixed price contract. Restructured and sold all of it's reactor business except Olkiluoto-3, which it still is liable for, to EDF.
Reviving the nuclear industry will be painful and costly, but the same is true for reviving and rehabilitating other heavy industries that have withered away, if and when these countries ever choose to do so. The justifications for resolving ourselves to their death are hypocritical. Both solar and wind power manufacturing industries, not to mention the automobile industry, would be non-existent in the U.S. without heavy subsidies. For example, special trade zones that incentive partial manufacturing of certain wind generator components in the U.S., or in the case of automobiles flat-out quotas. But even then the future of these industries in the U.S. remain tenuous. Fortunately for consumers (but less so for semi-skilled and skilled factory labor), solar panels, wind generators, and cars are easily imported; nuclear plants not so much, not unless the modular reactor designs take off.[1]
[1] Interestingly, the skillsets, including project management techniques, for these industries can't be imported, either. Toshiba bought Westinghouse because they thought they could use their superior heavy industry skills to rehabilitate Westinghouse and the American nuclear industry. But heavy industry skillsets are especially tuned to local industrial supply chains and labor pools, as well as domestic regulatory frameworks. Toshiba couldn't do squat with Westinghouse; it was deadweight from day 1.
[1] Fukushima being an obvious example. I'm neither an engineer nor nuclear cynic, but I was always skeptical of the claims nuclear engineers were making on the news in their self-defensive and, ultimately, self-defeating attempts to mitigate panic. They were far too credulous of engineering tolerances and quality control despite the evidence piling up in front of them regarding the probability of the supposedly improbable. Anyone remotely familiar with any kind of construction project knows things always fall short in the field.
I am hopeful about the new crop of companies currently designing SMRs. This was probably the way it should have been done from the onset, rather than pushing single unit power to hundreds of gigawatts.
I only began recording in 2018 particularly noteworthy reporting and research pieces (regarding any topic) I stumble upon. I just added the above to my personal bibliography for good measure.
For Hinkley, EDF have assumed the construction risk in return for an exceptionally high, guaranteed "strike price" for the electricity it produces.
But for Sizewell, it sounds like a different finance arrangement will be in place, likely where the UK government/public assumes more of the risk in return for a cheaper per-MWh price.
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/inves...
Construction started in 2007, with estimated completion in 2012 at a cost of €3.3 billion.
As of 2020, the plant is still not complete and the cost has spiralled to €19.1 billion. It is now tentatively planned to go online at the end of 2022.
So even the company with a financial incentive to under-estimate the cost is saying that the electricity it produces will be at best as expensive as wind energy already is.
Of course nuclear power plants can still generate electricity on a windless day, but if they're only used on such days, then the cost per Joule is even worse.
Perhaps the (estimated) £20 billion could be spent on energy storage projects like Vehicle-to-Grid distribution or hydrogen generation, which should be even more competitive 10 years from now when this power plant is supposed to start operating.
... And be low-carbon (~10gCO2/kWh). Whereas the £40/MWh estimate for wind included gas power generation, which is at 400gCO2/kWh. Given how wind has a typical load factor of 20-30% max in Western Europe, you’d be using gas at best 70% of the time, meaning an average carbon intensity perhaps around 300gCO2/kWh.
So for the same price (or even double that as a first step - nuclear costs decrease radically with lower risks perceived by investors), nuclear gets you > 30x less carbon in the atmosphere than wind+gas. That is not insignificant.
> they're only used on such days, then the cost per Joule is even worse.
Nuclear isn’t like gas: it is fixed-costs infrastructure, meaning that the more you use it, cheaper it gets. So you want to use it as much as possible. (French nuclear plants oscillate between 75% and 90% load depending on maintenance schedules.) So on a windy day, nuclear load won’t typically change too much, but rather gas and coal usage will go down to let wind electricity match up with demand. This means nuclear gets you less emissions even in that case.
No, they're totally separate things. It's not "wind and gas" as a single entity, it's "wind farms supply power to the grid at £40/MWh and gas plants also provide power to the grid at £40/MWh". In other words, it just means they cost about the same which is half the cost of nuclear. There is no 30/70 split as you imagined.
Which makes sense. Scotland gets around 90% of it's electricity from renewables, of which around 70% is wind power. It couldn't possibly do that if your figures were correct.
My point was to address the idea that nuclear is too costly as a long term solution, which I think (?) OP was using that cost/MWh comparison to intent.
FTR though, I do appreciate that gas + renewables can be a nice transition strategy (like the UK seems to have done to eradicate coal).
> There is no 30/70 split as you imagined.
It seems you understood I was talking about a 30/70 split in cost. That is not what I said: I was talking about a 30/70 split in usage.
But FTR, even in the sense I intended, you’re right, the number 30/70 is wrong, or at least it can only be valid under specific conditions that I’m not really able to quantify (electricity mix, coverage of demand, etc), and I hadn’t thought it through a lot.
My comment was addressing the pre-conceived idea that nuclear is too costly to be a long term solution. (Which I’m actually not sure the original comment meant, heh...)
The reason why is important though. Is it because of:
1) Political issues, where the government has set up incentives for the builder to lie?
2) Social issues, where environmentalists attack the project to drive up costs?
It seems unbelievable to me that nuclear plant planners are unable to plan because ... dunno, maybe they hear nuclear and lose the ability to add numbers. There has to be something else going on. Planning is relatively easy once there are 1-2 historical projects to look at.
My experience with energy markets is governments proactively screw them up for reasons I cannot discern. For some reason guaranteed profits is a common standard in Australia which for the life of me I do not understand. Which idiot thinks that is clever? The UK might be doing something similarly stupid.
Reading some of Jeremy Leggett's analysis of nuclear in the region, notably Flamanville and Hinkley, is highly enlightening.
From inability to plan or produce sufficiently high quality components, and then challenges getting them into place without damaging them, low quality work being undertaken in the construction process [1], government hiding details of contractual arrangements, a consistent (and predicted) drop in the price of power before and through the lives of these projects, industry players being painted into a corner where they must [try to] grow their business despite the above [2], combined with a surfeit of hubris all round.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/10/edf-warns-o...
[2] https://jeremyleggett.net/2016/06/03/the-nuclear-white-eleph...
You have literally nothing in your hands but it still won't stop you from blaming the government (which blindly throws money on it) and "environmentalists" (which obviously failed or those projects would not have started).
This is hilarious.
Every manufactured object has an insanely long and convoluted dependency chain, where each link is subject to disappearance due to factors completely out of your control. Especially objects that require special or unusual parts.
Then there's actually building the thing, which can go wrong for a million reasons before you've even reached the grand and rolling lands of human error.
"However, the BBC understands that the fact Sizewell C is a carbon copy of Hinkley - which has seen work on a second reactor there completed 30% more quickly than the first - is thought to have substantially mitigated that risk."
It sounds like it should be pretty easy to budget for this plant. Plans are allowed to include a 20% "we don't know what this is going to be spent on but something will come up" for surprises.
And yet, renewable projects typically come in within 10% of the contracted price.
The modular nature of renewables also allows them to be much more resilient in the face of component failure, or in face of construction errors (with the exception of common mode design failures). This means they can be installed with less skilled labor that makes more mistakes.
Renewable fields are akin to server farms w. large numbers of replaceable blades. Nuclear plants are like mainframes.
[1] https://omegataupodcast.net/181-why-megaprojects-fail-and-wh...
This should significantly reduce construction risk, as you have an experienced team who already understand how to build the thing.
(Going with 3.75% rule instead of usual 4% rule so you have a safety margin.)
It's quite sad to see the lack of innovation in western countries around the build and development of nuclear power plants. Red tape, regulation and lack of political will (due to unfavourable views on nuclear technology) will continue to see most countries fall behind on this.
It's really quite sad. Nuclear has a negative connotation to most but it's the future. Interstellar space travel will rely on the nuclear technology that should be worked on today.
I reason that we should be building and developing these technologies now rather than continuing to rely on burning carbon based fuels to power our homes. The technology is there. The will is not.
Sadly, too many dummies keep on pandering on about how it's dangerous which in turn, drives up cost - then other dummies come along and say "Oh it is too expensive", without understanding the first group of people that drove the cost up to begin with.
Red tape is invariably written in innocent victims' blood. And "regulation" is not a bogeyman.
But for a complex problem like this, I assure you there are no simple explanations - but people always seem to want simple explanations. That disappoints me.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54158091
https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/energy-news/toshiba-withdraw...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/25/hinkley-poin...