Most self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives I cone across don't seem to grasp the difference between spending and investment.
When they do understand investment, they want to attract private capital at a cost of 5% yoy, when government could borrow money at 0.1% yoy (Uk Hincley C debacle)
"Fiscal responsibility" is just their smokescreen. They certainly understand the difference between spending and investment. They just want to own the investment part, while government does the spending part.
We see this most frequently in military contracts, although NASA and public-works projects often oblige; most particularly nuke plants, of late. Public works and NASA innovate by sluicing to an impressively wide array of smaller yet still gaping pockets.
The question is whether government spending is good, or whether we should let private capital fund it? (If private capital will fund it, but will then want to profit off of it.) The argument was that it would make sense to spend government money in that case.
Newer wind farms don't have this problem only because we ended up with a big-C Conservative government that restructured the subsidies for new projects sometime around the 2013-2016 period as CfDs at prices which are now substantially lower than the market cost of electricity. That government is generally portrayed as pretty much the archtypical example of pro-austerity, anti-green, anti-investment "fiscal conservatives" who let corporations benefit at our expense. From the news reporting you'd think that they were the ones which structured deals in ways that let energy producers get undeserved windfall profits. The media even let Ed Milliband, who was actually in charge of energy when the opposition Labour party were last in power, blame them for the fact that these windfall profits are happening without challenging him on his own role in those contracts.
Ah, maybe I wasn't clear, I'm not thinking about generators who get subsidised, I'm thinking about the effect of the generation landscape on market prices. Even when there aren't enough wind generators to mean we don't need to buy any gas having more wind allows us to get better prices for the gas generation we need.
Right now there's about 7GW of wind power online and about 15GW of gas turbines. Lets ignore for now the fact we're just selling most of the wind power to our neighbours, that's 7GW which could otherwise have been supplied by the gas turbines. 7GW worth of higher gas turbine price bids were ignored because (of course) bids for wind power are basically zero.
What if it was 15GW of wind and 7GW of gas? The auction still hinges on a gas price, but now it's not the cheapest 15GW of gas, it's the cheapest 7GW of gas. If I built my gas turbine station on expensive land and thus I want higher prices to recoup my mortgage costs, I need to choose, take a loss with a lower bid or risk bidding too high and getting nothing until next auction ? Overall the effect is lower prices with more wind generation.
I agree that CfDs are the right mechanism by the way, and it shouldn't be tricky to find me talking about that long before gas prices shot up, and even before COVID, although you might not find it before Putin stole Crimea because I don't think I knew how this worked back then.
If we had twice as much wind power this might start to be an issue.
France is not quite ready to accept that nuclear is not the future, so will be subsidizing it for a while rather than building as much renewables as would be ideal for cheaper, more stable energy:
https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/edfs-woes-are-a-bigger-l...
> Today, we face a new situation where it’s not just new nuclear which is no longer competitive, but even the much needed refurbishment of the existing nuclear plants in France (“le grand carénage“) is not likely to be cheaper than building new renewable capacity. EDF recently estimated that, after all planned renovations for the 2014-2025 period, the 50-year average real cost of its electricity would be 55 EUR/MWh. In contrast, the recent tenders for offshore wind have yielded a strike of 44 EUR/MWh. These prices directly threaten the industrial strategy of EDF which has tried to keep as much as possible of its nuclear fleet running. There is little awareness of that reality in France.
What Germany really did wrong with their energy market:
https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/how-messed-up-was-german...
Basically, right-wingers moaning about "subsidies", just at the critical time Germany should have been pushing ahead with offshore wind and costing the country a lot of money as a result as they would have been running by now.
As they say on child toys, battery not included.
Offshore wind does peak in winter along with European demand, nuclear similarly schedules its maintenance and refueling for the summer which helps but both will almost certainly overproduce relative to current demand during the night on a predictable daily schedule if rolled out to any great extent so lithium batteries (in EVs or otherwise) do a lot to integrate their power over the short term as well as the TOU rates France has used for decades to make the most of nuclear power.
> EDF advises “The Heures Pleines option will suit you especially if you want to take advantage of price per kWh at the most advantageous to the day (ie 8 hours daily peak)”. Basically if you have a night-storage electric water heater, or storage radiators, then you would be best to choose this option, which provides off peak electricity rates to heat your appliances. See peak and off-peak rates on the EDF website.
Nuclear doesn't require storage, it can adapt to evolving demand [1]. I really don't know why people keep repeating that specific misinformation.
> as well as the TOU rates France has used for decades to make the most of nuclear power.
These contracts (heures creuses) are a legacy of the past, they are designed to be uncompetitive compared to the default rate.
[1]: https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
That's why France is at 75% nuclear and uses hydro and gas to fill in and exports power regularly (at least they did when their nuclear plants were all running).
You can theoretically go 100% wind if you just build enough of it. No one is doing that because there are better, cheaper options by complementing it with other zero carbon options including storage and transmission.
Dude, I just gave you an article written by EDF engineers to provide feedback on how plants actually work, it's not a theoretical analysis. Nuclear plants don't depend on alternative sources, and they don't need to export, simply because they regulate their output based on demand.
> No one is doing that because there are better, cheaper options by complementing it with other zero carbon options including storage and transmission.
Currently, no one is running a country-level grid on renewables alone using storage and transmission. The backup is, so far, always a high-carbon power source.
> The economic consequences of load-following are mainly related to the reduction of the load factor. In the case of nuclear energy, fuel costs represent a small fraction of the electricity generating cost, especially compared to fossile sources. Thus, oper- ating at higher load factors is profitable for nuclear power plants as they cannot make savings on fuel costs while not producing electricity.
Coal and nuclear are bad at this, that's why they are traditionally "baseload" and other techs are used to complement their strengths and weaknesses to get an economic total grid system.
> neither nuclear nor offshore wind exactly match the demand profile so some kind of storage/demand-response/complementary generation assets etc. is required.
There is no requirement to adapt demand for nuclear, and even though the availability of zero-cost storage could theoretically improve nuclear's cost-effectiveness, in reality, the cost of storage is greater than potential gains from running nuclear 24/7.
> that's why they are traditionally "baseload"
The article I provided states, quote:
> Nuclear power plants in France and Germany operate in load-following mode. They participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.
Right after the snippet you quoted, the following sentence is written:
> In France, the impact of load-following on the average unit capacity factor is sometimes estimated at about 1.2%.
Maybe you should stop making partial quotes to support repeating lies?
You appear to be claiming this means that no storage/batteries are required for nuclear grids, but they are for renewables.
This is as true for nuclear as it is for renewables. If you build enough to cover the peakiest peaks then you never have to use any storage.
It would be an interesting math exercise to see whether a stupidly all nuclear grid or a stupidly all renewable grid would cost more. I'd suggest renewables would very easily win this battle, but I've not seen anyone do the numbers, because both are stupidly expensive things to do and no one has any plans to do either for real.
What people with actual nuclear on their grids have done traditionally is:
Differing rates to encourage the demand to match nuclear production better.
Storage, generally pumped hydro which uses nuclear electricity when it is cheap and then releases it later during spikes.
Export/import to neighbours (some of whom may use it for pumped hydro, like Switzerland does with French nuclear)
Have other elements on the grid, like France's 15% gas plants, or hydro to fill in the gaps.
And in the future people will do the exact same things, except they'll use wind and solar instead of nuclear because they are much cheaper. And they'll use more lithium batteries, again because those are cheaper now. And the gas they burn will transition to hydrogen.
You should read the article I linked to, it has lots of details about how the French are in denial about this incoming reality from a Frenchman with an easily found track record on supporting nuclear and commenting on the energy industry. As he says, they are having problems now, because they were mostly correct for so long in the past, and that makes it harder for them to cope with being wrong now.
Load following requirements aren't determined by the plant operator, they're determined by the grid operator, and they're the same for every controllable output source. So far, nuclear plants fully comply with the european grid requirements.
> You appear to be claiming this means that no storage/batteries are required for nuclear grids
Well, yes, that's what I'm saying, and that's what the article says.
> It would be an interesting math exercise
It's not an interesting math exercise, it's the very nature of the problem. You keep ignoring that just because it is convenient to pretend a 55€/MWh nuclear plant is equivalent to a 44€/installed MWh wind farm.
In reality, building wind farms or PV farms create external dependencies. These dependencies are absorbed without too much of a cost when your grid massively depends on gas.
The rest of your message simply denies this reality because it doesn't align with your belief.
> it has lots of details about how the French are in denial about this incoming reality
IDK what you think the article says. It talks about the failure from political leadership to provide certainty about the future of power in France, and, as a consequence, the fact that nothing has been done in the last two decades to prepare our future production means. It's been well known for a while now, and the crisis means the penny had dropped for everyone at the time the article was written.
It is completely unrelated to nuclear plants ; had we had gas plants instead, our politicians would have made the same mistake.
No, it doesn't. They'd love to be able to say that. The reason they don't say it loudly and clearly is because it's not true.
So they have to say lots of things that kind of sound a bit like that if you are not paying attention, because it would be really good for them if it was true. But it's not.
France is going to struggle to keep 50% of their power nuclear even with a will to try. So in many ways it does not matter.
But so many people say it as a way to, falsely, impugn renewables that I'm standing on the principle. What you claim is true is not true. The document does not claim it, and if it did it would be lying.
You sound like a conspiracy theorist. The people writing these documents are engineers working at a public company, not members of a secret group trying to wash your brain.
All the data they quote can be cross-examined. It doesn't require belief to make one's mind up.
> France is going to struggle to keep 50% of their power nuclear even with a will to try.
I don't really see how that's related to the load-following ability of nuclear plants.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
And put as good a spin on it as they could.
But the underlying facts are not great.
Figure 1.3 for example, which shows the flexibility of nuclear in France and nuclear is the thing on the chart that varies least, while all the other follow the demand much more closely, especially hydro.
Or figure 4.1 where they don't bother going below 60% usage as the price for nuclear would just keep rising, and it's out of design range for most of them anyway.
As that document makes clear, nuclear has limited technical flexibility, but it's the economics that is the deal breaker. So talking about what is possible is hardly relevant.
Any attempt to deploy more nuclear in France would have rapidly hit diminishing returns and been financially disastrous.
This looks clever when market price is 50 per MWh, but when Putin decides to cut off the cheap gas you were using to make a lot of electricity and the market price rises to 500 per MWh, suddenly revenue stabilisation looks very different.
The UK has a bunch of wind farms which are quite old (up to about 30 years), and so even if they were subsidised when built the subsidy has expired but the wind farm is still there and still making electricity (typical design life is 25 years, in most cases as lifespan approaches the owners want to build a taller wind farm). However today the market price they're selling electricity for is far higher, as much as ten times. Newer wind farms have a Contract for Difference as revenue stabilisation, with the actual price they're paid fixed (a "strike price") and of course those strike prices are far lower than today's gas shortage market prices.
So there's pressure for government to agree that old wind farms get a CfD, with a price lower than today's market price but higher, perhaps much higher than future market prices, since now stabilisation is supporting a different government policy (don't let voters starve or freeze to death) rather than the original one (subsidise "green" energy solutions)
The irony is that if a previous UK government had built more wind power in the early 2000s, using more subsidies, that would actually save money today, even though it would have outraged fiscal conservatives at the time who imagined it would never pay off.