Slashdot Mirror

AC, nope, wrong again. Really wrong.

The Olkiluoto 3 plant in Finland, was planned to be finished 2010, now it is delayed till 2019.
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Capacity: It will have a nameplate capacity of 1600 MW.
Costs: The cost of Olkiluoto 3 was initially put at 3.2 billion euros but Areva in 2012 estimated the overall cost at closer to 8.5 billion euros. Since then, it has not updated its cost projection.

EDF on Monday confirmed a 10.5 billion euro cost estimate for a similar European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) it is building in Flamanville, France, which has also suffered delays and cost overruns.

Lets check what a ~10MW windmill costs?
The costs for a utility scale wind turbine range from about $1.3 million to $2.2 million per MW of nameplate capacity installed. Most of the commercial-scale turbines installed today are 2 MW in size and cost roughly $3-$4 million installed. Source: http://www.windustry.org/how_m...
and https://www.wind-energy-the-fa...

With "installed" in this case is meant: already operational ... so lets find a 10MW one ...
Siemens said it has committed to reducing offshore wind costs to â80/MWh including connection costs by 2025. Hannibal said the target of â100/MWh will be met by 2020. This are production costs of power, not the cost of the turbine, from: https://www.windpowermonthly.c...

This is a 9.5MW turbine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Hm, still not finding anything concrete regarding the price of a turbine, lets go with this corner numbers: https://about.bnef.com/blog/2h... The price of wind turbines set for delivery in 2H 2017 averaged $990,000 per MW according to Bloomberg New Energy Financeâ(TM)s Wind Turbine Price Index.

So, the nuclear power plant above costs close to 10billion for 1600MW. That is 6.2million per MW.
So with the cost of the nuclear plant I could build offshore wind parks 6 times as big. Considering CFs, that still two to three times more power for the same price.

Of course you can blame me for cherry picking a new power plant famous for cost overruns. But it is the most soon finished on in the west. Costs for nukes will increase, cost for wind is constantly decreasing.

P.S. this is an interesting read, too: https://www.irena.org/Document...

30% of revenue from energy production is equal to maintenance costs? Over what period, unit lifetime?

Yes.

See:

Operation and maintenance (O&M) costs constitute a sizeable share of the total annual costs of a wind turbine. For a new turbine, O&M costs may easily make up 20-25 per cent of the total levelised cost per kWh produced over the lifetime of the turbine.

https://www.wind-energy-the-fa...

I was too high with 30%, I remembered that from a conference, but ball park.

That's normally referred to as civil works, a distinction because of the lack of skills required in labour.

By who? Googling around, it seems that the physical products of civil engineering is the only thing actually called "civil works" out there.

What ever happened to the lie about increased productivity and automation, it would seem the benefits only got shared amongst the top psychopathic 1% and the rest simply got screwed over. It's time to start nailing the 1% and teach them a thing or two about being ruthlessly exploited.

And who's going to hire you after we fuck over the people who hire people? I'm not. That's for sure. There's all this take of comeuppance. There's no obvious awareness of reality. Work is just not that valuable any more. And the more lunatics such as yourself drive away those people who create stuff and employ people, the worse it'll get.

I'll make an easy prediction. At no point in the rest of your life, will society ever progress towards your goals above, no matter if society tries or not. It's an approach with failure inherently built in. And you'll be blaming that mean old 1% all the time for holding you back.

As with most renewable energy power plants, the renewable power plant is part of an energy portfolio that would include the traditional power plants in addition to the new renewable energy plants. In general, Nuclear and Coal make up the base generation while Natural Gas and Hydro plants make up the peak generation. As it now stands, the system operator (the entity that schedules which power plants turn on at what times) schedules the renewable plant to be generating at all possible times (weather permitting). The output of wave, wind, and solar plants can be fairly predictable from as little as 6 hours in advance to 1 week. Wave energy resource in particular can be predicted as much further in advance as large waves in Northern Scotland are usually caused by storm systems in the Mid Atlantic. Another bit to add to the mix is the consideration of capacity credit. Basically, we will need more Natural Gas and Hydro power plants in places like the UK as more and more renewable power plants are installed (i.e. 50% of total energy portfolio from renewables). Basically, for every 1000 MW wind farm, a 900-950 MW peaker plant needs to be available or built if not already in the system. Google "Capacity Credit" or just check out this article here: http://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/en/part-2-grid-integration/chapter-6-wind-power-contribution-to-system-adequacy/capacity-credit-of-wind-power/capacity-credit-values-of-wind-power.html. Finally, "well done" goes out to the engineers of Aquamarine. They continue to get funding, design, and build prototypes. I am glad to see the enthusiasm for their work.

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As far as costs for turbines, the actual deployment costs - cost of the turbine, land, and installation - is actually higher than I quoted, closer to $1.5 million. If it was the $160,000 you list, that would make our subsidy in the US even more insane, as it would represent a 25 times repayment of the cost of the turbine - we PAY the company 25 times over to put in the turbine AND we buy all the power they generate.

The gist of it is that Denmark exports almost all of the wind energy they generate to neighbouring countries, because most of the time the power generated is in excess of the demand.

Denmark is a very small country with lots of wind. I'd guess that they are doing this on purpose, simply producing power as an export product (probably a bit like Oregon in this story).

In Belgium, currently about 55% of our electricity is generated by nuclear plants. The problem? About 55% of the time (from 21h-6h on weekdays and all day on weekends), the power generated is in excess of demand and simply reducing the output of nuclear plants at night and on weekends is apparently not economically feasible (I can't imagine why they wouldn't do it if it were, it's not like Suez/Electrabel are corporations with a bleeding heart).

As a result, electricity is cheaper at night and on weekends, and virtually all of our motorways are lighted at night. Sure, it's nice to have all that light (except if you want to look at the night sky), and in the future this will also be useful for recharging electric cars, but the constant power generation by nuclear plants is not without its problems either.

Granted, that paper is several years old, but it still demonstrates the randomness of wind-based energy-generation pretty well.

It's not really random, but it definitely is variable. What is however generally more important is the predictability of the generation so you can adapt other means of production. And those prediction models get more accurate every year. In fact, the more wind mills are put into operation, the more accurate the models get because you get more measurement locations.

In Belgium, if the wind comes from the East, then based on measurements in Germany they can quite accurately predict the output of Belgian wind farms several hours in advance. This allows them to constantly adjust the power production of other plants (in Belgium it's mainly natural gas, often combined with burning garbage because we don't have room for huge landfills) and keep the grid at a more or less constant load.

Wind can never be used for base load energy generation without some kind of (expensive and impractical) energy-storing gimmicks, so instead of that how about just building a few comparatively cheap nuclear reactors and being set for decades? Perhaps at that point wind energy will be more feasible

One problem is that nuclear does not play nice together with wind/solar power generation because of its inflexibility in terms of output. It does not make sense to put lots of wind mills or solar panels on a grid that is almost completely fed by nuclear plants, because their production patterns cannot be used to complement each other. As a result, you get less investment in wind/solar power research, which is sort of a vicious circle.

It's true that you do need a base load guarantee and that localised wind production can in no way guarantee that. One of the keywords is locally though, because if you look at the wind over large areas of land (and/or water), the variations in total available wind power are reduced quite a bit (lots of nice graphs).

There's no silver bullet, but I think it's incorrect to paint the picture as if wind power is completely unsuited compared to nuclear power. Both have problems in terms of matching the demand and keeping an even grid load.