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World's Largest Offshore Wind Farm Opens Off Northwest England (reuters.com)
The world's largest offshore wind farm has opened off the northwest coast of England. "The wind farm has a capacity of 659 megawatts (MW), enough to power almost 600,000 homes, and overtakes the London Array off England's east cost which has a capacity of 630 MW," reports Reuters. From the report: The Walney Extension (as it is called) is made up of 87 turbines built by Siemens Gamesa and MHI Vestas, and covers 145 square kilometers (55 square miles), which is equivalent to around 20,000 football pitches. The 40 eight-megawatt MHI Vestas turbines being used stand 195 meters (213 yards) tall and are the largest wind turbines in operation globally. Britain is the world's largest offshore wind market, hosting 36 percent of globally installed offshore wind capacity, data from the Global Wind Energy Council showed. Walney Extension was among the first renewable projects to secure a so-called contract for difference (CFD) subsidy from the British government in 2014. The contract guarantees it a minimum price for electricity of 150 pounds ($195) per megawatt hour (MWh) for 15 years. You can view some drone footage of the offshore windfarm via Orsted.
Not necessarily. For one thing, we need more power generation that doesn't emit CO2, even at the expense of having to pay for it.
Also, consider what happens if we stop these payments: we'll end up with fewer wind generators. This'll save us money at times where the wind is very high and we're generating too much wind power, but what about the rest of the time? We'll end up having to pay to generate that power in gas plants instead. If the extra money spent on gas is greater than the constraint payments being paid to wind farms, then you'd be stupid to stop the latter. It'll cost you more money.
The article you linked hints at this when it says 'The National Grid said the wind constraint payments were “the most economically efficient way of managing additional green capacity”.'.
I don't have data on how often these payments are being made, but I can tell you that the UK's wind farms spend a significant amount of time generating less than the highest amount they generate, which suggests they don't spend a lot of time in shutdown mode (and it's worth noting that "shutdown mode" doesn't mean they're shut down; it means they're generating lots of power, which is great because that's exactly what you want).
I'm not saying these payments are desirable in and of themselves; obviously the grid needs upgrades to avoid wasting wind power (while considering the cost of doing so, and the impact of reduced constraint payments on the rate of new wind generation capacity, because we still want more of it). I'm just pointing out that this may very well be the overall cheapest option available, even before considering that we want to subsidise wind generation in order to get more of it.
See also https://www.electricitymap.org... for realtime CO2 intensity of electricity production across a big chunk of the world... e.g. right now (morning peak), the UK's running on 28% gas, 24% nuclear, 19% wind, 8% coal, 4% solar.
Oh yeah, should have said - it's GPLv3 code is here - https://github.com/tmrowco/ele...
Not necessarily. For one thing, we need more power generation that doesn't emit CO2, even at the expense of having to pay for it.
If cost is not a concern then why not use an energy source that is more reliable and emits less CO2? Such as nuclear power.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2018/08/why-i-favor-nuclear-power.html
Also, consider what happens if we stop these payments: we'll end up with fewer wind generators. This'll save us money at times where the wind is very high and we're generating too much wind power, but what about the rest of the time? We'll end up having to pay to generate that power in gas plants instead. If the extra money spent on gas is greater than the constraint payments being paid to wind farms, then you'd be stupid to stop the latter. It'll cost you more money.
Or, they could use nuclear power. That's what they could use the rest of the time. Nuclear power has lower environmental impact that natural gas so that seems more logical to use nuclear power to cover when the wind doesn't blow.
The article you linked hints at this when it says 'The National Grid said the wind constraint payments were “the most economically efficient way of managing additional green capacity”.'.
I don't have data on how often these payments are being made, but I can tell you that the UK's wind farms spend a significant amount of time generating less than the highest amount they generate, which suggests they don't spend a lot of time in shutdown mode (and it's worth noting that "shutdown mode" doesn't mean they're shut down; it means they're generating lots of power, which is great because that's exactly what you want).
I'm not saying these payments are desirable in and of themselves; obviously the grid needs upgrades to avoid wasting wind power (while considering the cost of doing so, and the impact of reduced constraint payments on the rate of new wind generation capacity, because we still want more of it). I'm just pointing out that this may very well be the overall cheapest option available, even before considering that we want to subsidise wind generation in order to get more of it.
It seems counter intuitive to keep adding more wind generation capacity and pay them to sit idle. It would seem more productive to put that money towards the structures needed to manage the wind power they have now so they can store that excess generating capacity, or do some kind of load shifting. Paying for more and more wind power when it seems they have too much already is just making the problem bigger. If they keep building more wind farms then at some point, or so it seems to me, that this paying wind farms to sit idle will not be so economically viable. Something would have to become cheaper than what they are doing now.
I found a document on the UK nuclear power plans and I didn't read it all just yet as it is very long.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/united-kingdom.aspx
It appears that the UK is planning on building more nuclear power plants. There must have been a change of heart on nuclear power 10 or 20 years ago. Seems like an awfully long time to build some nuclear power plants while they are spending so much money to subsidize wind power they can't use.
I'm guessing "big wind" has a strong lobby in the government to get such a sweet deal on subsidies.
So why are we paying so much? Denmark are paying half the amount for offshore electricity per MWh. This govt is useless with money.
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it'll all make sense to you when battery storage is in place
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
This is a huge money pit and the UK should shut this off, or at least dial it back, until they can figure out how to better manage wind power than paying the windmill owners to not produce power.
Here's a suggestion: instead of having multiple private companies involved, this could all be money moving from one pocket of a public energy company to another pocket of the same company, without the tax payer being burdened by the inefficiency of this made-up "competitive market".
Could you quantify that? I'm not sure how much a single gas turbine on one small site should produce, but a quick web search shows that GE's gas turbines produce 34 MW to 557 MW, so even the top end is less than the 659MW output given in the summary above.
Paying 92.5£/MWh for nuclear (Hinkley Point C) is peanuts in comparison with the 195£/MWh for the offshore wind farms.
Does that number include costs for post-operation dismantling of the facility, cleanup of the site, storage of the waste products over the centuries or more that may be needed, compensation / cleanup costs in case of accident(s) over the course of its operation, or release of radioactive waste products that may be within regulatory norms but still ends up in the environment?
And b) if it includes post-operational cleanup costs: is that number realistic? In the case of nuclear, history tends to show otherwise.
it'll all make sense to you when battery storage is in place
How long will that take? People keep talking about grid scale batteries in the future tense. Is this another case of "only ten years away, and always will be"?
Help me out here on how it is helpful to build wind power now, then "throw away" the capacity by shutting them down. Then also paying them to shut the wind farms down. Wouldn't it make more sense to build the batteries first? So that the batteries can help manage the existing wind, solar, and even coal and natural gas? Seems to me that having batteries on a coal plant would be a nice stop gap measure to keep from having to dial it up and down to match the load. Coal plants like to run hot and steady. Have enough batteries with the existing coal and wind then they could probably manage to shut down some coal plants permanently. Then manage growth in demand with more wind and more batteries.
At a minimum just stop spending money on windmills. If the batteries are going to get cheaper in ten years then just put the money in a banking account and let it earn interest. There's a good chance that wind power gets cheaper in that time too.
I'm not seeing the sense in this, you're going to have to explain this. I doubt waiting for the batteries to make sense in the future will be all that helpful in clarifying this. That's assuming the batteries ever come to be.
Does that number include costs for post-operation dismantling of the facility, (etc.)
Yes. Have the wind farm operators any plans to fund the decommissioning of their offshore facility at end-of-life? God knows but by the time wind and weather have wrecked them the original builders will be long gone and unaccountable to anyone.
Offshore wind farm power availability is about 30% of dataplate so this new facility will produce, on average about 250MW, not the headline attention-grabbing absolute maximum of 659 MW. Some days it will produce a lot more, some days a lot less even if we need the electricity right then. The Hinkley Point C nuclear facility will produce 3.2GW for most of the time, not being dependent on weather conditions. Uptime for modern nuclear plants is about 80-85% or so and outages for refuelling and maintenance are usually pre-planned well in advance.
Now consider the 45% capacity factor for the wind.
What is it with Europeans always measure things by soccer field size? Can we have a normal measurement, like Library of Congresses?
I live in Ireland and don't want any radiation in the sea here.
News that may shock you, I know but seawater is naturally radioactive, more than 10,000 Bequerels per cubic metre. Most of that activity is due to naturally-occurring potassium-40, the rest tends to be from various decay products from uranium-bearing rocks and other natural materials. A couple of Bq per cubic metre in seawater is from man-made sources, usually remnants from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. Some more is waste isotopes dumped into the sewers by hospitals, ending up in outfalls near the coast in places like Boston (there was a panic by some people when I-131 was found in Boston harbour soon after the Fukushima reactors overheated and leaked radioactive material into the Pacific. It turned out to come from a hospital which didn't have to sequester radioactive waste the way a nuclear power plant legally has to).
I can remember a flurry of interest in pairing large offshore windfarms in shallow European waters with large, wall-off "islands" of sea adjacent to the farm. Whenever there was excess wind for the grid offtake, seawater would be pumped into this enclosure, available for release as hydro when the wind slackened. Was this idea ever tried?
So a 145 sq km deployment of almost 100 turbines is equivalent to a single small utility scale power station.
With near as makes no difference zero carbon emissions or other pollutants, free and renewable fuel, uses no arable or otherwise useful land, little/no waste products, eliminates geopolitical influence of fossil fuel producing countries, cheaper if you eliminate subsidies from fossil fuel stations, and the list goes on. Just because we've built bigger fossil fuel plants doesn't mean this wind farm is a bad idea. Furthermore the dispersed deployment has no relevance at all since 3/4 of the earth's surface is water. Exactly what are we losing by using a tiny fraction of that ocean to generate power?
While I won't deny that fossil fuel fired plants maintain some advantages in some circumstances, let's not pretend that a wind farm has no advantages over fossil fuels.
To put that in perspective, the UK has 14GW of active installed coal fired power stations.
Not for long. All coal fired powerstations have to be closed in the next half decade and many of them have already begun to shut down if they haven't already. Near me there are three with a few miles of each other. Ferrybridge C has closed with its coal stockpile nowhere to be seen and a waste/biomass plant has been built on the same site, Eggborough is in the middle of closing down and hasn't generated power for over a year and Drax, which was one of Europe's largest coal fired stations is running at least 50% on gas/biomass/waste.
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It's quite possible that this wind farm will end up producing as much CO2 as if they just burned natural gas in a combined cycle plant.
Some rando person's blog is hardly an authoritative source but I'm sure it feeds your confirmation bias. Plus did you even read your citation? It doesn't support your argument at all. Obviously you are a fan of nuclear and nuclear is fine but it isn't going to replace fossil fuel stations because it has its own severe problems - some political, some economic, and some technical. Nuclear carries risks that too many people are uncomfortable with. Nuclear will (and should) be a part of the solution but the real heavy lifting to reduce our need for fossil fuels is almost certainly going to come from solar and wind plus some battery tech.
Wind power is only "green" if there is access to hydro for storage.
That's is quite simply false. Particularly when you compare it to fossil fuel fired power stations it typically replaces. And hydro isn't particular eco-friendly in a lot of cases.
Maybe batteries could do just as well as hydro, or perhaps even better, but it seems we simply can't build them fast enough.
Sure we can but we've really just gotten started on building the production capacity. It's going to take a minute to get there and it's growing very fast. Not as if we are building nuclear plants left and right either so I'm not sure what you think the viable alternative might be.
Installed capacity has meaning for hydro power, coal and nuclear. For solar and wind, it is like the relationship between the maximum speed on your car's speedometer vs what the roads and traffic allow.
Here is what all of the wind power in UK is generating in this live grid display:
https://www.gridwatch.templar....
If you look at the tiny graphs under the dials it displays wind power as a blue line in the second column. It peaked at about 5 GW wind production on Sunday Sept 2, and then was nearly zero Monday morning. The concept that the wind is always blowing somewhere is not true for a place as small as the U.K.
https://qz.com/1348969/europes...
Not being dependent on weather conditions my arse.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
And it cannot be throttled up or down to match need quickly.
I don't expect the two reactors at Hinkley C to be throttled at all, they'll run flat out 100% of their uptime since they'll only produce 15% of Britain's electricity demand at its lowest point (midsummer Sunday nighttime). There are a few other existing reactors providing a predictable 7GW or so but most of the on-demand generating capacity is met by fast-start combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) which can be brought on-line quickly to meet demand. Most of that 7GW of existing nuclear capacity is going away in the next ten to twenty years as the older AGRs are taken out of service -- there will be a single 1100MW PWR built in the 1990s left operating after the AGRs are shut down until Hinkley Point C comes on-line.
Having too much capacity is a totally different and much less serious problem than having too little (blackouts, rationing etc.) and weather-dependent renewables can't guarantee sufficiency to the same level that nuclear can.
A number of river-sited reactors have curtailed output recently because they have limits on how much they can raise the river water temperatures with their condenser loops. This is also true for coal-fired and even solar thermal plants which use river water for a cold-sink. It's possible to use land-based evaporative systems for the cold-sink condensers but that uses up water and costs more so it's not common except in desert conditions where solar thermal generating plants like Tonopah deplete the local aquifers for that purpose.
Britain has about 15GW or so of grid-connected wind generating capacity, including the new offshore wind farms being fellated in the press recently. Via an online monitor I've seen these grid wind turbines peak at 10GW at times (usually when storms are blowing through). I've also seen it produce only 50MW total for several hours at a time when a lull settles across most of the country. It averages about 3GW over a year but that's an average, it swings a lot and there's no certainty that it will produce lots of electricity when we need lots of electricity. Vast overcapacity of wind would help alleviate that risk. Several hundred GW of turbines would be a good start but that would cost a lot of money to build and maintain and replace after a couple of decades.
However, wind generating capacity does tend to be the greatest when we need lots of electricity. We tend to need the most power during the wet and windy winter months...when the wind bit of the wet and windy means wind generation is at or nearly at peak production.
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1) They make people nervous. Even though they rarely fail, when they do they have the capacity to do so catastrophically (and have so this is not hypothetical) and no reactor design we have has entirely mitigated this possibility. So politically they are unpopular even when they make technical sense.
There are molten salt designs that are pretty safe. In particular, they have tested that they survive a total loss of cooling. Which is rare, but exactly what happened at Fukushima. Unfortunately, Fukushima wasn't using molten salt. (The molten salt boils in the hottest places. Bubbles are much thinner than liquid, so there is less material in the active zone and the nuclear reaction stops. Salt pushed out of the active region is displaces into regions where the geometry and neutron-absorbing materials prevent further nuclear reactions.
The sad thing is, nobody has build a large-scale molten salt reactor for energy production.
2) They require ridiculous amounts of regulation and oversight to be safe which makes the economically challenging to operate profitable.
Sure, energy is not free. But fossil is really expensive if you can't emit CO2 - so expensive n
obody except researchers do that. Anyway, if nuclear is so burdened, leave it to governments.
3) We have no good solution for the waste they generate
Yes we have.
Old reactor designs produce waste that may need a million year of storage. Modern designs can burn all that waste, creating more energy per gram uranium/thorium used as a bonus. The only waste you get then, is fission fragments. They may require 800 years of storage, and there are plenty of buildings that old around. We know how to build storage that lasts a few thousand years. Be it deep caves or pyramids.
4) The liability requires government backed insurance guarantees and risk pools
Sure, this is the cost of nuclear. Crank up the price of electricity as needed, see if people still pay.
5) The fuel for them carries geopolitical problems (including WMD weapons proliferation in some cases)
A problem that is solveable. Inspection regimes, and the fact that thorium is much harder to use for bomb purposes.
6) The approval and construction process for them takes a very long time
Nuclear needs to be a part of the solution but nuclear has its own problems so it's simply not going to be viable to replace fossil fuels much beyond what it already has.
Nuclear may be slow - but that is not much of an argument. We'll simply live with expensive energy for some time. Either nuclear gets built, or some greener alternatives gets developed into usefullness.
How exactly does a 660MW plant power 600k homes ? Does each home only use 1.1KW ? seriously ?
AC re "generate that power in gas plants instead"
At a lower price saving people real money each utility bill....
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I understand (not really, it is sort of stupid actually, who really can imagine 20,000 football fields stuck together) but this is about England for Gods' sake, can't you speak in terms of soccer fields!!!! ?
"Wet and windy" tends to be in the spring ("March winds and April showers") and autumn here in the UK. We often get long lulls with little or no wind in the mid-winter when it's dark eighteen hours of the day. A quick check on the Gridwatch site's records for 30 days between mid-December 2017 and mid-January 2018 shows peak wind generation of about 9.7GW (at 2017-12-31 13:15:33) but there was a lull lasting about 30 hours when the wind contribution to the grid was less than 1GW (2018-01-11 through 2018-01-12). During that dip the lowest wind-generated output was about 280MW.
Hope and wishful thinking doesn't keep the lights on.
Hovering over countries (and US states) at random, I see that the UK is (at 9:45AM Eastern, US):
63% low carbon
40% renewable
Good for them! Uh... now I'm wondering what those numbers actually mean.
Since the percentages add to 103%, I assume they are measuring different things. Then, 63% of *what* is low carbon, and 40% of *what* is renewable?
Poring through the FAQ for explanation is not viewer friendly, they're not doing the public a favor. And for most cases, when the percentages add to *less than* 100% who would realize that they are measuring different things?
Or am I missing something?
Nice to have as a supplement, to coal, water, nuclear, but, wind/solar is just an ADDED resource, not a REPLACEMENT resource. You have to have some place to STORE the energy created by wind/solar, which is a finite amount of energy. If there is a PEAK demand, and you don't have the SUPPLY capacity, then you have to cut back. With coal/nuclear, you can spin up the generators, to GENERATE more energy on demand. I don't have a problem with wind/solar, but, they cannot be a REPLACEMENT for coal/nuclear.
Takes a 10kw generator for backup for our house, still can't power everything.
Turn off your cluster, then, or stop making carbon fiber. I was able to run a whole house including a deep well pump AND a shallow well jet pump on a 7kW generator.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even though Europe does have off shore Fresh water wind farms, the great lakes are still researching bird deaths. Ice build up on the lakes I can understand, not a lot of knowledge about that. But, bird deaths. Do these people not read or research already in place European Fresh Water wind farms. Or do they just like wasting money.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Have the wind farm operators any plans to fund the decommissioning of their offshore facility at end-of-life?
Since it won't be radioactive, their decommissioning estimates should actually be accurate, unlike every nuclear plant that was ever decommissioned.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I know nobody reads the story... But this is an old contract for a project going for a project opening now. Hinkley will open in 2025 or so...
"Walney Extension was among the first renewable projects to secure a so-called contract for difference (CFD) subsidy from the British government in 2014.
The contract guarantees it a minimum price for electricity of 150 pounds ($195) per megawatt hour (MWh) for 15 years.
Since this was awarded, the cost of offshore wind has fallen dramatically to a low of 57.50 pounds per MWh in the last auction held in 2017."
Fossil fuels make energy when its needed for a low price.
False statement. Fossil fuels are heavily subsidized to the tune of about $5 Trillion annually (that's 6% of global GDP) and that doesn't even include the costs of dealing with the pollution (including CO2) they are permitted to just dump in the atmosphere and elsewhere. Fossil fuels only seem cheap because we subsidize the crap out of them both directly and indirectly. Fully burdened they actually are more expensive than wind in a wide variety of use cases.
Not just when the wind is blowing within set limits.
Have you ever been off shore in the ocean? I'm guessing not because for all practical purposes the wind is ALWAYS blowing in the sorts of places they put a wind farm. There is some variability but it is far less than you are supposing.
Where are we at with these things being large-scale bird grinders or not?
Kriston
Does each home only use 1.1KW ? seriously ?
On average at a given time, yes. Actually much less.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
God knows but by the time wind and weather have wrecked them the original builders will be long gone and unaccountable to anyone.
And to where would they be gone?
Offshore wind farm power availability is about 30% of dataplate
Hint: don't build your wind plant at a place where you only get 30% nameplate.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Hope and wishful thinking doesn't keep the lights on.
But being interconnected with the rest of Europe does, and being interconnected with the largest synchronized grid of the planet does.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Wind turbines kill around 300,000 birds annually, house cats around 3,000,000,000. Clearly we need to be throwing cats into turbines!
In my area when we have our frequent wind storms it is not rare to have a commercial vesel of large size lose power and be driven onto our beaches. In one case the bow of an ocean liner came across the sand and was resting in the swimming pool of a condominium. Fixing that sort of thing is very expensive. Now, can these windmills take a hit from a large ship? How well do these turbines do when we have 180 mph. winds that gust even higher? How often would an event be expected based on local historic events and what cost would be involved to repair or replace the turbine?
We need a base load of power generation. Something cheap that will generate a continuous amount of power. Ignore (Shoot) all the Green Peace virtue signalers and nuclear would be perfect for this. We also need peak production, something that can be throttled up and down easily. Hydro is best for this but requires actual geography to have provided it. Coal and natural gas also work. Tide, wind and solar don't actually fit in this model. They don't make power when we need it and we still don't have a good way of storing it. Batteries aren't good enough yet and pump and storage maintenance costs are too high (even if your capital is free and the electricity cost goes negative).
Negative price - The UK government has guaranteed the operators they will pay a fixed price for the electricity produced by these windmills. That means that when the wind blows and no one wants the electricity the price of electricity will go negative. People will be paid to consume electricity. In Ontario, Ohio, Pennsylvanian and Michigan we did the same thing. Here the wind blows the most after everyone has gone to bed in January and February. This is also our lowest consumption time.
I've dealt with the bureaucracy in electrical grids in many countries. The stupidity is amazing but the UK is special, they have an extra layer of cronyism and arrogance that no other country has.
https://www.energy-uk.org.uk/customers/about-your-energy-bill/the-breakdown-of-an-energy-bill.html
The total of environmental and social obligation costs is 8%. The average UK electricity bill is about £600, so the total obligation is thus £48, plus VAT (5%) or £50.
The elements going into the social and environmental obligation payment are numerous, and outlined on the page. It's nowhere near £200, though.
From 2016 in the Telegraph (not really a supporter of this sort of thing):
"The cost of building offshore wind farms has fallen to a new low, with Sweden's Vattenfall winning contracts to build two projects in Danish waters for just over €60 (£51) per megawatt-hour (MWh)."
And before anyone mentions capacity factors that is MWh, not MW. MW does not include capacity factor, cost per MWh does.
Been running solar (3 KWh) for ten years. It is wonderful. I'm adding an additional 6 KWh next month. Of course, I'm in California, so I get sun 350 days per year.
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The homes themselves use less. But if you add in all the additional support services needed for those homes (power for street lighting, water pressure, service workers, etc), it ends up being about that high. It's even more if you include industrial power usage to produce the things people buy to put in their homes (food, clothing, your car, TV, computer, etc).
Nuclear is more expensive. It's that simple.
Then we should subsidize it until it's cheaper. If that works for other low CO2 energy sources then it should apply to nuclear as well.
Nuclear power also works at night, in high winds, in no winds, when it's raining, cold, hot... okay maybe it has to reduce power when it gets really hot. That's why we need a mix. Pick energy that's cheap, low CO2, and safe. The top three on that is onshore wind, hydro, and nuclear, not necessarily in that order. Then comes things like (also not in any particular order) geothermal, biomass fuels, off shore wind, and concentrated thermal solar. (Cite on CO2 emissions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
Solar PV is just a bad idea all around. Anyone that thinks that PV is cheap is only looking at the subsidized cost, the real cost is very high except when laid out flat on a field. Putting PV on rooftops might mean not losing any area of value but it can multiply the cost by five times. (cite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) Solar power isn't all that safe either, considering how many industrial accidents there are per real energy produced. Solar PV is also very resource intensive. (cite: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... )
If people believe that solar and wind can get cheaper if we will it so and throw enough money at the problem then we can do the same to make nuclear cheaper.
If nuclear power costs too much then lower the price. It's that simple.
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The main problem with wind is it can change output quite rapidly and traditional gas and coal stations can take a couple of hours to ramp up and down. The grid is a balancing act you need to produce enough to satisfy demand. Producing too much increases the frequency and too little decreases the frequency it's too little that can produce problems a sudden failure of a station can cause a cascade failure if it isn't reacted to fast enough and this can be less than a second. There are different ways to manage this. An easy one is freezer plants, you can drop power to these for up to a couple of hours without too much of a problem. Reducing demand is similar to increasing production. Smaller generators can ramp up quickly they tend to be pricey unlike a base load generator. There are also inter-connectors between countries there is one between wales and the republic of ireland and one one between northern ireland and scotland. Electricity can be flowing either way on these and power is traded on these continually.
Capacity payments seem like a strange thing but without them capacity would not be built, unfortunately there was a bit of a problem with the crash in 2008 capacity was being built and coming online but demand for electricity fell. This actually caused electricity prices to rise because less was being sold. Capacity payments are going down.
In ireland up to 65% of Wind Energy can be powering the grid thanks to small energy producers who can react quickly to balance the grid. Typically the grid supplies between 3000 to 5000 MW but it can go higher or lower. Without Peaking plants there just wouldn't be the supply available when its needed. Capacity payments ensure this peak supply is there when needed. Europe actually operates a single market for electricity. Electricity can be sent to other national grids as required. Brexit may bring some changes to how the interconnectors are operated currently there is a new one being built between Ireland and france which can handle around 4x the power that the 2 existing ones between ireland and the uk can handle.
I guess the hardest thing for most people to understand is why pay for electricity not to be produced? It's the variation in demand currently maybe 3000 MW is being used in ireland without over capacity you wouldn't have the 5000MW needed in the day. Wind Power mainly replaces peaking plant which is expensive to run.
If your interested
http://smartgriddashboard.eirg... gives a pretty good breakdown of the power generation in Ireland. For the Grid Northern Ireland and the Republic act as one.
http://ireland2050.ie/ pretty much gives a great background in Energy generation.
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But you have to build windmills to maintain the industry.
You mean like how we have to keep building nuclear power to maintain the industry?
We were building nuclear power around the world like mad 40 or 50 years ago and then... we stopped. People have become fearful of nuclear power because it's a mystery to them. We have accidents like at Fukushima because the people that know how they work retired, have gone senile, or died. When we need experts to fix what's broken we are finding that the best people for the job are over 80 years old or under a headstone.
I keep hearing on how decommissioning costs for nuclear power keep rising. Well, that's what happens when there is a lack of expertise and infrastructure. Then there's the complaints on having no place to put the waste. That's what happens when funding for facilities to process and dispose of this waste gets held up in congressional "debate" for THIRTY YEARS ! This isn't a problem that just appeared, our grandparents were talking about this. A quick Wikipedia search will show that the US federal government has been looking at Yucca Mountain as a potential disposal site since 1957, and approved it as a site in 1987. The government should have been able to start packing this hole in the ground with waste in 1998.
Nuclear power is expensive now because we killed the industry 40 years ago. We can make it cheaper if we only spend the money to build the infrastructure, just like we did with wind and solar. The longer we wait the more expertise in this field is lost. Claiming that we will never need this expertise again is simply false. All those nuclear power plants in operation now will have to be shut down and torn apart at some point, because nothing lasts forever. We'll need a place to dispose of the waste. People will have to become experts in this. We can train these people now or we can have them learn on the job, where mistakes can cost lives.
Because we stopped maintaining this nuclear power industry there's a shortage of medical isotopes for treatment and diagnostics. NASA is running short of their supply of reliable radiothermal generators for exploration. Missions failed because they tried to rely on solar power instead. If they had some strontium or plutonium to keep the electronics warm and powered up then we'd know more about the solar system now.
Nope, we can't have "nu-ku-lar" because... reasons. Since we lost all we learned from previous mistakes we will just have to repeat those same mistakes.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Now consider the 45% capacity factor for the wind.
At any given time the wind turbines might deliver 0% or 100%, ditto the gas turbines, although it that tends to be demand-led unless broken. The latter is why most plants have three or more gas turbines as the grid hookup won't generate revenue if you are waiting for a part for your single gas turbine, but wind farm failure is only typically a small fraction of the total. However, gas turbine capacity, if all power is demanded, is around 90% of nameplate. It's a limitation of the use of nameplate. If you simply multiplied the nameplate by the capacity factor and quoted things as 'typical' and 'up to' for the current nameplate, it might make comparison easier. But the peak here is still greater than any gas turbine, and even the 'typical' value greater than most.
What you really need to look at is a combination of cost per MWh, and whether it is either dispatchable, or its availability matches demand, not purely nameplate MW, and then also the emission profile. It's not simple, as it depends on your overall mix of energy resources, potentially covering intermittency issues. You could argue, that to cover this, then you might look at the overall cost of wind turbine plus gas turbine pairings (or other systems), but that's not really the way a large grid with multiple resources will operate.
Ferrybridge has been converting to gas for a while, unit by unit.
Oh, it's worse than that. It's quite possible that this wind farm will end up producing as much CO2 as if they just burned natural gas in a combined cycle plant.
Your link actually says:
Analysis by Larsen and Rez shows that we would do better in terms of carbon emissions if instead of installing low capacity factor wind or solar systems and backing them with natural gas, we simply used a combined cycle natural gas plant.
which is something slightly different.
The abstract is:
The capacity factor of wind farms in different regions of the United States has been calculated from hourly wind data and the power curves of the wind turbines. In places with constant high winds like the Texas panhandle, capacity factors of 40% are possible. However the capacity factors in less favorable locations in Illinois or New York are below 20%. Reliable capacity factor estimates are important since displacing efficient combined cycle gas turbines from baseload generation by intermittent wind power could lead to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions. Before a site is considered capacity factors should be calculated from the power curve of the proposed wind turbine and measured wind data throughout the year, preferably at hub height.
So, noting that it mentions low capacity factor wind, the paper is presumably suggesting ones that are sited such they have a capacity factor of 20% are not very economically viable, but in the case of the TFA, we are talking 45% capacity, so the above criticism linked from the blog may not be relevant.
working backwards, the average UK electricty bill is about £600, and it;s about £0.12/kWh, so that's 600/0.12 = 5000kWh. 5000/(365*24) is 0.6kW average. Given that people tend to not use that much when asleep, apart from the fridge and freezer, and not that much when at work, then yes 1.1kW is about right on average. Peak is another matter, but not everyone runs the kettle for tea at the same time, and less so given people don't tend to watch TV in the same way and so don't all rush to run the kettle in the ad break of Coronation Street.
Nuclear is more expensive. It's that simple.
Then we should subsidize it until it's cheaper.
Nuclear has gotten subsidies for more than 60 years.It always ever got more expensive. There is a word for doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
If that works for other low CO2 energy sources then it should apply to nuclear as well.
No. Why?
Nuclear power also works at night, in high winds, in no winds, when it's raining, cold, hot... okay maybe it has to reduce power when it gets really hot.
Great. But the problem is that you basically always have to have it running to not make the economics worse.... This means it is not too useful to have nuclear in a modern grid.
That's why we need a mix.
Yes, but a mix without nuclear as nuclear is simply too expensive.
Pick energy that's cheap, low CO2, and safe. The top three on that is onshore wind, hydro, and nuclear, not necessarily in that order.
No nuclear is not cheap. You said yourself we should just subsidize it until its cheap. So you are even contradicting yourself. If it were actually cheap, people would roll out nuclear and there would be no nuclear fanboys whining on slashdot on how we should have nuclear.
Solar PV is just a bad idea all around.
No, it is a great idea to give it a chance as it is getting cheaper and cheaper. In contrast to nuclear which always got more expensive in the past.
If nuclear power costs too much then lower the price. It's that simple.
If it were simple. Nuclear would be cheap by now. It is a very old technology which still isn't cheap. I think this makes it very obvious that it is not simply.
You are comparing a price from 2014 for a plant which opened now to a plant opening (maybe) in 2025 or so. Guaranteed prices for new contracts for offshort wind are 60 £/MWh as of last year.
>> Nuclear power is expensive now because we killed the industry 40 years ago.
Nuclear is expensive because the endless government and military subsidies stopped 40 Years ago.
And that was a good decision.
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My son manages installation contracts for these things. One worthy noted the subsidy increased the farther offshore the turbine was. He went for the longest distance and went to Siemens to get them built. The sales staff no being dummies went to the engineers and ask if putting units that far out was possible. After some calculations they said sure. The sale people then ask when could they be delivered. Shocked the engineers replied ,"Do you know how much that is going to cost!"
My understanding (which is limited to things I've read) of the nuclear cost issues stemmed from a few factors: NIMBYism lawsuits delaying work/political interference, limited manufacturing of specific reactor designs so benefits of scale could never take effect (most operating reactors are somewhat different designs), and retroactive regulatory compliance for plants under construction (not that I'm apposed to regulatory compliance but it did require a lot of reconstruction).
Surely a standardized reactor design that can be built quickly is simple in comparison to what was historically done. Would all that still be cheaper than alternatives? That I really don't know.
Then there's the ten years or more before you get a single watt out of it. Slapping up wind farms or solar is near instantaneous by comparison.
While lawsuits and bureaucracy certainly contributed to that, it is by no means the only factor. I would say it also has a lot to do with the size and the complexity of the projects. It is like huge software projects almost always have cost overruns. Surely, standardized software design methodology would prevent this too, right? In practice it is never easy and the same is true for nuclear. On paper, it all looks good and simple, but it practice it quickly gets really complicated.