Today as a more than usually stiff breeze covers the British isles, and wind power creeps up to 10% of demand, you can cry in your beer over the fact that today will cost you, the electricity consumer, a minimum of £3.6 million quid you wouldn't otherwise have had to pay.
For a populaton of c 70 million, thats 5p each you have dropped into the coffers of the troughers, or in terms of households about 15p
The Natural Philosopher scribbled...
You're so right. Just think, we could have used that money to buy fuel and arms for the RAF so they could fight another war.
BTW my food bill probably went up by £1 this week. Different trough and no gain for me.
Or we could have used it to improve paediatric care in the NHS.
Bill
with electricity prices rising to supermarkets, of course prices will go up.
2/3rd of the cost of green idiocy gets 'lost' in general inflation.
or build new nukes that actually work...
What'd the other 90% cost?
ah yes, this explains why the Mafia got involved in it early on in Italy then. Brian
You just can't, or more likely just won't, hoist it on board, will you?
According to the previously linked BBC Report in March 2013:
"Today, electricity sells on the wholesale market for about £45 per megawatt-hour (Mw). But anything under £90 a Mw would see Hinkley lose money."
So currently wholesale is half of the MINIMUM of what new nuclear would cost.
Today Gridwatch shows nuclear to be at 7.73GW.
So if that were to be generated by new nuclear build at the minimum likely price of £95/Mw or 9.5p/unit (EDF have to make a profit, and it makes the maths easier) that's £50/Mw or 5p/unit extra to the current price, so that's: 7.73 * 1,000 * 24 * 50 = £9,276,000
So that's 13p/pers>
half the price.
I'd fully agree with your costings IF wind was compelled to deliver an exactly defined level of generation at an exactly defined time, in say 2030. The level of generation has to be achieved under conditions of a stationary blocking high.
Nukes at £95 per MWh in are a bargain. Give me 30GW asap, and while we are at it another 30GW of coal. In parallel hack every wind turbine down and tell the FIT parasites to f*ck off.
What relevance has wind got to the exorbitant cost of nuclear energy?
Not exactly compared with the cost of carbon-based generation - the documents linked by Nightjar in a recent thread strongly suggest that once you've taken into account the recent increases in the cost of Hinkley C, even including either a carbon tax or carbon capture, carbon-based generation will be cheaper, and we have the fuels for it, and haven't for nuclear fission.
We haven't got the fuel for it. With current expected world supplies, say 10 years from when we've completed the first new plant, and the UK's current stockpiles of 392GWyr, you can be certain only of 30GW for 23 years or 8GW to last the full proposed plant lifetime of 60 years. Either way, you'll be incurring a great deal of extra expense
- over and above the latest huge increases in the cost of building the plant as evidenced by Hinkley C - recycling current stockpiles of waste fuel, depleted uranium, etc.
That would certainly be doable.
Nuclear, if it does actually go ahead as currently envisaged by HMG, will be a FIT parasite also, about 2.5 times than wind is currently.
Having answered your points, I'm going to take a little time out for some thinking out loud ...
The problem with wind is, as every body here knows, its variability.
However, demand is variable too. For years the operators of the NG have been doing a merry dance trying to meet varying demand by switching on & off constant supplies, often at ridiculously short notice - how in the name of human intelligence can it be sensible to have the grid overloading and have to power up extra capacity just because there's a commercial break in a popular TV program, or because one has just ended?
What is needed is more storage, then existing problems of meeting variable demand would be somewhat relieved, and the variable contribution of wind would be much more easily and usefully absorbed into the system. The question is how?
We've already done a great deal with hydro - already there are some places in Scotland where the same bit of water will go through as many as 4 hydro stations on its way to the sea. However, there are still one or two pumped storage schemes that were once mooted, but never got built, or at least the pumped storage part wasn't. Certainly we should build those asap, but this won't be enough on its own, and anyway doesn't alleviate any of the problems caused by variable demand.
So we have to be prepared to think rather more blue sky ...
Mackay suggests electrifying car travel, and using the charging of the vehicles to buffer variable supply and demand. But this would increase the demand for electricity overall, and thereby increase some already existing important difficulties, such as can the existing grid cope with the increased flows? In fact, we are already currently exacerbating such problems by electrifying all the railways. Why not at least put battery banks in the locos, or perhaps by the tracks (saves carting their weight around)? If that works, we could consider extending it to cover increasing amounts of road transport as well.
For the price of one Hinkley C, we could easily afford to put batteries and an invertor into every home.
Could we create pumped sea-water storage reservoirs and use wind-power to fill them?
I don't know how many of these and other possible ideas would work, but I am certain of one thing: If fusion cannot deliver, the future will of necessity be very, very different from the past, and therefore it's no good THINKING as in the past. We're probably going to have to wring every last joule from renewable sources that we can, and the sooner we get used to that idea and stop mindlessly bitching about it in Pavlovian parrot-fashion, the better. We're probably going to have to learn to capture carbon, and again, the sooner we start to learn how, the better. If we decide we really do need nuclear, HMG's existing proposals will lead to a very quick and costly dead-end, so we'd just as surely need to be thinking differently about nuclear power as well, and the sooner we accept that, the better. And the sooner a certain bigot here stops posting endless lies and disinformation on all these matters, the better.
I see your demetia is troubling you. We have established they are expensive white elephants.
He's too thick to understand stuff like that. In his dotage I suspect.
Yes, this is the part that's too hard for J and harry to understand. As I type, wind is producing just over 2GW. On Monday, it was under 1GW, at times *well* under. Since the windies promise us what you've asked for above, a constant level of generation, we're obviously due a refund e.g. for July, when you were lucky to get 0.1GW the whole month.
I'm still waiting for JJ and harry to indicate where and to whom the country (i.e. the rest of us) should apply for a refund, but curiously they seem unable to do so.
We haven't.
>
Suggest you read what I actually have been posting on this subject, not what you choose to think I have been posting.
Well, if we're going to play silly buggers, I'm still waiting for you, and others like you, to indicate where and to whom the country (i.e. the rest of us) should apply for a refund of all the historical subsidies that nuclear power has had and yet still expects us to pick up the tab for looking after its waste, but curiously you seem unable to do so.
The spivs in the city manipulating spot market price costs us far more :(
Have a listen to R4's Whinge at One - you will love it!
Manufacturers of wind turbines have been derating 800kW capable units to
500kW to harvest the income generated by FIT rules optimally. That is by deliberately obtaining less electricity from each one installed.Law of unintended consequences and a particularly daft set of rules.
Have you -any- ideas on how large these storage places would need to be at all?..
Even if we could get the wind to fulfil our needs, existing ones let alone with cars being electrically powered to add to demand..
And idea just how many and the amount of land they would need?.
Also just how long would they need to last to cope with blocking highs across the UK?. Those days of fairly even air pressure over the UK land mass..
You've already been told, many times, that this is cobblers.
Oh, you've noticed. Clever boy.
What else are the operators supposed to do? Tell a random chunk of the population to f*ck off?
The number of stations the water goes through is not relevant in any way at all. The only thing that counts is the altitude loss of the water from where it's been stored down to the generator.
Which ones were these then?
Which could store how much? And where are people going to put them? Most people won't have the room.
You do come up with some drivel, don't you? Got a list of viable locations for these reservoirs? No, I though not. And remember, you need
*height* to make these things work. Not at all the same as building a reservoir for drinking water.What ideas? You haven't come up with any yet. And no, you don't know, do you? You're just an incompetent blatherer coming up with bumper-sticker notions.
And suppose we can't? Or can't in any cost and energy effective way? Then what? Got a plan B?
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