1.4GW !

Just because something *must* be done doesn't mean it *will* be done. I don't know what will happen. But I think that the chance that what *should* be done (lots of SMRs would be a useful way forward) will be done, is low.

Typical cat beller.

I know that because I

ROFLMAO!

and the occasional book and journal. It's always

There are those that think that [aid 'experts' and 'authorities' have the right solutions, and there are those that think....

Back in the early noughties I assumed that the inevitability of nuclear power would lead to a flood of reactors by 2020.

Bu the incompetence and stupidity of government and the greed and corruption of renewable companies has brought the West to its knees.

But it is, like the Americans, case of only doing the right thing after every other profitable dead end has been mined out for public money. Europe and the USA are all facing populist revolts against the technocrats and the bureaucrats. They have failed to look after the people. Well tough s*it baby, lets hope it spreads to Russia

We are told maintaining the wind farms is going to create thousands (perhaps 100,000s) high paid, high skill jobs. This labour force and its support structure is not going to come cheap.

The green lobby cannot claim in one breath that renewables are going to be cheap and in another its going to provide masses of high paid jobs.

ALL TOGETHER NOW…OH YES THEY CAN!

They have been saying for decades that renewable energy is cheap…it’s just that we’ve never seen it, and nobody in the media ever challenges that risible claim.

It's likely a homespun guesstimate - and I'd doubt they'll share.

Probably best to be a little bit questioning:

Its the usual labour con trick of making job creation the same as wealth creation. In fact windfarms destroy wealth

In reality a few people will get very rich indeed.

The rest of us will pay three times more for leccy.

Miliband is f****ng clueless

They get the factors right, but don't do the full calculations

To get the true cost of solar power you have to take the cost of the farms, their expected lifetime, their expected capacity factor, the normal interest rate on capital, their maintenance costs and the cost of providing backup, and grid augmentation . And disregard any green subsidies or carbon credits.

It's a very complicated set of calculations.

Nearly every 'solar is cheap' ignores at least two vital factors. Many just take capital cost lifetime and capacity factors that are modelled, not real. And use 'green' interest rates and subtract the subsidies.

The real crunch is what you electricity bill ends up as.

I suspect, if you "follow the money" you will find it's Big Oil that has craftily bigged up renewables to inflate the value of their product. They hate nuclear even more than Greenies. And always have.

The "Green Lobby" simply doesn't have enough cash to capture governments. Whereas the oil companies have been doing it for over a century.

Dont you believe it.

Renewable UK, is a paid NGO funded by renewable companies to lie about renewables so that the renewable companies cant get taken to court for fraud.

Miliband includes FOE, GreenPeace, Renewable UK all as advisors to his policies. Who funds THEM?

It is I agree in big oils interests to support renewables as they realise that they not only cant work without gas backup, but the amount of gas used is barely altered at all, by the addition of intermittent renewables forcing gas out of baseload operation and into stop-start

Nuclear of course is the real competitor, which is why everyone is against it.

Doesn't the graph on that page show there shouldn't have been a doubling of consumer energy prices due to the Ukraine war?

All roads lead to Rome then ? That we can fiercely agree on.

Really, almost 100 years into the game, it should be trivial to rock up somewhere with a lego fission reactor and just built the turbines needed to make electricity. It's a cookie cutter operation.

I wonder what the economic and diplomatic effects of being 100% self sufficient in electricity (which ultimately can be used to make any sort of energy carrier) would be for the UK ? And moreover why it's never been seriously proposed ?

What happened to that 300 years of coal we were supposed to be built on ?

It's not cost to consumer, it's cost of generation - and I think it's a general US oriented analysis. You can read the report here:

A lot of that is in the linked document - but it is I think US based.

I bet. I'm just back from west Cumbria, and got chatting to a few people - all worked for Sellafield, along with 11,000 others. Plus another 40,000 indirectly. And that's just to process waste - nothing generated for over 20 years. I'm sure that cost is built into your figures somewhere ;-)

Well that's a very poor analysis. Even my home PV appraisal included a sinking fund, to cover the life of the components and maintenance. And capacity. There were no subsidies. I think they have to do all that to get MCS certification.

It'll be interesting to see Labour's figures . . .

Of course. Hence the excitement building as we wait for your calculations . . .

That's what Rolls Royce is trying to do.

Too many vested interests in oil gas windmills and so on., The problem is the nuclear industry is relatively honest and doesn't pay the huge bribes

We burnt it in about 100 years instead. At least to the point that its now cheaper to ship it in from the USA where its mined open cast in huge quantities

Cost of generation is meaningless if you cant get it to tehe consumer on time when its needed.

Anothert green lie...

Well there is another wikipedia page that directly contradicts that graph. Showin UK solar to be several rimes more expensive than nuclear. largely due to the lack of sunlight

As we al know, where big money is concerned, paid trolls rewrite wiki pages.

Yes. Wastereprocessing and decommissioning is built into all new nuclear costs

Yawn.

Even if I did them, you still wouldn't believe them.

You only need to store solar long enough to "make it dispatch-able". A solar plant with a battery bank, it could make power which could be delivered at 6PM. The input to the grid can be over a longer period of time. The peak power level feeding into the grid is "shaved off". Between 10AM and 2PM, the battery is charging at a fast rate (because the local grid could not handle that much current all at once).

Each day takes care of itself. If it's a cloudy day, the solar plant produces relatively little. Maybe the battery bank can save up some wind output from just up the coast, and dispatch that at 6PM. While a battery bank could be built on the same site as a solar plant, it's an independent entity, and can pay for itself by "keeping busy" even on cloudy days. You want it positioned in the grid, any place there is too much non-dispatch-able power that needs temporary storage to "smooth it out".

"Planning for winter", is an entirely different time scale. No storage method is really economical and suited to such time scales. For example, say I had a magic way of turning all the electricity in the sunny summer, into Hydrogen which I "dispatched" in winter. It would take a hell of a large field of liquid hydrogen tanks, and the cost and efficiency would be prohibitive. Whereas if I use a simpler battery, and use the power at 6PM, I don't need quite as large a battery.

The person who signed off on the solar plants, it might have been a better idea to read all the reports on his desk first, then decide which thing on the grid needs to be fixed first. A solar plant does not lower prices for families. However, a battery bank to squeeze the fat out of spot pricing arbitrage, that can pay for itself rather quickly. As the Australians learned while using their new battery bank. (We also learned a lesson here about spot pricing -- pricing so high, it DID raise the monthly bill. It's one of the things you need to "fix" on a grid.)

Any time your grid shows "negative pricing" offered to consumers, that means something is "very very wrong", OK ? I would be more than a little concerned, as a grid planner, if someone told me we were paying suppliers, to throw away power.

Many things need to be fixed. A solar farm is like "gravy for a meal". If there is no meal on your plate, why pour a liter of gravy into an empty plate ? You start with the fundamentals first. You need the meat and the potatoes in the plate first. The non-glam stuff that makes the grid work. Then you can celebrate with a fine vintage gravy, later.

Paul

And what battery bank would that be, and what would it cost, and what even if it existed, would it do to the levelised cost of solar power?

Stop cat-belling and build it yourself to see why it aint gonna happen