Totting up the last figures from EDF and Magnox, nets me 7.877 GW but the grid is showing 8,34GW, which ties in with the fact that one Reactor at Dungeness B was due to come back into serviuce after site improvements.
Refuelling the other is due to bring it onstream tomorrow..we might see a heady 9GW on grid by then.
I think that brings the round of refuelliings and maintenances complete until the autumn..
Notably there is no biomass stuff online at the moment.
I suppose it can't make money even with subsidies.
All the current 'renewables' put together are barely scraping a gigawatt.
Whereas we are importing 2GW of french nukey power, and maybe more via the dutch interconnect.
Very interesting to hear Dorothy Thompson (from Drax) explaining why biomass was going to make them money eventually on the excellent "Bottom Line" programme
Another Radio 4 program was talking about power across Europe. French have cheapest power, about half the price of ours, but current french politics is to reduce nuclear from 75% to 50% of the mix, with expected price rises and reduction of exports. Germany is the most expensive (I know from german colleagues that it's doubled in price since turning off their nucs). 50% of the electricity bill is tax, mostly to subsidise unviable renewables. Stangely, german households don't complain, but german industry is moving energy intensive factories out of the country.
We seem to pay 11% for "enviromental" levies, at least according to the breakdown on one of my recent bills. 50% is taking the piss.
Presumably quietly to themselves rather than loudly to their government. But I guess the chance of getting Merkle to switch the nukes back on is far less than a snowballs chance in hell.
They're only converting half their Selby plant to biomass, instead of fully converting it and building three more, plus centrica aren't building two planned woodburners either.
8.2GW today, down to 7.5GW by the 20th, maybe up to 9GW by month end
You might think that but it'd be wrong. Lots more money to be made by generating in winter rather than in summer.
There is today, more than 800MW
It depends what you mean by subsidies
Because during summer lots of overhead line, switchgear and transformer maintenance takes place, as well as sometime extremely long periods of overhaul of generation of many types.
There are import / export limits on the grid at transmission system boundaries and at the moment it's clearly cheaper to import almost 100% of the time from France and the Netherlands than pay use of system charges to fetch it from elsewhere in the UK. The loss of Didcot is already being felt. The UK needs a few nukes in London.
Ignoring interconnector capacity there was plenty of surplus Tuesday and for the next few weeks with reducing demand as industry runs down for a summer break.
40GW peak demand Tuesday, availability of around 49GW of Coal, CCGT, and nuclear. The interconnectors were still importing even with a minimum system price of 32 GBP/MWh at 04:30, coinciding with 26GW of system demand.
So yes, it must be cheaper otherwise you'd not see the near continuous interconnector flows FR + NED to the UK, the only dips being to satisfy EU demand peaks. (Not even a hint of export from the UK today) Clearly it's dependent on the cost of energy in mainland Europe and the auction price of the surplus capacity on the FR + NED links, but import from the FR + NED interconnectors is into almost the cheapest area of the UK Grid System., nearest to the highest demand.
The National Grid use of system charges are detailed here for both generation and demand.
formatting link
Fundamentally:
Generation is cheap to connect in London and the South East and increases to the North and West and is highest in Northern Scotland,
Demand, at its current levels, is cheap to fulfil in the extreme North of Scotland and increases towards the South East
So locate a generator alongside the demand and use of system charges are minimised, locate generation geographically / electrically away from the demand and the use of system charges increases.
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