July 2025: Wind not doing very well

But it is. The power output from a tidal station is roughly sinusoidal, with variations with the phase of the moon.

Now take two stations where the tides are 90 degrees out of phase, and you have continuous power.

What you don't have is enough suitable locations to power the grid. And if you care about the ecology, almost no suitable locations.

Andy

That's why RR are doing it differently

And no. Intermittency is nothing to do with nuclear power

No, You don't. The chances that they will produce identical power is nil And you still have to connect them by a dirty great cable

Tidal barrage power is not sinusoidal, and even if it were, two perfectly balanced sinusoidal curves don't produce constant power.

I would have though that was covered in electronics, rectifiers and whatnot. You'd need a smoothing energy store.

He didn't say constant he said continuous.

Of course.

A better solution is the one I calculated to run the wole country off. For a winter

Simply pump Loch Ness dry when the sun shines and the wind blows, and let it fill up again when it doesn't, tapping the energy flow on the way.

Loch Ness is a s*it hole anyway. No one would miss it.

Sadly it would be a far greater financial risk than 100 nuclear power stations that would do just as well at one tenth the cost

Renewables and nuclear energy complement each other in a low-carbon electricity system due to their intermittency. Wind and solar power are intermittent, while nuclear power provides baseload electricity that can run continuously at high capacity factors.

No. Renewables make the job of dealing with variable demand infinitely harder for baseload generators.

Wind and solar power are

That's true, but it doesn't mean they complement each other

From the perspective of a base load generator, renewables just increase the variability of demand they have to satisfy.

They are not available at short notice to cover variable demand, like gas and hydro They are useless for baseload, as they cannot be relied upon. They are useless for peaking demand, as they cannot be relied upon

In fact they are completely useless on the grid altogether. They dont solve problems: they create them.

No. Nuclear provides a continuous baseload, but it isn't good at changing power output to meet demand. Once you have a nuclear reactor, there is no economic reason to turn it off. So no economic benefit in turning it off when the sun shines or the wind blows.

To balance wind and solar intermittency, you need a dispatchable alternative, currently we use gas power stations. It is actually useful to have a cheap dispatchable alternative for nuclear too, to balance variation in demand.

So nuclear and wind/solar don't complement each other.

Some of the new nuclear power stations are designed to have a short term dispatchable capability to match variation in daily demand, see Terrapower's natriuum reactor. However, that can only balance short term variation (daily), not dunkelflaute, or winter.

If you don't understand this by now, I'm not sure why you participate in these threads?

Although it’s not clear, you seem to be saying that when it comes to the problem of renewables’ intermittency, nuclear can provide reliable generation.

If that’s so, then renewables could be junked and we could have reliable generation from nuclear.

Yes.

Were it not for the cost and policy environment, I might agree.

If nothing else, nuclear uses less concrete…

However, I suspect you need to do some research:

Strike prices:

Hinkley C: £92.50/MWh

Wind Generation:

Fixed Offshore: £113/MWh

Floating Offshore: £271/MWh

Onshore: £92/MWh

So, what costs are you talking about?

Well that's why we are working hard to tackle the policy environment and bring the cost down. It is, so to speak, easier to change a law made by the EU, than one made by God...

Includes all backup and inertaiul storage and grid connections

Ex of battery, gas backup and grid connection. Or tax breaks, green subsidies etc etc.

I was going to bring in those factors later in the discussion, such as the cost of gas generation to back up the loss from the wind farms, the payments when the wind doesn’t blow, the payments when the wind blows too much, the subsidies, the costs of an energy transport grid over the former energy balancing grid, etc etc, but patchmoney might as well address them now.

Who does pay for the connections for an offshore wind farm? At those prices, the question surely is: can we afford them?

That is the national grid, who charge the operators more, so it gets added to your bill.

In the end what you pay for renewable electricity bears absolutely no resemblance to what they charge the operators for it.

And of course higher grid costs makes ALL electricity more expensive.

That would have been extraordinarily crafty of you Spike, well done.

I understand why you 'gross up' the cost figures. But it really isn't that simple. If for no other reason, the infrastructure to deal with intermittency is already in place. I do agree that some of the cost should be accounted for, though - just not sure how much.

I'd assume such costs are factored in.

It's as much, IIUC, to do with private finance. Nuclear is such an enormous

It isn't . Not really. Not with the proposed level of renewables. As Spain discovered

Lol! if the true cost were made public no government would be able to subsidise renewables ever again and not a single windmill or solar panel would be installed ever again either...

The biggest danger renewable energy faces is the truth.