OT: CfD's

Last week, TNP stated that existing wind CfDs had a clause whereby the electricity supplier could opt out of the fixed price agreed and instead receive a price determine by a "reference rate", by paying a pre-agreed premium. Reading between the lines of standard BBC reporter scientific ignorance, I would guess the "reference rate" is based on the gas price.

In effect, this is the Government giving the electricity suppliers a financial instrument referred to as a deferred premium put option.

So, the government were offering the electricity companies insurance that the electricity wholesale price wouldn't drop below a fixed rate, while at the same time taking out no insurance to cap the amount paid for electricity. It is a typical managerial/governmental problem that managers often tend to avoid paying insurance to boost their apparent performance.

It is worth noting that the strike+premium of this option is not the same as the strike of a fixed forward rate without opt out. I could explain how to compare the two if anyone were interested.

Only since 2017. Many older installations are on ROCs.

Theo

Some are, and some are not and of those that are, they may not stay there if market prices make it more profitable to break the contract.

I think some (newer schemes) are on cfds, there were some schemes trying to get finished without having to use them?

Well, one of the main issues these days seems to be the way that different ways of generating energy are not calculated from inception to end of life. If you use that criteria, then very little would be 'green' so to speak. A lot of people say Nuclear is fine, as they hope by the time you have to decommission them more clean and save ways will be out there to store the radioactive waste, such as bugs that digest the material which makes it easier to bury etc.

Brian

I had a headache just reading it. The basic thing is that no matter how you moneterise the supply from different sources, you are in effect just hiding the truth in the end, and as we all know the truth, how can you insure against it?

If folk would stop looking at the cost and concentrate on the impact to the planet it might be more helpful. Brian

Disposing of nuclear waste safely is trivially easy compared to reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.

Considering that there's 4 billion tonnes of radioactive uranium in the ocean, a few hundred of concrete encased waste would not materially affect anything

You seem to be confusing apples and oranges.

Why do you consider Uranium with a half life of 4.47 billion years to be radioactive? While true nuclear waste has matter that will be decaying at a faster rate and so correctly considered dangerous for generations.

Your scientific and engineering skills are poor, more like those of an art student.

The question is that if such concrete waste were just dumped somewhere suitable, and geological processes allowed it to leach into the environment after a few thousand years, an easy goal to achieve, what difference would it make compared to natural radiation?

I suspect if we are talking of thousands of years to leach into the water supply, then by that time much of the radiation would have subsided. I'm sure there are articles on the levels after a specific time.

Either way Uranium is pretty inert, otherwise there wouldn't be any left in the Earth's crust.

Nukes are and dont produce CO2 either.

No, they realise that there is no point in decommissioning them, just design them to be filled with concrete when they have passed their useby date and leave them to radioactively decay safely.

No point in storing used fuel rods, reprocess them into new fuel when it makes economic sense to do that.

Brian Gaff snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote

Use nukes.

And the best way to do that is nukes.

How do you work that out ? Its an atom, stupid, not a chemical.

How do you propose to grind up the few tonnes hundred of concrete encased waste into microscopic particles, so you can then - somehow - disperse it evenly throughout the whole volume of the ocean? Otherwise, you see, your comparison is of complete irrelevance to the issue at hand.

#Paul