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I agree - is £92.50/mWh really that bad in context? Wind power strike prices are high also including subsidy. But comparing the mWh cost of wind power which is

I agree - is £92.50/mWh really that bad in context? Wind power strike prices are high also including subsidy. But comparing the mWh cost of wind power which is spectacularly variable Vs the cost of nuclear which is incredibly reliable seems dishonest to me. As more and more variable renewable energy comes on stream the premium value of reliable energy sources will surely increase over time. Fair enough there is battery storage + wind, but the costs of that are something like £1000/mWh+ now - hardly comparable.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Solar battery backed is under $100/MWh (wind even cheaper), and those costs will decline rapidly as battery manufacturing scales up. Nuclear will never get cheaper, not to mention the rapidly increasing decommissioning costs everyone is keeping off the books. Batteries are mostly non toxic and easily recycled.
- acidburnNSA 9y ago
  A backup battery for the 10-day wind lull from Dec 5th to Dec 15th in the Pacific Northwest would cost $90B and be a football field 100 stories high. Then it'd have to be replaced every 20 years. The footprint of something like that from a land, mining, and carbon standpoint is not trivial.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Legitimate question: How many electric cars would it be sitting on streets and in garages? https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.jpg
    - acidburnNSA 9y ago
      The 4 GWe wind farms have an average capacity factor of 35% so over ten days that's 336 GWh or 4.8 million Teslas, and that's just for the fraction of electric generation that's wind in the PNW. Scale that up to full electricity and then full energy and you're looking at a pretty serious challenge. Batteries are generally not what people consider for grid-scale power. The 100% renewable Stanford superstar, Jacobsen (who's suing his scientific critics), doesn't even use batteries in his scenarios (he uses pumped hydro and hydrogen instead).
  - hanbura 9y ago
    Maybe today, but with demand (and thus potential profit) for grid-scale storage increasing we see a lot of promisimg research in that area. Li-Ion is engineered for completely different tradeoffs, so there's massive room for improvement.
  - isostatic 9y ago
    Or would be 100 football fields 1 story high, or about 1/6th the area of a 1GW nuclear plant.
    - acidburnNSA 9y ago
      That doesn't sound quite right. Nuclear is very energy dense and has very low footprints in terms of land, fuel, mining, pollution, waste, and everything else except capital cost. I hope we can figure out how to build them cheaper. Acres per Megawatt Produced for different energy sources [1]: Coal 12.21 Natural Gas 12.41 Nuclear 12.71 Solar 43.50 Wind 70.64 Hydro 315.22 [1] https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf
      - isostatic 9y ago
        1GW of nuclear power is 1.3 SQ miles (1) or 832 acres. 100 football fields (required area for storage) is 130 acres [2] 130/832 is 1 in 6.4 Bird this is the storage that OP came out with his "100 story high" tale, not the generation (which you'd put off shore, perhaps beyond the horizon) [1] https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Papers/Land_Use_Carbon_Free_Technologies.pdf?ext=.pdf https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Pa... [2] http://www.stack.com/a/how-many-acres-is-a-football-field http://www.stack.com/a/how-many-acres-is-a-football-field
  - nl 9y ago
    Pump hydro is viable to build now for circumstances like that.
- trebligdivad 9y ago
  The problem with battery backed is getting longer storage; The UK government has just reduced the subsidy for storage technologies that can't keep it going for a few hours; See https://www.emrdeliverybody.com/Lists/Latest%20News/Attachments/150/Duration%20Limited%20Storage%20De-Rating%20Factor%20Assessment%20-%20Final.pdf https://www.emrdeliverybody.com/Lists/Latest%20News/Attachme... for the full assesment of how they came up with that.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

toomuchtodo 9y ago

Solar battery backed is under $100/MWh (wind even cheaper), and those costs will decline rapidly as battery manufacturing scales up. Nuclear will never get cheaper, not to mention the rapidly increasing decommissioning costs everyone is keeping off the books. Batteries are mostly non toxic and easily recycled.

acidburnNSA 9y ago
A backup battery for the 10-day wind lull from Dec 5th to Dec 15th in the Pacific Northwest would cost $90B and be a football field 100 stories high. Then it'd have to be replaced every 20 years. The footprint of something like that from a land, mining, and carbon standpoint is not trivial.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Legitimate question: How many electric cars would it be sitting on streets and in garages? https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.jpg
  - acidburnNSA 9y ago
    The 4 GWe wind farms have an average capacity factor of 35% so over ten days that's 336 GWh or 4.8 million Teslas, and that's just for the fraction of electric generation that's wind in the PNW. Scale that up to full electricity and then full energy and you're looking at a pretty serious challenge. Batteries are generally not what people consider for grid-scale power. The 100% renewable Stanford superstar, Jacobsen (who's suing his scientific critics), doesn't even use batteries in his scenarios (he uses pumped hydro and hydrogen instead).
- hanbura 9y ago
  Maybe today, but with demand (and thus potential profit) for grid-scale storage increasing we see a lot of promisimg research in that area. Li-Ion is engineered for completely different tradeoffs, so there's massive room for improvement.
- isostatic 9y ago
  Or would be 100 football fields 1 story high, or about 1/6th the area of a 1GW nuclear plant.
  - acidburnNSA 9y ago
    That doesn't sound quite right. Nuclear is very energy dense and has very low footprints in terms of land, fuel, mining, pollution, waste, and everything else except capital cost. I hope we can figure out how to build them cheaper. Acres per Megawatt Produced for different energy sources [1]: Coal 12.21 Natural Gas 12.41 Nuclear 12.71 Solar 43.50 Wind 70.64 Hydro 315.22 [1] https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf
    - isostatic 9y ago
      1GW of nuclear power is 1.3 SQ miles (1) or 832 acres. 100 football fields (required area for storage) is 130 acres [2] 130/832 is 1 in 6.4 Bird this is the storage that OP came out with his "100 story high" tale, not the generation (which you'd put off shore, perhaps beyond the horizon) [1] https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Papers/Land_Use_Carbon_Free_Technologies.pdf?ext=.pdf https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Pa... [2] http://www.stack.com/a/how-many-acres-is-a-football-field http://www.stack.com/a/how-many-acres-is-a-football-field
- nl 9y ago
  Pump hydro is viable to build now for circumstances like that.
trebligdivad 9y ago
The problem with battery backed is getting longer storage; The UK government has just reduced the subsidy for storage technologies that can't keep it going for a few hours; See https://www.emrdeliverybody.com/Lists/Latest%20News/Attachments/150/Duration%20Limited%20Storage%20De-Rating%20Factor%20Assessment%20-%20Final.pdf https://www.emrdeliverybody.com/Lists/Latest%20News/Attachme... for the full assesment of how they came up with that.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]