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Pumped hydro is "harder to build"? Fengning cost $1.8 billion for 3.6 gigawatts and took about 7 years to build. Hinkley point C will be about $30 billion dol
by pydry 5y ago
Pumped hydro is "harder to build"?
Fengning cost $1.8 billion for 3.6 gigawatts and took about 7 years to build.
Hinkley point C will be about $30 billion dollars for 3.2 GW and will take about 10 years to build.
Even prima facie I don't see how building a nuclear power plant could seem easy compared to pushing water uphill.
- glogla 5y agoOne of them being in China and the other being in UK would probably explain the costs by itself.
- Arnt 5y agoYou mean that labour is cheap in China? I've no idea whether it's representative, but I know a construction project where the labour costs were 12% of the final bill. That Hinkley Point project mentioned spends about $8m per day, how much does a construction worker cost per day in that area?
- pydry 5y agoFor reference, coire glas pumped storage in the UK is $1.3 billion and 1.5 GW / 30 GWh. More expensive than China, but not wildly so. 5 days' worth of nuclear power plant's output's worth of storage is 384 GWh. Assuming coire glas prices, $1.3 billion*384/30 maxes out at $16.6 billion or roughly half a hinkley. That also gives max output of 19.5GW that is fully dispatchable as compared to 3.2GW which comes out whether you need it or not (& must still be paired with storage/gas to match demand). Lowering the power rating will lower the cost of the pumped storage. Wind energy is currently about 1/3 the price of nuclear, so assuming 5-6 day lulls it still comes out break-even at the very least. Until you consider insuring against $800 billion fukushima style clean up costs. If we properly accounted for the cost incurred by insuring against this risk we'd never build another nuclear plant ever again.
- AndrewDucker 5y agoWorth pointing out that pumped storage can store power for months if necessary, but it can generally only supply electricity for several hours before it runs out. Whereas a nuclear powerplant will supply that electricity indefinitely. So if you have a wind lull that lasts several days you may run into issues unless you have a lot of pumped storage.
- lm28469 5y agoIt's also worth pointing out that to pump water up hill you still need an energy source...
- Arnt 5y agoA simple problem if you're willing to pump that water uphill while the sun is shining.
- lm28469 5y ago""Simple"" if you have the topography/natural resources to build it in the first place, ie not that simple
- pydry 5y agohttp://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ This seems to think that there are 100x as many topogrophical options as are required under pessimistic circumstances.