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Yup but you won’t be paying less than £0.30/kWh flat-rate pretty soon. Hinkley is stupidly expensive and I doubt the capacity factor will turn out any better t
by danw1979 4y ago
Yup but you won’t be paying less than £0.30/kWh flat-rate pretty soon.
Hinkley is stupidly expensive and I doubt the capacity factor will turn out any better than wind and batteries, but I still think we should build a few more nuclear power stations - the public will turn hard against renewables at the first sniff of power outages being caused because the wind wasn’t blowing, and we’re less likely to run into that with some nuclear baseload in the mix.
- adrianN 4y agoHow? Economics strongly suggest to run nuclear plants at maximum output whenever you can. So you wouldn't be able to use them as backups when there is a lack of wind power.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoUsing that money to build more wind and supporting infrastructure would make it much less likely. People don't talk about it much, but CfD has killed nuclear. It lays the long term costs and risks bare. Hinckley is going to overrun it's already high cost, and France will be left picking up the tab for any cost overruns. I wonder if their contract lets them just build the equivalent wind power to save money? Or just shut it down and walk away. At some point the cost of subsidizing expensive energy for another country is going to become untenable.
- u320 4y agoThere is no "equivalent wind power". They perform different roles on the grid.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoYes, and it's probably cheaper to emulate that role with other tech. Not sure the contract would allow for it though.
- finikytou 4y agoyes this is what led us to the current war... relying on other tech.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoYes, that's what all the people who like fossil fuels and Putin say anyway. But everyone else has responded by accelerating the renewable plans that those same Putin and Fossil apologists kept blocking for whatever reason, so it might work out okay in the end. Would have been nice just to have 4 decades of sensible climate action, cleaner air, healthier citizens, less terrorism, cheaper energy, warmer homes and no-one threatening to nuke Europe when they lose an Illegal war of conquest of part of it though.
- finikytou 4y agou do understand that most of the "renewable" model is to use gas/coal when there isnt wind or sun? guess who backed it... putin, biden and all the others ones that did not have nuclear as their main tech
- adrianN 4y agoNo the model is to have energy storage and phase out all fossil fuels. Using gas peakers is an intermediate step, but the plan is not to increase the amount of gas used, but instead to electrify processes that currently use gas (e.g. heating).
- finikytou 4y agowind is an intermittent energy at best. a turbine lasts at best 25 years then you can't recycle it. there is nothing you can renew in wind energy. oh and wind is changing so you might build it somewhere with a lot of wind just to find out its not there anymore a few years down. not even talking about the visual pollution it creates. money is not an issue when building energy such as nuclear. you'd need to price all the outcomes a nuclear reactor would bring to your economy and trust me no industry will want to rely on wind to meet their production goals.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoOffshore wind clearly wins on 'visual pollution' as well, if you do consider that more important than cost.
- u320 4y agoTo approach nuclear-like capacity factors on wind+batteries you need an INSANE amount of batteries, £0.30/kWh will seem like a bargain in comparison. Wind lulls can last for weeks or longer. There is a reason why countries like Germany are so focused on hydrogen for storage.