To clarify I would prefer it to be zero coal now and to have been zero for years, it seems we are in agreement there. We need more green production including nuclear and I'm glad to see the new CFD auction puts another massive amount of renewable plants into play at record low prices which will save consumers hundreds a year perhaps.
Energy price cap
- Thread starter Matesrates
- Start date
Lost Seasider
Well-known member
20:35, solar is down to zero, our 24.6GW of installed wind capacity is generating 2.3GW of power enough to meet 7.5% of current 29.6GW demand, 58% of our generation is coming from fossil fuels, another 15.5% nuclear and the rest is a combination of biomass, pumped storage and inter-connectors.
So after 20+ years of pushing for renewables, when the wind doesn't blow we're able to generate less than 10% of our electricity from renewable sources, and the winter peak is over double current demand.
I remain sceptical.
So after 20+ years of pushing for renewables, when the wind doesn't blow we're able to generate less than 10% of our electricity from renewable sources, and the winter peak is over double current demand.
I remain sceptical.
Tangerinemoss
Well-known member
This, this and this. It is the answer, fully bloody stop.
I see instead of thinking about literally any of the proposed solutions, you've just waited until a convenient time on the national grid website to reply.
Wait till the CEOs of these companies, the heads of investment firms throwing billions behind them, governments and government agencies who are planning for next zero, and everyone else working in the booming renewable industry hears about your sudden realisation that sometimes it's not sunny and sometimes it's not windy. I'm sure they will all pack up and go home.
@Lost Seasider go and look at the France national grid live data. See what happens when solar drops from 22% to 0%. Something else picks up the slack. A hint - it's not intermittent and it isn't a fossil fuel. But according to you it can't exist alongside renewables.
Shandypants
Well-known member
Meanwhile over in France they've had a massive 4% rise in their bills. Nuclear power owned by the govt for the people opposed to selling everything off to the highest bidder. Owned by private companies for the shareholders.
Lost Seasider
Well-known member
In which case the solar generation capacity is completely pointless.
Lol, how did you work that out? If you can't comprehend the opportunity that excess electricity will offer in a world rushing to electrify in all industries, you're not very imaginative. I have listed some to help, which you ignore.
Even an aggresive nuclear strategy is not going to supply 100% of your electricity. It's too expensive, and takes to long to build. However it can be used flexibly to support intermitent renewables, despite your claim that you for some reason can't have both. Solar and wind are cheap as chips, and only getting cheaper. The market is flooding into it. Companies are competing with each other to offer lower and lower prices for the national grid to buy their supply, knowing that if the price is higher than they offer, they owe the consumer the difference. The green revolution is happening in front of your eyes.
Lost Seasider
Well-known member
Explain to me the logic of leaving a nuclear plant idle so that you can generate some solar energy instead.
All of this relies on the government promising to buy every watt of power they generate at a fixed price, and the more surplus capacity the country has, the more is wasted.
Not idle, just able to ramp up and down. You're asking me to explain the logic as if it doesn't work. France is literally currently doing this. Go look at their national grid live data.
The Government will never not be able to pay curtailment fees, which may not even exist in 15 years. Solar and Wind power is incredibly cheap and getting cheaper. Household bills have shot up by 3,000 quid and you're talking about curtailment that costs the consumer 10 quid a year at its worst. Your idea that curtailment means the market isn't actually proving anything is stupid. You did read what I told you that these energy companies are going to owe the consumer 11 billion over the next few years because of the CFD contracts right? The money they make in curtailment is a FRACTION of that. So tell me, why do you think energy companies are desperate to build wind and solar, undercutting each other to offer record low prices that we couldn't even fathom a couple of years ago, knowing that if the cost of electricity is more than they offer, they are the ones who make up the difference? Knowing the cost is billions of billions of pounds that they write a cheque for that goes to consumers?
And we haven't even started with PPA contracts which are direct between a supplier and a buyer, and nothing to do with governments, which are already exploding. How do you explain that?
Lost Seasider
Well-known member
Okay, I've run a few scenarios for you to illustrate the point:
Basic assumptions:
- isolated unconnected market with no meaningful storage;
- peak demand 60GW;
- peak demand may occur on a very low wind day;
- the country must be able to meet demand;
- potential minimum wind output 5%;
- 5% of nuclear offline for maintenance at any time;
- project starting from scratch, government funding and acting as monopoly supplier;
- nuclear capital cost - £2,500,000/MW;
- wind capital cost - £1,000,000/MW;
- expected lifespan, wind: 25 years, nuclear: 60 years.
Scenario A (nuclear only) | | | |
Required peak | | 60,000 | |
Maintenance buffer | 5% | 3,000 | |
Required capacity | | 63,000 | |
Cost per MW | | £2,500,000 | |
Capital cost | | £157,500,000,000 | |
Amortized over expected lifetime | 60 | | £2,625,000,000 |
In the base, nuclear only scenario the capital cost is £157.5 billion, which is an annual cost is £2.625 billion.
Scenario B (nuclear/wind mix) | | | |
Required peak | | 60,000 | |
Maintenance buffer (not required) | 0% | 0 | |
Required capacity | | 60,000 | |
Cost per MW | | £2,500,000 | |
Capital cost | | £150,000,000,000 | |
Amortized over expected lifetime | 60 | | £2,500,000,000 |
| | | |
Installed wind capacity | | 60,000 | |
Cost per MW | | £1,000,000 | |
Capital cost | | £60,000,000,000 | |
Amortized over expected lifetime | 25 | | £2,400,000,000 |
Total cost | | | £4,900,000,000.00 |
and just for fun:
Scenario C (wind only) | | | |
Required peak | | 60,000 | |
Safety factor (assuming 5% minimum) | 2000% | 1,140,000 | |
Required capacity | | 1,200,000 | |
Cost per MW | | £1,000,000 | |
Capital cost | | £1,200,000,000,000 | |
Amortized over expected lifetime | 25 | | £48,000,000,000 |
In this scenario, the country decides to meet its energy needs from wind alone, because of the possibility of peak demand occurring on a low wind day they need to install 20 times the required capacity, this costs £1.2 trillion and raises the annual cost to £48 billion!!!
A simplified example of course, and you can play with the numbers, but however the market is designed somebody has to pay the cost in the end, and the fundamental message is clear, there is no point having a nuclear fleet standing idle (or able to ramp up as you put it) just so you can generate energy from wind.
Oh dear, there's a lot of faulty numbers to unpack here.
First of all let's start with accounting for no storage. This is based on nothing - your own unsupported opinion. You have not incorporated pumped hydro storage. Or the massively exploding battery market. Interconnectors too that import and export. You know, things that currently exist. And you are seemingly not aware of the very basic principle that the old days of the grid using supply to meet demand have changed. Anyone working in energy knows it is flipping to demand meeting supply. An entire elecric transport fleet charging at cheaper times. Electric cars doing the same. Smart appliances. You've not even included other renewables like solar, hydro and biomass for some unexplained reason, which can supplement wind (and does). Your figure of over 1 million capacity for wind is ludicrous, and cannot be taken seriously. I could end it here. Because that's it. You've contaminated the entire data set from the beginning. But I'll press on.
I don't know where your electricity prices are fitting into all this, as renewable electricity costs half as much as nuclear right now, and is getting cheaper - which you haven't incorporated at all. The cost of nuclear is rising, by a quarter over the last decade. The cost of renewables is declining, every year. Solar has halved. In comparison, as countries build more nuclear - US, France, Germany, etc, there has been negative learning curves, where the more you build, the more expensive they are. You've decided to pluck a number out of thin air and then spread it out over decades, artificially locking prices in place. We aren't building an entire new energy supply worth of plants and farms in one year. So your costs, even if accurate (and they aren't, you've just found the first source on Google which is about costs in America, not UK), go out of date immediately. And another reason they will go out of date is you've based it on 14MW turbines as if we won't get more capacity per turbine.
Lastly, you haven't at all accounted for the need for clean energy now. Building new power plants takes 15 years at least in most cases, possibly 20. What are we doing in the meantime? Importing natural gas at billions of pounds a year? How does that affect your calculations? What about the enormous financial cost of climate change that will go unmitigated for 20 years while we wait? That's billions of pounds a year spent. Not to mention, you know, the actual lives stake. Hundreds of thousands of people dying premature deaths due to air pollution while we wait for plants to come online. And the catastrophic effects of climate change worldwide beyond our shores. You do know that net zero is not 'current rate by 2049 then we flip a switch at 2050 and everything becomes zero emissions', right? To get global temperatures limited to 1.5c-2c warmer , we need to hit targets. We need drastic GHG emission cuts now, and certainly by 2030. Will Hinkley Power Plant even be operational by then?
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Lost Seasider
Well-known member
The model is a simplification to prove a point, you're free to add or change it as you wish.
Pumped storage is short term load balancing, batteries cost money, if you can give me an estimate on how much it costs to store 1MWh I'll happily add it to the model.
Just shifts the problem elsewhere.
The same applies equally to nuclear.
Very limited scope for hydro in the UK, solar is counter-cyclical with demand, biomass is debatable whether it's truely "renewable".
I've no idea what that phrase is intended to mean, are you saying that it doesn't cost £1,000,000 to install a 1MW turbine? I've seen higher.
Please provide a source for your claim.
Feel free to substitute your own numbers.
Except we don't have clean energy now, we have wind turbines producing less than 10% of the installed capacity that need 100% backup from fossil fuels, and if instead of starting this push for windmills 20+ years ago we'd directed our energies at nuclear, we could have a fleet of them in place by now that would cover most of our energy needs.
Matesrates
Well-known member
Surely whatever we do here will have minimal effect on global warming, we’re a tiny country and huge countries like India, Pakistan and China are nowhere near achieving net zero.
My o/p was about the here and now, which for millions in this country is terrifying.
My o/p was about the here and now, which for millions in this country is terrifying.
traffordtang
Well-known member
Including those who don’t pay tax? Not sure how that will work but we must trust truss
Your model isn't simple, it's wrong. I can just make up numbers like nuclear costs 6 and renewables costs 5 and that's very simple but not real, is it. For a starters, you've said the capital costs of 100% nuclear is 125bn. This is very obviously wrong, and we have evidence right in front of us to say so. Hinkley Power Point C is now up to 26bn in costs. Its max output will be 3.2 GW. You are saying we need 20x this capacity to meet peak demand. That's 520bn. You haven't included extended life or repower costs of wind, instead slapped a fixed 25 year lifespan on them.
Pumped hydro storage can kick in when solar diminishes or really at any peak time if planned - as it currently does. And battery costs are slashing all the time. By the time you put a figure into your "model", it's probably already reduced. Either way, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than expanding capacity by your laughable 2000% of peak demand. There are many different models (by actual experts) on how much installed capacity we will need. The most I've seen is 200 or so GW of wind. So you're only off by 900,000 MW.
Interconnectors do not 'shift the problem elsewhere'. What on Earth are you talking about. When we have excess supply we can sell it. When we have excess demand we can buy it. It's not going to perfectly match up every day of course, but it will help a lot. It closes the gap between demand and minimum expected output.
You still haven't at all accounted for the several hours a day that solar provides electricity. Solar exists. It exists currently. It is remarkably cheap. You've somehow wiped it off the face of the Earth. You keep throwing out massively important data inputs and expecting to produce anything of value. Yes, if you ignore all the other things in our arsenal, all the demand side changes which completely change the meaning of baseload as we know it, swat away things like pumped storage, biomass, batteries and interconnectors in a single sentence each, it won't work. If you pretend that minimum output will match peak demand - which goes against the entire principle of demand side reduction, and the revolution in our tech. Similarly if I say Blackpool won't win this weekend by only counting 7 of our players and putting them up against 11 I can be right.
What I referred to as 'ludicrous' is your assumption we will need 1.1m MW of capacity from wind. It's such an over the top absurd claim that it is incredibly hard to take any of this seriously. You keep on insisting on ignoring all the solutions we already know if, not to mention the innovation which will continue to come. The innovation which took solar from impractical to now 15x cheaper and booming as an industry.
Lastly you haven't grasped the need for renewable now. Which is more important than costs and the reason we are doing this. If coal was 99% cheaper than Nuclear or Wind we still couldn't use it (without carbon capture technology). Yes we should have installed more nuclear by now. We didn't. We are talking about future solutions here, not opining about the past. Around a quarter of our energy now comes from renewables. That will be higher by 2030. We can build wind farms in months. Power plants take decades. You have not at all accounted for the cost of human life and the massive economic cost that is reduced every year we add renewable energy to our grid.
Bottom line. We need to reduce our emissions by 80% by 2035. To do this, we need to have completely decarbonised our electricity grid by then. There will not be a single nuclear power plant we can agree to today that will be in operation by then. Argument over, full stop. There is no way to reach net zero by 2035 in electricity by going all nuclear. It's impossible. 100% nuclear as a goal to accomplish our aims is dead. It's too late. Renewables now is the only way to do this. And if the economic models show swapping them for nuclear at some point will work, cool. But to achieve net zero, it's renewables now.
S
Scaramanga
Guest
I wonder how many of the experts on this thread are actually in the industry?
Good luck trying to get China to do anything if 99% of other countries like us don't also aim for net zero. It would be especially rich for us, considering our historical emissions are 3rd highest in the world. It is correct that we are a tiny fraction overall, but so is every country in the EU, and the EU's emissions aren't tiny (bigger than India, for example).
I wouldn't discount China. They always overperform their renewable targets and are currently planning for a third of their grid to be renewable by 2025. Their peak carbon is imminent. They definitely aren't doing good enough, but it's not like they are just sat around laughing throwing coal in the fire while we try our best.
Anyway I have gone off topic over this thread but I don't think there's much discussion. Everyone hates the price rises. Government needs to tax energy companies, or figure out a way to give us more subsidies, or spread the cost out. Basically do anything other than go around the country talking to upper class wankers about how solar fields (mostly on private farmers' lands) are unsightly.
I don't think I've seen anyone claim to be an expert but some people like learning and discussing things. Kinda like talking about football when you're not a footballer. I love learning about renewables and the UK's future plans. And if you're asking, I would consider research part of my expertise/profession.
S
Scaramanga
Guest
Depends where you get your research and what you WANT to believe though doesn’t it.
Oh don't worry I got it all from Facebook memes and r/conspiracy
S
Scaramanga
Guest
Jackpot, your quids in then
Lost Seasider
Well-known member
You criticize my numbers, but fail to offer any of your own, you claim that costs are falling, but fail to offer any proof, everything you post appears to be wishful thinking plucked from the brochure of a renewables supplier.
You make much of the availability of battery storage, but again fail to provide any numbers or evidence, so here's a link for you: https://www.cibsejournal.com/technical/cost-model-battery-storage/
in the same period, there has been a significant fall in the price of lithium-ion battery storage, from £770/kWh to £180/kWh . This is plateauing, however,
The article goes on to provide a costed example that boils down to battery storages costing £750,000 per MWh over a 20-year period.
To put that number into some context, the UK is currently generating 18GW from gas and nuclear, to replace that with battery storage would cost £13.5 billion per hour, £324 billion per day, and since wind hasn't produced anything meaningful since 2 August, upwards of THREE TRILLION POUNDS for anything that might even approach a stable electricity supply.
It's your turn now, rather than copy-pasting from your wind energy salesman manual, how about some actual f***ing numbers showing that what you're selling can work.
Before we go any further on costs, I need to know that you can comprehend the fact that emissions need to curve down and we cannot meet our net zero goals by building 100% nuclear power which will take 20+ years to do. Because if you don't understand the cuts we need to make by 2030 and 2035 while new plants will barely be out of the planning stages, there's little point. I could argue coal is cheaper than Nuclear but it doesn't matter since the goal is to tackle climate change. That's the entire purpose of this whole exercise. If you can show me how we reduce GHG emissions by 80% of peak in the next 8 years with nuclear I'm all ears.
Lost Seasider
Well-known member
I dispute the word "need", it's a policy objective that in reality will have next to zero effect on climate change, I would like to know if it's remotely achievable and if so what the true cost of the policy would be.
I must say that I'm surprised you don't have the numbers to hand, you must surely know how much it costs to install a wind turbine, it's not impossible to make a reasonable estimate of how much battery storage would be required to support a 100% renewables network and how much that would cost, and yet you remain silent on this most basic of issue.
IPCC - emissions must be cut by 40% by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5c
https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/#:~:text=In the scenarios we assessed,reduced by about a third. Paris Agreement set the target at 45%. Let me know if you find a single source saying to keep emissions growing for 20 years, worsening climate change, before we do something. Because you definitely hear scientists say that a lot, you know, no panic guys we have a couple of decades before we need to do anything.
There's not much point plugging in numbers if your assumption is batteries need to supply energy all the time, and constantly be feeding into our energy grid, every minute and every hour. Which is of course ** stupid. Until you grasp the concept of DSR, and of the actual practical usages of batteries, you're not going to get it.
If you want a cost based model, I'd recommend the Imperial College one. The government produces them every few years too. Bit more sophisticated than your back of a fag packet calculations.
Imagine relying on Imperial College modelling for anything let alone something as important as this.
Fantasy modelling justified the crazy lending spree that led to economic meltdown in 2008. Fantasy modelling (from Imperial College no less) was used as justification for the crime against humanity that was lockdown. Fantasy modelling is the justification for the epic destruction caused by net zero policies. Coincidentally, all of these incidents have destroyed the wealth & power of the working & middle class while increasing the power of governments and the rich. When will people like you ever learn.
If you can make a better model show me
Lost Seasider
Well-known member
DSR flattens out the peaks and troughs, it doesn't remove the need to supply electricity completely, and with the potential for low wind conditions to persist for days on end (such as, for example, the last ten days), I don't see how DSR is going to solve the very basic problem that sometimes the wind simply doesn't blow.
This one: https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/88966/7/EFL_Net Zero GB Electricity_White Paper.pdf
That comes out at £40 bn p/a cost, although I have to say that I think their estimate of 140 GW of batteries is absurdly low.
I think the biggest problem with their model is they assume that we can rely on inter-connectors to meet our needs during low generation periods, setting aside the political risk that entails that is essentially an assumption that nobody else in Europe is trying to reduce their emissions, or alternatively is relying upon nuclear alone, if you remove that "electricity fairy" from the model (and I think they should), I suspect the true cost would go through the roof.
To throw away interconnectors which currently exist supplying renewable enegy would require the assumption no country will ever have excess power that they can sell (which they currently do). So in other words, fantasy.
Anyway, are you disputing the IPCC and Paris Agreement that we need to reduce GHG significantly by 2035? Are you suggesting we incease emissions for the next two decades? Because this is the most important baseline for every discussion. I'm happy to concede nuclear is cheaper long term, probably, but that isn't the point. Coal could be cheaper, that doesn't help now either.
Lost Seasider
Well-known member
We certainly can't rely on the inter-connectors this winter, Putin has seen to that, we know that Macron has threatened to cut off supply in the past, both to us and the Channel Islands, we know that the EU seems to regard us as a rogue province to be punished and eventually reconquered, I certainly don't want the country to be put in a position where it can be held to ransom every time the wind stops blowing,
Perhaps more fundamentally, it assumes that everyone else in Europe is going to continue burning coal and gas, or instead push for nuclear, if they instead opt for solar/wind then low production events (such as the night) are likely to be correlated across Europe and the assumption of supply breaks down.
I think it's quite reasonable to question whether we can truely rely upon inter-connectors, and ask how much it would cost without one.
I'm saying that I don't think that a 100% renewables based system is remotely possible with the current technologies, and to go for one is likely to result in many more years of burning fossil fuels as a way of keeping the lights on.
Perhaps a cost-effective storages system will come along, maybe hydrogen will make it work, but I think it's dangerous to assume such a thing.
What I'm also saying is that I think the push for renewables over the past 20+ years was a mistake that will require us to burn fossil fuels for the next 20+ years, when we could instead have completely eliminated them by now.
tangerine.com
Well-known member
My parents could only afford Coke (not the snorting stuff).Coal was too expensive. And forget using an electric fire.
You keep dodging the question of what we do to meet the targets required in the next decade or two to reduce greenhouse gases, if it isn't all in on renewables.
traffordtang
Well-known member
Meantime
Saudi oil giant Aramco has broken its own record with a $48.4bn (£39.8bn) profit for the second quarter of 2022.
It is a 90% year-on-year increase and marks the biggest earnings for the world's largest energy exporter since its public listing three years ago.
Saudi oil giant Aramco has broken its own record with a $48.4bn (£39.8bn) profit for the second quarter of 2022.
It is a 90% year-on-year increase and marks the biggest earnings for the world's largest energy exporter since its public listing three years ago.
Lost Seasider
Well-known member
And you keep dodging the question of how much it's going to cost, and will it even work.
On your specific point, I don't think the targets are achievable, and even if they were, it would make very little difference to global warming since China seems to have no interest in cutting its emissions, so we might be better served using the money building a secure energy network that doesn't rely entirely on the goodwill of France, and if that takes a few years longer then so be it.
I've given you loads of examples of tech and plans being put into place that can make it work. You ignored all of them or swatted them away in a sentence because you've become so stuck in your argument. Apparently interconnectors are 'fantasy magic'. The same interconnectors which were supplying 19% of our energy when I checked randomly at the weekend. Most from Norway (not France), and because we pay them, like all imports, not due to goodwill. It's not my problem if you can't take solutions we are literally using now, albeit on a smaller scale, seriously.
I don't know what it will cost. Neither do you. The government publishes models and there are independent ones out there like Imperial's. Can you tell me the cost of natural gas in 10 years time?
If you don't think clean energy is worth it I literally don't know why you are here. Why have you been arguing about nuclear instead of say, coal? I have no interest in arguing with someone so arrogant he thinks he knows better than global consensus that we need to cut emissions by 2030 and then further by 2035. If you don't see the need, good for you. You are wrong and I'm glad our Government doesn't agree and neither do most others. Nor do I have more interest in arguing with someone as ignorant to think China has 'no interest' in cutting emissions despite them spending hundreds of billions on renewables over the last couple of decades, lapping every other country in overall capacity and increasing their renewable sourcing up to nearly a third of all energy. The same China that is due to peak in emissions in the next couple of years, beating their own targets (which they do every time). China needs to do way more and is not currently on track to achieve its own net zero goals by 2060, but neither is it not doing anything. That's a farcical statement. Now add in America's recently passed IRA which is the most significant investment in green energy they have ever made, this is the future, happening now. The race to net zero has begun, the starting pistol was fired years ago. And Britain rightly recognises it has its own part to play, not just to avoid disaster, but because they recognise the opportunity in investing in a green economy. Thankfully the powers that be are a bit more forward thinking and hopefully don't succumb to your selfish 'let everyone else do the work and we will just burn coal and make money, which will definitely have no impact on global policy' attitude.
Wizaard
Well-known member
Liz Truss' solution is to abandon green levies as 'its just virtue signalling by the woke' while giving tax cuts. Slight snag is that the poorest don't actually pay tax so wont get assistance, while the richest will get proportionally greater support.
Whatever you do, don't harm the stakeholder and management dividends.
Did you hear her say the most depressing thing she could think of was a field full of solar panels? Course she got a clap from the audience of posh, upper class NIMBY wankers whose biggest issue in life probably is a slightly blighted view of the countryside.
She's awful, but I'm not too worried as she will change her tune once she gets in power and has to answer to real people, not 160,000 Tory voters. For starters, she will hear from farmers, who have 70% solar panels in the UK on their land voluntarily because it's passive easy income.
Wizaard
Well-known member
She has form for uturns.