The number one problem with renewables such as wind is their unreliability. There are occasional days when the wind doesn't blow over a very large area of the United Kingdom. As I said earlier, we have about 8GW of dataplate grid wind generating capacity, more than we have nuclear power capability. The average output is about 2GW annually from wind but that's an annual figure. I've seen the figure go as high as 5GW in stormy conditions and fall to as low as 50MW or 0.04% of the dataplate figure. Either we pay large amounts for backup generating capacity to fill that sort of a hole and burn fossil carbon like there's no tomorrow on those days or we freeze to death in the dark.
(Just had a look -- the grid wind total today right now is 310MW or about 2.5% of dataplate installation and about 1% of demand. We're buying in 2GW of French nuclear electricity as usual and burning fossil carbon gas like crazy but it's cheap.)
Storage isn't going to get much cheaper, not by factors of ten or a hundred as it would need to to make renewables a predictable and safe primary energy source. There is no miracle physics we can exploit to store large amounts of energy and recover it when we need it without paying for it in large amounts of cash (and land area for the cheapest options such as pumped storage). If there was a cheap storage option the wind generating companies would be deploying it today but they free-wheel on the grid using the nuclear baseload and the assorted CCGT carbon-burning generators (I presume we can agree burning wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic is not truly a renewable energy source...) to cover their downtimes when the wind doesn't blow. We really REALLY need to stop burning fossil carbon, like a decade ago and gas is only slightly better than coal, not a magical not-really-fossil-carbon fuel.
As for nuclear power plants shutting down for refuelling and refurbishment this is a scheduled operation done at a time when other nuclear plants, CCGT and some hydro can cover for the drop-outs. The nuclear industry has gotten very good at minimising the time for such operations to the point where modern reactors have an uptime of over 80% (see for example the operating record of Sizewell B, the only PWR in the British fleet).
Note that this single GenIIa reactor produces about 50% of the entire existing British wind annual generating capacity by itself.
The planned EPRs are expected to operate for 18 months or even longer between outages. Both reactors at Hinckley Point C won't be down at the same time so the 7% dropout you envisage won't happen and, in a better world, there would be overcapacity of nuclear to cover such individual or group dropouts anyway. The French schedule their nuclear refuelling operations for the summer when electricity demand is lower and even shut a few reactors down at that time since the Italians, Swiss, Germans, Britons and other export markets don't take enough electricity from their generating system.
Myself I find the idea of building a range of different reactor designs to be puzzling; I'd be tempted to go for something like the APR1000/Hualong 1 GenIIa design which the Chinese are building on a six-year timescale for about £5 billion each and reap the savings in design, licencing, mass manufacture of components, operations, fuel cycle etc. but nobody asked my opinion.
As for cost, remember that spending £18 billion on wind turbines today means spending another £18 billion in 20 years time when they wear out and need to be replaced, and another £18 billion twenty years after that. The reactors being built today will still be working at rated capacity sixty years from now, possibly longer. The Russians are building VVER1200 reactor vessels they expect to last for a century in operation.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Strike Price of Hinckley Point C
Date: 2016-08-01 10:20 am (UTC)(Just had a look -- the grid wind total today right now is 310MW or about 2.5% of dataplate installation and about 1% of demand. We're buying in 2GW of French nuclear electricity as usual and burning fossil carbon gas like crazy but it's cheap.)
Storage isn't going to get much cheaper, not by factors of ten or a hundred as it would need to to make renewables a predictable and safe primary energy source. There is no miracle physics we can exploit to store large amounts of energy and recover it when we need it without paying for it in large amounts of cash (and land area for the cheapest options such as pumped storage). If there was a cheap storage option the wind generating companies would be deploying it today but they free-wheel on the grid using the nuclear baseload and the assorted CCGT carbon-burning generators (I presume we can agree burning wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic is not truly a renewable energy source...) to cover their downtimes when the wind doesn't blow. We really REALLY need to stop burning fossil carbon, like a decade ago and gas is only slightly better than coal, not a magical not-really-fossil-carbon fuel.
As for nuclear power plants shutting down for refuelling and refurbishment this is a scheduled operation done at a time when other nuclear plants, CCGT and some hydro can cover for the drop-outs. The nuclear industry has gotten very good at minimising the time for such operations to the point where modern reactors have an uptime of over 80% (see for example the operating record of Sizewell B, the only PWR in the British fleet).
http://www.world-nuclear.org/reactor/default.aspx/SIZEWELL%20B
Note that this single GenIIa reactor produces about 50% of the entire existing British wind annual generating capacity by itself.
The planned EPRs are expected to operate for 18 months or even longer between outages. Both reactors at Hinckley Point C won't be down at the same time so the 7% dropout you envisage won't happen and, in a better world, there would be overcapacity of nuclear to cover such individual or group dropouts anyway. The French schedule their nuclear refuelling operations for the summer when electricity demand is lower and even shut a few reactors down at that time since the Italians, Swiss, Germans, Britons and other export markets don't take enough electricity from their generating system.
Myself I find the idea of building a range of different reactor designs to be puzzling; I'd be tempted to go for something like the APR1000/Hualong 1 GenIIa design which the Chinese are building on a six-year timescale for about £5 billion each and reap the savings in design, licencing, mass manufacture of components, operations, fuel cycle etc. but nobody asked my opinion.
As for cost, remember that spending £18 billion on wind turbines today means spending another £18 billion in 20 years time when they wear out and need to be replaced, and another £18 billion twenty years after that. The reactors being built today will still be working at rated capacity sixty years from now, possibly longer. The Russians are building VVER1200 reactor vessels they expect to last for a century in operation.