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Energy from offshore wind in the UK will be cheaper than electricity from new nuclear power for the first time.
The cost of subsidies for new offshore wind farms has halved since the last 2015 auction for clean energy projects
Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a subsidy of £57.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23.
This compares with the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant securing subsidies of £92.50 per megawatt hour.
Nuclear firms said the UK still needed a mix of low-carbon energy, especially for when wind power was not available.
Both nuclear and wind receive subsidies, but for the first time wind is coming to market with less, so providing the same electricity with less cost to the public than nuclear.
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Offshore Wind Power Cheaper Than New Nuclear
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Small change can often be found under seat cushions.
-- One of Lazarus Long's most penetrating insights
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:43PM (3 children)
Its all very well that wind-generated electrical power is cheaper than nuclear generated electrical power, but what happens when the wind doesn't blow?
On the BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme, when this topic was discussed, the spokesperson for the wind-power industry said they were very good at predicting the wind - getting it right 95% of the time a day in advance...but was curiously silent on how shortfalls in electrical power production would be managed. Nuclear is useful because it is on 'all the time', even when the wind doesn't blow, or at night when solar cells don't generate a great deal of power. Because nuclear offers a higher continuous availability, it can command a price premium; as can gas-fired power stations, which can fill in the gaps of renewable energy shortfalls.
And, no-one has invented 'grid-scale' electrical power storage batteries yet. Plenty are trying, and it will be great if such a technology can be engineered, but until it is, if you want reliable low-emissions electrical power generation, nuclear has to be part of the mix, with the exception of Norway.
Why is Norway an exception? Well, die to a lucky accident of topography, they have rather a lot of hydro-electric generation capacity. So on a windless, cloudless night in mid-winter, they simply use hydro. Everyone else can choose to burn fossil fuels, or use nuclear.
(Score: 2, Troll) by NewNic on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:49PM
The interesting thing about wind in the United Kingdom is that somewhere, it's windy, almost always.
So, while an individual turbine may produce power 30% (or whatever) the time, there is wind power available almost all the time. The UK is a small country and it's not too difficult to manage a grid that covers the entire country.
The real issue with renewables in the UK (as I see it) is counting wood pellets as renewable. Apart from all the fossil fuel used transporting the wood pellets to the UK, it's not at all clear that the trees that were cut down to produce the pellets are being regrown at the same rate.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday September 13 2017, @12:46AM
Just a pedant note: All power sources are intermittent, and you always need grid backup, renewables or not.
Nuclear isn't always on. It goes down for months at a time, and someone has to carefully plan how to deal with the shortfall (in small countries with few reactors. France/US always have a few refuiling on a rolling schedule).
Worse, it takes one (big) mistake to get a nuke to suddenly scram. Someone gets yelled at, a thick report gets written, activists get water-cannoned, and two weeks later, you're back at full blast. But in the meantime, the grid instantly lost a GigaWatt and nobody saw it coming, no forecast, nothing. It you suddenly lose five windmills to unforecasted failures, 'tis but a scratch in comparison.
Yes, nuclear is the king of baseload stability. But let's not act as if the only threat to grid stability worth planning for is because panels don't like thick clouds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @01:33PM
so baseload? predicted baseload? so what happens to the nuke plant if for some theoretical reason people don't use all the baseload? atoms get split for nothing and accumulate as 10'000 year waste nevertheless?
i think the problem is that renewable are trying to compete on a level playing field instead of a uphill battle:
we don't need solar and wind to replace conventional powerplants but rather they have to OVERTAKE them at least 200 percent.
there needs to be at least 200 percent of TOO MUCH renewables .. and then we step into the future where we get the sort of technology that takes the excess energy and converts it into something useful and storable (like "fake plastic wood" :] ).
i just stumbled across this the other day; in some european country they use excess renewable energy and create some sort of gas that they pipe into the gas-grid. the gas-grid in effect functions like a big gas cylinder. the resulting burnable gas is supposedly safe and can be used just like the previous gas to create heat ...
of course someone will lose but "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".