Ah now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. 400MW of wind power is actually about 120MW of actual power when you take into account the capacity factor typically 30% in the UK. While it's true that nuclear plants also have a capacity factor due to down time and refueling it's >90%.
You also can't just arbitrarily increase the amount of wind generation and hope the grid copes. There need to be major structural changes to cope with the intermittency of power.
Have people looked at combining gas generation and wind power, would being able to generate gas when there was too much electricity change the capacity factor equation?
I'm not currently aware of any wind turbines in the UK being powered down due to lack of demand, so the 30% capacity factor is exclusively due to lack of supply, i.e. no wind to turn the turbines.
It's definitely worth looking at with another 3x wind capacity or so.
I... put politely, don't understand how manufacturers can make that claim, it depends on exogenous factors. That said, you're right, the newest turbines are impressive structures and more consistent at their job.
Also that said, andy_ppp is right, or will be soon. If you want to make a dent in our fossil fuel needs on a cold windless day, you'll have giant globs of excess energy on warm windy days, that is simply orders of magnitude more than any practically-costed battery can store. At that point, who cares if electrolysis is only 30% efficient?
Your margins care, since those are a factor of installation cost, marginal cost and energy lost due to round trip efficiency.
That 70% loss defines the lowest possible price difference between buy cheap power and sell expensive. Therefore any other smart consumer or storage has that margin to work against, to compete you out of the market. This is why batteries can work, in some cases. But it is a pure inefficiency that will find a minimum equilibrium.
For your understanding, capacity factor is one of the parameters which is under the control of the turbine designer. If you connect up a huge 200m turbine to a little 3kw generator you can get a practically 100% capacity factor but obviously it's not an optimal strategy given the costs.
The problem is, the only place where you can make that worth the while is by building out solar in Northern Africa. Unfortunately, the countries in that region are a combination of failed states, governed by dictators, under threat of war or terrorism or pissed off after hundreds of years of Western colonial powers coming in, taking natural resources and leaving no meaningful income and perspectives to the locals.
There's no easy solution for a single one of these problems, much less for all of them.
No it could work in other places. You buy 1 unit of energy for £50 per unit. And then sell at £150 per unit, or £90 for your remaining 0.6 units. The profit is from the price difference. You make money from arbitrage. And this is the kind of price difference you would expect in a grid with lots of intermittent sources. And the cheaper the source commodity becomes the less efficiency really matters.
This is essentially the principle of a virtual powerplant - household tariffs like Octopus Agile (price fluctuations every 30 minutes) with a home battery make it possible to do this at quite a small (eg household) scale. A bigger operator could find bigger returns if they could make it work.
I think there's something to be said for storing excess energy like this - it beats paying into fossil fuel economies.
It's difficult to do these kinds of arbitrage deals with energy, at least electric energy - it's simply incredibly expensive and requires a lot of upfront cash to build out serious storage, whereas it's easy to store and ship oil - in a pinch, you can just buy an old tanker truck for a couple thousand dollars. Not to mention that in order to build such a project you would need a lot of transmission capacity in the grid so that you could e.g. have a battery in Bavaria buy up surplus power from the North Sea wind farms.
The one area where the principle works currently is ultra-short storage times like Tesla did in Australia... but that's not much of actual energy being stored, the service Tesla provides here is smoothing out demand - it has 194 MWh @ 150 MW, so barely one and a quarter hours of runtime at full load, with the complete grid having something like 60 GW peak capacity [1].
Another idea that is being floated is to repurpose old electric vehicle batteries or electric vehicles themselves as decentralized storage. That is a very charming idea, but again it requires large upfront investment for the batteries as well as for expanding the grid to keep up with the demand... and there are no standards yet for all the "smartness" needed for such a system to work, many chargers and electric vehicles are not capable of running in reverse, and many people are skeptic of putting a difficult to extinguish fire risk into their basement.
And yet another idea for arbitrage comes from the consumption side - basically have large consumers with storage such as a heating or warm-water system enabled for remote control so that oversupply spikes can be mitigated. But again, the current grids lack the "smartless".
Technically it is exactly the same as a generator, you sell power at a particular price. From the grid perspective it is exactly the same. The fact that you also consume energy is coincidental. And it can work well with existing grid systems by turning on as frequency drops or you get signals from a control room. It uses the same kind of approach as a peaker plant (the tanker truck filled with diesel and a generator).
Also knowing the usual imperialist power games played there even if we would with huge cost stabilise the area, an other power coming in destabilizing it again is quite a big risk...
About 60-70%. Possibly it could be improved with better electrolysis techniques or large-scale facilities. Some Swedish companies are pushing for that solution: https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/a-fossil-free-future/ For now it's only for the steel industry but could in theory be used for other parts of the grid too.
A 60-70% round trip efficiency would be very impressive for round trip efficiency of electricity to hydrogen and back. Its in the same ballpark as pumped storage. I can only assume it's assuming using fuel cells which are 90% efficient for the conversion to electricity. I'm not convinced these have really been deployed at that scale before, the biggest fuel cells I'm aware of are used in non-nuclear submarines where cost is not a priority.
See... this is again the rathole that leads to boondoggle spending. I'm not saying "buy wind only" as all the commenters immediately interpreted. I'm pointing out that this (hypothetical!) reactor is, even now, even in the development stage, already as expensive (plus or minus an order of magnitude) as readily deployed solutions already available in the market.
Be real. It's not going to catch up financially. It will never catch up financially. Nuclear will be what we start deploying only when we're working on the last 20% of capacity and trying to wind down the old fossil fuel generators (which will themselves be increasingly expensive as they become peaker plants).
Nuclear will never appeal to market producers of energy. It's just too expensive. Which is why we need to throw public funds at it instead. And if we're going to throw public funds at the problem, let's start with the low hanging fruit. The UK should be putting that money somewhere else, not here.
It does catch up, of course it does. It takes some time, but there is ROI, and it’s not even that far in time. It’s just that you have to spend more time in debt.
Fair comment, but in the UK we've screwed up nuclear for generations. Our old Magnoz reactors have a century long decommissioning period, and even in the 1960s were more expensive than coal. More modern reactors may differ, but Magnox set up the arguments for anti-nuclear advocates.
More recently, we (stupidly) accepted an abominable price for energy from Hinckley C, and indemnified the operators (including EDF if memory serves) against the cost of decommissioning.
There's evidently a good way to do nuclear, but Britain doesn't do it. We are inept, so our ROI is lower than yours. It is a great shame.
No, the grant, before any reactor, is equivalent to 400 MW (later adjusted down by capacity factor). The nuclear reactor itself is vastly more expensive ($2.4B after the 5th unit). So each reactor is closer to 1500MW of wind (again if we take 30% then 450MW more in line with the reactor) and that’s optimistic (because early nuke estimates tend to underestimate cost). So the real reason for nuclear is that it provides consistent output and thus has lower requirements on the grid.
> Nuclear will be what we start deploying only when we're working on the last 20% of capacity and trying to wind down the old fossil fuel generators
> Nuclear will never appeal to market producers of energy. It's just too expensive.
It seems to me that these two sentences contradict. The first implies that Nuclear will be appealing for 20% of the energy market, which is still a huge market.
If it was appealing, private industry would be investing. What I'm saying is that the only time nuclear makes sense is when you're trying to back-fill the last 20% (or whatever) of capacity that can't easily be born by other renewable sources. That doesn't make that 20% magically profitable, it's a gap that needs to be filled (likely by public investment).
It doesn't make sense for backfilling the last 20%. That last 20% isn't steady, it's highly intermittent demand, something that nuclear is terrible at addressing.
If we can work out a good storage technology (and I am optimistic about this), then I totally agree. If we can't, then nuclear with demand-following load might be the best available option.
Using nuclear for the last 20% makes no sense. Against wind/solar, you either use nuclear for everything, or you use it for nothing. There is no middle ground (well, except maybe in a tightly tuned scenario where solar could just be cheaper for daytime peak reduction, but even that is a bit iffy.)
You also can't just arbitrarily increase the amount of wind generation and hope the grid copes. There need to be major structural changes to cope with the intermittency of power.