On Tue, 10 Sep 2013 23:24:22 +0100, The Other Mike
wrote:
I'd fully agree with your costings IF wind was compelled to deliver an exactly
defined level of generation at an exactly defined time, in say 2030. The level
of generation has to be achieved under conditions of a stationary blocking high.
What relevance has wind got to the exorbitant cost of nuclear energy?
Nukes at £95 per MWh in are a bargain.
Not exactly compared with the cost of carbon-based generation - the
documents linked by Nightjar in a recent thread strongly suggest that
once you've taken into account the recent increases in the cost of
Hinkley C, even including either a carbon tax or carbon capture,
carbon-based generation will be cheaper, and we have the fuels for it,
and haven't for nuclear fission.
Give me 30GW asap
We haven't got the fuel for it. With current expected world supplies,
say 10 years from when we've completed the first new plant, and the
UK's current stockpiles of 392GWyr, you can be certain only of 30GW
for 23 years or 8GW to last the full proposed plant lifetime of 60
years. Either way, you'll be incurring a great deal of extra expense
- over and above the latest huge increases in the cost of building
the plant as evidenced by Hinkley C - recycling current stockpiles
of waste fuel, depleted uranium, etc.
and while we are at
it another 30GW of coal.
That would certainly be doable.
In parallel hack every wind turbine down and tell the
FIT parasites to **** off.
Nuclear, if it does actually go ahead as currently envisaged by HMG,
will be a FIT parasite also, about 2.5 times than wind is currently.
Having answered your points, I'm going to take a little time out for
some thinking out loud ...
The problem with wind is, as every body here knows, its variability.
However, demand is variable too. For years the operators of the NG
have been doing a merry dance trying to meet varying demand by
switching on & off constant supplies, often at ridiculously short
notice - how in the name of human intelligence can it be sensible to
have the grid overloading and have to power up extra capacity just
because there's a commercial break in a popular TV program, or because
one has just ended?
What is needed is more storage, then existing problems of meeting
variable demand would be somewhat relieved, and the variable
contribution of wind would be much more easily and usefully absorbed
into the system. The question is how?
We've already done a great deal with hydro - already there are some
places in Scotland where the same bit of water will go through as many
as 4 hydro stations on its way to the sea. However, there are still
one or two pumped storage schemes that were once mooted, but never got
built, or at least the pumped storage part wasn't. Certainly we
should build those asap, but this won't be enough on its own, and
anyway doesn't alleviate any of the problems caused by variable
demand.
So we have to be prepared to think rather more blue sky ...
Mackay suggests electrifying car travel, and using the charging of the
vehicles to buffer variable supply and demand. But this would
increase the demand for electricity overall, and thereby increase some
already existing important difficulties, such as can the existing grid
cope with the increased flows? In fact, we are already currently
exacerbating such problems by electrifying all the railways. Why not
at least put battery banks in the locos, or perhaps by the tracks
(saves carting their weight around)? If that works, we could consider
extending it to cover increasing amounts of road transport as well.
For the price of one Hinkley C, we could easily afford to put
batteries and an invertor into every home.
Could we create pumped sea-water storage reservoirs and use wind-power
to fill them?
I don't know how many of these and other possible ideas would work,
but I am certain of one thing: If fusion cannot deliver, the future
will of necessity be very, very different from the past, and therefore
it's no good THINKING as in the past. We're probably going to have to
wring every last joule from renewable sources that we can, and the
sooner we get used to that idea and stop mindlessly bitching about it
in Pavlovian parrot-fashion, the better. We're probably going to have
to learn to capture carbon, and again, the sooner we start to learn
how, the better. If we decide we really do need nuclear, HMG's
existing proposals will lead to a very quick and costly dead-end, so
we'd just as surely need to be thinking differently about nuclear
power as well, and the sooner we accept that, the better. And the
sooner a certain bigot here stops posting endless lies and
disinformation on all these matters, the better.
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