Re: Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO2 than thought

On 7 Jul, 05:47, "rlbell.ns...@xxxxxxxxx" <rlbell.ns...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Nuclear power is cheaper, now.

Yes, but now is not the issue - all Western nuclear power has long
since amortised its build costs.

That is not what I meant. Right now, in a proper licensing
environment that does not allow frivolous lawsuits to delay startup
after the plant has been built, a thousand megawatts of installed
nuclear power costs less than a thousand megawatts of installed wind
turbines. It is not only cheaper, but has a higher capacity factor,
so it will make more power/money.

I think you'll find that installed capacity of onshore wind is less
than that for nuclear. Though of course, wind power is only utilised
about 1/3 time. Offshore wind costs more but has 40% utilisation.
Onshore wind is cost competitive IF the right location is used.

I agree the new generation of nuclear plants look much more promising.
I believe the cost overruns and delays in Finland are teething
troubles with a new design, and EPR, APU 1000 etc will provide low
cost electricity.

The biggest determinant in the cost of nuclear is the cost of capital.
EDF, being part of the French Government, has an effective cost of
capital of about 4%. A nuclear plant has a higher cost of capital
because of the two risks: Construction costs, and future prices. When
financing a nuclear plant, you have to bear in mind the possibility
(unlikely) that it might be obsolete in 25 years.

The preference for gas turbine plants is solely for the speed at which they are built.

And the capital cost. It's only about £250 million / GW. When gas was
cheap, it was a no-brainer.

Nuclear power is capacity constrained so its likely we'll need both
nuclear and wind and gas.


On a purely economic basis, the
nearest rival to nuclear is coal. Where wind has not been subsidized,
it is not built.

You could say the same about nuclear, though I'm fairly optimistic
about the new builds.

Where subsidies dry up, the wind turbines stop spinning.

You mean stop being built

I have heard that in some locales, after the subsidies dried up, the
electricity from a wind turbine was not worth the costs of
maintenance, so they stop spinning. I would like to be misinformed,
but I am told that many of the wind turbines in the Altamount pass
were left for dead when the problem was not an easy fix. The big
subsidy was forcing utilities to buy all available wind power at the
peaking rate. Once that madness ended, from the perspective of
minimum acceptable rate of return, maintenance money diverted to other
investments was wiser than keeping wind turbines running.

The Altamount pass has wind turbines out of the stone age. They
produce 50KW. Not worth repairing.

Drawing conclusions from these is the same as looking at Britain's
Magnox reactors and dismissing nuclear as uncompetitive.


What you are suggesting is that some unspecified
developement will reduce the cost of wind power-- without reducing the
cost of anything else

On shore wind is cost competitive. But like nuclear, its capacity is
limited. We haven't built any large scale offshore wind farms yet, but
I'd expect their cost to fall with scale.

If it was cost competitive, there would be no need for any incentives
to get them built. You can only get so much scale benefits from wind,
as there is an upper limit to unit size

The size improvement is still ongoing (there a handful of test 5MW
units deployed now). It looks like it will peak at about 10MW for
horizontal axis machines.

The real benefit comes when you have production lines producing 5MW
units at the rate of several a day, rather than as specific projects,
and deploy them in quantities of 100s, with expensive deployment
equipment on site for several months.

Wind Power is still not a mature technology - the largest wind farms
in operation are only several hundred MW of capacity. That puts them
with early PWR designs in terms of maturity.


Until then, the power source with the lowest marginal cost has a role
for baseload power. Nuclear has low marginal cost, but wind is even
lower.

Can you prove that?

The wind may be free, but you still have to maintain the wind turbines.

Not on a day to day basis you don't. Most wind turbines are left
unmanned for weeks at a time.

Nuclear power plants need a lot of maintenance and fuel.

You have to compare the maintenance costs on a per megawatt*year
basis, so you are comparing the maintenance costs of one nuclear plant
with several hundred, if not thousand, wind turbines.

Compare operating costs rather than maintenance. Operating costs
include charge for waste disposal. Then you'd compare a 500 x 5MW
offshore wind farm with a 1GW nuclear plant. The offshore plant will
use more helicopters for sure.
.

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