Cos we can add up, run profitable businesses and understand The Scientific Method.

Next question?

A poorly argued piece. Is the cost of windpower based on the amount it delivers or the installed amount? The nuclear cost looks very similar. What about the required returns from your wind industry? Why not support the whole premise and lobby for no subsidies at all on power generation to reduce the costs to the people?

And finally, I don’t see the relevance of the whofundsyou study. It was designed from the start to praise the left leaning organisations and slate the right (not really right wing are they?) leaning ones.

The author works for the trade association for the wind energy industry, and is writing in a personal capacity.

Of course he is!

And this was quite funny.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100018107/it-doesnt-matter-who-funds-think-tanks-but-if-it-did-left-wing-ones-would-do-particularly-badly/

The New Economics Foundation, the Left-wing economics think tank, gains an A grade because their website does detail everyone who gives them substantial sums of money.
1. Grants and donations
£100,000 to £200,000
AIM Foundation
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
Network for Social Change

One of their three largest donors is the taxpayer – you and me. Another is an organisation that exists specifically to conceal the source of donations, the Network for Social Change:
“The Network for Social Change is a group of individuals providing anonymous funding for progressive social change, particularly in the areas of justice, peace and the environment. Together we give around £1m per year to a variety of projects and organisations.”

Forgive me if I don’t think that naming the deliberately anonymous group that funds you is all that transparent!

From Wikipedia:

“A 2004 study by the Royal Academy of Engineering found that wind power cost 5.4 pence per kW·h for onshore installations and 7.2 pence per kW·h for offshore, compared to 2.2p/kW·h for gas and 2.3p/kW·h for nuclear.[108] By 2011 onshore wind costs at 8.3/kW·h had fallen below new nuclear at 9.6p/kW·h, though it had been recognised that offshore wind costs at 16.9p/kW·h were significantly higher than early estimates mainly due to higher build and finance costs, according to a study by the engineering consultancy Mott MacDonald.[109] Wind farms are made profitable by subsidies through Renewable Obligation Certificates which provide over half of wind farm revenue.[110] The total annual cost of the Renewables Obligation topped £1 billion in 2009 and is expected to reach £5 billion by 2020, of which about 40% is for wind power.[111] This cost is added to end-user electricity bills. Sir David King has warned that this could increase UK levels of fuel poverty.[112]”

SO what the OP is saying is that wind farms are cheaper than Nuclear BECAUSE OF ROCs, or if you prefer, subsidies.

That is of course BEFORE you consider variability issues, estimated at 80% of total wind farm capacity, and the massive costs related to that. Or that wind farms are experiencing serious lifespan issues, with servicable lives closer to 10 years rrather than the 25+ years the manufacturers were initially claiming.

So all in all, the OP isn’t being 100% honest about the true costs of wind farms.

10 year lives?

Bloody hell. If that is true then the shills for wind need to be strung up to their own creations.

@JC:

Levellised costs are based on £/MWh. MWh is the unit of output, so factors in variable output from wind.

@Tyler:

Anything with a levellised cost of generation over the average wholesale price will require subsidy if new plant is to be built. Therefore, new nuclear will require Government support to turn a profit. Complaining about subsidies for onshore wind farms but saying greater subsidies for nuclear are fine is very odd.

Nice piece.

Always fun to see paid lobbyist complaining about lobbying. Professional jealousy or summat?

Leaving aside the usual suspects pretending that nuclear is really very, very cheap honestly, a little historical information to fill out the background.

Robert McAlpine were indeed involved in both Magnox and AGR construction, generally via consortia that included other industry players. Their consortium built the more successful Phase 1 AGRs (Hinkley Point “B” and Hunterston “B”). A rival consortium that included (then) Taylor Woodrow built the arguably less successful Hartlepool and Heysham 1. A third group built Dungeness “B” and arguably shouldn’t have been let loose with the project, which ended up several times over budget and many years late.

McAlpine and Taylor Woodrow combined their civil engineering expertise for the second phase AGRs (Torness and Heysham 2), and also the PWR at Sizewell “B”. The last named was sold as a project costing £1.5 billion and came out at around £2.2 billion, which for the civil nuclear industry was not bad going. Expect single reactor PWRs to come in at rather more than that nowadays.

These think tanks should add “writing in a personal capacity” to the end of their publications, thereby removing any suspicion of vested interests. That’s how it works, right?

@ cjcj

The German experience is that the gearboxes are wearing out considerably faster than expected….

@ Adam Bell

I’m sorry, but you’ve quoted generated wind power prices INCLUDING ROC subsidies (over 50% of wind farm revenues), EXCLUDING backup generation costs and compared them to the total costs of nuclear power including decomissioning costs.

I sorry to say it, but when even George Monbiot comes out in favour of nuclear power, I’m less inclined to listen to someone who is *paid* to promote wind farms and more inclined to simply look up the real dust to dust costs, which still come out in favour of gas and nuclear power.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of “green” power, and indeed my company is involved (mostly with the financing) of several such projects, but the analysis we’ve done is that wind is the worst performer of the lot, predominantly because of the low servicability rates/lifespans, the lack of any scope for improvement in the technology (unlike solar for example) and the variability rates, which thanks to relatively slow spool up times in conventional energy plants means you have to run another plant at 80% capacity *all the time* in the background.

Oh look, climate change deniers sticking up for right-wing lobby groups who happen to like corporate-sponsored nuclear power. No shame whatsoever.

Hey cjcj – you know we still have that bet on rising temperatures – have you conceded yet?

Forgive me if I don’t think that naming the deliberately anonymous group that funds you is all that transparent!

Still way better than the level of transparency at the TPA though isn’t it?

“wind is the worst performer of the lot, predominantly because of the low servicability rates/lifespans, the lack of any scope for improvement in the technology (unlike solar for example)”

Ooooh, no, that’s wrong. There is indeed a technological advance possible.

One of the limitations is wind speed. Too slow and you’ll not turn the blades fast enough to generate power. Too fast and you have to turn it off to make sure the blades don’t fall apart under the stress.

You can increase the viability of the technology by using better alloys to make said blades. If you could make them both lighter and stronger at the same time then you’d get more energy at low speeds and also be able to run them at higher wind speeds.

Your capital costs would be essentially the same (the better alloys would be slightly more expensive but as a portion of total cost it’s irrelevant) and you’d be getting more power: thus your power would be cheaper per unit.

And it is your lucky day: that better alloy is to add scandium to the Al/Mg alloys currently used. And all that would be needed (this is actually well known within the blade manufacturing community) is a reliable source of scandium.

And the lucky day thing is that I am the expert in scandium and currently engaged in establishing that source of scandium.

So send me money.

Weirdly, everything except the necessity of sending me money is true too.

@Tim:

Nothing wrong with lobbying, as long as you reveal who’s paying you to do it.

@Tyler:

You haven’t understood the figures, and have confused cost to the wind farm owner with system costs. The Mott Macdonald report looks at capex and opex of wind projects per MWh generated over a project’s lifetime. ROC support is revenue, not a cost. The system cost of wind per MWh is the wholesale price per MWh plus the total value of one ROC. This is the amount of money a wind turbine requires to turn a profit. The only relation it bears to the levellised cost is the requirement that the system cost is high enough to produce a profit above the levellised cost. Without that, no-one would build wind farms. The same holds true for nuclear.

Claiming that backup should be included in the costs of a windfarm is bizarre; that’s like saying nukes should pay for the gas plants they require for flexible output. System costs – in terms of the cost of balancing and transmission charges – are already included in MM report.

“Hey cjcj – you know we still have that bet on rising temperatures – have you conceded yet?”

Well if you had the courtesy to read or acknowledge my emails (which are being sent to the PP address) you will have seen that the line is now slightly downward sloping!

Nothing wrong with lobbying, as long as you reveal who’s paying you to do it.

I had a quick look at Renewables UK (where I assume you are) and you don’t list that information…..

@Tim:

At the bottom of the front page are the logos of all the companies that provide the most money. Under ‘Membership’ on the left you’ll be able to find every company or organisation that provides us with money, no matter how little.

Actually, that should be ‘Company Directory’, wrong link, sorry. Although Tim, if you want to pitch your request for funding to members of the industry, we are the premier vehicle for doing so…

But lending their support to nuclear power over wind farms is unusual in this context, because new nuclear power stations in the UK will require higher form of government support in order to be viable.

…So, advocating nuclear power over wind farms sits at odds with their political position.

And opposing nuclear power sits at odds with a commitment to public funding so why – other than a kneejerk opposition to any technology invented in the last 200 years – do both the ‘left’ and the ecology movement (not the same thing) oppose the only industry that can even possibly meet our future power needs short of a plague to cut the population down to ‘managable’ levels?

Apart from the questionable points about costs, the OP amounts to little more than argument by psychological association. ‘Some right-wing groups support nuclear power…so it must be a bad thing!’ Yet there are plenty of groups on the left – from George Monbiot to the GMB – that favour nuclear power.

@Shatterface & TONE:

I actually have no problem with new nukes. If they’re the cheapest way of decarbonising our electricity supply then let’s go ahead and build them. They may yet be the cheapest way of supplying low-carbon baseload power if carbon capture and storage don’t work out.

“Although Tim, if you want to pitch your request for funding to members of the industry, we are the premier vehicle for doing so…”

Excellent, I knew LC would be useful for something one day.

If you’d just like to get every member to pay up, say, £2k per company as a grant then I can get on with it.

Oh look, climate change deniers sticking up for right-wing lobby groups who happen to like corporate-sponsored nuclear power. No shame whatsoever.

I thiught the whole point of the OP is that nuclear power is actually publicly funded. To be consistent the left should support it.

And the climate change argument won’t work here: wind power is unreliable and will always have to be backed up by some other power source – which will include fossil fuels.

An investment in the nuclear industry would abolish the need for CO2 producing power stations.

So they may be astroturfers, which is useful to know. However I’m pretty sure that nuclear is an essential part of sustainable energy infrastructure so I cautiously welcome this. The important point is that there shouldn’t be a zero sum game between nuclear and other sustainable energy generation. We need nuclear because it provides excellent baseload with a very small footprint and we need wind etc too. Anything but coal, for a start, and preferably not more gas.

@Tim:

Only £1.3m? That’s about the cost of a megawatt of onshore wind. Go for the manufacturers directly and I’m sure you’d be able to work something out. Try one of the smaller players like Enercon or Nordex, or one of the startups like Principal Energy. The last has pretty good access to VC.

@ Adam Bell

Reading directly from executive summaries of the MM report (you can use the DECC or CIVITAS appraisals of it, as they both say basically the same thing):

Excluding carbon costs, coal-fired power stations are the least expensive technology for generating electricity for both near-term and medium-term projects.

Including carbon costs, gas-fired power stations are the cheapest option for near-term projects, but nuclear power is the least expensive in the medium-term. Other things being equal this would suggest that investment should be concentrated in gas and nuclear technologies. A mix of technologies is preferable for operational reasons. Coal-fired power stations become relatively uneconomic, reflecting the heavy carbon costs, especially in the medium-term.

Onshore wind looks relatively competitive on the MM data. But MM exclude the additional costs associated with wind-power. When allowance is made for these additional costs, the technology ceases to be competitive for both near-term and medium-term projects.

Offshore wind (even before allowing for additional costs) and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies are inordinately expensive.

What you’ve done is not bother to read the report, add the ROC subsidy back in (which is a COST to the taxpayer/end user, though NOT the generator) and then call wind power cheaper. Which is total nonsense. Note above how MM *EXCLUDE* additional costs for wind power – which is exactly what you’ve done, and might make sense for the producer who benefiits from ROCs etc, but makes no sense if you consider the true cost of production, which has to be subsidised somewhere else.

I rest my case, using the report you yourself reference.

@ Tim Worstall

As I understand it’s not the blades of the turbines which are the limiting factor for the most part.

Last I checked (which was admittedly a few years ago) it’s the limitations of the inherent technology of windfarms, with relation to the gearbox to dynamo to mains linkage. The gearboxes are designed to function in a relatively narrow range of speeds to eliminate the need for expensive smoothing to mains via transformers. You can make them with nice clever blades and gearboxes, but then you need much more expensive transformers (so lots and lots of expensive copper) to rectifiy the output.

That’s the main problem with wind. it’s not regular, and for best power generation you want it to be so. Hydro and Tidal is very regular, and solar cells are controlled by design, buut wind simply doesn’t allow that level of input control.

@Tyler:

Okay. So what you’re claiming is that wind costs the amount specified in the Mott Macdonald report, plus additional costs (you’ll need to specify these; the ones in the Civitas report are bonkers because they assume every wind farm needs a new connection to the grid at a point just north of London regardless of where they are), and that I’m somehow adding the cost of the ROC to the MM figure to make windpower look better. The MM figures are available on page IX of the report I linked, so anyone can see them. I have no idea what ‘adding the ROC back in’ means. Please specify this in terms of a number I am adding to the MM figures. You’ll find I’m not doing anything of the sort.

Coal isn’t the cheapest – CCGT is, even factoring in carbon costs. New supercritical coal plant is about £100/MWh from memory, compared to £80/MWh for CCGT. I’ve no idea where you got that idea from; the market currently favours utilising existing coal plant but that’s because of (a) current high gas prices, and (b) their owners running them at full tilt to take advantage of the fact before the Large Combustion Plant Directive comes in in 2015. New plant that meets the directive is very expensive.

Also, re: your response to Tim, look up ‘direct drive’ turbines.

@ Adam Bell

*Bangs head*

Both Civitas and DECC take their data directly from the MM report.

Looking at the chart in page IX, you fail to see that these ONLY account for the cost of setting up a power plant in cost per Mw, and DO NOT take into account any costs of backup generation. You also fail to mnetion that in this report nuclear is at 96/98 per MwH…not the much higher number in the Citi report you alude to in your article above. You also seem to ignore that these costs are a fixed plant for a fixed lifespan….25 years for wind and 60 for nuclear in the report. And ignored the utilisation calculations for the plant on the output, where wind is only working 30% of the time.

All in all, it looks like you have simply looked at the simple cost of actually setting up a plant, and none of the other inputs or outputs. pretty poor if you ask me.

All a direct drive wind turbine does is remove the (need for a) gearbox – making them cheaper and potentially more reliable. It DOESN’T change the fact that the wind turbine can only function effectively in a relatively narrow range of wind speeds to generate a useable output without resorting to expensive transformers or rectifiers. Not to mention the design paramaters of the blades themselves which won’t turn below a certain wind speed and will damage the wind farm if allowed to run freely above a certain wind speed. Wind farms are built to function in fairly narrow wind speed ranges for those two reasons.

And unless you have some unearthly powers, it is beyond human ability to control that wind speed, where it *is* fairly easy to control the inputs or driving forces too other forms of green energy.

“Only £1.3m?”

Good grief, don’t need that much. If you’ve £100k down the back of the sofa somewhere that will do just fine….

Why are right-wing groups lobbying for nuclear power?
Perhaps because they think it is the cheapest low-carbon option? Perhaps they don’t want to spend untold billions on wind farms that spend too much of the time broken down? Perhaps because it is the only practicable option in the medium-term to building more coal-fired power stations? Perhaps because more coal miners have died in chinese mines since the communists took power than people have died as a result of nuclear power in the history of the world (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki) despite chinese coal only producing a fraction of the power produced by civilian nuclear plants? Perhaps because they can see through the wind-power lobby and noticed that Denmark had a brown-out when the cable from Sweden’s nuclear power plants was briefly broken? Has anyone else asked why the wind companies in the US demanded a *higher* subsidy when the oil price went up? Yeah, that only makes sense if they use more power to smelt aluminium for the windmills than the dcf value of the power they generate? Do you think it is just vaguely possible that these guys got to be rich because they are less blitheringly stupid than Adam Bell who is basing a smear on our inability to read the minds of the directors and/or shareholders of Sir Robert MacAlpine Ltd. Can I let you all into a secret – “Star Trek” is fiction: Leonard Nimoy cannot really read minds.
The long-term solution has to be a mix of hydro and solar energy once the technology has improved, but in the short-term we have, as a low-carbon option, nuclear; as a medium-carbon one gas CCGT, as high-carbon coal and oil. As far as I can see, wind currently is higher-carbon than gas CCGT because the data suggesting that it is lower ignores breakdowns, decommissioning (a big part of the calculated nuclear costs) and understates downtime for the average windmill because it is based on the best sites.
Solar technology is improving fast but it is totally implausible that we should have sufficient solar electricity generating capacity in the UK before the current newbuild generators reach the end of their life. In Morocco, maybe, but not the UK.

@28. Tyler: “Not to mention the design paramaters of the blades themselves which won’t turn below a certain wind speed and will damage the wind farm if allowed to run freely above a certain wind speed. Wind farms are built to function in fairly narrow wind speed ranges for those two reasons.”

Tim Worstall’s point about blades that are stronger stands, however. The way to utilise such blades is to build taller wind turbines in order to benefit from wind gradient (more energetic air at higher altitude) and greater speed stability. For some reason, I don’t think people are going to think much about that idea. It may be viable for turbines mounted on top of existing high buildings.

Does anyone know whether continuously variable transmissions are practical? Fluid convertors?

@30. john77: “Solar technology is improving fast but it is totally implausible that we should have sufficient solar electricity generating capacity in the UK before the current newbuild generators reach the end of their life. In Morocco, maybe, but not the UK.”

That brings us, of course, to supply continuity. Of current sources (sic), nuclear and hydro are the options that deliver the UK most independence. Wind has poor supply continuity at times when the wind does not blow and is reliant on standby producers that can quickly ramp up; effectively, that means that wind power has the same supply continuity as oil or gas, which is determined by international politics. We should assume that the same would apply to solar power (a very exciting technology) if generated outside Europe. Tidal and wave power fit in somewhere between hydro and wind, I guess.

@ 31 Charlieman
There are islands where there are regular onshore and offshore winds at dawn and dusk, which are highly suitable for windmills that power intermittent use.
I fear that continuously variable transmissions robust enough would be horrendously complex and expensive

@ 31 Charlieman

A particular set of blades are only really designed to turn in a certain range of wind speeds..the gearbox itself is just there to modify the speed at the blade end to the speed of the generator coil such that the power produced is useable…..and when I say useable, I mean something which is easy to feed into whatever grid. Too high and low a potential difference across it and it makes it hard to bulk it all together from numerous farms without some for of transformer – and transformers are expensive.

Tim, why not use wind turbines to charge up fuel cells or equivalent? could that be viable, as there would be no need to plug them directly to the grid. Once fully charged, discharge the fuel cells or whatever into the grid. Would that remove the need for expensive transformers blah blah, and allow you to take advantage of even light winds?

Another thought I have is how the wing of a fighter jet can change its aspect for various air speeds – that idea adapted to wind turbines, the angle it slices the air changing for different wind speeds, or the blades retracting partially for especially high winds (I may have read about that somewhere, but don’t quote me, so to speak!!!)

We need both- wind power and nuclear, that is the informed opinion.

yes, both renewables and nuclear. It has to be the right kind of nuclear though. intergral fast reactors, buried far underground, to extract every last joule of available energy out of existing nuclear waste. making said waste safe in the process. At current energy demands, that is a 500 year

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/12/05/a-waste-of-waste/

http://www.monbiot.com/2012/02/02/nuclear-vs-nuclear-vs-nuclear/

It is not the exclusive preserve of so called rightwingers to be in favour of nuclear (real rightingers go for coal & fracking to fry the planet)

‘It is not the exclusive preserve of so called rightwingers to be in favour of nuclear (real rightingers go for coal & fracking to fry the planet)’

Absolutely, NP is our base power source and it the best way to provide this part of our energy requirement.

I am left wing wing and green, but we need NP.

As others have said, surely a more mixed approach to renewables backed up by Nuclear would be more useful?

Also, wouldn’t wind power technology become more efficient as we invest in it more? We don’t just sit around and say “because it’s not ideal now it’ll never be ideal” and sit with the same old technology we had before, most areas of technological advancement need some kind of subsidy to make increase their usefulness. Not only that, if we capitalize in our apparent ability to specialise some of our industry towards this sector, we could feasably corner the market and export this stuff worldwide. Iceland makes good use of its geothermal power, we should do the same with our offshore wind capacity as well, and support our national industry and job creation in the process.

@Dissident #35:

Tim, why not use wind turbines to charge up fuel cells or equivalent?

Battery power is impractical for the energy we are talking about. I’ll try to find the reference to a battery array somewhere in the Northwest of the States which demonstrates how impractical it is on a large scale.

Fuel cells strictly so-called work the wrong way around, as I understand it.

“Battery power is impractical for the energy we are talking about. I’ll try to find the reference to a battery array somewhere in the Northwest of the States which demonstrates how impractical it is on a large scale.

Fuel cells strictly so-called work the wrong way around, as I understand it.”

Not entirely true.

Using lead or lithium batteries on a large scale? Yes, impractical.

However, the fuel cell idea is that we use them as that “battery”. Use the excess electricity from renewables to electrolyse water. Store the hydrogen. Then when you need power run the H2 through the fuel cell.

And yes, fuel cells can be run either way: ‘leccie in get H2, H2 in, get ‘leccie. (You might not use the same cell to do both but the basic technology does work this way).

And yes, of course, there are a number of problems. This is a local only solution. You cannot pipe hydrogen around like you can natural gas (it leaks through the steel). You need to have cheap renewable ‘leccie because of the inevitable losses in electrolysis and then the fuel cell.

Currently it doesn’t work economically: better to run biogas or natural gas through the fuel cells rather than do the electrolysis (this is what Apple is doing at their new data centre in the Carolinas).

However, we do have solar PV falling in price. It’s not going to be next year but I do think that within a decade, certainly within two (get those 40% efficient multijunction cells down in price) that it would stack up as an economic method of providing domestic power at least. Won’t power factories but up to and including data centres etc.

If solar PV comes down to 2 cents, three cents a unit then I can see a lot of people adopting this sort of solution.

Disclosure: just to make any bias clear, I’m in discussion to do some work for the people making these fuel cells.

@Dissident:

Following on from my #41:

Battery arrays are Impractical for general use, that is; here are two hugely costly arrays, in China and Alaska, that fill niche needs:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3312118/Worlds-biggest-battery-switched-on-in-Alaska.html

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-01/china-builds-worlds-largest-battery-36-megawatt-hour-behemoth

There’s a two way conversion loss to and from DC, and battery technology isn’t (currently) capable of storing energy in the quantities needed otherwise than at prohibitive cost.