Offshore wind now cheaper than Nucular

Energy from offshore wind in the UK will be cheaper than electricity from new nuclear power for the first time.

The development, revealed in figures from the government, has been seen as a milestone in the advance of renewable energy.

The plummeting cost of offshore wind energy has caught even its most optimistic supporters by surprise.

Nuclear firms said the UK still needed a mix of low-carbon energy, especially for when wind power was not possible.

The figures, from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, for offshore wind were revealed as the result of an auction for subsidies, in which the lowest bidder wins.

Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a subsidy of £57.50 per megawatt hour. That compares with new nuclear plants at a subsidy of £92.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23.

Emma Pinchbeck from the wind energy trade body Renewable UK told the BBC: "These figures are truly astonishing.

"We still think nuclear can be part of the mix - but our industry has shown how to drive costs down, and now they need to do the same."
'Energy revolution'

Onshore wind power and solar energy are already both cost-competitive with gas in some places in the UK.

And the price of energy from offshore wind has now halved in less than five years.

Energy analysts said UK government policy helped to lower the costs by nurturing the fledgling industry, then incentivising it to expand - and then demanding firms should bid in auction for their subsidies.

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https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-clean-energy-projects-set-to-power-36-million-homes

MichaelG.

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Truly awful looking things.

IMHO each and every one of them wants a demolition charge around it's base.

Nick

Nuclear is ridiculously expensive, especially when you remember the newspaper headlines from when Calder Hall fired up, electricity was going to be so cheap they wouldn't even bother to charge for it.

You have to wonder how expensive electricity has to become before it is a cheaper option to convert a small generator from petrol to gas. For 1 kWh I pay 11.7p in electricity or 2.65p in gas.

25% efficiency and I am in profit plus I could harvest the excess heat in Winter.

Edited By Robin on 11/09/2017 09:39:10

Ah! But nuclear keeps generating even when the wind drops! Something these clever renewable people conveniently forget.

Andrew,

Have to disagree Nick_G, I love the sight of wind turbines and would happily have one in my garden

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That's because the electricity was a by-product of the main process, which was the production of Plutonium.

... We are now seeing the 'peace-time' price of nuclear-generated electricity.

MichaelG.

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Actually scratch my last post.

Take them down carefully and flog the tower sections to North Korea after convincing them they are hi-tech giant ICBM casings.

Nick

Think of all that lovely cheap neodynium we could get to play with

Edited By Robin on 11/09/2017 09:50:08

If they pay me a subsidy then they can store low level nuclear waste under my bed

Indeed, and the energy potential of nuclear materials is greater than anything else by an order of magnitudes vs any gas, petrol or other raw material. The future is still very much a nuclear one and the UK gov knows it.

Michael W

A significant proportion of environmentalists now accept that well managed and planned nuclear has to be part of the mix to address climate change.

From a personal perspective, nuclear power stations are less attractive than wind turbines!

Neil

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Granted.

But they blight just one area not vast swathes of coastline, fields and hills.

Nick

Do we really want to build fission reactors, even liquid thorium salt fission reactors when fusion may be just around the corner.

Or is fusion just another impossibility trying to attract funding?

Is Kim just about to send us some free plutonium?

So many questions.

Bad news Robin, we did the sums in another thread recently and showed that you ain't gonna beat big electricity on price with internal combustion at home.

I think it was Martin Kyte who highlighted the need to factor in all the costs before jumping to conclusions. That can be very hard to do. In the case of Nuclear, the fuel is dirt cheap and so is electricity generated from it. Until, that is you add in safety and decommissioning costs. The sad thing is that Nuclear is widely perceived to be worse than burning carbon. Not so. Although the effects are less in-yer-face, dumping large quantities of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere is not cheap in the long run. Health issues apart, the cost of Climate Change will be colossal, the only good news being that most of us old farts will be dead before the bill is presented!

Talking of old farts (and I speak as a fully qualified member of the club), we always have to remember that everything is continually changing. Our experiences and understandings may not still be valid. For example, listening to a chap talking about electric cars the other day, I suddenly realised that my ideas about battery reliability and cost are 30 years out-of-date. Modern batteries are much better than the carp of my youth, but somehow I don't quite believe it. It made me wonder if other forum members have similar problems with their world view? Anyway, the expert explained that industry direction and government policy are both based on battery technology in development for mass production ten years hence, not what's available off the shelf today. Throughout history pretty much all new technology starts off by being unreliable and expensive. Ten or twenty years later it's suddenly much cheaper and much more reliable. Wind power is just another example of the economics coming good in due time. So despite the mistakes of the past, there's still good reason to be optimistic about the future. It will be different though!

Dave

I hear pro nuclear arguments all the time ,usually from people who work there ,but you have a different perspective when you live near one of the biggest moneypits in the Uk, Sellafield .Which is stuck on the edge of one of the most beautiful parts of the country.

I would much rather live near a wind farm than a nuclear power station. I have done both.

I somewhat agree, although I wouldn't want one in my garden!

Some of them, where a degree of conscious design has gone into it do look very attractive. The ones that look like someone has put a garden shed atop a pole are less attractive. I'm sure they could be made to look even more beautiful if some effort was made.

One of my sisters works for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and it's clear that every single one of the existing reactors will take immense cost and effort to render even remotely safe. There is basically nowhere offsite to store the waste, as we have pretty much determined that there is no geologically safe or politically acceptable place for the stuff. So they have to make the cores safe and entomb the rest. The dead reactor sites are here to stay for many generations.

You'll notice that the government had to decouple the costs and responsibility for this rather awkward issue from the nuclear power generation industry to make nuclear power remotely commercially viable. And even then, the price of the energy from new plants like Hinkley are simply eye watering and nowhere near competitive.

There are storage solutions (literally) being developed including large scale fuel cell / battery technology and pumped storage. And it has to be said that unlike solar / PV, wind and sea turbines tend to generate more in the colder months.

Like most things, the answer most likely isn't a single technology but a mixture. It's good to see green technology approaching a level of maturity finally but disappointing that the turbine-haters in government have slashed the subsidies and feed-in tariff (FiT). If only they supported green technology to the same tune as nuclear....

Murray